Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (and How We Win It Back)
Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams
Verso £13.59

 
ALTHOUGH the term hegemony is commonly employed as a synonym for domination, a fuller understanding of how it has been used in Marxist thought emphasises acquiescence.

No-one did more to elevate the concept of hegemony to the centre of social analysis than the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, and at the heart of his writing is the notion of consent.

Gramsci’s mission was to develop a revolutionary socialist strategy fit to confront advanced capitalism based on a clear understanding of bourgeois power in modern societies where the state was unlikely to be toppled by a Soviet-style uprising anytime soon.

His most important observation was that the ruling classes retained control not only through the threat of force, but through the passive and active consent of subalterns to their intellectual and moral leadership.

A nexus employing myriad ideas, cultural forms, institutional norms, propaganda and education presented this state of affairs as the reigning “common sense” in order to ensure the subordination of social forces to the control of capitalism.

Hegemony Now demonstrates that given the neoliberal hegemony, lorded over by Wall Street and the “platform capitalism” of big tech, there is no better time for the left to be discussing the implications of Gramsci’s ideas and the debates they sparked.

That is because, as Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams argue, neoliberal hegemony has been breaking down since the 2008 financial crisis. The debris is everywhere: from the rise of populist authoritarianism to Brexit and beyond. If the left has hitherto failed to grasp the strategic nettle, there remain clues to a potential response in Gramsci’s work.

Readers should be aware that even though the authors have done a brilliant job stripping away much of the complexity that makes post and neo-Marxist language so difficult to engage with for ordinary mortals (stumped by the Quick Crossword let alone Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic project) this remains a densely theoretical field.

Nonetheless, this book repays close attention: in particular, Gilbert and Williams stage a courageous mission to rescue the materialist concept of interests from the swamp of identity politics.

They remind us that even though “class interests” are the driving force of historical materialism, there was an explicit rejection of this concept as crudely deterministic after the 1980s. While they trace the origins of this rejection, their aim is to give the notion of interests explanatory power over identity.

They write: “The distinction between, on the one hand, ‘values’, ‘identity’, ‘status’ or ‘recognition’ and, on the other hand, ‘interests’ is artificial, and in fact is always based on a dualistic conception of the human: between the ‘economic’ body and the moral psyche. From a materialist, non-dualistic perspective, however, to be possessed of a certain social status, or to receive ‘respect’ and ‘recognition’, to have a secure and stable sense of identity … or to have government conducted in accordance with one’s ‘values’ are all in fact realisations of specific and concrete ‘interests’.”

This observation is important to Gilbert and Williams’s portrayal of hegemony as a process by which certain sets of interests coincide to determine society’s direction of travel.

To build counter-hegemony in the vacuum bequeathed by neoliberalism, and ultimately to ensure that this follows a neosocialist trajectory, they argue for the creation of as large as possible an aggregation of interests through a broad social coalition behind a realisable ambition such as a “Green New Deal.”

This would appeal to Gramsci, who was so often misrepresented in post-Marxist thought as providing a justification for abandoning the concept of class.

Yet Gramsci did not see the united front as a reformist retreat from workers’ revolution, but rather as a deepening of the strategic approach to it of Lenin and Trotsky.

This was a pragmatic response to bitter lessons learned in political struggle by this Italian revolutionary. This was his response to the harsh reality that under advanced capitalism, the bourgeoisie will never be taken by surprise.