Hegemony and Identity

In his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel, Marx presents two seemingly opposed methods for emancipation. In the first he says:

"The proletariat is coming into being in Germany only as a result of the rising industrial development."

This is the formation of a class as a historically determined, revolutionary agent.As the result of capitalist logic, this subject is formed by a "drastic dissolution of society" and humanity is emancipated. All particularity is dissolved into a universality ( representative of the community). Contrast this with a passage further on in the essay:

"On what is a partial, a merely political revolution based? On the fact that part of civil society emancipates itself and gains general domination;..For the revolution of a nation and the emancipation of a particular class of civil society to coincide, for one estate to be acknowledged as the state of the whole society, all the defects of society must conversely be concentrated in another class, a particular estate must be looked upon as the notorious crime of the whole of society, so that liberation from that sphere appears as general self-liberation."

Again, in the first case, all power is dissolved through a totalizing, universal effect. In the second case, no such unmediated universality can be asserted. Writing at a time when it was clear that mature capitalism was not headed in the direction of class solidification, as predicted by Marx, but instead towards increasing class complexity, Antonio Gramsci looked toward the nature of that "mediation" and theorized that any revolutionary subject would be formed through hegemonic, political construction rather than some automatic, necessary movement of history. This construction would take place in the realm of civil society and would be ideological in nature.

Lets see if we can apply this to something as concrete as our own American revolution. First we see that a "particular estate", the Crown, becomes the site where "the notorious crime of the whole of society" becomes identified. From this antagonism an identity of "American" is formed in opposition, an identity able to incorporate landed elites, tenant farmers, petite burgeois, and even some laborers. They are united in a universalizing, abstract concept of Freedom so that their individual, particular demands form a chain of equivalences. This is the moment of hegemonic articulation. It is an ideological challenge at the political level but it does not eliminate the unevenness of power in the challenging group ( the landed elites do not relinquish power) nor involve a total unity of "the people". The elites, through displacement and representation ( sign becomes signifier) are able to present their particular aims as the ones which are compatible with the actual functioning of society. The landed gentry present their own partial emancipation as the emancipation of society as a whole (and embed this in a Constitution). Hegemony.

Currently the "ruling class" (always partial and politically constructed) has hegemonic power through the spread of a dominant ideology using the "Bureaucratic State- New World Order Elites" as the site where "all the defects of society" reside. As the guardians of private property, free markets, free will (Freedom), particular sectors ( workers, small businessmen, liberals, farmers, etc..) are temporarily (and partially) universalized into a hegemonic historical bloc. Of course the bloc is unravelling as people try to understand how Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump and Mitt Romney are part of Sarah Palin's Real America (state of the whole society)(?).

To be continued...