by
Jason Hirthler
Part
6 - Cracking the Shell
The
benign-sounding structural adjustments of the West have fairly
predictable results: cultural and economic chaos, rapid
impoverishment, resource extraction with its attendant ecological
ruin, transfer of ownership from local hands to foreign entities, and
death from a thousand causes.
We are
currently sanctioning around 30 nations in some fashion; dozens of
countries have fallen into ‘protracted arrears’ with western
creditors; and entire continents are witnessing huge outflows of
capital–on the order of $100B annually–to the global north as
debt service.
The
profiteering colonialists of the West make out like bandits. The
usual suspects include Washington and its loyal lapdogs, the IMF,
World Bank, EU, NATO, and other international institutions, and the
energy and defense multinationals whose shareholders and executive
class effectively run the show.
So why
aren’t Americans more aware of this complicated web of neocolonial
domination?
Italian
communist Antonio Gramsci, who pioneered the concept of cultural
hegemony, suggested that the ruling ideologies of the bourgeoisie
were so deeply embedded in popular consciousness that the working
classes often supported leaders and ideas that were antithetical to
their own interests.
Today,
that cultural hegemony is neoliberalism. Few can slip its grasp long
enough to see the world from an uncolored vantage point. You’ll
very rarely encounter arguments like this leafing through the Times
or related broadsheets. They don’t fit the ruling dogma, the
Weltanschauung (worldview) that keeps the public mind in its sleepy
repose.
But
French-Algerian philosopher Louis Althusser, following Gramsci,
believed that, unlike the militarized state, the ideologies of the
ruling class were penetrable. He felt that the comparatively fluid
zones of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) were contexts of class
struggle. Within them, groups might attain a kind of ‘relative
autonomy’, by which they could step outside of the monolithic
cultural ideology. The scales would fall. Then, equipped with new
knowledge, people might stage an inception of their own, cracking
open the cultural hegemony and reshaping its mythos in a more humane
direction.
This
seems like an imperative for modern American culture, buried as it is
beneath the hegemonic heft of the neoliberal credo. These articles of
false faith, this ideology of deceit, ought to be replaced with new
declarations of independence, of the mind if not the mainstream.
***
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