The Need to Outsource Information Operations: Gramsci and the Ideological Defeat of Islamic Terrorism
by William M. Darley
Journal Article | September 19, 2016 - 10:05am
The Need to Outsource Information Operations: Gramsci and the Ideological Defeat of Islamic Terrorism
William M. Darley
The Communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) developed the theory of cultural hegemony to further the establishment of a working-class worldview. Courtesy Wikimedia
Subject to a twenty-year jail sentence, and dying of exposure and abuse in an Italian prison in the late 1920s, the young communist Antonio Gramsci ruminated on why so many of the common people of Italy had been so resistant to what he regarded as the liberating message of Marxism, the crime of spreading of which was the reason he had been imprisoned. While meditating upon this conundrum, he hit upon an observation that would profoundly change the evolution of modern political thought as well as human sociology. He observed that, in general, human nature seems to impel members of any given society to stabilize the social order in which they live by collectively internalizing as reality certain abstract conceptions concerning what each individual considers the right and proper role each citizen should properly play in society. He further observed that these abstract assumptions concerning citizen roles underpinning society were mainly inculcated by the combined influence of established cultural institutions that reinforced each other in a manner that colluded to keep the structure of the social order fixed.
This process of converting abstractions into a perception that such were reality was a process Marxist theorists had already defined as reification (e.g., abstractions perceived as reality).1
However, by such reification, Gramsci observed, the roles and classes that existed in society came to be accepted by the members of the general populace as the natural and proper social order, even when such acceptance placed many of citizens in the position of being exploited and oppressed.2 And, of course, the prime benefactors of this process of reification and the social stratification that it produced were those economic classes at the top of the class structure. He described this phenomenon of reification that ensconced some at the top and the majority at the bottom of the socio-economic order as ideological “hegemony”.3 This concept is sometimes termed “cultural hegemony” by Marxist scholars.4
http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/the-need-to-outsource-information-operations-gramsci-and-the-ideological-defeat-of-islamic-
