Marx analyzed the dynamics by which employers profit from workers’ labor, predicting that this exploitation would inevitably spark a revolution. A logical conclusion, it would seem—yet most workers have not revolted over the past hundred years, nor are they revolting today. Marx also predicted that European societies with the highest proportion of workers, such as Germany and the United Kingdom, would move toward socialism. Yet they turned to fascism, while the socialist revolution took place in Russian society, which had a low proportion of workers.

This contradiction preoccupied the leader of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci. He spent his years in Mussolini’s prisons analysing it and concluded that authorities exercise not only coercive, material, violent hegemony but also cultural hegemony. They shape and propagate a system of values and beliefs that portrays reality as common sense—And once society comes to view reality as inescapable, it accepts it. If we realize that a class has imposed a system to exploit us, we realize that the solution lies in confronting that class and dismantling that system. But if we consider what is happening to be inevitable, why waste our energy trying to change it?

Societies in Palestine, the Global South and even the world are captive to the cultural hegemony of inevitabilities and the spirit of resignation it fosters.

Societies in Palestine, the Global South and even the world are captive to the cultural hegemony of inevitabilities and the spirit of resignation it fosters.

The colony is killing and expanding; Lebanon is powerless; Syria has gone from bad to worse; Iran was unable to stop the genocide—or did not even try; China and Russia, like the United States and Europe, pursue their own interests. Normalization is underway, society is sectarian, and decisions are imposed from above. With so many absolutes, how can there be hope?

But hope, too, is part of the hegemony of inevitabilities. “Right will........

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