Revolution and Culture

It's all Gramsci's fault, really.  I mean, what the fuck does he really mean by hegemony anyway?  The dude's writing revolutionary philosophy in prison.  Everything he writes is being censored, so he writes this really convoluted stuff.  It's brilliant enough that people think they understand what he's saying, but nobody really gets it.

I'm a take a stab at it for the shits and giggles.

Hegemony is the winning side in the cultural battle - in the US, materialism is the hegemony.  It infects everything we do.  Even if there were a communist revolution today that took over the government, nobody would go for it, since the culture itself is materialistic and anti-communist.  So, in order to create the conditions that might make the revolution possible, we first need to reconstruct the culture.

The problem is that the reproduction of culture is intimately tied into social reproduction.  In fact, I would argue that advertising has impacted the cultural reproduction such that social reproduction reproduces the conditions of poverty, but the youth - that holy grail of the advertiser - is barraged and steadily influenced to adopt a more materialistic culture than their forebears.

So, popular culture is inherently anti-revolution.  What about ethnically self-conscious cultures?  For many years, revolutionary rhetoric has been couched with ethnic nationalisms.  But in reality, this is oxymoronic.  Ethnic nationalisms are centered on cultural patterns that are idealized and constructed of historical patterns of the relevant ethnicity.  Revolutionary rhetoric is used as a reaction to the dominant American capitalistic culture, but it is an oppositional, not constructive rhetoric.

Mao's famous quote about revolution and reaction notwithstanding, Maoist political groups, both in China and in the US (Black Panther Party, Maoist International Movement, Revolutionary Workers Party), are inherently conservative and reactionary movements.  They are oppositional, not constructive.  Not coincidently, they are also predicated on ethnic opposition to European/White American domination.  But the reaction leads to some pretty sick and twisted dictatorial shit.  This isn't revolution; this is tyranny.

If one is truly dedicated to revolution, to change, one has to work towards a worldview that is beyond, not in opposition to the world that is.  Opposition is really the other side of the same coin, to use a metaphor I took from a great documentary on the Weathermen.  The revolution is about getting into the third dimension and getting outside of the two-sided, two-dimensional politics of the coin.