The process by which the disempowered are persuaded to participate in their own disempowerment.  It suggests that elites in society have the means of mental and cultural control and production by virtue of their ownership of all of the media of social discourse (education, the Church, the news media etc.) Gramsci first pointed out the capacity of these agencies to achieve a state of hegemony for the ruling class. Unlike other orthodox Marxists, he recognised the paucity of a doctrinaire Marxism which required the economic collapse of society as a precursor to revolutionary change, and saw the control over cultural production as an important vehicle to bring about that change. This theoretical shift moved the Marxist critique away from the economic determinism which it had under Stalin and formed the basis for much of what now passes for post- or neo-Marxist theory. From Gramsci's point of view, the armed repression of the state represented the failure of the dominant culture to achieve hegemony. Hegemony, in this sense, he defined as the process embodied in the ability of the State to create in its citizens a particular moral and ethical attitude corresponding to that espoused by the ruling elite, and thereby to have the mass of the population acquiesce to their own domination.

 

Gramsci's initial theories of hegemony have been later expanded by theorists Foucault, Bourdieu, Chomsky,  Stuart Hall and numerous others.

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