ABSTRACT
Hegemony is never absolute nor does it last forever. Hegemonic discourses attempt to present themselves as not being ideological at all; rather these discourses insist they are merely presenting social realities as the natural state of order - that's the way things are and have always been. Despite P1's self-identification as a member of an upper middle-class income bracket and its accompanying lifestyle, her observation about capitalism illustrates what Stuart Hall argued regarding whether one's ideologies necessarily correspond to class - that one cannot assume someone's socioeconomic and class-based structural position(s) can predict their ideologies. In his critique, P2 frames capitalism as an almost inescapable agentive force both psychologically and ideologically, and in this manner, dialogically echoing Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, a critique of capitalism as an all-encompassing, uncreative, and repetitive system. Gramsci observed that everyone is an intellectual but not all have the function of being an intellectual in society.
