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

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Another is debt, which works to reduce the horizon of possibilities that individual subjects can imagine as realisable. Gilbert and Williams argue that while many have seen this consent as having to be active (and critiqued Gramsci for this), they do not. A landmark piece of work combining theoretical rigour and innovation with a magisterial mapping of the landscape of contemporary power. They claim that consent to the neoliberal project was secured by persuading populations to accept private empowerment as consumers as a substitute for the weakening of social democracy. The first section builds a picture of the current state of things in the early twenty first century, and in particular how large finance and technology concerns built a world that suited their interests.

We cannot change anything until we have a better understanding of how power works, who holds it, and why that matters. In part two, the authors analyse how this state of hegemony of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ has been enabled and reproduced itself. While Gilbert and Williams discuss the creation of new coalitions and alliances in response to the slow death of neoliberalism, there are some surprising omissions.That said, this is an interesting analysis of both theory and strategy that makes good use of theory to build a realistic understanding of what the strategies and priorities of the modern left should be. At each stage of their argumentation, they seek to expand and build complexity into Gramsci’s key terms. Also, in many cases corporations that offer renewable energy are the same corporations that profit from fossil fuels (think for example of Shell and Vattenfall).

Every year we publish a selection of books and pamphlets that address the key issues facing activists and trade unionists. This is the starting point of Hegemony Now, which aims to update Gramsci’s analysis of power for the contemporary moment. The book partly delivers on this promise, but i had problems to keep the focus due to the many thematic detours. 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.Hegemony Now, addresses the unquestionable predominance of the big tech and financial sectors in relation to this state of crisis and the loss of moral authority of neoliberalism. In particular, they can help deconstruct shifts in the status quo and think through periods where existing power structures are unstable or falling apart. Gilbert and Williams’ main contentions are that in the 21st-century, the interests of technology firms and finance capital have converged and become mutually reinforcing. Gilbert and Williams] have done a brilliant job stripping away much of the complexity that makes post and neo-Marxist language so difficult to engage with for ordinary mortals .

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.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. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. The most interesting part comes with the concept of platforms as the fundamental neoliberal structure of modern society and economy, meaning that any progressive successor will have to "contend the succession to neoliberalism within its own hollowed out body, a hegemonic battle among its gleaming bones and rotting organs.