Capitalist hegemony and the 'new' world order : a Gramscian analysis of global restructuring

Abstract

Transformation in the global political economy in recent years has been both rapid and profound. This thesis applies concepts developed by Antonio Gramsci, leader of the Italian Communist Party in the early 1920s, in seeking to identify and understand the dynamic material and ideational forces driving contemporary global restructuring. Gramsci's interpretation of hegemony as "intellectual and moral reform" is used to explain the rise to dominance of the new intellectual and political right in the early 1980s. Mobilized by an ideology which shuns any state interference in the economy, the thesis stresses that the new right political economy perspective has been instrumental in transforming capitalist hegemony at the world level along pro-market, anti-statist lines. The argument hinges on the assertion that the new right's resurrection of laissez-faire capitalism has triumphed over Keynesianism on the ethical, moral and intellectual terrains of Marxist class struggle. It is demonstrated that the ideological hegemony of market capitalism is directly attributable to the consummate development of monetarist theory, and the subsequent spread of related neo-liberal principles to other disciplines, including, most prominently, development economics. The thesis concludes by asserting that a Gramscian analysis of the production, dissemination, and consumption of market ideology in both the North and the South is of paramount importance in advancing our understanding of present and future possibilities of international capitalist order.