Antonio Gramsci

Western Political Thought: Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, John S. Mill, Marx, Gramsci, Hannah Arendt. Also serves the Concept of Power unit (hegemony, ideology, legitimacy), the neo-Marxist theories of the state, and the neo-Gramscian approach in International Relations.

Official Syllabus: Paper I, Section A, Unit 10

Gramsci is the thinker who asked why the revolution did not happen. Marx had explained why the working class must revolt; by 1920 the conditions Marx specified were present across industrial Europe and nothing came of them, while the one country where power was actually seized was the least developed in Europe.

His answer changed the shape of Marxism. Rule in a developed society, he concluded, is secured by consent — by a ruling class making its own view of the world into the ordinary common sense of everybody else, through schools, churches, newspapers, parties, unions and habits. Coercion stands behind that consent as a last resort, but it is not what does the daily work.

That single move opened up everything the twentieth century did with culture and ideology. Cultural studies, discourse theory, the sociology of the media, subaltern history, critical International Relations and the modern vocabulary of hegemony, organic intellectuals and the culture war all descend from a set of unrevised notebooks written under censorship by a sick man who never expected to see them published.

He is also the most contested figure in the Marxist canon, for a reason worth stating at the outset. The notebooks are fragmentary, coded and internally inconsistent, and almost every major reading of Gramsci — Eurocommunist, structuralist, post-Marxist, subalternist, neo-Gramscian — is a reading of a different set of fragments.

The Life That Made the Theory

Gramsci is one of the few political theorists whose biography is genuinely load-bearing. A man from the poorest region of Italy, disabled from childhood, who organised workers in the country’s one industrial city and then wrote his major work in a prison cell under a censor’s eye, produces a theory about culture, subordination, regional backwardness and the long duration of struggle because those were the materials of his life.

Sardinia, Poverty and the Body

• Born 22 January 1891 at Ales in Sardinia, fourth of seven children of a minor registry official, in the poorest and most peripheral corner of the new Italian state.
• His father was imprisoned in 1898 over irregularities in his office, and the family fell into real destitution; the boy left school and worked at casual jobs for several years.
• A spinal deformity, associated with Pott’s disease, left him under five feet tall with a pronounced curvature and permanently poor health. He expected for most of his life to die young.
• His first politics was Sardinian regionalism, not socialism — the grievance of an internal colony against a northern state. It is the seed of The Southern Question and of his lifelong interest in the peasantry, whom orthodox Marxism had written off.

Turin, the Factory Councils and the Biennio Rosso

• He won a scholarship to the University of Turin in 1911, read literature, and studied linguistics under Matteo Bartoli. He never took a degree, leaving in 1915 for poverty and politics.
• The linguistic training is not a footnote. Bartoli’s neolinguistics treated language change as the spread of prestige forms outward from a dominant centre — one language exercising influence over another without conquest. That is the structure of hegemony, learned before he had the word.
• Turin was Italy’s Detroit — Fiat, mass production, a concentrated and militant workforce — and Gramsci arrived as a socialist journalist writing for Avanti! and Il Grido del Popolo.
• The biennio rosso, the two red years of 1919–20, was the high point of Italian working-class insurgency: strikes, land occupations in the South, and in September 1920 the occupation of the metal factories of Turin and Milan by their workers.
• The factory councils were his own project — councils elected by all workers in a plant, not just union members, which he read as the Italian equivalent of the soviets and the embryo of a workers’ state growing inside the old one.
• That defeat is the founding experience of his thought. The movement was absorbed by a negotiated settlement between unions and employers, and within two years Mussolini was in power. The working class had held the factories and could not convert that into political power.

L’Ordine Nuovo and the Founding of the Party

• In April 1919 he founded the weekly L’Ordine Nuovo with Palmiro Togliatti, Angelo Tasca and Umberto Terracini, the journal in which the council theory was worked out.
• The Socialist Party split at Livorno in January 1921, and Gramsci was a founding member of the Communist Party of Italy, formed there on 21 January under the leadership of Amadeo Bordiga.
• The quarrel with Bordiga is the seed of the strategic theory. Bordiga wanted a pure party abstaining from elections and alliances while awaiting the decisive moment; Gramsci concluded that a class becomes capable of ruling only by first learning to lead others.

Comintern, Vienna, Parliament and the Leadership

• He went to Moscow in 1922 as the party’s representative to the Communist International and stayed nearly two years, much of it in a sanatorium. There he met and married Julia Schucht, a Russian violinist; they had two sons, and he never saw the second.
• He moved to Vienna in late 1923 to work on a party fractured by faction, and returned to Italy in 1924 after election to the Chamber of Deputies for the Veneto, which carried parliamentary immunity.
• He became general secretary in August 1924 and founded the party newspaper L’Unità. The Lyon Theses of January 1926, largely his work, committed the party to the united front, to work inside mass organisations, and to the alliance of northern workers with southern peasants.
• In the autumn of 1926 he was writing Some Aspects of the Southern Question, which contains in embryo the analysis of intellectuals, regional blocs and class alliance. He never finished it; the arrest came first.

Arrest, Trial and the Twenty Years

• On 8 November 1926 he was arrested in Rome, his parliamentary immunity simply disregarded, in the round-up after an attempt on Mussolini’s life. He was first sent to internal exile on the island of Ustica.
• Tried before the Special Tribunal for the Defence of the State, he was sentenced in June 1928 to twenty years, four months and five days.
• The prosecutor’s line is the most quoted sentence in his story.

We must prevent this brain from functioning for twenty years. — the prosecutor at Gramsci’s trial

• He was held mainly at Turi, near Bari, in conditions that destroyed what remained of his health — tuberculosis, arteriosclerosis, hypertension and repeated haemorrhages.
• Moved to a clinic at Formia in 1933 and to Rome in 1935, he could no longer work. He formally regained his freedom on 21 April 1937 and died six days later, aged forty-six.
• The irony the prosecutor could not have anticipated is exact. Outside prison Gramsci was a journalist and organiser writing to deadlines; inside, with nothing else to do, he became a theorist. The sentence produced the work.

The Quaderni del Carcere: What Kind of Text They Are

• He began writing on 8 February 1929 and continued until 1935, filling more than thirty school exercise books — the Quaderni del carcere, the Prison Notebooks — some three thousand manuscript pages.
• They are not a book. They are working notebooks: notes, second and third drafts of the same note, reading summaries, translation exercises, and long stretches on Italian literary history.
• Everything was read by a censor, which shaped the prose more than any stylistic choice. He could not write “Marxism”, “Lenin”, “class struggle” or “revolution” plainly.
• Hence the coded vocabulary readers must decode. Philosophy of praxis stands for Marxism, the founder of the philosophy of praxis for Marx, Ilyich for Lenin, Bronstein for Trotsky. Some circumlocutions are pure evasion; others, as with the philosophy of praxis, carry a real position.
• He worked without a library. Books came slowly and at the censor’s pleasure, so he quotes from memory and returns obsessively to the few texts he had — one reason Croce and Machiavelli loom so large.
• The notes were never revised and often contradict each other, because they record a mind changing position over six years. Reading them as a finished doctrine is the commonest error made about Gramsci, and the source of most disputes about what he really held.
• He is commonly called the father of neo-Marxism, and with reason: both of its major currents run back to him — the critical or Frankfurt tradition, which took up culture, ideology and consciousness, and the structural tradition of Althusser and Poulantzas, which took up the relative autonomy of the superstructure.

Tatiana Schucht, Piero Sraffa and the Survival of the Notebooks

• Tatiana Schucht, his sister-in-law, was the one person who visited regularly through the prison years, carried his correspondence, argued with the authorities on his behalf and, after his death, secured the notebooks and got them out of Italy.
• Piero Sraffa, the Italian economist then at Cambridge, supplied the practical means — an open account at a Milan bookshop from which Gramsci could order what he wanted, the notebooks and writing materials, and a channel to the outside world.
• The notebooks travelled to Moscow through the Soviet embassy in Rome after his death and returned to Italy after the war. Without those two people the work would not exist.

Publication, and the Making of a Reputation

• Nothing appeared in Gramsci’s lifetime beyond his journalism. The Letters from Prison were published in 1947 and made him a literary figure in Italy before he was a theoretical one.
• The notebooks were first published between 1948 and 1951 in six volumes, arranged thematically rather than in the order written, under the direction of Togliatti and the post-war Italian Communist Party.
• That thematic edition shaped forty years of reading. By grouping notes by subject and quietly setting aside material awkward for the party, it produced a Gramsci more coherent and more systematic than the manuscripts warranted.
• Valentino Gerratana’s critical edition of 1975 restored the manuscript order with all variant drafts, making it possible to watch the thought developing — and to see the inconsistencies.
• In English the decisive volume is Selections from the Prison Notebooks, translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, from which nearly every English quotation is taken; a complete critical English edition by Joseph Buttigieg followed later.

A theorist read almost entirely through a posthumous, censored, unrevised and selectively edited text will be reconstructed differently by every generation that needs him.

The Problem Gramsci Set Himself

Why Revolution Failed in the West

• The starting point is an empirical embarrassment, not a philosophical puzzle. Marx held that revolution would come first where capitalism was most advanced, and it did not.
• After 1917 the conditions were present across industrial Europe — war, unemployment, inflation, armed and radicalised workers, a discredited ruling order. The revolutionary waves in Germany, Hungary and Italy all failed, and the Bolsheviks succeeded in the most backward large country in Europe.
• Gramsci’s answer is structural. State and society stand in different relations in the two settings: in Russia the state carried the whole weight of rule, while in the West a dense fabric of institutions stood behind it and absorbed the shock.
• The second half of the question is the more uncomfortable one. It is not only that revolution failed, but that the Western working class largely did not want one, and voted, worshipped, read and consumed within the terms its rulers set.
• That is what hegemony answers: why the exploited consent to their own domination, and consent freely, without believing themselves deceived.

Against Economism

• Economism is his name for the reduction of politics to the direct expression of economic interest, and he treats it as the central disease of the Marxism he inherited.
• In theory it holds that the superstructure merely reflects the base, so political and cultural struggle is decorative and only the economy is real.
• In practice it produces either fatalism or syndicalism — waiting for the inevitable crisis, or confining struggle to the workplace and wages.
• Its fatal weakness is self-refutation. If ideas simply follow interests, a class whose interests point to revolution should not be found voting for its opponents.
• He is equally hard on the mirror error, ideologism — the belief that ideas float free of material conditions. The relation is reciprocal action within a historic bloc, not determination in either direction.

Against the Fatalism of the Second International

• The Second International’s Marxism had become a doctrine of inevitability: capitalism would collapse of its own contradictions, and socialists had only to organise, wait and administer the succession.
• He treats that fatalism sociologically, not as a mere mistake. It was the religion of a subordinate class not yet capable of initiative — a faith that sustained morale precisely because the class could not yet act.
• A faith useful in the passive phase obstructs the active one. A movement expecting history to do its work will not build the organisation and the culture that taking power requires.
• His famous early formulation reverses the charge. Where mechanical Marxists complained that the Bolshevik revolution violated the laws of history, Gramsci called it a revolution against Capital — against the deterministic reading of the book, not against Marx.

Against Mechanical Materialism and Bukharin’s Manual

• The most sustained critique in the notebooks is of Nikolai Bukharin’s popular textbook of historical materialism, treated as the purest statement of everything wrong with orthodox Marxism.
• The charge is that Bukharin turns Marxism into sociology — general laws and classificatory schemes borrowed from the natural sciences and applied to society from outside.
• This substitutes causality for dialectics, producing what Gramsci calls an upside-down idealism: it looks materialist because it talks about matter, but its categories are as abstract and ahistorical as any metaphysics.
• The political consequence is the fatal one. A theory of iron laws leaves no room for political initiative, for the formation of a collective will, or for persuasion — that is, for everything Gramsci thinks actually decides outcomes.
• He is not rejecting materialism, but a materialism that has forgotten that history is made by people acting in conditions they did not choose.

The Sources: Croce, Labriola, Machiavelli, Sorel, Lenin

• Benedetto Croce is the great antagonist and the great debt. Italy’s dominant liberal-idealist philosopher had made the ethico-political the centre of historical explanation.
  • His stated project was to invert Croce as Marx inverted Hegel — keeping the insight into the power of ideas and grounding it materially.
  • The anti-positivist temper of the notebooks comes from Croce, which is why his Marxism is so unlike the scientistic Marxism of his contemporaries.
• Antonio Labriola, the founder of Italian Marxism, supplied the crucial claim that Marxism is an independent and original philosophy rather than a sociology bolted onto a borrowed metaphysics — and the term philosophy of praxis itself.
• Niccolò Machiavelli supplies the model of political analysis: how power is actually won and held, the founding of a state as a work of political art, and the Prince as a device for calling a collective will into being.
• Georges Sorel contributes the idea of the myth — a belief whose function is to organise action rather than to describe the world — and the vocabulary of the historic bloc, though Gramsci rejects his spontaneism.
• Lenin is the largest debt and the least visible, because he could not be named: the concept of hegemony itself, the leading role of the party, the peasant alliance and the united front.
  • Gramsci’s claim about him is strong — that in advancing the theory and practice of hegemony Lenin made a philosophical advance as well as a political one, establishing that the terrain of consent is a terrain of struggle.
• Others enter obliquely: Vilfredo Pareto on elites, and Vincenzo Cuoco, from whom the phrase passive revolution is taken.

The Philosophy of Praxis — Code Word and Real Position

• The phrase began as a way past the censor, and where Gramsci writes it he usually means Marxism.
• But it also states a position. It names a Marxism that is neither a materialist metaphysics nor a sociology but a philosophy of historically situated human activity.
• Praxis is the unity of theory and practice — thought arising from action, testing itself in action, and transforming the world rather than contemplating it. The eleventh thesis on Feuerbach is the ancestor.
• He calls it an absolute historicism. There is no standpoint outside history from which truth can be certified; all thought, Marxism included, is a product of its moment and must understand itself as such.
• He calls it equally an absolute humanism — a complete secularisation of thought, with no transcendent guarantor and no iron law standing in for providence. History is made by human beings and by nothing else.
• The risk was pressed hard later. If all truth is historical, on what ground is Marxism truer than the ideology it criticises? His answer — that a philosophy proves itself by becoming the practical consciousness of a class capable of transforming society — is more political than epistemological, and critics have said so.

Gramsci’s Marxism is not a science of society standing outside it, but the self-understanding of a class in the act of becoming capable of ruling.

Hegemony

Hegemony is the concept Gramsci is read for, and it is worth being precise about what is his in it. The word was in circulation before him, and the idea of ideological domination is older still. What Gramsci did was to turn a slogan about revolutionary strategy into a general theory of how rule works in modern societies, and then derive a strategy from it.

Where the Word Came From

• The Greek hegemonia means leadership, as distinct from arche, rule — the standing of a leading city among allies rather than a master over subjects.
• The Marxist usage begins in Russian Social Democracy in the 1880s and 1890s, with Plekhanov and Axelrod, where gegemoniya named a strategic problem: in a backward country the coming revolution would be bourgeois in content, so which class would lead it?
• Their answer, and then Lenin’s, was that the proletariat must lead — must exercise hegemony over the peasantry and the urban poor, giving political direction to a revolution not immediately its own.
• In that usage hegemony is about alliance within a revolutionary bloc. It applies to the subordinate class, concerns political direction, and is strategy rather than social theory.
• Three extensions make the concept Gramsci’s.
  • He applied it to the ruling class, not only the revolutionary one — the bourgeoisie rules by hegemony, which is why it is not overthrown.
  • He located it in civil society and culture, not merely in party alliances — schools, churches, newspapers, associations, popular fiction, language itself.
  • He made it a theory of the state and of history, generating the integral state, the historic bloc, passive revolution and the two strategies of struggle.

Intellectual and Moral Leadership

• The definitional formula is that hegemony is intellectual and moral leadership — direzione intellettuale e morale — exercised by a class over allied and subordinate groups.
• It is not propaganda and not brainwashing. Hegemony works precisely because it does not feel like an imposition: the hegemonic worldview is experienced as obvious, natural, simply the way things are.
• A hegemonic class presents its particular interest as the general interest, convincingly enough that subordinate groups adopt that account as their own spontaneous understanding of the world.
• The medium is common sense, which is why hegemony is inseparable from culture, education, religion and everyday language — and why he says that hegemony defines the limits of common sense, fixing the boundary of what can be thought possible.
• The contrast with coercion can be put as hard power against soft power. Hard power is exercised on the body, is concrete and rests on compulsion; soft power is exercised on the mind, is invisible, and rests on consent.
• It is exercised in civil society before it is exercised through the state — Gramsci’s decisive relocation of where politics happens.
• A class must be leading before it is ruling. His formula is that a class becomes dominant when it takes power, but must already have become leading beforehand, and must go on leading afterwards.

Domination and Direction: Dominio against Direzione

• The distinction is the one most directly asked about, and the terms are precise: dominio is domination, direzione is direction or leadership.
• Domination is exercised over antagonistic groups, which a class seeks to liquidate or subdue, if necessary by armed force. Direction is exercised over kindred and allied groups, which are led rather than crushed.
• The pair maps onto force and consent, coercion and persuasion, state and civil society, hard and soft power — but the mapping is a tendency, not a partition.
• The crucial point is that they are a combination, not alternatives, in proportions that vary by society and by moment. Every real regime is a mix.

Dimension	Domination (dominio)	Direction (direzione)
Instrument	Force, law, sanction	Consent, persuasion, moral authority
Terrain	Political society — army, police, courts, prisons	Civil society — school, church, press, association, party
Object	Antagonistic classes, to be subdued	Allied and subordinate groups, to be led
How it feels to the subordinate	Compulsion recognised as such	Common sense — the natural order of things
Cost to the ruler	Expensive, visible, self-delegitimising if constant	Real concessions and sacrifice of immediate interest
Stability	Brittle; provokes what it suppresses	Durable, but must be continuously reproduced
When it predominates	Crisis; the colonial situation; a class dominant but no longer leading	Normal times where civil society is developed

Hegemony Is Never Complete

• This is the point most often lost, and the difference between Gramsci and a conspiracy theory of culture. Hegemony is not a state achieved once and then possessed.
• It has to be produced continuously, day by day, through institutions that constantly renew it, because the conditions sustaining it are always shifting.
• It is won through real concessions. A class cannot rule in modern conditions by advancing its narrow economic interest; it must sacrifice some of that interest — wages, the franchise, welfare, legal protections — to secure the leadership that repays it.
• Those concessions are genuine, not tricks. They change the ruling class as well as the ruled: hegemony obliges the ruler to take on some of the values and demands of the ruled.
• And it is always contested. Alternative accounts of the world circulate in unions, in religion, in popular memory, and in the same common sense that carries the dominant view.
• The concessions have a limit. They may not touch what Gramsci calls the decisive nucleus of economic activity: a hegemonic class concedes much, but not its command of production.

The Historic Bloc and the Decisive Economic Nucleus

• The historic bloc keeps hegemony materialist, and dropping it is exactly how later readers turned Gramsci into a culturalist.
• In one sense it names the unity of structure and superstructure — a formation in which a mode of production, a set of institutions and a worldview sustain each other as a single organic whole.
• In another it names the social alliance on which rule rests: the coalition of classes and fractions, led by one of them, that makes a given order possible.
• The base does not disappear. Gramsci states that although hegemony is ethico-political it must also be economic, founded on the decisive function exercised by the leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity.
• That sentence answers half the criticism he receives, conceding the primacy of production while denying that production alone explains political outcomes.
• The counter-hegemonic implication is symmetrical. A subordinate class wins not by asserting its narrow interest but by constructing an alternative bloc — offering leadership to other subordinate groups and articulating their grievances into a common project.

Hegemony and the Theory of Power

• Hegemony is the historical version of what the power literature calls the third dimension. Dahl studied who wins decisions; Bachrach and Baratz added control of the agenda; Lukes identified power that shapes what people want.
• The link runs both ways. Lukes’s difficulty — attributing to people real interests they do not acknowledge — is Gramsci’s too, and his answer is better: subordinate consciousness is contradictory, holding both the borrowed worldview and the good sense generated by practical experience.
• Against Weber, for whom legitimacy is a matter of belief, Gramsci asks the further question: who produced the belief, through what institutions, and in whose interest?
• Against Foucault, the difference is the centre. Foucault’s power is capillary, without a subject and without a class; Gramsci’s is diffuse in operation but has a location — a class, a bloc, a decisive economic nucleus.

The Integral State

State = Political Society + Civil Society

• Gramsci’s definition of the state is the formula every answer on him should reproduce.

State = political society + civil society, in other words hegemony protected by the armour of coercion. — Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

• Political society is the state in the ordinary sense — government, bureaucracy, army, police, courts, prisons — the apparatus of direct domination and command.
• Civil society is the ensemble of so-called private organisms — schools and universities, churches, unions, parties, newspapers, publishers, voluntary associations, the family — the terrain on which hegemony is organised.
• The combination is the integral or extended state: the whole complex of activities by which a ruling class both justifies its dominance and wins the active consent of the governed.
• The division is analytical, not real. Gramsci says explicitly that it is a distinction of method: state schools organise consent, and voluntary associations can be as coercive as any statute.
• The payoff is strategic. If the state is only an apparatus of coercion, revolution means seizing it; if the state extends into every school and newspaper, seizing the apparatus leaves the real fortifications intact.

Relocating Civil Society into the Superstructure

• This is the technical move that makes Gramsci a heretic. For Marx, following and inverting Hegel, civil society meant the sphere of material and economic relations, whose anatomy was to be sought in political economy. Civil society belonged to the base.
• Gramsci moves it into the superstructure, where it is not the economy but the ensemble of ideological and cultural institutions standing between the economy and the state.
• Two levels of the superstructure follow: civil society, the level of hegemony and consent, and political society, the level of direct domination.
• They change at different speeds. A mode of production can be transformed quickly; the sedimented culture that legitimated it may take generations. That asymmetry is why the war of position is long.
• Civil society plays a double role, and both halves matter.
  • It is the outer defence of the existing order — a cushion that absorbs economic crisis and stops it reaching the state as a political crisis.
  • It is simultaneously the terrain on which the order can be contested, since the institutions that transmit the dominant worldview can be captured, split or rebuilt.

East and West: Ditches, Fortresses and Earthworks

• The most quoted structural passage in the notebooks is the East/West comparison, and it is the direct answer to why 1917 worked and 1919 did not.

In Russia the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between State and civil society, and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks. — Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

• In the East the state carried the entire burden. Tsarism had no dense fabric of parties, unions, independent churches, mass press or associations to fall back on; when the state failed there was nothing behind it, and a frontal assault sufficed.
• In the West the state is the outer ditch only. Behind it stand parliaments, elections, competing parties, unions, a mass press, an established church, schools, professional bodies and the whole apparatus of associational life.
• The military metaphors are deliberate, drawn from the First World War, where the war of movement gave way to years of entrenched positional struggle. He treats that transition as a general law of modern conflict, political as well as military.
• The distinction is geographical only as shorthand. It really contrasts two configurations of state and society, and Gramsci notes that East and West are relative positions — which is what makes the schema portable to colonial and post-colonial cases.

Marx and Gramsci Compared

	Marx	Gramsci
The state	Instrument of the ruling class; essentially coercive	Integral state — political society plus civil society; hegemony armoured by coercion
Where civil society sits	In the base — material and economic relations	In the superstructure — ideological and cultural institutions
How the ruling class rules	Ownership of the means of production, backed by state force	Intellectual and moral leadership, backed by force in reserve
The superstructure	Determined by the base, in the last instance	A structure in its own right; the terrain where rule is actually won
Ideology	Distorted consciousness serving class interest	A material force organised through institutions; contains good sense
Revolutionary agent	The proletariat, produced by capitalism itself	A historic bloc of subaltern groups and its organic intellectuals
Strategy	Revolution when contradictions mature	War of position first; power follows cultural leadership
Intellectuals	Not a distinct theoretical problem	Central; organic against traditional
Timescale	The crisis brings the moment	Protracted — the superstructure changes over generations
The party	The most advanced section of the workers	The modern Prince — organiser of a national-popular will

Relative Autonomy and the Marxist Theory of the State

• Gramsci is the first thinker in the Marxist tradition to concede the relative autonomy of the state, and later Marxist state theory begins from that concession.
• The background is in Marx himself, in the analysis of Bonapartism: a situation in which the warring classes so nearly balance that state power acquires a degree of independence, and a ruler appearing to stand above the class struggle takes the mantle of power.
• This is the door through which Poulantzas, Miliband and Althusser walk, and it is why Gramsci is examined as a theorist of the state and not only of culture.

Ideology, Common Sense and Culture

Ideology as a Material Force

• He breaks with the pejorative Marxist usage in which ideology means false consciousness — a distorted picture to be dispelled by science.
• For him ideology is a conception of the world, held by everyone and expressed in art, law, economic activity and every manifestation of collective life. The question is whose it is and how coherent.
• Organic ideologies are a material force. Ideas that organise masses, are embodied in institutions and shape conduct are as real a historical factor as a steel mill, because they determine what people will and will not do.

Common Sense and Good Sense

• Common sense (senso comune) is the everyday, uncritical, taken-for-granted worldview of ordinary people — the folklore of philosophy.
• Its defining feature is incoherence — a sedimented deposit of fragments of religion, science, superstition, proverb, the residues of past philosophies and the current common sense of the dominant class, held together by nothing.
• Hegemony works by inhabiting common sense, which is why it is so hard to dislodge: it is not a doctrine to be refuted but a set of assumptions that never become explicit enough to be doubted.
• Good sense (buon senso) is the healthy nucleus within common sense — the practical, critical, experimental element generated by people’s actual experience of work and life.
• This yields the account of contradictory consciousness. The subordinate worker holds two conceptions of the world at once: one absorbed from the dominant order and affirmed in words, and one implicit in his practical activity, which shows itself when he acts collectively.
• The strategic instruction follows directly. A counter-hegemonic project must work with common sense, not sweep it away — starting from the good sense already present and rendering it coherent, rather than importing a doctrine as a set of foreign notions.

The National-Popular

• The national-popular names a culture in which intellectuals and people are genuinely connected, and a class’s project has become a nation’s.
• He arrives at it through a literary complaint. Italy has no popular national literature — Italians read foreign serial novels — because Italian intellectuals have always been a caste addressing each other, cosmopolitan and detached from the people.
• A hegemonic project must therefore be national in form, speaking a people’s own idiom, history and sentiment, even while its content is class-based and its horizon international.

Folklore, Religion and Popular Culture

• He takes popular culture seriously as an object of political analysis, which almost no Marxist before him did.
• Folklore is not quaint survival but a conception of the world — implicit, unelaborated, belonging to strata excluded from official culture, and often containing progressive elements alongside fossilised ones.
• Religion is the largest case. The Catholic Church is for him the most successful hegemonic apparatus in history, and its success lies in maintaining ideological unity between the intellectuals and the simple without letting either drift free.
• His judgement on Marxism’s prospects follows from that comparison: a philosophy of praxis can supersede religion only if it meets people’s actual spiritual needs and is experienced as an expression of their own lives.

Language and Education

• Language is never neutral. Every language contains a conception of the world, and adopting a language means adopting its assumptions — a point his linguistic training made obvious to him.
• On education he is deliberately unfashionable, defending the old common humanistic school — Latin, Greek, history, rigorous discipline — against progressive schemes to give working-class children practical vocational training.
• His reason is access, not conservatism. Vocational schooling for the poor and classical education for the rich reproduces the class structure by dividing those who will govern from those who will execute; a single formative school for all is a condition of the subordinate producing their own intellectuals.
• Study is work, and hard work. He insists intellectual discipline is acquired by effort and repetition, and that pretending otherwise disarms exactly the children with nothing else to fall back on.

Intellectuals

All Men Are Intellectuals

All men are intellectuals, one could therefore say: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals. — Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

• The first half rests on a claim about work. There is no purely mechanical activity: every kind of labour involves some creative intellectual element, some judgement, some conception of the world.
• The second half restores the sociological question. What defines the intellectual is not superior mental equipment but a social function — the organising, directing and legitimising role a stratum performs.
• His own list is deliberately wide — not only philosophers and writers but engineers, managers, technicians, supervisors, doctors, bankers, lawyers, civil servants, journalists, priests and teachers: everyone who organises, administers or persuades.

Organic Intellectuals

• Every social group, arising on the terrain of an essential function in production, creates alongside itself strata of intellectuals who give it homogeneity and awareness of its own function — economically, socially and politically.
• Their work is articulation, not description. The organic intellectual expresses, in the language of culture, the feelings and experiences the masses cannot formulate for themselves, and gives them coherence.
• They are the dominant group’s deputies, in Gramsci’s exact word, exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government — the delegated tasks of organising consent and administering.
• The capitalist class illustrates the point. It created with itself the industrial technician, the political economist, the manager, the lawyer and the modern administrator — a stratum that made industrial society workable and made it seem natural.
• The new intellectual he wants is not the orator but the organiser — a specialist who is also a director, participating in practical life as constructor, organiser and permanent persuader.

Traditional Intellectuals

• Traditional intellectuals are strata left over from an earlier social order, whose organic class has passed but who continue as an apparently independent category.
• Their defining illusion is autonomy. Because their link is to a superseded class, they experience themselves as standing above history, economics and politics — an uninterrupted line of scholars serving truth as such.
• That illusion is politically useful to whoever holds power, since it lends the appearance of neutrality to positions that are not neutral.
• The classic case is the ecclesiastics. The clergy of medieval Europe monopolised religious ideology together with schooling, morality, justice, charity and good works, were organically bound to the landed aristocracy, and survived that aristocracy’s decline.
• The relationship with a new ruling class is assimilation, not opposition. A rising class conquers the traditional intellectuals ideologically, absorbing them — and does so faster the more successfully it produces organic intellectuals of its own.

Dimension	Traditional intellectuals	Organic intellectuals
Origin	Deposited by an earlier historical process	Produced by a class as it comes into being in production
Self-image	Autonomous, above class and politics	Consciously bound to a class and its project
Actual function	Still legitimate an order while denying they do	Articulate the class’s worldview and organise consent
Typical figures	Clergy, men of letters, the village notary and schoolmaster	Engineers, managers, technicians, economists, party organisers
Relation to power	Assimilated by the rising class; lend it the prestige of neutrality	Deputies exercising the subaltern functions of hegemony
Strategic significance	Winning them signals that a class is becoming hegemonic	Producing them is the condition of hegemony at all

Why the Working Class Must Produce Its Own

• There is no counter-hegemony without intellectuals, and no revolution without a counter-hegemony.
• The working class already produces intellectuals in the technical sense — technicians, foremen, skilled workers, union officials — but they have historically been absorbed into the service of capital.
• They must renovate popular thought, not replace it. Their job is not to inject a finished doctrine into workers’ heads but to make critical and coherent the good sense already present in popular experience.
• The rising class must also assimilate the traditional intellectuals, offering leadership to teachers, clergy, writers and professionals rather than treating them as enemies — which is how a class shows it can lead a nation and not only its own ranks.

Strategy: The Modern Prince and the Forms of Struggle

The Party as the Modern Prince

• He reads Machiavelli’s Prince as a political myth rather than a manual of cynicism — a work whose function is not to describe but to summon, giving concrete form to a scattered will and calling a people into political existence.
• The modern equivalent cannot be a person. In modern conditions the founder of a new order must be a collective, and the collective is the political party.

The modern prince… cannot be a real person, a concrete individual. It can only be an organism… in which a collective national-popular will… has already taken concrete form. — Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

• The party’s function is threefold, and none of it reduces to contesting elections.
  • To be the organiser and active expression of a collective will, welding scattered grievances into a project.
  • To be the crucible of the class’s organic intellectuals.
  • To be the agent of intellectual and moral reform — a secular equivalent of the Reformation, reaching into how people understand the world.
• Machiavelli’s Jacobin moment is the model. What made the French revolutionaries succeed, on his reading, was that they linked the urban revolution to the peasantry’s demand for land and so gave it a national base — the step the Italian Risorgimento never took.

Democratic Centralism Read Through Machiavelli

• He accepts the Leninist form but redescribes its content. Democratic centralism is not a chain of command but a continuous adaptation of organisation to the real movement from below, matching upward pressure with direction supplied from above.
• He contrasts it with bureaucratic centralism — a leadership that has ceased to listen, mistakes its own directives for the movement, and survives by inertia and coercion within the party.
• The party is a miniature of the integral state, and the same test applies: does it hold together by consent, and does it produce its own intellectuals?

War of Manoeuvre

• War of manoeuvre, also war of movement, is the frontal assault — rapid, direct and decisive: the seizure of the commanding heights, the insurrection.
• October 1917 is the paradigm, and the point is that its success was conditional on Russian conditions, not a universal model.
• Applied to the West it is suicidal, because the state is only the outer ditch: the insurgents take the ditch and find the fortresses intact — exactly what happened in Germany, Hungary and Italy.
• It remains the necessary final moment. Gramsci does not abolish it; he subordinates it in sequence. Power still has to be taken.

War of Position

• War of position is the protracted struggle within civil society for cultural and moral leadership, conducted before power is contested directly.
• It is fought in the institutions — schools and universities, the press, publishing, unions, professional bodies, cultural associations, religious life, popular entertainment, and the party.
• Its object is a counter-hegemony: an alternative conception of the world with its own intellectuals, institutions and common sense, capable of drawing allied groups into a new historic bloc.
• It is trench warfare, and he says so. It demands enormous sacrifices from vast numbers over long periods, and therefore an unprecedented concentration of hegemony and an iron patience.
• The sequence is the whole doctrine. In the West the war of position must be won first; the war of manoeuvre is the culmination, and attempting it prematurely guarantees defeat or a counter-revolution that undoes the gains.
• He attributes the recognition of this shift to Lenin — that the tactic victorious in the East in 1917 had to give way in the West to the only form possible there.

Underground Warfare: The Third Term

• The summaries give two forms of struggle; Gramsci gives three. Alongside the war of movement and the war of position he names underground warfare — clandestine, subterranean struggle.
• Underground warfare is the form imposed where open struggle is impossible — under a regime that has destroyed the institutions in which a war of position could be fought.
• The category is autobiographical, not decorative. Gramsci was writing under a Fascist state that had abolished the parties, the free press and the independent unions, which is to say it had razed the terrain of the war of position.

	War of manoeuvre	War of position	Underground warfare
Form	Frontal, rapid, decisive assault on the state	Protracted struggle in civil society	Clandestine organisation
Condition	State everything; civil society gelatinous	Dense civil society — fortresses and earthworks	Civil society destroyed or closed
Object	Seizure of state power	Counter-hegemony — leadership before power	Survival, cadre preservation, preparation
Terrain	Streets, garrisons, ministries	School, press, union, church, party, culture	Networks outside all legal institutions
Duration	Days or weeks	Generations	Indefinite; imposed, not chosen
Case	Russia, October 1917	Western Europe — the strategy he prescribes	Italy under Fascism — his own situation

Americanism and Fordism

• He treats Fordism as a hegemonic project born in the factory rather than a technique. Assembly-line production, Taylorist time-study and the high wage form a single system, and its aim is a new kind of worker.
• The high wage is the crucial insight. Ford’s five-dollar day is not philanthropy but the price of consent — compensation for a labour process stripped of skill and judgement, and a way of binding the worker to the system as consumer.
• Consent had to be manufactured outside the factory too. He notes Ford’s inspectors, the campaigns for temperance and Prohibition, and the regulation of workers’ family life — an attempt to produce a psycho-physical type disciplined enough for the new machinery.
• He explicitly asks whether Americanism is a new historical epoch or a passive revolution, and inclines to the second: a reorganisation of production that modernises society while pre-empting independent initiative from below.
• The essay matters for three reasons.
  • It shows hegemony being built at the point of production, answering the charge that he ignored the base.
  • It anticipates the analysis of consumer capitalism — the working class integrated as consumers, not merely repressed as producers.
  • It supplies the framework used for every later reorganisation of work, from post-Fordism to platform and gig labour.

Passive Revolution, Trasformismo and Caesarism

The Concept

• Passive revolution names change from above that modernises a society while preventing the subordinate classes from acting as an independent political force.
• He takes the phrase from Vincenzo Cuoco, who used it of the Neapolitan revolution of 1799 — a revolution made for the people rather than by them, and lost for that reason.
• The mechanism is molecular rather than dramatic. Concessions are granted piecemeal, leaders absorbed, programmes adopted in mutilated form, and the movement dissolves into the order it was going to replace.

The Risorgimento as the Model

• Italian unification is the case from which the concept is drawn, and his analysis of it is the most sustained historical writing in the notebooks.
• Two forces contested it. The Moderates around Cavour, representing the Piedmontese monarchy and the northern propertied classes, and the Action Party of Mazzini and Garibaldi, democratic and republican.
• The Moderates won by exercising hegemony over their rivals. They were a compact leading group with organic intellectuals of their own; the Action Party had no comparable social base and ended up executing a programme that was not its own.
• The decisive failure was the refusal of the agrarian question. The Action Party never took up the peasants’ demand for land and so never acquired a mass base — precisely the Jacobin step the French took and the Italians did not.
• Unification was therefore a conquest, not a national-popular revolution — the annexation of the peninsula by the Piedmontese state rather than the self-constitution of an Italian people.
• The South was the price. A bloc of southern landowners, their intellectuals and a subordinated peasantry was preserved intact and subordinated to northern industry — the origin of the Southern Question.

Trasformismo

• Trasformismo is the parliamentary form of passive revolution: the systematic absorption of opposition leaders, one by one, into the governing coalition.
• He distinguishes two phases — the absorption of individual opponents, and the later absorption of whole groups of the left into the conservative order.
• Its effect is decapitation. The subordinate classes lose their leaders to the ruling bloc exactly when those leaders become effective, and the movement never acquires an independent political existence.

Caesarism

• Caesarism arises when the contending forces balance each other in a catastrophic way — neither able to win, both able to prevent the other from winning — and a third figure or force arbitrates.
• He distinguishes progressive from regressive Caesarism. Progressive Caesarism helps a new force to victory even under compromise; regressive Caesarism preserves the old order in modified form. Caesar and Napoleon I against Napoleon III and Bismarck are his examples.
• Modern Caesarism need not have a Caesar. It can be exercised by a coalition, a parliamentary bloc or a bureaucratic-police apparatus with no charismatic individual at all.
• Fascism is the case in front of him — analysed as a regressive Caesarism and a passive revolution that modernised Italian industry and rationalised the state while destroying every independent working-class organisation.

The Southern Question and the Subaltern

The Southern Question

• Some Aspects of the Southern Question, written in 1926 and left unfinished at his arrest, is the bridge between Gramsci the party leader and Gramsci the theorist. Much of the later theory of intellectuals is already in it.
• The Italian South is analysed as an internal colony — a great social disintegration held in place by the southern agrarian bloc.
• The bloc has three tiers.
  • A mass of peasants, atomised and without organisation.
  • A stratum of intellectuals — the village notary, priest, lawyer, teacher and doctor — who mediate between peasants and the state.
• The intellectuals are the hinge. They connect peasants to landowners, translate peasant grievance into forms that do not threaten property, and are why the bloc holds together with so little force.
• Above them stand the great intellectual figures who give the arrangement its philosophical prestige. He names Croce and Giustino Fortunato as the keystones of the southern system, precisely because they are national and European rather than local figures.
• The northern working class cannot win alone. The Turin proletariat must break the agrarian bloc by winning the peasantry away from it, which means addressing the land question and producing intellectuals able to speak to the South.
• He also confronts the prejudice head-on. Northern workers had absorbed the propaganda that the South was backward by nature and the southerner biologically inferior — an ideology diffused by bourgeois writers and accepted as common sense by the very class it divided.

The Worker–Peasant Alliance

• Marx had little confidence in the peasantry, treating smallholders as a class incapable of representing itself and politically inert.
• Lenin’s innovation was to bring the peasantry into the revolutionary bloc, unavoidable in an overwhelmingly agrarian Russia.
• Gramsci makes the alliance a general requirement of hegemony, not an expedient of backwardness: a class becomes hegemonic only by taking up the demands of groups outside itself and making them its own.
• The alliance must be real, not tactical. It requires actual concessions on land, and intellectuals who can speak to peasants in their own idiom.

The Subaltern

• Subaltern was a military rank — a junior officer — and he uses it partly to evade the censor’s eye for “proletariat”. But it does work no other word does.
• It names the subordinate in general, across every axis: not only workers but peasants, the rural poor, women, religious minorities, colonised peoples, and any group excluded from the exercise of hegemony.
• The breadth is what makes it travel. Read onto India it takes in Dalits, Adivasis, religious minorities, women and transgender persons — groups whose subordination is not reducible to the wage relation, and whose alliance is what a counter-hegemonic bloc would have to consist of.
• His notes sketch a programme for a history of the subaltern classes, and its propositions are the charter of a whole school of historiography.
  • Subaltern groups are by definition not unified and cannot unify until they are able to become a state; their history is therefore intertwined with that of civil society and of the state.
  • Their history is necessarily fragmented and episodic, because they remain subject to the initiative of the ruling groups even when they rebel.
  • Every trace of autonomous initiative must be recorded, however small, since these are the elements from which an independent politics might be built.
  • That history must be reconstructed from the archives of the dominant, since the subaltern leave few records of their own — the methodological problem that later became a whole field.

Organic Crisis and the Interregnum

Organic against Conjunctural

• He insists on distinguishing two kinds of crisis, and treats failure to distinguish them as the standard error of political analysis.
• Conjunctural crises are occasional, immediate and almost accidental — a scandal, a lost election, a bad quarter. They produce day-to-day criticism and are resolved within the existing order.
• Organic crises are structural, running over decades, arising from contradictions the order cannot resolve in its own terms. They put the order itself in question.
• An organic crisis guarantees nothing. A ruling class can survive one — by reorganising, by absorbing its opponents, by passive revolution or by force.

The Crisis of Authority

• The crisis of authority is hegemony breaking down, and the definition is precise: the ruling class has lost its consensus and is no longer leading but only dominant, exercising coercive force alone.
• Its symptom is detachment. The masses have separated from their traditional ideologies and no longer believe what they used to; the old parties no longer represent, and the represented no longer recognise themselves in the representatives.
• He calls it a crisis of hegemony, or a general crisis of the state. It may follow a failure in some great undertaking, such as a lost war, or the abrupt movement of vast masses from passivity to activity with demands the order cannot meet.

The Interregnum Passage

• This is the most quoted sentence Gramsci ever wrote, and it is very widely misquoted. The standard translation reads:

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. — Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

• The Italian is fenomeni morbosi — morbid or pathological phenomena, symptoms of sickness. The image is medical: an organism unable to complete a transition, throwing up disorders in the meantime.
• The popular version — “now is the time of monsters” — is not what Gramsci wrote. It entered circulation through a loose French rendering and was repopularised in later commentary. It is a mistranslation, not a variant translation.
• The context is usually dropped too. The passage sits inside the analysis of the crisis of authority, and its point is that the interregnum is the interval between a hegemony that has failed and one that has not yet been constructed.

Optimism of the Will, Pessimism of the Intellect

• The motto he made his own was borrowed from Romain Rolland, and appears repeatedly in his journalism and letters; his own prison formulation is that he was a pessimist by intelligence and an optimist by will.
• The two halves are a method, not a mood. The intellect must see the situation exactly as it is, without consolation — which for Gramsci meant a defeated movement, a Fascist state and his own death in prison.
• The will must nonetheless act, because outcomes are not determined and history is made by people. This is the practical face of the philosophy of praxis and the direct opposite of Second International fatalism.

Criticism and Reception

Perry Anderson and the Antinomies

• Perry Anderson’s The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci is the most searching internal critique ever written of the notebooks, and the reference point for every later argument about them.
• Its central finding is that Gramsci gives three incompatible accounts of the relation between state and civil society, and moves between them without noticing.
  • Civil society against the state. Hegemony belongs to civil society and coercion to the state; the state is the outer ditch and civil society the fortresses behind it. Consent is preponderant in the West.
  • State and civil society in balance. Hegemony is shared between them, since the state also educates, legislates morality and organises consent through law and schooling.
  • The state absorbs civil society. The integral state includes both, the distinction dissolves, and everything is state — which abolishes the very problem the distinction was introduced to solve.
• Anderson’s diagnosis is a structural asymmetry Gramsci missed. Ideology circulates in both spheres, but the monopoly of legitimate violence belongs to the state alone; the two are therefore not symmetrical terms and cannot be balanced against each other.
• On the East/West schema he is blunter. The comparison flatters Tsarism: the Russian state was in fact weaker, more brittle and less penetrating than the parliamentary states of the West, which command vastly greater administrative and coercive capacity.
• His deepest point concerns where Western consent actually lives, and it is a correction rather than a refutation.
  • The general form of bourgeois consent is the parliamentary state itself — the belief that sovereignty resides in the electorate and that the people therefore rule themselves.
  • That belief is produced by the state, not by civil society, which locates the central ideological mechanism exactly where Gramsci’s first model does not look.
• He also warns about the strategic slide. A war of position with no specified terminus, and no theory of the moment power is taken, becomes indistinguishable from reformism — which is the use Eurocommunism made of it.

Bobbio on Civil Society

• Norberto Bobbio isolated the decisive conceptual move: Gramsci places civil society in the superstructure, whereas Marx placed it in the base.
• For Marx the anatomy of civil society was to be sought in political economy; civil society was the ensemble of material relations. For Gramsci it is the ensemble of ideological institutions.
• Bobbio read the consequence as a reversal of priority. If rule is decided in civil society and civil society is superstructural, then the superstructural moment becomes primary, and Gramsci is closer to Hegel’s ethical sphere and to Croce than to Marx.
• The reading was influential and immediately contested. Critics answered that it detaches civil society from the historic bloc and the decisive economic nucleus, both of which tie hegemony back to production, and that a reciprocal relation is not a simple inversion.

Althusser: Ideological State Apparatuses as a Rival Account

• Louis Althusser’s account of ideology and the state is the great structuralist alternative, covering the same ground with different machinery.
• He divides the state in two. The Repressive State Apparatus — army, police, courts, prisons, government — functions primarily by violence; the Ideological State Apparatuses — school, church, family, legal and political systems, unions, media, culture — function primarily by ideology.
• Their function is the reproduction of the relations of production. Capitalism must reproduce not only machinery and labour power but the submission of workers to the established order.
• Ideology is not false belief but a lived relation — the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence, with a material existence in rituals and practices.
• Interpellation is the mechanism: ideology hails individuals and constitutes them as subjects who recognise themselves in the identities offered, and do so freely — which is why the system works.
• He nominates a dominant apparatus. In mature capitalism it is the school, which holds children for years in a setting taken to be neutral and thereby makes what it transmits appear simply obvious.
• He attacked Gramsci by name for the absolute historicism, arguing that a theory historicising all knowledge cannot claim scientific standing for itself.

Dimension	Gramsci	Althusser
Location of ideological institutions	Civil society, distinguished from political society	Within the state — they are State Apparatuses
Philosophical stance	Historicist and humanist	Anti-historicist and anti-humanist; a process without a subject
Status of the subject	Consciousness is contradictory; good sense enables revolt	The subject is constituted by ideology; no prior ground to resist from
How consent is secured	Negotiated, won by real concessions, always incomplete	Reproduced structurally; functional to the system
Room for counter-hegemony	Central — the whole strategy	Hard to theorise; class struggle asserted rather than explained
Determination	Reciprocal within a historic bloc	The economy in the last instance; overdetermination

Poulantzas and Miliband

• The 1970s debate on the capitalist state is conducted on ground Gramsci prepared, since both antagonists work with the relative autonomy he was the first to concede.
• Ralph Miliband’s position is instrumentalist. The state serves the ruling class because the two are bound together — shared social origins, education and careers, interlocking personnel across government, administration and the coercive apparatus, and the structural power of concentrated private wealth.
• His own summary of the debt is neat: Marx supplied the socio-economic analysis of capitalism, Lenin the political analysis, and Gramsci the conceptual apparatus for cultural and ideological analysis — after which what Marxism needed was concrete historical work.
• Nicos Poulantzas’s position is structuralist. Class domination is not automatically translated into state power; the state is relatively autonomous and functions as the factor of cohesion of a social formation, which requires that it not be the direct instrument of any fraction.
• Poulantzas moved toward Gramsci in his last work, treating the state as a condensation of a relationship of forces and a strategic field traversed by class struggle, and arguing for a democratic road combining transformation of the state with movements outside it.

Laclau and Mouffe: The Post-Marxist Appropriation

• Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy takes hegemony to its logical conclusion and out the other side — the most influential and most contested use of Gramsci.
• Their claim is that he stopped halfway. He made political identity a matter of construction through hegemonic articulation but retained a last redoubt of essentialism: the privileged class subject and the ultimate determination of the economy.
• They remove it. Political identities have no necessary class belonging; they are produced through articulation, the practice of linking elements so that their identity is modified by the linkage.
• The programme is radical and plural democracy — a chain of equivalence linking the demands of labour, feminism, anti-racism, ecology and sexual politics without subordinating any of them to class.
• The charge is that they drop class, and it was pressed immediately.
  • Norman Geras argued they had abandoned every substantive Marxist proposition while keeping the vocabulary — a post-Marxism that was really an ex-Marxism.
  • Ellen Meiksins Wood described the whole current as a retreat from class, in which the working class dissolves into discourse and capitalism ceases to be the object of analysis.
  • The specifically Gramscian objection is textual. Hegemony, he wrote, must also be economic and rest on the decisive nucleus of economic activity; a hegemony theory with no such nucleus is a departure from his position, not an extension of it.
• Their reply is not negligible. Class reductionism is empirically false — the actual movements of the late twentieth century were not class movements — and a theory unable to account for them is not saved by loyalty to its founder.

Femia, Buci-Glucksmann and Sassoon

• Joseph Femia supplied the most careful analytic reconstruction, and two of his distinctions are standard.
  • He grades hegemony by degree: integral hegemony, where the mass identifies wholeheartedly with the leading group; decadent hegemony, where consent survives but the ideology is losing its grip; and minimal hegemony, resting on trasformismo and elite absorption rather than mass consent.
  • He works out the problem of contradictory consciousness — how a class can affirm a worldview in words while its practical activity implies another, and what follows for the possibility of revolt.
• Christine Buci-Glucksmann read Gramsci as the theorist of the expanded state and of a democratic transition, arguing that the enlargement of the state into civil society implies a strategy of transforming both together. Hers is the theoretical backbone of Eurocommunism, and the reading Anderson wrote against.
• Anne Showstack Sassoon emphasised hegemony as a strategy of alliances and his expansion of what counts as political — that the real innovation is treating the making of a collective will, rather than the seizure of an apparatus, as the substance of politics.

Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies and Thatcherism

• Stuart Hall did more than anyone to make Gramsci a working tool for analysing contemporary politics, and his account of Thatcherism is the demonstration.
• Authoritarian populism is his term for a hegemonic project that welded free-market economics to an authoritarian, traditionalist moral appeal — law and order, nation, family, discipline — and thereby won active consent among sections of the working class whose material interests it damaged.
• His point against the left of the time was that this was a serious politics, not a fraud.
  • Thatcherism worked on real popular grievances — against bureaucracy, unresponsive services and a paternalist state — and articulated them into a project of the right.
  • The left lost because it had no comparable project, not because voters were duped.
• He calls it a regressive modernisation — a genuine transformation carried out over the heads of the people it transformed, which is passive revolution in recognisable form.
• His work on race is the other major extension. Race is not a distraction from class but the modality in which class is lived — one of the terrains on which hegemony is organised and contested.
• Cultural studies grew from this. Popular culture ceases to be either mass deception or harmless entertainment and becomes a site of struggle in which meanings are articulated and can be re-articulated.

Robert Cox and Neo-Gramscian International Relations

• Robert Cox transposed Gramsci to the international level, founding the neo-Gramscian school of International Political Economy and giving critical IR its most-used framework.
• His method is the historical structure — a configuration of forces that constrains without determining, made of three reciprocally related categories.
  • Material capabilities — technological and organisational capacities, resources, accumulated wealth and armaments.
  • Ideas — both intersubjective meanings, the shared notions that make behaviour habitual, and rival collective images of social order.
  • Institutions — which stabilise a particular order, are the product of the other two, and become an arena of contest in their own right.
• He applies the framework at three levels — social forces generated by the organisation of production, forms of state understood as state–civil society complexes, and world orders.
• World hegemony is his central concept, and it is not dominance. A hegemonic world order is one in which material power, a prevailing collective image of world order, and a set of institutions fit coherently together, so that other states and social forces participate in it as legitimate rather than merely submitting.
• It originates domestically and expands outward. Hegemony rests on a historic bloc within a leading state and is projected internationally through the spread of its mode of production and through international organisations that universalise its norms. Pax Britannica and Pax Americana are his cases.
• The epistemological claim is the most quoted line in critical IR.

Theory is always for someone and for some purpose. — Robert Cox

• From it follows the distinction between problem-solving theory, which takes the existing order as given and makes it work more smoothly, and critical theory, which asks how the order came about and whether it might be changed. Realism is classified as the former, and thereby as a theory serving the powers that made it.

Stephen Gill and the Transnational Historic Bloc

• The transnational historic bloc names an alliance of transnational capital, internationally oriented state managers, and the intellectuals of international institutions and policy networks — a ruling bloc constituted across states rather than within one. His study of the Trilateral Commission examined how such a bloc’s collective consciousness is produced.
• Disciplinary neoliberalism names the regime that imposes market discipline on states, firms and individuals through credit ratings, capital mobility, conditionality and competitiveness benchmarking.
• New constitutionalism is its juridical form: legal and constitutional devices that insulate economic policy from democratic accountability — central bank independence, fiscal rules, investment treaties, dispute-settlement mechanisms and binding trade commitments.
• The Gramscian point is that this is hegemony, not mere coercion. It works by making a particular economic order appear as necessity — as common sense, with no available alternative — which is what makes it durable.

The Standing Objections

• That hegemony is unfalsifiable. If quiescence is evidence of hegemony and revolt evidence of its breakdown, the concept accommodates every outcome and predicts none.
  • The reply is that it is offered as a framework for conjunctural analysis rather than a covering law, and that it can be specified — Femia’s grades, and the identification of particular apparatuses and concessions, do exactly that.
• That it is culturally determinist. By making culture the terrain where rule is decided, Gramsci opened the door through which the economy walked out, and the later history of the concept proves it.
  • The reply is textual. The historic bloc and the decisive economic nucleus are in the notebooks; the drift is the work of his readers.
• That it underestimates coercion. Anderson’s point has a wider version: much compliance is explained not by belief but by the dull compulsion of economic relations — people go to work because they need wages, not because they have been persuaded that capitalism is just.
• That apparent consent is not consent at all. James Scott’s work on the hidden transcript shows subordinate groups performing deference in public while maintaining a dissident understanding offstage, and practising everyday resistance — foot-dragging, pilfering, sabotage, evasion.
  • What survives on Gramsci’s side is contradictory consciousness, which anticipates much of this: he never claimed the subordinate wholly believe, only that they lack a coherent alternative conception.
• That revolution is indefinitely deferred. A war of position with no theory of its terminus licenses permanent postponement, and became the theoretical cover for parliamentary accommodation. The objection lands against his followers more squarely than against him, since he sequenced the war of manoeuvre rather than abolishing it.
• That the concept has been stretched past usefulness. Hegemony now names American power, male dominance, a football team’s league position and the prevailing tone of a magazine — and a word that describes everything discriminates nothing.

Is Gramsci a Theoretician of the Superstructure?

• The honest answer is yes in emphasis, no in doctrine, and both halves have to be argued.
• The case for the description is strong.
  • His whole problematic is superstructural. He asks why the economic contradictions did not produce their expected political effect, and answers by examining schools, churches, newspapers and parties.
  • He denies that the superstructure is a reflection, treating it as a structure in its own right with its own institutions, timescale and laws of motion.
  • He relocates civil society from base to superstructure, shifting the decisive terrain upward.
  • He makes the superstructure the site of strategy. The war of position is fought entirely there, and power is taken only after it is won.
  • His concrete analyses are cultural — literature, folklore, language, religion, the Church, education, popular fiction, journalism.
• The case against is equally textual.
  • He never denies the primacy of production. Hegemony must be economic as well as ethico-political, resting on the leading group’s function in the decisive nucleus of economic activity.
  • The historic bloc is precisely the concept that prevents separation, naming the unity of structure and superstructure rather than the independence of the second.
  • His starting point is a class defined by its place in production, and the alliances he prescribes are alliances of classes, not of discourses.
  • The Americanism and Fordism analysis locates hegemony at the point of production — in the wage, the assembly line and the discipline of the workforce — which no culturalist would do.
  • He attacks ideologism as explicitly as economism, treating them as symmetrical errors.
• The resolution is emphasis against denial. He corrects the base–superstructure model rather than inverting it, replacing one-way determination with reciprocal action inside a bloc whose economic core remains decisive.
• A fair verdict has three parts.
  • He is the theoretician of the superstructure, in the sense that he is the first Marxist to theorise it as a structure at all.
  • He is not one in the sense of holding that the superstructure determines the base.
  • The ambiguity is real, which is why later writers could keep the autonomy and drop the class — exactly what post-Marxism did.

Gramsci did not replace the economic explanation with a cultural one; he explained why the economic explanation, left to itself, kept predicting events that did not occur.

The Indian Context

India is where Gramsci has been used most, and used most originally. The reasons are structural: a colonial state whose claim to rule was moral as well as military, a mass movement that had to build consent over decades before challenging power, a social hierarchy legitimated by religion rather than by force, and a post-colonial state that has transformed the economy from above while keeping both the beneficiaries and the victims inside the constitutional order.

Bipan Chandra and the National Movement as a War of Position

• Bipan Chandra’s reading is the most sustained Gramscian analysis in Indian historiography, and it rests on a specific claim about the colonial state.
• That state was semi-hegemonic. It ruled by force, but it also advanced a real ideological claim — the civilising mission, the rule of law, benevolent despotism, the promise of gradual self-government — and needed that claim believed by a significant part of Indian opinion.
• The national movement was therefore a struggle for hegemony, not primarily a military contest. Its first task was to destroy the moral legitimacy of colonial rule in the minds of Indians, and only then to confront its power.
• The rhythm is captured in his formula of Struggle–Truce–Struggle. Phases of mass confrontation alternate with phases of consolidation in which the movement regroups, extends its reach and absorbs its gains — which is what a protracted positional struggle looks like from inside.
• Quit India in 1942 is read as the war of manoeuvre — the moment of direct confrontation, undertaken only after the counter-hegemony was established, and sanctioned by Gandhi’s “Do or die.”

The Structural Fissure

• The structural fissure thesis is Chandra’s most distinctive contribution, and it explains how a non-violent movement could work against an empire.
• The colonial state had a contradiction inside its own legitimating claim. It presented itself as lawful, constitutional and morally superior, and had to maintain that presentation before Indian opinion, British opinion and the world.
• That claim limited what it could do. A state whose title to rule rests on the rule of law cannot rule by massacre indefinitely without destroying the claim that legitimated it — which is what happened after Jallianwala Bagh.
• The movement’s strategy was to operate inside that fissure and widen it. Open, non-violent, deliberately illegal mass civil disobedience forced the state either to concede or to reveal itself as naked coercion, and both outcomes advanced the movement.
• The salt satyagraha is the perfect illustration. A state that taxed salt and beat unarmed men queuing to make it could not simultaneously be the benevolent guardian of a backward people, and the point was made to the world.

Ranajit Guha, Subaltern Studies and Dominance without Hegemony

• Ranajit Guha founded Subaltern Studies on Gramsci’s programme for a history of the subordinate, and took the term itself from the notebooks.
• The project’s founding complaint was against elitism in Indian historiography — both colonialist history, which explains Indian politics by the manoeuvres of the Raj, and nationalist history, which explains it by the achievements of the Congress leadership. Both write the people out.
• Its founding proposition is the autonomous domain. There existed an autonomous domain of subaltern politics — peasant insurgency, tribal revolt, popular religion, rumour, festival, riot — structurally split from the elite domain, neither derived from elite initiative nor contained by it.
• Dominance without Hegemony is the theoretical statement, and its formula is compact: Dominance = Coercion + Persuasion, matched by Subordination = Collaboration + Resistance.
• The colonial state failed the hegemony test. In the metropole bourgeois rule had persuasion outweighing coercion; in the colony coercion was paramount, and the state never absorbed Indian civil society into itself. Colonial rule was dominance without hegemony — an autocracy administered by the world’s leading liberal democracy.
• The charge extends past 1947. The Indian bourgeoisie, Guha argues, failed to speak for the whole nation — it mobilised the masses without integrating them, spoke on their behalf without speaking to them — and that failure was inherited by the post-colonial state.
• The methodological consequence made the field famous. Subaltern consciousness must be recovered from documents produced by their enemies, by reading the archive against the grain — the police report, the trial record, the settlement officer’s note.
• The project’s later self-criticism matters. Gayatri Spivak questioned whether the subaltern can speak within an archive and a discourse not their own, and pressed the absence of gender from the early volumes; the school then moved from social history toward post-colonial and cultural theory, drifting from its Gramscian starting point.

The Split with Nationalist Historiography

• The disagreement between Bipan Chandra and Ranajit Guha is the sharpest debate in modern Indian historiography, and both sides are Gramscian — which is what makes it instructive.

	Bipan Chandra	Ranajit Guha
The colonial state	Semi-hegemonic — real ideological claims, exploitable fissure	Dominance without hegemony — coercion paramount
The national movement	A genuine hegemonic project drawing the masses into a common struggle	An elite project that mobilised the masses while containing them
Gandhi	Architect of counter-hegemony and mass political education	The figure through whom subaltern militancy was channelled and restrained
The people	Participants in a national struggle led by the Congress	Actors in an autonomous domain with their own politics and idiom
Independence	The success of a long war of position	The historic failure of the nation to come into its own
Method	Structural and strategic analysis of the movement	Reading the colonial archive against the grain

• Chandra’s objection to the subalternists was that they romanticise fragmentary and episodic revolts, underestimate what the anti-imperialist coalition achieved, and mistake the absence of subaltern autonomy in the record for its suppression by historians.
• Their objection to him was that his account carries a nationalist teleology in which the people appear as followers, and that hegemony in his usage smooths over the coercion and exclusion inside the movement itself.

Partha Chatterjee: Passive Revolution as the Indian Framework

• Partha Chatterjee’s use of passive revolution is the single most influential Gramscian idea in Indian political science, and the concept Indian scholarship reaches for most often.
• The claim is that the Indian bourgeoisie was never strong enough to rule alone. It could neither destroy the landed classes nor break the colonial administrative structure, so it entered a coalition — with landed elites and with a bureaucratic-managerial stratum — and used the state as the instrument of development.
• The post-colonial state therefore does from above what a bourgeois revolution failed to do from below: it plans, industrialises, abolishes intermediaries and modernises social relations, while preventing the subordinate classes from becoming an independent political force.
• The Nehruvian synthesis is the ideological form. A developmentalist, secular, planning state claiming to stand above particular interests as trustee of the whole nation is precisely a passive revolution’s self-description.
• On the nation he adds a second argument. Colonial nationalism divided the world into an outer, material domain, where Western superiority was conceded, and an inner, spiritual domain, where sovereignty was asserted in advance.
  • That inner domain is where the nation was imagined before it was fought for, and where its most conservative settlements, on caste and on women, were made.
• His later work extends the framework to the liberalisation era as the passive revolution of capital.
  • Primitive accumulation proceeds — land acquisition, displacement, the dispossession of peasants and forest dwellers — because capital requires it.
  • The state simultaneously reverses its effects for the populations it displaces, through welfare, compensation, employment guarantees and targeted transfers, because those populations vote.
  • Hence his distinction between civil society, the domain of proper rights-bearing citizens, and political society, the domain in which large populations negotiate with governmental agencies by means that are not always legal and claims not framed as rights.

Sudipta Kaviraj

• Sudipta Kaviraj gave the passive-revolution reading its most precise political-sociological form, analysing the Nehruvian order as a dominant coalition of three elites — the industrial bourgeoisie, the landowning rural elite, and the bureaucratic-managerial and professional class.
• The coalition was held together by an ideological synthesis — planning, secularism, non-alignment, developmentalism — that let each partner read its own interest into the national project.
• Its erosion explains the crisis of the 1970s and 1980s. As the partners’ interests diverged and new groups entered politics, the synthesis stopped working and Indian politics fragmented along regional, caste and communal lines.
• His wider argument concerns the gap between elite and vernacular political languages — a constitutional, English-medium discourse of rights and a popular vernacular discourse of community and identity, imperfectly translated into each other.

Caste as Hegemony

• Caste is the strongest Indian case for the theory, and the reason Gramsci was taken up here so readily. A purely coercive account cannot explain a hierarchy that persisted for centuries with very little standing coercion.
• Its ideological apparatus is unusually complete. Ritual, textual authority, doctrines of purity and pollution, the theory of karma explaining present status by past conduct, endogamy, and the ordering of everyday life supply a total account of the world in which the hierarchy is not an injustice but the nature of things.
• It operates through graded inequality, its deepest structural feature. Because almost every group has someone below it, each has an interest in preserving the system, and a united front of the subordinated becomes very hard to build. Ambedkar’s account of an ascending scale of reverence and descending scale of contempt names the mechanism exactly.
• This is the third dimension of power in historical form: subordination accepted as legitimate by those subordinated, and grievance that largely does not arise because the categories in which it might be formulated are supplied by the hierarchy itself.

Phule, Ambedkar and Periyar as Counter-Hegemony

• The anti-caste movements are best understood as counter-hegemonic projects, and each attacked the ideological apparatus before the political one.
• Jyotirao Phule built an alternative history and an alternative myth.
  • Gulamgiri recast the caste order as the conquest of an indigenous people by outsiders, and revived Bali Raja as the symbol of a just pre-Brahminical order — a counter-narrative aimed at the sacred story itself.
  • The Satyashodhak Samaj supplied the organisation, and his schools for girls and for untouchable children supplied the intellectuals.
• B.R. Ambedkar’s argument is the clearest statement anywhere of the priority of cultural revolution, and reads almost as a Gramscian text.
  • Caste is not a division of labour but a division of labourers, sustained not by economic function but by religious sanction.
  • The sanction must therefore be destroyed first. In Annihilation of Caste he argues that political and economic reform cannot succeed while the belief system legitimating hierarchy remains intact — that the reformation of society must precede the reform of politics, as in the European cases he cites.
  • This is a demand for cultural rather than merely economic revolution, and it is the point at which he breaks with the Indian Marxists, who treated caste as a superstructural reflex that would dissolve with class.
  • His practice matches the theory. Mooknayak and Bahishkrit Bharat built a counter-public; the Mahad satyagraha and temple-entry campaigns contested ritual exclusion directly; the burning of the Manusmriti attacked textual authority itself; and his conversion to Buddhism in 1956 was an exit from the sanctioning cosmology altogether.
  • He was also, in Gramsci’s precise sense, an organic intellectual of the Dalits — produced by the community, articulating its experience in a language that could compel the state, and building institutions to produce more like him. His insistence on education is the war of position stated as a slogan.
• Periyar E.V. Ramasamy’s Self-Respect Movement shows a counter-hegemony converting into state power.
  • It attacked Brahminical ritual, priesthood and religious authority, created self-respect marriages without priests, and built a Tamil-Dravidian counter-culture with its own press, symbols and idiom.
  • Its political successors have governed Tamil Nadu for decades. A war of position won in civil society and then translated into government is a rare and instructive outcome.

Dalit Assertion and Bahujan Politics

• Kanshi Ram’s political project is Gramscian in structure, whether or not the vocabulary was borrowed.
• He began by organising the educated Dalit employees — the salaried stratum produced by reservation — into a cadre organisation before founding a party. That is the deliberate construction of organic intellectuals for a subordinate bloc.
• The Bahujan framing is a historic bloc. Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes and religious minorities were addressed as a single majority with a common interest — an alliance of subaltern groups against the hegemony of the few.
• The cultural work preceded the electoral work: rewriting history around Phule, Ambedkar, Shahu and Periyar, erecting statues, renaming institutions, and constructing an alternative pantheon and calendar. Symbolic capital was contested before political power was.
• The Bahujan Samaj Party’s capture of government in Uttar Pradesh is one of the clearest instances in democratic politics of a subordinate group converting a counter-hegemony into state power.
• The later trajectory illustrates the other half of the theory. The turn to a broader “sarvajan” coalition including upper-caste candidates admits two readings.
  • The necessary widening of a bloc toward genuine hegemony, which is what Gramsci says a leading class must do.
  • Or trasformismo — the absorption of a movement’s leadership into the order it set out to displace.
  • Both readings are available, which is itself a Gramscian observation.

Patriarchy and Feminist Counter-Hegemony

• Patriarchy is hegemonic in the technical sense: it secures compliance through consent rather than mainly through force, and is reproduced in the institutions of civil society — the family above all, then religion, schooling, law and popular culture.
• Its mechanism is the naturalisation of a social arrangement. The sexual division of labour, restrictions on mobility, differential inheritance and the ideology of the self-sacrificing wife are experienced not as rules but as the way things are — the purest form of common sense.
• Feminist counter-hegemony has followed the war of position closely.
  • Consciousness-raising is the making-critical of good sense — turning privately felt experience into a shared political account.
  • The autonomous women’s movement built organisations, publications and legal-aid networks outside both the state and the established parties.
  • The anti-rape campaign following the Mathura judgment produced amendments to the law of evidence and consent, and the Vishaka guidelines later established workplace protection through the courts — counter-hegemony converted into legal form.
• The persistent asymmetry is instructive. Legal and constitutional gains have run far ahead of common sense, which is Gramsci’s proposition that the base can be changed quickly and the superstructure only over generations.

Hind Swaraj as a Counter-Hegemonic Text

• Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj is the most radical counter-hegemonic act in the national movement, because it refuses the terms on which the colonial claim rested.
• The colonial argument for rule was civilisational — that British rule brought law, science, medicine, railways, education and progress to a society incapable of them.
• Gandhi does not answer that India is also civilised. He denies that modern civilisation is civilisation at all, and calls it satanic.
  • He attacks its institutions directly — railways as the spreader of plague and famine, lawyers as a profession that multiplies disputes, doctors as those who enable men to continue their vices, and machinery as the great sin.
• The strategic effect is what a war of position aims at. If modern civilisation is not superior, the colonial project loses its moral warrant, and independence becomes not a favour to be earned by demonstrating fitness but a wrong to be ended.
• The rest of his practice follows the same logic. Khadi and the charkha were a counter-hegemonic material practice; the constructive programme built the institutions of an alternative civil society; and the salt satyagraha exposed the state’s benevolence as a claim it could not sustain.
• The important qualification is Guha’s. Gandhi’s counter-hegemony was directed outward at the colonial state, and its record on the internal hierarchies of caste and gender is precisely what the subalternists and the Ambedkarite tradition contest.

Media, the Manufacture of Consent and the Indian Debate

• The phrase “manufacture of consent” is often attributed to Gramsci and is not his. It comes from Walter Lippmann, and was made famous by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky.
  • Their propaganda model identifies structural filters — ownership, advertising dependence, reliance on official sources, organised flak, and a unifying ideological frame — that shape what mass media report.
• The distinction from Gramsci matters. The propaganda model is closer to an instrumentalist account: elites own the media and the media serve them. Gramsci’s consent is negotiated, involves real concessions, is contested inside the same institutions that transmit it, and is never complete.
• The Indian debate turns on several documented developments.
  • Concentration of ownership and cross-media holdings, and the entry of large industrial conglomerates into news broadcasting — which raises the classic question of whether the press belongs to civil society or to the ruling bloc.
  • Dependence on advertising revenue, which makes audience composition and advertiser sentiment structural constraints on content.
  • “Paid news”, documented by the Press Council of India, in which paid content is presented as editorial matter — the clearest available case of consent being purchased rather than won.
  • Digital platforms and algorithmic curation, which have produced a new and less visible layer of agenda-setting, and a corresponding debate about regulation, intermediary liability and misinformation.
• The scholarly question is whether India is best described as hegemonic or as dominance without hegemony, and it is genuinely open.
  • Guha’s framework suggests the latter for the colonial period and something close to it after.
  • Chatterjee’s passive revolution suggests accumulation managed without cultural leadership.
  • Chandra’s framework suggests that hegemonic projects in India are real, contested and periodically defeated at the ballot box.

India is where hegemony earned its keep: a hierarchy sustained for centuries with little standing coercion, an empire whose claim to rule was moral, and a state that transformed an economy from above while keeping the transformed inside the constitution.

Contemporary Relevance

The Interregnum Revived

• Gramsci’s vocabulary returned to general circulation after 2008, and the interregnum passage became the standard shorthand for the condition of the liberal international order.
• Recent work in International Relations has tried to make the borrowing rigorous rather than atmospheric, distinguishing three levels at which an organic crisis operates: the processual, in long-run contradictions of the global political economy; the organic, in the mismatch between representatives and represented; and the morbid, in the symptoms thrown up in society.
• The sceptical corrective is worth carrying. Orders do not simply die of old age and successors are not born; they are built, by identifiable actors with identifiable projects, and interregnum talk can become a way of avoiding the question of who is doing the building.
• The crisis of authority has proved the more useful half — the detachment of masses from traditional ideologies, the failure of established parties to represent, and the resulting opening for figures promising to bypass the whole apparatus.

Hegemony on the Right

• One of the more striking facts about his afterlife is how thoroughly the right learned from him. The European Nouvelle Droite adopted his strategy explicitly under the name metapolitics: win the battle of ideas and culture first, and political power will follow.
• The reasoning is Gramsci’s own, turned around. If the terrain of rule is common sense, then changing common sense — through publishing, foundations, media, think tanks, curricula and language — is the primary political activity, and elections are a lagging indicator.
• It confirms rather than refutes the theory. He described a mechanism of political rule, not a possession of the left, and its availability to any project with the patience to use it is exactly what he claimed.

Neo-Gramscian Analysis of the Present

• Disciplinary neoliberalism and new constitutionalism remain the sharpest tools for analysing why economic policy is so often placed beyond electoral reach — independent central banks, fiscal rules, investment treaties, trade commitments — and why that insulation is defended as necessity rather than argued for as choice.
• The Fordism analysis has live descendants. Platform and gig work reorganise the labour process and the worker’s self-understanding together, and the reading of the wage as the price of consent transfers directly.
• Algorithmic curation is the newest hegemonic apparatus, and it fits the framework uncomfortably well: it operates in civil society, shapes what appears self-evident, is experienced as neutral, and belongs to no state.

Conclusion

• Gramsci explained a failure without abandoning the theory that had failed. Marxism predicted revolution in the advanced West and got it in backward Russia; he identified what the model left out rather than discarding the model.
• What it left out was consent. In societies with dense civil societies, rule is secured by intellectual and moral leadership exercised through schools, churches, newspapers, parties and popular culture, with coercion held in reserve — hegemony protected by the armour of coercion.
• That required rebuilding the theory of the state. The integral state is political society plus civil society; the superstructure is a structure in its own right; and civil society moves from the base, where Marx put it, into the superstructure, where rule is actually contested.
• The strategy follows from the analysis. Where the state is everything, a war of manoeuvre works; where fortresses and earthworks stand behind it, the war of position must be won first, by a party acting as the modern Prince and by intellectuals organic to a rising class.
• He supplied the vocabulary for defeat as well as victory. Passive revolution, trasformismo, Caesarism and the crisis of authority describe how orders survive their own crises by absorbing, conceding and reorganising — which is the ordinary condition of politics far more often than revolution is.
• The cost of the achievement is the ambiguity his critics identify. Once consent, culture and ideas do the explanatory work, the economic base can be quietly dropped, the concept becomes elastic enough to explain any outcome, and revolution can be deferred indefinitely. All three things happened to his followers.
• His defence is in the notebooks. The historic bloc ties the superstructure back to production, and the decisive nucleus of economic activity sets a limit to what hegemony can concede. He corrected the base–superstructure model; he did not invert it.
• India is the strongest demonstration of the theory’s reach — caste as hegemony, the anti-caste movements as counter-hegemony, the national movement as a war of position, the post-colonial state as passive revolution, and the subaltern as a category that founded a school of history.
• The reason he is still read is that his question has not gone away. Every functioning order rests on a great many people accepting arrangements that do not serve them, and no account of politics that cannot explain that acceptance is complete.
• Gramsci made the explanation of consent a permanent part of political theory, and the terms in which it is now conducted — hegemony, common sense, organic intellectuals, the culture war, the interregnum — are all his.
• Gramsci made the explanation of consent a permanent part of political theory, and the terms in which it is now conducted — hegemony, common sense, organic intellectuals, the culture war, the interregnum — are all his.