Hegemony and Cultural Revolution

Antonio Gramsci’s concepts of “hegemony” and “subalternity” have enjoyed a high currency in contemporary cultural studies and postcolonialism. These concepts were formulated by Gramsci as practical strategies and tactics of socialist revolution between the two world wars. What the proponents of Gramscian cultural theory are facing today, however, is an era of globalization marked by the “end” or “failure” of socialist revolution. In the advanced Western world of capitalism, it is not revolution, but commodification that figures most prominently in social life. And commodification has rapidly expanded and intruded into the spheres of culture on a global scale. The theoretical currency of Gramscian theory thus betrays a fundamental contradiction or paradox: the revolutionary theory of the Italian communist leader is now appropriated by the academic Left of the West to address contemporary cultural issues that have little to do with social revolution.

Although Gramsci’s cultural theory is widely regarded as nonreductionist, anti-essentialist, and relevant to contemporary social life in both the industrial or “postmodern” West and the “postcolonial” or Third-World non-West, its revolutionary “core” can hardly be dismissed. ¹ It is true that Gramsci’s theory of revolution deals primarily with the realms of culture and consciousness and remains largely theoretical. After all, most of his major work was produced in an Italian fascist prison, and the projects he envisioned have hardly materialized. However, Gramsci was not alone in thinking of hegemony and cultural revolution. Chinese Marxists, Qu Qiubai and Mao Zedong especially, not only theorized but also practiced cultural revolution. Cultural revolution was conceived by Qu Qiubai and Mao Zedong first in the 1920s and 1930s, at roughly the same time that Gramsci reflected upon hegemony and culture. It is arguable that cultural revolution emerged as a central theme in the formation of a distinct “Chinese Marxism.” Parallels between Gramsci and Chinese Marxists are not merely superficial and accidental. Despite differences between Italy, an advanced capitalist country of the West, and China, an agrarian country of the Third World, the historical contexts in which Gramsci and Chinese Marxists conceived their theories have some profound similarities. First, the period of the 1920s and 1930s was characterized by the world-wide communist insurrections and revolutions, as well as by economic and political crises in the capitalist world that led to the rise of fascism. Gramsci’s Italy became a major fascist state, while China faced a threatened and eventually actual invasion by fascist Japan. Second, although Gramsci lived in the capitalist West, he was mainly concerned with the issues of the imbalances between the capitalist centers of the West and the noncapitalist margins of the non-West, as shown by his preoccupation with the “Southern question.” The Chinese Marxists, on the other hand, tried to transcend the West/East dichotomy in their internationalist aspirations for communist revolution. Above all, both Gramsci and Chinese Marxists were looking for revolutionary alternatives to capitalist modernity, and they adopted similar strategies of center/margin struggle in a twofold sense. First, they set the margins of the underdeveloped “South” (Gramsci) or the agrarian East (Chinese) against the capitalist center; second, they set the cultural arena of ideas and words, generally regarded as peripheral, against the central capitalist bastions of economic and political power.

A historical conjuncture with significant bearings on contemporary cultural studies is the decade of the 1960s. In China, the decade was marked by the “Great Cultural Revolution,” which coincided with the global social upheavals sweeping from France to the United States. It is no coincidence that just as Mao ultimately put his theory of cultural revolution into practice on a massive scale, some “Western Marxists,” Althusser in particular, rediscovered the values of both Gramsci’s and Mao’s “noneconomist” and antideterminist theories that prioritized superstructural and cultural change.

Contemporary cultural studies and postcolonialist theories are to a large extent heirs to the intellectual legacy of the 1960s, particularly the radical French intellectual movements. The “rediscovery” of Gramsci is intimately related to that legacy. But equally undeniable is the “Chinese connection” here, especially with respect to the issue of cultural revolution. Whatever critical usage “hegemony” and “subalternity” may have...