Big Ag uses the same playbook to get what it wants and stifle what it doesn’t as every other “Big” out there—Big Tech, Big Pharma, etc. From Colin Todhunter at off-guardian.org:
Antonio Gramsci argued that propaganda is the main fabric through which contemporary power asserts itself. For Gramsci, propaganda is central to cultural hegemony; in other words, the dominance of a particular worldview (often that of the ruling class or elite) that is so deeply internalised by society that it becomes ‘common sense’ and uncritically accepted as natural and inevitable.
There are many reasons why transnational agribusiness has been able to secure its dominance in the global food system, not least its enormous economic and political clout. However, Gramsci’s insights, alongside Bernays’s ‘engineering of consent’ and Chomsky and Herman’s media propaganda model, help us to understand the sector’s dominance on an ideological level.
Gramsci’s cultural hegemony theory describes how dominant interests gain control by force or law but more importantly by shaping the cultural beliefs, and narratives of the entire society. Schools, media and science institutions help to preserve the status quo to ensure that the interests they ultimately serve are experienced as reality itself.
Bernays developed this further, arguing that modern propaganda appeals to irrational emotions and unconscious desires, engineering consent for deeply unjust outcomes. Chomsky and Herman’s propaganda model adapts these insights for the media age, revealing how consent is manufactured through selective news, expert testimony, corporate ownership of information pathways and the systematic filtering of dissent.
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