Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (And How We Win it Back)

Description

Whose world are we living in? The clear answer is the tech entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley and the sections of finance capital most closely allied to them. In Hegemony Now, Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams ask: How did this historic bloc of Wall Street and Silicon Valley establish their control over contemporary global culture? Hegemony Now considers the political means by which finance capital - greatly assisted by emergent digital technologies - re-established pre-eminence within the capitalist class and across wider society in the 1980s and 1990s. Digital technology corporations such as Apple, Facebook and Google have established virtual monopolies both on the distribution of information and on key infrastructures of everyday life, communication, and entertainment. Digital platforms, Hegemony Now makes clear, are a key mechanism of institutionalised power, and the contemporary state can increasingly be understood as itself a form of platform. What can be done, and by whom? What alliances and coalitions might have the potential to challenge the hegemony of the techno-financial elite? What programme might they coalesce around? And what technical and institutional infrastructures would we need to build in order to realise their political potential? The authors present a range of possible outcomes, from the utopic to the dystopian. Hegemony Now is at once a theory of power and hegemony in the twenty-first century and a road-map for the fights ahead.

Jeremy Gilbert is Professor Cultural & Political Theory at the University of East London. He is the author of Common Ground, Anticapitalism and Culture and Twenty-First Century Socialism. He is one of the host's of Novara's #ACFM podcast. Alex Williams is a Political Theorist currently based at City University. He is the co-author, with Nick Srnicek of Inventing the Future, as well as numerous articles on the future of left politics and contemporary formations of digital power.

A landmark piece of work combining theoretical rigour and innovation with a magisterial mapping of the landscape of contemporary power. Gilbert and Williams have produced an essential guide to socialist strategy today. -- Nick Srnicek Gilbert and Williams offer practical and hopeful strategies for changing the "directions of travel" of the contemporary conjuncture - especially in the U.S. and U.K. But what makes Hegemony Now uniquely impressive is how seamlessly their politics emerges from their sophisticated analysis of the conditions and actualities of the present. Grounded in rich theorizing and a strong commitment to historical specificity, they pull post-Marxism back from the brink by taking up the under-theorized concept of material interests. Mapping the relations among economics, politics, and culture, they refuse to give in to the seductions of simplicity, choosing instead to make visible some of the complexities and contradictions that have produced a distinct set of interconnected crises. This is a book that crosses the divide between political economy and cultural studies, but it is a must-read for anyone trying to make sense of the apparent chaos of contemporary life and the possibilities for a better future. -- Lawrence Grossberg In engaging and accessible prose, Gilbert and Williams provide an astute political analysis of our current conjuncture...an important provocation for the left. -- Michael Hardt In the process of clarifying and updating the often misunderstood (and occasionally maligned) concept of hegemony, Gilbert and Williams also provide us with a valuable analysis of the "long 1990s": an account of its constitution, a diagnosis of its crisis and a map for its overcoming. Anyone committed to the latter must engage with this book. -- Rodrigo Nunes, author of Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organisation The task for socialists is to live without illusions without becoming disillusioned. Gilbert and Williams have written a timely contribution in how the left acts strategically - learning from the successes and failures of the last decade. -- Aaron Bastani