Each year on November 8^th, thousands of the best high school basketball players sign their National Letter of Intent, officially handing over their rights to the NCAA. While many Division I basketball players receive a full scholarship to attend their respective university, the NCAA prohibits athletes from seeking compensation for the use of their names, images or likenesses in television broadcasts, video games, and memorabilia sales. Additionally, besides for their scholarships and meager stipends, athletes are prohibited from being compensated by their university. Additionally, last year, the NCAA posted $1.1 billion in revenue, while individual high major basketball programs often see tens of millions in annual revenues themselves.

Participating in college basketball, which effectively economically disenfranchises players from profiting from their own likeness, has become a “common sense” form of hegemonic domination. When high school coaches refer to “playing at the next level”, they are ubiquitously referencing playing in the NCAA. While the vast majority of college athletes will never have a marketable enough image for the NCAA rules to have a significantly negative economic effect on them, for “Blue Chips”, or the top players in each graduate class, this rule is highly unprofitable. In the United States, the NCAA has hegemony over the sport of basketball, especially since the NBA shut out the best high school athletes from being able to turn professional straight from high school, with the institution of “Article X” in 2005.

However, one dad is attempting to tear down the entire model that the NCAA has dominated for decades. Led by the bombastic, outlandish, and imposing patriarch, Lavar, the Ball family has taken the basketball world by storm. Not only has Lavar figured out how to dominate the mainstream news cycle, but his merchandising company, Big Baller Brand, has achieved extraordinary success.  While the oldest Ball son, Lonzo, took a traditional route, playing through high school and one year at UCLA before making it to the NBA, Lavar Ball calculated that it would be in his two younger sons’ best interest to fully circumvent the NCAA. By avoiding the restrictive NCAA, and placing his sons LiAngelo and LaMelo in a professional league in Lithuania, the two younger Ball brothers have been able to use their popularity to sell Big Baller Brand merchandise with a surprising amount of success. While LiAngelo and LaMelo’s basketball skills are debatable, their celebrity is undeniable, as they have amassed 2.3 million and 3.6 million Instagram followers respectively. Though it is unclear whether or not they will spark a “revolutionary” trend, their actions can certainly be characterized as counter-hegemonic.

“Citizenfour” is a prime example of a pictorial depiction of a counter state movement. The documentary chronicles Edward Snowden’s process, incentive, and aftermath to releasing classified NSA surveillance on the American people. Edward Snowden is a name that lives in infamy in the United States because he conspired against the American Government after learning the degree to which intelligence officers invaded the privacy of American civilians to spy on them for the sake of national security.

As a documentary, “Citizenfour” represents counter-establishment because its a subversion of the government to reveal the truth. Snowden started a movement where the public sought greater transparency and liability within the branches of government. Snowden managed to make a state vulnerable by exposing its clandestine operations–– his goal was to exploit the paradox of government surveillance of its people in a liberal democracy.

How does the state respond when it feels threatened? How does the state regain control over its populace when its broken their trust? Although the Snowden case is a contentious issue in the United States due to the national security circumstances at the time, I would argue that Snowden’s actions were revolutionary because of the instability it created with the Government and its people. In some respects, his actions can be seen as a reformist type of revolution because he wasn’t trying to dismantle the governmental system but to expose it. It catalyzed a period of awareness and hyper-sensitivity among the American people which has since changed the way the Government navigates its tactical surveillance in the name of national security. Snowden makes me think about the applicability of Gramsci’s organic intellectual. He conjures up the narrative of a modern organic intellectual because he is both a participant in elite American politics and government as well as living his life as an American citizen. He understands the desires and necessities for the Government to respect the privacy of Americans because he fit the demographic of who the Government was surveilling. Yet he was also an agent of the American government therefore understanding the knowledge and premise of what the NSA was trying to accomplish. His awareness of how the State was surveilling the American people and understanding the American civilian psyche helped him make an informed decision about how to effect change from within the system.

As in most fields, the rise of the internet and computing technology has upended the music industry in unfathomable ways. Over our lifetimes, the power record companies held over musicians and their work has dissipated into thin air; however, new forces such as Spotify  and Apple music (or any other streaming platform) have established an entirely new hegemony within the industry. Think about it, how much music do we really pay for anymore?

The flat monthly fee many of us (myself included) pay for access to a streaming service leaves artists making less than one cent per single stream of their work. Despite neglecting fair compensation for artists and their work, streaming on the internet has become the standard unit of the music industry. Just about everything an artist does today is designed to help them maximize the amount of clicks on their content. Record label offices once dedicated to getting music on the radio, on television, or in the movies are now hubs of social media experts whose mission is to increase their artists’ followers. Artists themselves fall prey to the “common sense” created by the industry’s shift that devalued music by simply giving away tons of free content to remain fresh in the feeds of whatever social media app they want to increase their presence on. The popularity of streaming platforms and their consumer friendly costs have established a hegemony upon the music industry in which the actions of artists are sharply circumscribed by the market’s desire to maximize access to musical content while minimizing its cost.

There are bands and artists that buck these trends to an extent. Perhaps counter hegemonic, jam bands like Phish, the Grateful Dead, and young bands like Vulfpeck represent a possible challenge to consensus and the integrity of “the horizon of the taken-for-granted.” Phish and the Dead cultivated large fan bases dedicated to enjoying live music that looks, sounds, and feels different every single night that forces fans (though they oblige willingly) to put money directly in the pockets of those they love. Vulfpeck’s brilliant 2014 album of all silence called “Sleepify,” released with a message telling their then small fanbase to stream the album during their sleep to fund a free tour, grossed over $20,000 before Spotify took the content down (more than enough to fund the short tour).

However, its tough to say if these are truly counter-hegemonic actions because they have been absorbed by the music industry. Phish and the Dead’s willingness to let fans tape and distribute shows (first through analog processes but later through the early internet in the 90s) is the very basis of streaming services now. Vulfpeck mastered crowd funding long before it started becoming more popular. Maybe the willingness of the industry to usurp their methods should be a measure of success for these counter-hegemonic practices. However, it also suggests that the industry’s hegemony over the masses is more powerful than previously understood since it can continuously adapt its practices to maintain profits while appeasing listeners.

Within the UN, there has been a growing challenge to Western power by the BRICS countries, economically and politically, for as the BRICS countries increasingly develop economically, they have been able to shift the balance of power, thereby challenging Western hegemony. The UN, as a bastion of Western neoliberal ideology, was instituted with the rise of American hegemony and has been viewed as largely furthering Western interests and ideas of rule of law, market economies, and human rights in the name of peace. However, given the disparities in the ability and willingness–economically, politically, militarily, etc.–to implement and enforce such policies, many developing countries have begun to form an oppositional bloc to Western powers, namely the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe.

This is has manifested itself in terms of resistance to Western financial institutions and free trade policies, which are viewed as propagating Western interests at the expense of the economic well-being of developing countries, and instead have advocated for policies that relax free trade provisions, and environmental and labor standards for developing countries. Also part of the growing counter-hegemonic narrative of the BRICS countries is evident in the divergence in the interpretation of human rights and on how and when they should be implemented within countries. The West espouses a very different doctrine of human rights, particularly concerning civil and political rights, than do BRICS and developing countries, whose emphasis is almost always on economic and cultural rights with at times blatant disregard for civil and political rights. This is particularly evident through the East Asian understanding of human rights put forth by East Asian statesmen, who state that East Asian values privilege the collective over the individual, stability over conflict, welfare over freedom, and authority over self-assertion (see Bell, Nathan, and Peleg, 2001). Therefore, the Asian Values debate has produced a counter-hegemonic narrative within human rights, in which East Asian states and other developing countries that have joined the bloc, have argued for a relativist interpretation of human rights over universalism that prizes economic development, sovereignty, and political stability, such that accordingly Western human rights values long espoused and institutionalized in the UN under the UDHR, are inimical to developing countries’ priorities, cultural practices, and objectives. Thus, even though the UN is viewed as a neoliberal institution serving the interests of Western powers and propagating Western global hegemony, there has been a growing counter-hegemonic narrative put forth by the increasingly economically and politically powerful BRICS countries, which has attracted other developing countries to present a mounting counter-hegemonic discourse to Western international organizations and ideology.

“…Gramsci understood and emphasized, more clearly than did his interpreters, the complex unity of coercion and consent in situations of domination.  Hegemony was a more material and political concept in Gramsci’s usage than it has since become.  For another thing, Gramsci well understood the fragility of hegemony…Let us explore hegemony not as a finished and monolithic ideological formation but as a problematic, contested, political process of domination and struggle.”  Roseberry, pg. 358

What do we mean when we say that a film, TV show, or album, is “revolutionary?”  Can culture be “counter-revolutionary?”

Provide an example of culture, high or low, that preserves or reproduces the “common sense” terms of domination.  Alternatively, present a cultural practice or phenomenon that represents a possible “counter-hegemonic” challenge to consensus and the integrity of “the horizon of the taken-for-granted.”  Examples can include books, poems, songs, movie or TV clips, myths and oral traditions.  Case selection and historical scope is up to you (it does not have to be from the US).  Have fun with this blog!