5 Contemporary Neoliberalism 139
have become dependent on those processes and we accordingly, under the spell of neoliberal ideology, hesitate to question innovation. To keep this going it requires that a certain buy-in from the population that the solution to any problem is renewed financial market innovation. Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci wrote most of his important work while sitting behind prison bars in Mussolini’s Italy in the 1930s. Like so many others throughout human history, Gramsci was severely punished for his ideas. The most important of which is his theory of cultural hegemony. He observed that as capitalist institutions became entrenched into, it was unnecessary for the political establishment to use force to gain acceptance and compliance from the population of working people. Instead, the corporate class exercised its control over cultural production to massage the values, beliefs, and norms into the accepted belief of all. Gramsci describes cultural hegemony as “the spontaneous consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group.”44 The dominant group of our time is the corporate hegemony—a powerful network of corporate institutions, and its attending social class, and its subordinate institutions in government. Its control over the American economy and society stands largely unchallenged and extends its influence everywhere. As we will see in the next chapter, the American population hold onto a popular consensus around the core elements of neoliberalism, which prevails as both corporate ideology and as popular folklore. American believe wholeheartedly that their economic society is exemplified as a system of free markets, individualism, and innovation. Neoliberalism is so deeply entrenched in the popular imagination that most Americans are unable to see that economic institutions even exist. There is a popular myth that runs through certain new age circles that tells a peculiar story about when the large ships of European explorers first arrived in coasts of North America, they were considered invisible to the indigenous people. They were invisible to these people, so the story goes, because such ships and foreign ways were so alien to their collective mindset and shared experience that they were unable to actually see the ships. In all likelihood, the story is not true, but like all myths there is an element of truth value in the fiction. When people
