The Struggle for a New Common Sense

The war in the Middle East has initiated a struggle to develop a non-Western “common sense” within the international order.

Unlike Structural Marxism which argued that the economic mode of production acts as the foundation of any society; Neo-Marxism lays emphasis on the idea that culture plays an equally important role in shaping the foundations of any society, sometimes playing a more consequential role than economics.

The Unraveling of Hegemony

Antonio Gramsci, the Italian philosopher and neo-Marxist thinker argued in his work The Prison Notebooks that the dominant classes of a society remain in power not only through the exercise of coercion through the institutions of political society like military, police, and the courts of law, but also through the generation of legitimacy for their rule through the shrewd use of institutions of civil society like educational institutions, places of worship, cinema, and mass media, among others. This is........

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