Howard Barrell: OVER A BARREL
What’s in a word? Probably not a great deal more than the user puts into it. The idea of rigid definitions is discredited, and the way in which a word is commonly used is little more than a rough guide to its meaning.
So it is often not easy to know what others mean by their words, particularly when they use a big one like “hegemony”.
This word is cropping up regularly among members of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party to describe what it is they are out to achieve in South Africa.
I had thought the idea had had its day. It certainly has a past. In the communist tradition, this stretches back to English translations of the writings of Joseph Stalin and also of Nikolai Bukharin, one of the more celebrated fatalities of Stalin’s purges. Mao Zedong, too, liked to talk of hegemony.
But the idea really came to prominence among Marxists as a result of the prison writings of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist who died shortly before the outbreak of World War II.
By the late 1970s, Gramsci’s theory of “hegemony” was highly fashionable on the left; it was de rigueur to be able to run a glib tongue through it, furrow your brow and expatiate upon it.
But when, in 1989 to 1991, the old iron law of history clunked to a halt, like a lot else in the Marxist tradition, those who spoke of “hegemony” seemed to leave the theatre through a side door.
Now, however, “hegemony” is back – certainly in South Africa. It has taken up a position off-stage left. And it may help us understand recent ANC talk of “Mickey Mouse” opposition parties. It may also help explain the contempt which a number of ANC and SACP leaders evidently have, not merely for the opposition parties, but also, it would seem, for the idea of opposition itself.
Like most Marxist theory after Karl Marx, Gramsci’s idea of hegemony was developed to cope with Marxist prophecy’s failure to materialise. In Europe between the first and second world wars, many people were going hungry, the proletariat was on the march and capitalism seemed to be in a crisis. But the workers’ party in Italy stubbornly failed to follow the Bolshevik example in Russia and to seize state power. Why was this?
Well, in Gramsci’s mind, the explanation could not be the simplest available. It couldn’t be that the workers, after a clear-headed appraisal of their interests, just didn’t want to live under communism.
No. The reason, Gramsci suggested, was that there was a system of beliefs, and institutional and social relations promoted by the ruling bourgeoisie which had gained the consent of many people from other classes, including many workers. This consent made it possible for the bourgeoisie to retain its ascendancy in relation to other classes and its grip on state power, without having to resort to the kind of coercion which might cause the other classes to revolt.
This system of consent, if you like, was the ruling class’s hegemony.
Hegemony was an innovative addition to the Marxist lexicon of rationalisations. It became a far more sophisticated line of reasoning than the “false consciousness” which other Marxist theorists had suggested as a reason a proletarian revolution had not occurred.
As is evident, Gramsci’s theory saw an important role for intellectuals. He was certainly not the first in the communist tradition to look at their role, but he arrived at a more strategic appraisal of it and of the importance of ideas than his predecessors.
For Gramsci, intellectuals tended to formulate or organise the systems of consent on which ruling classes relied. For that reason, intellectuals were also critically important in challenging or amending a system of consent – or in replacing it altogether. So intellectual and cultural activity were important sites of struggle.
If you are in the SACP or ANC and follow Gramsci, you now see yourself as engaged in an ongoing battle for hegemony – a battle in which many of the ideas and conventions of your opponents must not just be opposed, but must be delegitimised.
In your struggle to set up your own hegemony, you will be willing to meet some of the demands of your opponents, but always on your own terms. You want an opponent’s consent; but his dissent, where it persists, has no standing.
In other words, if you were Henry Ford, you would have told your opponent he could have any colour of Ford as long as it was black.
This is an improvement on the crudities of Vladimir Lenin and Stalin. Gramsci’s idea of hegemony is more sophisticated than the old view that ideas and social mores are determined almost wholly by economic factors. He ascribes greater autonomy and power to ideas.
Gramsci also has a less crass view of the state than his predecessors. Most others in the communist tradition had tended to see state power as something which was held at any one time by only one class and maintained by violence or the threat of it.
For Gramsci, however, the class holding state power seeks to expand consent for its rule among other classes – that is to establish its hegemony – with the threat of violence held largely in reserve. So, for him, state power is a mix of both violence and consent.
We should, I suppose, be grateful that our Gramscian compatriots in the SACP and ANC seek our consent. It is, however, their contempt for dissent that is worrying. Many of us may be Mickey Mouse. But, when they suggest we are, they begin to sound like Lenin again, albeit a rather limp-wristed version of the man, in drag.