Mike Phipps reviews Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (and How We Win It Back), by Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams, published by Verso

With the collapse of neoliberalism in the face of unprecedented global crises, we are “in a moment of grand realignment,” argue the authors, where anything is possible. Their book is a guide to what the political left should do in these uncertain times.

The authors’ analysis of how we got here takes a well-trodden path. But their narrative of the rise of neoliberalism does include some interesting cultural observations – for example, on the rise of reality TV and the emergence of commercial hip-hop culture, with its emphasis on star performers, personal narcissism and a competitive world view, displacing optimistic evocations of community, solidarity and mutual empowerment associated with earlier genres in black music. Both trends illustrate the spread of hegemonic neoliberalism into new areas. The same competitive, individualist thinking had from the 1980s permeated the public sector, with its emphasis on targets, performance indicators and ‘efficiency’.

“Just as corporations were abandoning any notion that they might have a purpose other than the ruthless maximisation of profit, new public management advocates were encouraging public services to model themselves on corporations.” Such thinking was hostile to the very idea of public service as such and mocked the notion that public servants could be motivated by anything other than the desire to enrich themselves at public expense.

A substantial section of the book is devoted to an understanding of how consciousness develops and evolves among different social layers in connection to what political leadership is being offered. While the tools of analysis, developed from Gramsci onwards, may seem abstract, this nonetheless matters: a failure to understand this process explains why much of the media and academic commentariat were notoriously unable to account for the significant gains of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party at the 2017 UK general election, following the Brexit vote.

“As utterly commonplace as this sounds, much political commentary simply finds it very difficult to grasp the basic fact that people can, and sometimes do, change their minds.” But what are the circumstances under which this can happen? The authors examine the conditions which led to the loss of “active consent” for the post-war settlement and the rise of the New Right to illustrate their argument.

As early as the 1990s, “the visible tendency of aggressive neoliberalism to generate massive social inequality was compromising its political legitimacy,” suggest the authors. A new assemblage of forces crystallised to continue the pursuit of neoliberal economics, this time linked to a programme of social liberalisation: the ‘Third Way’ of Clinton, Blair and Schröder.

True, up to a point. Yet there remained something quite socially conservative about this new politics, which belied its apparently liberal credentials. Witness the tough regime for asylum seekers, the crackdown on civil liberties and the punitive ‘zero tolerance’ criminal justice policies pursued by Blair and his co-thinkers elsewhere.

The 2008 financial crash marked the beginning of the end for the Third Way and the need for a different section of the political class to do the bidding of finance capital in new conditions, by imposing tough austerity regimes. In their wake came new movements of left and right challenging the authority of the professional politicians to pursue such a narrow agenda on behalf of a powerful but small class fraction. These movements have highlighted the crisis of legitimacy of the established governing elites.

Is the left in a good position to take advantage of this crisis? As far as the UK is concerned, the authors make an arguably contentious assessment of the Corbyn Project, but their analysis of the current state of the left, despite the 2019 defeat, is sound: “the organised left in much of the UK is larger, more visible to itself and others, more intellectually dynamic and socially diverse, and demographically younger than at any time since the collapse of the late 1980s.”

The question then arises: what strategy should the left adopt to build a hegemonic coalition of interests? The political basis for this, assert the authors, is the Green New Deal, whose great virtue is that it seeks to articulate the long-term interests of the vast majority of humanity. But organising for it will require innovation and flexibility.

Gilbert and Williams argue that any successful hegemonic project must have both a socialist and a populist dimension, “identifying key popular demands, narrating recent events and proposing programmatic solutions that align various progressive demands with each other.” But in the face of the rise of the authoritarian right, it must also be fundamentally democratic in character.

Some of this is a bit abstract, as the authors freely admit. But the general emphasis cannot be faulted: one of the strengths of Labour’s campaign in 2017 was its ability to present its radical solutions to the crisis as pragmatic and sensible, while painting the Tory adherence to further failed austerity as an ideologically-driven cleaving to outdated dogma.

Today the need for state-led responses to the triple crises of the pandemic, climate emergency and cost of living catastrophe could not be clearer. The left’s job is to weave together the class interests and radical solutions into a popular narrative that can open the path to power.

Mike Phipps’ new book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.