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Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World
How did we come to live in a world dominated by big tech and finance?
Today power is in the hands of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. How do we understand this transformation in power? And what can we do about it?
We cannot change anything until we have a better understanding of how power works, who holds it, and why that matters. 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.
Hegemony Now explores how these forces came to control our world. The authors show how they have shaped the direction of politics and government as well as the neoliberal economy to benefit their own interests. However, this dominance is under threat. Following the 2008 financial crisis, a new order emerged in which the digital platform is the central new technology of both production and power. This offers new opportunities for counter hegemonic strategies to win back power. Hegemony Now outlines a dynamic socialist strategy for the twenty-first century.
Today power is in the hands of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. How do we understand this transformation in power? And what can we do about it?
We cannot change anything until we have a better understanding of how power works, who holds it, and why that matters. 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.
Hegemony Now explores how these forces came to control our world. The authors show how they have shaped the direction of politics and government as well as the neoliberal economy to benefit their own interests. However, this dominance is under threat. Following the 2008 financial crisis, a new order emerged in which the digital platform is the central new technology of both production and power. This offers new opportunities for counter hegemonic strategies to win back power. Hegemony Now outlines a dynamic socialist strategy for the twenty-first century.
320 pages, Hardcover
Published August 30, 2022
About the author
Alex Williams
4 books4 followersAlex Williams is a lecturer in the sociology department at City, University of London. He is the author of Hegemony Now (Verso 2017, with Jeremy Gilbert) and Inventing the Future (Verso 2015, with Nick Srnicek)
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
September 3, 2022
(2.5) I'm not sure what the point of this book is. Alliances with progressive sectors of capitalist industry to overcome the ecological crisis? Hegemony no!
November 6, 2022
When I heard Jeremy Gilbert talking about this book on the Politics Theory Other podcast it sounded really exciting. The book partly delivers on this promise, but i had problems to keep the focus due to the many thematic detours. It is a book that wants to much: Updating recent post-marxist and post-structuralist theory, recounting the history of the UK-left, the Labour party and some US campaigns, analysing real-existing neoliberalism and delivering an organisational strategy for the left. While many of these topics are of dear interest to me, teh book failed- as so many do - in developing clear-cut advices or strategies.
To recap: its complicated, you have to know your enemy well and every situation ought to be analysed carefully. 226 pages derivation, 25 pages result.
To recap: its complicated, you have to know your enemy well and every situation ought to be analysed carefully. 226 pages derivation, 25 pages result.
February 26, 2023
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. 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. The second section then theorises this using concepts including hegemony along with the theories of Deleuze and Guattari (which I'm aware of but not in any way familiar with) to build an understanding of how this power is constructed and has continued to be supported by political parties that win elections despite seemingly not being hugely popular in general. The final section then sets out a proposal for strategies that the left should pursue based largely on the principle of understanding what is pragmatically possible and creating the coalitions that will allow realistic goals to be achieved in practice.
The second section is probably the most interesting, but also the one that wanders around a little. 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." (p.205).
This sets the stage for the final section, whose emphasis on practical coalition building could easily be perceived as reformism, something the authors a plainly keen to disavow. I understand where they are coming from, but I do wonder whether in practice the end result would be limited reforms that are eventually dissipated by a Thermidorian revanche of capitalist interest, rather than creating a gathering wave of progressive change that Gilbert and Williams imagine.
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.
This is the final book I read in my reading on the theme of hegemony set out here https://marxadventure.wordpress.com/2...
The second section is probably the most interesting, but also the one that wanders around a little. 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." (p.205).
This sets the stage for the final section, whose emphasis on practical coalition building could easily be perceived as reformism, something the authors a plainly keen to disavow. I understand where they are coming from, but I do wonder whether in practice the end result would be limited reforms that are eventually dissipated by a Thermidorian revanche of capitalist interest, rather than creating a gathering wave of progressive change that Gilbert and Williams imagine.
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.
This is the final book I read in my reading on the theme of hegemony set out here https://marxadventure.wordpress.com/2...
July 5, 2026
A lot of people on the left won't have a lot of time for this book on the basis that i) one of the co-authors called out people for leaving the Labour Party after Corbynism was purged and ii) the centrality he grants to the soft-left or progressive sections of capital in the currents balance of forces. But I personally found this book very helpful in rendering a lot of strands in conversations I've been having with like-minded people for many years more coherent than I've seen them in a good wee while, so I hope to make the broad outlines available.
The object of this book is to account for the erosion of the postwar Keynesian consensus by neoliberalism. The former is defined as a general commitment, shared to varying extents by left and right governments in Europe and the United States from 1945 - 75, that full employment would be maintained, that wages, leisure time and social insurance would rise continuously. The upshot here was that the generation growing up after the second world war was the first in recorded history in which it could be said that a majority came to adulthood with no direct experience of scarcity. Despite the fact that this dispensation was in part sustained by a compact between the political / capitalist class and the leadership of the organised labour movement that political demands would never escalate to the point of threatening capitalist social relations or undermine support for the so-called Cold War against the Soviet bloc, the working-class was not in the driver’s seat. There was never clear widespread support for a post-capitalist society. The social formation overall tended to enrich capital and encourage governments to regard citizens as consumers. This is why our world is presently characterised by precarity, debt, greater levels of exploitation, reductions in overall taxation, legal restrictions on trade union organising, reductions in spending on core public services which are increasingly subject to market competition.
Neoliberalism is not characterised by the same levels of consensus which sustained the previous regime of accumulation. It and its consequences are universally reviled, but consent need not take the form of straightforward enthusiastic endorsement, rather it is often passive. A term we use to understand how social reality is made to conform to neoliberal assumptions to the extent that it seems inevitable or desirable, is ideology, a means of designating systematic sets of ideas promoted and deployed by elites to legitimise their power and encouraging behaviours in others likely to maintain or enhance this power. We think about this in order to figure out how decisive numbers of the population can be encouraged to join a political project to challenge it, but this is not just a matter of telling people they’re wrong. Marxism has been elaborated as a recognisable doctrine for over 150 years but has failed to make a dent in the capitalist social order. Instead material circumstances and organisational capacities must be changed simultaneously. This, we hope, can be accomplished by engaging in the many beliefs they do hold, identifying the ones we like and offer incentives for them to be developed and entrenched while diminishing the force of the ones we don’t like. One of the reasons why some people on the left don’t have a huge amount of time for one of the authors of this book is a position he outlined on the Politics Theory Other podcast to the effect that anti-imperialism is the highest stage of consciousness. An angry reply I sent to him at the time expressed the fact that in Ireland the situation is reversed. The fact that anti-imperialism is at the root of politics and culture is something the far-right have internalised very well and deployed to far more success than the left in bringing the large numbers of people to believe demonstrably untrue things about current levels of inward migration and its effects on wages, crime and housing.
Aspects of social scientific theories devised by Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, Althusser, Laclau, Mouffe and DeLanda are all deployed to derive Gilbert and Williams’ underlying theory of material interest. First: interests have an objective reality, regardless of the subjective conceptions of the individuals and groups to whom they pertain. This is asserted to distinguish between: i) interests are real and ii) relevant subjects are fully and consciously expressing them as demands. Not only is this field of interests infinite, it is infinitely inflected as they might or might not be actualised according to the unfolding specificities of the relevant place and time. This allows us to say historical subjects have complex, contradictory and competing sets of interests rather than buying into a vanguardist approach which we might be familiar with from Trotskyist sects or dissident Republican groups (which is not to say that within certain places or times they can’t do good work or don’t have a role in whatever envisioned revolutionary horizon), in which the objective interests of historical actors represent a singular essential truth derived from whatever analysis. Within this model the leadership claim to know the nature of those they sought to lead in ways that the led do not understand.
The member of the working class who buys an iPhone or throws a firework at an IPAS centre is pursuing a set of plausibly reliable interests, as someone who feels violence, debtorship, consumption as their only meaningful forms of agency. The communist intuition would be that this guy would have other interests over longer and more ambitious time-scale because the interests of all are best-served by forming relations of solidarity in opposition to capitalist ones, allowing the maximum possible potential of as many human beings as possible to be collectively achieved. The aim then is to move along the decision tree in a way that we get past the ideology-mesh which ensures only a restricted set of interests are thinkable (which is not to assert that it won’t be demoralising or dangerous to begin the work with one-to-one conversations with mobilised fascists).
The only practical guidance which can be taken as an absolute is to carefully analyse the conjuncture with a view to identifying class fractions most likely to be radicalised most easily and organise them into a coherent force before mobilising other groups. But ultimately, and I think this is an underrated point: sheer material circumstances will do most of the work of persuasion. The major preoccupation of most human beings for most of their adult lives will be ensuring their and their childrens’ survival. Under circumstances in which this is difficult but achievable its attainment will secure most of their attention and energy and they are unlikely to devote their attention to political organisation or agitation. When it becomes unachievable, poverty and desperation will drive them to agitate.
So what has the post-structuralist detour brought us if we've ended up at a classical Gramscian / Leninist strategy, and had the truth-claims we're supposed to have escaped back in via the different types of horizon, whether communist, social democratic or liberal. Perhaps a better diagnosis of how opaque interest has become in a way it wasn't in 1917? If this book was a century older it would be History and Class Consciousness when proletariat as messianic historical force was plausible because it was in front of your eyes. Lenin has to be still with us, but in a milieu with a different signal to noise ratio.
Post-script: historical sweep a bit broad
The object of this book is to account for the erosion of the postwar Keynesian consensus by neoliberalism. The former is defined as a general commitment, shared to varying extents by left and right governments in Europe and the United States from 1945 - 75, that full employment would be maintained, that wages, leisure time and social insurance would rise continuously. The upshot here was that the generation growing up after the second world war was the first in recorded history in which it could be said that a majority came to adulthood with no direct experience of scarcity. Despite the fact that this dispensation was in part sustained by a compact between the political / capitalist class and the leadership of the organised labour movement that political demands would never escalate to the point of threatening capitalist social relations or undermine support for the so-called Cold War against the Soviet bloc, the working-class was not in the driver’s seat. There was never clear widespread support for a post-capitalist society. The social formation overall tended to enrich capital and encourage governments to regard citizens as consumers. This is why our world is presently characterised by precarity, debt, greater levels of exploitation, reductions in overall taxation, legal restrictions on trade union organising, reductions in spending on core public services which are increasingly subject to market competition.
Neoliberalism is not characterised by the same levels of consensus which sustained the previous regime of accumulation. It and its consequences are universally reviled, but consent need not take the form of straightforward enthusiastic endorsement, rather it is often passive. A term we use to understand how social reality is made to conform to neoliberal assumptions to the extent that it seems inevitable or desirable, is ideology, a means of designating systematic sets of ideas promoted and deployed by elites to legitimise their power and encouraging behaviours in others likely to maintain or enhance this power. We think about this in order to figure out how decisive numbers of the population can be encouraged to join a political project to challenge it, but this is not just a matter of telling people they’re wrong. Marxism has been elaborated as a recognisable doctrine for over 150 years but has failed to make a dent in the capitalist social order. Instead material circumstances and organisational capacities must be changed simultaneously. This, we hope, can be accomplished by engaging in the many beliefs they do hold, identifying the ones we like and offer incentives for them to be developed and entrenched while diminishing the force of the ones we don’t like. One of the reasons why some people on the left don’t have a huge amount of time for one of the authors of this book is a position he outlined on the Politics Theory Other podcast to the effect that anti-imperialism is the highest stage of consciousness. An angry reply I sent to him at the time expressed the fact that in Ireland the situation is reversed. The fact that anti-imperialism is at the root of politics and culture is something the far-right have internalised very well and deployed to far more success than the left in bringing the large numbers of people to believe demonstrably untrue things about current levels of inward migration and its effects on wages, crime and housing.
Aspects of social scientific theories devised by Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, Althusser, Laclau, Mouffe and DeLanda are all deployed to derive Gilbert and Williams’ underlying theory of material interest. First: interests have an objective reality, regardless of the subjective conceptions of the individuals and groups to whom they pertain. This is asserted to distinguish between: i) interests are real and ii) relevant subjects are fully and consciously expressing them as demands. Not only is this field of interests infinite, it is infinitely inflected as they might or might not be actualised according to the unfolding specificities of the relevant place and time. This allows us to say historical subjects have complex, contradictory and competing sets of interests rather than buying into a vanguardist approach which we might be familiar with from Trotskyist sects or dissident Republican groups (which is not to say that within certain places or times they can’t do good work or don’t have a role in whatever envisioned revolutionary horizon), in which the objective interests of historical actors represent a singular essential truth derived from whatever analysis. Within this model the leadership claim to know the nature of those they sought to lead in ways that the led do not understand.
The member of the working class who buys an iPhone or throws a firework at an IPAS centre is pursuing a set of plausibly reliable interests, as someone who feels violence, debtorship, consumption as their only meaningful forms of agency. The communist intuition would be that this guy would have other interests over longer and more ambitious time-scale because the interests of all are best-served by forming relations of solidarity in opposition to capitalist ones, allowing the maximum possible potential of as many human beings as possible to be collectively achieved. The aim then is to move along the decision tree in a way that we get past the ideology-mesh which ensures only a restricted set of interests are thinkable (which is not to assert that it won’t be demoralising or dangerous to begin the work with one-to-one conversations with mobilised fascists).
The only practical guidance which can be taken as an absolute is to carefully analyse the conjuncture with a view to identifying class fractions most likely to be radicalised most easily and organise them into a coherent force before mobilising other groups. But ultimately, and I think this is an underrated point: sheer material circumstances will do most of the work of persuasion. The major preoccupation of most human beings for most of their adult lives will be ensuring their and their childrens’ survival. Under circumstances in which this is difficult but achievable its attainment will secure most of their attention and energy and they are unlikely to devote their attention to political organisation or agitation. When it becomes unachievable, poverty and desperation will drive them to agitate.
So what has the post-structuralist detour brought us if we've ended up at a classical Gramscian / Leninist strategy, and had the truth-claims we're supposed to have escaped back in via the different types of horizon, whether communist, social democratic or liberal. Perhaps a better diagnosis of how opaque interest has become in a way it wasn't in 1917? If this book was a century older it would be History and Class Consciousness when proletariat as messianic historical force was plausible because it was in front of your eyes. Lenin has to be still with us, but in a milieu with a different signal to noise ratio.
Post-script: historical sweep a bit broad
January 3, 2024
A brilliant book. Probably the thing I'd most want to share with people in the UK to draw them towards grasping how we might look to go beyond the state we are in. So many avenues of thought that could provoke discussions which could lead to positive change. It feels like the book I will most buy to share with other people, in the same way that I have shared the back catalogue of the podcast Culture, Power, Politics as a way to introduce British people to a re-understanding of how the history of the UK has led to where we are now. This book is another excellent avenue to approach that quandary.
March 24, 2024
i didnt get it 😭😭😭
someone explain what these bros were yappin about😭
someone explain what these bros were yappin about😭
February 17, 2023
A summative and unique assessment of where capitalism is today, and how the left reconstructs a political and social movement to challenge the power of Wall Street and Big Tech. I particularly enjoyed the integration of 'New Left' poststructuralist thinkers to understand the complexity of class and coalition building today, with Deleuze and Gattari's concept of 'multiplicity' being instructive for me. In the future, I want to see more scholarship from Gilbert, Williams and a wider contemporary Left dealing seriously and properly with these questions and countering hegemony and building counter hegemony, as difficult as that is.
April 4, 2023
Although I thoroughly enjoyed the authors analysis on the concept of hegemony and how neoliberal forces have managed to become hegemonic, I remain very sceptic of their proposal to form a coalition with progressive sectors of capital in order to overcome climate change. Do the authors not see that these sectors have no interest at all in a more egalitarian and democratic society? 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). The Left should not seek any cooperation with these sectors whatsoever.
January 13, 2023
Hegemony - the process by which discrete groups or networks come to guide the development of society as a whole, in the service sector of a set of interests
“Hegemony now!” sounds like what Frank Costanza would say in Seinfeld if he’d gone to Wall St and proposed a holiday called Hegemony instead of Festivus. Would have made a cool episode.
“Hegemony now!” sounds like what Frank Costanza would say in Seinfeld if he’d gone to Wall St and proposed a holiday called Hegemony instead of Festivus. Would have made a cool episode.
May 28, 2023
Really interesting read.
October 26, 2023
I'm always up for a good roast of Laclau-Mouffe. This has nothing else going on beside that though. Super disappointing.
May 21, 2026
Super freaking dense
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews