Cultural hegemony

Malawi is in perennial state of crisis. Widespread poverty, dysfunctional services like health care, economy, security, infrastructure, the list goes on and on. This situation is disadvantageous for the large majority of the population. But there is a group of people who profiteer from the poverty of the majority. Those people need to keep the situation as it is, to maintain their advantageous position, against the interest of the large majority. The truth of the matter is, that these people are exactly the people who have the power to improve the country. It is the ruling class who has an interest in keeping us oppressed, and keeping us poor. (Even the working middle class is paid much lower wages here than in developed countries for comparable work). These powerful people need to reproduce the system as it is: old people die, new technologies are introduced, young people enter the job market every day. This creates development of one kind or another: positive or negative, everything flows (panta rei). So to keep things as they are, the ruling class cannot sit back and enjoy their opulent lifestyle. Against the continuous renewal of society, they need to actively intervene to keep their advantageous position. They need to keep on teaching people the mores of the current order, to keep their advantageous position stable.

On the one hand they use physical repression, through the police, justice system, prisons and in last instance the army. But this is expensive both in money and in other resources. So it is more advantageous for them to get us to cooperate with their interests, against our own interests.

The way to so this is: They infuse us with an ideology in which the current state of affairs (them rich and powerful, us poor and dis-empowered)  is presented as the natural state of affairs, and beneficial for all. They come up with standards like “respect for authority”, “democracy”, “justice”, “development project”, “national interest” and more. These are implicitly used in the media, official speeches, school curriculum, books, you name it. It works stronger when these standards are not explicitly explained, but simply taken for granted. It is not that in every article on social deviance, the journalist tells us we have to obey the law. It is simply expected of us, that we despise those who do not conform to the current order.

This is called cultural hegemony.

How can they control all these writers, presenters, preachers, fathers and others who control us in these Ideological State apparatuses? The powerful people in the State control education. Even private schools have to train for the national exams according to the national curriculum. This is full of ideology, for the status quo, which is to the advantage of the current ruling class. Then all middle level functionaries have been indoctrinated with the ruling class doctrine of obedience, and the expectation that the State is benevolent for all. A journalist can get worked up over a case of corruption. But the journalist has learned to expect the state to be in principle benevolent, and advantageous for all. So that the criminal who steals our tax money is seen as an aberration. And the Justice who keeps the poor on remand, and lets the rich off after bribing or getting bail is seen as an aberration. But the whole set up of the State is never questioned. In school, in the media, from the sermon we learn to not question these underlying issues. We learn to see abuse of power as an incident. But when you look at our society you see that this abuse is not an incident, it is systemic. The whole set up of our society is full of systemic abuse of power, violence! Economic violence where hard working people are kept in abject poverty. Physical (and deadly!) violence when we protested in 2011. Mental violence, when we are being exposed to censored development materials, and propaganda in the media. We are being oppressed by a few rich old men (and even fewer rich old women). The majority of the population is female. The majority of the population is young. The majority of the population is poor. The majority of the population is dis-empowered. But if you check our media, you see an overwhelming majority of rich old powerful men representing our nation. This shows how also the media are complicit in holding our society back, and letting us be arbitrarily ruled by these rich old powerful men (and very few women).