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Politics
is not only fought out in state houses, workplaces or on battlefields,
but also in the language we use, the stories we tell, and the images we conjure — in short, in the ways we make sense of the world.
Cultural
hegemony is a term developed by Antonio Gramsci, activist, theorist,
and founder of the Italian Communist party. Writing while imprisoned in a
Fascist jail, Gramsci was concerned with how power works: how it is
wielded by those in power and how it is won by those who want to change
the system. The dominant idea at the time amongst Marxist radicals like
himself was that in order to attain power you needed to seize the means
of production and administration — that is, take over the factories and
the state. But Gramsci recognized that this was not sufficient. In his
youth, he had witnessed workers take over factories in Turin, only to
hand them back within weeks because they were unsure what to do with the
factories, or themselves. Gramsci had also observed the skill of the
Catholic Church in exercising its power and retaining the population’s
allegiance. Gramsci realized that in order to create and maintain a new
society, you also needed to create and maintain a new consciousness.
The repository of consciousness is culture. This includes both big-C
Culture, culture in an aesthetic sense, and small-c culture, culture in
an anthropological sense: the norms and mores and discourses that make
up our everyday lives. Culture, in this sense, is what allows us to
navigate our world, guiding our ideas of right and wrong, beautiful and
ugly, just and unjust, possible and impossible. You may be able to seize
a factory or storm a palace, but unless this material power is backed
up by a culture that reinforces the notion that what you are doing is
good and beautiful and just and possible, then any gains on the
economic, military and political fronts are likely to be short-lived.
The power of cultural hegemony lies in its invisibility. Unlike a
soldier with a gun or a political system backed up by a written
constitution, culture resides within us. It doesn’t seem “political,”
it’s just what we like, or what we think is beautiful, or what feels
comfortable. Wrapped in stories and images and figures of speech,
culture is a politics that doesn’t look like politics and is therefore a
lot harder to notice, much less resist. When a culture becomes
hegemonic, it becomes “common sense” for the majority of the population.
No culture, however, is completely hegemonic. Even under the most
complete systems of control, there are pockets of what Gramsci, and
later Hall, called “counter-hegemonic” cultures: ways of thinking and
doing that have revolutionary potential because they run counter to the
dominant power. For Gramsci, these cultures might be located in
traditional peasant beliefs or the shop-floor culture of industrial
workers; for Hall they might be found in youth subcultures like
Rastafarians and punks, and even in commercial entertainment. The
activist’s job, according to Hall, is to identify and exploit these
cultural pockets, build a radical counter-culture within the shell of
the old society, and wage the struggle for a new cultural hegemony.
An important caveat: Gramsci never believed that cultural power alone
was enough. The fight for cultural hegemony had to be part of an
overall strategy that also incorporated struggles for political and
economic power.
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