To what should we ascribe that the most genuine bourgeois economists, even the big corporate bosses said "Marx was right" during that big crisis of 2008 which has crackled the world economy? How about today's flag bearers of the state intervention for the crisis and bankruptcy, who were once exalting the free market almost to the level of god and counting the words mentioning about the state intervention as a sin?

Marx said this: "At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or - this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms - with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure."1

When the dominant material relations of the society, which means the economic foundations of it, goes into a deepening crisis; law, politics, religion, art or philosophy forming its superstructure, that is to say, the ideological formations which people give meaning to their social existence and relations in their own consciousness, also go into a process of chaotic inversion.

The existential crisis of capitalism, of the last exploiting and class-based social formation, is the exposure of the society be caught by a deadly crisis thoroughly with all economical, political and ideological dimensions. The dissolution of the bourgeois ideological hegemony along with a chaotic situation that the superstructure gradually arrives is one primary stratum of this crisis.

Let's begin our analysis at this stratum by having a short trip in the notebooks of Gramsci and borrowing a decisive concept from there.

Bourgeois Ideological Hegemony

Bourgeoisie sustains its sovereignty through both the domination and the hegemony. Gramsci emphasizes this fact by explaining that sovereignty is identical with coercion but administering requires the consent. While domination means to coercion, hegemony means the production of consent. As the coercion, which means dictatorship, is concretized in the armed suppression apparatuses, the production of consent, which means hegemony, is concretized in the ideological apparatuses. With a more complete expression, hegemony is the sustainability capacity of the power of ruling class over the oppressed classes, mainly through their consent.

Rising of the bourgeoisie to the position of sovereign class and its consolidation of class sovereignty, substantiate through its universalizing its own class interest and presenting that interest as identical with the interest of the whole society. Because, in the modern history, a class that assumes the role for administering must persuade the whole society that it has the strength and capability for administering, and must convince the other classes that it practices its own interest as the interest of whole society. This states that the class which gathers the economic-material power at its hand and takes up the administration of the society, becomes the hegemonic.

Individual interest in society is the particular appearance of the general class interest abstracted from individuals. The interest of the bourgeois individual, therefore, independent from his/her personality, is the objective expression of the general interest of the bourgeois class. However, when this general class interest is fictionalized as the interest of whole society on the ideological level, all members of the society are needed to be objectificated through being linked to this general class interest. The worker is the one who produces the capital, that is to say, the money, but his/her labor power is bought by the money that he/she produces. Money rules over the worker and gains a personality. The worker who is alienated to his/her own labor, on the other hand, transforms into an appendage of means of production, into a labor power object which money buys, and hence, he/she becomes a reified. In this case, individual interest of the worker, does not spontaneously emerge as the particular expression of the general interest of the working class. While money, as the materialized focus of the fictionalized general social interest, is subjectificated, the worker is objectificated. Individuals making up the working class, by this way, constitutes a mass which actually internalizes the viewpoint of its class opposite.

Hegemonic bourgeois ideology plants the sovereign class ideas and values to the consciousness of all members of the society. People under the influence of ideological hegemony, evaluate the social incidents with an adopted viewpoint. This viewpoint which they consider as their own, with the words of Gramsci, is the commonsense and natural for them. Here, the commonsense is the transformed version of the sovereign bourgeois class philosophy, which infiltrates through various simplifications and turns into the philosophy of average masses as the deep-rooted behavior stereotypes of society, virtues, moral norms and religion forms. Oppressed people thinking within the boundaries framed by the commonsense, become the bearers of the thinking of the sovereign class, which is transformed into commonsense, and thus the re-producers of the existing social relations. The tendency to question this social relations and to change them gradually, for instance, the awakening of the idea and will which comprehends that the unlimited wealth of a parasite minority versus the ever increasing poverty of the vast majority is no way natural and that must absolutely be changed, can only spread among the masses when the commonsense, this alienated consciousness, crackles down.

Those words of Marx and Engels, tells exactly about this situation: "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has the control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas."2 Law, art, religion, philosophy, politics, which are stamped by the bourgeoisie, are functional in binding the working class and the oppressed to the bourgeois world view. The means of mental production are the ideological apparatuses with a wide range from school, academy, family, media, church and mosque, law, party, trade union and association, think-tank institution, theater and cinema.

Hegemony, pulls the dictatorship to the background and hides it. Moreover, it creates the legitimacy thought of the coercion apparatuses like army, police, jurisdiction, and prison, for example creating a belief that the monopoly of using weapons for political purposes can only belong to the state, and makes oppressed classes accept this thought. Thus, the oppressed classes are rendered as convinced that those who don't give consent to the power and become targeted by the state force, have already deserved this, thereby they get ideologically disarmed.

As Gramsci said, the state is not only an apparatus which founds and protects the sovereignty of the ruling class, but at the same time, is a totality of practical and mental functions producing consents of those who it keeps under its administration, it is "the hegemony which is strengthened by force."3 The state, itself, is a source of hegemony as much as it manages to present itself as a being which stands above the society, looks after the interests of all classes and keeps them in balance and controls the social conflicts without bias. Voluntary participation to the bourgeois parliamentary system may be the primary form of ideological hegemony over the oppressed classes. Therefore, bourgeois democracy itself is one single ideological factor. Even the bourgeois army is not only effective as a military organization, but also as an apparatus spreading the dominant ideology.

The stratum of intellectuals provides the organic connection between infrastructure and superstructure. Intellectuals, form the ideas and institutions which composes the ideological and political identity of social integrity, carry out the ideological hegemony and political administration duties of the ruling class. Politicians, religious authorities, teachers, journalists, broadcasters, artists, writers, academicians, philosophers compose this intellectuals stratum. Shortly, organic intellectuals build the collective consciousness of their own class, operate the ideology of their class at social, economical and political levels. The world view of the ruling class is spread to the whole society by the organic intellectuals who work as its officers and brought in as the commonsense of average people.

A social integrity based on a continuous coercion of the bourgeois order, is not economically and politically sustainable in long terms. Because, capital is produced by the relationship between free capital owner and free labor power owner. This, is a business contract between lawfully free and equal individuals and one of the main distinctions of capitalist productions from the other exploitative class societies. And bourgeois state, claims to represent the whole population constituted of single equal and free citizens in terms of a formal-lawful equality. Of course, there will be no reproduction of the capital relations without the acceptance of these general norms which actually belong to capital class by the whole sides. Bourgeois ideological hegemony, ensures the voluntary acceptance of this norms by the laboring majority. But, once the hegemony is constituted, there is no guarantee for an everlasting voluntary obedience. Since the social conflicts and clashes are continuous, the capital class needs a continuous ideological bombardment in order to infiltrate the ideas and emotions of the laboring classes. Hence, the hegemony needs to be produced over and over again.

In order to sustain the hegemony, it is necessary for the ruling class to do material maneuvers which help creating illusions as if they are representing the interest of the whole society beyond their own class interests, and to make concessions. Bourgeoisie, if it supplies the continuity of social consent, needs to take care of the basic demands of the oppressed classes which are under its hegemony, through keeping and reproducing a compromising balance. Because the laborers and the oppressed give consent to the power of the ruling class only when they find correspondences to some of their demands and desires in the existing social order, when they keep their hope for a prosper life alive, at least their hope for leaving a better future for their children. It is not logical to think the continuity of the consent of the oppressed classes to the ruling without providing any of the demands and expectations of various forms of movements of the working class and the oppressed, trade unions and mass organizations, or directly masses of people. For the bourgeoisie to have the capacity of concessions is all about its ability to restrict the struggle of the working class with the economical field, to quench the oppressed classes' reaction with reforms, to prevent the dissolution of the bourgeois ideological hegemony and thus to prevent falling the capitalist order itself into danger.

Organic depression, as in the conceptualization of Gramsci, is a crisis influencing all the dimensions of a societal form. Different than the conjuncture crises which have no deep historical-social roots, organic depression is a detachment stop between structure and superstructure. Bourgeoisie, which cannot produce its own existence as it used to do, also loses its ability and legitimacy of administering other social classes. There appears ideological cracks and breaks in the superstructure institutions. The traditional bourgeois representation mechanism, bourgeois parliament and mainstream bourgeois political parties experience a persuasiveness erosion and thus loss of function. Oppressed classes start to see mainstream bourgeois parties no longer their representatives. Bourgeois political order becomes unavailable to structure itself as it used to, there emerges a crisis of representation. Decaying and dissolution examples affecting each other in all superstructure institutions and ideological apparatuses spread over. Oppressed classes head to an unprecedented independent mobility.

Characterized by the ripening and unearthing of the incurable contradictions in the structure of society, the organic depression also appears as a hegemony crisis. Bourgeois legitimacy and authority, the bourgeois belief system attributed to all society goes in a crisis. The consent of the oppressed classes to the ruling class becomes unreproducible. The social basis of the conflicts and dissolutions in the superstructure is the conflicts and crises in the economical structure. As the relations of production, which is the material support of the ruling class' dominance, are stuck in crisis, its dominance over the means of mental production is also shaken. The power of ideological apparatuses to subject the oppressed classes to the interest of ruling class as before erodes. The activity of the apparatuses of coercion and methods of dictatorship come to the fore. Dissolution of ideological hegemony brings in not only the leaving of the oppressed classes out of the ideological orbit of the ruling class, it brings in, at the same time, the leaving of a growing section of the intellectuals from the dependence on the ruling class. Also, the ideological integrity among the ruling class itself also breaks apart, incoherence spreads and deepens.

With the emphases of Gramsci, if the ruling class loses its existence as a consensus and becomes only a ruler rather than an administer as a result of leaning only to the absolute coercion, then it means that large masses do no longer believe in the traditional ideologies anymore and already detached from the influence of them.4 According to this, dissolution of the bourgeois hegemony on the ideological level is an abstraction of the formation of a situation in which the dominants can no longer able to rule as before and the oppressed does no longer want to be ruled as before on political level.

Bourgeoisie, without a doubt, at the first chance they get, aims to crash and dismantle the political focuses against the order. Still, it is a must to have material concessions and maneuvers tying the oppressed class to the order again. The ruling class tries to overcome the hegemony crisis through program change and regaining the ideological and political control by giving some concessions to the oppressed classes. A cure is sought to the depression through unification of mainstream bourgeois parties who lost their power to influence people or emergence of a third power which is generally symbolized at a charismatic leader at a point when progressive or reactionary forces are not able to surpass one another.

At a point where providing the expanded reproduction of the capital relations and restructuring capitalism in the forms opening the development path of productive forces are still possible, when the working class who gathers all the oppressed around cannot reach a strength to take the political power as a class subject of revolutionary counter-hegemony, bourgeoisie will elude the organic depression and reconstitute its ideological hegemony.

However, where there is hegemony, there also are opportunities for the counter-hegemony. Because, as can be seen, the hegemony can only be defined in the context of ideological struggle relationship. Ideological struggle, on the other hand, is nothing but carrying on the class struggle at the front of social consciousness. Since the organic depression is a moment where bourgeois ideological hegemony experiences a dissolution and where a hegemony crisis bursts out, opportunities to form and expand the counter-hegemony in such periods are more available than ever.

The Hegemony Crisis

In today's conditions of the imperialist globalization, chronic mass unemployment, absolute impoverishment and hunger, war and migration create consequences which socially exclude a growing section of the world population. Masses of the excluded and cursed, this sediment of capital relations are growing ceaselessly. The mentioned consequences of the capital's loss of ability to develop productive forces are also the supports of the fact that it gets caught to an existential ideological hegemony crisis.

With the words of Marx and Engels, "The dominant thoughts, are nothing but the expressions of dominant material relations; dominant thoughts, are the material, dominant relations comprehended in the form of ideas, therefore they are the expressions of relations which make a class a dominant class; in other words, these thoughts, are the ideas of its dominance."5 From the existential crisis of the dominant material relations, there also arises the existential crisis of the dominant ideas.

Bourgeoisie, which had come in view in the stage of history with a claim to be the speaker of the universal interests of all humanity, can no longer put forth an ideological packaging capacity which presents its class interest as identical with the universal interests of all humanity. In its existential crisis, the capital does not only fall into a legitimacy loss in the eyes of the working class and the oppressed, but also extremely strains even for bourgeoisie to provide a general common direction, a clarity in thinking and an ideological integrity. Therefore, ideological objections with anti-capitalist discourse can arise from the bourgeois intellectuals stratum.

On the one side, there is the extensive surplus of capital and on the other, there is the chronic surplus of labor. Capital surplus and labor surplus cannot meet, capital production gets weaker and weaker to expand itself. The unity of the opposites is cracking, labor and capital become no longer each other's condition for existence. Labor and capital, which are in constant contradiction with each other, but produce their common existence conditions reciprocally, are getting independent at the point we reach, their existence conditions objectively detach. And since it is like that, the capital lacks the conditions to ideologically tie its opposite to itself. At its own peak, the kingdom of money, now throws up its producer, the labor, out of the kingdom.

Today, the world monopolies hold such a big capital force that the bankruptcy of the ones in crisis means squashing the whole capitalist economy under the wreckage of this bankruptcy. Thus, the arguments such as the exclusiveness of free market, the untouchable private entrepreneurship and the hazard of the state intervention, which are furbished as the ideological dogmas of the imperialist globalization, were thrown away in 2008 all of a sudden. Yes, the state intervention to the bankruptcies happened, but the bourgeois ideologues cannot replace the thrown-away ideological arguments with new hegemonic ideas.

Where the laborers' hope for a better life both for themselves and their children isn't consumed yet, even when the daily contradictions sharpen most, reproduction of the bourgeois ideological hegemony is possible. However, this hope is being consumed today. New generations who get better education than their parents and who are raised with a higher cultural level cannot reach better jobs or higher incomes than their parents. Compared to the increase of the material and cultural prosperity level of the society by the advancement of the social productive forces, the growing laboring majority of the population becomes unavailable to benefit from this prosperity.

As the bourgeois state retreats from its function to supply free social services and from being an economical actor, as it says goodbye to the "welfare state" forever, as it loses its national basis economically embodied in domestic market, it gets completely peeled off its social crust. Today's bourgeois state stands out as a bare coercion and usurpation apparatus of the ruling class against the oppressed classes. It becomes unable to produce the misconception of national interest unity and the illusion of its publicity feature coming from its undertaking free social services anymore. It loses its quality of being the primary ideological glue. As the bourgeois state alienates people on such scale, the antagonism between state and people sharpens on the same scale.

Conjoining of both right conservative and social democrat labeled mainstream bourgeois parties at the same program of the imperialist globalization eats up their credibility in the eyes of the oppressed classes. The consciousness telling people that participating the parliamentary bourgeois democracy doesn't mean the same with freedom is spreading everyday. But the crisis of the bourgeois representation isn't only resulted from here, it is also resulted from the fact that the bourgeois state is taken over by a handful of world monopoly and that it has lost even its function as a collective management organ of the capital, almost completely.

Profiling, surveillance cameras, tapping telephones, social media and e-mails, extending the time of custody, normalizing the state of emergency, restriction over the freedom of traveling, the police assaults getting ordinary to the right demanding demonstrations are a short summary of the political route of the bourgeois state in the period of the imperialist globalization. Bourgeois democratic laws and norms are being cut down, political role of the bourgeois parliament is decreasing. And when the state appears as a pure guardian of the ruling class against the oppressed classes in these forms, it demolishes its ideological legitimacy, the charm of parliamentary representation, the belief for its existence as a socially necessary organization with its own hands. The paradox here, is that for continuation of the bourgeois dominance, the gap arising from the decline in opportunities to generate consent can only be filled with practices of coercion but the sum of these practices, on the other hand, mutilates the role of bourgeois state as an apparatus of hegemony for good.

The state bureaucracy is a stratum maintaining the indirectness between the economical structure of the society and its ideological-political superstructure. The variety of the social classes and strata which the composition of bureaucracy is collected, equally brings persuasiveness to the state's claim to represent the oppressed classes. When bourgeoisie collects the primary bureaucrat cadres mainly from the middle class, this, especially, contributes the ideological and political articulation of the middle class to the ruling class' state. However, today, as this collection decreases and the state administrators are started to be constituted of managers of the capital monopolies directly, this articulation and illusion also start to fade away. Compared to the persuasiveness of the above-the-classes ideological arguments of a state whose cadres are usually collected from middle class and which acts relatively autonomous from time to time, the persuasiveness of the ideological arguments of a state whose cadres mostly come directly from inside the bourgeoisie and whose space to act independently has been narrowed, seems very weak. Through democratic election, parliamentary representation and equal citizenship law, but at the same time, through collecting intellectual bureaucratic cadres from every classes and especially from the middle class, covering the state's feature as the ruling class and the success of this mystification can no longer be possible.

Property owner petty bourgeois stratas of urban and rural are going under a fast devastation, being pushed towards the ranks of the working class. Big capital's stomaching of the petty property ownership, expropriation of the laboring peasantry, becoming wage laborers of city's self-employed majority who is experiencing a class segregation and petty merchant's inability to withstand against the capital competition, are all mean to the vanishing of the opportunities for petty bourgeoisie to increase its income and life standards under capitalism and to develop its existence as a property owner in an objective sense. For this reason, at this point where it thins out over and over, the middle pillar of capitalist society is living a breakage now. But this melting of the middle class brings in the drying out of the main source of capitalism's class compromise and the knockout of the main class carrier of the bourgeois hegemony. Because the middle class in capitalist society is the basis for reformism, for keeping hopes to get better in the current order and for spreading the dream of climbing up the social ladder. The capital itself dynamites this ideological hegemony bridge between the upper and lower class.

For the youth, getting higher education doesn't assure better life conditions or guarantee higher wage jobs than their parents. Already, yesterday's well-educated self-employed people are gradually turning into wage workers today. Education lost its quality as a lever for students from people's youth to jump upper classes. Capitalism doesn't cheer the youth with a hope for a privileged future in the current order. It gathers them, usually as low wage workers or as unemployed, within the ranks of the proletariat. This, from the angle of the youth, means an objective rupture from the bourgeois order. Since the effect of traditional belief dogmas and moral norms over young generations and their dependence on traditional bourgeois mainstream parties are more restricted than other sections of the population, and also with the development level of communication and transportation tools today, enormous opportunities for fast dissolution of old thinking mode and fast universalization of new thinking mode everywhere pile up. The objective rupture of the youth from being bounded with capitalism and the birth of a universal "rupture generation" symbolize the collapse of bourgeois ideological hegemony and the start point of the rupture of the working class and all the oppressed from the bourgeois order.

As the fields of intellectual creativity become the fields of capital and individual mental labor turns into wage labor, the culture, art and literature dry out in the dependence relations to a bunch of monopolistic capitalist. For real, an innovative bourgeois art or literature trend can no longer flourish, pessimism and skepticism, a melancholic fatalism spread from the bourgeois art and literature field. Beneath the innovation and fashion sheathe, there grins the banality of the repetition. The buyers of the babbling of the postmodernist philosophy on the denial of universality, the impossibility of grasping the objective truth and the expiration of big narratives, of its philological games around the metaphysical abstractions or of a nihilist mental conformism decrease day by day. As the congestion in the productivity of capital breaks down the application of science to the production, more hideous anti-scientific declarations from the bourgeois-minded scientists such as ending the worldwide hunger via genetically modified food spread out. Religion, is rushed into the help of bourgeois ideological hegemony in crisis, and presented as a saving shelter to the oppressed classes who feel desperate.

This worldwide hegemony crisis is not the crisis of the ruling class hegemony in single countries; it is the bankruptcy of capitalism's power to ideologically bind the laborers and the oppressed humanity to itself. Bourgeoisie's worldwide hegemony crisis, of course firstly and strikingly, appears very specific in the swift loss of altitude of US imperialism. Yet, both in imperialist countries and in dependent or financial-economical colony countries, of course as an abstraction and on uneven levels, the bourgeoisie is under the influence of the same hegemony crisis. Since each country has unique history, tradition and ideological variance, and since each country's position in the world of the imperialist globalization has its peculiar dimensions, the spread and effectiveness of the hegemony crisis is uneven. But, while the integrated world market fact of the imperialist globalization, internationalization of capital, social-economical integration of capitalist countries and transportation and communication technologies connecting all people with each other mean that capitalism, with all these dimensions, more than ever, creates a world society; it also ensures that its hegemony crisis carries an integrated character on a worldwide scale more than ever.

Hegemony Clashes of the 20th Century

A big general depression that capitalism was caught by a crisis with all dimensions - economical, political and ideological -, took place in the period between the first and the second imperialist re-division war. In 1929, the capitalist world, which had been shaken by the destruction of the 1st World war and by the rupture of the October Revolution, entered into an economical crisis which swiftly created a huge wave of unemployment and poverty. The bourgeoisie sank into the deepest ideological hegemony crisis ever seen. While capitalist states were floundering in crisis, the successes of the socialist construction in the Soviet Union were forming socialism as a material alternative for laboring humanity. The laborers in USA, where the unemployment rates were breaking records, were admiring the socialist program of the Soviet Union which had abolished the unemployment. The Soviet Union and the Komintern were standing as a proletarian counter-hegemony base, an ideological magnet for the workers and the oppressed living in the capitalist countries, the strongest blasting agent that exploded the bourgeois ideological hegemony caught up in crisis. Besides, after the Soviet Union came of the 2nd World War triumphant, the hope of the laboring humanity for establishing socialism through a revolutionary path grew even more, Western European communist parties grew stronger as ever, new revolutionary power were established in Eastern Europe and in Asia and many colonized countries took the route towards winning their independence through national struggles. It was the time where socialism had stabbed capitalism with the knife of "welfare state", right on its bosom.

The order of the capital, however, managed to overcome this staggering general crisis. Because even though the capitalist development was interrupted, the revolutionary working class failed to present a historical move that would end capital relations on a worldwide scale, and capital still had the ability to develop productive forces. This was the material basis of bourgeoisie's success to overcome its great ideological crisis, as well as to create its ideological hegemony again. Up to 1930's, there emerged two negations of the hegemonic ideological arguments of free market. The first one was the socialist denial, the one outside the bourgeois order, which was being manifested in the socialist construction of the Soviet Union, as well as the revolutionary powers spreading after the 2nd World War. The second one, on the other hand, was the Keynesian negation extending from the New Deal in the United States to the West European notion of "welfare state", as being within the order. For the bourgeois school, Keynes was the new prophet from now on until he would leave his chair to Friedman 40 years later. He was the one who formulated the necessity of the capitalist state to make demand-generating and market-regulating interventions, to present itself as a shareholder that keeps the multi-competitive environment of the capital in balance and prevents the extreme speculative movements of the capital.

As the bourgeois state joined the game as a shareholder, and as the world market, which was narrowed by the revolutions, were expanded and deepened through swallowing individual small properties which had not been industrialized yet, the capitalist development accelerated. Thus, in order to prevent working class to break off with the order, the "welfare state" was put forth as a concession and the Soviet Bloc's sphere of influence was limited by the universal positioning of the Cold War under the US umbrella. So, with all of these, capitalism managed to find a way out from that general depression. The acceleration in the capitalist development after the 2nd World War, transition to the "welfare state" form in the capitalist metropolises, increase in the real salaries of the working class and a relative improvement of their life conditions were all allowed bourgeoisie to re-create its ideological hegemony. The picture became upside down; it was the laborers of the socialist countries who were admiring the laborers living in the capitalist states. And this time, capitalism stabbed socialism with the knife of "market". The revisionist Soviet administration were going off the revolutionary rails of socialism, the European communist parties were transforming into the reformist political fractions of the working class and thus, the proletarian counter-hegemony were dissolving.

This fall and rise of the bourgeois hegemony did also lead to an handover in the ideological leadership of the imperialist capitalism. After the 2nd World War, USA came up as the leading power that would re-organize the relationship among the bourgeois states, universalize the new model of capital accumulation based on state monopoly capitalism, re-establish the "world currency" system again, develop and institutionalize new colonialist relations, re-unite the capitalist world and militarily protect it against the socialist world. As being the promise of raising freedom and welfare, the symbol of the individual entrepreneurship which was expressed by the "American Dream", the USA was the ideal model for bourgeois civilization. The worldwide bourgeois hegemony was being identified almost with the re-creation of the whole capitalist world from the US image. The ideological hegemony of the US was depending on its political leadership capacity over the world bourgeoisie. And this capacity was about its supremacy of military power to restrict the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War period, and of the financial-economical power for making US dollar the global currency. Those slogans of "free world", "parliamentary democracy", "freedom of enterprise" and "creative power of competition" were setting its hegemonic ideological arguments.

Another hegemony crisis of the capitalist world during the 20th century, exposed itself with the '68 uprising. The wave of the '68 student movement burst out in the Western capitalist countries and soon it spread to all continents and became blended with the particular social-political contradictions of each countries. The women liberation struggle and black rights movements were growing and developing. Correspondingly, the myth of the "welfare state" were weakening, the ideological apparatuses of the bourgeois order were dragging into a turmoil, the imposed social value judgments were losing favor, that is to say, the bourgeois ideological hegemony was becoming to dissolve. The wave of the '68 was the expression of a massive rupture out from the bourgeois order at the level of consciousness but this rupture was limited mainly with the student youth. The anti-capitalist charactered student movement came to the fore as the focus center of the counter-hegemony. The ideological rupture of this politically responsive ranks of the intellectuals, was perhaps a warning itself for a further shocking universal crisis for capitalism, a new choke in the capital relations that would arise couple of years after. However, this manner of the student movement positioning in the realm outside the order, failed to incite the oppressed classes in general to rupture out from the bourgeois hegemony. Because the working class ranks which had widely jump on the stage of the struggle were actually in a search to expand their rights on the basis of "welfare state" within the capitalist conditions. Correspondingly, the ruling class was able to respond this demand with the capacity to maneuver and make concessions in this regard.

While the student youth was leaving the field of the ideological hegemony and arming themselves with the revolutionary consciousness, the working class continued to remain under the bourgeois ideological hegemony due to their reformist consciousness and action line that was bound to gain better conditions within the order. This allowed the order of the capital to re-create the bourgeois ideological hegemony in crisis. So, together with the aid of the communist parties which had become totally reformists, it succeeded in holding the working class bounded with the limits of the order as well as absorbing the anti-capitalist students into the capital relations and policies back again. The challenge of the student movement's uprising against the traditional bourgeois values was cooled down by changing the overdue traditional value judgments. The black rights movement was rendered ineffectual and even gained by the order, through oppressing the Black Panthers with counter-revolutionary violence, but moreover, through raising many black people up to the levels of bourgeoisie and of state along with the legislative regulations done in favor of equality. The women's liberation movement as well, was temporarily removed from being a threat for the bourgeois order, as a result of pulling a number of women to the ranks of the bourgeois class and politics, as well as doing some legislative regulations concerning their rights.

The crisis of 1975, which shook capitalism and push it for a new capital accumulation model, was also not enough to drag the bourgeois hegemony into a crisis again. Yet, The Pentagon-Wall Street hegemony got hurt by the defeat of the gigantic US military power in Vietnam and by the collapse of the Bretton Woods System which was symbolizing the power of the US dollar. Nevertheless, as being the driving force of the transition to the period of imperialist globalization and the actor of the counter-revolutionary triumph that gave an end to the Soviet Bloc, the USA managed to keep its ideological leadership position until the 2000's. Since the gate of the imperialist globalization was opened in the period of the universal American hegemony and since the world monopolies had been intensified at most in the USA, the leadership of developing political strategy and financial model for the interest of the international capital also belonged to the USA.

The collapse and dissolve of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact led to a new impetus for the existing ideological illusion of the laborers. In the eyes of an average person, capitalism was eternal and without any alternative. The fall of the Soviet Union together with the East European states on its orbit and the destruction of the majority of the Western Communist Parties led to a break in the belief and sympathy for socialism among laborers and intellectuals. The ideals of world revolution and of socialism were defeated even in the consciousness of the majority of those who were once fighting for these ideals. On the eve of the 21st century, bourgeois hegemony was much like enjoying its strongest days in the organizational sense. Well then, why does today's hegemony crisis, which has been fired only ten years after those happy days, carry an existential character unlike the previous ones?

Where Is the Difference?

The essential difference of today's bourgeois hegemony crisis from the the past is not related with the intensity of these ideological quakes but of their qualities. There is no indication that today's bourgeois hegemony crisis, which has not yet reached to its peak, can be overcome. On the basis of the success of the bourgeoisie to overcome yesterday's hegemony crisis, there lays the fact that the dynamics of capitalist development was not at the stage of reaching its own limits and capital's ability of developing productive forces has not exhausted yet. For the serious congestions in the social production relations, there were still some existing remedies that would clean the way of the production of capital again. Correspondingly, the ruling class, which had not lost its capacity to make concessions and to maneuver yet, was able to head towards for some reforms that would serve to regain the consent of the oppressed classes. The difference is exactly right here!

Yesterday, the working class of the capitalist countries was able to benefit from the surplus profit flowing from the colonies into the capitalist states and this was creating the basis for the ideological illusion that the interests of the working class and the bourgeoisie could be common. In the case of the dependent countries on the other hand, the national capitalist development path was able to respond the expectancy of the working class and the laborers. It was possible to pack the bourgeois state, which depended on parliamentarian democracy, carried out social services and formed the compound of the bureaucracy from the whole society, as a common organism that protects the interests of the whole nation. The "welfare state" phenomenon was providing material opportunity for the inoculation of the bourgeois ideology which was dazzling the eyes of the whole world's oppressed classes with fake glow of the capitalist development. Again, the atmosphere of the "social consensus" spreading from the middle class was giving a fresh breath to the dominant class. Thus, on this social basis, it was possible to repair the disrupted apparatuses of the bourgeois ideology and by substituting their overdue discourses with the new ones, the ideologists of the capital were succeeding in convincing the majority of the society.

The 20th century had witnessed all these happening. Some part of the profits obtained from the colonies were distributed to the workers of the imperialist countries. There also existed post-colonial countries which managed to maintain their capitalist development based on an internal market relatively independent from imperialism. The "welfare state" did actually bring considerable improvements in the living conditions of the working class. However today, at an increasing pace, factories are moving from capitalist metropolises to the markets of cheap labor and social services are becoming marketable. The imperialist financial oligarchy is now having an eye on the last leftovers of the "welfare state", the domestic market of a country has become a free field for the movement of the world monopolies and the dependent/subordinated countries have become the financial-economic colonies. Rather than being consequences of subjective choices of the ruling class, these changes are being experienced as the consequences of capital's objective laws of motion. And the same objectivity is echoing on the fact that the bourgeois thought is no longer able to create an essential cure for the existing general depression, neither to put forward a new Keynes anymore.

The faith to the US capitalism, which was once freshened up with the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of neoliberalism, is now gone with the wind. In 2008, when the millions of workers and the middle class from USA were facing with the risk of losing their jobs, retirements and houses, the so called "American Dream", which used to promise them to climb up the social ladder, did collapse upfront. USA is no more a role model of the imperialist globalization, of the whole capitalist world. If it still seems to preserve its leadership over the capitalist world, it is because there is no chance for any other country or a unity to reconstruct capitalism with an alternative and redemptive model, so that they would embody the creation of the bourgeois ideological hegemony in their existence, and in parallel, the anti-capitalist alternative has not been formed yet as a socialist model in the consciousness of laboring humanity.

Today, even though the political organization of the capital still presents itself as separate bourgeois states, the production and the trade have completely been globalized along with the formation of the integrated world factory and world market. This deadly corrosion in the social material base of the bourgeois nation-state does not allow one state to create a global hegemony anymore; neither for the US hegemony to maintain itself as used to be nor for another imperialist state to take that overdue role alone.

When the bourgeoisie reaches to the limits of the economic and social possibilities that allows to absorb the demands of other classes, the hegemony's pillars start to crack. Consuming those maneuvering possibilities, indeed, does not mean that you cannot make any actual maneuvers in terms of ideological, political or economical sense. Bu it means that you no longer have a chance to respond the basic social-economical demands of the oppressed classes enough to hold them in balance with the social consensus. For this very reason, all those ideological compliments for capitalism have already become history; the concept of "New World Order" failed to keep up, the rhetoric that imperialist globalizaton will bring more wealth and freedom has already become implausible. Because the capital and the state have essentially lost their capacities to produce minimum solutions within the borders of the order for the basic problems and demands, to do maneuvers of making concessions in order to gain at least some part of the working class and the oppressed, as a result, to hold the contradictions between capital and labor, and between state and people within a manageable context in terms of soothing and dissolving various social struggles by pulling them inside the order.

It is ironic that Fukuyama's prophecy, "the end of history", which puts forward capitalism as an eternal system, is now manifesting itself as the end of the capitalist history, by the dialectic law of turning into the opposite.

The Pangs of Counter-Hegemony

Engels warned: "According to the materialistic conception of history, the production and reproduction of real life constitutes in the last instance the determining factor of history... The economic situation is the basis but the various factors of the superstructure - the political forms of the class struggles and its results - constitutions, etc., established by victorious classes after hard-won battles - legal forms, and even the reflexes of all these real struggles in the brain of the participants, political, juridical, philosophical theories, religious conceptions and their further development into systematic dogmas - all these exercise an influence upon the course of historical struggles, and in many cases determine for the most part their form."6

As much as thought follows practice, ideology reflects economy. But, just as how the matter does not determine the idea exactly same, the economy does not determine the ideology as the same. Since those who create and spread the ideological hegemony are the individuals and institutions producing ideas, the hegemony is a phenomenon that exist within the domain of social and political subjects, that is to say, it is about subjectivity. And since it is about subjectivity, it is not a passive replica of the changes or transformations taking place in the social material basis. In that sense, the hegemony's role differs; sometimes progressively realizes the opportunities that the objective material reality has for a change, whereas sometimes cuts them back in a reactionary way. Ideological efficiency may accelerate or decelerate the development of the social events. In order not to fall into a mechanistic deterministic approach and a pure reductionism, it has to be taken into account that the ideological field is shaped by subjective interactions and struggles, by frictions among various wrong, defective, twisted or relevant perceptions of the material reality arising from both realistic but also absurd thoughts and interpretations as well.

On the basis of a hegemonic ideological system, there exists the dialectic unity of the consent and the dissent. As much as to keep the consent, the struggle of ideological hegemony, is a struggle also for convincing those who oppose. However, this nature of the hegemony struggle includes the approval that each hegemony could only exist together with the possibilities of the counter-hegemony. Because creating hegemony, is a goal that is given in the ideological struggle which constitutes one of the layers of the class struggle. Just as the hegemony, the counter-hegemony is produced and spread in various fields such as family, education, press, art, religion, culture, ethics, daily life, parliament and parties, unions and associations, sport clubs, etc...

The bourgeoisie, of course, continue to use its ideological apparatuses in order to keep laboring humanity deprived of the envision of future. However, the capital-labor and state-people contradictions all over the world, are immensely intensifying in objective terms. And the laborers and the oppressed are turning towards increasingly radicalizing quests.

It is true that, the proletariat is also experiencing a deep pang of the creation of the counter-hegemony. Resistances of the working class, social movements of the oppressed, international struggles against imperialist globalization, the Latin American popular left wave, "Indignados" and "Occupy" movements, the revolutionary process of the Middle East and the North Africa, the search for "another world is possible" are all stood not enough yet to create a counter-hegemony. Because those social movements and people's uprisings do not meet directly with the goal of socialism. For the expanding ranks of the working class and the oppressed to be united under a programme and thus to have the clearness of goal, is still not the case. However, even though the hegemony crisis of the bourgeoisie stands as an unsurmountable objectivity arising from the material conditions, the proletariat's pang for creating counter-hegemony is a matter of a subjective insufficiency deriving from the confusion in consciousness which can be overcome by the solution of the question of organization and political program.

This is a symptom of an interlude where a society form has actually been expired and experiencing the pang of the transition to a new society form, whereas the question of how that new form would be has not been explicitly fallen into place. While the capacity of the capitalist society to keep all classes together on the basis of capital production is vanishing, its reflection on the social consciousness occurs primarily as an ideological confusion. The working class and the oppressed are tried to be separated by being pushed to the ranks of racism and nationalism, as well as to the reactionary religious movements. Workers are losing their jobs to the cheap labor of the immigrants, the middle class has already been wrecked, small peasantry are losing their lands, medium sized shareholders are facing bankruptcies, but all the reactions arising from these cases can be easily flowed into the racist-fascist channels, with an illusion as if they would manage to defend their position through protecting the national state and national economy. However, at a time where the social material basis of the bourgeois states are fading, the racist and nationalist forms of consciousness, as the reactionary responses against imperialist globalization, can only function as a temporary ideological attraction.

When the social basis turns upside down, then it is inevitable for the traditional forms of ideas, which owe its existence to that social basis, to turn upside down as well. The weakness of the hegemony in crisis allows the counter-hegemonic undercurrents to leak from each cracks and finally rise for a counterattack.

Under an existential hegemony crisis, an average person's consciousness starts stirring and mobilizing. As it starts breaking off the dominant forms of consciousness, the spread of the revolutionary consciousness accelerates by leaps. Developing social movements within the international struggles against imperialist globalization, extending from "Occupy" and "Indignados" movements to the Arabic uprisings and even to Turkey's Gezi uprising, are constituting of signs of a rupture from the dominant form of the consciousness, even though they have still not managed to own a unity of goal and direction. New conditions are providing a source for the creation of the idea among the laborers that the social revolution is nothing but a necessity, and this process will be accelerated. Because any quest that is not aiming to end the capital relations, has no chance to bring any solution to the fundamental problems of the workers and the oppressed and day by day this fact becomes much more clear.

The class contradictions sharpening in an antagonist manner, are bringing about new class struggles. Class contradictions and class struggles, also reflect the battles in the field of ideological hegemony. And developing class struggles step by step fills the pool of the class consciousness formation with the drops of consciousness. The objective ground for the working class, whose intellectual capacity has notably much more developed than yesterday, to gain the socialist class consciousness is much more strengthened, in today's conditions where capital relations are pushing the layer of intellectuals more and more towards proletarianization, the high educated youth, deprived of the opportunities to climb up the social ladder through the education, are joining the working class, and the share of the intellectual labor in the ranks of working class has been immensely expanded. Moreover, the disastrous level of the commodification of the women's sexuality and of the plunder of natural and historical environment, make both the women's liberation and ecologist struggle a direct compound of the struggle for socialism in objective terms. In the conditions of capitalism's existential ideological crisis, all of these quests of liberation are moving day by day outside the realm of the order. The counter-ideological currents rooted in the class, gender, national or racial basis, are squeezing bourgeois ideological hegemony in crisis.

There's no social movement law such as having the consciousness first and get into action afterwards. Rather, the social rupture from the capitalist order are pushing the masses towards the action, and the action creates its own consciousness. For the masses to transform an essential revolutionary perspective into a form of consciousness can only be possible within the action. The masses can change its consciousness only through the action. In a place where solution possibilities within the order are wiped out, it is inevitable for the actuality to deepen the questioning the order and derive solution perspectives outside the order, just as how these movements create their own new revolutionary leaderships within themselves. But the counter-hegemony can be established by depending on an ideological and political leadership practice, which possess the actual essential consciousness of contradictions and antagonisms existing both in the economic and political grounds, as well as be able to illuminate the necessity of a totally new social consolidation of a new structure and the superstructure. The will struggle of such a leadership, is the element itself that accelerates the collapse of the bourgeois hegemony, as well as the founder and the center for the counter-hegemony.

If the existential crisis of the bourgeois production relations means to the crisis of the whole bourgeois society, then the emancipation of a class is identical with the emancipation of the whole society from this weight of the crisis. While ending the capital relation, the proletariat will also abolish its own existence but together with itself, it will emancipate the whole society.

Yes, Marx was very right. And he also wrote this: "Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation."7 The question of establishing the socialist counter-hegemony, together with the conditions that will solve this question, is at the current agenda of the struggle against capitalism.

1Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Foreword, Marx-Engels, Selected Works, Vol 1, Sol Publications, 1976, s.609.

2Karl Marx - Friedrich Engels, the German Ideology (Feuerbach), Sol Publications, 1992, p.70.

3Antonio Gramsci, Notebooks from Prison, Onur Publications, 1986, p.186.

4Antonio Gramsci, Notebooks from Prison, Onur Publications, 1986, p.125-140.

5Karl Marx- Friedrich Engels, the German Ideology (Feuerbach), Sol Publications, 1992, p.70.

6Letter from Friedrich Engels to Joseph Bloch on September 21-22, 1890; Marx-Engels, Selected Works, Vol.3, Sol Publications, 1979

7Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Foreword, Karl Marx, Marx-Engels, Selected Works, Vol.1, Sol Publications, 1976