Deconstructing the Hegemony; Reconstructing the Pluriverse — II

Exploring Hegemony’s playbook through different lenses

We are Forests by Shilo Shiv Suleman

To re-member and co-create [a Life-Sustaining Civilization], it is absolutely essential to accept the decolonial vision of a pluriversal planet where the edges and the margins flow into the center. To be precise, there is no center. It is a vast network of living and thriving ebb and flow of intermingling and interconnected narratives and cosmologies shaping life. It is neither a dogma nor an ‘ism’. It fetishises neither the market nor profit.’ ~ The Dangers of a Single Story - Part III

I believe participatory democracy is a myth in a world largely run by a Eurocentric and hegemonic monomyth predicated solely on economic growth and profit. The very foundations of a regenerative world cannot be created unless it’s a pluriversal one. Hegemony and regeneration are inherently contradictory philosophies: the former seeks to exploit, expropriate, expand, and exclude; the latter seeks to include, bring alive, and go beyond anthropocentrism to ecocentrism.

All efforts to co-create and design a pluriversal and regenerative world will be thwarted by hegemonic forces; sometimes overtly and explicitly but often covertly and imperceptibly, disguised in benign garbs. Therefore, in this part, I have tried to shed light on some of the more covert and unquestioned methods used by the hegemonic powers to maintain the dominant narrative.

Before that, let me try to summarize why I am taking the pains to write so much about hegemony and its invisible building blocks. I believe, we cannot deliberately de-design and dismantle hegemony unless we understand and learn to see its manifestations. The crude and brutish colonial presence of the past was easy to see and resist. However, the more subtler forms of coercion and control that permeate every facet of our lives are more difficult to pin down. And for this to happen, it is important to understand the building blocks of the hegemonic narrative.

We tend to see hegemony through different lenses depending on our interests and areas of experience and expertise — for some dismantling the hegemony will sound like degrowth, for others, it is social justice; for some it is decolonization, and for others, ecofeminism. What is critical to understand is that they are all interlinked parts of a vision for a world that is post-hegemonic, post-growth, beyond anthropocentric, and truly life-sustaining and life-affirming. No matter where we stand, we are all in this together. The hegemony serves no one except a handful of billionaires and tech barons.

In this part, I will continue with the dismantling of the The Playbook of Hegemony so that we are better equipped to spot the patterns, connect the dots, and see the linkages between seemingly disparate and discrete areas of our lives. As I have mentioned in the previous part, dismantling the hegemony requires understanding certain criteria. I have added four more here to the earlier six.

1. Eschewing the myth of human supremacy (anthropocentrism) and the hierarchy of humans (its usually called racism, casteism, etc.). In this context, I recommend reading Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
2. Recognizing that the Eurocentric ontology, epistemology, and cosmology are just one among many
3. Acknowledging that its self-proclaimed universality and superiority is a facade, a myth.
4. Renouncing the conviction that the world must be conceived of as a unified totality; stop playing the ‘god trick’ as Donna Haraway eloquently put it.
5. Accepting that many ontologies (ways of being and relating), many worldviews, and many epistemologies (knowledge systems and ways of knowing) exist.
6. Realizing that when diverse cosmologies, ontologies, and epistemologies are allowed their own place in the civilizational unfolding, only then can we dream of possible futures different from the hegemonic past.
7. Recognizing that the unheard, unseen, unacknowledged voices from the borders and edges carry the seeds of a post-hegemonic world; they are delegitimized and silenced for a reason.
8. Rejecting the projection of humans as isolated individuals in endless competition with each other.
9. Renouncing the endless cycles of consumerism and meaningless production, and the apparatuses put in place to turn us into mindless consumers (the entire industry of advertisement and marketing)
10. Recognizing that the hegemonic forces want us to feel there is no other alternative, and that it is the biggest con game ever.

In part 1, I roughly sketched out the rise of the Eurocentric imperial-colonial power, and its imposition as a hegemonic force through colonization of the greater part of what is known as the ‘Global South.’ I also highlighted how Global South was forced to become the provider of raw materials and cheap/free labor (and I am not even getting into the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade that practically built America) as well as a captive market for Europe’s products. Colonies like India were also forced to grow the cash crops required for wealth accumulation by the Empire.

This meant, for example, demolition of the existing agricultural system and seasonal food crops to grow cash crops like Indigo (required as a dye by the textile manufacturing industry of Great Britain) and Opium at industrial scale. Opium was forced on China with the intention of creating a docile population addicted to this drug who could then be manipulated to do ‘trade’ with the Empire. I highly recommend reading the Ibis trilogy by Amitav Ghosh: Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire. Apart from being eminently readable, they are excellent documents of a period of colonial history that spans the subcontinents of India, China, and the metropole, Europe. The trilogy shows the interlinked chain of events that caused the Opium Wars, the rise of indentured labor, and the demolition of the economy and ecology of country.

Often, a myth of subservience is perpetuated to show that the oppressed did not resist. This is however blatantly false. A play Nil Darpan (The Indigo Mirror) highlighting the plight of farmers and bringing it to the notice of the elites of Kolkata was shut down for abetting Indigo Revolt, a farmers’ uprising to reclaim their rights.

Ryots were forced to plant indigo, a crop which was in demand by the international textile industry but which degraded the land. They had to take out loans and sell the crop to planters at fixed (low) prices, forcing them into a cycle of debt and economic dependence that was often enforced with violence. The play reflected the realities of intimidation, exploitation, violence (including sexual violence), and lack of redress through the judicial system experienced by many in Bengal.” ~The Indigo Revolt

In short, through a combination of siphoning away raw materials, forcing the abjectly poor into indentured labor, and selling back the finished products to the colony, Europe accumulated massive wealth that helped materialize its Industrial Revolution while laying waste to vast parts of the Global South. I highly recommend reading Shashi Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire: What the British did to India to understand the machinations and manifestations of imperial colonization.

This is to highlight a few instances of constant exploitation and intimidation that accompanied the colonization of India, and other countries of the Global South. Another tool in the colonizer’s toolkit of oppression was ‘famine’. Today, this is playing out in Gaza as the hegemonic powers of Israel and its supporters deliberately prevent aid from entering. UN agency says 40 percent of Gaza’s population ‘at risk of famine’.

Israel’s war in Gaza has created a humanitarian catastrophe, with half of the population of about 2.2 million at risk of starvation and 90 percent saying that they regularly go without food for a whole day, the United Nations said in a recent report.

This is not an article on history, but an attempt to show the ingrained violence that accompanies colonization and the many tools in its arsenal. This violence takes many forms that can be primarily classified under:

1. Outright genocide of indigenous peoples as happened e.g., in the Americas
2. Violent Ecocide in the form of destruction of the natural cycles of agriculture and nature that happened almost everywhere, and I have just highlighted above. I recommend reading Vandana Shiva’s work for a more comprehensive understanding, primarily Staying Alive Women, Ecology and Survival in India and Soil Not Oil: Climate Change, Peak Oil and Food Insecurity; Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything is a fascinating exploration of capitalism’s impact on global warming. All the books mentioned call out the hegemonic monomyth built on the nexus of big money, big tech, big pharma, politics, and power.
3. Ongoing Epistemicide that is a form of invisible violence that has never stopped. This is a term coined by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, which implies the irreparable loss of knowledge through exclusion, silencing, and deliberate distortion and misrepresentation of all epistemologies — especially those of the Global South — that were in contradiction to the dominant myth.

Fast forward to the present. Let’s admit that it is not easy to maintain hegemony. It requires a lot of hard work, lobbying, cunning, money, and a pathological lust for power. Oh yes, also a sense of entitled supremacy. However, even the most imperial colonialists know that its maintenance requires an ongoing participation of people, and this needs to be achieved through various means. I have touched upon some of the explicit ones so far. The implicit ones are even more insidious because they are invisible, and often camouflaged as beneficial. I have briefly covered a few to highlight the influence and impact they have on society at large.

Philanthropy. this is one of the tools in the hegemony’s arsenal. Look at all the philanthropic work of foundations — Rockefeller, Ford, Bills and Melinda Gates, just to name a few. Let’s take Rockefeller, for example: “Through a network of over 13 foundations, 75 family trusts and other mechanisms of high finance, the Rockefellers maintain a dominant interest in some of the world’s largest oil companies: the Standard Oil companies of New Jersey, Indiana and California and Mobil Oil; the second largest U.S. commercial bank, Chase Manhattan; the second and third largest U.S. life insurance companies, Metropolitan and Equitable; Eastern Air Lines, Consolidated Natural Gas, Union Tank Car, Itek and the world’s largest real estate development, Rockefeller Center.”

When Bill Gates pours money into Africa for feeding the poor in Africa and preventing famine, he’s pushing the failed Green Revolution, he’s pushing chemicals, pushing GMOs, pushing patents,” tells Vandana Shiva to FRANCE 24’s Marc Perelman. ~An Interview with Vandana Shiva

Philanthropist billionaires are not really interested in shifting or transforming the status quo. In fact, they are vehemently against it. Their main aim is to maintain, perpetuate, and imperceptibly block all other alternatives so that their profit and capital accumulation do not reduce. Vandana Shiva calls this ‘philanthro-capitalism’. I also recommend reading Vandana Shiva’s Philanthrocapitalism and the Erosion of Democracy: A Global Citizens Report on the Corporate Control of Technology, Health, and Agriculture

When corporate-endowed foundations first made their appearance in the United States, there was a fierce debate about their provenance, legality, and lack of accountability. People suggested that if companies had so much surplus money, they should raise the wages of their workers. (People made these outrageous suggestions in those days, even in America.) The idea of these foundations, so ordinary now, was in fact a leap of the business imagination. Non-tax-paying legal entities with massive resources and an almost unlimited brief — wholly unaccountable, wholly nontransparent — what better way to parlay economic wealth into political, social, and cultural capital, to turn money into power?

What better way for usurers to use a minuscule percentage of their profits to run the world? How else would Bill Gates, who admittedly knows a thing or two about computers, find himself designing education, health, and agriculture policies, not just for the US government but for governments all over the world?” ~Arundhati Roy, Capitalism: A Ghost Story

Philanthropy by the elites is often a means of maintaining and capturing social and political power. It ensures that the status quo remains unquestioned, and the so called ‘developing nations’ are duly grateful. “The common assumption that philanthropy automatically results in a redistribution of money is wrong. A lot of elite philanthropy is about elite causes. Rather than making the world a better place, it largely reinforces the world as it is. Philanthropy very often favours the rich — and no one holds philanthropists to account for it.” ~How Philanthropy benefits the super-rich

Dig a little deep, and you will see that the philanthropists seek to control the global narrative by any means at their disposal. “Pursuit of profit by Western companies — and their political allies — stalled South Africa’s fight against HIV” reported Ed Vuillamy in How drug giants let millions die of Aids. The article reveals a sleazy nexus of politics, big pharma, and big money across the key imperialist powers.

My intention is to highlight the myriad ways that the Empire retains control; the invisible ways that hegemony stays unchallenged and unfettered, insidiously disguised and disseminated.

Propaganda. This is the most favored tool in their arsenal. Billionaires have been buying up media houses like candies from a local store. Needless to say, billionaires owning media is bad for democracy. This doesn’t require much explanation, and material on this abound on the Internet. Propaganda is all about ‘perception management’ and the manufacturing of consent. This has now been elevated to an art form by state-sponsored and billionaire-supported media houses. Some direct quotes from Noam Chomsky’s, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media shows the crafty and deceptive use of media in maintaining the status quo, the dominant narrative, and overarching invisible hegemony.

The beauty of the system, however, is that such dissent and inconvenient information are kept within bounds and at the margins, so that while their presence shows that the system is not monolithic, they are not large enough to interfere unduly with the domination of the official agenda.

Large corporate advertisers on television will rarely sponsor programs that engage in serious criticisms of corporate activities, such as the problem of environmental degradation, the workings of the military-industrial complex, or corporate support of and benefits from Third World tyrannies.

“Genocide” is an invidious word that officials apply readily to cases of victimization in enemy states, but rarely if ever to similar or worse cases of victimization by the United States itself or allied regimes.

Finally, mass media plays a huge role in maintaining the consumerist culture, which is precisely the gameplan of large corporations and the politicians. Depoliticized, isolated, insecure, and atomized individuals will hardly construe any threat to the current hegemony; whereas, a thinking, well-informed, connected and caring community of people can upend the very status quo.

This is precisely what is happening as the propaganda machines run aground, their willful deception made visible. People across the world are taking to the streets, posing a serious threat to the current hegemonic power balance. The nation-states of the Global North — the upholders of the hegemonic order — are imploding from within.

Education. This has, of course, been long recognized as a machine of production creating well trained minds to serve the various areas of the hegemony and support its expansion and maintenance. Colonization of education began as early as colonial invasion. The hegemonic power realized the importance of controlling young minds from early on: a) to prevent any disruptive thoughts and questions from arising that would inconvenience the invading power; b) to train the upcoming generation to think favorably of the occupying power; c) to create workers who understand the necessities and dynamics of the evolving colonizing entity.

This resulted in generations across the global south untethered from their own epistemologies and ontologies, and indoctrinated into a worldview that was not only alien but also falsely presented as universal, superior, and the only way of to understand reality.

However, imposing this dominant worldview through the education system often required violence as documented by the unmarked graves of Canada’s residential school system for the indigenous children. “The school system was created to isolate Indigenous children from the influence of their own culture and religion in order to assimilate them into the dominant Canadian culture. Over the course of the system’s more than hundred-year existence, around 150,000 children were placed in residential schools nationally.” The schools, scattered across the country, were aimed at eradicating the culture and languages of the country’s Indigenous populations.

Thomas Babington Macaulay became famous in India for Macaulayism, which refers to the policy of introducing the English education system to British colonies. I was born a couple of decades after India gained independence, and grew up in a completely Macaulified education system. This meant I read more of Shakespeare and Wordsworth than Gandhi or Tagore. It has been a painful and uphill battle to familiarize myself with the roots of my own culture and my mother tongue.

Having said that, let me acknowledge that I don’t regret learning about another worldview; I regret that it had to be an imposition of a manner that sought to give the Western worldview primacy while erasing all others, and especially those that appeared contradictory.

The maintenance of hegemony is thus a highly interlinked project, and requires taking over of and productization of education in a way that is invisible to us. Today, most universities across the world are bent on ‘corporatizing’ their syllabus; education is seen through the lens of market value. Liberal arts and humanities feature low down the scale in the world of free market capitalism. Suddenly, STEM education is the in thing. Now, one has to make an economic case for education. The demands of big businesses become trends in education with parents paying eyewatering fees to make sure their children can make a living. The entire education system is deeply implicated in maintaining the hegemony, and the status que ensures it stays that way.

That education was to be an innovative mechanism for the attainment of foreign policy objectives as proposed by Senator Fulbright in the midst of military demobilization from World War II with legislation to “commit the United States government deeply to international education but, at the same time, in a sophisticated way to integrate such educational activity into foreign policy of the nation”. ~Education As A Strategy in Foreign Policy of the United State

To this day, being a Fulbright Scholar carries enormous credibility and prestige. While there is undoubtedly rigor and excellence required to attain the scholarship, I wonder how it also influences and maintains the hold of hegemony over young minds.

Can this become a vehicle of a truly pluriversal world-sensing where myriad and diverse ontologies, epistemologies, and cosmo-visions are celebrated, integrated, and woven together in a matrix of learning that celebrates our indelible interconnectedness?

This is by no stretch of the imagination a comprehensive overview of the tools used by the hegemony to assure its continued propagation. This is more like an overview and glimpses of the some of the most visible. Needless to say, the hegemonster has penetrated all the recesses of our lives — education, healthcare, economics, ecology, politics, and even spirituality. Everything has a price tag attached; ‘thingification’* is the norm; efficiency, the mantra; Otherization, the goal; and oppression and isolation, the price.

However, the tides are visibly turning. The people are on the streets. Voices can no longer be silenced. For all its ills, social media has democratized communication and broken through the barricades of propaganda. The hegemony is unraveling. Its facades have flaked off exposing the sordid and immoral underbelly. Nonetheless, we still have a long way to go. And we have to be ready to midwife the futures that are seeking to be born.

Once again, we are in a liminal space filled with possibilities and potential. But as Antonio Gramsci wrote: The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’. We have to look out for the morbid symptoms; and actively build capacities to deliberately design for a pluriversal world in our spheres of activity and influence.

Today, I believe, it is important to recognize that colonialism and neocolonialism is no longer geographically dictated; the modus operandi of colonization and the narrative of hegemony have now been appropriated by a handful through the tools of neoliberal capitalism. The rest of us are products, manipulated and colonized in various ways, whether we sense it or not. Therefore, this article is not only about decolonization of the Global South but decolonization of our collective humanity, our imagination, and our planet.

*In a treatise on Discourse on Colonialism, Aime Cesaire writes:

Between colonizer and colonized there is room only for forced labor, intimida­tion, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape, compulsory crops, contempt, mis­trust, arrogance, self-complacency, swinishness, brainless elites, degraded masses. No human contact, but relations of domination and submission which turn the colonizing man into a classroom monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production.

My turn to state an equation: colonization = “thingification.”