The Paradox of Hegemony

It takes hegemony to beat hegemony

The paradox of hegemony is we need hegemonic leadership to fight hegemonic leadership.

This sounds like fighting fire with fire, but once we really understand what “hegemony” is, it actually shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Hegemony isn’t some tool we’ve created. It’s not an instrument of propaganda or a form of illuminati mind-control.

It’s simply a word that describes a process inherent to human interaction.

The thing existed long before the word we created to describe it.

Hegemony is as unavoidable as communication itself.

Whether through language or nonverbal signals, we can’t help but communicate when we’re in the presence of another person.

Just looking at each other — or not — is active communication.

Similarly, just organizing a group is active hegemony.

Hegemony can be defined a bit more academically, as: the ongoing process of a particular class articulating their own group interests as the shared interests of the social whole.

We can talk about an “achieved hegemony” which means that, for a particular period of time, the class-in-power has established a commonly agreed upon worldview that favors themselves, and they’ve garnered widespread support from the classes-out-of-power.

The key thing about hegemony versus other modes of negotiating power is that hegemony is often defined as “domination by consent,” implying the subordinated people are willing participants in their subordination.

What this looks like in everyday life: we all grow up with the idea of a “Dream Job” that will magically make us happy. We believe that our lives are best lived by finding a spouse, starting a family, and buying a house as expediently as possible. We pressure each other to get better jobs at better companies, like the Amazons or Googles or Facebooks of the world, to buy better cars and better clothes. We worship people “on the grind” and even coined a word for our “hustle-culture.”

We think this benefits us, as a symbol of high status. But in reality, this culture of fervent workaholism benefits capital owners 350x more than the people who believe so blindly, yet sincerely, that “hard work alone” is the key to success.

At the end of the day, who wins? Is it the person spending every cent of their biweekly paycheck on a recurring cycle of mortgage, car-loan, student-loan, and credit-card payments? (Or worse yet… do you pay rent?!)

Does this lifestyle truly benefit the most people possible? Or have we just been hegemonically persuaded it’s the best way to live?

A simple way to test if this is the best way forward — if we would build this all again from a blank slate — is to ask ourselves: Do the ends justify the means?

In our current neoliberal culture, I personally don’t think so.

BACK TO HEGEMONY AS A USEFUL TOOL

It might sound ridiculous to suggest subordinated people are active participants in their own subordination. But seeing this play out in our everyday lives, it’s clear that hegemonic influence is all around us.

Fortunately, there is an opportunity. Hegemony isn’t limited to “leaders” telling “followers” what to think. It’s a term describing all communicative interactions between people; explaining how messages are sculpted, transmitted, internalized, and shared across social systems.

In spite of its historic use as a tool of oppression, hegemony has the potential to bring about cultural liberation for the current out-of-power classes to develop a post-neoliberal future.

It’s certainly easier to exert hegemonic influence when you control the news media, entertainment media, and political lobbying channels of any given country. That’s why we typically think of “hegemony” as something that wealthy elites do to screw-over poor people.

That’s why everyone should understand what hegemony is and how it actually works.

Hegemony is one of the most influential theories of the 20th century, first developed for modern Western application in the 1930s by Antonio Gramsci and since refined by hundreds, if not thousands, of academics. It’s critical this knowledge breaks beyond the artificially expensive walls of higher education, where it remains concentrated in the hands of wealthy elites who continue to use hegemony theory to perpetuate a culture of scarcity, competition, and oppression.

With this new model, adapted for the problems of the 21st century, we can understand the ways neoliberal culture perpetuates itself through complex neoliberal hegemony, and we can develop a countercultural movement that effectively disarms the dominant class.

Modern hegemony theory goes well beyond the (groundbreaking) work Gramsci developed from the cold isolation of a WWII jail cell. Today we understand that hegemonic influence stretches far beyond political parties, permeating corporate hierarchies, class-rooms, and even friend-groups.

Everywhere there is social interaction, there is hegemony in action.

We have to move past any fear associated with the word and start to embrace hegemony for positive social change. It’s the only way to combat hegemony being used to perpetuate damaging neoliberal interests.

Let me know what you think about complex hegemony theory or neoliberal hegemony! I’m curious what others know about these areas and what you reflexively think of when you hear these words.

Any thoughts on potential future alternatives?

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