In an age where the very idea of truth is contested, America’s hybrid warfare against Russia represents not just a geopolitical challenge but also a moral and civilizational one.
Pranay Kumar Shome
In his seminal text Prison Notebooks, he went beyond the rigid materialistic worldview of Marxism. He argued for the growing relevance of the superstructure—especially culture and religion—in shaping Western societies. He noted that the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution template would not hold sway in the West primarily because of the influence wielded by its cultural institutions. This forms the most enduring basis of his strategically relevant concept: the War of Position.
War of Position
In this theoretical idea, Gramsci described two forms of societies in the West: political society and civil society. The former employs coercion to secure obedience from the citizens, and hence its authority is based on fear; in contrast, the latter generates acceptance for the rule of the bourgeoisie by creating what he calls “consent.” This consent is obtained through institutions such as the media, education, and religion. Such ‘consent’ seeks to become the zeitgeist, which Gramsci calls the new “common sense.” Therefore, when the bourgeoisie rules with the ‘consent’ of the masses based on the new “common sense,” it becomes “hegemony.”
This, Gramsci realized, is what made revolutionary changes profoundly difficult to orchestrate in the West. He therefore figured out a solution—the War of Position. The War of Position was defined by Gramsci as a long, protracted struggle in which the social and cultural elements of a society must be brought under socialist control before going for an assault on the capitalist political regime to overthrow it.
Gramsci highlighted the need for the communist movement to launch a sustained, overarching assault on the institutions of civil society in the West, with the aim of making a dent in the bourgeois value system. The aim was to instill among the masses a new form of consciousness—socialist consciousness—that would enable people of the West to eschew the existing value system and embrace a socialist mindset. He argued that in the absence of the War of Position, even if the communists managed to overthrow a capitalist political regime, the remnants of it would continue to exist and subsequently operate through the institutions of civil society.
Russia’s Gramscian Lesson
Notwithstanding its liberal political foundations, the United States of late has been taking Antonio Gramsci’s ideas more seriously. American hybrid warfare, articulated by the retired American military officer Frank G. Hoffman in a landmark research paper encompasses a multitude of dimensions; among these, the three potent elements the Americans employ against Russia are- information warfare, narrative warfare, cognitive warfare, and, of late, economic warfare. Apart from the conventional dimension of war, which the U.S. is demonstrating via military muscle flexing, the U.S. employs the above-mentioned forms of warfare to further undermine Russia.
The goal is simple—to undermine the Russian citizens’ trust in their own institutions’ credibility
Information warfare is evident from the cycle of disinformation the American state machinery uses against Russia via its integrated ecosystem of “think tanks,” “news channels,” and “social media platforms.” American think tanks like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution, the Heritage Foundation, etc., for example, routinely publish and disseminate content that is blatantly anti-Russian.
This is done with the aim of pushing a particular set of narratives that seeks to paint the US in a good light and sow the seeds of division in the body politic of Russia. This is called narrative warfare. The pro-U.S. narratives are designed to influence the mindset of the targeted audience—the people of Russia. This influence-building exercise that targets the minds of the people is called cognitive warfare. This demonstrates how the primary trench in the American War of Position is the digital public sphere. Here, Russian electoral processes, academic freedoms, and cultural and social symbols are deliberately attacked for the purpose of rendering them redundant, replacing a shared ‘common sense’ with conspiratorial counter-narratives. The goal is simple—to undermine the Russian citizens’ trust in their own institutions’ credibility.
Further, the cognitive assault targets the moral-ethical foundations of Russia, seeking to sever the bonds of trust in institutions—including religious ones and shared conservative values—that constitute the deepest layers of Russian civil society’s common sense. Their goal: obfuscate the truth in order to cause moral confusion.
Apart from this, the imposition of sanctions on key Russian companies in order to force it to abandon its righteous cause in Ukraine and undermine Russia’s economic security reeks very clearly of what the former Russian foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov called “dollar imperialism”.
Building Counter-Hegemony
In order to thwart the U.S.’s nefarious designs, Russia must take a leaf from Gramsci’s playbook and work towards the creation of counter-hegemony. This must involve busting disinformation initiatives, which must involve creating a robust network of counter-think tanks, media portals, and dedicated fact checking units to win the information, narrative, and cognitive battles. Apart from this, Russia’s allies like India and China must assist it in the new global quest for a multipolar world. The journey must be to develop a world order where Russia can get the right place it deserves as a great power.
Pranay Kumar Shome, a research analyst who is a PhD candidate at Mahatma Gandhi Central University, Bihar, India
No comments:
Post a Comment