Hegemony can be described in reference to ideology: the power to shape  the very perceptions and desires of subordinate groups, so they do not think to challenge existing social relations because they are taken as natural

A lot around us is intolerable: exploitative class system, humiliating caste system, dehumanising racial oppression, mortifying sexual harassment, domestic violence, environmental destruction! Still billions of us around the globe go on living with an awful boss, a bullying husband, a violent feudal lord, a bloody tyrant! The People’s Poet, the late Habib Jalib, therefore, sometimes would wonder:

Is dard ke        dunya say    guzar kyon nahi jatay

Ye loog bhi kiya loog hain, maar kyon nahi jatay (1)

Resistance:

Not mere Habib Jalib, anybody subjected to injustices or committed to the idea of changing the world is tormented by the thoughts: why do oppressed comply? why don’t they rebel all along the way?’

The answer is not an easy one. In fact, there is not one but many answers. Charles Tilly most helpfully provides a checklist of the accessible answers:

1.  The premise is incorrect: subordinates are actually rebelling continuously, but in covert ways.

2.  Subordinates actually get something in return for their subordination, something that is sufficient to make them acquiesce most of the time.

3.  Through the pursuit of other valued ends such as esteem or identity, subordinates become implicated in systems that exploit or oppress them. (In some versions, no. 3 becomes identical to no. 2)

4.  As a result of mystification, repression, or the sheer unavailability of alternative ideological frames, subordinates remain unaware of their true interests.

5.  Force and inertia hold subordinates in place.

6.  Resistance and rebellion are costly; most subordinates lack the necessary means.

7.  All of the above (Tilly 1991).

To grasp Tilly’s views, we need to acquaint ourselves with the notion of hegemony that thwarts resistance and revolution.  But hegemony cannot be comprehended without disentangling the concept of power.

Power:

According to British philosopher, Bertrand Russell (1957: 10-11): “The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics. Like energy, power has many forms, such as wealth, armaments, civil authority, influence on opinion. No one of these can be regarded as subordinate to any other, and there is no one form from which the others are derivates”.

This definition of power sounds convincing. However, analogy between Power and Energy is bit misplaced. There is an agency behind power the way matter is the source of energy. Russell does not identify the  agency behind Power. Marxists point out that power derives from class structure. However, liberals deny Marxist notion of class as the agency behind power.

This debate was particularly hot in the 1950s/60s USA.  Robert Dahl, a liberal American scholar, studied power and decision-making in the US city of New Heavens in the 1950s. Dahl described power as something that induces behavioral change. For instance, A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do. Dahl’s study, titled Who Governs?, was aimed at subverting Marxist model of ‘elite power’ popularized by C Wright Mills.  Dahl, from his research, concluded that American democratic model was pluralist and there was no elite bossing over ordinary citizens.

Dahl was challenged by Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz, first in an essay titled ‘Two faces of Power’ (1962), and later Power and Poverty (1970). They pointed out that A might also use coercion, influence, authority, force and manipulation to creating or reinforcing social and political values and institutional practices that limit the scope of the political process for B to only those issues which are comparatively innocuous to A.  Liberals (also called pluralists in this debate), for years, flaunted this study.

Steve Lukes while partially agreeing with Bachrach and Baratz criticizes both notions. He says (2005: 19): “The trouble seems to be that both Bachrach and Baratz and the pluralists suppose that because power…only shows up in cases of actual conflict, it follows that actual conflict is necessary to power. But this is to ignore the crucial point that the most effective and insidious use of power is to prevent such conflict from arising in the first place”.

In his view: “Power as domination is the ability to constrain the choices of others, coercing them or securing their compliance, by impeding them from living as their own nature and judgement dictate” (Ibid:85). He considers power as “a potentiality, not an actuality – indeed a potentiality that may never be actualized” (Ibid:69). It is also important to note that ‘power’ is explicitly relational and asymmetrical: to have power is to have power over another or others (Ibid: 73).

But how this power that is only a potentiality is exercised even when it is perhaps never actualized? The answer lies in the concept of hegemony propounded by Italian Marxist and founder of Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci. Some of his works have been translated to Urdu, though presently out of print.

Hegemony:

Hegemony is defined in many ways. In fact, Gramsci never defined it in certain terms. He was imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascist regime even if he was a member of the parliament. In jail, he was denied the facilities to read and write for many years. He would have crystallized the concept of hegemony, one hopes, had he not perished in the jail. Understandably, it is conceptualised in many ways. For instance, hegemony is defined sometimes as ‘soft power’, occasionally it is depictd as ‘intellectual and political leadership’ of one class over the other. It can also be described as crystallization of ruling class’ ideas into common sense.

As a matter of fact, David Harvey points out, “Gramsci’s own use of the concept was sufficiently ambiguous to allow multiple interpretations. It sometimes refers solely to political power exercised through leadership and consent of the governed, as opposed to the political power exercised as domination through coercion. On other occasions it seems to refer to the particular mix of coercion and consent embedded in the exercise of political power” (Harvey2003:36).

Robert Hackett and William Carroll (2006:41) define hegemony as “the practices, cultural codes and social relations through which popular consent to an unequal social order is secured, and the ‘system’ thus stabilized”. In liberal democracies, for instance, “a successful bourgeois hegemony entails an ensemble of alliances involving (fractions of )the capitalist class as well as other groups and institutions in the cultural and political fields – a ‘hegemonic bloc’ that presents its interests as universal while selectively dispensing material and symbolic concessions (‘bread and circuses’) to pre-empt the unification of opposition from below”.

Gramsci views power as both concentrated in the state and distributed through the organizations of civil society [such as the school, the family, the media] all of which diffuse hegemonic worldviews into daily life. To the extent that such a worldview become widely adopted as ‘common sense’, hegemony fulfills a role that naked coercion could never perform: it mystifies power relations and public issues; it encourages a sense of fatalism and passivity toward political action; it justifies every type of system-serving sacrifice and deprivation (Ibid:41).

Hegemony can be described in reference to ideology: “the power to shape the very perceptions and desires of subordinate groups, so they do not think to challenge existing social relations because they are taken as natural, beyond history or politics” (O’Sulliva et al. 1994: 133).

Hegemony is not mechanical, not simply coercive, nor deceitfully manipulative. Rather, hegemony is the political outcome of a leadership’s ability to intellectually and morally move society towards a reluctantly or enthusiastically agreed-upon set of cultural and economic practices…Hegemony is constructed using some of the ideas and concerns of all groups (Artz, Lee and Kamalipour 2003:16).

Marxist French philosopher Louis Althusser explains how this is achieved in practice. He suggests that a social formation that does not reproduce the conditions of production at the same time as it produces, does not last. In other words, it is not enough to have a master-slave/feudal-serf relationships. The system must ensure that slave turns up every morning to do his job. Slave’s turning up every morning at farm/factory is what Althusser calls reproduction. ‘The ultimate condition of production is therefore the reproduction of the condition of productions’. The reproduction of conditions is granted through what he calls RSAs as well as ISAs (Althusser 2001:86). Any state has two state apparatuses it could use: Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) and Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs). According to Althusser, ISAs consist of ‘the education system, the family, the legal system, the political system, the trade unions, the media, and the culture’. The RSAs include, ‘the government, the administration, the army, the police, the courts, the prisons, etc’, which function ‘by violence at least ultimately’ [since repression, e.g.  administrative repression, may take non-physical forms] (Ibid:96). The ISA help slave  internalise the naturalness and inevitability of the fact that he has to obediently arrive every morning at the farm/factory. In case of obstinacy, RSAs do the job! This is how hegemony is ensured.

Notes:

1. Transliteration: Why these people keep living lives full of misery and pain, why don’t they simply die

Bibliography

Althusser, Louis (2001) Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press

Artz, Lee and Kamalipour, (eds) (2003) The Globalization of Corporate Media Hegemony. State University of New York Press

Bachrach, P and Baratz,M(1970) Power and Poverty. New York: Oxford UP

Hackett, Robert A & Carroll, William K (2006) Remaking Media: the Struggle to Democratize Public Communication. London : Routledge

Harvey, David (2003) The New Imperialism. Oxford UP

Lukes, Steven (2005) Power: A Radical View. New York: Palgrave

Mouffe, Chantal (1979) Hegemony and ideology in Gramsci. In Mouffe, C (ed) Gramsci and Marxist Theory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul

O’Sulliva et al. (1994) Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies. London: Routledge

Russel, Bertrand (1957) Power: A New Social Analysis. London: Ruskin House

Tilly, Charles (1991) Domination, Resistance, Compliance…Discourse. Sociological Forum. 6(3):593-602

Farooq Sulehria is working with Stockholm-based Weekly Internationalen (www.internationalen.se). Before joining Internationalen, he worked for one year,2006-07 at daily The News, Rawalpindi. Also, in Pakistan, he has worked with Lahore-based dailies, The Nation, The Frontier Post and Pakistan. He has MA in Mass Communication from Punjab University, Lahore. He also contributes for Znet and various left publications in Europe and Australia.