The war in the Middle East has initiated a struggle to develop a non-Western “common sense” within the international order.
Unlike Structural Marxism which argued that the economic mode of production acts as the foundation of any society; Neo-Marxism lays emphasis on the idea that culture plays an equally important role in shaping the foundations of any society, sometimes playing a more consequential role than economics.
The Unraveling of Hegemony
Antonio Gramsci, the Italian philosopher and neo-Marxist thinker argued in his work The Prison Notebooks that the dominant classes of a society remain in power not only through the exercise of coercion through the institutions of political society like military, police, and the courts of law, but also through the generation of legitimacy for their rule through the shrewd use of institutions of civil society like educational institutions, places of worship, cinema, and mass media, among others. This is meant to advance a conception of existence through ideas where conditions of injustice appear as justice, resulting in the dominant class being given the permission to rule on behalf of the struggling masses. He calls such ideas common sense, which ultimately generates hegemony.
With regard to the ongoing war, liberalism’s objective through the action of the Zionist-White Nationalist duo was to paint an impression that the campaign was a just war through a relentless media, political, and cultural campaign of highlighting Iranian “excesses” and the righteousness of liberal interventionism. However, the airstrike at a school in Minab that killed over a hundred innocent children coupled with the high death toll of civilians in air operations over the subsequent months has effectively shattered the liberal promise of civilian protection. To make matters worse, the Israeli head of state, Benjamin Netanyahu has called ‘regime-change’ one of the primary goals of the Israel’s war against Iran, mimicking what its staunchest ally America has done to so many sovereign states over the years.
Organic Crisis & New Common Sense
The failure to generate global consent for their military campaign marks the collapse of the Western intellectual and moral leadership. What was presented as a just war has turned out to be nothing but a smokescreen—an attempt to distort the real, exploitative image of liberalism. In this context, the American-Israeli duo is suffering from what Gramsci termed an organic crisis. This idea posits that when the dominant class is unable to sustain its rule through the institutions of civil society, it uses coercion—the hallmark of political society which is nothing but the exercise of naked power.
Military aggression and sanctions can no longer function as tools to defend a global consensus the duo is attempting to achieve; rather, they reveal two declining powers trying to enforce compliance only through destruction.
This crisis of authority has opened up ample space for the Global South to launch a strategic War of Position—a prolonged struggle to hijack, dismantle, and eventually replace the very same institutions of civil society the West has used for creating consent for its rule—politically, culturally, and ideationally. In this regard, through the furthering of alternative financial regimes, sovereign media networks, cultural institutions, multilateral platforms like SCO, BRICS, and G77, the Global South is trying to establish counter-hegemony, starting right from the grassroots level.
This counter-hegemonic project rejects the universalist and atomized premise that liberal internationalism as an ideology represents universal human progress. In its place, it argues that legitimacy lies in civilizational preservation, the right of self-determination, and the protection of sovereign decision-making power.
Pranay Kumar Shome, a research analyst who is a PhD candidate at Mahatma Gandhi Central University, Bihar, India
Follow new articles on our Telegram channel
