Hegemony and Social Agency

Question 1 Why can it be argued that the conflicts depicted in the documentary Ballot Measure 9 are characteristically modern conflicts? What are some of the main social contradictions depicted by the video? Based on the Marshall Berman reading, what might either Jean Jacque Rousseau, Karl Marx or Friedrich Nietzche say about these conflicts, if they could see this video? Hegemony and Social Agency Many people, as they learn more about the global social problems facing humanity, feel frustrated and helpless. The problems seem so big and complex, what can anyone do? What can an individual do? One reason for frustration is the idea, often taken from Hollywood movies, that the fundamental unit of social agency is the individual actor. While it is true that individuals can sometimes make a big difference, sociologists would point out that social agency —the capacity to act in order to initiate social change— even in these cases depends on social cooperation. Individuals who make a big difference are usually really good at cooperating and getting others to cooperate with them. You may remember the photograph of the lone student in China standing up in front of tank in Tiannamen Square which has been circulated widely by the North American media. Sociologists point out that this undoubtedly courageous and heroic act of resistance nevertheless depended on the cooperation of thousands of people at Tiannamen Square and millions of others in unions and other organizations supporting the students. Consequently, sociologists sometimes make a distinction between individual behaviour (what an individual does, in a given situation, idiosynchratically), social practices (what many or most people do in accordance with norms or rules) and social agency (how people act in order to change the ground rules of the social institutions by which they live). In the face of individual helplessness and frustration, the evidence we have that social agency is real and possible is the fact that the world has changed. If the world has changed, then some people must have changed it. If some people have changed the world, then so can I. To this line of reasoning that countless people in modern times have worked out for themselves, sociologists add the importance of cooperation. Individuals, social groups and classes become social actors possessing social agency through the institutions and traditions to which they belong, for institutions and traditions sustain diverse modes of cooperation, the basic motor of social agency. Social institutions are often formal and possess a legal status (eg. nation-states, corporations, professional organizations, political parties, churches, mosques etc.) but not always (some sports clubs, arts organizations, support groups and other networks etc.). Such social institutions and networks therefore provide people with modes of social agency, some more effective than others. Cultural traditions are usually passed down from one generation to the next. The generation which inherits a tradition always reinvents it in some way (such as ecological or feminist values). But sometimes they are almost entirely new inventions (such as patriotic national traditions, traditions of consumption, youth subcultures). Social movements rely heavily on cultural traditions and often influence, or at least carry out a struggle inside, social institutions. For these reasons, social movements are crucial to turning individuals and groups of people into social agents. Furthermore, it follows from our discussion of hegemony and patriarchy that social agency entails some form of struggle over hegemony. The powers that be must struggle to maintain their rule and leadership. Whereas popular and democratic forces undertake counter-hegemonic contestation involving new forms of solidarity and alliance (which all require cooperation where there was none before). With respect to the global problem or issue you are studying, you will need to find out which specific social institutions and cultural traditions activate social agents. Which • nation-states • multinational corporations • global agencies (World Bank, U.N., I.M.F., W.T.O. etc.) • local cooperatives and associations, unions, etc. • NGOs • anti-systemic social movements, political parties, cultural traditions are are the releveant social actors? You will furthermore need to find out how available forms of social agency are organized into hegemonic blocs, where the pressure points are where struggles, protest and contestation are already taking place. Lastly you will need to try to understand how some people may be excluded from available forms of social agency. For meaningful change to outpace the status quo, some new configuration of political forces will need to enter the field of contestation. Often the key to this involves the inclusion of those who are presently excluded from the available forms of social agency, or, at least, new modes of cooperation. Here, the democratic character of the forms of social agency being invented becomes an important consideration. Replenishing social capital by inventing new ways of cooperating need to also restore political capital by deepening and widening democratic ways of doing things in order to be counter-hegemonic, at least according to one major value of modernity.