Rent Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals

Synopsis

Hegemony How-To is a practical guide to political struggle for a generation that is deeply ambivalent about questions of power, leadership, and strategy. Hopeful about the potential of today’s burgeoning movements, long-time grassroots organizer Jonathan Smucker nonetheless pulls no punches when confronting their internal dysfunction. Drawing from personal experience, he provides deep theoretical insight into the all-too-familiar radical tendency toward self-defeating insularity and paralyzing purism. At the same time, he offers tools to bridge the divide between anti-authoritarian values and hegemonic strategies, tools that might just help today’s movements to navigate their obstacles—and change the world.

Praise for Hegemony How-To

“Smucker shows how we might turn popular disaffection into a powerful force for change. This book is desperately needed.” ”—Astra Taylor, director of Žižek! and Examined Life

“Jonathan Smucker is a critical voice within an important emerging political project whose aim is to move the next Left generation from symbolic and often self-marginalizing strategies toward approaches that can lead to effective main-stage intervention.”—Max Elbaum, author of Revolution in the Air

“If Saul Alinsky and Antonio Gramsci somehow had a bastard lovechild, he might be named Jonathan Smucker.… He has trained thousands of grassroots activists in campaign strategy concepts and leadership skills, and now he’s finally breaking it all down in a book that wrestles with moral, strategic, and practical questions about power.”—Andrew Boyd, co-editor of Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution.

“Smucker’s theoretically informed and passionate discussion of leaderlessness will pave the way for a new understanding and practice of organization. This insider’s critique will also incite scholars touched by poststructuralism to rethink their strong suspicion of collective power.”—Cihan Tugal, author of Passive Revolution

Jonathan Smucker is the Director of Beyond the Choir and has worked for more than two decades as an organizer and strategist in grassroots social movements. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Nation, The Sociological Quarterly, and elsewhere.

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