Cultural hegemony

The Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) developed cultural hegemony to explain the control structures of society, and said that the working class must produce their own intellectual leaders to counter the worldview of the ruling class.

In Marxist philosophy, cultural hegemony is the dominance of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class who manipulate the culture of that society—the beliefs and explanations, perceptions, values, and mores—so that the worldview of the ruling class becomes the accepted cultural norm. As the universal dominant ideology, the ruling-class worldview misrepresents the social, political, and economic status quo as natural, inevitable, and perpetual conditions that benefit every social class, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class.

In philosophy and in sociology, the denotations and the connotations of term cultural hegemony derive from the Ancient Greek word hegemonia (ἡγεμονία), which indicates the leadership and the régime of the hegemon. In political science, hegemony is the geopolitical dominance exercised by an empire, the hegemon (leader state) that rules the subordinate states of the empire by the threat of intervention, an implied means of power, rather than by threat of direct rule—military invasion, occupation, and territorial annexation.

Background

Historical

In 1848, Karl Marx proposed that the economic recessions and practical contradictions of a capitalist economy would provoke the working class to proletarian revolution, depose capitalism, restructure social institutions (economic, political, social) per the rational models of socialism, and thus begin the transition to a communist society. Therefore, the dialectical changes to the functioning of the economy of a society determine its social superstructures (culture and politics).

To that end, Antonio Gramsci proposed a strategic distinction between the politics for a War of Position and for a War of Manœuvre. The war of position is an intellectual and cultural struggle wherein the anti-capitalist revolutionary creates a proletarian culture whose native value system counters the cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie. The proletarian culture will increase class consciousness, teach revolutionary theory and historical analysis, and thus further develop revolutionary organisation among the social classes. On winning the war of position, socialist leaders would then have the necessary political power and popular support to begin the political manœuvre warfare of revolutionary socialism.

Socio-economic analysis

The initial Marxist application of cultural domination was as an analysis of economic class (base and superstructure), by which Gramsci developed the definition of "social class". Cultural hegemony occurs when the working classes believe that the prevailing cultural norms of a society — the dominant ideology imposed by the ruling class — are the natural order of things in society. In the strategic war for position, the working-class intelligentsia ensure that the working classes do not perceive and believe that the prevailing cultural norms are natural and inevitable, so recognize the artificiality of bourgeois culture; man-made social constructs used as instruments of social domination, e.g. the institutions (state, church, and social strata), the conventions (custom and tradition), and beliefs (religions and ideologies), etc. That to realise their own working-class culture the workers and the peasants, by way of their own intellectuals, must do the necessary analyses of their culture and their national history in order to realise the political liberation of the proletariat from the old ways of thinking about the order of things in society.

Cultural hegemony

Cultural hegemony is neither a monolithic intellectual praxis (politics and policies), nor a unified system of values (ideology), but a complex of social relations produced by the social stratification of the individual social structures of a society; the social class system and the social strata of each class. Social cohesion arises from each social and economic class having a specific social purpose, and each class having an in-crowd class-logic that allows social behaviours particular to and different from the behaviours of other social classes; social structures establish and demarcate the social order. Consequent to their assigned socio-economic purposes, the social classes will intellectually coalesce into a society with a greater sense of national mission, as decided by the dominant ideology of the ruling class.

Gramsci said that cultural and historical analyses of the “natural order of things in society”, would allow common-sense men and women to intellectually perceive the social structures of bourgeois cultural hegemony. In everyday life, personal common sense has a social role In each sphere of life (private and public) common sense is the intellectualism with which people cope with and explain their social stratum within the greater social order, which each person experiences as the status quo, as "the way things are" in society. Yet the limitations of common sense inhibit the person's intellectual perception of the socio-economic exploitation made possible with cultural hegemony. Given the perceptual discrepancy in seeing the status quo hierarchy of bourgeois culture, most people concern themselves with (private) personal matters, rather than with the (public) concerns of politics, and so do not question the fundamental sources of their socio-economic oppression.

Intelligentsia

In perceiving and combating cultural hegemony, the working class and the peasant social class depend upon the leadership of the intelligentsia — scholars, academics, and teachers, scientists, philosophers, administrators et al. — produced by their specific social classes; thus Gramsci distinguished between the intellectuals of the bourgeoisie and the intellectuals of the working class, respectively, the men and women who are the proponents and the opponents of the cultural status quo:

Since these various categories of traditional intellectuals experience through an esprit de corps their uninterrupted historical continuity, and their special qualifications, they thus put themselves forward as autonomous and independent of the dominant social group. This self-assessment is not without consequences in the ideological and political fields; consequences of wide-ranging import. The whole of idealist philosophy can easily be connected with this position, assumed by the social complex of intellectuals, and can be defined as the expression of that social utopia, by which the intellectuals think of themselves as "independent" [and] autonomous, [and] endowed with a character of their own, etc.

— Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (1971), pp. 7–8.

The traditional and vulgarized type of the intellectual is given by the Man of Letters, the philosopher, and the artist. Therefore, journalists, who claim to be men of letters, philosophers, artists, also regard themselves as the "true" intellectuals. In the modern world, technical education, closely bound to industrial labour, even at the most primitive and unqualified level, must form the basis of the new type of intellectual. . . . The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist of eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor [and] organizer, as "permanent persuader", not just simple orator.

— Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (1971), pp. 9–10.

Gramsci's influence

In 1968, Rudi Dutschke, a leader of the German student movement, the "68er-Bewegung", said that changing the bourgeois society of West Germany required a long march through the society's institutions, in order to identify and combat cultural hegemony.

German student movement

In 1967, the German student movement leader Rudi Dutschke applied Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony with the phrase The Long march through the Institutions (Marsch durch die Institutionen) to identify the political war of position, a European Communist allusion to the Long March (1934–35) of the People's Liberation Army, by means of which the working-class intellectuals would produce the popular culture to replace the dominant ideology imposed by the cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie.

State apparatuses of ideology

The philosopher of Structural Marxism, Louis Althusser presented the theory of the Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses to describe the complex of relationships among the different organs of the State that transmit and disseminate the dominant ideology to the populations of a society. The ideological state apparatuses (ISA) are the sites of ideological conflict among the social classes of a society; and, unlike the military and police forces, the repressive state apparatuses (RSA), the ISA exist as a plurality throughout society. Despite the ruling class's control of the RSA, the ideological apparatuses of the state are both the sites and the stakes (the objects) of class struggle, because the ISA are not monolithic social entities, and exist amongst society, as the public and the private sites of continual class struggle.

In On the Reproduction of Capitalism (1968), Althusser said that the ideological apparatuses of the state (ISA) are overdetermined zones of society that are a complex of elements of the dominant ideologies of previous modes of production; thus, the ISA are sites of continual political activity in a society, which are:

• the religious ISA (the clergy)
• the educational ISA (the public and private school systems)
• the family ISA (patriarchal family)
• the legal ISA (the legal and court systems)
• the political ISA (political parties)
• the company union ISA
• the mass communications ISA (print, radio, television, internet, cinema)
• the cultural ISA (literature, the arts, sport, etc.)

The parliamentary structures of the State, by which elected politicians exercise the will of the people also are an ideological apparatus of the State, given the State's control of which populations are allowed to participate as political parties. In itself, the political system is an ideological apparatus, because citizens' participation involves intellectually accepting the ideological "fiction, corresponding to a 'certain' reality, that the component parts of the [political] system, as well as the principle of its functioning, are based on the ideology of the 'freedom' and 'equality' of the individual voters and the 'free choice' of the people's representatives, by the individuals that 'make up' the people".

See also

• Behavioral contagion
• Collective action problem
• Cultural capital
• Cultural conflict
• Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990), by James C. Scott
• Focal point (game theory)
• Hegemonic masculinity
• Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe
• Herd behaviour
• "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" (1970), by Louis Althusser
• Marxist cultural analysis
• Marx's theory of alienation
• Nicos Poulantzas
• Political consciousness
• Post-hegemony
• Sheeple
• Social capital
• Soft power
• Southern strategy
• Subaltern (postcolonialism)
• The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1962), by Jürgen Habermas

Further reading

• Beech, Dave; Andy Hewitt; Mel Jordan (2007). The Free Art Collective Manifesto for a Counter-Hegemonic Art. England: Free Publishing. ISBN 978-0-9554748-0-4. OCLC 269432294.
• Bullock, Alan; Trombley, Stephen, eds. (1999), The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought (3rd ed.).
• Flank, Lenny (2007). Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony: Marxism, Capitalism, and Their Relation to Sexism, Racism, Nationalism, and Authoritarianism. St. Petersburg, Florida: Red and Black Publishers. ISBN 978-0-9791813-7-5. OCLC 191763227.
• Gramsci, Antonio (1992), Buttigieg, Joseph A (ed.), Prison notebooks, New York City: Columbia University Press, ISBN 978-0-231-10592-7, OCLC 24009547
• Abercrombie, Nicholas; Turner, Bryan S. (June 1978). "The Dominant Ideology Thesis". The British Journal of Sociology. 29 (2): 149–70. doi:10.2307/589886. JSTOR 589886.
• Anderson, Perry (1977). "The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci" (PDF). New Left Review. No. 100. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-05-18.

External links

• Gramsci (archive), Marxists.
• International Gramsci society.
• Gramsci, journal, AU: UOW, archived from the original on 2012-11-28.
• Rethinking Marxism.
• Rethinking Marxism: Association for economic & social analysis, EI Net, archived from the original (review) on 2013-02-21
• Gramsci, "Selections", Prison notebooks, Marxists.
• Gramsci, Prison notebooks, Marxists.