An Ordinary Person

The Culture War

Paul Rosenberg over at OpenLeft is writing an ongoing series of excellent and provocative posts using Gramscian theory of hegemony to analyze the ongoing culture wars in the U.S. Here are some links to his posts:

• Repress U-A Gramscian Case Study In A War of Position: The “Homeland Security” Attack On Academia
• Will The Real Culture War Please Stand Up??
• Obama’s Surrender to Hegemony–How “Common Sense” Can Lead Us Astray

 

From Wikipedia:
Antonio Gramsci was an Italian writer, politician and political theorist. A founding member and onetime leader of the Communist Party of Italy, he was imprisoned by Mussolini’s Fascist regime. His writings are heavily concerned with the analysis of culture and political leadership and he is notable as a highly original thinker within the Marxist tradition. He is renowned for his concept of cultural hegemony as a means of maintaining the state in a capitalist society.

According to Rosenberg:

But there’s a deeper meaning, which is clearly understood by rightwing culture warriors, and virtually unknown to everyone else. This meaning comes, ironically, from a leading Marxist theorist, the highly independent Italian leader, Antonio Gramsci, who described culture war as a struggle for ideological control of the broad range of institutions in society. . .

Gramsci was grappling with the question of why Marxist predictions had not come to pass, why the rise of working class power had not lead to a communist revolution, or even the dominance of socialist political parties. The reason, he believed, was that workers aspired to become their class enemy–they wanted to join the bourgeoisie, not destroy it, and the reason for that was the hegemony of bourgeois ideology, expressed through a whole range of political institutions.

Gramsci’s argument is based on an analysis that can clearly be transposed onto other forms of ideological struggle, such as the one that grips America today. Whether or not Gramsci was entirely right in his specific analysis (not being a communist, I obviously think he wasn’t), he clearly was onto something, and America’s post-1960s New Right has followed his prescription quite faithfully, even if they did not cite him specifically until Rush Limbaugh did so in the 1990s. By engaging in a Gramscian culture war, the right has positioned itself to define the terms of the “culture war” as commonly understood.

 

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