Is Gramsci a theoretician of super-structures? Give reasons in support of your answer. (2004)
In the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx called the economic structure the real foundation on which a legal and political superstructure rises. Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) kept that architecture but moved the decisive struggle upstairs. He is a theoretician of the superstructures in emphasis, not in the sense of making them determine the base.
Why the Label Fits
- His problem was superstructural. The Prison Notebooks (1929–35) asked why ripe economic contradictions produced no revolution in the West after 1917. The answer lay in schools, churches, newspapers and parties.
- Civil society moved. For Marx civil society was the sphere of material relations, part of the base. Gramsci fixed two major superstructural “levels”: civil society, the “private” organisms of consent, and political society, the state.
- Hegemony. Rule rests on intellectual and moral leadership won in civil society; the state is hegemony protected by the armour of coercion.
- Ideology as a material force, embodied in institutions, with common sense and good sense as objects of study.
- Strategy on the same terrain. The war of position, organic intellectuals and the party as modern Prince all operate there.
Norberto Bobbio, at the 1967 Cagliari conference, drew the conclusion: Gramsci inverted Marx twice, placing ideology above the economic structure and, within the superstructure, consent above force.
Why the Label Misleads
- The historical bloc. Structures and superstructures form an “historical bloc”: material forces are the content, ideologies the form. The concept names their unity, not the primacy of either.
- The economic nucleus. Hegemony is ethico-political but must also be economic, resting on the leading group’s role in the decisive nucleus of economic activity. A ruling class concedes wages or welfare, never its command of production.
- Class roots. Consent flows from the dominant group’s prestige in production, and organic intellectuals arise from an essential function in the world of economic production.
- Americanism and Fordism. Hegemony is built in the factory; Henry Ford’s high wage is the price of consent.
- Two errors. He attacked economism and ideologism alike.
Jacques Texier replied to Bobbio in an essay pointedly titled “Gramsci, theoretician of the superstructures”. He accepted the label but denied the inversion: for Gramsci as for Marx the economy stays decisive in the last instance, as Friedrich Engels had put it in 1890. Louis Althusser (For Marx, 1965) had already systematised this relative autonomy of the superstructure, while attacking Gramsci’s historicism.
An Indian Test
B. R. Ambedkar‘s Annihilation of Caste (1936) held that social reform must precede political reform, since caste survives by religious sanction more than by force: a Gramscian priority. Yet Partha Chatterjee‘s reading of the post-colonial state as passive revolution ties that ideological settlement to a coalition of capital, landed elites and bureaucracy, which is Gramsci’s own balance.
Conclusion
Gramsci is the theoretician of the superstructures in one sense: the first Marxist to treat them as a structure with its own institutions and rhythms. He did not invert Marx. When Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe cut the historical bloc loose from its economic base in 1985, they left Marxism altogether, which shows how much the economic anchor mattered to him.