Gramsci's Turn to the Superstructures - 4

Gramsci's Turn to the Superstructures - 4 

But Gramsci was still a Marxist: He insisted

that the economic base set parameters on the operation

and on the effects of the superstructures.

As in Marx's political works the economy constituted

political actors as classes. Working from

the theory of class formation in The communist

Manifesto, and characterizations of class struggle

in The Class Struggles in France and The

Eighteenth Brumaire, Gramsci argued that class

organization moves through three stages: fist, a

combination into sectoral associations (trade associations

in the case of capitalists or trade unions

in the case of workers): second. an "economic- ,.

corporate" phase when the clks is organized

around its common economic interests; and third,

a political or hegemonic phase in which a class

presents its interests as the interests of all. At this

point the dominant or leading class makes economic

sacrifices in order to elicit the consent of

the led. but these "concessions" don't touch the

essential interest of that class. Concessions elicit

the consent of workers without threatening the

profits of capital (Przeworski 1985, particularly

Chapter 4). Democracy becomes the institutional

mechanism through which concessions are extracted

from capital and redistributed to other

classes. Its stability rests on economic growth

and a capitalist class prepared to make economic

sacrifices.

Gramsci substituted the possibility of class

compromise for Lenin's "irreconcilability of class

antagonisms." In so doing he underlined the

strength of capitalist hegemony which could only

be broken by the modem prince (the party). The

party is to the working class what the state is to

the capitalist class, but it does not have access to

coercion, nor can it dispense material concessions

to allied classes, such as the peasantry. Instead,

it has to build an alternative hegemony by

substituting itself for civil society, creating prefigurative

institutions of socialism already within

the framework of capitalism. Ideology -as

"a concrete phantasy that would act on the dispersed

and shattered will to arouse and organize

its collective will" (1971, p. 126) -becomes

supremely important in countering bourgeois

hegemony and in building class alliances. Organic

intellectuals close to, and with faith in,

subordinate groups must assume a critical role in

any such war of position.