Marxist as Seen Through Gramsci
Introduction
Among Marxist thinkers, Gramsci is seen as one of the most important in the development of Western Marxism. Hegemony is a concept that was developed by Gramsci to expound the reason why the inevitable socialist revolution predicted by orthodox Marxism had not taken place by the early 20th century. Lenin also used the concept to represent the political leadership of the working individuals in a democratic revolution. Gramsci suggested that capitalism-maintained control not only through violence, economic and political coercion but also through hegemonic culture. A consensus culture was developed where working-class individuals identified their good, thus maintained a status quo rather than revolting.
Marxist as Seen Through Gramsci
Gramsci suggested cultural hegemony and capitalism that would control political and economic coercion. According to the philosophy of Marxist cultural domination is the ruling class dominate the diverse society and manipulate the culture. This means that the view of the ruling class becomes the accepted norm. This valid ideology justified that political, economic, and social status are beneficial and inevitable for every social class rather than social constructs, which are artificial and only benefit the ruling class. That is the suggestion that Gramsci gave on how the ruling class maintains and establishes control.
This cultural hegemony states how the ruling class maintains power using cultural institutions. Hegemonic power is used to manage consent to capitalist order rather than using force to maintain order. In the 20th century, the political-science denotation of hegemony (dominance) expanded to include; the cultural domination, by a ruling class, of a socially stratified society. This by manipulating the dominant ideology (cultural values and mores) of the society, the ruling class can intellectually dominate the other social classes with an imposed worldview (Weltanschauung) that ideologically justifies the social, political, and economic status quo of the society as if it was a natural and healthy, inevitable and perpetual state of affairs that always has been so.
Marxist-Leninists as Seen Through Mao and Lenin
Lenin used hegemony to indicate the political leadership of the working class in a democratic revolution. Leninism is the political theory for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The work of Lenin was to provide working classes with political awareness. This revolutionary leadership is founded on community manifesto identifying the working class as the communist party of every country.
Mao presented his commitment to communism through three basic principles which are: practical efficiency, dialectics, and revolutionary populism. Mao believed that mobilized masses were always the strongest, and all exploiters were less, thus weak. Through these three principles, China has experienced immense change, and they appear as underlying motives and values animating Chinese politics (Boose 2019).