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Reading Gramsci through Fanon:

Hegemony before Dominance in
Revolutionary Theory
Noaman G. Ali
Published online: 31 Mar 2015.

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To cite this article: Noaman G. Ali (2015) Reading Gramsci through Fanon: Hegemony
before Dominance in Revolutionary Theory, Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics,
Culture & Society, 27:2, 241-257

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 Rethinking Marxism, 2015
Vol. 27, No. 2, 241–257, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2015.1007793

Reading Gramsci through Fanon:

Hegemony before Dominance in
Revolutionary Theory

Noaman G. Ali
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This essay examines the importance of Antonio Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony and
dominance for anticolonial movements. Hegemony is a practice of power that rests
substantially on the consent of various strata achieved by groups possessing or seeking
state power, whereas dominance relies primarily on coercion. Subaltern groups and
revolutionary parties, Gramsci argues, must displace ruling-class hegemony and
become hegemonic themselves before assuming state power. But not all ruling classes
are integrally hegemonic. As Ranajit Guha argues, colonialism represents “dominance
without hegemony.” Examining Frantz Fanon’s discussion of anticolonial nationalism,
I argue that even in situations of apparent dominance without hegemony, subaltern
classes and revolutionary parties must achieve hegemony before state power for
genuine decolonization. The essay argues that the emergence, consolidation, and
problematic outcomes of FRELIMO’s (Front for the Liberation of Mozambique)
resistance to Portuguese colonialism indicate the need to pay close attention to the
dialectic of hegemony before dominance.

Key Words: Colonialism, Frantz Fanon, Antonio Gramsci, Hegemony, Revolutionary

Theory

Joseph Buttigieg (2005, 36) notes that the misinterpretation and inappropriate
application of Gramscian concepts can be “strategically disabling.” The concept of
hegemony is no exception. By focusing too narrowly on hegemony as a strategy used
by ruling groups, it is easy to forget that Antonio Gramsci, jailed leader of the
Communist Party of Italy, posited hegemony as a strategic question for subaltern
groups and their revolutionary parties. Arguing that the subaltern has to become
hegemonic (Green 2002, 21–2), Gramsci importantly distinguishes between hegemony
and dominance. He defines hegemony as a practice of power that rests substantially
on the consent of various strata achieved by groups possessing or seeking state power,
whereas dominance is a practice of power relying primarily on coercion. Gramsci’s
concepts have been adapted to studies of colonial and postcolonial societies, but
many scholars have analytically conflated hegemony with dominance. Ranajit Guha
(1997, 23) notably defines hegemony as a condition of dominance, suggesting that
hegemony presupposes coercive state power. Yet such a view clouds any examination
of these concepts for subaltern strategy.

© 2015 Association for Economic and Social Analysis

 242 ALI

In contrast, in this article I will confirm Peter D. Thomas’s (2009) argument that
hegemony must be understood as conceptually differentiated from but in dialectical
relationship with dominance, and I argue that this distinction is strategically
important for revolutionary theory. I make this argument by reading Frantz Fanon
as a theorist of the dialectic of hegemony and dominance in colonial society and
anticolonial movements and by examining the Mozambican anticolonial movement.
The essay is divided into three sections. In the first section, I examine the stress
Gramsci places on the conceptual distinction of and the relationship between
dominance and hegemony. Through Guha I examine whether and how colonialism
represents a situation of “dominance without hegemony” and the implications of this
for subaltern strategy. In the second section, while reading Gramsci through Fanon,
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I argue that Fanon sees a necessity for subaltern groups, acting through their
revolutionary parties, to achieve hegemony even before achieving state power. In the
last section, I examine the resistance to Portuguese colonialism led by the Front for
the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO). In light of Gramsci’s and Fanon’s theories,
I argue that examining the emergence and consolidation of FRELIMO’s struggle—and
its problematic outcomes—reveals the need to pay close attention to the dialectic of
hegemony before dominance in subaltern movements.

Gramsci and Guha on Dominance and Hegemony

To examine the relevance of Gramsci’s concepts of dominance and hegemony for

colonial and postcolonial contexts, understanding his view of the state is key. Gramsci
considers the modern democratic state (which, as I will elaborate below, he
distinguishes from underdeveloped states such as tsarist Russia) to extend beyond
“political society”—the formal, coercive apparatus that legislates and regulates—and
into “civil society.” Civil society refers to the range of private associations and
activities entered into freely by people living under the state. Although civil society
“operates without ‘sanctions’ or compulsory ‘obligations,’ [it] nevertheless exerts a
collective pressure and obtains objective results in the form of an evolution of
customs, ways of thinking and acting, morality, etc.” (Gramsci 1971, 242). Ruling
classes establish their authority by monopolizing coercion via the dictatorship of the
state apparatus—that is, by domination—and also by acquiring the consent of
subaltern classes through leadership and persuasion—that is, through hegemony.
Gramsci (1971, 12) distinguishes between social hegemony and political govern-
ment. Social hegemony comprises the “consent given by the great masses of the
population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant
fundamental group; this consent is ‘historically’ caused by the prestige (and
consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position
and function in the world of production.” Political government comprises the
“apparatus of state coercive power which ‘legally’ enforces discipline on those
groups who do not ‘consent’ either actively or passively. This apparatus is, however,
constituted for the whole of society in anticipation of moments of crisis of command
direction when spontaneous consent has failed”—thus, the integral state equals
 HEGEMONY BEFORE DOMINANCE 243

“political society + civil society, in other words hegemony protected by the armour of
coercion” (263).
In order to achieve and maintain state power in this integral manner, a class has to
become hegemonic by making its particular interests appear universal. This
universalization takes place in both the ideological and material realms of civil
society: while the “development and expansion of the particular group are conceived
of, and presented, as being the motor force of a universal expansion, of a
development of all the ‘national’ energies,” the dominant group is also “coordinated
concretely with the general interests of the subordinated groups … [with the
formation and superseding of unstable] equilibria in which the interests of the
dominant group prevail, but only up to a certain point” (Gramsci 1971, 182). Indeed,
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hegemony—and politics properly understood—cannot be reduced to disembodied

ideological and cultural mystification, a matter of “competition in conjuring and
sleight of hand,” and critical activity cannot be reduced to “the exposure of swindles,
to creating scandals, and to prying into the pockets of public figures” (164). Rather,
hegemony involves a crucial political-economic element in creating a stake for
subordinated groups in ruling-class projects:

Hegemony presupposes that account be taken of the interests and the

tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised, and that a
certain compromise equilibrium should be formed—in other words, that the
leading group should make sacrifices of an economic-corporate kind. But
there is also no doubt that such sacrifices and such a compromise cannot
touch the essential; for … hegemony must also be economic, must
necessarily be based on the decisive function exercised by the leading
group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity. (161)

Equilibrium denotes that hegemony is a process—once achieved, hegemony has no

fixed end.
As a process, hegemony is operationalized through several constructive measures;
even reaction and conservation are deliberate, constructive acts of will (Gramsci
1971, 174). “Social hegemony and state domination” (13) are organized by
intellectuals, not only of the traditional sort prepared by schools and institutions,
but also by “new” intellectuals active in “practical life, as constructor, organiser,
‘permanent persuader’ and not just simple orator” (10–1). Schools have a positive
(and courts a negative) educative function, and these are important state activities,
“But in reality, a multitude of other so-called private initiatives and activities tend to
the same end” (258).
Political society is thus not easily disconnected from civil society, as a nexus forms
in institutions that are a part of both, such as schools and universities. There is a
dialectic between political and civil society: “The ruling groups and their allies are
not passive observers of the goings-on in civil society. Through their presence and
participation in various institutions, cultural activities, and many other forms of
social interaction, the dominant classes ‘lead’ the society in certain directions”
(Buttigieg 2005, 44). The mass affiliation that results from ruling classes performing a
 244 ALI

progressive function in the productive process is referred to by Joseph Femia (1981,

46) as “integral hegemony.”
But when there is a deep crisis of authority, the ruling classes lose the consensus of
the great masses and no longer lead the masses or exercise integral hegemony.
Rather, they are only dominant, “Exercising coercive force alone” (Gramsci 1971, 276)
—“The function of ‘domination’ without that of ‘leadership’: dictatorship without
hegemony” (106). Distinguishing between domination and hegemony, Gramsci high-
lights the possibility of ruling groups being dominant without being hegemonic. As
Femia argues, however, and as we will further explore, Gramsci recognizes that there
is political unity among elite classes and strata but that this unity does not “reach
down to the masses and construct a truly national community”; Femia (1981, 47–8)
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accordingly terms such situations “minimal hegemony.”

Guha reinterprets Gramsci’s distinction between domination and hegemony in
applying the concepts to British colonialism. He argues that insofar as the British
relied overwhelmingly more on coercion than persuasion in their rule, it was a
practice of dominance without hegemony. Guha (1997, 19) argues moreover that at
no point did capital succeed in “overcoming the obstacles to its self-expansion and
subjugating all precapitalist relations in material and spiritual life well enough to
enable the bourgeoisie to speak for all of that society,” as it supposedly had in
England and France. He argues that ideologies designed to generate consent by
British imperialism were not universalizing but existed in two distinct paradigms:
“[The despotic state] did not have a ruling culture, although there was a ruler’s
culture operating side by side with that of the ruled in a state of mutual indifference,
if not mutual acceptance in all cases” (64). The imperatives of British dominance
were articulated in terms familiar to British colonizers, even as they referred to the
very events and ideas articulated in different cultural registers by the ruled. For
instance, coercion was posed by the British in terms of “order,” which is “enforced by
the coercive apparatus of the state” (25). But the idiom of order “interacted with …
the Indian idiom … of Daṇḍa, which was central to all indigenous notions of
dominance,” and certainly these idioms overlapped to “make [coercion] what it
was under colonial conditions” (28), while capital’s universalizing tendency never-
theless failed to “match the strength and fullness of its political dominion by
assimilating, if not abolishing, the precapitalist culture of the subject people” (63).
The reason for this apparent failure, Guha (1997, 67) suggests, is that none of
bourgeois culture’s “noble achievements … can survive the inexorable urge of capital
to expand and reproduce itself by means of the politics of extra-territorial
dominance.” The very mode of exploitation prevalent in colonialism relied on
despotism—the primacy of coercion—which remolded, without radically altering,
precolonial “semi-feudal practices and theories of power” (29). Even the illusion of
generalized consensus was not reached, nor was building such integral hegemony
attempted, for the “colonial state was structured like a despotism, with no mediating
depths, no space provided for transactions between the will of the rulers and that of
the ruled” (65). To a limited extent, however, the opposite was also true: in the early
twentieth century, the British attempted to generate consent through certain formal
institutions, and “force (without losing its primacy … ) had to learn to live with
 HEGEMONY BEFORE DOMINANCE 245

institutions and ideologies designed to generate consent” (25).1 But because coercion
was always given primacy over consent, hegemony was compromised and minimal.
Guha (1997, 23) specifically notes, however, that he wants to avoid the “Gramscian
juxtaposition of domination and hegemony … as antinomies. This has, alas, provided
far too often a theoretical pretext for the fabrication of a liberal absurdity—the idea
of an uncoercive state—in spite of the basic drive of Gramsci’s own work to the
contrary.” He cites a passage of Gramsci’s (1971, 57–8) that might support the liberal
position: “A social group can, and indeed must, already exercise ‘leadership’ before
winning governmental power (this indeed is one of the principal conditions for the
winning of such power); it subsequently becomes dominant when it exercises power,
but even if it holds it firmly in its grasp, it must continue to ‘lead’ as well.” To avoid
liberal absurdity, Guha (1997, 23) defines hegemony as “a condition of Dominance
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(D), such that … Persuasion (P) outweighs Coercion (C) … there can be no hegemonic
system under which P outweighs C to the point of reducing it to nullity.” That is, if
there is no coercion, there is no dominance, and therefore no hegemony. Guha’s
reading of Gramsci thus implies that dominance refers to coercive state power,
without which there can be no hegemony, and he does not consider hegemony and
dominance with respect to subaltern strategy. But Gramsci’s juxtaposition of
hegemony and dominance must be understood through the lens of class analysis
and, further, should not be restricted to the bourgeois state.
Gramsci is not concerned merely with examining the ways in which the bourgeoisie
exercises hegemony and dominance; he explores how subaltern groups, led by the
proletariat, can operationalize these concepts. Gramsci (1971, 53; emphasis added)
studies Italian history to understand how previously subaltern groups acquired
“autonomy vis-à-vis the enemies they had to defeat” and “support from the groups
which actively or passively assisted them … before they could unite in the form of a
State.” He goes on to note, in the sentence preceding the one cited by Guha, that “a
social group dominates antagonistic groups, which it tends to ‘liquidate,’ or to
subjugate perhaps even by armed force; it leads kindred and allied groups” (57).
Subaltern groups become dominant upon assuming state power, as a matter of course.
But importantly, Gramsci sees dominance more broadly as the use of coercion against
enemy groups, which does not presume possession of state power. Gramsci is not
confused about the possibility of hegemony being achieved without the use of
coercion. Rather, Gramsci understands hegemony and dominance as “strategically
differentiated forms of a unitary political power” (Thomas 2009, 163) that are to be
pursued by revolutionary classes. The party must organize different strata and groups
of subaltern classes into a political unity in order to achieve hegemony, and it must do
so “before” it achieves dominance. Temporally, Gramsci argues that hegemony must
be achieved before the assumption of state power. Yet, as his discussion of the war of
position shows, achieving hegemony is also conceptually primary to achieving
dominance, understood as the capacity to exercise coercion against ruling classes.
Gramsci (1971, 233) argues that a “war of position” is necessary to displace and
supplant the hegemony of the bourgeoisie in the modern democratic state. A “war of

1. As I will elaborate, Fanon argues that colonialism did achieve the consent of certain
comprador classes. That is, as per Femia (1981), there was minimal hegemony.
 246 ALI

manoeuvre” (or movement), a frontal attack on the state apparatus at the moment of
its apparent weakness, such as during an economic crisis, cannot be sufficient to
overthrow the integral state. Integral hegemony in civil society is a “very complex
structure … resistant to the catastrophic ‘incursions’ of the immediate economic
element (crises, depressions, etc.)” (235). Proletarian hegemony is to be built
through war of position in the “trenches” of civil society against bourgeois hegemony.
This is not merely a struggle of cultural productions, for the organization of ideology
and culture, along with material struggles, must be “theorised in political terms”
(Thomas 2009, 175). The party must become the bearer of a “new culture” by
reorganizing the functions served by various associations to which its members might
otherwise belong (Gramsci 1971, 265) and thereby exercising an educative and
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formative role among subordinated classes, in contradistinction to that exercised by

the bourgeois state, while negotiating and mediating between subordinated groups to
form a political front. The party must be “conceived, organised and led in ways and in
forms such that it will develop integrally into a State” (267), and this must relate
dialectically to the development of its coercive capacities, for “politics creates the
possibility for manoeuvre and movement” (232). Again, this war of position
(hegemony before dominance) is not a temporal argument about when to engage in
militant actions but is a conceptual argument, while the war of maneuver remains in
revolutionary theory but plays “more of a tactical function than a strategic one” (235,
239; see also Thomas 2009, 166).
Gramsci (1971, 243) suggests, however, that the war of position applies for
“modern States” but not for “backward countries or for colonies, where forms which
elsewhere have been superseded and have become anachronistic are still in vigour.”
He refers specifically to Russia as a “backward and primitive capitalist civilisation”
(lxvi) where the “State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous”
(238). Here the “governmental apparatus, especially the coercive organs, is so
pervasive that it overwhelms social and political life”; as a result, “Civil society does
not, or barely, exists” (Fontana 2006, 33). There was a “direct” contradiction
between the masses and the coercive apparatus, unmediated by organizations of
consensus formation: ruling classes were dominant but not integrally hegemonic, a
situation of minimal hegemony that parallels Guha’s description of India. The
Bolsheviks thus could carry out a war of maneuver to take power. In the West,
however, there was a “proper relation between State and civil society, and when the
State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed” (Gramsci
1971, 238). The integral hegemony “created by the greater development of
capitalism … [required] of the revolutionary party a strategy and tactics altogether
more complex and longer-term than those which were necessary for the Bolshe-
viks” (lxvi).
Yet Fanon sees the construction of such subaltern hegemony in “backward”
situations as being central, suggesting that it is a more universal revolutionary
strategy than that restricted to advanced capitalist societies. And though Fanon is
often dismissed as a theorist of violence, it may be more fruitful to consider him a
theorist of the dialectic between dominance and hegemony.
 HEGEMONY BEFORE DOMINANCE 247

The Dialectic of Hegemony and Dominance in

Fanon’s Anticolonial Nationalism

Fanon appears to argue, like Guha, that colonial society is structured as a despotism
without hegemony (though, as we will see, Fanon has a more nuanced view of
colonial society). Echoing Gramsci, Fanon (1968, 38) notes that, in capitalist
countries, political superstructures such as educational systems and rewards given
to workers lighten the “task of policing considerably,” even as intellectuals organize
to “separate the exploited from those in power.” In contrast, “The colonial regime
owes its legitimacy to force and at no time tries to hide this aspect of things” (84).
“Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties.
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It is violence in its natural state” (61). Fanon also agrees with Gramsci and Guha that
“anachronistic” forms persist, as bourgeois colonizers fail to universalize their own
culture and values and mode of production, despite the Westernization of indigenous
elites. “A reasoned analysis of colonial society … [shows] that the native peasantry
lives against a background of tradition, where the traditional structure of society has
remained intact, whereas in the industrialized countries it is just this traditional
setting which has been broken up by the progress of industrialization” (111). As in
India, however, the semifeudal “petrification” of the peasantry is molded by
colonialism. “Ringed round by marabouts, witch doctors and customary chieftains,
the majority of country-dwellers are still living in the feudal manner, and the full
power of this medieval structure of society is maintained by the settlers’ military and
administrative officials” (109–10).
This petrifaction of the peasantry under so-called traditional authority was central
to modes of governance and exploitation in colonial Africa, a world “cut in two”
(Fanon 1968, 38). Mahmood Mamdani (1996, 37) refers to this bifurcated state form in
colonial Africa as “decentralized despotism,” in which colonial authorities operated
two separate regimes of law: direct rule for citizens—that is, for settlers and those
indigenous who were incorporated into “civilization”—and indirect rule or decen-
tralized despotism for subjects: “Peasant communities were reproduced within the
context of a spatial and institutional autonomy. The tribal leadership was either
selectively reconstituted as the hierarchy of the local state or freshly imposed where
none had existed, as in ‘stateless societies.’ Here political inequality went alongside
civil inequality. Both were grounded in a legal dualism” (17).
Colonialism in Africa operated in two separate paradigms (idioms, in Guha’s terms)
and two separate regimes of law that went further than the kinds of customary laws
and institutions constructed in India (Mamdani 1996, 50). Colonial rulers refused to
universalize their mode of production or their culture, laws, and values and refused
to concretely articulate their interests with those of the great masses of the
colonized precisely because such separation was central to imperialist exploitation.
Through their selected chiefs, colonizers operationalized “extra-economic coercion”:
“Compulsion by which free peasants with customary access to land [were] con-
scripted, forced to labor, or to cultivate” (52). The refusal to universalize is hardly
the failure of the colonial system but is rather its success. Dominance without
 248 ALI

hegemony thus appears to be the political form of a generalized system of

exploitation in colonial Africa.
But Fanon notes that there is a segment of the colonized population that responds
with a form of consent to colonialism, making Femia’s notion of minimal hegemony a
more apt characterization. Urbanized business sectors, traders, civil servants, as well
as “workers, primary schoolteachers, artisans, and small shopkeepers who have begun
to profit—at a discount, to be sure—from the colonial setup” together form the
leadership and supporters of nationalist political parties (Fanon 1968, 60). The bulk of
these parties’ supporters are constituted by the proletariat, the “nucleus of the
colonized population which has been most pampered by the colonial regime. The
embryonic proletariat of the towns is in a comparatively privileged position … In
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the colonial countries, the working class has everything to lose” (109). These parties
have no desire for the “radical overthrowing of the system,” as they are “in fact
partisans of order, the new order” (59). Their goals involve the attainment of greater
degrees of power and of reforms and improvements in their living conditions—goals
that reinforce the system’s logic rather than subverting it. Their concrete interest in
the survival of this system makes them, in a sense, allied classes of the colonial ruling
classes. To the extent that there is an imperialist hegemony beyond the colonizers
themselves, it is limited to this “‘bourgeois’ fraction of the colonized people,” which
includes the proletariat (109). Outright collaboration, in which certain elites
facilitate colonial rule, is also part of this minimal hegemony. Following Gramsci, it
would appear that revolutionary anticolonial strategy would be, like the apparent
strategy of the Bolsheviks, to oppose the violence of the state with the frontal war of
maneuver.
Fanon, however, outlines problems on different levels of any such strategy. One
danger is precisely that the leadership of the nationalist struggle falls upon this
compromised segment of the colonized population, at the expense of an integrally
hegemonic project that takes into account the concrete interests of the broad
masses. Fanon (1968, 61) berates nationalist parties for giving short shrift to the
peasantry, among other classes, which are “systematically disregarded for the most
part by the propaganda put out by the nationalist parties.” In his Gramscian reading
of Fanon (or Fanonist reading of Gramsci), Ato Sekyi-Otu (1996, 138) argues that the
colonized bourgeoisie is incapable of “implementing an authentic bourgeois revolu-
tion, one which in forging the foundations of an autonomous capitalist economy is
solicitous of the popular needs of the nascent nation,” for as Fanon (1968, 149–51)
notes, it has “practically no economic power … [and] the economy has always
developed outside the limits of [its] knowledge.” Even though the “propaganda of
nationalist parties always finds an echo in the heart of the peasantry” (114) because
of its spontaneously revolutionary nature, the nationalist parties are historically
unwilling and unable to become hegemonic upon attaining power in the postcolonial
order. Quite the contrary, “Powerless economically, unable to bring about the
existence of coherent social relations, and standing on the principle of its domination
as a class, the bourgeoisie chooses the solution that seems to it the easiest, that of
the single party … [which] is the modern form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie,
unmasked, unpainted, unscrupulous, and cynical” (164–5).
 HEGEMONY BEFORE DOMINANCE 249

We return to Guha’s formulation: the postcolonial bourgeoisie, unable to become

integrally hegemonic, relies primarily on coercion to reproduce its power. For Fanon
(1968, 148), the postcolonial order led by the compromised indigenous elite is
characterized by a “national consciousness [which] is nothing but an empty shell.”
Moreover, lacking economic clout, the postcolonial bourgeoisie ends up as comprador,
serving as the “transmission line for [an international] capitalism rampant though
camouflaged, which today puts on the mask of neo-colonialism” (152). The successor
to patterns of colonialism, this postcolonial order is a situation of dominance without
hegemony—at best, a minimal hegemony.
The emergence of the neocolonial state in the hands of this comprador bourgeoisie
is not inevitable. Fanon (1968, 175–6) argues that the bourgeoisie “must be stoutly
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opposed because, literally, it is good for nothing,” and certainly not for articulating
its interests with those of the broad masses for genuine nationalist struggle. A truly
popular outcome must involve the action of the peasantry and lumpenproletariat,
though this is also insufficient. Part of the solution lies in peasant radicalism, which is
“inherently more inclusive and unyielding in its demands than the essentially
individualist, particularist, and meliorist politics of the urban national bourgeoisie
and trade unions. Since the loss of land was a collective loss destructive of the
material and moral foundations of communities … the demand for it is inherently
expressive of a social consciousness … which is viscerally subversive of the colonial
order and therefore represents an intimation of national consciousness” (Sekyi-Otu
1996, 161). Fanon also points to the lumpenproletariat, the informal sector in the
urban centers, as a potentially revolutionary force for whom, in Sekyi-Otu’s words,
“bread (denied them by chronic unemployment)” is the social question (162).
Negation defines both groups, “For they have nothing to lose and everything to
gain” (Fanon 1968, 61). This exclusion propels their spontaneous desire to negate
the negation, and armed struggle, borne by spontaneity, can become total and
overwhelming. Localized struggles can coalesce into national revolt, a struggle of
national unity.
Yet for Fanon this spontaneous revolt is tenuous because colonizers make
concessions; they co-opt certain chiefs and regions and attempt to disarm the
colonized subject psychologically through facades of respect. National unity crumbles
in the face of tribal vendettas stoked by the colonial state and its collaborators. “The
discovery of this instability inherent in the native is a frightening experience for the
leaders of the rebellion” (Fanon 1968, 140). Lacking a concrete strategy with iterated
objectives of struggle, the seemingly quick passivity of the colonized drives leaders to
realize that “hatred alone cannot draw up a program” (139). The spontaneity of the
masses is as quick to die down as it is to rise up. Thus the “war is not a single battle
but rather a series of local engagements … So we must be sparing of our strength, and
not throw everything into the scales once and for all. Colonialism has greater and
wealthier resources than the native. The war goes on” (141).
The war against colonial dominance is not simply a war of maneuver; a frontal
attack is not enough to bring down the coercive apparatus of the colonial state.
Although it is not integrally hegemonic, the colonial state’s vast reserves, its
intrigues, and its manipulations compel the nationalists to undertake a protracted
war of position. At stake here is precisely that the “more brutal manifestations of the
 250 ALI

occupying power may perfectly well disappear” (Fanon 1968, 142). Through conces-
sions that seem to give more power and agency to the colonized, the country can end
up in a “servitude that is less blatant but much more complete … certain concessions
are the cloak for a tighter rein” (142). The colonial hegemony that absorbs the
colonized elites, who easily “enter into undefined compromises” (142), can thus
extend ideologically to the colonized masses, but this can only be a temporary
pretense of hegemony, for “such a compromise cannot touch the essential” of
extraeconomic coercion (Gramsci 1971, 161).
Without a clearly defined strategy, anticolonial leaders will be unable to count on
the spontaneity of revolutionary forces to carry through to the end in the face of
marginal concessions. Such concessions will seem not like marginal victories but like
victory itself: “They are so used to the settler’s scorn and to his declared intention to
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maintain his oppression at which ever cost that the slightest suggestion of any
generous gesture or of any good will is hailed with astonishment and delight” (Fanon
1968, 142). A variety of tactics and a coherent, focused strategy is necessary for
national liberation. But if not the national bourgeoisie, if not the proletariat, if not
the peasantry and lumpenproletariat, then who are Fanon’s “leaders of the
rebellion”? Who are the agents who will lead the war of position in articulating a
truly hegemonic project, and how will they do so?
Like Gramsci, Fanon sees a key role for a revolutionary party in mobilizing the
masses, in playing an educative role, and in forging a truly national, popular, and
socialist culture. “A country that really wishes to answer the questions that history
puts to it, that wants to develop not only its towns but also the brains of its
inhabitants, must possess a trustworthy political party … the party is a tool in the
hands of the people” (Fanon 1968, 183–4). The party must comprise those “wayward
elements” expelled from mainstream nationalist politics who move to rural areas and
enter into a fruitful dialectic with the masses (125–7), as well as the “small number of
honest intellectuals, who have no very precise ideas about politics, but who
instinctively distrust the race for positions and pensions which is symptomatic of
the early days of independence” (177). Sekyi-Otu (1996, 172) describes their mission:
“To forge a regenerative union between the insurrectionary demands of the destitute
of the city and spontaneous actions of the dispossessed of the country.” The content
of this union is precisely the content of the nation. Reformist nationalists give the
nation a formal universality defined by territorial boundaries but that is in substance
particular to their own self-interest and tribal appeasement—a “tribe which makes
itself into a party” (Fanon 1968, 183). The task of revolutionary nationalists, in
contrast, is to forge a “substantive universality generated by intimate knowledge of
the country’s variegated parts” (Sekyi-Otu 1996, 177). The revolutionary movement is
not, for Fanon (1968, 187), a party operating from the top down but is an
organization built from the bottom up: the party must not be “simply content with
having contacts with the masses … [it] should be the direct expression of the masses.”
The party has to organize the masses in countering the “death of the aboriginal
society, cultural lethargy, and the petrification of individuals” introduced by
colonialism (93).
Although colonialism does not have a massive positive educative system as exists in
the West, its entire apparatus is a negative educative system, for the “first thing that
 HEGEMONY BEFORE DOMINANCE 251

the native learns is to stay in his place” (Fanon 1968, 52). The role of party organizers
is to counter this, to educate and coordinate the masses, to raise their consciousness
to a more total understanding of affairs on a national level, but also to be educated
and to be coordinated by the masses: “If the leader drives me on, I want him to
realize that at the same time I show him the way” (184). The key is not merely to
forge a national understanding ideationally but to also undergird this organizationally
and materially. The traditional structures being used by colonialism have to be
countered by the reclamation and transformation of “tradition”—such as self-
criticism meetings—for the liberation struggle. The “words outlawed by the coloni-
alist bourgeoisie” are reclaimed, the “village assemblies, the … people’s committees,
and the … local meetings and groupments” are (re)organized to build community
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(46–7). Materially, the struggle links together the resources and capabilities of various
regions—once liberated, but also even when under occupation. The concrete,
localized experiences of exploitation and deprivation are to be transformed through
education and actual economic connection to an understanding of international
exploitation and national potentialities (189–93). For Fanon, national culture and
consciousness are the articulation of the concrete and total experiences of the
struggle of the masses (224), and it is the party that has to lead this struggle to
rebuild indigenous culture, politics, and economy even without having control of the
state.
The similarities between Fanon’s notions of organizing and those of Gramsci are
evident. Marcus Green and Peter Ives (2009, 27) note that for Gramsci “the party is
not a tool to impose an external or transcendental worldview but functions as a
practical link between social multiplicity and political unity in which the articulation
of a ‘collective consciousness’ is created that has the potential to challenge dominant
hegemony.” Sekyi-Otu (1996, 180) says of Fanon, “The outcome of the ‘meeting’
[between intellectuals and the masses] is to be neither the reign of an undivided
truth nor the disarray of particular wills and local knowledges, but the generation of a
common vocabulary of disputation and concerted action: universal understandings of
contestable claims.” Sekyi-Otu notes that hegemony in this Fanonist context belongs
to the “emergent structure” of anticolonial and postcolonial struggle that cannot
exclude any particular indigenous “social constituency,” in contradistinction to
hegemony belonging to “a paramount subject such as Gramsci’s ‘fundamental class’”
(1996, 180, 171). Yet in both cases what is necessary is an alliance of subordinate
groups. In the colonial context, this alliance means the concrete articulation of the
economic interests of particular classes into the total interest of the nation. The
economic must correspond to the political and cultural, involving the conscious
activity of the great masses. The subaltern element, rather than “‘resisting’ a will
external to itself … is no longer resisting but an agent, necessarily active and taking
the initiative” (Gramsci 1971, 337).
It is precisely through this concrete struggle, in unifying the broad masses against
the colonizer in the first instance and against the comprador bourgeoisie in the
second, that concrete articulation of the various subordinate groups is achieved. Here
Fanon is emphasizing praxis—the compromised bourgeoisie’s triumph is not inevitable
and is eminently avoidable so long as the revolutionary forces are organized. In a
context where the overwhelming force of the colonizer makes it dominant with only
 252 ALI

minimal hegemony, a subaltern hegemonic project must nevertheless be forged in

order to be able to maintain the long battle that is necessary. The anticolonial
struggle is won “not because there are no more enemies left to kill, but quite simply
because the enemy, for various reasons, will come to realize that his interest lies in
ending the struggle and in recognizing the sovereignty of the colonized people”
(Fanon 1968, 141). A reading like this further suggests that Fanon shares with Gramsci
the notion that hegemony can and must be achieved by subordinate groups “before”
dominance: that is, even as they develop their capacity to fully dominate the
colonizers and the comprador bourgeoisie. And when Fanon speaks of “violence,” he
is referring to the liberation struggle as a whole, never underplaying its sociopolitical
aspects, to which the military aspects must be subordinated.
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Portuguese Colonialism and

Mozambican Revolutionary Anticolonialism

If British and French colonialisms achieved minimal hegemony in systems that relied
largely on dominance, then Portuguese colonialism in Africa achieved even less. Its
critics referred to it as “ultra-colonialism … both the most extreme and the most
primitive modality of colonialism” (Anderson 1962, 97). Such conditions sparked a
variety of responses from emerging nationalists by the early 1960s, coalescing in
armed struggles for liberation—what Gramsci might consider wars of movement. Yet
the emergence and consolidation of armed struggle, and its problematic outcomes,
stress the need to pay close attention to the complex dialectic between dominance
and hegemony in subaltern movements.
Mozambique’s domination by the Portuguese began in the 1500s, but the latter
established control over most of the territory in the late 1800s. Portugal made little
attempt to unify the economic activities of Mozambique, resulting in “three distinct
and discrete economic regions in the country … [with] virtually no economic exchange
between them beyond the draining of revenue by the colonial state” (O’Meara 1991,
88). Central to the exploitation of Mozambican people was the colonial Indigenato
system, a legal system of differentiation between Portuguese citizens and native
subjects, with two separate regimes of law (Anderson 1962, 108). The system was
paradigmatic of indirect rule and decentralized despotism. Indigenato legally
permitted the forced extraction of labor from Mozambicans and established legal
instruments, such as restriction of movement and taxation, to ensure the integration
of Mozambicans into a cash economy. Forced labor was central to the colonial
economy and was widespread even up to independence. Extraeconomic coercion and
the extraction of surplus from Mozambicans thus characterized Indigenato.
Moreover, Indigenato established a system of local chiefs (régulos) who acted as the
interface between Portuguese colonialism and local communities. Régulos were
remunerated by the Portuguese in exchange for collecting taxes and mobilizing labor
to fill quotas for the authorities and corporations. They sometimes supervised cash
crop production and were responsible for the allocation of land and other resources
(O’Laughlin 2000, 16–7). To establish the régulos, the Portuguese superimposed
relatively rigid hierarchies over a variety of fluctuating forms of decentralized and
 HEGEMONY BEFORE DOMINANCE 253

often semiautonomous social and political organizations across Mozambique. While

they wanted to identify “true” chiefs, they also looked to appoint those they felt
would be more loyal to colonialism, and often this meant selecting those who were
not legitimate authority figures in the eyes of local communities (Pitcher 1998, 122).
Not all régulos were simply collaborators, as many attempted to mitigate the effects
of colonialism, and others participated in forms of resistance or evasion. Yet overall,
régulos often saw their own interests as consonant with those of colonialism,
establishing a minimally hegemonic alliance between the colonizers and a class of
native power holders.
The Portuguese did not allow much activity in civil society if it was not tightly
controlled by the colonial state. Indigenato did provide for assimilados, by which
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natives applied to become officially assimilated on the basis of speaking Portuguese

and with sufficient education and income and “good character” (Anderson 1962, 108).
These assimilados—sometimes employed in administrative and technical positions,
mainly in urban areas—constituted a very tiny proportion of the population. Still,
such urban intellectuals often led the formation of organizations that “carried out
political action under the cover of social programmes, mutual aid, and cultural or
athletic activities,” combined with a protest press (Mondlane 1969, 106). The colonial
state’s pressure turned these groups into “bourgeois clubs” compelled or coaxed to
join the “chorus of allegiance” to the regime (107)—the Portuguese were distrustful
even of comprador associations. With little in the way of mediating institutions,
Portuguese colonialism was structured as a “dominance without hegemony.”
Facing difficulty operating inside Mozambique, many nationalists formed exile
groups, eventually coming together in Tanganyika. Following the example of
Tanganyikan nationalists, Mozambican organizers facilitated “linkages between the
many dance clubs, football teams, and funeral associations” formed by northern
Mozambican migrants of Makonde origin, constituting what ultimately became the
Mozambique African National Union (MANU) in 1961 (West 2005, 135). Many such clubs
also integrated into the Unĩao Democrática Nacional de Moçambique (UDENAMO),
which formed earlier in northern Rhodesia in 1960 (Cahen 1999, 43).
MANU appears to have been formed largely to “serve the interests of the Maconde
petty bourgeoisie,” a class of peasants becoming or having already become agrarian
and merchant capitalists (Alpers 1984, 383), whereas the leadership of UDENAMO
included a more urban, educated petty bourgeoisie from southern Mozambique
(Cahen 1999, 45–6n27). In 1962, MANU and UDENAMO merged with another
nationalist organization to form the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO),
which pulled in more petty bourgeois elements. Thus organizers consciously sought,
first, to give programmatic and political coherence to what we may argue was a
“primordial and gelatinous” civil society in exile, and second, to bring already
organized groups together in political unity. A nascent hegemony was constructed
under the leadership and in the interests of the petty bourgeoisie.
Moreover, nationalist organizers in northern Mozambique had been working through
existing forms of social organization to build roots among and alliances with
residents. “MANU ‘mobilizers’ [worked] clandestinely in Mueda to broaden the
protonationalist movement’s support base, issuing membership cards … [and tapping]
into existing social networks on the plateau” (West 2005, 135). FRELIMO took over
 254 ALI

these networks, and organizers worked through churches, matrilineal networks (137),
and “hometown boys” (Henriksen 1983, 75) in order to approach locals; indeed,
mobilizers “paid proper deference to local authorities and observed parochial
customs.” For example, a mapiko dancer, invited to different settlements, also
moonlighted as a FRELIMO organizer (West 2005, 133–4). Though much of FRELIMO’s
leadership was modernist, they sought not to alienate but, as per Fanon, to reclaim
and transform “tradition”—at least at first. The content of the mobilization linked
the concrete concerns and interests of the peasantry with those of petty bourgeois
sectors. “The mobilizers worked to get potential recruits to recall instances of
personal suffering … They associated … imperialism with well-understood local
wrongs” (Henriksen 1983, 73). The realities of “chronic hunger, half of their children
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dead of disease at the age of five, the lack of shoes and clothing, no education,
forced labour,” were linked to a national-popular liberation struggle (Cornwall 1973,
34). FRELIMO thus built a hegemonic alliance of the petty bourgeoisie and peasantry.
Organizing consent into political unity was intertwined with coercive aspects.
When FRELIMO was formed, nationalists had largely agreed on the necessity of armed
struggle, precisely because Portuguese “ultra-colonialism” responded heavy-handedly
even to mild demands: most notably, firing upon a crowd that had gathered in support
of jailed leaders, and killing many, in the 1960 “Mueda Massacre” (West 2005, 135;
Cahen 1999). Association with FRELIMO was dangerous, especially for mobilizers who
could end up tortured or dead. After nearly two years of organizing in northern
Mozambique, FRELIMO launched an armed struggle in late 1964—hegemony before
dominance, indeed. Now FRELIMO guerrillas and mobilizers approached “traditional”
leaders such as régulos more directly, recruiting amenable ones and attacking hostile
collaborators. “These bold attacks on powerful figures of local authority convinced
many … that collaboration with the Portuguese could be as dangerous, if not more so,
than collaboration with FRELIMO” (West 2005, 139). FRELIMO confronted greater
turns in the dialectic of hegemony and dominance with the growth of armed struggle.
As Portuguese rule was forced out of large areas, FRELIMO faced the opportunity—
and need—to supplement its mobilization organizationally and materially, deepening
its hegemony in these “liberated zones.” Aside from abolishing colonial taxes and
excesses, FRELIMO established “village political committees, judicial structures, crop
growing schemes, People’s Shops, rudimentary education programmes and health
services” (Henriksen 1978, 444). Such institutions also existed, more solidly, in
Tanzania, where FRELIMO operated as a “proto-state,” incorporating northern
Mozambican refugees from the war. While reclaiming “traditional” forms—such as
palavers, where village elders and FRELIMO representatives would discuss problems
potentially for days to seek unanimity (Cornwall 1973, 93)—FRELIMO also attempted
to transform tradition, such as the role of women. Women “held low prestige and
subservient positions to men, which made them receptive to promises of a new social
ordering and improved status” (Henriksen 1983, 81). FRELIMO actively recruited
women into the guerrilla forces and deployed them as particularly effective
mobilizers. Exercising an educative and formative role, FRELIMO extended and
deepened its hegemony.
Yet within the movement, the direction of the struggle broke down along lines
analyzed by Fanon, with respect to petty bourgeois leadership. The agrarian and
 HEGEMONY BEFORE DOMINANCE 255

merchant petty bourgeois elements had originally taken up nationalism because they
wanted freedom to do business as in British colonies like Tanganyika, without
Portugal’s anticompetitive tactics, and not because they wanted egalitarianism
(Alpers 1984; Cahen 1999). Other sections of the leadership, largely in the military
wing, had turned toward revolutionary socialist principles and spoke of abolishing the
“exploitation of man by man” in general (Machel 1985, 41). At the second congress of
FRELIMO in 1968, the latter tendency won the day, by insisting the congress be held in
liberated areas and then by expelling a leading rural petty bourgeois figure. Others
defected and sought to form their own parties but were rebuffed by mobilized
peasantries that stuck to FRELIMO (Saul 1973; Opello Jr. 1975). FRELIMO still
projected itself as broadly nationalist, not socialist, but its direction was defined.
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Fanon’s idea of an alliance between a radicalized petty bourgeoisie and a militant

peasantry appeared to have arrived; revolutionaries exercised hegemony within
FRELIMO and over liberated zones.
But the victory of the radicals might have come at a price for FRELIMO’s hegemonic
ambitions. In addition to its place in Mozambique, the Portuguese military was
concurrently stretched across Angola and Guinea-Bissau in liberation wars that were
unpopular within Portugal. The radicals argued that the “level of hostilities called for
a shift from structures designed for political mobilization to those suitable for combat
operations” (Opello Jr. 1975, 80). The “stress on spreading guerrilla incidents
overrode prolonged preparations for an insurgent infrastructure” (Henriksen 1983,
32). It is true that nationalists faced considerable colonial repression in organizing
civil society fronts in major population centers, but there is little evidence of
FRELIMO attempting to infiltrate existing social and sports clubs (79). The military
focus appears to have taken away from deep political mobilization and the
consolidation of hegemony. Moreover, FRELIMO mostly bypassed the largest segment
of the population, the Makua-Lomwe tribes, who were seen as being friendly with the
Portuguese and hostile to the Makonde, among whom the guerrillas were rooted. New
fighting fronts in the northwest were preceded by political mobilization but were not
reinforced by an “extension or a reproduction, as such, of the liberated zones”
(de Bragança and Depelchin 1986, 169). Rather, resources were reshuffled from
popular programs to military efforts. As guerrillas pushed into central Mozambique,
local populations were not “properly politicized” and fighters “resorted to more and
more civilian violence” and political murder in order to undermine colonial authority
(Henriksen 1983, 37, 74–5). Coercion overrode consent, as the war of maneuver
overrode the war of position.
Stressing the war of maneuver was not unwise militarily, but it may have become a
political liability. Intensifying the war in Mozambique led to the 1974 Carnation
Revolution in Portugal, against its fascist regime. The revolution opened up the way
for negotiations with anticolonial movements, and Mozambique achieved independ-
ence in 1975—the war had not even reached its southern districts. FRELIMO took
power, but its “organizational structure in the major population centers … was
rudimentary … Large ethnolinguistic communities, such as the Makua-Lomwe, were
inadequately won over. Nor were there instances of FRELIMO penetration above the
rank and file of the army or lower colonial bureaucracy … FRELIMO’s insurgency
drive outstripped deep political mobilization in large sections of the country”
 256 ALI

(Henriksen 1983, 40). Though the war of maneuver had succeeded, FRELIMO appears
not to have established its own hegemony integrally while becoming dominant.
While deeper analysis of Mozambique’s postindependence politics is beyond the
scope of this piece, the question of hegemony after taking power certainly persists in
revolutionary theory (see Thomas 2009, 232–40). We can note that by the 1980s, as
neighboring apartheid regimes backed brutal destabilization wars, and as FRELIMO
attempted to implement a transition to socialism with unwilling populations, some
FRELIMO leaders lamented that the Carnation Revolution had “occurred too early,
thereby suggesting that victory was achieved without having been properly prepared”
(de Bragança and Depelchin 1986, 166). Dominance had overshadowed hegemony:
FRELIMO had won the form of the nation but appeared unsuccessful in filling it out
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substantively.

Conclusion

I have argued for an understanding of hegemony that does not see it as the exclusive
preserve and strategy of ruling groups. Indeed, state power can be achieved and
maintained without integral hegemony, as is most apparent in cases of colonialism.
Moreover, hegemony is something that must be achieved by subordinate groups and
their revolutionary parties even before they achieve state power. Achieving state
power without hegemony can be a great risk, particularly for projects of egalitar-
ianism operating against the grain of imperialism. In Mozambique, despite a
destabilization campaign that turned into a civil war, FRELIMO never lost control of
the state apparatus. But it abandoned attempts to build socialism and embraced
precisely the neocolonial capitalism that Fanon warned against. FRELIMO is still
dominant in Mozambique. The question is whether or not it is hegemonic.

Acknowledgments

I thank Dale Shin, Esteve Morera, Joshua Moufawad-Paul, Zabia Afzal, Elleni Centime
Zeleke, and Parmbir Gill for their encouragement and constructive comments. I also
thank Peter Ives and an anonymous reviewer for their feedback, which contributed
substantially to improving the paper. A version of this paper was presented at the
2009 Rethinking Marxism conference.

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