THE hegemony is getting me down.
If you’re on the right side of theirstory, you know which hegemony I’m talking about.
It makes me want to go all out for…nothing. Because it seems that anything I go ‘all out’ for has to be either totally for profit –which I couldn’t bring myself to do– or totally anti-capitalist, totally anti-hegemony. Anything in-between only supports the hegemony in various insidious ways. This is what we all have to live with. (Better, perhaps, to go all out for profit, and then make some kind of big break from the hegemony to spend the winnings on counter-hegemonic initiatives, further down the line.)
This is what I have been led to believe. Yet I know that I cannot live my whole life in a totally anti-capitalist way (even if I were to ‘drop out’ entirely). No-one can.
Apparently, all (or most?) activists have to separate their lives between acceptance of the hegemony (including, ‘making a living’ or ‘earning a wage’) and educating / acting against the hegemony. Apparently, we have to compartmentalise counter-hegemony into a corner, small or large, of our lives. Otherwise, the argument goes, we convince ourselves that the half-measures or ‘relatively good’ or charitable initiatives (if we’re lucky) or wage labour we get involved with or are subject to, for much of our time, could somehow, somewhere be revolutionary i.e. deeply necessary.
This is indeed, what a respected teacher of mine seemed to say recently. But isn’t this nonsense? Doesn’t dividing off our counter-hegemonic work from the rest of our lives amount to accepting the divide-and-conquer, atomising, compartmentalising tactics and effects of the capitalist hegemony? And is true compartmentalisation of counter-hegemony even possible, when the hegemony is supposed to be so all-pervasive, even in our most intimate of thoughts?
Wouldn’t it be better to understand ourselves as holistic beings, always carrying both hegemony and seeds of counter-hegemony within us, wherever we are? (Even those, I might add, who claim to be out-and-out capitalists). Isn’t that closer to the truth? And if us counter-hegemonists –perhaps a nicer and fresher term than the crude-sounding ‘anti-capitalist’–are walking, talking dialectical conversations between hegemony and counter-hegemony, then doesn’t there open up the possibility, in every moment, for the nuanced growth or construction of STRATEGY for defeating hegemony, not just in counter-hegemonic spaces, but in ALL spaces, and at all times?
The hegemony is everywhere, even in our most private thoughts, but so is counter-hegemony. We simply cannot afford to relegate counter-hegemony to the ‘radical’ corners of our lives. We can instead go all out for strategising to manifest this dialectic in increasingly liberatory ways, whatever moment or space we are in.
Centre of the Web 