The imbibing of the hegemonic culture into the minds of the general population is a major function of the school system, with both school curricula and school books being tightly controlled. Inconvenient facts and ideas are kept away from impressionable young minds. This continues within the university system, where “critical” theory means being critical of only the cultural aspects of society and the study of economics has been stripped of its dangerous political-economic insights into the real workings of Western societies. Gabriel Rockhill has done much excellent work in showing how the US state and related foundations (e.g. Ford, Rockefeller) funded and directed the non-communist “critical” theory that now dominates the Western social sciences.

just six conglomerates plus Meta, Google and Elon Musk. The newspaper industry has also been radically consolidated within a handful of owners, many straddling multiple countries (e.g. News Corp). All of the Western media tends to rely upon two news agencies for much of their content - Thomson Reuters (owned by the Thomson family) and the Associated Press, based in London and New York respectively. Reuters is well known for tight linkages with the security services, including the hiring of ex security service personnel. Any non-compliant media outlets are swiftly reminded of their responsibilities to the capitalist elite hegemony, and if necessary financially disciplined or even removed (as with Parlerin 2021, as currently threatened with respect to TikTok, and as facilitated by recent EU “misinformation” legislation). Naked Capitalism has an excellent piece on the latter here. The Guardian newspaper was directly disciplined by the UK security servicesafter its publishing of documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013, and has been a reliable servant of the UK ruling class ever since.

In the modern world the category of intellectuals … has undergone unprecedented expansion. The democratic-bureaucratic system has given rise to a great mass of functions which are not at all justified by the social necessities of production, though they are justified by the political necessities of the dominant fundamental group. (Ibid: 13)

The combination of extremely high concentrations of ownership and control of the means of cultural production, and corporate entities, together with the relatively small number of organic intellectuals with shared backgrounds in influential and senior roles across the spectrum of society allows for a high level of message discipline. We have seen this with respect to the COVID pandemic, the proxy war with Russia, the Zionist genocide, the increasingly aggressive nature of Western rhetoric and actions toward China, and the drive to divide and conquer the population along intersectional lines such as race, sexual orientation and gender identity (itself undermining basic concepts of biological sex) while ignoring the fundamental question of class dynamics and economic inequality. The latter has been very effectively spread through many aspects of society, such as the academy and schools, human resources departments and government agencies and policies just as the capitalist class intensified the class war in the 2010s after crushing Occupy Wall Street.

The construct of “hate speech” has been extensively utilized, together with the manipulative misuse of the term “misinformation”, to support extensive new censorship laws as well as the outright banning of non-compliant media outlets such as Russia Today. With the intensification of the ruling class war against the rest, and the increasingly desperate measures to somehow hold back the inevitability of the rise of the Other 7 Billion spearheaded by China and Russia, must come greater cultural control at home. Note the highly coordinated fashion of the rise of “anti hate speech” laws across Western nations recently:

No alternative voices must be allowed to gain traction, as has been the case with TikTok and the evisceration of Zionist propaganda and disinformation. Increasing losses, such as those in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine and across the Sahel must be carefully filtered and used to stoke a sense of threat rather than one of acceptance and an anti-war mentality. Gramsci would recognize the increasingly fascist nature of Western societies as it is accepted by the elites that social democracy and the manufacturing of consent may no longer be fully up to the task.

Accepting the relative specificity, and the significant historical determinism, of the processes of change within individual societies, Gramsci immersed himself in the history of Italy, and Europe in general, and the nature of the dominant ruling coalitions. Gramsci (1971b: 200) also rejected

a scholastic and academic historico-political outlook which sees as real and worthwhile only … movements that are governed by plans worked out in advance to the last detail or in line with abstract theory and noting that reality produces a wealth of the most bizarre combinations … it is not reality which should be expected to conform to the abstract schema

Accepting the importance of contingency and the shortcomings of universalist schemas. In Germany and England, the bourgeoisie had allied itself with the old feudal aristocracy who remained as a governing stratum. As in Italy, Gramsci saw the resultant ‘revolutions’ as passive ones, driven by the dominant classes and the state downwards rather than by a mass revolution that replaces the dominant classes (e.g. the Russian Bolshevik Revolution). The US Civil War swept away the feudal and aristocratic structures of the South, and the extremely small (in relation to European nations) scale of the US state represented little resistance to a more purely bourgeois dominance.

The complex interactive nature of the relationship between material capabilities, institutions and ideas, and the power of new ideas that become part of the common sense, is detailed by Gramsci:

a popular conviction often has the same energy as a material force or something of the kind, which is extremely significant. The analysis of these propositions tends, I think, to reinforce the conception of historical bloc in which precisely material forces are the content and ideologies are the form, though this distinction between form and content had purely didactic value, since the material forces would be inconceivable historically without form and the ideologies would be individual fancies without the material forces (Gramsci, 1971d: 377).

In the 1950’s Liberation Theology arose within the Latin American Catholic Church to challenge elite dominance that the Church had been instrumental in legitimizing and was heavily suppressed. More recently, evangelical congregations subject to the teachings of the Prosperity Gospel have grown rapidly within Latin America and Africa without such suppression. For example, a third of Brazilians were members of such congregations in 2010, and many churches have become major business empires with interests and philosophies overlapping with other societal elites. Within China, the Party-state has been extremely mindful of controlling, or if needed suppressing, religious movements that may create a challenge to its legitimacy and the hegemonic culture that serves its interests.

Where civil society is little developed, as in pre-communist Russia, a direct assault upon the state, a war of manoeuvre, may be successful. Where civil society is well developed, as in the liberal capitalist nations, such a direct assault will not prevail. The war of manoeuvre must be preceded by a war of position that challenges the cultural dominance of the historic bloc. In this respect, a constant focus of the historic bloc upon ‘radical’ intellectuals, and actions to repress and delegitimize them becomes a first line of defence against the success of any counter-hegemonic cultural project. In Latin America the opposition had been successful in establishing a counter-hegemonic cultural project in the post-war years in many nations was set to take the reins of power. The result was the alliance between the US capitalist elite and their Latin American capitalist and military vassals to crush this project through state terror, coordinated at the inter-country level through Operation Condor. Terror was unleashed upon “the enemy within” over a couple of decades until the oppositional organic intellectuals were dead, tortured and terrorized into subservience, or had fled abroad (and even there they were not safe from assassination and abduction).

This is a war of very different state/society complexes, on one side those dominated by the capitalist class and on the other those where the bourgeoisie is subjugated by the Party-state (China) or or where its power is very significantly balanced by other interests (Russia and Iran). The Western capitalist classes must discipline their own populations, even to the point of those populations accepting the sacrifice of their own social support systems and perhaps even lives to preserve their own domination. As bourgeois democracy fails to do this, increasingly authoritarian and fascistic tools will be utilized. The fascist US reality of 1917-1920 as President Wilson and the capitalist elite manipulated and bullied the American people into a war that they did not want stands as a possible low-tech version of the future of Western nations.

References

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