Cultural Hegemony is a concept developed by Marxist Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci. It starts from the postulate that the conquest of power presupposes the conquest of public opinion. Hegemony describes the cultural domination of the ruling class, as well as the role that daily practices and collective beliefs play in establishing systems of domination.
The analysis of hegemony was first formulated by Antonio Gramsci to explain why the communist revolutions predicted by Marxin industrialized countries had not happened. Marx and his successors had indeed claimed that the growth of industrial capitalism would produce a gigantic working class and cyclical economic recessions. Added to the other contradictions of capitalism, these recessions would lead an overwhelming majority of the population, the workers, to develop, in order to defend their interests, organizations, in particular unions and political parties. The succession of economic crises would finally lead the working class to overthrow capitalism in a revolution, to restructure the economic, political and social institutions, on the basis of scientific socialism, and to begin the transition to a communist society . Although Marx and Engels predicted this scenario in the famous Communist Party Manifesto ( 1848 ), workers in industrialized countries still had not completed this "mission" decades later.
Gramsci believed that the failure of the workers to make the socialist revolution was due to the hold of the bourgeois hegemonic culture on the ideology and the organizations of the workers.
In other words, the cultural representations of the ruling class, that is, the ruling ideology, had rubbed off more than Marx could have thought on the masses of workers. In "advanced" industrial societies, hegemonic cultural tools such as compulsory schooling, mass media and popular culture had instilled a "false conscience" in workers. Instead of bringing about a revolution that would truly serve their collective needs (according to Marxists), workers in "advanced" societies gave in to the sirens of nationalism, consumerism and social advancement, embracing an individualistic ethos of competition and personal success or even lining up behind bourgeois religious leaders.
Noting the relative failure of economic determinism in the face of the strength of the dominant ideology, Gramsci proposed a distinction between “war of position” and “war of movement”. The "war of position" is a cultural war against bourgeois values which present themselves as "natural" or "normal". The socialist elements must therefore seek to break into the news media, mass organizations and educational institutions in order to propagate revolutionary analysis and theory, to increase class consciousness.and to push for revolutionary engagement. This cultural struggle must allow the proletariat to attract all the oppressed classes in its struggle for the seizure of political power. For Gramsci, any class that aims at the conquest of political power must indeed go beyond its simple "economic" interests, take moral and intellectual leadership, and make alliances and compromises with a number of social forces. Gramsci calls this union of social forces a “historical bloc” (term borrowed from trade unionist Georges Sorel ).
