Davidson, Alastair
Gramsci, Hegemony and Globalisation
A lecture given at the lecture-forum organized by University of the Philippines Office of the President, College of Social Sciences and Philosophy, Department of Political Science and Third World Studies Center (January 27, 2005).
Gramsci's point that battles are won and lost on the terrain of ideology is a much earlier and more complex explanation of the mediations between objective economic and social conditions and politics. It accounts generally for the fact that the continuation of contradiction--as must ever be the case under capitalism--and the worsening conditions for the majority of the world's population do not mean the emergence of a political opposition to capitalism. It remains to be seen whether the new nationalism and its closed borders, which keep such migrants at home with their contradictions, will foster conditions for the constitution of new collective working-class consciousness. Global capitalism fixes class relations in an impure state--a pure duality of capitalists and proletariat never develops anywhere. This means that any socialist transformation requires the building of a cross-class alliance of majorities on national-popular bases, rather than class. Therefore, that hegemony, which permits new ideas to become social forces, has to win out over the old hegemony in an organisational "war of position."
Link to journal.
Gramsci's point that battles are won and lost on the terrain of ideology is a much earlier and more complex explanation of the mediations between objective economic and social conditions and politics. It accounts generally for the fact that the continuation of contradiction--as must ever be the case under capitalism--and the worsening conditions for the majority of the world's population do not mean the emergence of a political opposition to capitalism. It remains to be seen whether the new nationalism and its closed borders, which keep such migrants at home with their contradictions, will foster conditions for the constitution of new collective working-class consciousness. Global capitalism fixes class relations in an impure state--a pure duality of capitalists and proletariat never develops anywhere. This means that any socialist transformation requires the building of a cross-class alliance of majorities on national-popular bases, rather than class. Therefore, that hegemony, which permits new ideas to become social forces, has to win out over the old hegemony in an organisational "war of position."
Link to journal.
| Lingua | eng |
| Nomi |
[author] Davidson, Alastair |
