American hegemony arises in the factory, fusing force and persuasion without state intermediaries

Evidence

It also allows a continual reduction of the economic function of transport and trade to the level of a genuinely subaltern activity of production. Indeed, it has led to the attempt to absorb these activities into productive activity itself. Recall here the experiments conducted by Ford and to the economies made by his firm through direct management of transport and distribution of the product. These economies affected production costs and permitted higher wages and lower selling prices. … Since these preliminary conditions existed, already rendered rational by historical evolution, it was relatively easy to rationalise production and labour by a skilful combination of force (destruction of working-class trade unionism on a territorial basis) and persuasion (high wages, various social benefits, extremely subtle ideological and political propaganda) and thus succeed in making the whole life of the nation revolve around production. … Hegemony here is born in the factory and requires for its exercise only a minute quantity of professional political and ideological intermediaries. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1064

Categorization

• DEFINE: A key core-concept moment: hegemony of a distinct type — ‘born in the factory’ — requiring few professional political intermediaries, contrasting productivity-embedded persuasion against tradition-layered hegemony.
• XREF: Connects to later analyses of Fordism and cultural hegemony shaping everyday life through production rather than ideology — a distinct mechanism from European bourgeois hegemony over residual cultural traditions.
• DEEPTHINKING: The idea that hegemony can be produced in the workplace itself — with force and persuasion fused into production and daily life — is a dense, paradigm-shifting formulation of how domination operates without a thick ideological apparatus.