Framing the aff as “counterhegemonic” still ontologically relies on a dominant hegemonic order

Contemporary readings of hegemony and counterhegemony tend to rely on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, in which dominant groups maintain their dominance less by overt repression than by subtle forms of control that manufacture the consent of dominated groups. For Gramsci, hegemony was an attempt to understand the ways in which the bourgeoisie was able to present itself (and its interests) as universal, “capable of absorbing the entire society, assimilating it to its own cultural and economic level.”68 Gramsci showed how the State was not simply a ‘night watchman’, whose functions are limited to safeguarding public order and respect for the laws; the State also has a hegemonic function, in its “production of the will to conform.”69 Gramsci is not always consistent on the precise meaning of hegemony;70 however, I am more interested in the way hegemony has been taken up and deployed in analyses of social movements. There are significant differences in the ways in which hegemony has been taken up as a form of analysis, but there are also shared tendencies.71 As Stuart Hall suggests, hegemony tends to be intertwined with the question of “what strategies and forms of political action/organization could unite concretely different kinds of struggle?”72 In this sense, counterhegemony opens the possibility of a more systematic transformation of hegemonic structures. The apparent need for counterhegemony follows from the ontological assumptions of the hegemonic analytic. Hegemonic practices remain in place until they are displaced by new practices, which become hegemonic. Movements must become unified into a counterhegemonic bloc so that they can challenge and displace currently dominant practices and institutions.

In its contemporary formulations, ontology of hegemony and counterhegemony is often combined with much older and common-sensical notions of scale, suggesting that local resistance is too small and too weak to challenge massive hegemonic regimes such as transnational capital.73 From this perspective, social movements are made intelligible through their (potential) effects on these hegemonic structures. This has led some neoGramscians to insist that only a unified bloc would be capable of challenging the immense powers of transnational capital.74 This undergirds Stephen Gill’s claim that Foucault’s account of “localized, capillary forms of power/knowledge” lacks a connection to “macro-structures” of power.75 What’s needed is a coalition between currently dispersed movements, such as workers and environmentalists. For others, this requires articulating common interests across progressive movements, rather than emphasizing differences.76