Gramsci, Hegemony, and the World Order

March 6, 2025 by Bert Oliver

Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist philosopher, is easily underestimated with regard to what his intellectual legacy can teach us in the 21^st century. It is true that Gramsci – or rather, a caricature of Gramsci, as well as of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory – has been in circulation for some time (and of Martin Heidegger, too, although he and Theodor Adorno, of the Frankfurt School, did not see eye-to-eye), but these caricatures don’t do any of them justice.

For one thing, Bernard Stiegler has shown at length that Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) correctly diagnosed the detrimental effects of ‘the culture industry’ on American (or the West’s) collective intellectual prowess as manifested in the (in-)ability to think independently of cultural stereotypes. To be sure, the ideological orientation of universities can – and does – have a distorting effect on the work of thinkers when it is appropriated for reasons other than a concerted attempt to interpret it faithfully and rigorously, with a view to demonstrating its relevance for the present.

This is nothing unusual and leads to what I have called a ‘caricature’ above. Here I shall try to show, albeit briefly, what such caricatures obscure concerning the true value of an important thinker’s intellectual legacy for our present situation.

Gramsci was a Marxist, and therefore opposed Mussolini’s fascism in Italy in the early 20^th century. He died in prison in 1937, where he was incarcerated by the fascists, and has left a rich legacy of conceptual-theoretical means to understand various forms of oppression or tyranny. (Here I draw mainly from the text of an excellent book on Gramsci’s work – George Hoare and Nathan Sperber: An Introduction to Antonio Gramsci: His Life, Thought and Legacy, London, Bloomsbury, 2016.)

Among these, his best-known concept is probably ‘hegemony,’ which is mostly used these days as a synonym for ‘domination’ or ‘dominance,’ as in ‘cultural hegemony.’ In this sense, America wielded global cultural hegemony in the latter half of the 20^thcentury. What most people don’t know, however, is that the term, ‘hegemony,’ is derived from the ancient Greek word, ‘eghestai’ – ‘to direct or to lead.’ It is therefore connected with ‘leadership.’ During the 28-year-long Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens in ancient Greece, these two city-states occupied the position, respectively, of ‘hegemon’ (‘eghemon’) a derivative of ‘eghestai,’ which meant that they played the leading role in relation to other city-states, which were their respective allies.

Hence, with regard to culture, or society, or politics, any individual, or organisation, which takes a leading position concerning an important issue or series of events, could be said to play a hegemonic role in this sense of taking the lead. As observed above, this is not how the term is usually employed, but on revisiting Gramsci’s thinking recently, I was reminded of it. This set me thinking about the role that various figures and organisations have played for a number of years now as far as, arguably, taking the lead goes where manifestations of tyranny and authoritarianism since the advent of the fake pandemic are concerned. To grasp how this is possible, some aspects of Gramsci’s very original thought – which anticipated that of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu by decades, albeit written in a different idiom – have to be reconstructed first.

To combine the concepts of culture and hegemony – conceived as ‘leadership’ – intelligibly, one has to keep in mind that Gramsci regarded culture as being diametrically opposed to culture as a ‘value system.’‘ For him, the latter conception would impart artificial coherence, stagnation, and a lack of dynamism to it. Furthermore, it drives a wedge between culture and politics, as well as thought and practice. In contrast to this, Gramsci portrays culture as an organic collection or unfolding sequence of quotidian practices.

Culture is, therefore, a certain way of living and acting in every domain of society, with no one sphere of activity being elevated above any other as far as its claim to being part of culture is concerned. Just as Gramsci claims that ‘everyone is a philosopher,’ so every person belonging to different realms of society and social activity contributes to culture, from a teacher and a student, to a politician, a businessman, a journalist, a dancer, or a writer. Succinctly phrased, on a daily basis, everyone takes part in the cultural process, either creatively or – and this is important to note – destructively.

Applying this insight to what has happened in society since 2020, before the inauguration of Donald Trump as American president, it is easy to discern the predominantly destructive (but simultaneously constructive) cultural and political – because the social and political are inseparable from the cultural, for Gramsci – actions that have unfolded globally. Since Trump’s installation in the presidency, however, he and his team have initiated a sustained attempt at tipping the scales in favour of (re-)constructive political-cultural engagements. It may seem strange to use the term ‘cultural’ in this sense, but it should be kept in mind that Gramsci does not intend this term to bear the usual meaning, where it is almost exclusively associated with art, music, ballet, and so on.

It is therefore worthwhile remembering that, for the Italian thinker, culture, including politics, marks a social space of interminable activity, so cultural hegemony would therefore denote that aspect of cultural activity – which, perhaps surprisingly, for Gramsci crucially comprises education in a broad sense – which occupies a ‘leading’ position. According to the Italian thinker, this does not only refer to ‘education’ encountered at schools and universities but includes it. Education occurs in every sphere of society, from the informal way children are brought up at home, and formally at school, to training in craft and technology, and at tertiary level in universities. It is one of Gramsci’s most compelling insights that every relationship that may be called ‘hegemonic’ is unavoidably also an educational relationship in some way, but again, not necessarily salutary by that token.

Should some cultural endeavour in any of these spheres develop into a ‘leading’ or hegemonic practice in this sense, it is said by Gramsci to ‘attract’ people to it – an important consideration as far as evidence is concerned of the ‘attraction’ that some organisations appear to have exercised on (potential) readers, who are hungry for leadership regarding a critical response to the egregious acts of tyranny since 2020.

Culture is therefore not the exclusive domain of artistic or intellectual refinement, restricted to the ‘educated elite,’ which is the impression often created by those in the upper echelons of society, with more power and influence than others. Instead of allowing this erroneous conception to result in a watered-down, insipid ‘intellectualism,’ Gramsci argues that (quoted in Hoare and Sperber, 2016, pp. 28-29).

Culture is something quite different. It is organization, discipline of one’s inner self, a coming to terms with one’s own personality; it is the attainment of a higher awareness, with the aid of which one succeeds in understanding one’s own historical value, one’s own function in life, one’s own rights and obligations.

This remark explains why an individual is often the driving force in a group or organisation which, taking the lead, forges ahead along a cultural, but also political trajectory, to impart to society a novel orientation concerning the challenges of the present. Gramsci does admit, however, that regardless of the shared heterogeneous cultures of a certain period and a society, these are usually wrought under the influence of the cultural inventions of ‘elites.’ What is meant by this becomes clearer when one reflects on his claim that literature, the fine arts, and philosophical thinking are embedded in a network of significant political relations to ‘ordinary’ culture.

Nevertheless, everyone in a community or society contributes to this ‘culture of the everyday’ in their daily lives. Small wonder then, that Gramsci’s contribution to cultural philosophy includes his reflections on the mutual relations of power between ‘high culture’ and ‘popular culture,’ as well as on the reciprocity between the culture of ‘elites’ and that of ‘subalterns.’ An example that comes to mind is Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, where one witnesses the culturally transformed dramatic presentation of working-class culture on the stage or in cinema. Therefore, the issue of power – or rather, of the relation between knowledge and power – is unavoidably woven into his thought concerning the relations between culture and politics. After all, for him, neither culture, nor power can be separated from knowledge – something that Bourdieu and Foucault would later develop in their own respective ways.

Given the heterogeneity of different individuals and groups taking part in cultural activities, for Gramsci it is inconceivable that culture should be ‘frozen’ in time and space – it is continually in a condition of Heraclitean flux, insofar as it is subject to historical and geophysical becoming. In other words, cultures simultaneously change spatially and temporally. This is not to deny that a powerful culture can exert such influence worldwide that a process of cultural and societal homogenisation can occur, such as the global Americanisation of culture in the second half of the 20^thcentury. But even this is not conclusive, and cultural differences are usually perceptible among different nations, for example, Cuban and French culture compared to the American.

To combine this with ‘hegemony,’ it is useful to remember its etymological link with ‘directing’ or ‘leading.’ Not only does this link emphasise the dynamic nature of cultural (and therefore ‘educational’) activity, which is constantly evolving and developing (not always in a constructive fashion), as those who participate creatively in it mature. It also suggests the possibility that, even at a time when hegemony belongs to a certain group or interlinked number of organisations, other groupings are, in principle, capable of wresting the initiative from the current ‘hegemon’ and taking the lead instead.

This does not happen overnight, however. In any society, a more or less concerted – or at least congruent, if not initially intentional – series of developments has to occur, in order to reach a kind of critical mass, at which point the hegemonic position will pass from the previous ‘hegemon’ to the new one. This flow of events usually issues from an emerging resistance to, and competition with, the actions undertaken by those who occupy the leading (that is, hegemonic) positions in society at a certain stage. Isn’t this what has happened since the advent of openly being subjected to draconian measures of control, in a coordinated fashion, worldwide, by the agents and puppets of the globalists since 2020? Intrepid, and sometimes ingenious individuals and organisations, such as Brownstone, have participated in this process of informed resistance for a number of years now, and one could even argue that the latter has played a leading role in the process as a ‘hegemon’ of sorts.

Today, we are witnessing this process unfolding in a geopolitical context, too, where the discourse of ‘multipolarity’ is challenging that of ‘unipolarity,’ ‘bipolarity,’ and the ‘rule-based order’ of the West, which has until recently been maintained under the leadership of the United States. With Donald Trump having been elected to a second term as US President, it is difficult to predict which of these countervailing currents will prevail (given Trump’s determined attempt at the advancement and consolidation of American interests), but as far as I am concerned, it would appear that the momentum of the number of countries (particularly the BRICS countries) advancing ‘multipolarity’ will not easily be stopped.

In our time, we have witnessed a certain ‘standardisation’ or homogenisation of culture under the hegemonic sway of a supposedly ‘liberal’ worldview, which has turned out to be anything but liberal in the true sense of the word. In fact, it has functioned as an illiberal straitjacket which, in effect, has tended to smother culture as a dynamic, variegated, cognitive and ultimately ethical ‘process.’ In Gramsci’s terms, it has assumed the shape of a hegemony promoting ‘conformity.’

The only thing that would mitigate this is what Gramsci discerns in the tension between ‘conformity’ and ‘spontaneity,’ where the lower levels of education require conformity of students or apprentices to be able to lay the intellectual foundation for spontaneity (at tertiary level), where the student reaches the point of being able to reflect critically on what she or he has learnt during the ‘conformity years.’ For Gramsci, what he calls the ‘organic’ intellectual’s vocation is to construct, in cooperation with the dominated classes or groups in society, such an educational process, which appears to be both progressive and ‘conservative’ in the sense of progress based on the tried and tested foundations of society (but not those that have led to oppression).

What must be added is that, as Hoare and Sperber remind one, an element of ‘force’ is never completely absent from the formation of hegemony, largely because power – which Gramsci conceives of in Machiavellian fashion – concerns the nature and relative equilibrium between ‘coercion and consent’ (or ‘force and reason’). The form which such ‘coercion’ assumes in various contexts where hegemony is in the process of emerging may differ widely from one context to the next, but the point is that it concerns the exercise of power – either bluntly through command, or subtly, through the force of efficient and compelling leadership.

As Gramsci observes: ‘The function of hegemony or political leadership exercised by parties can be estimated from the evolution of the internal life of the parties themselves’ (Gramsci, in Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowel Smith, International Publishers Co., p. 752).

It is noteworthy that efficiency would also play a crucial role in education, because as a materialist, Gramsci valued education at all levels, including that of the body, as shown by the fact that he often stresses ‘muscles’ working together with ‘brain’ – but ‘quality’ of education must be understood in conjunction with his conception of culture and education as dynamic, socially pervasive processes where no homogeneity prevails. In other words, the qualitative variegation of cultural activities, including education in the broad sense (which includes the role of intellectuals), should be recognised and encouraged.

Against this backdrop, it becomes clear that the task of cultural ‘renewal’ which one faces today should promote what Gramsci calls ‘spontaneity,’ even if it is based on the foundation of ‘conformity.’ It is only at the level of ‘spontaneity’ that the leadership or hegemony required for the reconstruction or recomposition of culture can occur. And an organisation such as Brownstone has already demonstrated, through the work of its community of scholars and thinkers, that it can contribute to this cultural and political process in a significant manner.

Bert Olivier works at the Department of Philosophy, University of the Free State. Bert does research in Psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, ecological philosophy and the philosophy of technology, Literature, cinema, architecture and Aesthetics. His current project is 'Understanding the subject in relation to the hegemony of neoliberalism.'

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