Hegemony Now! – Gramsci reloaded

#nonfiction #politics

“Where is the revolution?” With rising inequality, impending ecological breakdown, ongoing genocide – many of us feel that ‘something should be done’,. Then we look around and see everyone else turning up at work, doing the dishes or just trying to get through the day. And so we, too, put the day’s misery out of mind and get on with it. The rent must, after all, be paid.

Hegemony Now! – How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (and How We Win It Back) Jeremy Gilbert & Alex Williams interrogates why this happens. Why, if so many of us so acutely feel the injustices of our present moment, does nothing ever seem to change? Gilbert and Williams seek the answer in an update of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. Gramsci introduced the term during the days of Mussolini’s fascism to describe the ability of one group in society to exercise control over everyone else. Control here doesn’t need to mean men with guns, nor does it mean total control of the North Korean variety. Instead, hegemony describes a state where a dominant group, or bloc of groups, manages to get just enough of the rest of us to do as they wish to keep themselves in power, using a variety of means, most of them not directly violent.

Mussolini’s Italy lies almost a hundred years behind us, and a lot has changed since then (though depressingly, a lot has also stayed the same). Hegemony Now! benefits from integrating hegemony 1.0 with extensive developments in critical and philosophical thinking. This is necessary not only to account for social, economic, political and technological changes, but also to deal with the displacement of the Working Class as the teleological Subject of History, endowed with its necessary world historic mission to overthrow capitalism.

Instead, Hegemony Now! needs to start over with a working class that is complex and multifaceted, and to varying degrees complicit in the maintenance of the capitalist system that exploits it. This in itself is an improvement, because it forces us to approach the working class as it actually is, rather than how we would like it to be, and avoids us projecting a uniform ‘class interest’ onto it which it is the duty of some intellectual vanguard to explain. A complex and multifaceted subject requires a complex and multifaceted theory. Hegemony Now! identifies a range of factors that incentivise alignment of the working class with the currently dominant social bloc – which Gilbert and Williams identify as an unholy alliance between finance capital and Big Tech.

First, Hegemony Now! introduces a distinction between passive and active consent, noting that it isn’t necessary for workers to believe in all the dogmas of the dominant bloc, provided that their disagreement is impotent. Most people may disagree with the increased use of private sector providers in the NHS, for example, but there is no obvious way to express that disagreement in a way that could plausibly make a difference.

This links to Hegemony Now!’s second valuable perspective, which is what I would term ‘horizons of viability’ (although the authors don’t use that term). Gilbert and Williams propose that when any class, social bloc or individual expresses demands, these are shaped not only by their interests, but also by what they perceive to be achievable. In other words, there has to be the belief that there is a viable pathway from where we are now, to where we want to go. Hegemony Now!’s contention is that it is that horizon that is constantly subject to political contest, and is always being diminished by the dominant bloc. Workers may well want higher wages, but if they do not believe that this can be achieved through democratic control of their workplaces, they may settle for something less ambitious, such as trade union bargaining, or supporting efforts to make their firm more ‘competitive’, or restricting immigration. Hegemony Now!’s vital contribution here is that it is not the case that workers are deceived by some ‘false consciousness’ about what their interests are, but that the dominant bloc can contain these interests by only allowing demands that do not disrupt the current system.

For many labour organisers, campaigners or activists this sound fairly obvious. Anyone who has spent any time organising workers knows that their identities, hopes, dreams and actions are multifarious and complex, and that their demands are constrained by what they perceive to be possible. Much organising time is not spent on convincing workers of what they want, but of the fact that what they want can be attainable. Nonetheless, Hegemony Now! offers a helpful toolkit to inform and direct organising work, and conceptualise the difficulties it often faces.

In some chapters however, the theoretical arguments do feel quite removed from the praxis of activists. An entire chapter of the book is committed to demonstrating that workers, while not having immanent interests intrinsic to their class, still have interests beyond the demands they express at any given time. Any organiser will likely find themselves bemused by the amount of argument deployed to ‘prove’ something that to them will be a daily empirical reality. The chapter on interests was the starkest instance of this, but as a whole the book feels like it is written in two registers: one for lay activists, and one as part of an ongoing academic debate. Gilbert and Williams do attempt to provide context about this broader debate, but without being read up on its parameters, it remains difficult to follow. It doesn’t help here that while the book has ample footnotes, the references are all to entire works, rather than to locations with them. Certainly this showcases the authors’ erudition, but informing the reader that something can be found ‘somewhere’ in Capital is not exactly helpful.

In the conclusion of the book, Gilbert and Williams return to our opening question, expanding on the (And How We Win it Back) bit in the title. This section is shorter than I would have liked. The authors note the need to form alliances, but even a mere three years after publication, it looks less plausible that there is a strong ‘progressive faction’ within capital that can be peeled off using the Green New Deal as a vehicle to align interests. And even if that was possible, it is not clear if the working class would not simply be the subservient partner in such an alliance. Already, the specific recommendations in the book feel therefore dated.

Where its recommendations are less conjuncture specific Hegemony Now! is on stronger terrain: political education, consciousness raising, and building a counter-hegemonic infrastructure (e,g. in new media) are not shiny and new, but the authors are not wrong that the Left is currently neither good at nor sufficiently invested in them. Naturally, these things are easier said then done. Hegemony Now! provides a lot of theoretical backbone to help people undertake these activities, but falls short of being an effective organising manual for any of them. A whole sequel could, and should, be written to help a generation of activists and organisers disconnected from these traditions and practices to reinvent them for the 21st century. Still, with so many Left books limited to mere diagnosis, the fact that Hegemony Now! contains practical steps is commendable.

In the end, Hegemony Now! is a useful resource for activists who want to better understand how to build a counter-hegemonic force, but it is not for the faint of heart. Some of the theoretical digressions are difficult to navigate without knowing the coordinates of the debate to which they clearly contribute. The same applies to the language, although I appreciate the authors want to be precise and nuanced, and have added a helpful glossary. Throughout, Hegemony Now! speaks to two readerships, and it doesn’t address either as well as it would have done if it had focused on one or the other. But in the absence of ‘Political Education For Dummies’, we should be grateful that the authors chose to address a wider readership, and give us at least the starting point to build a Left counter-hegemonic project.

Further reading