Geoscience Reference
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to novels to public rituals - what Marx sometimes called the 'super-
structure' of society in which people's beliefs and values were condi-
tioned and contained. This superstructure, Marx (and Friedrich Engels)
argued in
The German ideology
(1846/1976), misrepresented the reali-
ties of class inequality upon which the capitalist economy ('the base')
depended. This is because the content of superstructural discourses
and signs was controlled by capitalists who sought to legitimise their
interests and ensure social order by concealing this inequality. For
example, the concept of the entrepreneur that gained currency in
nineteenth-century Europe and North America was, in Marx's view, a
misrepresentation of the real conditions in which economic agents are
obliged to exist in a capitalist society. Far from being 'free' to become
successful entrepreneurs through their guile and inventiveness, most
people were consigned to a life of selling their capacity to work (their
labour power) to others for a wage (often a very low one). This con-
signment, Marx argued, was based on the 'original sin' of 'primitive
accumulation' - an eighteenth-century process of separating people
from the 'means of production' that involved 'hard power' (e.g. physi-
cal enclosure of land, the dispossession of farmers) and which created
a class of asset-less people 'free' to work for capitalists. In summary,
for Marx, 'ideology' was a mesh of ideas and representations that sus-
tained ruling class interests by obscuring the inequities those interests
depended on. Today he might point to the discourse of 'sustainable
consumption' as ideological. It invites consumers to believe - wrongly
Marx would doubtless argue - that ceaseless commodity consumption
and environmental protection are compatible.
My gloss of Marx is necessarily brief to the point of being inade-
quate, but I've said enough to introduce Gramsci's particular concep-
tion of soft power. Writing in the 1920s and 1930s in Italy, he proposed
a subtler and more 'positive' conception of ideology than that associ-
ated with the Marxism of his day. He was unsatisfied with the ideas that
(1) ruling ideologies operate without much dissent; (2) they are deter-
mined by dominant class interests of the bourgeoisie; and (3) ideologies
are 'negative' (they always hide or conceal things so as to disadvantage
large sections of a society). Gramsci wrote at a time when national states
were far more socially powerful and visible to citizens than in Marx's
day, when 'civil society' was denser, and when Marxism itself had suc-
cessfully challenged capitalist ideology (notably in Russia in 1917 when
communists led by Lenin had taken control of the country). He was
interested in how social power was not so much imposed as
negotiated
by ruling groups and institutions. His notions of 'hegemony' (rule by
consent), 'historic bloc' and 'war of position' all spoke to how power
was exercised in complex societies marked by a range of often colliding
