"That is hegemony: being able to offer a direction for society as a whole, governed from a social class that has conquered political power," writes Mejía Madrid.

This article by Fabrizio Mejía Madrid originally appeared in the October 23, 2026 edition of SinEmbargo, a Mexican independent news outlet.

When a movement comes to power it needs to build its hegemony. That word, “hegemony,” means using consent, common sense, and a way of seeing the world. Hegemony means that the social class that has come to power, instead of only using coercion unilaterally, has to elaborate an idea of the State that allows it to consolidate a new regime. Antonio Gramsci wrote two thousand pages about it from the prison into which he was thrown by the Italian fascists in the 1930s. His best reader was Peter D. Thomas, who died just this week. This column will rely on his interpretation of Gramsci to answer a question: why did Andrés Manuel López Obrador write Grandeza and Pueblo?

To be clear. The movement is obradorismo. The hegemony is what we call the 4T, and its horizon is Mexican humanism. The social class that came to power with Andrés Manuel, and of which he is the greatest creation as a leader, is made up of all those who were left out of the Mexican neoliberal model. There are, of course, the workers who were super-exploited, with wages kept at the minimum for survival. There are the ejidatarios of the countryside who found themselves forced to emigrate or to grow drugs. There are, also, the middle classes with no options to study or to have a home. There are, in addition, the business owners and merchants who watched the benefits of neoliberalism pass them by because they could not compete against the monopolies or against the corrupt complicity between officials and overnight tycoons. They are those whom neoliberalism considered disposable. Young people, the poor, the elderly, and, geographically, the south and southeast of the Mexican Republic. Professors of Marxism will criticize this characterization because social classes—they will repeat to me—are the result of the relations of production. But, from a political point of view, that majority discarded by neoliberalism is the one that burst into the 2018 election in favor of López Obrador. And I call them politicized classes. They are against neoliberalism and its corruption. That far. The 4T did not set out to make a socialist revolution, nor is it social democratic, because its main banners are the rescue of those at the bottom, not political correctness or Islamophobic feminism.

It is for them that the 4T governs. Its opponents are the business owners who benefited from neoliberalism through sales of state companies at ridiculous prices, financial bailouts that remain unpayable to this day, and exemptions from taxes, electricity, water, and social security. The media became part of these new abusive and corrupt corporations. The traditional intellectuals rose under the protection of Carlos Salinas de Gortari as a caste of vanities that called itself independent from politics while it supported the project of national plunder and electoral fraud. The traditional universities oriented themselves toward neoliberal ideology. The global monsters of energy, mining, and finance can’t wait for the constitutional reforms that contained neoliberal development to be thrown out. Those are the adversaries of the 4T as a regime.

So the consolidation of hegemony is needed. This is a double practice: generating among all the allied sectors the consent that the project is the desirable one for everyone, and keeping the opponents at bay. The allied classes that came to power—Gramsci tells us—are led, and those that oppose are dominated. The authorization to lead them, common sense, the way of seeing the world, is shared within the political alliance with other classes to form a historic bloc. Coercion is only for political adversaries. They are not convinced, they are compelled. The allied classes consent to that coercion given that they all share the idea that domination should remain stable over time. That is, that the class that achieved power carry out its project of transformation. In one sentence: that the change of policy become a definitive change of regime, with no going back. This leadership/domination is accompanied by a political tactic of positions, that is, of holding the ground by fortifying oneself and wearing down the adversary. Before the movement came to power, tactics of maneuver were undertaken, with precise and almost surprise attacks, taking advantage of every opportunity to defeat the PRIAN. Now what is called for is to fortify oneself or, as Andrés Manuel has said, to anchor oneself in principles.

The natural terrain for deploying hegemony is that of civil society. But not that of Claudio X. González and Lorenzo Córdova. Those of the Pink Tide (Marea Rosa) claim to be isolated individuals, non-partisan, fragments of a jumble of particular interests with no possible mediation. That is not the civil society of Gramsci, about which Carlos Monsiváis wrote in Entrada Libre and No sin nosotros. Civil society, Gramsci writes, is “the ethical content of the State.” The power of the movement is precisely that it turns a public ethic—do not lie, do not steal, do not betray the people—into an obligation of the State.

It is a civil society that is not that monstrosity that calls itself “non-partisan” and has no greater vision than its own particular, tiny needs: those of its block, its company, its VIP lounge, its arrangements of contracts, awards, and posts. No, civil society is the ethical content of the State, which must fulfill those obligations to generate a social base whose horizon is the Nation and its continuity over time. That is hegemony: being able to offer a direction for society as a whole, governed from a social class that has conquered political power. This provides the State with a permanent base which is, in the end, what will allow it continuity in the future.

Andrés Manuel left the Government of the Republic with a consensus proven by the continuity with Claudia Sheinbaum, who in 2024 obtained six million more votes than the 30 million of 2018. Approval levels are very high, and that indicates that consent in public opinion is consolidating around the issues on the agenda. Here we must not confuse the media, which are the ladies and gentlemen of radio, TV, newspapers, and platforms, with public opinion, which is the majority judgment. However, López Obrador was very insistent on discrediting the heads of the caste of vanities that called itself “intellectual” during neoliberalism. He did so to undo an authority that turned out to be very flimsy, not only morally, but above all in the supposedly cultured and wise content they flaunted. But, really, the apparatus of neoliberal hegemony did not depend on their two magazines, Nexos and Letras Libres, which were not sold but warehoused, nor on their publishing houses. If anything, that Clío television series had a little relevance, telling a history of Mexico in which Porfirio Díaz was a modernizer and not a lackey of foreign capital, and Díaz Ordaz had ordered the students killed because he felt physically very far from the ideal of classical beauty. In the hegemonic apparatus of neoliberalism, what really counted was the enormous circulation of self-help manuals in which every destiny was an individual responsibility and, in the end, the poor were poor because they wanted to be. That was the neoliberal manifesto of the mass pedagogy that humiliated millions.

But, in the case of hegemony, there is still a lot of ground to cover. What we have ahead of us is to change the content of personal happiness, from the accumulation of money, goods, academic degrees, and recognition, toward living together with others. With his books, López Obrador has left a sketch of a worldview called “Mexican humanism.” In his book Grandeza, he goes to our Indigenous and communal past to build a model of future happiness: in solidarity, without interest in profit or privileges, honest, libertarian, reciprocal in mutual aid, and connected with nature. In his book Pueblo, the link is with a political history of Independence, the Reform War, the victory over the French invasion, the Revolution, cardenismo, and the Fourth Transformation. It is the history of a people that resists knowing that its struggles, pains, and defeats are for future generations. With these two texts, what AMLO seeks is to generate a hegemony for the political leadership of the social base of the State, which is obradorismo, the officials and popular representatives, and for those who are allies in transit toward forming a historic bloc.

It is crucial to think that this Mexican humanism is not a romanticization of a supposed human essence that, in reality, masks the fact that social relations under capitalism and, especially, under neoliberalism, are anti-humanist. It is a political practice and an ethic of the State. It is neither a starting point nor a point of arrival. It is a practice. The practical humanism to which the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser referred at some point is not conceived from the individual subject who is self-conscious, introspective, who has intentions and authorship, but from the person. The person is not an intimacy like the subject, but a mask in the games of roles imposed by the society in which one lives. The person is a product of the needs to which the economic system subjects us, crossed by our common history, our collective epic, and a field of political action that generates an identity that is not individual but collective. Gramsci writes: “(The person) is not an ontological presupposition—that is, of what its essence is—but rather the result of a moral self-creation, implicit in the ethical reality of an active coexistence. The person is a perishable subject, and as such, can be destroyed, saved, or defended.” The person does not build themselves, does not pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but is the result of others. Helping another in misfortune is to feel with them and, also, to help yourself be a little better.

And so, what AMLO does in his two books is to defend a type of person within the different needs and moral self-creations imposed by the economic model, the bustle of political events, the ruptures, the setbacks, and even luck. The national history written by López Obrador is the epic of a Nation that has withstood almost everything: foreign invasions, coups d’état, dictatorships, and wars of attrition. It has withstood neoliberalism and has been able to contain it peacefully. If not, look at Claudia Sheinbaum’s tactics in the face of the gringo offensive of the new Monroe Doctrine, the Shield of the Americas, the narco groups now judged to be terrorists, and the shameless interference to distort public debate and, with it, the outcome of Latin American elections.

That is why it is a “Mexican” humanism, because it is not about an essence of the human, but about its encounters, its intersections, with the history of a national community. Mexican humanism is Andrés Manuel’s proposal for the formation of that public spirit that will give continuity to the hegemony of the 4T.

For this, the class in power needs to carry out two kinds of transformations. One, a new intellectual function from below that Gramsci called the “democratic philosopher.” And the other, what he called the “hegemonic apparatus.” The first is to recognize that there is no intellectual class, but that there are intellectuals in all classes. Gramsci defines them as the social organizers of the ethics of the State. The Italian philosopher writes: “intellectuals should not be characterized concretely by their intellectual work, but by the position of this intellectual work within particular social relations, including political ones.” Thus, from the point of view of hegemony, it really does not matter whether a historian, a political scientist, or a novelist writes about this or that topic, or even whether they are good and we like them, but where they are situated in the struggles between historic blocs. To the surprise of many, it turned out that almost all of the caste of intellectual vanities are on the right and, lately, under the orders of a self-declared “ultra-right-winger,” swindler, and fraud like Ricardo Salinas Pliego. While they present themselves as independent, these writers clearly serve a bloc that benefited from corruption and the sell-off of national assets. The motivation of the intellectual caste to sign open letters alongside the corrupt and clowns, or to give lectures at the University of TV Azteca, is the terror of losing their character as a caste, of no longer being respected simply because they speak or write from their sublime height, and of being forced to listen to the intellectuals from below and to feel with them in order to learn from them. Terror and contempt for popular wisdom and for simple human beings threw them into the seats of TV Azteca. What a shame.

That was precisely one of the points where the project of the Nation hit a wall, as in health care: a new social base had to be formed. In this case, of thinkers who intervene in reality and help, by listening to the voice of the popular, to create a cultural climate for the new regime. Gramsci, whose Italian Communist Party was relatively orphaned in the 1930s, thought of a new form of intellectual function which he called the “democratic philosopher.” To visualize it, he took an old metaphor that Marx had used in his youthful writings: the wind harp. This was a musical instrument consisting of a sound box and strings of different thicknesses that played music every time the wind blew. Gramsci likens the currents of the wind to the contradictions of popular common sense, and the democratic philosopher to the sound box that reorganizes them and makes them harmonious. The democratic philosopher must be “a permanent persuader,” Gramsci writes, “who tells the truth as a political necessity.” And he adds: “The modern prince, the myth-prince, cannot be a real person, a concrete individual; it can only be an organism, a social element in which a collective will, which has already been recognized and has to some extent asserted itself in action, begins to take concrete form. This organism is already provided by historical development, and it is the political party, the modern form in which partial collective wills that tend to become universal and total are summed up.” In any case, a massive contingent of people must be organized to listen to the contradictions of popular common sense in order to harmonize them. It is not a task for a chosen few.

The other necessary transformation is the so-called “hegemonic apparatus.” When the liberal revolutions brought the bourgeoisie to power, it used schools, newspapers, pamphlets—whose current equivalent is social media—and organic intellectuals for its hegemony. The neoliberals used universities, self-help manuals, and reality show competitions to spread and normalize their greedy, selfish, utilitarian and, in the end, hollow worldview. What should we use in the 4T? During the pre-revolution we used the media within our reach: flyers, videos passed from hand to hand, the movement’s newspaper, Regeneración. But now, in power, there are those who propose streaming series or memes. No doubt they will help, but I suspect that it may be necessary to build a hegemonic apparatus of our own from the ground up.

Fabrizio Mejía Madrid

Fabrizio Mejía Madrid is a writer and journalist.  
He contributes to La Jornada and Aristegui Noticias. He has published more than 20 books, among them the novels Disparos en la oscuridad, El rencor, and Tequila DF.

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