Antonio Gramsci — the Quarrel with Orthodox Marxism

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), Italian Marxist and founder of the Communist Party of Italy, shifted Marxist analysis from the means of production alone to culture, ideology, civil society and everyday life. His sharp question: why did the proletarian revolution predicted by Karl Marx not occur in advanced capitalist societies? His answer was hegemony — the bourgeoisie rules not only by owning production but by making its values appear normal, natural and binding as “common sense.” This made him a Hegelian Marxist, a Neo-Marxist, and a major “theoretician of superstructure.”

“The supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as ‘domination’ and as ‘intellectual and moral leadership.'”

Antonio Gramsci

Life and works

Won a scholarship to the University of Turin; joined the socialist movement; in 1921 became a Central Committee member of the new Communist Party of Italy. Arrested in 1926 under Fascism — Benito Mussolini: “We have to prevent this mind from continuous functioning.” In prison he wrote the Prison Notebooks (1929–1935); also The Modern Prince and Notes on the Southern Question, where hegemony first appears.

Influences

G.W.F. Hegel (history, consciousness, dialectic), Benedetto Croce (culture and historical development), Niccolo Machiavelli (The Modern Prince — the party as organiser of collective will), Rosa Luxemburg (The Mass Strike — war of position and manoeuvre), with Vilfredo Pareto and Georges Sorel in the background.

Agreement and departure

Philosophy of praxis

Gramsci describes the philosophy of praxis as a reformed Hegelianism — the living interaction of theory and practice arising from counter-hegemonic struggle, by which subaltern classes “educate themselves in the art of government.” His humanism shows in the line: “Man is above all else mind, consciousness — that is, he is a product of history, not of nature.”

The Theory of Hegemony

Hegemony The predominance of one social class over another through leadership, consent and moral-intellectual direction — “predominance by consent,” not mere domination by force. A class becomes hegemonic when its worldview is accepted as natural, normal and universal by subordinate classes.

Hegemony works on the economic, political, moral and intellectual planes together; the dominant class projects its particular interests as the general interest of society. It must also be a fundamental class — an owner or non-owner at one of the two poles of production. Lucio Gruppi captures it: hegemony is “the ability to unify and maintain united a social whole via ideology that is… characterized by deep class contradictions.”

Two faces: domination and leadership

Supremacy shows as domination (coercive control through political society) and intellectual and moral leadership (guidance of allied groups through persuasion, education and culture). Political society supplies force; civil society supplies legitimacy. Coercion never disappears — it remains the “armoured core” behind the legal order, and a rule based on repression alone is a “dictatorship of the night-watchman.” Stuart Hall adds that hegemony must be “continually renewed, recreated, defended and modified”: “Hegemony is not a state of grace which is installed forever.”

Consent, common sense and the historic bloc

The ruling class converts its ideas into common sense — “a chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions” diffused through schools, churches, family, media and popular culture until domination appears spontaneous. It does not rule alone: it builds a historic bloc through alliances, compromises and limited sacrifices, “winning over” subaltern classes. Richard Peet and Elaine Hartwick: hegemony “mystifies power relations… encourages fatalism and political passivity, and justifies the deprivation of many so that few can live well.” Colonial rule worked the same way — the “White Man’s Burden,” an Anglicised elite, civil servants and zamindars easing imperial domination; the Gandhian era reads as a struggle against that ideological legitimacy.

Limited and expansive hegemony

Limited hegemony — the dominant class fails to accommodate subaltern interests; revolution becomes more feasible. Expansive hegemony — it accommodates them through reforms and concessions; revolution becomes harder. Hegemony is therefore a moving process of negotiation, not a static fact.

The Integral State — Political and Civil Society

Gramsci expands the state beyond government. The integral state = political society + civil society; it rules through force and consent together. His line “Every State is a dictatorship” underlines that even consent-based orders keep a coercive capacity.

The integral state — coercion and consent fused. Civil society (family, school, church, unions, media, culture — legitimacy and consent; a “trench system” of fortresses shielding the state) + Political society (government, law, police, military, courts — coercion and domination, open when consent fails) = Integral State (rule by force AND consent)

Transparent and opaque states

Passive revolution & the state as educator

Under modern capitalism the bourgeoisie often changes the forms of its rule without surrendering class power — absorbing demands from below and reorganising hegemony. Gramsci calls this passive revolution; reformism, fascism and the assembly-line methods of Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford are examples. Perry Anderson reads the Gramscian state as an educator — it socialises and carries cultural transformation, so belief and consent become the basis of state power rather than the reverse. This is why Gramsci is called a “theoretician of superstructure.”

The Theory of Intellectuals

Gramsci widens the category far beyond scholars and artists: intellectuals are all who perform organisational, technical, cultural or directive functions — administrators, bureaucrats, managers, politicians, the “organizers of culture.”

The starting point “All men are intellectuals, but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.”

None are independent in an absolute sense; all are organic to social groups. On the vertical plane he distinguishes “specialists” (who organise industry) from “directors” (who organise society); on the horizontal plane, traditional from organic intellectuals.

Organic intellectuals organise the “systems of relationships” that build hegemony; they give a class coherence, confidence and direction, bound to the masses by “organic cohesion.” An emerging class must also ideologically conquer the traditional intellectuals while elaborating its own — this is how counter-hegemony becomes possible. Norberto Bobbio, in “Gramsci and the Conception of Civil Society,” calls him a “theoretician of superstructure” for showing how intellectuals shape ideological power.

UPSC 2015

Discuss Gramsci’s notion of ‘organic intellectuals’.

Counter-Hegemony and Revolutionary Strategy

If bourgeois hegemony blocks revolution, proletarian politics must first break it. Counter-hegemony means constructing alternative values, beliefs, institutions and leadership — working-class intellectuals, broader alliances and a new “collective will.” Gramsci does not expect subordinate groups to liberate themselves automatically; education, organisation and critical consciousness are necessary.

Drawing on Niccolo Machiavelli, the Modern Prince is the revolutionary party: it develops organic intellectuals, educates the masses in the art of government, converts dispersed grievances into direction, and becomes the expression of the collective will. Counter-hegemony begins when imposed “common sense” is punctured and subaltern groups articulate their own “good sense,” forming a “coalition of subalterns.”

Marx vs Gramsci — and Gramsci’s Reach

The reach is wide: Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe extend hegemony to the discursive construction of political identities; Stuart Hall applies it to media and popular culture; Paulo Freire to critical pedagogy; Robert W. Cox carries it into International Relations — “dominance by a powerful state may be a necessary but not a sufficient condition of hegemony,” with the IMF and WTO read as pedagogical institutions of a neoliberal worldview. David Harvey notes that common sense “typically grounds consent” for market rule; Louis Althusser‘s Repressive and Ideological State Apparatuses speak directly to the Gramscian concern. Black Lives Matter reads as counter-hegemonic politics; Greta Thunberg, as an organic intellectual of contemporary activism.

Criticism

His position stands sharply against orthodox Marxism; the political-society / civil-society line is powerful but, by his own admission, only conceptual; consent never fully leaves coercion behind (the “coercive armor” remains); and the War of Position is intellectually rich but slow and demanding. Critical interlocutors include Antonio Negri, Michel Foucault, Nicos Poulantzas and Herbert Marcuse.

“The abolition of the class struggle does not mean the abolition of the need to struggle as a principle of development.”

Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci: Power, Hegemony & Civil Society

Hegemony = dominance maintained not merely through coercion but through consent. Ruling class presents its worldview as natural, moral, common sense.

“The supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as ‘domination’ and as ‘intellectual and moral leadership’.”

Antonio Gramsci

Hegemony = ideology organised through institutions. Corresponds to Lukes’ 3rd dimension of power.

Counter-Hegemony

Hegemony in International Relations

Robert W. Cox applies hegemony to IR: global hegemony requires military power + economic power + ideological leadership + institutions that normalise worldview (UN, World Bank, IMF, free markets, democracy, US global influence).

Susan Strange: structural power = power to shape global structures of money, trade, production and knowledge. Joseph Nye: soft power = attraction makes one country’s preferences appear universal.