PYQ 

•  According to Gramsci, ‘hegemony is primarily based on the organization of consent. Comment. (19/20)

•  Comment: Gramsci’s concept of Hegemony (16/10)

•  Critically examine Gramsci’s concept of Hegemony. (08/60)

•  Explain, as per Gramsci, the distinction between hegemony and domination. (13/15)

•  Is Gramsci a theoretician of super-structures? Give reasons in support of your answer. (04/60)

•  Discuss Gramsci’s notion of ‘organic intellectuals’ (15/15)

Introduction:

"Power, dominance and leadership are three main features of hegemony".

The term hegemony describes the relatively dominant position of a particular set of ideas, thereby inhibiting the alternative ideas. Hegemony derives from the Greek term hēgemonia (“dominance over”), which was used to describe relations between city-states.  

There are three ways through which hegemony could be maintained:

•  Hegemony as hard power-The bedrock of contemporary US power lies in the overwhelming superiority of its military power. The US today has military capabilities that can reach any point on the planet accurately, lethally and in real time. As the Iraq invasion shows, the American capacity to conquer is formidable.

•  Hegemony as structural power-Hegemony in this sense is reflected in the role played by the US in providing global public goods. The best examples of global public goods are sea lanes of communication (SLOC) and the Internet. The US share of the world economy remains an enormous 28 per cent. A classic Example of the structural power of the US is the academic degree called the Master’s in Business Administration (MBA).

•  Hegemony as Soft Power-This third sense of hegemony is about the capacity to ‘manufacture Consent’. America is the most seductive, and in this sense the powerful, culture on earth. This attribute is called ‘soft power’: the ability to persuade rather than coerce. Example Mcdonaldization and cocalisation. 

Gramsci’s Theory of Hegemony

Introduction:

Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist intellectual and politician, who can be seen as the perfect example of the synthesis of theoretician and politician. He wrote on philosophy, political theory, sociology, history, and linguistics. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Communist Party of Italy. 

•  He was a vocal critic of Benito Mussolini and fascism. Gramsci is best known for his theory of cultural hegemony, which describes how the state and ruling capitalist class – the bourgeoisie – use cultural institutions to maintain power in capitalist societies. 

•  Gramsci drew insights from varying sources, not only other Marxists but also thinkers such as Niccolò Machiavelli, Vilfredo Pareto, Georges Sorel, and Benedetto Croce. 

•  The notebooks cover a wide range of topics, including Italian history and nationalism, the French Revolution, fascism, Taylorism and Fordism, civil society, folklore, religion and high and popular culture.

Notable ideas:

•  Cultural hegemony

•  bourgeoisie as the hegemonic group

•  building a counter-hegemony to challenge capitalist power.

•  war of position.

•  the distinction between "traditional" and "organic" intellectuals

Concept of Hegemony:

•  Hegemony is the central idea among many by which Antonio Gramsci established a humanistic, neo-Marxist approach to revolutionary change. Instead of subordinating the superstructure of ideas to the force of the economic base, Gramsci empowered the influence of ideas over Marxism's economic determinism. At the core of Gramsci's methodology is the dialectical relationship between hegemony (consent–support) and domination (coercion–force).

•  The concept of hegemony first appeared in Gramsci’s Notes on the Southern Question (1926), where it was defined as a system of class alliance in which a “hegemonic class” exercised political leadership over “subaltern classes” by “winning them over.”

In the view of Gramsci Hegemony” entails two things:

1)  First of all, it presupposes that the “hegemonic class” takes into consideration the interests of the classes and groups over which it exercises its “hegemony.” Added to this, some equilibrium between the hegemonic class and the subaltern classes is entailed whereby the hegemonic class will be forced to make some sacrifices tangent to its corporate interests. 

2)  Secondly, “hegemony” entails economic leadership besides ethico-political leadership. In other words, it entails that the hegemonic class be a “fundamental class” that is, a class situated at one of the two fundamental poles in the relations of production: owner or non-owner of the means of production.

According to Gramsci, hegemony (“predominance by consent”) is a condition in which a fundamental class exercises a political, intellectual, and moral role of leadership within a hegemonic system cemented by a common world-view or “organic ideology.”

Conclusion:

Gramsci's concept of 'hegemony' also explains why the working-class parties have only achieved a relatively moderate degree of success in the open competition for political power in the capitalist countries. Gramsci, therefore, insisted that revolution in the economic sphere was not enough to end the capitalist domination. It was necessary to reinforce revolution in the cultural sphere in order to achieve this end.

Advanced Reading: Difference between hegemony and domination:

Gramsci operates with different conceptions of hegemony when dealing with the national and the international arena. At the national level hegemony has been defined as dialectical unity between leadership and domination, including both, consensus and coercion. The term is used to depict the form of rule of the fundamental social group or class over subordinate groups in ‘modern’ capitalist states. 

•  For Gramsci, hegemony at the international level is in fact based on the economic power realized as military power of a given country, being war or the threat of war eventually what “makes a hegemonic power”. 

o  Gramsci recognized hegemony as dialectical unity between leadership and domination which cannot be understood as an opposite to domination, nor can hegemony be understood as a possible ‘addition’ to domination. 

o  And yet there are situations in which Gramsci envisages the possibility of “domination without hegemony”, in the words of Gramsci, “Domination without hegemony as an exception in passive revolution”.

•  Gramsci illustrated that a class is dominant in two ways, that is, it is ‘leading’ and ‘dominant’. 

o  It leads the allied classes and dominates over the adversarial classes. 

o  Therefore, even before attaining power a class can (and must) lead; when it is in power it becomes dominant but continues to lead as well.

•  Gramsci believed that the supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as ‘domination’ and as ‘moral and intellectual leadership.’ 

o  A social group is dominant over adversaries it tends to “liquidate” or to submit also with armed force and is leading over allied and like-minded groups.

o  Social group can or rather must be leading even before conquering governmental power (this is one of the principal conditions for the same conquest of power); later, when it exercises power and even if maintains it strongly in its hands, it becomes dominant, but it needs to continue to be ‘leading’ then there must be hegemonic activity. This hegemonic activity is the essential symptom of Hegemony.

Conclusion:

•  To conclude we can say that, Gramsci asserted hegemony as synthesis of “moral and intellectual leadership” while “domination” is realized given that political power is grasped and that the fundamental social group was and continues to be “leading”. In common parlance, the word “domination” denotes subjugation, or the exercise of absolute control either by a state or by an individual. 

•  On the other hand, “hegemony” conveys such notions as influence, patronage or leadership. The Italian social theorist, Antonio Gramsci uses the two terms to analyze the structure of power of the European bourgeoisie state of his time.

Advanced Reading: Superstructure theory:

•  The Italian social theorist, Antonio Gramsci, is now being recognized as the greatest Marxist thinker since Karl Marx. His theory of hegemony and domination has also been widely recognized as a necessary complement to Marxism. As it Provides a base to understand the nature and manifestations of the super structures present in the society. In the 1930s, when he was languishing in prison, he put down his ideas in a rather elliptical and allusive style. Such ideas were compiled and published under the title, Prison Notebooks.

For Gramsci, dialectics means three things:

1. interaction between the intellectuals (party leaders) and the masses. 

2. explanation of historical developments in terms of thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis; 

3. the relation between the sub-structure and super-structure.

•  Gramsci asserted that by using socializing mechanisms such as the church, schools, the press and other non-governmental institutions, the bourgeois state foists its own values and beliefs on society, thereby providing direction which eventually leads to the growth of superstructure and substructure in the society.

•  Gramsci does not subscribe to the notion of human liberation as merely an inevitable consequence of the internal dynamics of capitalism. 

•  Gramsci feels that in backward societies where the level of consciousness is low and where people are ruled by apathy and fear then there lies scope of subjugation by the dominant group. Which parallels the supremacy of force, but diminishes the need for its application. 

Conclusion:

According to Gramsci, the “base” of the social order consists of the relations between men or between classes, which determines their various powers of control over the means of production, distribution, and exchange. It determines the actual place people occupy in society. Those who control the base constitute a super structure and therefore exercise domination over the sub structure.

Advanced Reading: Organic Intellectuals:

•  “The proletariat, as a class, is poor in organizing elements. It does not have its own stratum of intellectuals, and can only create one very slowly, very painfully, after the winning of state power. However, it is important and useful for a break to occur in the mass of intellectuals: a break of an organic kind, historically characterized. It is a mass formation, a left tendency, in the modern sense of the word: i.e., one oriented towards the revolutionary proletariat” - Antonio Gramsci (from Prison Notebooks)

•  According to Antonio Gramsci the public intellectual is a kind of organic intellectual who accomplishes the function of connecting the mass of population to the leadership of the state through a web of social relationships. The quest for a new type of public intellectuals, more precisely, an organic collective intellectual (a new party) comes from the actuality of the revolution to overcome a non-favorable situation for the proletariat.

•  Gramsci gives the example of the organic intellectuals created by the bourgeoisie: “the capitalist entrepreneur creates alongside himself the industrial technician, the specialist in political economy, the organizers of a new culture, of a new legal system, etc.” 

•  In general, to be an intellectual organic to a fundamental class means to embody technical skills and perform directive functions with regard to a specific mode of production. An organic intellectual is a kind of public intellectual that derives a precise sense from the totality described by the socio-economic formation. 

Conclusion:

According to Gramsci, the state requires the active role of intellectuals as individual and collective organizers of private life. They perform the complex function of bringing about the consent of the population to meet the needs of production on a daily basis. In sum, the new category of organic intellectual replaces the traditional elite intellectual that was the controller of public life in premodern times. The concept of organic public intellectual concretely joints the social division of labor and the forms of the state within a specific socio-economic formation.