Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (And How We Win it Back)

Product Information

However, they recognise that this will require major international, intra-governmental coordination and high levels of participation by platform users. 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. In part two, the authors analyse how this state of hegemony of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ has been enabled and reproduced itself. 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.

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. The book partly delivers on this promise, but i had problems to keep the focus due to the many thematic detours. Through upgrading the concept of hegemony—understanding the importance of passive consent; the complexity of political interests; and the structural force of technology—Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams offer us an updated theory of power for the twenty-first century. 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. 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.Gilbert and Williams argue that while many have seen this consent as having to be active (and critiqued Gramsci for this), they do not. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Gilbert and Williams] have done a brilliant job stripping away much of the complexity that makes post and neo-Marxist language so difficult to engage with for ordinary mortals .

Through upgrading the concept of hegemony-understanding the importance of passive consent; the complexity of political interests; and the structural force of technology-Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams offer us an updated theory of power for the twenty-first century. At each stage of their argumentation, they seek to expand and build complexity into Gramsci’s key terms.

The second section then theorises this using concepts including hegemony along with the theories of Deleuze and Guattari (which I'm aware of but not in any way familiar with) to build an understanding of how this power is constructed and has continued to be supported by political parties that win elections despite seemingly not being hugely popular in general.

In the process of clarifying and updating the often misunderstood (and occasionally maligned) concept of hegemony, Gilbert and Williams also provide us with a valuable analysis of the "long 1990s": an account of its constitution, a diagnosis of its crisis and a map for its overcoming. They trace the securing of neoliberal hegemony and strategic position of influence by big tech and financial capital. I understand where they are coming from, but I do wonder whether in practice the end result would be limited reforms that are eventually dissipated by a Thermidorian revanche of capitalist interest, rather than creating a gathering wave of progressive change that Gilbert and Williams imagine.Facebook sets this cookie to show relevant advertisements to users by tracking user behaviour across the web, on sites that have Facebook pixel or Facebook social plugin. We cannot change anything until we have a better understanding of how power works, who holds it, and why that matters. Historical subjects can therefore simultaneously have complex, contradictory and competing sets of interests which might emerge given different contexts and perceived possibilities and horizons.