Economic Power Is Not Enough: A Gramscian View of the Afrikaner’s Loss of Cultural Hegemony

Economic power without cultural power offers only a false sense of security.

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Originally Published on OntLaer in Afrikaans (18 June 2026)

The left-liberal media and populist political parties in South Africa make a point of using the Afrikaner’s relative prosperity as a weapon. This narrative, which also resonates strongly in foreign media, is deployed to silence Afrikaners regarding legitimate community concerns. The implication is always that Afrikaners are “complaining with a silver spoon in their mouth” and should rather count their blessings and keep quiet.

Such arguments are deliberately aimed at disempowering and marginalising the Afrikaner, and at sweeping historical and contemporary grievances under the carpet. They facilitate the systematic sidelining of the Afrikaner from the public sphere, from the civil service and state-owned enterprises to public schools and universities that are being deliberately anglicised.

At the same time, the factual history of the Afrikaner is either ignored or distorted to such an extent that the entire group is portrayed as historical outcasts, land thieves, and oppressors. Perspective is deliberately disregarded. In this way, an understanding of the complex history of a minority that itself had to rise from oppression, escape extreme poverty, and fight for decades to preserve its language and culture against the former power of the British Empire is prevented.

This systematic disempowerment is not a coincidence. It is a calculated strategy to neutralise the Afrikaner’s remaining influence. The post-1994 rulers realised that it would take a long time to weaken the Afrikaner’s economic base. They knew, however, that economic power would eventually wither if the cultural legitimacy behind it was first eroded and destroyed. Economic power without cultural power is simply not sustainable in the long run. To understand this dynamic, we must look at the insights of the great Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci.

Gramscian Hegemony

Gramsci (1891–1937) was an Italian intellectual and politician who opposed Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime. His outspoken thinking landed him in prison, where the regime sought to silence his voice permanently. It failed. In prison, Gramsci wrote his famous Prison Notebooks, in which he developed the concept of “cultural hegemony”.

Gramsci asked why the Marxist revolution of 1917 succeeded in the less developed Russia, but repeatedly failed in more advanced Western European countries such as Italy and Germany. His conclusion was that the ruling class in the West does not rule merely through the army or police, that is, through coercion, but through culture.

Ironically, a hundred years after Gramsci, we see that Western Europe is indeed beginning to yield to a silent revolution. The influx of, and cultural takeover by, immigrants with non-Western cultures is causing the hegemony of Western culture to be increasingly displaced by the cultural hegemony of non-Western groups. Total Western hegemony is thus slowly but surely disappearing into nothingness.

When a group achieves cultural hegemony, it imposes its own worldview, values, and morality so successfully on civil society that it is accepted as almost normal. Gramsci postulated that if you control people’s cultural and intellectual framework, you do not need to force them with physical violence. They will police and direct themselves in the direction you desire.

The Afrikaner and Cultural Hegemony

Before 1994, the Afrikaner established cultural hegemony in South Africa by dominating the most important institutions of civil society: the state administration, municipal governance, state-owned enterprises, the military, police, schools, universities, the media, churches, and the arts. This granted the Afrikaner exceptional institutional power, which served as a shield for the economic power built up over generations. This combination enabled a small minority to survive politically and culturally in a demographic sea of fellow citizens with other cultures.

With the transition in 1994, the Afrikaner agreed to a new, egalitarian constitutional order. Although political power was relinquished, the Afrikaner business elite managed to protect large parts of their economic capital. This was largely achieved through strategic wealth-sharing with the new politically connected elite, a process that, for all practical purposes, served as a mechanism for coordinating economic survival through the creation of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). It was an immediate outcome in the early years after 1994, but eventually turned into the corrupt, unearned, and elite-favouring monster we experience today, to the detriment of broad-based economic upliftment. The same success could not, however, be achieved with regard to the Afrikaner’s cultural hegemony.

Why Economic Power Is an Illusion

Ownership of economic capital gives a minority group merely a false sense of security. If you no longer control the cultural and moral narrative, you control nothing. When the dominant hegemony portrays you as immoral, or as a historical or even contemporary enemy, those economic assets can at any time be targeted through legislation such as aggressive BEE targets or expropriation.

Herein lies Gramsci’s greatest warning: without the preservation of your own cultural institutions that tell and defend your own story, the minority group’s children will over time internalise the ruling class’s guilt narrative. We already see this in the current school curricula, where Afrikaner history is presented one-sidedly, distorted, and without historical context.

This leads to internalised guilt in a new generation that is subtly programmed to view its own culture as inferior. They buy into the hegemonic idea that the current state occupies the exclusive moral high ground, and that draconian “transformation” is the only logical reality.

The “War of Position”

How does a minority fight back against this domination? Gramsci’s answer was the “war of position”. Because a minority will lose a direct frontal clash with the state, the institutions of civil society must be gradually reconquered or built from scratch.

Institutions such as Solidarity, AfriForum, and Sakeliga fit perfectly here as practical, counter-hegemonic instruments. Akademia and Sol-Tech are not merely educational infrastructure; they are incubators for what Gramsci called “organic intellectuals”: people who give the minority’s own worldview new intellectual stature and articulate it effectively.

At the same time, for example, the FAK does essential work to reclaim historical heritage and prevent the state from rewriting history. Sakeliga and its networks of business chambers, in turn, are building an economic ecosystem that can function independently or semi-independently of the state’s coercive transformation demands. Only by linking economic power to the reconquest of their cultural capital can Afrikaners ensure that the majority state’s hegemony does not ultimately swallow them.

Piet Du Plessis retiree with a long history of applied socio-economic development. A liberated Afrikaner who has moved beyond self-flagellation and believes that he has been freed to live out his cultural pride and values, and to proclaim them openly when appropriate.