It's the Hegemony, Stupid!

Hegemony for Gramsci's is how we can distinguish historical economism vs. historical materialism. The process of following the money is not enough for revolutionary change of the "structure" of the conflicts in the world economy. This is why Gramsci critiques syndicalists, in favor of labor union and direct action, nearly as much as he criticizes laissez-faire liberalism. Now I'll admit that much of his argument here escapes me, but it got me thinking about our current global economic crisis. We're fucked either way , but I think Gramsci is inviting us to complicate our understanding the "need for change" in Washington.

Gramsci excoriates crude "economists" claiming that "they forget the thesis that asserts that men become conscious of fundamental conflicts on the terrain of ideologies [which] is not physical or moralistic in character, but structural and epistemological...Critical activity is reduced to the exposure of swindles, to creating scandals, and to prying into the pockets of public figures" (Gramsci, 215). Investigative journalism never looked so asinine. Hegemonic forces of power deal out ideological warfare on the structural level, not on the personal. Reality trumps appearance.

As for nowadays, I recently listened to a lecture from Naomi Klein, author of No Logo, and most recently, The Shock Doctrine, criticizing Milton Friedman, the grandaddy of economic deregulation, which Gramsci himself points to as an unnatural symbiont to liberalism (perhaps the kind we know see as neo-liberalism). Friedman's economic revolution entered with Ronald Reagan and dominated the global landscape since, Clinton definately not excluded. Near the end of her talk Klein cites Friedman's 1982 edition of Capitalism and Freedom: "Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around." Her fear is that we have not yet produced new ideas for superstructural (cultural, economic, and political) philosopher that won't thrust us again into the pit of systemic crisis. Before we join the Obama bandwagon, we need to make sure that he's not just the glue that sticks old forms of hegemony back together.