Activity

What needs to be resisted when faced with the shocking reports and images of the burning Paris suburbs is what I call the hermeneutic temptation: the search for some deeper meaning or message hidden in these outbursts.

we need to talk about hegemony, an idea that was developed most famously by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Hegemony is a system of power within complex societies

the Austrian school of economic and social theorists – in particular Hayek and von Mises – that proposed that the world was simply too complex to manage through state control and that only markets would be capable of functioning as an appropriately supple information-processing and coordination system

While Labour were committed to ‘sharing the proceeds of growth’ more equitably than in the Thatcher and Major years, the process by which growth was to be achieved remained the same: the embedding of neoliberalism within government, society, and the economy.

What you do, simply, is convince enough of those other social groups that their interests are best served by throwing in their lot with you than by supporting the other side. This is what it means to achieve ‘hegemony’ (leadership) within a wider ensemble of social forces.