1.3 Ideological power
The final face is ideological power: in this dynamic, power means being able to shape meaning, and influence how people interpret the world. Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s 1981 book Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature highlights the purpose of controlling the thoughts and feelings of the individuals at the receiving end of power. In summary, doing so prevents people in power from needing to explicitly and openly exercise power; it also encourages populations of people to self-manage, meaning that they control themselves. This view of power sees it as widely distributed in any society. It is not just senior people or those with lots of money who maintain power, but most people, through their everyday activities and attitudes. This is how the ‘common sense’ of a society is created – by informal networks of people, institutions and organisations going about their everyday business in ways that re-enforce certain power dynamics.
Political theorist Antonio Gramsci (2005), writing before the Second World War, described this view of power as ‘hegemony’, which is a word indicating a collection of people dispersed across various organisations and tiers of life who exert power over a society. From this perspective power is inescapable, as its ideologies are renewed daily by ordinary and powerful people alike. For example, the power of a hereditary monarchy is maintained not only by the king or queen but by the network of politicians, media, charities, businesses and ordinary people who promote, take an interest in and celebrate royalty. Resisting hegemony can therefore be very difficult because its resources are spread out across a society. However, another implication of interpreting power as hegemony is that it can be more accessible precisely because it is widely distributed. For instance, you could contribute to or resist monarchical power in a range of ways and through a range of organisations – you could join a celebratory street party or a street protest, for example.
Marginalisation
However, certain groups of people do have less access and power, or are even marginalised entirely, as you explored in relation to necropolitics in Week 1. People who are marginalised by dominant power, however, may also have different identities, priorities and values to one another – for example, a climate action pressure group may want economies to shrink while trade unions may want them to grow. Yet if these different groups manage to find some commonalities, they can form a chain of association, building what is known as a ‘counter-hegemony’, which can offer meaningful challenge to power. However, counter-hegemonies can still be absorbed by ruling power – e.g. a government can adopt most of a trade union’s demands but do little to address climate change – thus breaking the internal unity of a counter-hegemony. Or the counter-hegemony can grow in size over time, absorbing greater numbers of people until it is in a position to offer a serious challenge to ruling power – sometimes even taking power for itself.
Housing hegemony
A strong example of hegemony at work exists in relation to housing in the UK. Although a significant proportion of people in the UK pay a disproportionate amount of their monthly income to private landlords, the issue is rarely discussed in any depth by any of the three major UK political parties or by the national media. There is a powerful hegemony at work to maintain this status quo, involving big-money housing developers, politicians, private landlords, media and even many people who own their homes outright. In the UK, owning a property and keeping it as a financial asset is viewed as aspirational, even as ever greater numbers of young people find this goal an impossible one to achieve.
Such an ideological view of housing is re-enforced daily through reality television programmes and the finance columns of newspapers and websites. It is even visible in the dominance of the word ‘property’ as shorthand for a flat or house; property can be anything that someone owns, yet its common use has become synonymous with housing. Alternative models – such as the widespread provision of social housing in Vienna (Austria) and models of regulated renting in Germany – are left undiscussed.
Although Gramsci was a white Italian from Sardinia, race scholar Stuart Hall (2021) believed that his ideas held great value for understanding how race and racism work in society. The power of Gramsci’s ideas is perhaps best illustrated by the oppression he was personally subjected to. Sardinians in Gramsci’s time suffered racism within Italy, with reactionary people, particularly in the north, treating them as inferior. Gramsci, a communist, was considered so dangerous by the ruling fascist party that he was imprisoned for 11 years under grim conditions during the 1920s and 1930s, suffering terrible health and eventually dying as a result.
Hall took Gramsci’s idea of hegemony as a way of exploring how racism works in societies. He stated that racism needed to be understood as something that is widely distributed and systemic, which was kept alive through everyday practices and cultures. Such racism always suit a particular purpose – for example, powerful people creating a panic about refugees entering the UK can distract from other issues affecting the country, related to the economy or public services. The flip side of this argument is that an anti-racist power can be built by engaging and connecting across multiple, dispersed organisations – e.g. charities working with businesses, trade unions and community groups. A counter-hegemony can work from the bottom-up, influencing how people in formal positions of power approach race.
Activity 1 Identifying faces of power
Identify one issue that matters to you at work, in your community or in society at large. Is it extensively addressed by people in power, not addressed at all or somewhere in between? Working through each face of power in turn, make some notes or have a conversation with someone about what is done (or not done) about your issue by people in power.
Comment
For the purposes of the activity, let’s suppose that you are concerned about the rising cost of your gas and electricity bills. You want to better understand how power might create higher energy prices but also how it can be used to lower them.
Decision-making power: Recognising that companies made inflated profits from energy from 2022 the UK Government decided to implement a range of measures to lower people’s bills. It imposed a windfall tax on profits. It announced an Energy Price Guarantee, limiting how much customers could be charged for their energy; an Energy Bills Support Scheme providing a £400 discount for households during the winter; further provisions were put in place for businesses, as many small businesses were facing insolvency, and for people living in poverty.
Non-decision-making power: Neither the government or the main UK-wide opposition parties suggested that parts or all of UK energy be brought under public ownership, as happened in other countries.
Ideological power: Politicians tend to focus on tighter control and management of private energy companies, signalling a broad shared ideology amongst the main UK-wide political parties. Such an ideology may be a commitment to privatised utilities in principle – a belief in the ability of markets to provide efficient and empowering outcomes – or one that does not regard public ownership as a priority.