Cultural hegemony
In Marxist philosophy, cultural hegemony is the domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class who manipulate the culture of that society—the beliefs, perceptions and mores—so that their imposed, ruling-class worldview becomes the accepted cultural norm. In philosophy and in sociology, the term cultural hegemony has denotations and connotations derived from the Ancient Greek word ἡγεμονία indicating leadership and rule. In politics, hegemony is the geopolitical method of indirect imperial dominance, with which the hegemon rules subordinate states, by the threat of intervention, an implied means of power, rather than by direct military force, that is, invasion and annexation; the etymologic and historical evolution of the Greek word ἡγεμονία, of its denotations, has proceeded thus: In Ancient Greece, ἡγεμονία denoted the politico–military dominance of a city-state upon other city-states, as in the Hellenic League, a federation of Greek city–states, established by King Philip II of Macedon, to facilitate his access to and use of the Greek militaries against the Persian empire.
In the 19th century, hegemony denoted the geopolitical and cultural predominance of one country upon other countries, as in the European colonialism imposed upon the Americas, Africa and Australia. In the 20th century, the political-science denotation of hegemony expanded to include cultural imperialism; that by manipulating the dominant ideology of the society, the ruling class can intellectually dominate the other social classes with an imposed worldview that ideologically justifies the social and economic status quo of the society as if it were a natural and normal and perpetual state of affairs that always has been so. In 1848, Karl Marx proposed that the economic recessions and practical contradictions of a capitalist economy would provoke the working class to proletarian revolution, depose capitalism, restructure social institutions per the rational models of socialism, thus begin the transition to a communist society. Therefore, the dialectical changes to the functioning of the economy of a society determine its social superstructures.
To that end, Antonio Gramsci proposed a strategic distinction, between a War of Position and a War of Manœuvre. The war of position is an intellectual and cultural struggle wherein the anti-capitalist revolutionary creates a proletarian culture whose native value system counters the cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie; the proletarian culture will increase class consciousness, teach revolutionary theory and historical analysis, thus propagate further revolutionary organisation among the social classes. On winning the war of position, socialist leaders would have the necessary political power and popular support to begin the political manœuvre warfare of revolutionary socialism; the initial, theoretical application of cultural domination was as a Marxist analysis of "economic class", which Antonio Gramsci developed to comprehend "social class". That such praxis of knowledge is indispensable for the intellectual and political liberation of the proletariat, so that workers and peasants, the people of town and country, can create their own working-class culture, which addresses their social and economic needs as social classes.
In a society, cultural hegemony is neither monolithic intellectual praxis, nor a unified system of values, but a complex of stratified social structures, wherein each social and economic class has a social purpose and an internal class-logic that allows its members to behave in a way, particular and different from the behaviours of the members of other social classes, whilst co-existing with them as constituents of the society. As a result of their different social purposes, the classes will be able to coalesce into a society with a greater social mission; when a man, a woman, or a child perceives the social structures of bourgeois cultural hegemony, personal common sense performs a dual, structural role whereby the individual person applies common sense to cope with daily life, which explains the small segment of the social order stratum that each experiences as the status quo of life in society. Publicly, the emergence of the perceptual limitations of personal common sense inhibit the individual person’s perception of the greater nature of the systematic socio-economic exploitation made possible by cultural hegemony.
Because of the discrepancy in perceiving the status quo—the socio-economic hierarchy of bourgeois culture—most men and women concern themselves with their immediate personal concerns, rather than with distant concerns, so do not think about and question the fundamental sources of their socio-economic oppression, its discontents, social and political. The effects of cultural hegemony are
Surplus value
Surplus value is a central concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy. "Surplus value" is a translation of the German word "Mehrwert", which means value added, is cognate to English "more worth". Surplus-value is the difference between the amount raised through a sale of a product and the amount it cost to the owner of that product to manufacture it: i.e. the amount raised through sale of the product minus the cost of the materials and labour power. Conventionally, value-added is equal to the sum of gross profit income. However, Marx uses the term Mehrwert to describe the yield, profit or return on production capital invested, i.e. the amount of the increase in the value of capital. Hence, Marx's use of Mehrwert has always been translated as "surplus value", distinguishing it from "value-added". According to Marx's theory, surplus value is equal to the new value created by workers in excess of their own labor-cost, appropriated by the capitalist as profit when products are sold. Marx thought that the gigantic increase in wealth and population from the 19th century onwards was due to the competitive striving to obtain maximum surplus-value from the employment of labor, resulting in an gigantic increase of productivity and capital resources.
To the extent that the economic surplus is convertible into money and expressed in money, the amassment of wealth is possible on a larger and larger scale. The problem of explaining the source of surplus value is expressed by Friedrich Engels as follows: "Whence comes this surplus-value? It cannot come either from the buyer buying the commodities under their value, or from the seller selling them above their value. For in both cases the gains and the losses of each individual cancel each other, as each individual is in turn buyer and seller. Nor can it come from cheating, for though cheating can enrich one person at the expense of another, it cannot increase the total sum possessed by both, therefore cannot augment the sum of the values in circulation; this problem must be solved, it must be solved in a purely economic way, excluding all cheating and the intervention of any force — the problem being: how is it possible to sell dearer than one has bought on the hypothesis that equal values are always exchanged for equal values?" Marx's solution was to distinguish between labor-time worked and labor power.
A worker, sufficiently productive can produce an output value greater than what it costs to hire him. Although his wage seems to be based on hours worked, in an economic sense this wage does not reflect the full value of what the worker produces, it is not labour which the worker sells, but his capacity to work. Imagine a worker, hired for an hour and paid $10 per hour. Once in the capitalist's employ, the capitalist can have him operate a boot-making machine with which the worker produces $10 worth of work every 15 minutes; every hour, the capitalist receives $40 worth of work and only pays the worker $10, capturing the remaining $30 as gross revenue. Once the capitalist has deducted fixed and variable operating costs of $20, he is left with $10. Thus, for an outlay of capital of $30, the capitalist obtains a surplus value of $10; the worker cannot capture this benefit directly because he has no claim to the means of production or to its products, his capacity to bargain over wages is restricted by laws and the supply/demand for wage labour.
Total surplus-value in an economy is equal to the sum of net distributed and undistributed profit, net interest, net rents, net tax on production and various net receipts associated with royalties, leasing, certain honorariums etc.. Of course, the way generic profit income is grossed and netted in social accounting may differ somewhat from the way an individual business does that. Marx's own discussion focuses on profit and rent ignoring taxation and royalty-type fees which were proportionally small components of the national income when he lived. Over the last 150 years, the role of the state in the economy increased in every country in the world. Around 1850, the average share of government spending in GDP in the advanced capitalist economies was around 5%. Surplus-value may be viewed in five ways: As a component of the new value product, which Marx himself defines as equal to the sum of labor costs in respect of capitalistically productive labor and surplus-value. In production, he argues, the workers produce a value equal to their wages plus an additional value, the surplus-value.
They transfer part of the value of fixed assets and materials to the new product, equal to economic depreciation and intermediate goods used up. Labor costs and surplus-value are the monetary valuations of what Marx calls the necessary product and the surplus product, or paid labour and unpaid labour. Surplus-value can be viewed as a flow of net income appropriated by the owners of capital in virtue of asset ownership, comprising
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon is an essay written by Karl Marx between December 1851 and March 1852, published in 1852 in Die Revolution, a German monthly magazine published in New York City and established by Joseph Weydemeyer. English editions, such as an 1869 Hamburg edition, were entitled The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte; the essay discusses the French coup of 1851 in which Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte assumed dictatorial powers. It shows Marx in his form as a social and political historian, treating actual historical events from the viewpoint of his materialist conception of history; the title refers to the Coup of 18 Brumaire in which Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in revolutionary France, in order to contrast it with the coup of 1851. In the preface to the second edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx stated that the purpose of this essay was to "demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero's part."This essay contains the most famous formulation of Marx's view of the role of the individual in history translated to something like: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.
The Eighteenth Brumaire catalogs the mass of the bourgeoisie, which Marx says impounded the republic like its property, as composed of: the large landowners, the aristocrats of finance and big industrialists, the high dignitaries of the army, the university, the church, the bar, the academy, the press. It shows more criticism of the proletariat than is typical of his other works, referring to the bureaucracy as a "giant parasitic body" and describing widespread perceptions of the proletariat as a "party of anarchy and communism," a party paradoxically established on precepts of an oppositional "party of order." Along with Marx's contemporary writings on English politics and The Civil War in France, the Eighteenth Brumaire is a principal source for understanding Marx's theory of the capitalist state. Marx's interpretation of Louis Bonaparte's rise and rule is of interest to scholars studying the nature and meaning of fascism. Many Marxist scholars regard the coup as a forerunner of the phenomenon of 20th-century fascism.
This book is the source of one of Marx's most quoted statements, that history repeats itself, "the first as tragedy as farce", referring to Napoleon I and to his nephew Louis Napoleon: Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle, and the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire. Marx's sentiment echoed an observation made by Friedrich Engels at the same time Marx began work on this book. In a letter to Marx of 3 December 1851, Engels wrote from Manchester:.... It seems as though old Hegel, in the guise of the World Spirit, were directing history from the grave and, with the greatest conscientiousness, causing everything to be re-enacted twice over, once as grand tragedy and the second time as rotten farce, Caussidière for Danton, L. Blanc for Robespierre, Barthélemy for Saint-Just, Flocon for Carnot, the moon-calf together with the first available dozen debt-encumbered lieutenants for the little corporal and his band of marshals.
Thus the 18th Brumaire would be upon us. Yet this motif appeared earlier, in Marx's 1837 unpublished novel Scorpion and Felix, this time with a comparison between the first Napoleon and King Louis Philippe: Every giant... presupposes a dwarf, every genius a hidebound philistine.... The first are too great for this world, so they are thrown out, but the latter strike root in it and remain.... Caesar the hero leaves behind him the play-acting Octavianus, Emperor Napoleon the bourgeois king Louis Philippe.... Marxist philosophy Margaret A. Rose, Reading the Young Marx and Engels: Poetry and the Censor. London: Croon Helm, 1978; the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Preface to the Second Edition The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Charles H. Kerr, Chicago, 1907; the Eighteenth Brumaire Of Louis Bonaparte, International Publishers, New York City, 1963
