Through upgrading the concept of hegemony—understanding the importance of passive consent; the complexity of political interests; and the structural force of technology—Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams offer us an updated theory of power for the twenty-first century.

They suggest a viral campaign or mass global boycott, although they don’t see this happening any time soon. Gilbert and Williams argue, however, that Gramsci’s concepts, especially if updated to accommodate the complexity of the contemporary world, are crucial for analysing power relations in the current conjuncture.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. They warn that neoliberal values, policies, and worldviews have been deeply embedded in the infrastructures that have been created by platform technology and that even if neoliberalism ceases to be the dominant paradigm, it will take time to undo. Nevertheless, they also argue that while platform capitalism poses major challenges for progressive politics, it may offer more opportunities than post-Fordism did for collective organisation. While Gilbert and Williams discuss the creation of new coalitions and alliances in response to the slow death of neoliberalism, there are some surprising omissions. A really useful work using the concept of hegemony as theorised by Gramsci and others to analyse the current state of society and politics in (primarily) the UK and US and set out a future strategy for the left, broadly conceived.

When I heard Jeremy Gilbert talking about this book on the Politics Theory Other podcast it sounded really exciting. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Symbolised by the shock of Trump’s victory in the US and the Brexit vote in the UK, politics has seemed somewhat incomprehensible.In doing so, they are in danger of undermining their own analytic position as well as potentially slipping into a well-worn academic nostalgia for 1968 as the one true authentic protest moment. Alex Williams is a political theorist and lecturer in digital media and society currently based at the University of East Anglia. Through upgrading the concept of hegemony – understanding the importance of passive consent; the complexity of political interests; and the structural force of technology – Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams offer us an updated theory of power for the twenty-first century. In particular, the lack of some of the key protest movements and platforms for change that have occurred since the 2008 financial crash.

Gilbert and Williams] have done a brilliant job stripping away much of the complexity that makes post and neo-Marxist language so difficult to engage with for ordinary mortals .Gilbert and Williams’ main contentions are that in the 21st-century, the interests of technology firms and finance capital have converged and become mutually reinforcing.

Another is debt, which works to reduce the horizon of possibilities that individual subjects can imagine as realisable. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit. Hegemony Now is split into three parts, the first outlining the securing of neoliberal hegemony in the 20th century by big tech and financial capital, going back to the end of the post-war settlement and 1968 in particular as the ‘most intense phase’ of a longer conflict (13). A landmark piece of work combining theoretical rigour and innovation with a magisterial mapping of the landscape of contemporary power.Gilbert and Williams argue that while many have seen this consent as having to be active (and critiqued Gramsci for this), they do not. We cannot change anything until we have a better understanding of how power works, who holds it, and why that matters. Nonetheless, the macro political analysis contained in Hegemony Now is incredibly valuable and adds much to the debates around the potential demise of neoliberalism. And while it is reasonable to argue that Occupy was not effective because of its lack of demands, it did, as Kate Crehan and others have argued, make a dent in the triumphalist hegemonic narratives that developed after 1989 in ‘the long 1990s’ (119-120).