Public ideas
Gramsci’s ideas explained
At last – a Marxist whose ideas can be summarized in plain language, and thay are clearly relevant to today’s conditions.
Antonio Gramsci (1891 – 1937) was an Italian communist intellectual, whose ideas are well-known among Marxist scholars, but Marxist scholars aren’t the most adept at explaining ideas to lesser mortals.
Christopher Pollard of Deakin University does us the service of explaining just one of Gramsci’s ideas – his most important one – in his Conversation essay Antonio Gramsci: his philosophy explained. That is his particular idea of “hegemony” in a cultural context. As Pollard explains it, Gramsci used the term:
to refer to the way a politically dominant class maintains its ruling position not simply by force, or the threat of force, but also by consent. A class that uses open or veiled coercion through state power to impose its will, he observed, can be said merely to “dominate” other social groups; it becomes “hegemonic” when it also provides “intellectual and moral leadership” over allied groups in civil society.
Political and economic systems in democracies sustain their legitimacy through consent, a consent that is upheld and nurtured by those who shape the culture and underlying beliefs of public institutions. That’s more subtle than some lock-step centrally-imposed canon. Dissent is permitted, encouraged even, but within boundaries. Pollard reminds us that “Gramsci argued that the education system, the news and popular media, literature and the arts, trade unions, churches and intellectuals all play vital roles in shaping people’s perceptions and understanding”.
His thinking was influenced by the failure of communism to eventuate in the economically-determinist way that Marx had predicted. Ideas precede action.
What goes for communist revolutionaries goes for others seeking to achieve social change, whatever their political ideology.
Gramsci’s approach gives us some insight into the ways voters in democracies vote against their class interests, and why those on the right become so preoccupied with culture wars. It helps explain why those who work in the world of public ideas – public servants, journalists, academics – never stray too far from the basics. Those who do stray aren’t taken out and shot: they’re simply dismissed as cranks.
But it leaves the question of whether the hegemony of ideas that serve the established order simply emerges through convenience, or if is subject to deliberate manipulation.