Philosophy
Gramsci’s theory of hegemony explains how political power shapes “common sense” through media, institutions, and trust networks like WhatsApp, making ideological narratives feel natural rather than constructed.
Manufacturing Common Sense
If Marx gives us the economic skeleton of unfreedom, Gramsci gives us its nervous system.
Antonio Gramsci, writing in a Fascist prison in the 1930s, was trying to understand something that puzzled Marxists of his generation: why didn’t the working class revolt? They had the numbers. They had the grievances. Why did they keep voting, broadly, in the interests of those who exploited them? His answer was hegemony — the idea that power in modern societies is maintained not primarily through force but through the manufacture of consent, through making the existing order seem natural, inevitable, and correct.
Hegemony works through what Gramsci called common sense: the unexamined, taken-for-granted world of everyday life. Common sense is not stupid; it often contains sediments of genuine experience and folk wisdom. But it also contains the deposits of centuries of ruling-class interest, now so thoroughly incorporated into ordinary thinking that they no longer feel like interests at all. They feel like facts.
Consider what passes for common sense in contemporary Indian electoral politics. That development means infrastructure. That a strong leader is better than a complex coalition. That communal identity is a natural rather than produced political category. That the Muslim neighbour’s vote is somehow more threatening than the corporate donor’s cheque. None of these is a fact. Each is a political choice, encoded as common sense through decades of media, education, religious institutions, and political speech. Once established, they do not need to be argued for. They are simply the water we swim in.
Now introduce the WhatsApp ecosystem into this picture, and the manufacturing accelerates. Gramsci’s model was built around the shakha, the local branch of a political party, the neighbourhood institution, the place where ideology was transmitted person-to-person, over time, through trust networks. WhatsApp replicates the shakha at scale. A family group, a neighbourhood group, a caste association group: these are the new intimate spaces where common sense is made. And unlike the shakha, they operate at velocity. A morphed image, a fabricated speech, an out-of-context video these circulate in hours, through networks of genuine affection, amplified by the very intimacy that makes the medium trusted.
Elections today has been shaped by a WhatsApp common sense that has been years in construction. The narrative of majority community victimhood as a people under demographic threat, of a state government that appeases at their expense – has circulated so thoroughly that it feels, to those inside it, simply like describing reality. The incumbent government’s record, its genuine achievements and genuine failures, its complex relationships across communities, its patronage networks, all of this is real and available for honest scrutiny. But the WhatsApp common sense does not produce scrutiny; it produces recognition. You receive a message and it confirms what you already know, because what you already know was also, largely, produced by messages like this one. We should resist two easy moves here. The first is to make WhatsApp the villain ; as if the problem is a technology that can be regulated away. The second is to make winning party the villain ; as if other parties don’t manufacture common sense, as if other parties own machine isn’t deeply invested in controlling the epistemic environment of its voters. Hegemony is a structural condition, not a partisan crime. What differs is who currently holds hegemonic advantage and through what machinery.
Gramsci’s insight is that before we vote, we have already been taught how to see. The election does not interrupt that teaching. It consolidates it.