Welcome to Monday Methods.

Sorry for the late post, I had the flu for the last couple of days and within suffering the effects, I was not as efficient as I planned to have been.

Anyways, the topic of today's Monday Methods is Marxism, though not so much the school of political thought that seeks to abolish the private ownership of the means of production but rather as a theory with which historians and other disciplines of the humanities and social sciences approach the analysis and understanding of society.

Marxism as a theoretical approach in its broadest sense might be best characterized as looking at history and society through the lens of material, meaning economic, relationships and how this influences political, social, and other factors and prompts them to change. Following Marx's analysis of capitalism, the idea is that the base (meaning the economic relationships in a society) influence or even determine the superstructure (meaning ideology, politics, social relations, the role of religions etc.).

A social-economic system based on landholders, tenants, and serfs produces, according to Marxist thought, different social and political relationships as well as a different view and understanding of the world. Yet, what all social-economic systems have in common is a conflict between between different groups in their setting based on their interest and position within this social-political-economic structure. These groups are called classes and within modern capitalism, the main classes are the bourgeois, i.e. the people who own the means of production such as facilities, machinery, tools, infrastructural capital and natural capital (the things used to produce economic value), and the proletariat, i.e. the people who have nothing to offer but their labor force. Within the social-political-economic system these groups have opposed interests, which they will struggle over whether it is on the ballot box, in the workplace or in other venues.

Viewing history through this lens can give pertinent insight into how societies change and how economic formations can influence political, social, and other factors. There is a vast variety of different approaches even within Marxism to view history and society but the one I'd like to present today is the concept of hegemony.

Pioneered by Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist, while he was imprisoned in Mussolini's Italy, I felt that hegemony was a pertinent concept because it not only attempts to explain how balance is maintained in an economic system that predicates conflict but also how groups participate in a system in a way that goes against their objective interests, whether these are workers supporting Fascism and thus a system hellbent on destroying unions and empowering certain capitalists or parts of a working class voting for man who literally lives in a golden tower.

Gramsci posits that in order to stay in power a system can not only rely on coercion and force but is also depends on the consent of the governed. As one author summed up Gramsci's concept:

Dominant groups in society, including fundamentally but not exclusively the ruling class, maintain their dominance by securing the 'spontaneous consent' of subordinate groups, including the working class, through the negotiated construction of a political and ideological consensus which incorporates both dominant and dominated groups.

In practice this means that within the political discourse, actors persuade dominated groups of society to accept its own moral, political and cultural values and make them accepted as "common sense", i.e. something that seems like the natural order of things and thereby indisputable.

The concrete content of hegemony as well as how it is attained vary from area to area, from point in time to point in time but when we ask the question for hegemony e.g. for the Nazi state, we must research what kind of mixture of coercion and propaganda, media etc. lead German society to accept Nazi rule and its anti-Semitism. So, Gramsci's concept of hegemony becomes a useful lens to better understand historical and contemporary societies.

Gramsci's concept has gone on to enjoy a certain popularity among historians of a post-colonial approach as well as in the field of cultural studies. Raymond Williams one of the fathers of mode4rn cultural studies relied on Gramsci. Eric Hobsbawm, probably the most prominent Marxist historian of the second half of the 20th century, has called Gramsci one of the most influential thinkers he has ever read. His theory is an example on how a Marxist inspired approach can open up new avenues of viewing historical developments and gain insights.

Further reading:

I asked before and got nothing; I thought I'd give it another shot. The Standing Rock pipeline controversy has got me digging into treaty history a bit. In the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, the "country north of the North Platte River and east of the summits of the Big Horn Mountains" is designated as "unceded Indian territory" (Article 16). I would have assumed that meant just that narrowly defined area, but at least two maps I've seen have included what appears to be the territory reserved in the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty as part of the unceded territory. The first one (linked below) says it depicts "other Sioux lands as defined in the 1868 treaty, as found by the Indian Claims Commission." So, does this have to do with something the Indian Claims Commission turned up, or am I just reading the treaty wrong?

Maps: