roachboy

hegemony: ideology: control of worldviews through the ability to shape categories and the logics that are available to combine them.

once upon a time, in the olden days of private ownership of large-scale firms, the bourgeoisie was a tiny discrete social group and as over against them in marx were the folk who sold their labor power for a wage. back in those days, it made sense to imagine a small and shrinking cadre of the wealthy and powerful whose wealth enabled them political and personal freedom, whose abilities to be politically and personally free presupposed a vast system of wage slavery. there are those who get to flower as human beings and there are those who sell their labor power, become interchangeable as commodity-bearers (labor power is a commodity) dehumanized, etc.


once upon a time, during the transition away from craft production, there was still an argument to be made that atomizing work, deskilling, repetition were all dehumanizing, and that a system of production geared around that generated problematic human costs, even as standardized goods were cheaper than non-standardized goods--but once upon a time it was not obvious that there was any demand or need for standardized goods--such demand was produced--and so it follows that in capitalism, demand follows supply at the point where those who mediate that relation are able to tell those who demand what they want. it is like this, it is always like this in capitalism, that demand follows supply once demand is told by those who mediate that relation what it is that they want.

supply follows demand an partial, almost upside down view of the world that generates the illusion of power residing with those whose primary social function is to select from amongst a narrow range of officially sanctioned consumer options, to desire within circumscribed limits, to think in particular ways and not others. hegemony lay not only in the creation of desire the creation of demand but also in the image that one has of how demand fits into a larger picture, one that presupposes a separation of the economic from other spheres and a host of other bourgeois mental ticks besides.

once upon a time industrial production was concentrated inside of nation-states so that firms, by accepting the nation-state as a natural boundary within which primary economic activity was undertaken and understood, necessary found themselves involved with questions of the social reproduction of the labor force--to operate they needed a stream of minimally skilled but ultimately interchangeable bodies to be subordinates of the machinery on the factory floor.
once upon a time, this obligation to concern itself with the reproduction of the labor force meant that a number of brakes obtained on rates of exploitation. of course there was in the old school terminology always an industrial reserve army, but now the industrial reserve army is the size of the planet. anything goes. the most blinkered an short-sighted form of capitalism run the show. its natural, like the weather.

those days are largely gone: the is no working class to speak of in the united states at this point, not in the old sense of the term. there are working-class people in the sociologically descriptive sense, but not so many in terms of the political sense, that which marx isolated through the notion of the proletariat, the class in and for itself. and there is a relatively large social group which owns the instruments of production through the holding of stock and other instruments. there are varying degrees of class awareness amongst this population. class position being vague, of course, all types of populist or identity-politics ideologies are eaten in these neighborhoods many folk are of the lumpenbourgeoisie. i like that term and haven't used it for a while. the sack of potatos that carried political shit for the holders of power, those nice reliable petit bourgeois reactionaries who act against their own objective interests because they'd rather pretend they were wealthy than look the fuck around....and there is an ideological context in which this is all understood as natural and necessary like the weather. hegemony is the ability to convince people that any number of particular political and economic choices that adversely affect populations way beyond the limits of the firm or industrial sector just happen like the weather. powerless we all are. such inequality of power is natural--some get to decide others react--some decide your fate, you watch tv. it's natural. like the weather.

since the current socio-economic order, call it neoliberalism call it globalization it hardly matters, is natural like the weather--no matter that this assumption is a pure function of hegemony, a demonstration of it, a confirmation--the extent to which this neutralizes thinking about the material fact of the existing order AS a system is a good index of the effects of hegemony--so here: there is inequality and there is inequality. there, in aristotle, it is natural. here, because everything is naturalized because those nice men on tv say so those nice people who write for the papers say so those nice photographs i look at tell me so that nice tv footage i see shows me so, there is inequality there was natural inequality in aristotle there is inequality now where i am told everything that happens is like the weather, they are the same so q.e.d.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite