9Hegemony, Counter-hegemony, Anti-hegemony
1William K. Carroll University of Victoria
Résumé
Cet article adopte une position de réalisme critique dans l’exploration des formes et des
conditions changeantes de l’hégémonie et de la contre-hégémonie des époques « post-
m o d e r n e s », « n é o - l i b é r a l e s » et « m o n d i a l i s t e s ». Les projets et les pratiques
hégémoniques à l’heure actuelle rendent communément acceptées des politiques axées sur
le marché et une culture fragmentée, leur infusant une organisation de consentement qui
fonctionne à la fois au niveau local et au niveau mondial. Mais ceci ne constitue qu’une
mince hégémonie, une base fragile, écologiquement insoutenable, de cohésion sociale et
de reproduction matérielle. Si le fondement de l’hégémonie contemporaine, même
périlleux, est profond, la contre-hégémonie se doit d’explorer ce fondement. Cette critique
semble révéler l’articulation de divers courants subalternes et démocratiques-progressifs
en un bloc contre-hégémonique qui articule les dissensions dans le temps et dans l’espace.
La contre-hégémonie doit tenir debout, affronter les enjeux de l’État ainsi que ceux qui
préoccupent les sociétés civiles nationales et transnationales. Sa durabilité au-delà des
conjonctures exige non seulement une vision éthique commune, mais un contexte
politique approprié à la tâche. La discussion porte sur une gamme d’évolutions récentes
pertinentes à ces enjeux. La conclusion de l’article est une critique des politiques de
singularités dispersées anti-hégémoniques, dont la perspicacité doit être intégrée à une
forme stratégiquement cohérente, surtout quant à la valeur de l’action directe et de la
préfiguration.
Abstract
This article takes a critical realist stance in exploring the changing conditions for and
forms of hegemony and counter-hegemony in “postmodern”, “neoliberal”, “globalized”
times. Current hegemonic practices and projects make common sense of a market-driven
politics and a fragmented culture, infusing into them an organization of consent that
operates both locally and globally. Yet this amounts only to a thin hegemony, a weak and
ecologically unsustainable basis for social cohesion and material reproduction. If
contemporary hegemony is deeply yet perilously grounded then counter-hegemony needs
to address those grounds. This stricture points to the articulation of various subaltern and
progressive-democratic currents into a counter-hegemonic bloc that organizes dissent
across space and time. Counter-hegemony needs to walk on both legs, taking up state-
centred issues as well as issues resident in national and transnational civil societies. Its
durability across conjunctures requires not only a shared ethical vision but a political form
appropriate to its tasks. A range of recent developments relevant to these issues is
discussed. The article concludes with a critique of the anti-hegemonic politics of dispersed
singularities, whose insights, particularly on the value of direct action and prefiguration,
need to be integrated into a strategically coherent form.
1
Keynote Address to the Annual Meeting of the Society for Socialist Studies, York University,
Toronto. June 2006. I thank Paul Kellogg and Bob Ratner for comments on an earlier draft.

Hegemony, Counter-hegemony, Anti-hegemony10
Introduction
Today, the question of hegemony — of organizing consent to the ruling relations of
capitalism — looms larger than perhaps at any time since the 1930s, yet the challenges of
constructing a political alternative to the rule of capital seem more daunting than ever.
Amid the creeping fascism of the American imperial state, the deepening inequalities that
consign billions to lives of permanent privation, and the deteriorating ecological
conditions for the accoutrements of modern life, it would be easy to fall into a profound
pessimism of both intellect and will. And yet these times seem full of possibilities for
living differently – more democratically, more ecologically. If in this interregnum, there
is a plethora of morbid symptoms, there is also the prospect of new life – new ways of life.
Here, I want to explore some of the bases and dynamics of hegemony and counter-
hegemony in the current era. Probably the most influential contemporary version of
‘hegemony theory’ in the past couple of decades has been that of Laclau and Mouffe
(1985), whose deconstruction of the orthodox Marxist meta-narrative has provided
somewhat of an exit route from historical materialism. Yet the poststructuralist insight that
discourse constitutes its subjects and objects comes at some cost. In absorbing what
critical realists call the ‘intransitive’ structures of the world – the ones that exist regardless
of how they might be characterized in discourse – into their transitive aspects,
poststructuralism relativises knowledge as the product of so many incommensurable
language games (Joseph, 2002: 219). Such ‘discourse reductionism’(Assies, 1990: 57) has
two disabling effects on critical theory and practice. It disables the critique of unjust and
ecologically perilous conditions such as the capitalist appropriation of surplus value or the
advent of rapid climate change, but it also rules out critique of the ideological
mystification of such intransitive conditions. The descent into discourse, à la Laclau and
Mouffe, has had a specific impact on the theorization of hegemony. As the process of
articulation becomes more important than that which is articulated, hegemony and
counter-hegemony appear as purely discursive matters, abstracted from political-economic
context.
2
Interestingly, just as Laclau and Mouffe were taking leave of Marxism, a new generation
was beginning to place hegemony at the centre of a revitalized historical materialism,
sensitive to the socio-historical relations that post-structuralism underplays yet committed
to non-reductive forms of explanation. Elsewhere (Carroll, 1990) I have discussed some
of the key works that in the 1980s enabled political economists to embrace Gramsci
without disowning Marx.
3
Here, I want to take up more recent contributions, and widen
2
This is not to discount poststructuralism as a method of analytically subverting discourses and texts,
including hegemonic ones. With Nancy Fraser (1995), I would submit that poststructuralism is best
understood as a critical method, attuned to the constitution of meaning in textuality (Carroll, 2004).
As theory, poststructuralism is hobbled by its inherent incapacity to make truth claims about a world
that is known discursively but constituted both discursively and extra-discursively.
3
Among the key contributors to this literature are Robert Cox (1987), Stephen Gill (1995), Bob Jessop
(1983) and Kees van der Pijl (1984; 1998).