Alex Williams - Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (And How We Win it Back)

Hegemony Now

Hegemony Now

How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World
(and How We Win It Back)

Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams

First published by Verso 2022
Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams 2022

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the editor and authors have been asserted

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-314-9

ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-316-3 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-317-0 (US EBK)

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

CONTENTS

The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

Antonio Gramsci

In the years since 2016, it has seemed at times as if the world was coming apart. From the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, to the UKs vote to leave the European Union, and from the global COVID-19 pandemic to the early signs of catastrophic climate collapse, the world seemed to be running the script of a particularly unsubtle dystopian fiction. Where previously order, of a sort, had reigned, now everywhere disorder was spreading. The rules that were deemed to govern politics and economics were rapidly discarded. What once seemed impossible rapidly became inevitable. All the signs have become present that we are living through an epochal crisis. This is the global crisis of neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism, which is the political system that has ruled almost the entirety of the planet since the 1990s, is everywhere in decline, if not ruination. Meanwhile, its successors scrabble in the debris left behind for new forms of power. As this global political crisis collides with a planetary health crisis, against the backdrop of an intensifying environmental crisis, the systems of order that regulate our political world have been plunged into disarray. We are in a moment of grand realignment, where different cycles of world history have clicked together to produce a rare instant where more or less anything could be possible.

To do so we need to be thinking about politics through the idea of hegemony.

Power and Hegemony

Today, the term hegemony is used fairly commonly, but in quite different ways. Perhaps most often it is used to describe the domination or influence of one nation-state over another (e.g., American geopolitical hegemony). This is indeed the root meaning of the term, as it emerges from ancient Greek. Sometimes too we might hear it being used to describe an influential social norm (e.g., hegemonic masculinity). But perhaps the most significant development of the idea of hegemony, and the one we will be using for the most part in this book, was developed by the Italian communist writer, politician, and journalist Antonio Gramsci.

Gramsci was one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party and spent much of the end of his life as a political prisoner under the despotic rule of Benito Mussolinis fascists. His writings roamed over many topics, such as political history, philosophy, and culture. Underpinning them all was an emerging idea about how power worked, which he termed hegemony. In a sense this was all about political leadership, of a collective and emergent kind. How was it, Gramsci asked, that relatively small groups come to rule large, complex societies as a whole? How was it, for example, that a relatively modest social faction like the fascists had come to control such a large and diverse society as Italy in the 1920s? This kind of question remains at the heart of our work today. Though hegemony is often used to try to understand how settled situations of power work, it is also invaluable to thinking through moments where the existing power structures begin to fall apart. Once all of the local laws of power begin to fail, we must return to general principles, and it is hegemony that gives us a suitable method to understand the mechanics of power in their broadest dimensions

But what in fact even is power? Simply put, power is the capacity to influence. From this perspective, politics is the operation of power and nothing else. Politics is above all a practical business of the construction, transformation, and contestation of systems of power. Arguably, there can be no such thing as a theory of power in itself. This is because power is never merely concerned with itself, because power is that thing which is manipulatively involved in the relations, dynamics, and configurations of other things. Everything is not political, at least not a priori. Yet anything can be political should politics become concerned with its arrangement, whether as a matter of policy or through less intentional or explicit effects. Power, the sole concern of politics, must of necessity itself always be found within another substance. Power is that hungry thing that consumes all and is at once everywhere and nowhere.

It is this liquid, mercurial entity that hegemony best describes. Yet because power in itself must always be present in some other kind of substance, this raises for us the brute fact that we are writing today almost one hundred years since Gramscis key prison writings. Our world is very different to that of the 1920s and 30s. The very existence of neoliberalism, a reactionary movement to route around all the efforts to restrain capital that were developed in the early twentieth century, attests to this, let alone the emergence of digital technology platforms, global finance, or disaggregated supply chains. For these reasons we need to update and upgrade Gramscis account (and those of his most notable successors). This book therefore presents a number of developments on the modern and postmodern theories of hegemony.

This book is arranged in three main sections. We encourage our readers to tackle them in any order but would draw attention to the fact that most of the social history is concentrated in part I, the political theory in part II, and the political strategy in part III. We have also included a glossary of key terms for reference.

Power in the Twenty-First Century

Power can only be effectively measured with reference to processes of change and stasis. The way to determine who has the majority of power and who does not is to examine what the dynamics of relative change and stasis are, and to consider which interests are being served in the process, and which intentions are being realised. Given this, which of the competing social, political, economic and cultural agendas of the last great period of global political upheaval, the 1970s and 80s, have acquired the most force and social authority? Of all of the competing social groups to emerge during this period from the New Right to the New Left who actually got the world that they wanted? There is a clear answer to this question: the people who got the world that they wanted were the tech entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley and those sections of finance capital closely aligned with them. The precise combination of social liberalisation, anti-egalitarianism, globalisation, deregulation of markets, financialisation of assets and digitisation of media and information that has characterised the leading tendencies of global culture (and we do mean global) can be seen as more or less direct expressions of the interests and values of this particular coalition of class fractions.