Hegemony and Wage Labour in the UK Will Stronge A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Brighton for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2020 Abstract: This thesis seeks to determine the relationship between wage labour as a social relation and hegemony (broadly conceived) as a system of asymmetrical power relations. It argues that wage labour is a ‘hegemonic structure’ fundamental to capitalist social relations and for this reason is crucial to accounts of hegemony in a number of ways. The dissertation articulates this thesis from two ‘directions’, that build from engagements with two different theoretical fields: hitherto studies of hegemony on the one hand and theories of the capitalist wage labour process on the other. Firstly it attempts to construct an account of hegemony that coherently includes wage labour by speaking to what I perceive to be a lacuna in the field of study: a sustained engagement with wage labour as a crucial component of capitalist societies and a fortiori any hegemony – or hegemonic situation – that occurs within them. This gap in the field betrays a lack of history in accounts of modern power in (capitalist) societies but also a general neglect of economic logics and their specificity. Secondly, and from the reverse ‘direction’ of argument, the project aims to contribute to an account of wage labour within capitalist social relations by bringing the categories taken from the analysis of hegemony (coercion, consent, organic intellectuals, sedimentation, etc.) to bear on the analysis of the labour process itself, and also by situating the wage labour process within (the wider) mechanisms of hegemony (that operate at larger scales of social relations). The thesis uses the UK as the context through which the arguments are expounded. The thesis concludes with a selection of possible directions for future research, based on the ground established in the foregoing chapters. 2 Contents Introduction p. 5 Chapter One: Gramsci, Hegemony and Wage Labour p. 20 Chapter Two: Gramscism and the Limits of Hegemony p. 67 Chapter Three: Hegemonic Structures and Wage Labour p. 124 Chapter Four: Hegemonic Projects and Wage Labour p. 154 Conclusion p. 194 Bibliography p. 207 3 Acknowledgements I’d like to thank Iain Grant, Alison Assiter, the Phull Set and Kyle Lewis for being important lightning rods and mentors along the path of my philosophical education. I’d like to also thank my supervisors, who had patience and gave me the space to explore many different avenues before settling on this one. Declaration: I declare that the research contained in this thesis, unless otherwise formally indicated within the text, is the original work of the author. The thesis has not been previously submitted to this or any other university for a degree, and does not incorporate any material already submitted for a degree. Signed Dated: 29/12/2020 Introduction 4 This thesis argues that wage labour is a ‘hegemonic structure’ fundamental to capitalist social relations and for this reason is crucial to accounts of hegemony in a number of ways. The dissertation articulates this argument from two ‘directions’, building from engagements with two different theoretical fields: hitherto studies of hegemony on the one hand and theories of the capitalist wage labour process on the other. The thesis’ original contribution lies both in its critique of existing scholarship on hegemony and in its integration of two genres of political/social theory that are rarely in conversation. Firstly it attempts to construct an account of hegemony that coherently includes wage labour by speaking to what I perceive to be a lacuna in the field of study: a sustained engagement with wage labour as a crucial component of capitalist societies and a fortiori any hegemony – or hegemonic situation – that occurs within them. In brief, if to study hegemony is to study the given (multi-faceted) mechanisms of coercion and consent in a particular historical conjuncture, then to study capitalist hegemony requires us to study wage labour as in some way imbricated within these mechanisms. My thesis argues that wage labour relations are often touched on – or glossed – in prominent work on hegemony, and yet are relatively poorly theorised, or side-lined, in favour of wider cultural or political phenomena. I particularly identify this as a problematic lacuna in the work of theorists such as Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and Stuart Hall. Not only is this gap identified, but I make the argument that to not include wage labour within accounts of hegemony is to ignore a fundamental aspect of the history (and present) of capitalist societies such as the UK: the history of the establishment of wage labour, also known as ‘primitive accumulation’. This history is identified as a ‘foundational coercion’ that, I argue, must be recognised by accounts of hegemony if these accounts aspire to be adequate to the analysis of power and domination in modern societies. By building and integrating an account of wage labour into an analysis of hegemony, my project thus argues that this allows for a more comprehensive interpretation not of hegemony in the abstract (which I understand to be a more or less impossible, or incoherent, concept), but of concrete hegemonic situations – or ‘case studies’, as it were. This makes the project both an intervention into the method of analysing hegemony/ies 5 (and the history of these methods), and also a kind of toolkit with which to potentially bring to bear upon other, given hegemonic situations, both from other histories but also in the future. Secondly, and from the reverse ‘direction’ of argument, the project aims to contribute to an account of wage labour within capitalist social relations by bringing the categories taken from the analysis of hegemony (coercion, consent, organic intellectuals, sedimentation and others) to bear on the analysis of the labour process itself, and also by situating the wage labour process within (the wider) mechanisms of hegemony (that operate at larger scales of social relations). The labour process theory tradition reveals key insights into how the labour process within capitalist society functions – including the power relations at play – but has thus far remained at a relative distance from the concepts and vocabulary of the field of hegemony studies.1 This gap is particularly remarkable – as I argue in depth in chapter three – as the categories of hegemony map onto workplace relations in revealing ways, uncovering the (hegemonic) politics of work right down to physical workspace arrangements and managerial techniques. In this sense, my dissertation is considering the ‘micro-physics’, interpersonal frictions and power relations of waged work – the ‘politics of work’ in a broad sense2 – and applying a political analysis drawn from the tradition of hegemony studies. Precursors and parallel approaches The original synthesis of theoretical traditions and questions that my project seeks to enact is yet to be explored extensively, but nonetheless there is inevitable overlap with a number of previous bodies of work. For example, there are parallels to the way in which Foucault, in the Birth of Biopolitics lectures (2008), builds an account of governmentality – taking the emergence of neoliberalism as his object of inquiry. In these lectures – particularly lecture nine – Foucault discusses how American neoliberal governmentality was built, in part, via the re-definition of (waged) work as an investment (human capital). The waged worker comes to be seen as ‘a machine that produces an earnings stream’, a being endowed with 1 Notable exceptions – such as Michael Burawoy – are noted in the course of the thesis. 2 In the same sense that ‘the personal is political’ is usually meant. 6 what Foucault names ‘capital-ability’ (2008, p. 225). By effecting this ‘epistemological transformation’ with regards to waged work, neoliberal thinkers such as Schultz, Becker and Mincer helped build – over numerous decades – a new kind of governmentality that would come to shape labour market (and workplace) governance across the globe (something that is touched on in my final chapter’s treatment of ‘employability’). This picture of the construction of a governmentality (and wage labour’s position within it) is mirrored in my dissertation, via the conceptual apparatus taken from Gramsci and his descendants. Where Foucault, in that text, focuses on the epistemological shifts necessary for new forms of practice and governance – encapsulated in the very term govern-mentality – a Gramscian approach leads me to discuss both the discursive frames – or forms of common sense – that inform a given hegemony, but also the coercive, often violent practices that attend and ground it (and in particular the social relations around wage labour). In short, we might say that the Gramscian approach to ‘systemic power’ that I deploy here thinks the regulation of bodies and discourses of consent together regarding waged labour – thus bringing together objects and methods of inquiry that Foucault also deploys, but in separate texts and not always in conjunction with the problematic of wage labour.3 My approach has also been gestured towards in less academic but nonetheless important interventions, such as Srnicek and Williams’ Inventing the Future (2015). In that text, the authors succinctly map the emergence of neoliberal hegemony and then pivot towards possible counter-hegemonic strategies for a post-neoliberal world.4 At the centre of their argument lies wage labour as a fragile social relation ripe for the unpicking within the game of hegemonic politics – with Laclau, Mouffe and Gramsci acting as key reference points. Their account, in that text, of wage labour’s position within capitalist, hegemonic relations is brief – more of a platform from which to spring than a thorough historical-theoretical 3 For instance, Discipline and Punish (1977) is a key text for the analysis of the emergence of wage labour and the violent regulation that attends it, but its focus does not stay with wage labour – moving instead onto the broader shifts in forms of power from the Ancien Régime to the modern period.