Hegemony

The text that we have been reading lately is very stimulating with all the Marxism, Marxists ideas and concepts. This weekend we were assigned to read Antonio Gramsci’s The Intellectuals while paying attention to his particular and influential concept of Hegemony. Dictionary.com’s definition of Hegemony is leadership or predominant influence exercised by one nation over others, as in a confederation. So basically how a group of people rule over other people is what we are looking at and this is clearly seen in Gramsci’s The Intellectuals. He starts off right in the beginning stating that there are “the intellectuals”, “organic intellectuals”, and non-intellectuals. Throughout the whole text this idea of Hegemony is visible with intellects, workers, and everyone else. Schooling even comes in and plays a role. “School is the instrument through which intellectuals of various levels are elaborated.” People are getting ranked and put into categories here and there with people at the top ruling them. I don’t know why but I still see people falling into different classes and from a Marxist point of view there shouldn’t be. The other readings we had to do also showed hegemony with “Rudolph’s Shiny New Economy”, “Girl”, and “Dickens’ Great Expectations”. By Looking at things from a Marxist point of view everything actually means something else. It is like there is an ulterior message in things. E.g. all of the things that are pointed out in “Rudolph’s Shiny New Economy.” How Rudolph represents this, Herbie represents that, and even the Abominable Snowman represents something. I always thought Rudolph was just a Christmas story and that it was just made to promote Christmas. Here in the reading they represent Marxist ideas like how Herbie is an elf who wants to be a dentist but he can’t. Then Santa is the leader and he makes everything work. I guess sometimes we need a leader to ensure that things move along and work out smoothly. I only briefly talked about the aspects of Marxism. There were many Marxist things in "Girl" and "Dickens' Great Expectations" as well.