Hegemony Now (part one) - w/ Jeremy Gilbert
Jeremy Gilbert returns to PTO to talk about his new book - co-authored with Alex Williams - Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (And How We Win it Back). In part one of our three part conversation we talked about Antonio Gramsci's notion of Hegemony and how, in the view of Jeremy and Alex, we live in an era in which an alliance between big tech and finance structures the global economy and whose values suffuse the cultural field. We talked about why tech and finance play the leading role in the global economy, in a way that does not characterise the energy sector or other extractive industries. We also discussed why - in contrast to tech and finance - neither the New Left of the 1960s, nor the New Right associated with the Reagan and Thatcher administrations got the world they wanted by the century's end, even if they achieved certain partial victories. We also talk about why Jeremy and Alex argue that the left should appeal to people on the basis of shared collective interests, rather than on the basis of moral values.