What a day! There was wall-to-wall media coverage of just
one of 370,000 babies born yesterday around the world and confirmation that
Labour is pressing ahead with plans to break its current links with the organisations
that created the party in 1900.
Are these events linked in any way? I think they are – in
one important respect. They both contribute to what Antonio Gramsci referred to
as the hegemony of the ruling class in terms of penetrating the rest of us with
their outlook and ideology.
Hegemony is not a pretty word and also hard to pronounce
(try it). It means domination or supremacy. Gramsci was a founder-member of the
Italian Communist Party. Despite being an MP, he was seized by Mussolini’s
fascist regime in 1926 and spent the next six years in jail.
Although he died a few years after his conditional release
on health grounds, his Prison Notebooks
were smuggled out of jail and later published. Gramsci wanted to understand why
the masses in the major capitalist countries seemed to support the state
political system. So he investigated how the ideas of the ruling class were the
dominant, or hegemonic, ideas in society.
An essential, even “socially accepted function” of any state is, as Bob Jessop,
professor of sociology at Lancaster University, explains is to “enforce
collectively binding decisions on the members of a society in the name of their
common interest or general will”.
So how are these “common interests” articulated? How are we
persuaded, for example, that monarchy is good for every single person and that
we should be happy that there is another addition to the royal family? This
particular notion is achieved by way of social traditions, culture, ideas that
we are born into, through the education system, the church and, of course, the
media.
From the BBC to the “liberal” Guardian, there was only one story yesterday – the birth of one
single baby. “Duchess in labour as the world awaits news”, said the BBC
website. Yes, the whole world was standing by! The Guardian had rolling “live coverage” all day long.
A good day to bury bad news. So off the headlines went (in
no particular order), the terrible situation in Syria, the end of the welfare state, outsourcing the NHS, surveillance state,
tax cuts for fracking, global recession etc. Then later in the day, in stepped
Ed Miliband, leader of the Labour Party with his own particular contribution to
hegemony.
Whatever came later, the
foundation of the Labour Party by the trade unions at the beginning of the 20th
century challenged the hegemony of ruling class ideas. It had been accepted
until then that workers could only find representation through the Liberal
Party.
The Tories bitterly opposed
the scheme whereby trade unionists automatically had part of their
subscriptions passed on to Labour to fund its campaigns and election work. So
in 1927, the Baldwin government banned
the practice. Instead, trade unionists had to opt into paying the levy. Labour
opposed the move and pledged to repeal the law, which was in force for two
decades.
Miliband is, as we know,
proposing that Labour now follows what the Tories did in 1927. And yesterday it
became known that his party is calling a special
conference in March 2014 to get the rules changed. For good measure, the
voting rights of the unions are to be further reduced.
This then is Miliband’s
contribution to passing on the ideological domination of the ruling class. He
doesn’t care that the party will lose millions as a result. Miliband is more
interested in impressing middle-class, middle-England voters in the general
election scheduled for 2015.
So Labour, having abandoned
its famous socialist Clause 4 in 1995, is applying the coup de grâce to its
history. Naturally, the Guardian,
dresses this up as “reform” when it is nothing of the kind. More hegemonic
deception!
You can point to numerous,
every-day examples of this process. What is a more difficult task is to develop
ideas and, above all, practices that challenge not just the grand illusions and
deceptions but also the capitalist power structures that lie at the heart of the hegemony
that Gramsci was referring to.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
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