Before starting to talk about counter-hegemony, we must turn to Antonio Gramsci, who introduced the concept of hegemony into the broad scientific discourse of political science. In his teachings, Gramsci says that within the Marxist-Leninist tradition, there are three zones of domination:

• Traditional economic domination for Marxism, which is determined by ownership of the means of production, which predetermines the essence of capitalism. According to Marx, this is economic dominance in the sphere of infrastructure.
• Political domination, which Gramsci associates with Leninism and considers as the relative autonomy of the superstructure in the realm of politics. When the political will of certain proletarian forces is capable of changing the political situation, although the infrastructure for this is not fully prepared. Gramsci interprets this as the autonomy of a particular segment of the superstructure. We are talking about political power, expressed in parties, in the State, in the classic attributes of the political system.
• Domination in the third sector is the structure of the superstructure, which Gramsci relates to civil society, while emphasizing the figure of the intellectual.

Gramsci believes that hegemony is the domain of attitudes of inequality and domination, not in the realm of economics and politics, but in the realm of culture, the intellectual and professional community, art and science. This third sector has the same degree of relative autonomy as Leninism in politics. A revolution, in this case, from Gramsci’s point of view, has three aspects: in the economic sphere (classical Marxism), in the political sphere (Leninism) and in the sphere of civil society, which is the sphere of freedom, and the intellectual can choose between conformism and non-conformism, a choice between hegemony and counter-hegemony, between serving the status quo or choosing a revolution. The choice that an intellectual makes does not depend on his economic position, that is, on his relationship with the ownership of the means of production, nor on his political affiliation to a particular party.

Gramsci sees the Western world as a world of established hegemony, in which a capitalist system has been established in the economic sphere, bourgeois political forces dominate politics, intellectuals serve the interests of bourgeois political forces and serve capital in general, an intelligent environment. . All this as a whole in international relations creates a certain context, at the center of which is the pole of established hegemony. Gramsci invites nonconformist and revolutionary intellectuals to create a historical bloc that opposes this hegemony. We will return to this point a little later, but now we will consider a slightly different aspect of Gramscian thought. From Gramsci’s point of view, there are situations in which relationships arise between a developed capitalist system and those societies that are not yet fully integrated into the core of hegemony. These modern types of societies, in which hegemony has not completely won, are described by Gramsci as the model of Caesarism. He suggests that, in these intermediate states, the political elite is not yet really embedded in the western capitalist world, where capital, hegemony and bourgeois political parties represent the interests of the middle class that define the agenda to be followed.

Charles Kupchan, in his book No One’s World, proposes this model, which Gramsci calls Caesarism, divided into three types:

• The modern Russian corrupt autocracy and other similar models in the post-Soviet space, representing the elite of corrupt clans.
• The system of Chinese totalitarianism, which maintains totalitarian power at the state level.
• The system of Middle Eastern petromonarchies, which include in the structure of their domination, in their Caesarism, also religious or dynastic aspects, such as the Saudi sultanates. Iran can be classified as an intermediate form, between the Gulf monarchy model and Russian autocracy.

Caesarism is in very interesting conditions: on the one hand, under pressure from a growing middle class, on the other, it comes from a more developed West. The hegemony from outside and from within forces Caesarism to make concessions, to de-sovereign itself, to enter into a common global process in favor of global hegemony. From Gramsci’s point of view, Caesarism cannot simply insist on itself, ignoring these processes, so it follows the path that in modern political science is called transformism.

The term transformism refers us to Gramscism and neo-gramscism in international relations theory, where it means the game of Caesarism with the challenges of hegemony, that is, partial modernization, partial movement towards hegemony, but in order to maintain political control. . Thus, transformism is what China has been doing since 1980, what Putin’s Russia has been doing, especially in Medvedev’s time, what the Islamic States have been doing lately. They absorb some elements of the West, capitalism, democracy, political institutions for the separation of powers, they help to produce the middle class, they follow the example of the national bourgeoisie, internal hegemony and international external hegemony, but they do not do it in the same way, not all of them. exactly, at the level of a facade to maintain a monopoly of political power that is not strictly hegemonic.

The basic analysis of the grammatical terms hegemony, caesarism and transformism that we performed was necessary as a prelude to the development of a counter-hegemonic theory.

2. Historic pact

Considering that all people have political rights and delegate them to parties through participation in elections, and the possession of economic rights is differentiated in the economic sphere, Gramsci believes that in the third sector exactly the same process of delegation of their rights occurs.  Civil society representatives enable intellectuals to represent themselves in the field of intelligence in a kind of conditional civil society parliament. According to the theory of neo-Gramscism, there is the concept of a historical pact, and since we are talking about civil society, it can have two fundamentally different vectors: either the historical pact is directed towards hegemony, or a historical pact can be implemented in the interests of of the revolution. Hegemony from Gramsci’s point of view is not a destiny, but a choice, just like the choice of political parties. Stephen Gill, a neo-Gramscist, describes the Trilateral Commission as a historic pact of conformist intellectuals in favor of hegemony. These are the only scholars in this class of organizations where the members of that organization themselves do not consider themselves a paranoid form of conspiracy theory and recognize their academic status. Ultimately, every person, according to Gramsci, is free to be in favor of capitalism or communism, and even if a person does not belong to the proletarian class, he can be a member of his country’s communist party and participate in political battles. follow socialists or communists. Proletarian class affiliation is not required for membership in a political party. Likewise, at the level of intellectualism, it is not necessary to be at a disadvantage, it is not necessary to be expelled from the system of society to ally with the counter-hegemony that, and this is the main foundation of Gramscism, any intellectual can choose and adhere to the historic pact of the revolution.

In the 1960s, and especially in the 1970s, when Gramscism spread across Europe, a unique situation developed. So the intellectual sphere was completely occupied by leftists and it was simply indecent not to be a communist. Communism and morality were identified within the scope of civil society, although communist parties did not dominate in the political sphere, and bourgeois relations continued to persist in the economic sphere. It was with this, to a large extent, that the events of 1968 and Mitterrand’s rise to power were connected. The turn to the left in France did not begin with the victory of leftist forces in parliament or with the government itself, but with the creation by French intellectuals of a counter-hegemonic, then Marxist, historical bloc. They made their choice, without anyone expelling them from the bourgeois newspapers, which continued to be financed by various bourgeois circles.

This degree of freedom brings us to the question of the constructivism of social reality, which is not fatal. The process of construction of social reality lies in the intellectual’s freedom to make his fundamental choice in favor of a historical pact: hegemonic or counter-hegemonic.

3. Counter-hegemony/counter-society

The concept of counter-hegemony is introduced by international relations specialist Robert W. Cox as a generalization of Gramscism and its application to the global situation. He says that today the entire system of international relations is built in the service of hegemony. Everything they tell us about the relations between states, about the meaning of history, about wars and invasions is pure propaganda for the hegemony of the oligarchic world elite. To a large extent, this construction is based on the axis of the intelligentsia that opts for hegemony.

R. Cox poses the question of creating an intellectual construction of a global alternative revolutionary reality and for this he introduces the term counter-hegemony, giving it a fundamental justification. He talks about the need for a global historical bloc of world intellectuals who choose revolution, choose critique of the status quo and, most importantly, not necessarily on a Marxist basis, because Marxism presupposes some sort of fatalistic economic program of historical processes. R. Cox believes that the historical process is open and in this sense the domination of capital is a construction. In this he differs greatly from neo-Marxists, including Wallerstein. This post-positivist, constructivist, post-modernist idea of R. Cox, whose essence is that in conditions of globalization it is necessary to pose the question of counter-hegemony with the same globality, from the bourgeois-liberal hegemony, carrying out the transformism, since later or later this transformism will break Caesarism.

The second principle that Cox introduces is that of counter-society, as the current global society is based on the domination of liberal-bourgeois principles, that is, it is a society of hegemony. This is a society of hegemony through language, images, technology, politics, customs, art, fashion, everything. Consequently, it is necessary to build a counter-society. All that is good in a global society must be destroyed, and a new society must be built in its place, so to speak, a society with the opposite sign. Instead of the rule of universal principles, local communes must be built; instead of a liberal monologue, we must build a polylogue of organic cultures. Thus, counter-society will be an alternative to the society that exists today, in all its basic principles.

Robert Cox’s terms are counter-hegemony and counter-society.

4. Thinking about counter-hegemony

John M. Hobson, international relations scholar, author of The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, in which he criticizes Western racism and affirms the brilliant idea of building international relations in a new model of counter-hegemony based on the works of Cox, Gill, and the neo-gramscists is a blessing. The criticism is wonderful, but what to do, what counter-hegemony should be created, we will not find it in his works, except in two or three pages. Therefore, it is necessary to contemplate the counter-hegemony. To conceive of counter-hegemony, one must first conceive of hegemony. We come back to this topic again to properly understand what we are thinking.

So what is hegemony?

Hegemony is the universalization of liberalism, understood as the only context for a monologue. Liberalism is an absolute farce, speaking of counter-hegemony and counter-society, we mean a total dismantling of liberalism. Thus, to contemplate counter-hegemony is to contemplate illiberalism, to contemplate a society that is radically opposed to liberalism. It should be noted here that the illiberalism we have to think about when building counter-hegemony must be the illiberalism of tomorrow. This has to be forward illiberalism, not backward illiberalism.

What is retrograde illiberalism? This is conservatism that disappeared a long time ago and beyond the horizon of history, fascism and National Socialism that disappeared not so long ago, and communism, sovietism and socialism that only recently disappeared. All this was not overcome by liberalism by chance, it was not by chance that hegemony dissolved, disintegrated, exploded and sent to the historical dump, to ahistorical oblivion, those illiberal ideologies that were listed. Facing them, with all the ease of such a movement, will not bring us any closer to the solution of the problem of creating counter-hegemony. We will be the bearers of an archaic, Marxist, Nazi, fascist or conservative-monarchist discourse, which by itself has already demonstrated that it cannot resist the historic battle with hegemony. Consequently, this is an ineffective reality check to oppose liberalism.

Liberalism’s main victory lies in the fact that at the center of its discourse is the principle: freedom versus non-freedom. This simple dialectic turned out to be very effective, as the 20th century has clearly demonstrated. To defeat its ideological enemies, liberalism used the idea of totalitarianism as a concept. Therefore, as soon as liberalism felt this totalitarian aspect in the ideologies that offered its non-liberal alternative, it immediately included the strongest part of its ideology, which is called liberty.

To consider these processes in more detail, it is necessary to recall the content of John Stuart Mil’s liberty. Freedom is “freedom from”, negative freedom, and for negative freedom to work, there must be a positive non-freedom, that is, the thesis of totalitarianism. When there is a society based on, say, a fascist racial identity, but you don’t specifically conform to it, then your freedom will be directed against that identity. The same goes for communism. If you don’t share this ideology, you apply the negative thesis of freedom to this positive thesis of a totalitarian society, and as a result, sooner or later you will win. Negative freedom works because “freedom from” acquires content through dialectical negation.

Today liberalism has conquered all it could conquer and has set itself to this task. “Freedom from” is now given to us by definition, as a given. Today we live in a liberal world where, in principle, there is nothing to free us from, that is, the “freedom of” has developed all its relational-creative potential, because it has freed itself from all those ways that, in a certain way, or another , kept the individual in a certain state of unfreedom. At this time, the pure side of freedom was revealed, “freedom from” as freedom from anything is really just nihilism. Nihilism that was not on the surface precisely because someone obstructed that freedom. Consequently, freedom in victorious liberalism means nothing more than the absolutization of nihilism. Liberation is nothing.

What we are experiencing today is the absolute victory of hegemony combined with its fundamental implosion. This implosion of liberalism is an important factor in its hegemonic triumph. But for now, liberalism is opposed to a slow Caesarism in later stages, as a temporary defect, which is fine-tuned by global liberalism so that the end of history can finally occur. By the way, let’s pay attention to the fact that we understand the word end as the concept of The End of History, by Francis Fukuyama, as an end, but in English the word end has another meaning – the objective, that is, this is the objective of the story, story, his telos, where he’s going. This is the conquest of history reaching its apex, its limit, that is, where it went. We live in liberalism as in victorious nihilism, and the implosion of that nihilism is taking place before our eyes.

What else is left for free liberal humanity? Of the last forms of collective identity expressed in gender. The problem of sexual minorities is not an accidental epiphenomenon of liberal strategy, it is its very center. The logic in this case is simple: if a person does not free themselves from their gender, they will remain in a totalitarian state of separation from other human individuals of a certain collective identity, male or female. Consequently, sex reassignment is not only a right, but will soon become a duty as well. If a person does not change sex, then he is, in fact, a fascist, because if an individual is male or female, then he accepts a slave existence within the framework of his definition of gender. Not the equality of the sexes, i.e., their change, derives from freedom, the “freedom from”, the freedom of a person from gender, from sex, as well as the cosmopolitan freedom to choose citizenship, place of residence, profession, religion. All these liberal freedoms require a logical step, gender freedom and a total multiple gender change, because the individual starts to get used to it and falls back into the totalitarian framework of gender. But this is not the limit, as the last unsurpassed collective identity remains, the belonging of an individual to humanity. As an example of the need to overcome human identity, which ultimately is also fascism from the point of view of liberal logic, we can mention the Cyborg Manifesto by Donna J. Haraway, as well as the ideas incorporated in the transhumanist program.

Overcoming gender and collective human identities are just details that will occupy our consciousness for some time, frighten conservatives and incompletely modernized liberal elements, and conversely, inspire liberals to continue their next exploits. At the same time, it should be noted that the agenda has narrowed, and with the development of genetic and surgical art, microtechnology, biotechnology and the unveiling of the genome, we are indeed on the verge of this program becoming a technical topic. It is proposed not to wait any longer, but to think in such a way that liberalism, in principle, in its nihilistic program, has accomplished its mission. And what does it mean to think ahead in illiberalism? It means thinking about illiberalism, which is after this dehumanization of man, after the loss of gender identity. It is necessary to see the horizon of liberalism as an absolute victory of Nothingness and to offer an alternative not from outside, but from within. The point is that, ultimately, liberalism goes beyond sociology and leads us into anthropological problems. Society disintegrates, a post-society emerges, a liberal citizen separated from the world, a cosmopolitan who, in fact, does not belong to any society.

Massimo Cacciari calls this a society of total idiots who lose the ability to communicate with each other, because they lose everything in common that connects them, an individual language emerges, a rhizomatic networked existence, etc. In this situation, we arrive at the last human frontier, from which it is proposed to start a project of counter-hegemony. The main course of counter-hegemony in its anthropological aspect is the idea of a radical rethinking of freedoms. It is necessary to oppose liberalism not to totalitarianism, for in doing so we only feed its destructive energies, but the principle of significant freedom, that is, of “freedom for”, freedom in J.S. Mill’s terminology. Addressing the problem of anthropology, where the individual principle is above humanity, liberalism should not be opposed to conservative values, but to something radically different, and the name of this radically different thing is the concept of person or personality, i.e. freedom. against freedom, the person against individual freedom.

Personality returns the person to the essence of his humanity, this is his fundamental revolutionary task of creating himself by his own strength. This is, so to speak, a metaphysical category. In Christianity, the personality is where the fusion of the divine principle with the individual takes place. A person is born at the moment of holy baptism. In religions, personality is described in different ways, but as Marcel Mauss so beautifully revealed in his works, in any archaic society it is the concept of person that is in evidence. This is not an individual, it is the intersection of the eidetic subject of some given and spiritual or generalized species. Thus, by opposing individuality to some form of social integration, we attack liberalism and offer illiberalism not from behind, but we need to propose a model of illiberalism of the future. The personality must rebel against the individual, “freedom to” must move against “freedom from”, not unfreedom, non-society and some other forms of collective restrictions. We must face the challenge of nihilism. This, according to Martin Heidegger, is the difficult knowledge of nihilism.

To think of counter-hegemony means to think of a creatively free personality as the root of this counter-hegemony. Without this fundamental regime change under the conditions of total nihilism, we will not create any intelligible concept of counter-hegemony.

5. The counter-society model

The model of counter-society must necessarily be open from above, this is the principle of freedom, at the head of this society must be those who are maximally open to the higher dimension of the personal, who are not as identical as possible to each other. They are contemplative philosophers. Platopolis as a political expression of open Platonism, led by a philosopher who thinks of everything but himself. He doesn’t govern, he doesn’t do anything, but he opens up the possibility for everyone to be an individual. It opens the possibility for society to open up from above, it makes this society truly free, without realizing its limitations. He creates such a society, this is the State, this is the sacred society.

Counter-society must be built from above, it must be absolutely open from the vertical, this is its fundamental principle. An open political philosophy of the vertical must be the platform for a historic new pact of intellectuals. If we create this pact on the basis of pragmatic alliances, we will not succeed, because sooner or later liberalism will take over in all these ways.

6. Counter-hegemonic diversification of actors in International Relations

For the counter-hegemonic diversification of actors in IR, one can start from the concepts and definitions of transnationalism and neoliberalism in international relations, which affirm the expansion of the nomenclature of actors in the context of hegemony. It is proposed to accept this symmetry in the construction of counter-hegemony and to recognize that the historical bloc must be composed of actors of different scales.

The structure of counter-hegemony can be as follows: at the center are intellectuals with an open vertical philosophy, that is, a historical pact between intellectuals. It must necessarily be global, it cannot be national, in any country of any culture, even, for example, in the great Islamic world or in Chinese, it is impossible to do that. All that is needed is a global scale of counter-hegemony and a global unification of counter-hegemonic intellectuals based on an open philosophy. A constellation of systems of different scales can be built around this main actor, symmetrically in the way Joseph S. Nye describes a transnational liberal system, where states, parties and movements, industries, groups, religious movements and even singular individuals become actors.

All of them not only can, but are also actors in international relations, in the hegemonic model of globalization. We are talking about counter-globalization, not anti-globalization, not alternative globalization, but counter-globalization, which recognizes that in order to overthrow this hegemony it is necessary to unite actors of different scales.

7. The will and resources of counter-hegemony. The archipelago of Massimo Cacciari

The axis of the counter-hegemonic strategy must be constructive will, not resources. First the will, then the resources. This will must come from the counter-hegemonic global intellectual elite as members of global society. Of course everyone thinks, but intellectuals also think for others, which is why they have the right to be walkers of the people, to be representatives of humanity as such, whose global discourse is now captured and shaped by representatives of the historical bloc. hegemonic. By the way, when liberals are attacked in a case, the scarcity and inconsistency of their argument is necessarily revealed, and all this because their argument is strong.

However, on what resources can this constitutive will of the intellectual elite be based? First of all, this is the second world, about which Parag Khanna writes, the BRICS countries, the states that, in the current status quo, received a little less or are not in the first roles. And these are pretty much all the states that feel uncomfortable in the prevailing architecture of hegemony. But, by themselves, these countries are not a counter-hegemony, by themselves they will not do anything.

The dominant regimes in these countries, if not activated, will continue to engage in transformationalism, but counter-hegemonic intellectuals must fight back, even on their own project, rather than waiting to be called to work for the government. It is important to understand that the government is committed to transformism and will deal with it regardless of location: in China, Iran, Azerbaijan, India, Russia, BRICS countries, there is a continuous transformation.

Counter-hegemonic intellectuals must intercept the narrative and dictate the agenda so that these states exercise Caesarism for as long as possible. But this is not an objective, the objective of counter-hegemony is different, however, the potential of these countries is a good resource, and as a tool to achieve the proposed task, it is quite good. For example, a nuclear-armed state seems very convincing as an argument against hegemony.

Likewise, anti-liberal parties around the world are relevant as a counter-hegemonic resource, regardless of whether they are right or left, socialist or conservative. To this must be added several movements of a vertically open type: cultural, artistic, aesthetic, ecological. In this context, it is worth paying attention to the fact that the world peasantry and the world industry, sooner or later, will be victims of the banking and financial system, the tertiary sector of the economy, which are already beginning to collapse in the face of the proportional growth of the globalist speculative finance capital. They should not be expected to ally themselves with the counter-hegemony and propose plans, but they can also be considered as one of the resource components in the arsenal of the alliance of counter-hegemonic intellectuals within the historical pact.

All traditional religions, which in essence are illiberal, as opposed to liberally oriented religions, which are basically secular or relativistic, or, shall we say, unreligious, can also function as a resource for counter-hegemonic intellectuals. The task of the counter-hegemonic historical bloc is to unite all these resources in a global network. This is where Massimo Cacciari’s “Archipelago” concept, which he applies to Europe, will come in handy, but the idea itself could spread more widely. Massimo Cacciari maintains that between the universalist Logos and the anarchy of the atomic idiots there is a private logos. This particular Logos, along with Edgar Morin’s complexity paradigm, along with operations on complex structures, with non-linear models, can be very useful.

This is a fundamental question, because with a complex model, it becomes possible to build a dialogue and integrate right and left in a single historical pact, while at the moment looking at each other through the lens of their own tactics.

8. Russia and hegemony

Russia is today a field of typical transformism and what is commonly called Putinism is nothing more than Caesarism. It opposes internal hegemony in the form of Moscow’s White Ribbon and Echo opposition (1), as well as external hegemony that pressures Russia from outside. Caesarism is balancing these factors, trying to play on the one hand with modernization and on the other hand with conservatism, trying to maintain power by any means. This is very rational and very realistic: there is no idea, there is no worldview, there are no goals, there is no understanding of the historical process, there are no telos in such a government – this is ordinary Caesarism, in his Gramscist Understanding.

Caesarism’s opposition to internal and external hegemony forces it to necessarily move in the direction of counter-hegemonic intellectuals, but transformismo is an adaptive-passive strategy, which means that sooner or later the objective of this transformismo, however, will destroy Caesarism. As hegemony comes from outside as well as from within, any modernization objectively leads, in one way or another, to the strengthening of the middle class, and the middle class is an enemy of the State, just as the bourgeoisie, capitalism, individualism are enemies. both of concrete society and of humanity as a whole.

How soon will Caesarism fall? Time shows that this can take a very, very long time. In theory, it should go down, but it still exists, proving to be quite successful at times. It all depends on whether the transformation is carried out successfully or unsuccessfully. It’s a passive rearguard strategy doomed to fail, but sometimes in the most paradoxical way it can be quite effective.

It is quite obvious that if in the last 13 years this strategy has been maintained with such widespread omnivorous and ideological pragmatism, then it will continue to exist, despite the indignation it causes on all sides. However, it is worth noting that it is precisely the successful transformism that prevents the State from being destroyed by representatives of global hegemony.

But this is not enough, a completely different type of strategy is needed, counter-hegemonic in essence, with the aim of promoting the theory of a multipolar world. Another important initiative is the Global Revolutionary Alliance, which is a very active strategy that can be developed in Russia at a parallel level, both Russian and global, international. And even if there are some internal contradictions among the representatives of the global revolutionary alliance in Europe or America, and there are some, and there are many, then this moment should not shame anyone, much less stop. Since people choose the same counter-hegemonic ethics despite the societies in which they live. By rejecting hegemony, there is no need to focus on power. Now the authorities say “yes” to us because we are on the same side with regard to hegemony, we are against hegemony and the authorities, in one way or another, are against hegemony. But even if hegemony has triumphed in Russia, this situation should not influence the decision-making of the counter-hegemonic intellectual elite, as it must move in the name of fundamental goals. Only an orientation exclusively to an idea, to eschatology, to telos, to a goal and not to momentary benefits, can bring victory and success.

The historic pact of intellectuals with an open vertical philosophy can be in solidarity with the Russian Federation in its current status as one of the most important elements of the archipelago of counter-society. Putin’s nuclear Russia is an excellent island in this archipelago, perfect for an external revolutionary struggle, a wonderful base to train people who must promote eschatological and revolutionary activities on a world scale. It’s a very valuable tool, but without it you could still be the same. We need to seek contacts in China, Iran, India, Latin America, create counter-hegemony in African countries, Asian countries, Europe, Canada, Australia, etc. All malcontents are potential members of the counter-hegemonic archipelago: from States to Individuals.

Two things cannot be equated: the national interests of the Russian Federation, exhausted by the end of transformismo, and the counter-hegemonic global strategy. These are different things, for counter-society is deliberately extraterritorial and is an archipelago.

Translator’s Note:

(1) Echo of Moscow (Russian: Э́хо Москвы́) is a Russian 24-hour radio station based in Moscow. It broadcasts in many Russian cities, some of the former Soviet republics (through partnerships with local radio stations) and via the Internet. The current editor-in-chief is Alexei Venediktov. Moscow Echo became famous during the events of the 1991 Soviet coup attempt: it was one of the few media outlets to speak out against the State Committee on the State of Emergency. It is a medium with liberal positions.