Cultural hegemony


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 and explanations, perceptions, values, and mores — so that the 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 every social class, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class. This Marxist analysis of how the ruling capitalist class establishes and maintains its control was originally developed by the Italian philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci.
In philosophy and in sociology, the term 'cultural hegemony' has denotations and connotations derived from the Ancient Greek word hegemonia indicating leadership and rule. In politics, hegemony is the geopolitical method of indirect imperial dominance, with which the hegemon rules subordinate states, by the threat of intervention, an implied means of power, rather than the threat of direct rule — military invasion, occupation, and annexation.

Background

Etymology

In history, the etymologic evolution of the Greek word hegemonia and its denotations has developed thus:
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 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.
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", 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, must not be perceived as natural and inevitable, but must be recognized as artificial social constructs 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 whereby the individual person applies common sense to cope with daily life, which explains 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 personal concerns, rather than with distant concerns, and so do not think about and question the fundamental sources of their socio-economic oppression, and its discontents, social, personal, and political.
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.

Intellectuals

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:

Gramsci's influence

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 to identify the political war of position, an allusion to the Long March of the Communist Chinese People's Liberation Army, by means of which, the working class would produce their own organic intellectuals and culture to replace those imposed by the bourgeoisie.

Critique of Gramsci

The ideological apparatuses of the State

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. 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 are the sites of ideological conflict among the social classes of a society. That, in contrast to the repressive state apparatuses, 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 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, 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:
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 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."