Review: Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams, ‘Hegemony Now’
Review of Jeremy Gilbert and Alex William’s Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (and How We Win it Back) (Verso, 2022), 336 pages
Abstract
Hegemony Now, addresses the unquestionable predominance of the big tech and financial sectors in relation to this state of crisis and the loss of moral authority of neoliberalism. It aims to update Gramsci’s analysis for the contemporary moment. For many scholars of neoliberalism, hegemony has been too simplistic a framework for analysis. Gilbert and Williams argue, however, that Gramsci’s concepts, especially if updated to accommodate the complexity of the contemporary world, are crucial for analysing power relations in the current conjuncture. They trace the securing of neoliberal hegemony and strategic position of influence by big tech and financial capital. They argue that platform capitalism poses major challenges for progressive politics, but may also offer opportunities for collective organisation. Gilbert and Williams offer a detailed and methodical analysis which helps think through complexity, but also miss some key points which could add to their analysis.
Reviewed by Claudia Firth
Gilbert and Williams start their book with the classic quote from political theorist Antonio Gramsci which sums up the last few years scarily well. This is his description of an ‘interregnum’, the gap between powers, or crisis of authority, that occurs when belief in the status quo has been shaken and doesn’t quite hold in the way it did. People ‘no longer believe what they used to’ and those able to exercise hegemony can’t do it as effectively anymore without resorting to force. Gramsci argues that while this interval exists, morbid symptoms will persist as ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born’ (Gramsci, 1971: 276).
There is no doubt that there has been something of a crisis of authority in the status quo. Symbolised by the shock of Trump’s victory in the US and the Brexit vote in the UK, politics has seemed somewhat incomprehensible. This is the starting point of Hegemony Now, which aims to update Gramsci’s analysis of power for the contemporary moment. The book addresses the unquestionable predominance of the big tech and financial sectors in relation to this state of crisis and the loss of moral authority of neoliberalism. In so doing, it adds to the growing literature on the potential death or otherwise of neoliberalism, and signals, alongside others, a potential return to Gramsci’s ideas in relation to power.
As a theory of power, hegemony has to some extent, fallen out of favour. Among many scholars of neoliberalism in particular, hegemony has been seen as too simplistic a framework for analysis, relying on Marxist politico-economic factors and top-down domination. As Gilbert and Williams argue, however, Gramsci’s ideas can be understood as more nuanced than being about pure domination and lend themselves well to a detailed analysis of power relations, especially at times of instability and crisis. In particular, they can help deconstruct shifts in the status quo and think through periods where existing power structures are unstable or falling apart. If updated to accommodate the complexity of the contemporary world, as Gilbert and Wiliams do, they could be crucial for analysing power relations in the current conjuncture. Their approach is to develop Gramsci’s concepts to include more complexity, through additions from other critical thinkers such as Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari. This is much needed, particularly at a time when the appeal of simplified narratives is highly potent. However, there are also omissions in the book which have the potential to do their aim of complex analysis a disservice.
If we understand hegemony to mean more than pure domination but rather the production and maintenance of a strategic position of influence, the sectors that have ‘won’ this position, through a number of mechanisms, including culture and infrastructure, are those of technology and financial capital. Gilbert and Williams’ main contentions are that in the 21st-century, the interests of technology firms and finance capital have converged and become mutually reinforcing. They warn that neoliberal values, policies, and worldviews have been deeply embedded in the infrastructures that have been created by platform technology and that even if neoliberalism ceases to be the dominant paradigm, it will take time to undo. They also argue that all forms of cultural and social innovation have been largely subordinated to the objective of increasing computerisation. In order to ‘consent’ (although they argue, largely passively) to neoliberalism, subjects have been offered private autonomy as a trade-off for the giving up collective and democratic power. Nevertheless, they also argue that while platform capitalism poses major challenges for progressive politics, it may offer more opportunities than post-Fordism did for collective organisation.
Hegemony Now is split into three parts, the first outlining the securing of neoliberal hegemony in the 20th century by big tech and financial capital, going back to the end of the post-war settlement and 1968 in particular as the ‘most intense phase’ of a longer conflict (13). This section gives a historical overview of the historic bloc or ‘assemblage’ that emerged in the late 70s and 80s. In part two, the authors analyse how this state of hegemony of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ has been enabled and reproduced itself. This includes a detailed and methodical analysis using Gramsci’s tools to examine the mechanisms through which hegemony has been perpetuated. This makes up the majority of the book and is the most successful in many ways. Part three looks towards the future and the potential ‘war of position’ that could be waged in the name of a reinvented neo-socialism based on a Green New Deal.
At each stage of their argumentation, they seek to expand and build complexity into Gramsci’s key terms. Gramsci’s well-known formula is that hegemony is maintained by a combination of coercion and consent, with consent being sought through the construction of ‘common sense’: a worldview that is produced to align itself with the hegemonic groups’ interests, and presented as ‘natural’. Gilbert and Williams argue that while many have seen this consent as having to be active (and critiqued Gramsci for this), they do not. Rather, they argue that it is possible for large groups of people to find themselves in disagreement with hegemonic common sense, while simultaneously being forced to defer to it and comply with its norms, behaving to all intents and purposes as if they believed in it. This is the split neoliberal subject that many of us will recognise: compelled to network, become entrepreneurial, brand the self, or act in ways that while we do not believe in them, feel compelled to enact, in order to ‘play the game’ and get on.
Manufacturing consent involves a whole array of techniques and affective states. A ‘complex set of interrelated power mechanisms’ has operated to selectively empower some social groups and partially subjugate others (77). These techniques have also created disparate effects within groups and subjects, disempowering them in some ways and empowering them in others. Gilbert and Williams focus in particular, on the empowerment of people as consumers, at the same time as their disempowered as workers and citizens. They claim that consent to the neoliberal project was secured by persuading populations to accept private empowerment as consumers as a substitute for the weakening of social democracy.
One key mechanism for compliance has been the increase in precarity. Growing job insecurity and anxiety mean individuals are compelled to find private strategies to survive and have less time and capacity for political organisation. Another is debt, which works to reduce the horizon of possibilities that individual subjects can imagine as realisable.
The authors’ discussion of interests in relation to horizons of possibility is one of the areas in which the book is particularly effective. Their contention is that politics is precisely about the contestation and negotiation of interests, something that has been implicitly denied and occluded by much contemporary public discourse. They expand the concept of interests away from the narrow definition associated with deterministic forms of Marxism, to look at how the interests of Silicon Valley and financial capital have been served, but also how workers might have been persuaded to vote for outcomes which are against their own interests, such as Brexit. In order to do this, they turn to Deleuze and Guattari’s seminal work Capitalism and Schizophrenia. While at first glance, this may seem an unusual choice, given the appearance of the split subject (although they do not name it as such), it is perhaps not so unexpected. Deleuze’s concept of multiplicity allows the authors to conceptualise interests not as fixed and stable but as virtual, that may or may not actualize and become concrete. Historical subjects can therefore simultaneously have complex, contradictory and competing sets of interests which might emerge given different contexts and perceived possibilities and horizons.
They also successfully expand the term platform to include other forms of infrastructure: the global financial system, the energy system, production systems, global governance institutions, education, media and nation level state bureaucracies. They argue that platform power is a particular crystallisation of neoliberal hegemony, embedding and automating key influence into the fabric of the social and technical world. Whether through intentional design or unintentional evolution, these determine the conditions of human behaviour as well as any potential for resistance, transformation and change. They cite the example of Amazon as becoming the very infrastructure of everyday commerce.
Indeed, one of the goals if a 21st-century socialism is to prevail, must be to wrest control of the major platforms from monopoly corporate control. However, they recognise that this will require major international, intra-governmental coordination and high levels of participation by platform users. They suggest a viral campaign or mass global boycott, although they don’t see this happening any time soon.
While Gilbert and Williams discuss the creation of new coalitions and alliances in response to the slow death of neoliberalism, there are some surprising omissions. In particular, the lack of some of the key protest movements and platforms for change that have occurred since the 2008 financial crash. In doing so, they are in danger of undermining their own analytic position as well as potentially slipping into a well-worn academic nostalgia for 1968 as the one true authentic protest moment. As they chart the collapse in authority of neoliberalism on the levels of media narrative, discourse and popular consent, there is no mention of the Occupy movement at all. In their description of the hegemonic crisis in 2008-9, they say that it lay ‘somewhat dormant until the ruptures of 2016 with Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the emergence of serious neo-socialism throughout much of the global North’ (204-5). While the 15M movement gets a small mention, the book is written as if Occupy, and in the UK, the student movement of 2011, never happened. And while it is reasonable to argue that Occupy was not effective because of its lack of demands, it did, as Kate Crehan and others have argued, make a dent in the triumphalist hegemonic narratives that developed after 1989 in ‘the long 1990s’ (119-120). It was finally okay to say in public that capitalism wasn’t working. As people from all walks of life took up space outside the financial centres of power and refused to leave, the slogan ‘we are the 99%,’ did create a shift in Gramscian common sense (Crehan, 2016). Furthermore, while there is quite extensive discussion of The World Transformed (TWT) and Momentum as the main grassroots movements in the UK, the book doesn’t acknowledge the many activists who came from Occupy and the student movement to grow Momentum and TWT, putting energy into the electoral hope of a victory for the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn.
While Gilbert and Williams state that ‘one error of recent years was the leftist movements to go “all in” on a purely electoralist strategy’ which they describe as naive (238), Hegemony Now is on the brink of a similar error. And while they embrace Rodrigo Nunes’ perspective of complexity (Neither Vertical nor Horizontal) in a section on organisational ecologies, this doesn’t imbue the rest of the book as it could. In addition, there is discussion of which sectors of the population might be won over, but there is no discussion of scale, or mention of concrete examples such as city-based platform municipalist initiatives which emerged in Europe post-2011. These initiatives have attempted to link local electoral platforms with social movements and have been somewhat successful in challenging platform tech giants like Uber and Airbnb.
Given that Gramsci’s perspective relies on coalition building and the understanding that counter power is built and contested on multiple levels, these omissions are unexpected. Especially, as the authors themselves argue, that:
‘centralised, professional political parties, open democratic assemblies, self-organised networks, disciplined bureaucracies, local affinity groups: all have roles to play in specific contexts, and only a complex ecology of such institutions and practices is likely to be able to sustain an effective counter-hegemonic movement’ (235)
Instead, it is still left mostly to the national political party to be the main protagonist of change. And while the importance of this is not to be diminished, the fact that a Green New Deal shouldn’t seem contentious but seems to have fallen off the agenda, means that the wholesale critique of neoliberalism that Gilbert and Williams call for appears unlikely.
Nonetheless, the macro political analysis contained in Hegemony Now is incredibly valuable and adds much to the debates around the potential demise of neoliberalism. We are facing an increasingly complex world, and the tools Gilbert and Williams’ develop from Gramsci enable us to think about this complexity without the reductions or simplifications that can be so appealing.
References
Crehan, Kate (2016) Gramsci's Common Sense: Inequality and its Narratives, Duke University Press
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (2004) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London; New York: Continuum
Gramsci, Antonio (2005) Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Reprint Edition), London: Lawrence & Wishart Ltd.
Nunes, Rodrigo (2021) Neither Vertical nor Horizontal: A theory of political organisation, London; New York: Verso
Claudia Firth is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol Business School, working in the interstices between Cultural Studies, Political Economy and Organisation Studies. She is a member of the Fair Creative Economies research project and the Sustainable Production and Consumption, and Inclusive Economy research group. Her research has included work on commons, co-ops, grassroots self-organisation and the contribution and sharing economy, reading groups as critical pedagogy and organisation, and listening as a mode of organizing in arts-activism. Forthcoming publications include articles on political organisation, mutual aid and technology, and neoliberalism in the current conjuncture.
Email: claudia.firth@bristol.ac.uk
