Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (and How We Win It Back) - Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams
Published in 2022 by Verso, London, UK, and Brooklyn, NY
336 pages
ISBN: 9781786633149
Over the past decades, we have witnessed a tremendous shift in political power. Following the wave of neoliberal reforms in the Reagan and Thatcher administrations and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, material and ideological power was consolidated toward neoliberal capitalism. This led to the rise of Third Way politics (defined most prominently through the Clinton and Blair administrations in the US and UK, respectively), which attempted to fuse socially liberal positions with fiscal conservatism. This blend of faux-progressivism combined with the laissez-faire free-market economics of right-wing libertarianism dovetailed perfectly with the growing Silicon Valley ideology.
Since the 90s, the power of big tech and finance has consolidated power into the hands of the few in our current age of financialized, platform capitalism. The solidification of the post-war neoliberal consensus--to which both liberals and conservatives consent and perpetuate--sailed relatively smoothly until it faced the rough and choppy waters of the 2008 financial crisis. At this point, the professional-managerial class struggled to maintain its hegemonic grip on the ideological battleground.
This fracture allowed for populist parties to rise within the US and the UK, culminating in the elections of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson to the lead executive positions and the passage of Brexit. This turn to right-wing populism was not without challenges, however, and the campaigns of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in the US did much to revitalize a palpable leftist discourse after decades of dormancy. Yet, these campaigns ultimately did not accomplish their goal of securing executive power.
In the wake of the revitalized interest in anti-capitalist organizing over the past several years, the Left has faced a string of minor successes and significant defeats. Today, despite the insistence by conservatives that the education system and media are overrun by the “woke Left,” the actually-existing Left has very little power within British and American politics. Fragmented by ideological and material differences and overwhelming opposition by both liberals and conservatives, the Left has struggled to find a cogent political strategy to challenge the dominant structures of power.
Instead, power in our contemporary landscape lies in the hands of Silicon Valley technocrats and Wall Street executives. How did this consolidation happen, and what can be done to challenge their grip on the levers of power? In their 2022 book, Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (and How We Win It Back), Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams give an overview of how power is secured and why it matters in our contemporary context. Utilizing a neo-Gramscian conception of hegemony, Gilbert and Williams show us how media-driven passive consent, the intersection of political interests, and the platform power of technological landscapes have shaped our world, as well as how these tools can be used to challenge the dominant structures of power today.
Overview:
Divided into three parts, Hegemony Now traces how the development of neoliberalism dovetailed into the rise of Silicon Valley and the financialization of capitalism that defines and controls our current political and social order. The authors show how Big Tech and Wall Street were able to effectively utilize the structures of the neoliberal order to maintain hegemony and shape policies to their benefit. Following the 2008 financial crisis, this neoliberal framework has become increasingly unstable, thus opening the possibility for alternative hegemonic strategies to come together and fight for power.
In Part One, Gilbert and Williams argue that in the wake of the professional class’s fracturing in 2008, the interests of Big Tech and Wall St. were most effectively served in the ensuing power vacuum. The authors trace the development of neoliberalism from the post-Fordist era of the 1970s and 80s to the present day. According to the authors, the professional class was able to maintain the passive consent of the population while eroding the foundations of popular democracy by offering increased access to a wide array of consumer goods for low prices. Yet, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, this facade began to crack and fracture, and the professional class struggled to maintain its hegemony.
Amid this crisis, the authors argue, two major social blocs were able to seize power: Big Tech and Wall Street. The tech giants in Silicon Valley seized the neoliberal policies of offshoring labor to the Global South to lower labor costs and utilized this globalization of industry to cheaply produce and distribute their goods and digital services across the globe. Meanwhile, the financial sector found itself to be “too big to fail,” relying on the federal government to bail it out of years of predatory and risky behavior. This allowed the industry to continue to have an outsized influence in global politics and to further shape policies that fit their particular interests.
After giving the reader the appropriate historical context for their argument in the first section, the authors then dive deeper into the theory behind their thesis in Part Two. Taking their theoretical cues from Gramsci, the authors utilize the concept of hegemony to reconstruct the history of how social blocs have shifted from the post-war era to the present day. They utilize the works of Deleuze and Guatarri to theorize the roles of persuasion and passivity in establishing hegemony, which often resides in a gray area between consent and coercion. They theorize the role of coercion and consent to the neoliberal project, writing, “Consent to the entire neoliberal project has been secured largely by persuading populations to accept private ‘empowerment’ as consumers as a substitute for the partial reversal of social democracy, and for the weakening of representative democracy itself, after its high point of effectiveness in the post-war period” (109).
Gilbert and Williams then establish their position that politics is primarily driven by the negotiation of interests (137). Pushing back against Laclau and Mouffe’s influential work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Gilbert and Williams critique their focus on the articulation of political demands instead of interests. They utilize the dyad of the virtual and the actual as explored in the works of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Manuel DeLanda to define these two concepts (143). As such, they define political demands as “interests that have been actualized on the plane of active political discourse” (143), while political interests are “best understood as potentialities: as potential future states of being that could or could not become actual, depending on the precise outcomes of historical and political processes” (144). As such, the authors insist that political and historical subjects contain a multiplicity of interests and are careful to note that these sets of interests are often complex and contradictory. Thus, political struggle is centered around the contestation and consolidation of interests, which then become solidified into tangible political demands.
The authors then take this framework to examine the role of platform power in securing hegemony. Platform power concerns how power utilizes infrastructure to cover itself to make it invisible (ie. education, media platforms, etc). Accordingly, the authors investigate how platform power is utilized to influence and secure the goals that are related to a group’s political interests (72). Gilbert and Williams argue that Big Tech and Wall Street have secured the infrastructure necessary to influence politics in their favor, often shaping the landscape of our day-to-day interactions (via social media and digital banks) and the way we think about ourselves and each other. This possession of platform power helps to explain why certain sectors are supported by political parties, even if they are not popular.
These interests, however, are never stable. While we often think of politics as a Chess match with stable rules and strategies, Gilbert and Williams argue that politics is more akin to the ancient Chinese game of Go, “where what is figure and what is ground is always ambiguous and under contention” (180). In Part Three, Gilbert and Williams apply their framework to the current political landscape, noting the fragmented nature of the Left in Britain and the United States. The authors compare and contrast the political campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, the latter of whom they castigate for his approach of primarily appealing to morality. By highlighting Sander’s appeal to pragmatism, they suggest various methods that the Left can utilize to form coalitions around shared interests that align toward a common political horizon.
Commendations:
First of all, Hegemony Now is an engaging and accessible account of the neo-liberalization of American and British society from the Reagan/Thatcher era to the present. Gilbert and Williams clearly and routinely articulate the structure of their argument throughout each chapter, and also provide a glossary of terms at the back of the book. For those who have no background in political theory, this glossary serves as a fantastic introduction to various concepts such as hegemony, social blocs, platforms, and political horizons.
When reading any argument, it is always important to pay attention to sentences that begin with “*____* is…” These sentences -- in which the author clearly defines their terms -- serve as signposts to where the author is coming from, as well as where they are going with their argument. This book is replete with these kinds of sentences, which give the uninitiated reader ample opportunity to follow the authors step-by-step in their argument. As such, this work is an incredibly useful introduction to the concepts of hegemony and Gramscian theory, updating and applying them to our current world of financialized global capitalism where power lies in the hands of the very few.
Gilbert and Williams also brilliantly point out how social blocs are inherently unstable and malleable, constantly changing according to material conditions. The focus on platform power as an underlying structure of modern neoliberal capitalism allows us to build a cogent strategy to overcome the hegemonic grip that these sectors possess on economic and social policies. The authors heavily advocate for coalition building across social blocs to achieve tangible reforms in favor of progressive policies. While its real-world implications and effectiveness can certainly be contested, this strategy of building counter-hegemony is something that I find particularly fascinating and worthy of further explication.
Critique:
On the other hand, Gilbert and Williams’s analysis has a few key weaknesses. The section on theory, while often well-defined and more accessible than most theoretical works, can still be a bit dense for the average reader. While the book doesn’t dive too deeply into theory, the reader would benefit from possessing at least a vague, passing familiarity with Gramsci, Althusser, and Laclau and Mouffe before reading this work. However, as the authors only give a surface-level introduction to these theories, a deeper understanding of these authors' work is by no means a prerequisite to comprehending the larger arguments that Gilbert and Williams make throughout this volume.
A much more salient and pressing issue with this work is the authors’ misty definition of class and the role it plays in struggling against the forces of capitalism. Throughout the book, Gilbert and Williams frequently utilize the term “class” to define the professional elite of bureaucrats. I’m not convinced that this demographic should be categorized as a class that can work alongside the proletariat. These “progressive” capitalists seem to fit the category of petit bourgeois. By framing them as a separate class, the authors obfuscate the nature of the real class struggle.
It can be argued that this is done intentionally, as Gilbert and Williams’s solution is to build coalitions with the more progressive sectors of the pro-capitalist blocs to secure incremental reforms. If the history of class struggle has taught us anything, it would tell us that this is a losing strategy. I’m all about coalition building, but it seems like the overall interests of these groups are contradictory, even if there are small overlaps in which interests overlap. Overall, contra Gilbert and Williams, I am not convinced that these small concessions are enough to build a counter-hegemonic force that can adequately overcome the threats that we now face, namely the rise of fascism throughout the Western world and the looming ecological crisis. Rather, despite the authors’ protestations, these proposals seem to be little more than limited reforms that can and will be rolled back by the interests of capitalists at the first chance they get. While Gilbert and Williams’s volume shows the power and complexity of coalition-building, it does not necessarily inspire the hope for the radical change that is needed if we are to move beyond our current socio-political status quo.
Conclusion:
Overall, Hegemony Now is an incredibly useful introduction to how Silicon Valley and Wall Street have used neoliberal policies to secure hegemony, as well as how we can combat the grip they hold over our political and social order. While certainly not a novel analysis, the authors successfully and accessibly apply Gramsci’s thought to the current political crises in the United States and the United Kingdom, giving budding Leftists a broad strategy for taking power back from the hegemonic grip of Wall Street and Big Tech. I deeply appreciate their commitment to coalition-building and securing power through the intersection of the interests of shifting social blocs, though I remain concerned that they overestimate the potential of radical, meaningful change through such measures. Regardless, their work serves as a timely reminder of the immense opposition that the contemporary Left faces in building solidarity and power in the face of globalized techno-capitalism, as well as the opportunities that lie at the intersection of our common material interests.