HEGEMONY commonly means the supremacy, authority, control, leadership, power or dominance by one social group — or state — over others, exercised through political, ideological, economic or military means.  

In the late 18th and throughout the 19th century, industrial capitalists increasingly dominated other groups including the remnants of feudal landowners throughout Europe as well as over the working class.  

Their growing economic power, the growth of towns (and in Britain especially, the depopulation of the countryside) was accompanied by political changes, reflected in turn in civil society, including religious practice and educational provision.  

In parallel the European “great powers” including Britain, France and the Netherlands, later joined by the United States, came to establish hegemony over Asia and Africa.  

Imperial domination was maintained through a variety of means; ideological, cultural, economic and financial, as well as military.  

During the Victorian era Britain “ruled the waves”. At its height in the early 1920s the British empire — the largest in the world — covered well over a quarter of the Earth’s surface.  

Rule Britannia, written in 1740 as exhortatory entertainment, came to be taken seriously even by sections of the British working class as a description of a “natural” state of affairs.  

With the rise of US hegemony it became a joke again (Noel Coward’s song Mad Dogs and Englishmen starts with the first 10 notes).  

Today US hegemony — not just its economic and military dominance but also its cultural and political influence — is challenged by the rise of China as well as by the refusal of liberation movements elsewhere to remain part of the US’s “back yard”. The current US president, like his predecessor and our own prime minister, have become sad, dangerous jokes.

The issue of hegemony is central to the establishment of socialism. Lenin used the term hegemony to denote the necessary political leadership of the working-class during a socialist revolution. 

In many ways, “hegemony” is a much better rendition of Marx and Engels’ terms “Diktatur” and “Herrschaft” which are often translated as “dictatorship” — a term which only acquired its current meaning of tyranny following the rise of fascism during the 20th century.  

Increasingly today the term hegemony is used in the context of ideology and culture. The dominant ideas of any society are those of the ruling class and challenging class rule also means challenging those ideas.  

In Britain, for example, just three companies (News UK, Daily Mail Group and Reach) dominate 83 per cent of the national newspaper market (up from 71 per cent in 2015).  

Five publishers account for 80 per cent of all local newspaper titles. The digital landscape is hardly less concentrated.  

Google dominates search while popular apps like Instagram and WhatsApp are owned by Facebook (now Meta), itself the most popular social media site.  

All of them depend on commercial advertising. This represents an enormous power of influence in the hands of a very few, wealthy people.

Our developing understanding of hegemony — the way that power is secured and maintained — owes a good deal to Antonio Gramsci, a founding member and early leader of the Italian Communist Party.  

Imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascist regime, Gramsci wrote widely on a range of topics, including the nature of cultural hegemony, developing Lenin’s analysis of how the ruling capitalist class establishes and maintains its control. Gramsci argued that the “superstructure” of capitalist society importantly comprises both “political society” (including the state, its military the law, police and other institutional elements) and “civil society”.

Civil society includes social norms, gender roles, the family, entertainment and the arts. All help to maintain capitalism’s ideological and cultural hegemony.  Hegemonic culture propagates its own values and norms so that they become the “worldview” of the majority of the population. 

That culture is backed up by coercion. Economic force is built into the system because people have to earn their living; physical force always remains a possibility of last resort but the ideology of “common sense” secures consent, maintaining the status quo.  

Most importantly, that ideological dominance is not focused in any one particular agency but is dispersed through civil society.  

Together the state and civil society form what Gramsci called the “integral state” — a state that “secures consent to its rule from those it subjugates.” It is underpinned by multiple interconnections, institutional, political, and economic.  

These include the close links between the corporate world and political institutions, typified by the “revolving door” between business and the Civil Service; and by cronyism, a characteristic of both Labour and Tory governments, and particularly apparent today.  

These interconnections are not always obvious but occasionally they surface as exemplified by the appointment in late 2020 of Tim Davie as new director-general of the (supposedly impartial) BBC at a salary of over half a million.  

Ex-deputy chair of Hammersmith and Fulham Tory Party, before joining the BBC Davie was vice-president (marketing) at PepsiCo Europe and previously corporate marketer for Proctor and Gamble. Davie’s appointment was followed by that of a new BBC chair “to ensure that the BBC returns to its core values of impartiality” to replace Sir David Clementi, former deputy governor of the Bank of England and director of the Rio Tinto Group and of Virgin Money.  

The eventual appointee was Richard Sharp, a banker (JP Morgan, then Goldman Sachs) and donor (over £400,000) to the Tory Party. Charles Moore, former Daily Telegraph editor, withdrew at an early stage after demanding £280,000 a year for the part-time post.  

That example could be multiplied many times over. That ideological dominance “at the top” permeates society. 

It is reinforced by the experience of everyday life; the need to keep your job to pay the mortgage (if you’re lucky enough to have one); through financial advice, advertising, lifestyle and fashion fads, cascading down to the local level where the hegemony of “common sense” is maintained by a mixture of peer pressure and self-censorship which limits the expression and discussion of radical or “alternative” ideas and views.  

Capital’s cultural hegemony is facilitated both by racism and sexism, and by varieties of identity politics (all subjects of earlier Q&As), all of which obscure the class nature of exploitation and facilitate “divide and rule”. 

As Marx declared: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, ie the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.” 

Challenging this “common sense” at an ideological level has to go hand in hand with challenging the formal coercive role of state institutions.  

The Cuban minister of culture, commenting on the election of right-wing governments in South America and the defeat of socialist administrations that had succeeded in achieving major improvements in education, health and housing, asked rhetorically: “Why does this happen? The cause is cultural. It is because we haven’t been able to transform the consciousness of the people […] we need to win this hegemony across society. That is what makes the process irreversible.”

The issue of hegemony presents multiple challenges to the left in all capitalist societies, not least in Britain.  

One challenge is education; the need to break through the fog of “false consciousness”; to encourage a deeper understanding of the political economy of capitalism and to invigorate critical thinking and collective action — a central focus of the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ school.  

You can find details of the Marx Memorial Library’s rich autumn programme of lectures and of its online courses — an Introduction to Marxism and an Introduction to Marxist Economics (all of which challenge the hegemony of “orthodox” ideas) together with earlier Full Marx Q&A features (this is number 81) on the MML website www.marx-memorial-library.org.uk.