List of Acronyms
Chapter 4: Hegemony in the current context
4.2 Changes in the economic base
As discussed in the last chapter, according to Marx and Gramsci there is a dialectic relationship between the economic base and the superstructure, including the state. The superstructure is primarily determined by the relations and forces of production, so ideas and institutions do not arise in a vacuum but within an historically specific social environment on a particular economic base. The critical thing to remember here is the point of the capitalist state, its relationship with civil society, and the role of hegemony. The role of state, Gramsci argued, was to secure the interests of the ruling class, by uniting the (competing) members of the bourgeoisie and mobilising subordinate classes to serve the capitalist mode of production.
It does this through a combination of force (primarily the role of the State) and hegemony (primarily the role of civil society); but will always prefer to use hegemony rather than force, and when force is used to attempt to ensure (through hegemony) that most of society
considers its use legitimate. The actual content of hegemony, the relationship of civil society to the state, etc., shifts as economic relations shift; it is also different in different nations. It is complex and contested.
However, in general, changes in the economic base (relations and forces of production) over time and space will impact on the superstructure - on ideas (individual psychologies, cultural
5 This is, of course, crisis as defined by capital - as Holloway (2010a) points out, real crisis is “the falling apart of the social relations of capitalism” (p.204); capitalist (government, family, the education system, churches, the legal system, political parties, the media, etc.). Again, this is not a crass, deterministic process, but rather a complex and often contested one.
In my discussion below I consider briefly the ways in which capitalism has developed over the last century, and why (i.e. changes to the economic base), before focusing on the current form of capitalism, neoliberalism. I then consider how this has affected the superstructure of institutions and ideas, including the role of state and civil society, obviously in dialectic relationship with the economic base. Finally, I discuss in detail what I consider to be the current set of hegemonic ideas. In this, I am mindful of the fact that, as Gramsci argued,
“hegemony operates at the multiple levels of ideology, culture, politics and the economy”
(Cooper, 2005, p.13).
4.2.1 Economic crisis
The very nature of the capitalist mode of production requires that capital grow “no matter what the social, political...or economic consequences” (Harvey, 1989, p.180 quoted in Foley, 1994, p.127). Thus “crisis is defined as lack of growth” (Ibid.)5.
As discussed in Chapter 3, Marx showed that the inherent contradictions in the capitalist mode of production create inevitable crises, and capital thus needs to restructure itself from to time in order to overcome these. In particular, the crisis of over-production, in which the ratio between paid and unpaid/surplus labour changes and the rate of profit falls, is an inherent and recurrent feature of capitalism, and requires reorganisation. Marx argued that despite such restructuring, the inherent contradictions in capitalism would intensify and ultimately lead to the collapse of capitalism, because the increasingly organized proletariat would revolt. Many Marxist thinkers have subsequently argued that such a collapse is imminent (McLellan, 1979), particularly in the light of developments in capitalism arising from periodic crises; and thus many Marxists have subsequently sought to explain how
capitalism has in fact survived (Harvey, 2003) (Gramsci, as we have seen, developed his theory of hegemony partially to do just this).
Obviously, capitalism has survived, having undergone further crises, and further reorganisation, leading to what is now commonly referred to as ‘advanced’ or ‘late’
capitalism, generally agreed to be “an historically distinct phase of capitalism” (Albo, 2005, p.246). Ernest Mandel (cited in Jameson, 1984) has argued that it is the ‘purest’ stage of capitalism to date). This has had profound impacts on the forces and relations of production in the period since Gramsci was writing.
Historically, capitalism has dealt with periodic crises in three ways:
1. Devaluation/destruction of productive capacity or the money value of commodities,
through, for example, depression/recession, banking crashes, inflation, plant shutdowns, war;
2. State planning and regulation;
3. Temporal or spatial displacement (Foley, 1994, 127).
All of these can be detected in the process that has unfolded over the last century, and which so significantly impacts on us now. One of the key aspects of this has been the globalisation of capital. Marx argued that the development of the world capitalist system was inevitable, but also necessarily uneven since capital will always move to the area of greatest profit, and there will thus be geographical (and historical) variations. This has certainly been the case.
Harvey (2003, pp. 76-77) argues that there have been three main phases in capitalist restructuring:
• the nationalist project (of colonialism) which lasted roughly until 1945.
• the subsequent phase led by the United States of America in order to establish a global compact, and allow for the systematic geographic expansion of the capitalist system. This phase was thus characterised by United States’ insistence on
decolonization and ‘developmentalism’. In this period, accumulation by dispossession was relatively muted, and there was (as always) resistance - the national liberation movements, dependency theory as a counter to modernization, etc.
• this phase broke down in the 1970s, because a number of problems, including the
etc. resulted in eroding profit. This meant that new markets needed to be forced open, and this was done using neoliberalism, the IMF, etc. Transnational corporations (TNCs) were a critical agent in this new phase, which saw new kinds of accumulation through dispossession, such as structural adjustment programmes (SAPs).
Each of these was accompanied by changes in the superstructure, including state and civil society, and was accompanied by a set of hegemonic ideas (and, of course, resistance to this), discussed further below.
4.2.2 Colonialism
The first phase of imperialism, the nationalist project, was explored in detail by Gramsci’s near contemporaries, Lenin and Luxemburg. Luxemburg (cited in Harvey, 2003) argued that there were two aspects to capital accumulation, which were ‘organically linked’. The first was within the commodity market and the place where surplus value (through the
exploitation of labour) was produced - i.e. the factory, mine, agricultural estate etc. On the surface, this aspect presented peace, prosperity and equality. The second aspect was quite different:
Its predominant methods are colonial policy, an international loan system...and war.
Force, fraud, oppression, looting are openly displayed without any attempt at concealment, and it requires an effort to discover within this tangle of political
violence and contests of power the stern laws of the economic process (Luxemburg in Harvey, 2003, p.73).
According to Lenin, the highest stage of capitalism is imperialism; but this creates a third contradiction to capitalism:
1. The contradiction between labour and capital. Capital must exploit labour, since this is the basis of profit; so this contradiction is necessary and inevitable, but obviously also the basis for conflict.
2. The contradiction between those who compete for control of resources. Again, this contradiction is both necessary and inevitable.
3. The contradiction between the Western industrial nations and those of the Third World. This contradiction is created because imperialist countries must industrialize Third World countries in order to properly exploit them; thus creating new
revolutionary classes within them (McLaren & Farahmandpur, 2005, pp.2-3).
So for both Luxemburg and Lenin imperialism allowed capitalism to extend its lifespan, but this created its own terminal contradictions, and thus simply delayed the inevitable - they thus saw imperialism as marking the final stage in capitalist development (McLellan, 1979;
Harvey, 2003).
During the nationalist (colonialist) phase, imperialism operated primarily as a means of capital accumulation through dispossession - as Amilcar Cabral (1979) observed,
“imperialism is piracy transplanted from the seas to dry land” (p.127); and more recently, Bond (2004) has asserted “Africa was and remains the world’s leading example of
accumulation by appropriation and dispossession” (p.212).
Not surprisingly, the structural changes involved in the colonialist capitalist project impacted significantly on the superstructure, and created, as Marx predicted, geographical and
historical variations. Mahmoud Mamdani (1996) argues that the colonial state was considerably more complex than the Western state. Unlike the Western capitalist state, it involved both direct and indirect rule of the ‘uncivilized’. Direct rule was unmediated, centralised despotism, and operated primarily in urban areas. Indirect rule was mediated and decentralised despotism. This occurred primarily in rural areas as a form of control over the
‘free’ peasantry, primarily through customary law exercised by tribal authorities. The colonial state was thus bifurcated: “two forms of power under a single hegemonic authority.
Urban power spoke the language of civil society and civil rights, rural power of community and culture. Civil power claimed to protect rights, customary power pledged to enforce tradition” (p. 18); but the purpose of the state, however, remained the same - to consolidate the power of the ruling class. Civil society in the colony was also different from in the West, in that, whilst it remained the purview of the bourgeoisie, it was racialised. It was first and foremost the society of the colons, and primarily a creation of the colonial state, which
Whilst colonialism was primarily about accumulation through oppression, as argued above, it was not of course presented as such; rather, it was accompanied by an ideological argument to secure consent - in other words, hegemony. As Cabral (1979), speaking of the horrors of Portuguese colonialism, said, “All this was and still is perpetrated in the name of
‘Civilization and Christianity’” (p18). Colonialism consisted of a package of Christianity, capitalism and state-law (materially, via the missionary, the merchant, and the magistrate and
‘mercenary’), rationalized as a civilising mission to those who were ‘unenlightened’, pagan, uncivilized etc. (Shivji, 2006). Frantz Fanon’s work shows how deeply ideological the colonialist project was, including as a pivotal element the destruction of selfhood of the colonized, and the recreation of what it means to be black: the black “is a product of [the]
cultural situation”, which “slowly and subtly - with the help of books, newspapers, schools and their texts, advertisements, films, radio - work their way into one’s mind” (Fanon cited in Gibson, 2003, p.106). The coloniser becomes everything good, human, alive - the colonized, everything bad, brutish, inert (Gibson, 2003, p.106). This works to justify the colonial project (as ‘civilising mission’) to both the colonized and the coloniser.
Of course, the colonial project was deeply contested and resisted, inter alia by national revolutionary struggles within the colonies, within which such writers as Guevara, Cabral and Fanon were involved.
4.2.3 Decolonisation and developmentalism
As we have seen, Harvey (2003) argues that the second phase of capitalist reorganization involved a process of decolonisation and developmentalism, largely driven by the United States of America in the post-World War II period. Whilst many commentators saw the end of the colonial period as the end of imperialism, many writers (particularly those from the colonised nations) understood that the struggle for national liberation did not end
imperialism, primarily because of the creation of a national bourgeois class during
colonialism that continued to operate after the colonial power left; in other words, the ruling class continued to dominate. Mamdani’s (1996) analysis, discussed above, shows how the capitalist project within the colonial states was racialised. This affected how the
superstructure changed with capitalist reorganization in this phase. The first moment of
anticolonial struggle, Mamdani argues, was the struggle of the embryonic native middle and working class for entry into (white, colonial) civil society - i.e. exactly as is necessary to secure the interests of the ruling class. This initial anticolonial struggle thus created an indigenous civil society (separate from that of the colons) - but, since the state remained racialised, this was of little significance. The second moment of anticolonial struggle was for the state. Whilst many anticolonial struggles successfully deracialised the state, very few succeeded in deracialising civil society. Indeed, more often, the indigenous civil society was collapsed into government, leaving a racialised civil society. The intent was the same - the securing of bourgeois interests - but the form was different from that in the West.
Che Guevara (2002), in a speech to the Afro-Asian Conference in Algeria in February 1965, said that “as long as [capitalist] imperialism exists it will, by definition, exert its domination over other countries. Today that domination is called neocolonialism” (p.23). This had resulted in the development
of a parasitic bourgeoisie that adds nothing to the national wealth of their countries but rather deposits its huge ill-gotten profits in capitalist banks abroad, and makes deals with foreign countries to reap more profits with absolute disregard for the welfare of the people. (Guevara, 2002, p.23)
Amilcar Cabral (1979), writing at much the same time as Guevara, also spoke of the illusion of independence in ‘neocolonial’ states, in which political power was held by native agents of the colonial powers, especially the local bourgeoisie. However perhaps the most brilliant analysis of the post-colonial (capitalist imperialist) state is that of Fanon. In Fanon’s analysis:
The beginning period of decolonization brings emergent contradictions. It is the reformist parties and the new classes they represent that set great barriers to full decolonization. Instead of promoting real social change, violent speeches and symbols operate as a new type of sublimation, masking accommodationist politics which put a brake on mass activity. In place of a precise political or social program, they offer “dreams”, often couched in xenophobic or racial language....They attempt
At the decisive moment, the colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained inactive, comes into the field. It introduces that new idea...non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic élite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as them and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. (Fanon, 1961/2009, p. 48)
Meanwhile, Harvey (2003) argues, the decolonisation process was accompanied by a particular set of hegemonic ideas to do with development, from the West. This was by no means a new phenomenon - Gramsci (1971), for example, had argued that “A particular ideology born in a highly developed country, is disseminated in less developed countries, impinging on the local interplay of combinations” (p.182). In the post-colonial period, the former colonies were encouraged to follow an economic and development path which assumed that the Western history of development was the best (in fact the only possible) pattern for poorer countries to follow, and that the aim of development was to achieve a Western-style capitalist society and economy. This approach to development came to be called ‘modernisation’ (Youngman, 2000). The argument of modernisation theorists was that the underdeveloped regions were simply at the early or ‘traditional’ stage of development.
The transfer of knowledge, technology and capital, through, for example, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), from the ‘advanced’ societies to less advanced ones would speed up their advance through various stages of development. These transfers would bring ‘backward’ societies to a point of economic ‘take off’ after which progress would be self-sustaining, and a high-consumption, welfare-type society would emerge as it had done in the advanced Western/Northern countries (Ibid.). In fact, of course, this was simply the further expansion of the capitalist mode of production, largely (although not only) to the benefit of the United States of America and national bourgeoisies.
Modernisation suggested a particular role and structure of the state. Drawing on Lenin’s work on imperialism, African scholar Samir Amin (1997) argues that the classical form of capitalism, developing out of the industrial revolution in Europe, crystallised the Northern countries into national autocentred bourgeois states, whilst further pushing to the periphery Africa, Latin America, and Asia (other than Japan). Peripheral nations were advised to adopt
6 Whilst the welfare state is sometimes used as an argument against Marx’s claim that the state acts on behalf of the ruling class, in fact it was built on segmenting the workforce, and the super-exploitation of women, ethnic groups and immigrants both the industrialisation process, and the bourgeois state, as their model for development (i.e. to undergo ‘modernisation’). The post-World War II period (the period of heightened
‘modernisation’) thus saw the industrialisation of countries in the periphery, and the dismantling of the autocentric national production systems of the West/North nation states, particularly as globalization deepened and these economies became integrated into the world production system.
Meanwhile, in the West, the structural changes in the West/North between 1945 and the early 1970s, created liberal-democratic welfare-state consensus in Western Europe and North America (Offe, 1985, cited in Welton, 2001, p.153). Within this system, trades unions (and other specialized interest groups) and political parties emerged as the dominant collective actors (Welton, 1993). During this period, most countries in the West/North had integrated projects for national development, and the welfare state reigned supreme (Touraine, 2001)6.
By the mid-1960s, ‘modernisation’ theory was coming under increasing attack from the post- colonial counties of the South. They argued that the newly independent states could not develop along the same model as Europe and North America had because the ‘Third World’
countries were poor and powerless as a result of the West’s own development processes, which had exploited the ‘Third World’ countries, and made them even less developed - in other words, underdeveloped. The very things that had contributed to the West’s
development were the main causes of ‘Third World’ misery. This was an important insight because it recognised that being ‘underdeveloped’ was not a passive situation that was just an accident of history but rather precisely the result of (capitalist) ‘development’ processes happening elsewhere in the world. Many of these theorists thus argued for breaking the relationship of dependency on the developed North (although this was not always a break with capitalism per se) (Youngman, 2000).
4.2.4 Neoliberalism
However from the mid-1970s, there was a gradual (and inevitable) fall in the rate of profits, because of a crisis of over-production (Mayo, 1999, p.1). Bond (2000) argues that in this period, improved technology replaced paid labour, thus squeezing the potential for profit (which, as we have seen in the previous chapter, is only derived from unpaid/surplus labour), whilst decreasing the market (fewer workers means fewer earners means fewer people able to buy) - exactly as Marx predicted. Meanwhile, production increased. There was thus
overproduction. Other Marxists (eg. Harvey, 2003, 2011) have argued similarly.
Thus, as Foley (1999) has argued, “The real crisis of our time is a crisis of capitalism as it undergoes one of its periodic restructurings in order to become yet more exploitative, productive and profitable” (p.135). The restructuring we have seen is called neoliberal globalization. What neoliberalism really is is capitalism’s response to the crisis of overaccumulation since the mid-1970s:
To ignore underlying class struggles is to see neo-liberalism as a de-politicised, technical development plan which is failing to deliver (and therefore needs to be adjusted) rather than a set of policies deliberately promoted by particular classes to defend their own economic interests (and therefore needing to be completely rejected) which, in its own terms, is working very effectively (Kane, 2001, p.147).
Neoliberalism is a set of economic ‘rules’; but, as with colonialism and developmentalism, it is much more than that, because it is accompanied by a whole system of institutions and ideas. Giroux (2005), for example, has asserted that “Neoliberalism has to be understood and challenged as both an economic theory and a powerful public pedagogy and cultural politics”
(p.14). Thus neoliberalism exists in both the economic base and the superstructure,
containing a complex set of interlocking institutions, ideas and practices. A growing number of left theorists have argued over the last two decades that neoliberalism, as an idea, has become hegemonic (see, for example, Payne, 1995; Mayo, 1999; Neocosmos, 2009a; etc.).
This is symbolised by TINA, which stands for “There is no alternative”, which is what Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, said when she justified the