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

Product Information

The authors’ discussion of interests in relation to horizons of possibility is one of the areas in which the book is particularly effective. 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). It is a book that wants to much: Updating recent post-marxist and post-structuralist theory, recounting the history of the UK-left, the Labour party and some US campaigns, analysing real-existing neoliberalism and delivering an organisational strategy for the left.

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. 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. 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. While many of these topics are of dear interest to me, teh book failed- as so many do - in developing clear-cut advices or strategies.

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. In engaging and accessible prose, Gilbert and Williams provide an astute political analysis of our current conjuncture an important provocation for the left.

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. However, there are also omissions in the book which have the potential to do their aim of complex analysis a disservice. 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. 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.

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). A really useful work using the concept of hegemony as theorised by Gramsci and others to analyse the current state of society and politics in (primarily) the UK and US and set out a future strategy for the left, broadly conceived. In part two, the authors analyse how this state of hegemony of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ has been enabled and reproduced itself. 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. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit.