Gramsci's hegemony and consciousness
Explanation
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was an Italian philosopher, politician and communist leader, founder of the Communist Party of Italy (1921) and victim of the fascist regime (imprisoned from 1926 until shortly before his death). In prison, in broken health but lucidly, he wrote the Prison Notebooks (published posthumously from 1948), one of the most influential works of twentieth-century Western Marxism. His central concept for theorising consciousness is cultural hegemony.
The problem Gramsci tries to solve is: why, despite the objective conditions that according to Marx should produce the proletarian revolution, does it not occur in advanced capitalist countries? His answer is that the dominant classes do not only dominate by coercion (state, police, army) but fundamentally by hegemony: the active and passive consent of the dominated to the values, beliefs and interpretive frameworks that favour the established order.
Hegemony is produced in civil society: schools, churches, media, family, unions, parties, cultural associations. These spheres, apparently neutral or non-political, are in fact ideological battlegrounds in which classes struggle to impose their worldview as the shared common sense. Schools form docile subjects; religion consoles without transforming; media naturalise the existing order; dominant popular culture reproduces hegemonic values.
Intellectuals have a crucial role: Gramsci distinguished between traditional intellectuals (who think themselves neutral, like academics, clergy) and organic intellectuals (who explicitly articulate the worldview of a class). Each historical class generates its own organic intellectuals. For the proletariat to be able to dispute hegemony, it must form its own organic intellectuals, capable of elaborating an alternative culture.
The war of position is another key Gramscian metaphor: against the illusion of a war of movement (frontal revolutionary assault, as in Russia in 1917), in advanced capitalist societies the struggle for transformation requires patience, cultural work, construction of counter-hegemony on multiple fronts over a long time. The cultural trenches must be occupied one by one, common sense transformed, education and organisation undertaken. Revolution is also —and perhaps first— cultural revolution.
For the theory of consciousness, Gramsci contributes the idea that individual consciousness is profoundly constituted by cultural hegemonies that operate as a naturalised background, hard to make conscious, and that social transformation requires reflexive and collective work on these hegemonies. His influence has been enormous: in British Cultural Studies (Stuart Hall), in Indian subaltern studies (Ranajit Guha), in post-Marxism (Laclau and Mouffe), in critical media theory, in critical pedagogy (Freire), in contemporary political analysis. As a conception of consciousness as a field where long-term hegemonic struggles are fought, Gramsci's work remains one of the most penetrating of the twentieth century.
Strengths
- Analytic sophistication of the culture-politics link.
- Explains consent without reducing to mere deception.
- Massive influence on contemporary cultural studies.
- Applicable to analyses of media, education, populisms.
Main critiques
- Risk of functionalism (everything serves hegemony).
- Hard to measure 'degree of hegemony' empirically.
- Tension between voluntarism and structure.