There are two main stands leading to the Gramscian
idea of hegemony:
1. The third international concerning the strategy of Bolsheviks and the
creation of a socialist state.
2. the writings from Machiavelli.
He is looking for a way of creating Hegemony and he
wants to mention conditions. He enlarges the definition of the state. He says
that it is possible that leaders hand out power to other civil instances, as
long as they recognize the hegemony. So Gramsci says that the notion of the
state would also have to include the underpinnings of the political structure
in civil society. Gramsci thought of this in concrete historical terms. All the
institutions that form people are consistent with the hegemonic order.
Gramsci comes to the conclusion that western societies
differ fundamentally from Russian societies. Because of their intern
organisation, it was hard for communists to turn over the state to with a
revolutionary approach. He states that a war of movement is not the way to deal
with the western societies, a war of position is better. This means you slowly
build up the strength of the social foundation of a new state. In western
Europe, the struggle had to be won in civil society before an assault on the
state could achieve success. The difficulty about this is the fact that you
have to create a counter hegemony with all new institutions and intellectual
resources.
Gramsci says there are two kinds of societies; on has
undergone a social revolution and worked out fully its consequences in new
modes of production and social relations. The other kind were societies which
had so to speak imported or had trust upon them aspects of a new order created
abroad, without the old being replaced. In these societies, there was no active
hegemony because the opposing forces did not succeed in creating a revolution.
This created passive revolution conditions.
There are some typical accompaniments to passive
revolution:
1. Ceasarism. A strong man intervenes to resolve the stalemate between equal
and opposed social forces. There are progressive (when strong rules presides
over a more orderly development of a new state) and reactionary (when it
stabilises existing power).
2. transformismo. The widest possible coalition of
interests. It is about cooperation between subaltern social groups.
We use passive revolution to show that there is no active
hegemony because no dominant class has been able to establish a hegemony in
Gramsci’s sense of term.
Gramsci states that state and society together
constituted a solid structure strong enough to replace the first. Such a
structure is a historic bloc. Ideas and material are always relating and
mutually influencing each other. An historic bloc cannot exist without a
hegemonic social class. A new bloc can occur when a sub group brings his ideas
to the stage in a society and overrules the others. In western societies, this
will be done by a war of position.
In the creation of historic blocs, three levels of
consciousness are separated: economic-cooperative, solidarity of class
consciousness and the hegemonic.
Hegemony and
international relations.
The state remains for Gramsci the basic entity in
international relations and the place where social conflicts take place, the
place also, therefore where hegemonies of social classes can be built. The
emergence of new worker led blocs at the national level would, in this line of
reasoning, precede any basic restructuring of international relations. States
that are powerful, have undergone a profound social and economic revolution and
have most worked out the consequences of this revolution in the form of social
relations.
Hegemony and world
order.
It would appear that, historically, to become
hegemonic, a state would have to found and protect a world order which is
universal in its conception. The hegemonic concept of world order is founded
not only upon the regulation of inter-state conflict but also upon a globally
conceived civil society, a mode of production of global extent which brings
about links among social classes of the countries encompassed by it. A hegemon
can encompass more peripheral countries in it by a passive revolution. in the
world hegemonic model, hegemony is more intense and consistent at the core and
more contradicting at the periphery. Hegemony is an order with world economy
with a dominant of production which
penetrates into all countries. It also encompasses social relationships. You
can describe it as social, political and economic structure.
Mechanisms of
hegemony: IOs.
IOs form the process through which a hegemon can
develop its ideology in to the world. Features that express IOs and their
hegemonic role are:
1. They embody the rules which facilitate the expansion of hegemonic world
order.
2. They are themselves the product of hegemonic world order.
3. They ideologically legitimate the norms of the world order.
4. They co-opt the elites from peripheral countries
5. They absorb counter hegemonic ideas.
International institutions are usually formed by the
hegemonic state and its rules.
The prospects for
Counter-Hegemony.
world orders are grounded in social relations. Gramsci’s analysis of
Italy: only a war of position can, in the long run, bring about structural
changes, and a war of position involves building up the socio political base
for change through the creation of new historic blocs. This is the core of
changing the world.
