The Crisis of Hegemony and Counter-hegemony under Transnational Capitalism

This paper explores the issue of hegemony under transnational capitalism. It conceptualizes how transnational accumulation and supraterritorial space has altered capitalism in general and its hegemony in particular. It aims to provide a framework of understanding and analyzing the way globalization has reshaped the terrain and parameters of social, economic and political relations both at the national and the global levels, and exerted pressure on the resilient and hegemonic capacities of capitalism. It proposes to examine the ways social relations of domination, subordination and organic interplay are produced, maintained, decomposed and delinked while continuously undergoing transformations. Inspired by the Gramscian and Polanyian theoretical and analytical categories, the paper analyses the fading "organic" linkage between state, market and civil society under transnational capitalism. It concludes that transnational capitalism is creating serious dual contradictions: the crisis of both hegemony and counter-hegemony. Transnational capitalism is not able to create a "transnational hegemony" similar to that under nation-state capitalism, nor is it able to foster a transnational consensual power of civil society and organic counter-hegemony social forces. Rather, transnational capitalism is producing the opposite result: reducing the legitimacy of capitalism's hegemony and limiting its resilient capacities while creating non-organic counterhegemonic movements in various forms and directions including fundamentalism and terrorism.