Cultural hegemony

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The Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) developed the theory of cultural hegemony to further the
establishment of a working-class worldview.

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In Marxist philosophy, cultural hegemony is the domination of a culturally diverse society by

the ruling class who manipulate the culture of that society—
the beliefs, explanations, perceptions, values, and mores—so that their imposed, ruling-
class worldview becomes the accepted cultural norm; the universally valid dominant ideology, which
 justifies the social, political, and economic status quo as natural and inevitable, perpetual and
beneficial for everyone, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class.[1][2]
In philosophy and in sociology, the term cultural hegemony has denotations and connotations
derived from the Ancient Greek word ἡγεμονία (hegemonia) indicating leadership and rule. In
politics, hegemony is the geopolitical method of indirect imperial dominance, with which
the hegemon (leader state) rules subordinate states, by the threat of intervention, an implied means
of power, rather than by direct military force, that is, invasion, occupation, and annexation.[3]

Contents
[hide]

 1Background
o 1.1Etymology
o 1.2Historical
 2Intellectuals
 3Gramsci’s influence
 4Critique of Gramsci
o 4.1The ideological apparatuses of the State
 5See also
 6References
 7Further reading
 8External links

Background[edit]
Etymology[edit]
The etymologic and historical evolution of the Greek word ἡγεμονία, and of its denotations, has
proceeded thus:

 In Ancient Greece (8th c. BC – AD 6th c.), ἡγεμονία (leadership) denoted the politico–military
dominance of a city-state upon other city-states, as in the Hellenic League (338 BC),
a federation of Greek city–states, established by King Philip II of Macedon, to facilitate his
access to and use of the Greek militaries against the Persian empire.[2]
 In the 19th century, hegemony (rule) denoted the geopolitical and cultural predominance of one
country upon other countries, as in the European colonialism imposed upon the Americas,
Africa, Asia, and Australia.[4]
 In the 20th century, the political-science denotation of hegemony (dominance) expanded to
include cultural imperialism; the cultural domination, by a ruling class, of a
socially stratified society. That by manipulating the dominant ideology (cultural values and
mores) of the society, the ruling class can intellectually dominate the other social classes with an
imposed worldview (Weltanschauung) that ideologically justifies the social, political, and
economic status quo of the society as if it were a natural and normal, inevitable and perpetual
state of affairs that always has been so.[2][5][6][7]
Historical[edit]
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 a War of Position and 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 propagate further 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.
The initial, theoretical application of cultural domination was as a Marxist analysis of "economic
class" (base and superstructure), which Antonio Gramsci developed to comprehend "social class".
Hence, cultural hegemony proposes that the prevailing cultural norms of a society, which are
imposed by the ruling class (bourgeois cultural hegemony), must not be perceived as natural and
inevitable, but must be recognized as artificial social constructs (institutions, practices, beliefs, et
cetera) that must be investigated to discover their philosophic roots as instruments of social-class
domination. That such praxis of knowledge is indispensable for the intellectual and
political liberation of the proletariat, so that workers and peasants, the people of town and country,
can create their own working-class culture, which specifically addresses their social and economic
needs as social classes.
In a society, cultural hegemony is neither monolithic intellectual praxis, nor a unified system of
values, but a complex of stratified social structures, wherein each social and economic class has a
social purpose and an internal class-logic that allows its members to behave in a way that is
particular and different from the behaviours of the members of other social classes, whilst co-existing
with them as constituents of the society.
As a result of their different social purposes, the classes will be able to coalesce into a society with a
greater social mission. When a man, a woman, or a child perceives the social structures of
bourgeois cultural hegemony, personal common sense performs a dual, structural role (private and
public) whereby the individual person applies common sense to cope with daily life, which explains
(to himself and to herself) the small segment of the social order stratum that each experiences as
the status quo of life in society; "the way things are". Publicly, the emergence of the perceptual
limitations of personal common sense inhibit the individual person’s perception of the greater nature
of the systematic socio-economic exploitation made possible by cultural hegemony. Because of the
discrepancy in perceiving the status quo—the socio-economic hierarchy of bourgeois culture—most
men and women concern themselves with their immediate (private) personal concerns, rather than
with distant (public) concerns, and so do not think about and question the fundamental sources of
their socio-economic oppression, and its discontents, social, personal, and political.[8]
The effects of cultural hegemony are perceptible at the personal level; although each person in a
society lives a meaningful life in his and her social class, to him and to her, the discrete social
classes might appear to have little in common with the private life of the individual man and woman.
Yet, when perceived as a whole society, the life of each person does contribute to the greater social
hegemony. Although social diversity, economic variety, and political freedom appear to exist—
because most people see different life-circumstances—they are incapable of perceiving the greater
hegemonic pattern created when the lives they witness coalesce as a society. The cultural
hegemony is manifested in and maintained by an existence of minor, different circumstances that
are not always fully perceived by the men and the women living the culture.[9]

Intellectuals[edit]
In perceiving and combating cultural hegemony, the working class and the peasantry depend upon
the intellectuals produced by their society, to which ends Antonio Gramsci distinguished between
bourgeois-class intellectuals and working-class intellectuals, the proponents and the opponents of
the imposed, normative culture, and thus of the social status quo:
Since these various categories of traditional intellectuals [administrators, scholars and scientists,
theorists, non-ecclesiastical philosophers, etc.] 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.[10]

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 labor, 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.[11]

Gramsci’s influence[edit]

In the 1960s, the German student leader Rudi Dutschke, of the 68er-Bewegung, said that changing the
bourgeois West Germany required a long march through the society’s institutions, in order to identify and
combat cultural hegemony. This quote is often mis-attributed to Antonio Gramsci.[12]

Cultural hegemony has philosophically influenced Eurocommunism, the social sciences, and
the activist politics of socially liberal and progressive politicians. The analytic discourse of cultural
hegemony is important to research and synthesis in anthropology, political science, sociology,
and cultural studies; in education, cultural hegemony developed critical pedagogy, by which the root
causes of political and social discontent can be identified, and so resolved.
In 1967, the German student movement leader Rudi Dutschke reformulated Antonio Gramsci's
philosophy of cultural hegemony with the phrase The long march through the
institutions (German: Marsch durch die Institutionen) to identify the political war of position, an
allusion to the Long March (1934–35) of the Communist Chinese People's Liberation Army, by
means of which, the working class would produce their own organic intellectuals and culture
(dominant ideology) to replace those imposed by the bourgeoisie.[13][14][15][16][17]

Critique of Gramsci[edit]
The ideological apparatuses of the State[edit]
As conceptual criticism of cultural hegemony, the structuralist philosopher Louis Althusser presented
the theory of the ideological state apparatus to describe the structure of complex relationships,
among the different organs of the State, by which ideology is transmitted and disseminated to the
populations of a society.[18] Althusser draws from the concepts of hegemony present in cultural
hegemony, yet rejects the absolute historicism proposed by Gramsci. He argues that the ideological
state apparatuses (ISA) are the sites of ideological conflict among the social classes of a society.
That, in contrast to the repressive state apparatuses (RSA), such as the military and the police
forces, the ISA exist as a plurality. While the ruling class in power can readily control the repressive
state apparatuses, the ISA are both the sites and the stakes (the objects) of class struggle.
Moreover, the ISA are not monolithic social entities, and are distributed throughout the society, as
public and as private sites of continual class struggle.
In On the Reproduction of Capitalism (1968), Louis Althusser said that the ideological apparatuses
of the State are over-determined zones of society that comprise complex elements of the ideologies
of previous modes of production, thus, are sites of continual political activity in a society, which
are[19]:

 the religious ISA (the system of Churches)

 the educational ISA (the systems of public and private schools),

 the family ISA,

 the legal ISA,

 the political ISA (the political system, e.g. political parties),

 the trade union ISA,

 the communications ISA (press, radio, television, etc.)

 the cultural ISA (literature, the arts, sport, etc.)

Althusser said that the parliamentary structures of the State, by which the “will of the people” is
represented by elected delegates, are an ideological apparatus of the State. That the political
system, itself, is an ideological apparatus, because it involves the “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.”[20]

Cultural hegemony refers to domination or rule achieved through

ideologicaland cultural means. The term refers to the ability of a group of people
to hold power over social institutions, and thus, to strongly influence the values,
norms, ideas, expectations, worldview, and behavior of the rest of society.

Cultural hegemony functions by achieving the consent of the masses to abide

social norms and the rules of law by framing the worldview of the ruling class,
and the social and economic structures that go with it, as just, legitimate, and
designed for the benefit of all, even though they may really only benefit the ruling
class.

It is distinct from rule by force, like in a military dictatorship, because it allows

those in power to achieve rule using ideology and culture.

Cultural Hegemony According to Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci developed the concept of cultural hegemony based on Karl

Marx’s theory that the dominant ideology of society reflected the beliefs and
interests of the ruling class. He argued that consent to the rule of the dominant
group is achieved by the spread of dominant ideologies -- a collection of world
views, beliefs, assumptions, and values -- via social institutions like education,
media, family, religion, politics, and law, among others. Because institutions
do the work of socializing people into the norms, values, and beliefs of the
dominant social group, if a group controls the institutions that maintain social
order, then that group rules all others in society.

Cultural hegemony is most strongly manifested when those ruled by the

dominant group come to believe that the economic and social conditions of their
society are natural and inevitable, rather than created by people with a vested
interest in particular social, economic, and political orders.

Gramsci developed the concept of cultural hegemony in an effort to explain

why the worker-led revolution that Marx predicted in the previous century had
not come to pass. Central to Marx’s theory of capitalism was the belief that the
destruction of the economic system was built into the system itself
since capitalism is premised on the exploitation of the working class by the ruling
class.

Marx reasoned that workers could only take so much economic

exploitation before they would rise up and overthrow the ruling class. However,
this revolution did not happen on a mass scale.

The Cultural Power of Ideology

Gramsci realized that there was more to the dominance of capitalism than the
class structure and its exploitation of workers. Marx had recognized the
important role that ideology played in reproducing the economic system and the
social structure that supported it, but Gramsci believed that Marx had not given
full credit to the power of ideology. In an essay titled “The Intellectuals,” written
between 1929 and 1935, Gramsci wrote about the power of ideology to
reproduce the social structure via institutions like religion and education. He
argued that the intellectuals of society, often viewed as detached observers of
social life, are actually embedded in a privileged social class and enjoy prestige in
society. As such, they function as the “deputies” of the ruling class, teaching and
encouraging people to follow the norms and rules established by the ruling class.

Importantly, this includes the belief that the economic system, the political
system, and a class stratified society are legitimate, and thus, the rule of the
dominant class is legitimate.

In a basic sense, this process can be understood as teaching students in school

how to follow rules, obey authority figures, and behave according to expected
norms. Gramsci elaborated on the role the education system plays in the process
of achieving rule by consent, or cultural hegemony, in his essay, “On Education.”

The Political Power of Common Sense

In “The Study of Philosophy” Gramsci discussed the role of “common sense” --

dominant ideas about society and about our place in it -- in producing cultural
hegemony. For example, the idea of “pulling oneself up by the bootstraps,” that
one can succeed monetarily if one just tries hard enough, is a form of common
sense that has flourished under capitalism, and that serves to justify the system.
For, if one believes that all it takes to succeed is hard work and dedication, then it
follows that the system of capitalism and the social structure that is organized
around it is just and valid.

It also follows that those who have succeeded economically have earned their
wealth in a just and fair manner and that those who struggle economically, in
turn, have earned their impoverished state. This form of common sense fosters
the belief that success and social mobility are strictly the responsibility of the
individual, and by doing so obscures the real class, racial, and gender inequalities
that are built into the capitalist system.

In sum, cultural hegemony, or our tacit agreement with the way that things are, is
a result of the process of socialization, our experiences with social institutions,
our exposure to cultural narratives and imagery, and how norms surround and
inform our everyday lives.

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 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.

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.

Stephen Duncombe teaches the history and politics of media at New York University. He is the author or
editor of six books, including Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy and the
Cultural Resistance Reader. Duncombe is a life-long political activist, co-founding a community based
advocacy group in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and working as an organizer for the NYC chapter of
the international direct action group, Reclaim the Streets. He co-created the School for Creative Activism
in 2011 and is presently co-director of the Center for Artistic Activism www.artisticactivism.org.
Gramsci and hegemony

The idea of a ‘third face of power’, or

‘invisible power’ has its roots partly, in Marxist thinking about the
pervasive power of ideology, values and beliefs in
reproducing class relations and concealing contradictions
(Heywood, 1994: 100). Marx recognised that economic
exploitation was not the only driver behind capitalism, and that
the system was reinforced by a dominance of ruling class
ideas and values – leading to Engels’s famous concern that
‘false consciousness’ would keep the working class from
recognising and rejecting their oppression (Heywood, 1994:
85).
False consciousness, in relation to invisible power, is itself a ‘theory of
power’ in the Marxist tradition. It is particularly evident in the
thinking of Lenin, who ‘argued that the power of ‘bourgeois
ideology’ was such that, left to its own devices, the proletariat
would only be able to achieve ‘trade union consciousness’,
the desire to improve their material conditions but within the
capitalist system’ (Heywood 1994: 85). A famous analogy is
made to workers accepting crumbs that fall off the table (or
indeed are handed out to keep them quiet) rather than
claiming a rightful place at the table.
The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, imprisoned for much
of his life by Mussolini, took these idea further in his Prison
Notebooks with his widely influential notions of ‘hegemony’
and the ‘manufacture of consent’ (Gramsci 1971). Gramsci
saw the capitalist state as being made up of two overlapping
spheres, a ‘political society’ (which rules through force) and a
‘civil society’ (which rules through consent). This is a different
meaning of civil society from the ‘associational’ view common
today, which defines civil society as a ‘sector’ of voluntary
organisations and NGOs. Gramsci saw civil society as the
public sphere where trade unions and political parties gained
concessions from the bourgeois state, and the sphere in
which ideas and beliefs were shaped, where bourgeois
‘hegemony’ was reproduced in cultural life through the media,
universities and religious institutions to ‘manufacture consent’
and legitimacy (Heywood 1994: 100-101).

The political and practical implications of Gramsci’s ideas

were far-reaching because he warned of the limited
possibilities of direct revolutionary struggle for control of the
means of production; this ‘war of attack’ could only succeed
with a prior ‘war of position’ in the form of struggle over ideas
and beliefs, to create a new hegemony (Gramsci 1971). This
idea of a ‘counter-hegemonic’ struggle – advancing
alternatives to dominant ideas of what is normal and
legitimate – has had broad appeal in social and political
movements. It has also contributed to the idea that
‘knowledge’ is a social construct that serves to legitimate
social structures (Heywood 1994: 101).

In practical terms, Gramsci’s insights about how power is

constituted in the realm of ideas and knowledge – expressed
through consent rather than force – have inspired the use of
explicit strategies to contest hegemonic norms of legitimacy.
Gramsci’s ideas have influenced popular education practices,
including the adult literacy and consciousness-raising
methods of Paulo Freire in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970),
liberation theology, methods of participatory action research
(PAR), and many approaches to popular media,
communication and cultural action.
The idea of power as ‘hegemony’ has also influenced debates
about civil society. Critics of the way civil society is narrowly
conceived in liberal democratic thought – reduced to an
‘associational’ domain in contrast to the state and market –
have used Gramsci’s definition to remind us that civil society
can also be a public sphere of political struggle and
contestation over ideas and norms. The goal of ‘civil society
strengthening’ in development policy can thus be pursued
either in a neo-liberal sense of building civic institutions to
complement (or hold to account) states and markets, or in a
Gramscian sense of building civic capacities to think
differently, to challenge assumptions and norms, and to
articulate new ideas and visions.