Gramsci's Turn to the Superstructures - 3

Gramsci's Turn to the Superstructures - 3 

On the basis of this reconstituted core, Gramsci
expanded the positive heuristic of Marxism
giving greater autonomy to the realm of the superstructures.
Rather than periodizing the history
of capitalism on the basis of its economy -
competitive versus monopoly, national versus

imperial, anarchic versus organized, etc. -
Gramsci periodized it on the basis of its political
institutions, specifically the rise of civilsociety.
The complex of private but national organizations
such as mass political parties, trade unions,
and mass media, integrated subordinate classes
into capitalist society. Whereas his predecessors
saw 1871 as marking the beginning of the demise
of capitalism, for Gramsci it signalled the
ascendancy of the bourgeoisie over both the old
classes and the working class.
Gramsci made corresponding innovations in
the theory of the state. He saw the state as the
means through which the capitalist class "not
only justifies and maintains its dominance, but
manages to win the active consent of those over
whom it rules" (1971, p. 244). The state is not
simply negative and repressive but also positive
and "educative" -not simply the military and
the police but parliament, law, and education.
The state unites with the "trenches of civil society"
to organize and structure interests in accordance
with the preservation of capitalism.
Such a revised theory of politics and ideology
called for a change in revolutionary strategy from
one that emphasized seizure of state power to
one that called for the conquest of civil society,
for :he transformation of schools, trade unions,
churches, and political parties as well as the creation
of new arenas of opposition to capitalism.
A war of movement (assault on the state) could
only be successful afrer a war of position has rebuilt
civil society. Lenin's model, in which war
of position follows war of movement, applied to
Russia because there ". . . 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" (1971, p. 238). Thus,
Gramsci criticized Luxemburg and Trotsky for
applying to advanced capitalism theories of
revolution-the mass strike, the permanent revolution
-which are only appropriate to early or
backward forms of capitalism.