REIFICATION & HEGEMONY

The problem started with Lukacs who talked about reification, a concept drawn not only from Marx, but also from Weber.When the proletariat revolution failed to break out in Western Europe, Lukacs and Gramsci-the founders of Western Marxism-argued that the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat had been fragmentised.Terms such as 'reification' and 'hegemony' were introduced to explain the effects of twentieth-century capitalism on the class-consciousness of the proletariat.To bring about a proletariat revolution, so they argued, a Leninist type of revolutionary party must be formed to guide the proletarian back to true revolutionary class consciousness.But is there really latent revolutionary consciousness that has to be manipulated and neutralised because of the threat it poses to the political status quo?Even if such revolutionary consciousness did exists, as Eduard Bernstein argued, the improved conditions of capitalism of the early twentieth century had made revolutionary struggle an outmoded form of social change. Gramsci realised the problem of an elitist party and tried to come up with a more democratic version of a Communist party, emphasising on the role of factory councils, the importance of working class culture, and the role of organic intellectuals.
The model of an elite-led revolution, I would argue, is no longer suitable or even desirable in the new millennium.With the arrival of IT, there are new centres of resistance to hegemony or strategies of rule from the above-be it in the form of cultural imperialism or other modes of domination.This is where the methodological tools of social history pioneered by EP Thompson and new theories of power relationships popularised by Foucault become useful.