Hegemony, Governmentality and the Globalist Discourse of Neoliberalism: A Critical Marxian Introduction

1. Introduction
The last thirty years have witnessed the rise and (arguably, since last year) fall of neoliberalism as an ideology and modus operandi of advanced capitalism. These have also been the decades of contemporary globalization as a phenomenon that is intertwined with and quite often is taken as being synonymous with neo-liberalization –often considered as driven by American hegemonism- (cp: Laclau and Mouffe, 2001; Held and McGrew, 2000; Agnew, 2005) .
The two seemingly self-reinforcing concepts and their practices have had significant impact on critical thought and praxis with a wide range of literature, some sceptical, some supporting and some advancing transformative views on globalization (cp. Held and McGrew, 2000), neoliberalism and neoliberal globalization. This is not surprising; almost unimaginable quanta of wealth fictitious and real have been generated in the last thirty years. Yet, never before has such magnitude of inequalities which have been recorded in the same period been witnessed by humankind. Not surprisingly these state of affairs has thrown up a variegated counter-movement of the many losers in the global neoliberal regime described variously as anti-, alter-, globalization.
The neoliberal era of capitalism might be coming to en end with the present economic crisis that has been compared to the Great Depression, which was decidedly signalled by the collapse of Lehman brothers on September 15, 2007. This however has been more due to its implosion and not as a result of the challenge it has faced in different ways at every step of its development, by progressive or alternative voices and forces. We are presently, it could be argued, in a period of transition that could mark yet another transformation of sorts, in human history. Yet the question of what exactly neoliberal globalization is and how it could sustain and indeed consolidate itself for a quarter of a century, remain contested terrain.
In an effort to grapple with this question, this essay will consider neoliberal globalization from the theoretical standpoints of hegemony and governmentality. We will agree with Hart (2008), that “current influential theories of neoliberalism cast in terms of class project, governmentality and hegemony are at best partial” (cp: Hart, 2008; 688). We shall however be more concerned with what sense we could make from these “partial” rays of understanding which these theoretical standpoints provide as indeed, all theoretical world views, particularly of a phenomenon being lived remain, in our view “at best partial”. Despite this, we would, quite like Hart, present our view of the significance of Lefebvre’s relational conception of the production of space, as being of crucial import for counter-hegemonic forces in understanding and more importantly engaging the ancien regime behind globalization towards the attainment of social transformation.
In the light of the above, the essay’s body is structured into three parts.
First, we look at hegemony and discourse analysis. We shall relate the re-conceptualization of hegemony as theory by Gramsci, to the reformulation of this by Laclau and Mouffe as a possible touchstone for socialist strategy in the present era. In deepening our recourse to Laclau and Mouffe’s perspective, we will relate their view of the critical role of discourse to the establishment of hegemony which has made hegemony central to their discourse theory.
Second, we consider governmentality and neo-liberalism. We shall draw on the Foucaultian theory on governmentalization as a mentality, rationality, skills and techniques of government which is post-feudal or put another way peculiar to modern industrial/post-industrial society (cp Dean, 1999:2). We shall look at neoliberalism as governmentality and governmentality as a strategy of and for neoliberal globalization.
Finally before making our conclusions, we shall turn our attention to the challenges of producing and expanding counter-hegemonic spaces which confronts forces of social transformation, representing an alternative globalization movement within nation-state boundaries and transnationally. This we hinge on the imperative need for social transformation.
We posit our thesis rooted in Gramscian analysis that the existing global order of neoliberalism founded through discourse and sustained as the re-formulation of hegemonic relations that have reconfigured the space of the political on a world scale, requires the building of historic blocs within nation-states whose tasks would however have to extend beyond the spaces of the national.




2. Hegemony and discourse analysis
At the heart of theoretical formulations on hegemony is the representation of the universal or social totality, by a subject particular, a social actor (or an alliance of actors), which constitute the hegemon. In ancient Greece, the context was territorial as the universal was Hellenic civilization and the hegemon one of the Greek city-states .
In discussions within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, at the beginning of the last century, starting with Plekhanov and then subsequently with Martov and Lenin in the wake of the 1905 revolution, the universal context became bourgeois ‘society’ and the social particular a class (the proletariat). It however was considered instrumentally, basically as a strategy for the working class as the social particular to unite other oppressed strata in Tsarist Russia under the banner of its programme in the quest for power (Femia, 1985: 24 – 25).
Gramsci’s development of thoughts on hegemony turned it into a concept and indeed a political theory. How is power won and how is power maintained by a social group which is not necessarily in the majority beyond using the brutal hand of force, which on its own can never be all sustaining of such power? Allied concepts such as consent, common sense, ideology (as social cement), passive revolution and good sense took up new meanings in Gramscian thought . For Gramsci though, the social particular was an economic-corporate entity, class, and the universal was comprised of classes as well within the territorial boundaries of a nation-state. Hegemony becomes a cultural all-pervasive reality of relations between the (economic-corporate) hegemon (which fulfils tasks beyond its strictly economic-corporate interests) and the rest of national society through the instrumentality of the ‘intellectual and moral leadership’ of the former.
Gramsci’s formulation puts in perspective how social control by the dominant class constituting ‘political society’ is wielded, in and through ‘civil society’. He was concerned with seeking reasons behind the failure of the revolutionary project in Western Europe (particularly Italy) while it had been successful in backward Tsarist Russia, not merely from a contemplative beginning but from the point of strength of his own lived experience before his incarceration (cp: Clark, 1977). The hegemonic class bloc legitimizes its moral authority in solving some national problems of its time in history. A historic bloc, as a counter-hegemonic force is likewise formed by being able to posit formulations for the unresolved historically established dilemmas of the country. It begins to wield ‘intellectual and moral leadership’, hegemony even before and as a pre-condition for attaining political power. The state is thus seen, not only as a social relation reflecting the contention and balance of forces within the broader society, it is further conceptualized as broader than political society (the state in the narrow sense of it) encompassing both it and the civil society as the integral state. These key aspects of Gramsci’s formulations are significant for our views which we shall express below.
The publication of Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Social Strategy in 1985, on the heels of the rediscovery of Gramsci heralded by Cox in 1981, was considered as a watershed . This according to Critchley and Marchart (2004: 3-5), was due to four reasons which distinguished it. First, while not out rightly discarding Marx, it strengthened the Gramscian traditions in Marxism (paving the way, according to the authors themselves ‘post-Marxism) . Second, it signalled a loss of the privileged position of class as an ontological basis for grappling with the theorization and strategizing for social change. Third, it was a leading voice for the ‘discourse turn’. Lastly it displaced post-structuralist thought while forging relations between deconstruction and discourse theory.
Our concern here is in relating discourse theory to the construction of hegemony within the neoliberal order towards situating what we characterise as globalist discourse. This we will come back to. Here though we must state before going into a limited excursion into discourse theory that a major significance of Laclau’s conceptualization of hegemony was its situation in a period of neoliberal, advanced capitalism, historically. Not surprisingly as with most currents of neo-Gramscian theory, hegemony as a conceptual anchor now becomes applied to a global universal, while not eschewing the integrally constitutive place of the national universal within this framework. The global universal however subsumes national, sub-national, international and transnational social actors.
This subsuming of the various levels of the social into the political is manifested in and constructed within the terrains of discourse. In addressing the perennial question of relations between structure and agency in human history and the process of its continuities and discontinuities, consolidation and transformation; historical realities are constructed as systems of discourse through the practice of social actors’ political articulation.
Within the flux that discourses’ articulatory nature entails, ‘recomposition’ and ‘rearticulation’ of hegemonic relations become the engine-room of an ‘absent totality’ of history seeking itself (Laclau and Mouffe, 2003: 7). There is neither universal truth nor (more properly put) ‘universal discourse’ as is the case with the teleological totalitization of history by classical Marxism (Ibid: 4). Thus “Hegemony’ will not be the majestic unfolding of an identity but the response to a crisis” (Ibid: 7) and this, of course would arise through the articulatory process of discourse and not some teleological trajectory of class struggle. Discourse here is not a passive phenomenon but an active one, involving different social actors occupying different subject positions seeking to dam the tide of flow of differences each in its interest, results in a ceaseless attempt at creating an ever elusive centre. Hegemonic relations which are defined by it thus amount to contestations as well as the manifestation of the equilibrium of power relations, what he addresses in Emancipation(s) as “a power struggle” (Laclau, 1996: 22).
To sum up on Laclau’s reconstruction of the concept of hegemony as and through discourse analysis, it presents reality as contingent relations which have been fixed in some way obviating the possibility of a the way. Signification plays a role to the signified in emancipatory discourse not in itself, but, but in being “empty” is detached from hitherto context, enabling the hegemonic (or counter-hegemonic) force in filling it to represent the totality of the universal incommensurable to its particularity (cp: Laclau, 2000: 51).

3. Governmentality and (neo-) liberalism
Foucault attempts to provide a perspective for understanding the art and practice of government (of polities and of the self) and as well situating liberalism (in general, and to a less extent, neoliberalism particularly) in his conceptualization of governmentality. Danaher et al further point out that while the development of this governmentality within the French philosopher’s work might be sketchy, it ‘provides the context for many other concepts – discourse, biopolitics and biopower, discipline and punishment, regulation, the production of subjectivities –that are important to his work’ (2000; 95).
What we may ask is governmentality and how does it relate to neoliberalism?
Dean, 2000 states that “the term governmentality seeks to distinguish the particular mentalities, arts and regimes of government and administration that have emerged since ‘early modern’ Europe” (p. 2). He delineates this in a Foucaultian sense from ‘government’ in general considered as the ‘conduct of conduct’. He also avers that Foucault’s developing the concept was in response to ‘the long term recession of the ideal of a welfare state and the revitalization of the claims of a form of economic liberalism in liberal democracies’.
According to Dannaher et al (Ibid; 95), for Foucault, governmentality entailed a genealogy of the movement of the pre-modern forms of sovereignty in Western Europe towards the development of what he termed ‘technologies of government’ or what Dean describes, borrowing from Foucault, as the ‘governmentalization of the state’ (p. 6). This involves the contentious and contended establishment of a liberal rationality for government by conflating the economic element with diplomatic/military and policy knowledge types and at the same time a critique of the reason of state (Dean, Ibid 52).
Liberalism thus in the Foucauldian sense is not necessarily a coherent body of ideas or institutional framework. It is an assemblage of ideas and technologies which as a rationality is a version of bio-politics and yet in tensions with it. It is attitude further is an alternative model in Foucualt’s view to both the social contract and perpetual warfare theories of state. We thus come to see this governmentalization of the state which it is couched as in the Foucaultian sense of power being productive; repressive and emancipatory. An approximation of the liberal ideal for him, we would argue thus becomes the agonistic fulfilment of a non-totalizable history.
In the name of freedom, liberalism was thus a sustained critique of the welfare state and neoliberalism signalled the ‘death of the social’ (Rose, 1999, 176). In the typical Foucaultian approach of course, we could be made to believe this does not mark a foreclosure of counter-hegemonic spaces developing within neoliberalism. Not only would it be possible to consider liberalism as emancipatory; it of course as a discourse in the Foucaultian sense, cannot but create its ‘other’.
Globalism and counter-hegemonic spaces
Globalization is a process which has been described in various ways by different authors, as entailing an increasing integration of the world economically, socially, culturally and politically . The process of globalization as been traced by some as far back as the early Greco-Roman empire-building efforts (cp; Held and McGrew, Ibid) or more realistically to the expansion of Europe over the last millennium (cp: Maddison) .
The past thirty years after Thatcher and Reagan emerged in the UK ad the US respectively have however witnessed an ideological grafting on this in itself neutral and seemingly innocuous development of the human race’s spaces. This in our view has gone through three phases marked by the discourse with which neoliberal globalism as come to define itself as being equivalent to globalization . The first of this phase (1979 – 89) was characterized by the monetarist counter-revolution declaring itself as the only alternative, for the precise reason that there was an alternative in ‘actually existing socialism’, but this alternative signalled its wobbling feet with the Polish balance of payment crisis at about the same time Thatcherism was commencing the neoliberal onslaught. 1989 marked a watershed in the reconstitution of global hegemony which commenced a decade earlier. With the collapse of the Berlin wall, and the pervasiveness of Structural Adjustment Programmes, it was no longer a discourse of asserting neoliberalism as the only game in town, a “Washington consensus” was deemed to exist. In 1994, the Zapatista resistance’s commencement signalled the beginning of a sustained counter-hegemonic response to the neoliberal globalist content of the globalization discourse.
The second circle of neoliberal globalization however could be deemed to have ended with Seattle in 1999. The contestations of ten years have thrown up the slogan of a new world possibility as a critical ‘empty signifier’. The collapse of Lehman’s brothers might have confirmed the alternative globalizationist position that neoliberal globalization is unsustainable, but, not surprisingly it has, for the moment at least, left the same forces behind neoliberal globalization as the elements with the initiative of attempting to re-constitute their hegemony. Operating through and within International Organizations, leaning on -while not conceding- to its ‘other’ which is constituted by transnational civil society; power still rests in the hands of the United States, EU & Japan. In our view, governmentality accrues a global attribute through these. The integration of what we would see as this governmentalization of globalization, the entrenchment of the arts, techniques and mentalities into a process that had commenced with Columbus and pirates on the high seas is at the heart of the possibilities which the present global hegemonic relations have of being reconstituted by the these despite the crippling blow on the present economic crisis.
To what extent can emancipatory forces break through this fort of a governmentalized globalization that seeks its self-survival on its own terms?
We find the way forward in the opening up of the political spaces of remembrance and envisioning through practical struggles within everyday life which the unfolding depression itself will deepen on one hand. On the other hand we also agree with Cox’s formulation of the need for states with agendas that challenge the hegemonic order for a global hegemonic project to be realisable (cp: Cox, 1987: 59).
These two positions are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary they reflect the multi-faceted nature of the production of space and the articulation of the counter-hegemonic, in today’s globalist order. It is in this light for example that we see the Bolivarian efforts at building 21st Century socialism as being of great importance.
The lessons from the hitherto ‘actually existing socialisms’ and Marxist/neo-Marxist/post-Marxist thoughts have been part of the articulatory processes and spaces of counter-hegemonic forces at national and transnational planes. This being important though, the future remains in a fluid flux and the challenge ahead is to dismantle the leviathan of globalist globalization through struggles as means that can lead –albeit without guarantees – to ends of participatory democratization (which alone is ultimately emancipatory) at the global, national and every day living levels.
Conclusion
We have tried to argue here that neoliberal globalization marks a re-configuration of the hegemonic forces of capitalism in the 20th Century. This was enthroned with a globalist discourse that was rooted in an economic reconfiguration after the organic crisis of the mid-70s.
We posited as did Hart that neoliberalism could be understood as governmentality as well as a globalist hegemony, but that both theoretical grasps of neoliberal globalization still do remain at best partial.
We affirm the need for a reconsideration of the space relational realities at the level of the global, national and daily leaving as necessary for counter-hegemonic forces strategizing for an emancipatory process that can not be determined in its consummation teleologically or a priori. Considering the fact though that states still retain some locus with the governmentality of the global essential for its transformation, the project of building the historic bloc on the basis of the national-popular still remains critical for a social transformatory project.
It is in this light that we view the Bolivarian revolution as a major lodestone with all its inadequacies still, for counter-hegemonic forces that challenge the discourse and hegemonic power of the globalist forces of the presently subsisting world-wide ancien regime.





Notes
Mosca in our view does give and excellent perspective of the foundations of socio-historical foundations of hegemony with its inadequacies coupled into ‘political liberty’ which has served “as bases for the constitutions of the great modern states of European type” (cp Mosca, 1939: 358 – 359).

Gramsci dissolves the ‘before’ and the ‘after’ of the attack on the Winter Palace, the smashing of the state as postulated in Lenin’s State and the Revolution, in a dynamic way that stresses the emerging dominant class as necessarily exercising hegemony before the decisive moment of winning power as indeed a necessary pre-condition for such a moment (cp: Sassoon, 1987: 131 – 132)

we will not let definitions of these hold us at this moment, and thus consider the understanding of these basic Gramscian concepts as given as given

This period corresponding to the beginnings of the enthronement of a globalist neoliberal after what could have been considered an organic crisis of capitalism in the mid-70s on the heels of the longee duree did necessitate the application of Gramsci’s thoughts on a global plane. Not surprising thus, the field of International Relations was a greenhouse for neo-Gramscian ideas

It has been taken as granted, including by Laclau and Mouffe as well that a major advancement of their theoretization on hegemony is in overcoming the essentialism of Classim which Gramsci is deemed not to have been able to despite breaking the chimera of economism in Marxian thoughts. Do however cp the MIA’s assertion (which we subscribe to) that their formulation does not necessarily vitiate a class analysis of hegemony
Based on a ‘logic of contingency’

cp. Held and McGrew, 200? For a detailed analysis of the contending ontological and epistemological point of convergence and divergence on what constitutes “globalization”.

we are more inclined to this formulation as a pre-Galilean world which believed the world was flat could hardly have been global in its ‘world’
we have actually argued elsewhere –in ‘Neoliberal Globalization and the Informalization of Work’ 2009, an essay submitted for the Trade Union Strategy Course and which in a more developed form has been accepted for publication in the next issue of the Nigeria Industrial Relations Journal



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