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THE ELGAR COMPANION TO ANTONIO
GRAMSCI
ELGAR COMPANIONS TO GREAT THINKERS
This vital series brings together cutting-edge scholarship that critically
explores the work of social sciences’ most influential thinkers in light of key
contemporary issues and topics. Edited by leading international academics,
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and advance our understanding of their ideas and the enduring significance of
their intellectual legacy. From Arendt to Weber, economics to sociology, this
series will be essential reading for all academics, researchers and students of
the social sciences seeking to understand the profound impact of these great
thinkers and how they continue to influence contemporary scholarship.
For a full list of Edward Elgar published titles, including the titles in this series,
visit our website at www.e-elgar.com.
The Elgar Companion
to Antonio Gramsci
Edited by
William K. Carroll
Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Victoria,
Canada
ELGAR COMPANIONS TO GREAT THINKERS
Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© William K. Carroll 2024
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is available from the British Library
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ISBN 978 1 80220 860 3 (eBook)
EEP BoX
Contents
List of contributorsviii
Acknowledgementsxi
1 Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for our times 1

William K. Carroll
PART I GRAMSCI IN CONTEXT
2 Gramsci: life and times of a revolutionary 31

Nathan Sperber and George Hoare
3 Gramsci, Marx, Hegel 48

Robert P. Jackson
4 ‘The Revolution against “Capital”’: constancy, change

and collective will in Gramsci’s concepts 66
Derek Boothman
5 Historico-political dynamics in the Prison Notebooks:

passive revolution, relations of force, organic crisis 83
Francesca Antonini
6 Hegemony as a protean concept 99

Elizabeth Humphrys
PART II THE PHILOSOPHY OF PRAXIS: A NEW

POLITICAL VOCABULARY
7 The historical bloc as a strategic node in Gramsci’s Prison

Notebooks118
Panagiotis Sotiris
8 State, capital and civil society 136

Marco Fonseca
9 Intellectuals, ideology, and the ethico-political 152

Jean-Pierre Reed and Carlos L. Garrido
v
vi The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci
10 Where Trotsky’s horizons stop, Gramsci’s begin: the

passive revolutionary road to capitalist modernity 171
Adam David Morton
11 War of maneuver and war of position: Gramsci and the

dialectic of revolution 189
Daniel Egan
12 Welding the present to the future ... thinking with Gramsci

about prefiguration 204
Dorothea Elena Schoppek
13 The Modern Prince and revolutionary strategy 219

Alexandros Chrysis
PART III GRAMSCI FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
SECTION A: PHILOSOPHICAL AND

POLITICAL-ECONOMIC ISSUES
14 Gramsci, post-Marxism and critical realism 240

Jonathan Joseph
15 Hegemonic projects and cultural political economy 261

Bob Jessop
16 Fordism, post-Fordism and the imperial mode of living 279

Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen
SECTION B: SOCIAL AND CULTURAL REPRODUCTION
17 Hegemony, gender and social reproduction 299

Anna Sturman
18 Cultural studies: the Gramscian current 315

Marco Briziarelli and Didarul Islam
19 Antonio Gramsci and education 334

Peter Mayo
20 Hegemony without hegemony: Gramsci, Guha and

post-Western Marxism 350
Sourayan Mookerjea
Contents vii
SECTION C: HEGEMONIC STRUGGLE
21 Social movements and hegemonic struggle 370

Laurence Cox
22 Hegemonic struggle and right-wing populism 388

Owen Worth
23 Gramsci and hegemonic struggle in a globalized world 406

Thomas Muhr
SECTION D: GLOBAL ORGANIC CRISIS
24 Transnational neoliberalism in organic crisis 428

Henk Overbeek
25 Beyond ecocidal capitalism: climate crisis and climate justice 448

Kevin Surprise
Index469
Contributors
Francesca Antonini is an Assistant Professor in History of Political Thought
at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy.
Derek Boothman is a Full Professor (retired) in the Dipartimento di
Interpretazione e Traduzione (DIT) at the Università di Bologna, Italy.
Ulrich Brand is Professor of International Politics at the University of Vienna,
Austria.
Marco Briziarelli is an Associate Professor in the Department of
Communication & Journalism at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque,
United States of America.
William K. Carroll is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the
University of Victoria, Victoria Canada.
Alexandros Chrysis is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Panteion
University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece.
Laurence Cox is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the National
University of Ireland Maynooth, Ireland.
Daniel Egan is a Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of
Massachusetts Lowell, USA.
Marco Fonseca is an Instructor in the Department of International Studies at
Glendon College, York University, Toronto, Canada.
Carlos L. Garrido is a doctoral student in Philosophy at Southern Illinois
University, Carbondale, USA.
George Hoare in an independent researcher in political theory, based in
London, UK.
Elizabeth Humphrys is Senior Lecturer and Head of Social and Political
Sciences, University of Technology Sydney, Australia.
Didarul Islam is a graduate student in the Department of Communication &
Journalism at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA.
viii
Contributors ix
Robert P. Jackson is Senior Lecturer in Political Thought in the Department

of History, Politics and Philosophy, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.
Bob Jessop is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University, UK,
retiring in 2021; he was previously Reader in Government at the University of
Essex, UK.
Jonathan Joseph is a Professor of Politics and International Relations in the
School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of
Bristol, UK.
Peter Mayo is a Professor in the Department of Arts, Open Communities and
Adult Education at the University of Malta.
Sourayan Mookerjea is Director of the Intermedia Research Studio,
Department of Sociology, at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada.
Adam David Morton is a Professor in the Discipline of Political Economy
within the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney,
Australia.
Thomas Muhr is Principal Investigator at the Centre for International Studies
(CEI-IUL), ISCTE-University Institute Lisbon (ISCTE-IUL), Portugal.
Henk Overbeek is Emeritus Professor of International Relations in the
Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the Vrije
Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Jean-Pierre Reed is an Associate Professor of Sociology, Africana Studies,
and Philosophy in the School of Anthropology, Political Science, and Sociology
at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, USA.
Dorothea Elena Schoppek is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of
Political Science, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany.
Panagiotis Sotiris teaches philosophy at the Hellenic Open University in
Greece.
Nathan Sperber is Docteur associé with the Centre européen de sociologie
et de science politique (CESSP) at the École des hautes études en sciences
sociales (EHESS) in Paris, France.
Anna Sturman is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Sydney Environment
Institute, University of Sydney, Australia.
Kevin Surprise is a Lecturer in Environmental Studies at Mount Holyoke
College, South Hadley, Massachusetts, USA.
x The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci
Markus Wissen is a Professor of Social Sciences at the Berlin School of

Economics and Law, Germany.
Owen Worth is Professor and Head of the Department of Politics and Public
Administration at the University of Limerick, Ireland.
Acknowledgements
I had been ruminating on the need for a companion to Antonio Gramsci for
some time, when Harry Fabian, Elgar’s Commissioning Editor, invited me in
May, 2021 to edit this collection. Of course, I leapt at the opportunity, and so
I am grateful, in the first place, to Harry, for extending that invitation, and for
all his subsequent support in the preparation of this volume. In the summer of
2021, I set about writing a detailed prospectus for the Companion. In my con-
ception, it would begin with an examination of Gramsci’s life and times and,
within that context, the development of his thought, but would also unpack the
central ideas in his reformulation of historical materialism and reflect on his
continuing influence across many fields in the social sciences and humanities
and in strategic thinking on the left. In the fall of 2021 I began contacting
prospective contributors, and was pleasantly surprised that nearly all of the
scholars I approached immediately agreed to participate. I am grateful to all
the authors contributing to this collection, for their dedication to this project
(including peer reviewing of each other’s work) and its occasionally tight
deadlines. Finn Deschner came onto the project in March, 2023, as editorial
assistant, and has done superbly in getting the full manuscript into final form.
I also appreciate the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada, in funding Finn’s position.
Victoria, Canada
April, 2023
xi
1. Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for
our times
William K. Carroll
INTRODUCTION
Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) has been hailed as the ‘theoretician of super-

structures’ (Texier, 2014) yet eulogized as ‘a practical politician, that is
to say a combatant’ (Togliatti, 1979, p. 161). He has been mourned as an
anti-fascist martyr (Charles, 1980), declared ‘dead’ as a source of political
insight (Day, 2005), and remembered sympathetically as ‘the Hunchback
from Sardinia’ whose own subalternity was a ‘formative factor’ in his radical
thought (Germino 1990, pp. 1, 24). These varying appraisals are testimonies
to Gramsci’s rich and contested legacy. In Perry Anderson’s estimation,
Gramsci’s thought
aimed to an extent unlike that of any previous Marxist at a unitary synthesis of

history and strategy, covering at once the legacy of the pre-capitalist past, the
pattern of the capitalist present and the objective of a socialist future in his country.
(Anderson, 2022, p. 78)
Particularly since the 1970s, when Valentino Gerratana’s critical edition of the
Prison Notebooks was published in Italian (Gramsci, 1975) and anthologies
of his work began to appear in translation (e.g. Gramsci, 1971), Gramsci’s
thought has permeated a great range of scholarship and has informed the stra-
tegic thinking of left-wing activists (and also right-wing intellectuals (George,
1997)) around the world. Nearly a century after his arrest and imprisonment
(and nine decades after what Peter Thomas (2009) has called the Gramscian
moment of 1932, when the Italian political prisoner reached particularly stun-
ning theoretical and strategic insights after years of incarceration and reflective
writing) Antonio Gramsci remains an iconic political and intellectual figure,
on a global scale (Dainotto and Jameson 2020).
Although the main reason for Gramsci’s continuing influence stems from
the perspicacity of his thought, a contributing factor has been the critical ‘open-
ness’ of his approach to analysing the human condition (Marzani, 1957, p. 6).
1
2 The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci
Building on Marx, Gramsci developed a dynamic and holistic framework for

political analysis and strategic thought, based in concrete history and geared
toward actualizing the possibilities for revolutionary transformation of the
capitalist way of life. And, like Marx’s concept of alienation, which has fuelled
deep insights within historical materialism on the character of advanced cap-
italism (Marcuse, 1964; Ollman, 1971; Musto, 2021) while also having been
taken up by other scholars within mainstream sociology and related fields
(Seeman, 1975), Gramsci’s core concepts have shaped thinking both within
historical materialism and without. Indeed, a Google search returns more than
60 million results with the h-word ‘hegemony’.
Yet this remarkably wide reach, combined with the openness of Gramsci’s
approach to language, with many keywords borrowed and repurposed from
other writers (including hegemony itself as well as such Gramscian concepts
as historical bloc, passive revolution and wars of position and maneuver),
poses challenges in assembling a compendium of works on Gramsci and
his thought. To be clear at the outset: Antonio Gramsci was a Marxist. He
co-founded the Communist Party of Italy and at the time of his arrest by
Mussolini’s police in 1926 was General Secretary of the party and a member
of the Italian Parliament (with diplomatic immunity that his jailers ignored).
The entire corpus of his Prison Notebooks, encompassing 3,369 pages in the
critical edition of 1975 (Gramsci, 1975), presents a brilliant elaboration of his-
torical materialism, pulling its centre of gravity back to the foundations Marx
laid in 1845 in his ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ (Marx, 2002). In developing further
what he called (borrowing from Labriola, (Mustè, 2021)) ‘the philosophy of
praxis’, Gramsci attended in particular to Italian and European history and the
economic, political and cultural practices and relations that organize consent to
a capitalist way of life, as well as the practices that in challenging that hegem-
ony point in a quite different direction.
Given that Gramsci’s thought was thoroughly grounded in historical mate-
rialism, a Companion to his thought also should be centred in that perspective.
This volume follows that precept. Rather than widen the focus to include work
that invokes keywords from Gramsci’s theoretical vocabulary without embrac-
ing his problematic, the chapters that follow hue closely to Gramsci’s formu-
lations, situated within the living tradition of Marxism. Within that tradition’s
broad scope, the Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci offers a comprehensive
set of chapters presenting and reflecting on Gramsci’s many contributions to
critical social science, social and political thought and emancipatory politics.
As Burawoy (1990) has observed, historical materialism is a vibrant, open
research programme.1 The goal in this collection, then, is not to exhume the
intellectual remains of a century-old corpus. It is, rather, to bring Gramsci’s
insights – theoretical and substantive – to life by engaging not only with his
Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for our times 3
original work but with the various streams of broadly Marxist scholarship that
have flowed directly from that work.
A further consideration in framing and compiling this collection is that
Antonio Gramsci, although remarkably well read in the social sciences and
humanities of his time, was not an academic. Mentored at the University
of Turin by Matteo Bartoli, one of Italy’s leading comparative philologists,
Gramsci dropped out of his Bachelor’s programme in 1915, to pursue full-time
activism and journalism (see Chapter 2). Although his incarceration neces-
sitated a shift from writing newspaper articles on the immediacies of the
day-to-day struggles to the ‘disinterested’ writing strategy he adopted in the
Notebooks, removed from the pressures of the contingent and immediate (see
Chapter 18), those notes were not written for a detached academic readership.
In consideration of Gramsci’s insistence on a philosophy of praxis, linking
theory and practice, this Companion intends to be of maximal value and inter-
est not only to a wide range of scholars, but to activists and to students (many
of whom may be in the process of becoming activists).2 This objective further
underlined the need for a treatment that begins with a close engagement with
Gramsci’s world and worldview, but extends to the subsequent development
of his ideas, up to and including contemporary issues. This volume, therefore,
is divided into three parts.
In Part I, contributing authors situate Gramsci’s thought within the broad
context of his life and times. These chapters engage closely with Gramsci’s
work in ways that accentuate and reflect on the context of his life, his influ-
ences and in turn his immediate influence, particularly within historical mate-
rialism. The contents of Part I, especially when read alongside Gramsci’s own
writing on philosophy, politics and history, provide a foundation for the chap-
ters comprising Part II. These chapters present key themes within Gramsci’s
perspective, connecting them to the wider framework of his thought, but also
tracking their further development within the subsequent Gramscian stream
of historical materialism. Part III offers the most contemporary analyses.
Complementing Part I, which places Gramsci’s breakthroughs in context,
and Part II, which focuses on key concepts and traces theoretical threads
from Gramsci forward, these chapters are organized around major fields of
scholarship in which Gramscian perspectives are particularly salient in the 21st
century. They connect Gramsci’s original problematic with specific domains
within recent and contemporary scholarship, wherein Gramscian scholars have
applied that problematic in the analysis of late capitalist modernity.
PART I. GRAMSCI IN THE CONTEXT OF HIS TIME
Placing Gramsci in the context of his time means situating him in the Europe
and more specifically, the Italy, of the 20th century’s early decades. Gramsci
engaged deeply with a wide gamut of philosophers, from the Renaissance

political theorist, Niccolò Machiavelli, through to contemporaries of various
political stripes – Benedetto Croce, Giovanni Gentile, Georges Sorel etc.
Concurrently, his thought developed through participation in debates within
historical materialism and the socialist left, particularly through the critical
stances Gramsci took toward the deterministic reading of Marx that became
predominant in the 2nd International, the positivism of leading Bolshevik
theorist Nikolai Bukharin, and the bureaucratic centralism that characterized
Joseph Stalin’s leadership in the Soviet Union.
Gramsci described his own method as philological. As Ludovico de Lutiis
(2021) notes, philology, the ‘methodological expression’ in the study of lan-
guage ‘of the importance of particular facts’, underlies Gramsci’s writings in
the Notebooks and lies at the centre of various reflections; it is indispensable
for reconstructing an author’s thought and, indeed, the past. An approach to
understanding language and culture within historical context, philology was
strongly differentiated from the structural linguistics initiated by Ferdinand
de Saussure, which, particularly as later appropriated by poststructuralism,
emphasized the internal construction of meaning within systems of significa-
tion, detached from concrete historical practice and extra-linguistic relational-
ity.3 The attraction of Euro–North American intellectuals in the 1960s–1990s
to the self-enclosed insularity of this theory of language and meaning seemed
to consign philological scholarship to the margins. In more recent years, as its
socio-ecological limits became increasingly evident, the leading edge of post-
structuralism has morphed into ‘new materialism’ – characterized by Terry
Eagleton as ‘really a species of post-structuralism in wolf’s clothing’ which
‘emerged in part to replace a currently unfashionable historical materialism’
(2016, pp. 11, 17). Meanwhile, and notably in Italy through Rome-based
Fondazione Gramsci and the International Gramsci Society and its journal,4
a new generation of scholars has approached Gramsci, fittingly, from the phil-
ological and historical materialist perspective he himself favoured.
The chapters comprising Part I of this Companion take up this same per-
spective, presenting Gramsci’s thoughts within the context of his life and
times, and thereby penetrating into the social and political moorings of his
conceptual universe.
As Dante Germino (1990, p. 7) has observed, ‘the roots of the mature
Gramsci’s revolutionary critique of society extended deeply into the Sardinian
soil of his youth’. Gramsci’s experiences as ‘a Sardinian hunchback from
history’s margins’ (Germino, 1990, p. 265) – his own subalternity – grounded
his politics as he became active as a journalist and organizer in his 20s, after
moving to Turin, a major industrial centre, to take up university studies in
1911. In Chapter 2, Nathan Sperber and George Hoare recount Gramsci’s life
and times, focusing on the two-decade period of Gramsci’s political activism
and intellectual production, from his early political writing in 1914 to his trans-
fer to a clinic in Rome, extremely weak and exhausted, in 1935. Incarcerated
from 1926 until shortly before his death in 1937, with the intent ‘to stop this
brain from working for twenty years’, the unintended consequence was the
Prison Notebooks, a pursuit of politics ‘by other means’, in a novel melding of
theory and action and a profound contribution to revolutionary strategy.
The four chapters that follow Sperber and Hoare’s biographical overview
dive into Gramsci’s oeuvre, setting it within the context of his times. In
two highly complementary companion pieces, Robert Jackson and Derek
Boothman focus attention on intellectual currents with which Gramsci engaged
in developing his own approach to philosophy and politics. These careful read-
ings add nuance to our understanding of Gramsci’s Marxism.
Of course, no one is born a Marxist, or a liberal or a fascist. Moreover, these
worldviews are neither static nor homogeneous. As Gramsci observed in the
Prison Notebooks (and as Robert Jackson recounts in Chapter 3), Marx’s own
concept of the organization of collective agency remained entangled within
elements such as Jacobin clubs, trade organization and ‘secret conspiracies of
small groups’ (Gramsci, 2011, vol 1, p. 154). In the decades surrounding the
turn of the 20th century, the prevailing tendency within Marxism, codified in
the Second International (1889–1916) offered a deterministic, ‘stagist’ account
of history, within which mass political agency was subordinated to a faith in
the inevitability of a final economic crisis, provoked by capitalism’s structural
contradictions, which would usher in socialism.
Jackson notes how Gramsci’s newspaper article, ‘The revolution against
Capital’, published a few weeks after the Bolshevik seizure of state power
in November 1917, rejected Marxism as a deterministic orthodoxy but cele-
brated how the Bolsheviks were ‘living out Marxist thought – the real undying
Marxist thought, which continues the heritage of German and Italian idealism’
(Gramsci, 1994, p. 40). In Chapter 4, Derek Boothman’s close reading of this
article, its reception and its reverberations in the Prison Notebooks, tracks the
development of Gramsci’s anti-determinist, open Marxism, which Gramsci
eventually called the philosophy of praxis. While rejecting positivist readings
of Marx (including Nicolai Bukharin’s reduction of Marxism to sociology,
in his Historical Materialism (1925)), Gramsci embraced the dialectic at the
centre of Marx’s thinking – that people make their own history, though not in
conditions chosen by them. Gramsci’s Marxism was rooted in his appropria-
tion of Marx’s (2002 [1845]) ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, which open by criticizing
the one-sidedness of ‘all hitherto-existing materialism’, namely, the omission
of human sensuous activity – praxis – as integral to materiality itself. As Marx
went on to note, this ‘active side’ of material reality was grasped philosophi-
cally by idealism, which Hegelian dialectics took to its limit.
Boothman calls attention to the emphasis on collective will and transforma-

tive agency running throughout Gramsci’s thought. This may surprise readers
familiar with Gramsci as a theorist of ‘dominant ideology’ (as in Abercrombie
et al., 1980). It points us toward the Hegelian current that was retained in
Gramsci’s mature work. If Hegel’s unique achievement was to join ‘the two
moments of philosophical life, materialism and spiritualism, dialectically’
(Gramsci, 2011 [2007], vol. 2, p. 143) – enabling one to gain a ‘full conscious-
ness of contradictions’, positing oneself ‘as an element of the contradiction’
and ‘rais[ing] this element to a principle of politics and action’ (Gramsci, 2011
[2007], vol. 2, p. 195) – historical materialism brought this dialectical holism
to fruition. In advancing this interpretation, as Jackson points out in Chapter 3,
Gramsci criticized both the mechanical materialism of Bukharin and the ‘phi-
losophy of the spirit’ espoused by Benedetto Croce, a neo-Hegelian and the
leading Italian philosopher of the 20th century’s first half. Indeed, Gramsci’s
historical materialism, the philosophy of praxis, was developed as a critique
of what Jackson calls Croce’s pathological dialectic: his ‘subjective account of
history based on the progression of philosophical thought rather than specific
conditions of class struggle posed by problems of historical development,’ as
Adam Morton (2005, p. 439) has put things.
Gramsci’s conception of history as praxis is unfolded further in Francesca
Antonioni’s essay on historico-political dynamics in the Prison Notebooks
(Chapter 5). Importantly, this conception entails a close relationship between
history, theory and strategy. As she points out, ‘in Gramsci there is no
clear distinction between historical investigation, theoretical reflection and
political strategy, each aspect stimulates the other two and is in turn influ-
enced by them’ (this volume, p. 89. For Gramsci, historical reality consists
of a multi-tiered ‘relation of forces in continuous motion’ (Gramsci, 1971,
p. 172), whose trajectory depends on the strategies and struggles of contending
agencies. Antonioni reconstructs Gramsci’s view of (European) history as
three moments: the first marking the rise of the bourgeoisie up to the French
Revolution of 1789, the second encompassing the making of European capi-
talism under bourgeois hegemony, the third (commencing in the latter decades
of the 19th century) witnessing in World War I and the Russian Revolution
the inception of the organic crisis of the capitalist world. Transitions from one
to another occurred through specific combinations of ‘objective conditions
and subjective tendencies’. If the French Revolution epitomized transition
under the control of a vigorous and hegemonic bourgeoisie, elsewhere (and
particularly in Italy) passive revolutions achieved transformation less through
hegemonic leadership than through slow, ‘molecular’ shifts (see also Chapter
10). The fascism that arose in the 1920s amid intensified class struggle and that
was consolidated, as passive revolution, in the 1930s, was not only an attack on
labour and the left, but entailed an element of state-corporate planning – a new
strategy for managing capitalism without encroaching on its economic nucleus

of private profit. Although as Antonioni notes, Gramsci’s analysis of fascism
does not directly bear upon the rise of right-wing populism in the current
organic crisis (see Chapter 21) she invites us to adopt Gramsci’s basic attitude,
to understand what is really changing and why, and to explore the implications
for the elaboration of an alternative political strategy.
As a final contribution to Part I and a bridge to Part II, in Chapter 6 Elizabeth
Humphrys ponders the concept at the centre of Gramsci’s theoretical/strategic
universe: hegemony. Humphrys traces its development, which was inspired
by Lenin’s use of the term in the strategy of a worker–peasant alliance that
enabled the Bolsheviks to gain state power in Russia in 1917. Given the
extremely uneven development of capitalism in Italy and as a southerner
himself, early on Gramsci recognized the need for such a strategy, uniting
subaltern classes of Italy’s developed ‘North’ and underdeveloped ‘South’. As
he wrote in 1925,
the proletariat can become the leading and the dominant class to the extent that
it succeeds in creating a system of class alliances which allows it to mobilize the
majority of the working population against capitalism and the bourgeois State. In
Italy, in the real class relations which exist there, this means to the extent that it suc-
ceeds in gaining the consent of the broad peasant masses. (Gramsci, 1990, p. 443)
In the Notebooks, in dialogue with Machiavelli and Croce, he extended and

deepened his notion of hegemony, from a strategic concept describing a class
alliance to a complex theoretical concept. Gramsci took on the challenge of
explicating how hegemony – rule with consent of the ruled, leadership as
persuasion armoured with coercion – is accomplished, and how an alternative
hegemony (sometimes called a counter-hegemony, although Gramsci never
used that term) might be advanced through organizing subaltern groups around
an alternative social vision. In introducing the conceptual armamentarium
associated with hegemony in the Gramscian sense, Humphrys’ essay, along
with other chapters in Part I, sets the scene for the chapters in Part II. The theo-
retical/strategic concepts featured in the latter chapters expand the meaning of
hegemony in its various facets, and explore subsequent scholarly and political
engagement with these concepts.
PART II. THE PHILOSOPHY OF PRAXIS: A NEW

POLITICAL VOCABULARY
Perry Anderson (1976) avers that Western Marxism emerged out of the defeat
of the left in the 1920s and 1930s, in which Gramsci participated. That defeat
brought the ‘rupture of political unity between Marxist theory and mass
practice’ (p. 55), leading to ‘a seclusion of theorists in universities’ (p. 92).

This tendency is best exemplified by the first-generation Frankfurt School
theorists, who offered penetrating analyses of the contradictions of advanced
capitalism but fell silent as to how an exit from capitalism could possibly be
brought about. Gramsci was an exception. An activist first, a prisoner later,
Gramsci was never cloistered in academe, and in prison he committed himself,
as Sperber and Hoare recount in Chapter 2, ‘to pursue politics by other means’.
In the Prison Notebooks he developed a rich political vocabulary, attuned pre-
cisely to the strategic challenge of creating revolutionary transformation under
conditions of advanced capitalism.
The middle chapters of this Companion unpack the keywords of that
vocabulary. Each chapter presents Gramsci’s original formulation of a core
theoretical conception, and tracks the application of his insights, theoretically
and strategically, in subsequent scholarship, primarily within the historical
materialist tradition. Given the close interrelations of Gramsci’s dynamic con-
cepts, the focus in these chapters on core concepts does not seal one concept
off from others. Rather, authors consider how a given thematic fits within the
larger Gramscian problematic, and how it has been taken up in subsequent
scholarship.
Gramsci’s concern to deliver a holistic and dynamic analysis of capitalist
modernity, carrying real strategic value, is well registered in his concept of
historical bloc. In Chapter 7, Panagiotis Sotiris subjects this complex concept
to meticulous dissection, relying on Gramsci’s Notebooks and on more recent
discussions. ‘Historical bloc’ enabled Gramsci to reformulate the relation
between structure and superstructure, core to historical materialism, in fully
dialectical terms, consistent with his view of history. In a famous passage
that Sotiris quotes, Gramsci states that ‘structure and superstructures form
an “historical bloc.” That is to say the complex, contradictory and discordant
ensemble of the superstructures is the reflection of the ensemble of the social
relations of production’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 366). The key word here, differen-
tiating Gramsci’s formulation from a mechanical and reductionist approach, is
ensemble: both structure and superstructure are riven with contradiction and
discord; there is no linear, causal relation between them. Historical bloc not
only gives Gramsci a perspective on the dynamic unity of the economic, the
political and the cultural-ideological; as a strategic node in Gramsci’s thought,
historical bloc ‘points to what a strategy for hegemony implies’ (Sotiris,
this volume, p. 125). If capitalism’s ruling class rules through the complex
assemblage of a hegemonic historical bloc, Sotiris, following Gramsci,
concludes that the struggle for an alternative hegemony must be the struggle
for a new historical bloc. In practice, this means ‘an articulation of transition
programmes emanating from the collective struggle, ingenuity and experimen-
tation of the subaltern classes along with the new organizational forms, new
political practices, and new political intellectualities that can turn them into
historical reality’ (Sotiris, this volume, p. 134).
In Chapter 8, Marco Fonseca begins from the concept of historical bloc,
and proceeds to examine its mutually-constitutive, historically emergent
elements. Gramsci saw state, capitalism and civil society as interpenetrating
fields of capitalist modernity, furnishing the terrain upon which a distinct way
of life takes shape and is reproduced, contested and transformed. Marx and
Engels (and Lenin) had conceptualized the state primarily as an apparatus of
political coercion, protecting the private property at the core of capitalism.
Gramsci retains this insight, but extends our understanding of the capitalist
state, which he called the integral state, to comprise a dialectical ensemble of
state apparatus and civil society, blending coercive and persuasive forms of
power. As for capital, in Fordism (see also Chapter 16) – the mass production
of commodities for mass consumption, entailing deskilled labour, relatively
high wages calibrated to increasing labour productivity, and the burgeoning
of consumer goods – Gramsci recognized the predominant form that industrial
capital would take in the 20th century. This not only produced a plethora of
commodities, it also required and thus came to produce new forms of proletar-
ian subjectivity. This latter production process ramified from early managerial
efforts to inculcate discipline into the mass workforce by promoting puritan-
ical values to the active, educative role of the state, through schooling and
social programmes, in creating conditions for a new type of worker: a worker
who ‘feels that he/she has, in fact, made all the decisions and ‘succeeded’, as
measured by increasingly complex psychological, social and developmental
indicators, in adjusting and creating the ‘internal equilibrium’ needed to
live successfully in the modern world’ (Fonseca, this volume, p. 143. Key
to creating such internal equilibrium are the ‘private’ associations of civil
society, formally distinct from the ‘public’ realm of the state yet intimately
tied to it. The former, including clubs, church groups and worker associations,
comprise the sphere of ethical life, where people acquire the ‘common sense’
that informs their voluntary subjection to market society as a matter of ‘free
choice’. Increasingly, the state depends on its
dialectical unity with civil society understood as a system of “trenches and forti-
fications” or an ensemble of private or civilian associations where a hegemonic
process works to generate new forms of voluntary submission and consensus for
both capital and state and, more broadly, the existing historical bloc. (Fonseca, this
volume, p. 139)
Fonseca’s engagement with recent literature underlines the continuing rel-

evance of this formulation, in understanding the rise of neo-fascism in the
current crisis as well as the ‘joyful alienation’ of atomized individuals in the

consensual service of domination.
Within Marxist thought, the ideological basis for voluntary submission to
domination has been theorized by means of both ‘negative’ and ‘positive’
concepts of ideology (Larrain, 1983). In the negative concept, whose clearest
exemplar is Lukács’ (1972) analysis of reification (which was based on Marx’s
account of commodity fetishism, and subsequently elaborated by the Frankfurt
theorists), ideology secures submission through mystification. Gramsci is the
key theorist of the positive concept. For him, ideology is not false conscious-
ness, but a fundamental aspect of political struggle.
In their discussion of intellectuals, ideology and the ethico-political (Chapter
9), Jean-Pierre Reed and Carlos L. Garrido unfold Gramsci’s positive concept
of ideology. Famously, Gramsci held that all people are intellectuals, that
reflection and inference are universal human capacities. However, only some
groups specialize, as organizers of culture, in the philosophical and conceptual
elaboration of ideas. Among them are the traditional intellectuals – survivals
from pre-capitalist times who continue to perform ideological functions (e.g.
clergy, academics) – and the organic intellectuals, whose organizational
practices are crucial to the life of capitalism’s fundamental classes. If capital’s
organic intellectuals include managers and industrial technicians, liberal
economists, lawyers, accountants, mainstream journalists and the managers
and minions of the culture industries, organic intellectuals also develop within
the proletariat, key examples being labour activists and trade-union political
economists. Reed and Garrido observe that organic and traditional intellectuals
who are aligned with the capitalist order serve as the bourgeoisie’s ‘deputies’
(Gramsci’s term). Their task is to elaborate, refine and promote the ideas of
modern market society, thus providing ‘moral and intellectual’ leadership in
organizing consent to the capitalist way of life (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 12, 453).
In contrast, the proletarian organic intellectual’s remit is to create ideological
conditions for subalterns to gain collective agency in the struggle for social-
ism. Clearly, Gramsci’s depiction here is not descriptive (the aspirations
of many labour activists stop well short of socialism); it is strategic, and
normative. Importantly, he recognizes that this process is not unilateral but
dialectical, with both sides – the leaders and rank-and-file – learning from each
other in a creative collaboration through which ‘the links between reason and
emotion and theory and practice are secured in critical and participatory ped-
agogy’ (Reed and Garrido, this volume, p. 164). The ‘common sense’, often
fragmented and inchoate, that informs subaltern practice includes a nucleus of
‘good sense’, grounded in experience and at odds with the ruling hegemony. In
fostering counter-hegemonic world views, the task is to refine this nucleus by
dis-articulating it from hegemonic meanings and re-articulating it to a socialist
conception of the world. Such moral and intellectual reformation, organized to
some extent through a revolutionary party, enables subalterns to pass from an

understanding of their immediate interests (what Lenin called trade-union con-
sciousness) to a broad recognition of the need for fundamental socio-political
transformation. For Gramsci, this process is crucial to the formation of an
alternative historical bloc.
In Chapter 10, Adam Morton picks up the thread of Antonioni’s discussion
in Chapter 5 of passive revolution in the geopolitical-economic making of
capitalist modernity, and braids it with Trotsky’s concept of uneven and
combined development. Trotsky’s (2008 [1932], pp. 3–5) complex concept,
which Gramsci adopted, includes the insight that the geographical unevenness
of capitalist development creates a dynamic in which centre and periphery
shape each other’s development, in dialectical combination. Gramsci went
on to consider how that dynamic has shaped the conditions for capitalist state
formation ‘from above’ on the periphery of the capitalist heartland.5 In passive
revolution, ‘the state replaces the local social groups in leading a struggle for
renewal’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 105), a scenario noted by Gramsci in his analysis
of the Southern Question within Italy, but applicable to other contexts of
‘revolution from above’, particularly within the dynamic of uneven capitalist
accumulation (see for instance Morton’s (2003) own research on Mexico). As
Morton notes (this volume, p. 179), (at least) two related processes define the
essential form of passive revolution: (1) the revolution issues ‘from above’,
without popular initiative and (2) the revolution is pushed along a conservative
path that protects and even restores the basis for ruling-class power. Morton’s
chapter follows the development of passive revolution in Gramsci’s (and
subsequent) thought, arguing that this concept provides ‘a lateral field of cau-
sality to the structuring condition of uneven and combined development’ (this
volume, p. 182), situated, as it is, in the nexus between state forms and uneven/
combined development.
Some interpreters of Gramsci generalize the concept of passive revolution
to signify a ruling class strategy deployed particularly in settings of organic
crisis, to pacify and incorporate dissent by implementing co-optative reforms.
Following this line of thought, Christine Buci-Glucksmann (1979) has argued
that top-down passive revolution calls for a counter-strategy of ‘anti-passive
revolution’. A key strategic element in the latter is what Daniel Egan calls the
dialectic of position and maneuver. In Chapter 11, he interrogates the military
metaphor, repurposed by Gramsci from historian Hans Delbrück, which con-
trasts the war of maneuver and war of position. In the struggle for hegemony,
the latter becomes particularly important within advanced capitalism. The
expansion of civil society and thus the integral state creates ‘a succession of
sturdy fortresses and emplacements’ (Gramsci, 2007, vol. 3, p. 169) – neces-
sitating a dialectic between conjunctural struggles focused on seizing state
power (the war of maneuver) and the protracted struggle, resembling trench
warfare, to create the conditions, in an alternative historical bloc, for socialism.

Importantly, although the war of position ‘must create a new civil society
expressing social relations appropriate for a socialist mode of production’
(Egan, this volume, p. 196), the two kinds of warfare are not sequential but
dialectically related. Just as success in trench warfare requires identifying the
enemy’s weakest point and staging a direct assault on it (a war of maneuver),
socialist revolution requires a war of position that gains ground within and
transforms civil society while also developing a well-organized political
instrument – a party – capable of centralized leadership in transforming the
state. In criticizing post-Gramsci arguments that envisage a two-stage revolu-
tionary process (first war of position, then war of maneuver), Egan implores
us ‘to recognize the moments of force that are inherent in a counter-hegemonic
strategy, just as moments of consent are inherent in the use of revolutionary
coercion’ (this volume, p. 201).
The dialectic of position and maneuver thus recommends both the creation
of ‘a new civil society’ and a new political instrument (Harnecker, 2007) that
can guide a multifaceted and multi-scalar process of transformation. Dorothea
Schoppek and Alexandros Chrysis take up these linked issues respectively,
in Chapters 12 and 13. An illuminating contemporary example of their inter-
penetration has been offered by Michelle Williams in her study of the war
of position and maneuver in Kerala, India. There, the Communist Party of
India (Marxist) has long practised a ‘counter-hegemonic generative politics
that attempts to establish new institutions and practices that extend the role of
civil society over the state and the economy’ (Williams, 2008, p. 9). Through
governing within a succession of coalitions while fostering organic ties to
Kerala’s vibrant popular sector, the party has coordinated grass-roots initia-
tives, decentralized, self-reliant development and participatory democracy.
Over decades, this war of position has shifted power within civil society, and
has fostered one of the highest levels of quality of life in the majority world.
As Williams (2008, p. 156) concludes, for such an alternative project to take
root, ‘a new type of political party’ must forge a ‘synergistic relation’ with
civil society ‘to ensure that the necessary institutional spaces are created and
the capacity for civil society participation is developed’. Another compelling
contemporary example of prefigurative change within a war of position comes
from Venezuela, in the communes, councils and missions that, within the
Bolivarian revolution, have advanced local forms of participatory democracy
(Duffy, 2012; Bean, 2022).
In ‘Welding the present to the future’ (Chapter 12), Dorothea Schoppek
traces the theme of prefigurative politics within Gramsci’s thought, begin-
ning with the insights he achieved during the Red Biennium (1919–1920,
see Chapter 4) of intense proletarian mobilization in Italy in the wake of the
Russian Revolution. Gramsci’s activism and journalism around the 1919
Factory Councils movement in Turin drew his attention to the need to create
the embryonic structure of socialism, ‘to weld the present to the future, sat-
isfying the urgent necessities of the present and working usefully to create
and “anticipate” the future’ (Gramsci, 1919). This concern with prefigurative
politics, including the importance of moral and intellectual reformation (con-
necting with themes explored in Chapter 9) is at the centre of this chapter.
After reviewing critiques of the anti-statist, nonstrategic and often co-optative
tendencies in prefigurative politics as practised today, particularly in the global
North, Schoppek revisits Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, for further insight.
She concludes that prefigurative politics should be conceptualized not as
a free-standing project but ‘as an integral strategic part of a war of position in
the struggle for hegemony’ (Schoppek, this volume, p. 215).
Alexandros Chrysis carries these ideas further in his incisive account of
Gramsci’s conception of the Modern Prince and revolutionary strategy. As
we have seen, Gramsci’s thinking is predicated on his dialectical conception
of the integral state, as ‘dictatorship + hegemony’ – a unity of coercion
and consent, extending well beyond the state apparatus per se. In building
a counter-hegemony, the proletariat and its allies must develop capacity for
both forms of power. The Modern Prince, the revolutionary party, is the vehicle
for this. In view of the tendency for subaltern consciousness to be fragmented
and focused on immediate interests, this political party must function as ‘the
collective teacher of the proletariat and its allied groups’ (Chrysis, this volume,
p. 227). Yet in view of the coercive power concentrated in the capitalist state,
this party must combine ‘the power of ideas with the power of arms’ (ibid.),
providing organization and direction within the counter-hegemonic historical
bloc and thereby enabling the collective use of force in a war of maneuver.
Chrysis goes on to critique several strands of recent scholarship (and activ-
ism) – epitomized in Holloway’s (2002) notion of changing the world without
taking power – that underestimate the need for a revolutionary party capable of
leading both a war of position and a war of maneuver. Instead, and in view of
the failures of anti-capitalist movements detached from revolutionary parties
to ‘change the world’ in real, substantive terms, Chrysis concludes that it is
time to reach the ‘critical balance’ between movement and party.
PART III. GRAMSCI FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
Our current setting is, in many ways, different from the Europe Gramsci knew
in the first three decades of the 20th century. Yet, compelling similarities
also stand out. Like us, Gramsci lived through a global organic crisis. In
Gramsci’s time, this took the form of a ‘crisis of European civilization that
had been building since 1870’, ignited by the collapse of the world market
with World War I (Vacca, 2020b, p. 29). His activism, journalism and later
carceral writing took place amid the ensuing political crisis, including the
Russian Revolution and the crisis-ridden interwar years (punctuated by the
Great Depression) during which fascism took hold in Italy and other capitalist
states. In our time, no less a hegemonic authority than the World Economic
Forum has announced a ‘polycrisis’, a convergence of cascading crises marked
by geopolitical confrontations, resource rivalries, economic instability and
climate breakdown, ‘with compounding effects, such that the overall impact
exceeds the sum of each part’ (World Economic Forum, 2023, p. 57). When
we ponder the relevance of Gramsci in the context of our times, we need to
keep both the divergences and the parallels in mind.
More than any other Marxist of the early 20th century, and particularly since
the Prison Notebooks became more widely available in the 1970s, Gramsci’s
ideas have influenced a wide range of disciplines in the social sciences and
humanities. This Companion’s third part tracks the application of Gramsci’s
approach to the philosophy of praxis across these fields, conveying a sense of
continuing relevance and power of these ideas – as tools for understanding the
changing complex of hegemonic apparatuses and the struggles and collective
agencies pressing for transformative change in the world today.
Philosophical and Political–Economic Issues
The first three essays in Part III are of broad theoretical significance as they
take up central philosophical and political–economic issues surrounding
hegemony and hegemonic struggle today. Jonathan Joseph, in Chapter 14, crit-
ically engages with poststructuralist readings of Gramsci (most influentially,
Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) post-Marxism), and then turns to recent work that
resituates Gramsci’s thought within an influential philosophical movement
linked to contemporary historical materialism: critical realism. In Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe sought to rescue Gramsci from the
economic reductionism they viewed as essential to Marxism. But, as Joseph
notes, their constitutive conception of discourse tends to reduce reality to the
ideas we have about it, with deleterious analytical and political ramifications.
Alternatively, through a critical-realist lens, hegemony is conceived ‘in
relation to those social structures and generative mechanisms that represent
its conditions of possibility’ (Joseph, this volume, p. 250). Along these lines,
Gramsci’s thought can be viewed as a post-positivist intervention that attends
to both the social structures through which hegemony is reproduced (structural
hegemony) and the concrete hegemonic projects through which collective
agency is formed in defence of or in opposition to the ruling order (surface
hegemony). On the latter, Joseph points to recent work (e.g. Davies, 2011)
that draws on Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality to examine how
emergent, networked forms of governance disperse power, as an element of

neoliberal hegemonic strategy.6
In the latter decades of the 20th century, as the post-war class compromise
dissolved and as neoliberalism became more clearly articulated, Bob Jessop
(1983) applied Gramscian analysis to the emerging order, theorizing the
hegemonic projects and corresponding accumulation regimes of late capi-
talism. Pondering the shifting terrain of state and capital, Jessop built on the
Gramsci-influenced analyses of French regulation theory (Aglietta 1979) and
state theorist Nico Poulantzas (1978). Jessop’s neo-Gramscian framework
has been very influential among social scientists (‘hegemonic project’, a term
he introduced, returns more than 20,000 results in Google Scholar). More
recently, he has collaborated with Ngai-Ling Sum, whose cultural political
economy combines a strong semiotic analysis with Jessop’s neo-Gramscian
political economy. Jessop and Sum’s work, discussed by Jessop in Chapter 15,
exemplifies the continuing value of Gramsci’s insights and the added value
that issues from integrating those insights with contemporary social-scientific
thought. As Jessop notes, cultural political economy aligns with Gramsci’s
own approach: it retains Marx’s abstract analysis of the capitalist mode of
production while focusing on concrete conjunctures, the dynamic movement
of leadership within them and the semiotic clusters of meaning activated in
reproducing/contesting hegemony (on the last of these, see also Ives’s (2004;
2005) insightful analyses).
Gramsci’s notes on Americanism and Fordism have inspired a long train of
analyses of the distinct forms of advanced capitalism, typically focused on the
Global North. In Chapter 16, Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen look beyond
global capitalism’s core, explicating how the generalization of Fordism has
brought an ‘imperial mode of living’ predicated on North–South relations
that are both imperialist and ecologically destructive. Clearly, the ‘consumer
society’ that blossomed in the North had its dark underbelly. Concomitantly,
it enabled commodification to enter the pores of working-class life, in an inner
appropriation of human subjectivity. Although Fordism fell into crisis in the
1970s, its transmogrification into neoliberal post-Fordism only intensified
this process. In our time, as the real costs, both in super-exploitation of labour
and environmental ruin, are primarily borne in the South, a ‘new compromise
between the elites and subalterns’ is struck, further deepening the imperial
mode of living as this way of life becomes globally generalized. Brand
and Wissen conclude that the current conjuncture offers three options – an
authoritarian stabilization of the imperial mode of living (the project of the
Northern extreme right), a passive revolution, through ecological moderniza-
tion, to green capitalism, and an ‘emancipatory social-ecological alternative’
centred on care rather than profit. I will revisit the third option in this chapter’s
conclusion.
Social and Cultural Reproduction
Marx’s (1967) abstract reproduction schemes, in the second volume of

Capital, pioneered a macroeconomic analysis of capital as self-expanding
value, but it was Gramsci who, in his analysis of hegemony, took up the
broader, concrete issue of how capitalist social formations are reproduced.
As generalized commodity production, capitalism produces not only mon-
etized goods and services; its ‘second product’, requiring a continual and
contested process of social reproduction, is human beings and their creative
capacities, commodified as labour power (Lebowitz, 2020). Producing that
second product has been a gendered process, sited in such institutions as the
family, schools, health care and other components of the welfare state. In the
past half-century, socialist-feminist scholars have developed a Gramscian
perspective on social reproduction that offers keen insights on gender and
hegemony. In Anna Sturman’s contribution to this Companion (Chapter 17),
Gramsci’s reflections on Americanism and Fordism offer an opening for
feminist analysis and critique, beginning with the patriarchal nuclear family as
a hegemonic form within capitalism. While taking note of some deeply prob-
lematic currents that have emerged within the ambit of feminism as the organic
crisis of neoliberalism has deepened (see also Chapter 22), Sturman provides
a compelling account of how social-reproductive feminism has amplified some
key Gramscian insights on hegemony and counter-hegemony. She argues that
participation ‘in expansive acts of care and solidarity which fall beyond the
formal workplace’ is integral to building a counter-hegemonic historical bloc.
As the morbid symptoms of ecological collapse proliferate, our understanding
of the stakes widens to include the conditions for socio-ecological reproduc-
tion – as in a stable climate, fertile soils, green urban infrastructure and health/
healthcare in the broadest of senses.
Integral to social reproduction, of course, is cultural reproduction, as
Chapters 18, 19 and 20 in this volume affirm. In the first of these, Marco
Briziarelli and Didarul Islam reflect on the Gramscian current in cultural
studies, which blossomed as an interdisciplinary field from its centre in
England in the 1970s and 1980s. The intellectual leadership of Raymond
Williams (1977) and Stuart Hall (1980) inspired many in the Anglosphere
to rediscover Marxism through a Gramscian lens while accentuating the cul-
tural moment in their analyses. Gramsci’s own expansive concept of media,
which refused the technological fetishism that is typical in media studies and
emphasized the social organization of communication, offers an especially
relevant perspective in our times of digital social media and platform capital-
ism. Indeed, in attending to the social media prosumer as a new kind of active
audience whose self-activation via digital practices seems to shape their own
subjectivity, an expansive, Gramscian understanding of media as a social

process intrinsic to contemporary capitalism is a crucial resource.
Schooling and education comprise a fundamental element in social and
cultural reproduction. Just as he viewed media expansively and relationally,
Gramsci considered education in its broadest sense, not simply as formal
education, observing that ‘every relationship of “hegemony” is necessarily an
educational relationship’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 350). Elemental to his conception
of hegemonic struggle is ‘the pedagogical force of culture’ (Giroux, 2002,
p. 59), which features also in his notion of the Modern Prince, tasked in part
with a programme of intellectual and moral reform (see Chapters 9 and 13).
In Chapter 19, Peter Mayo recounts Gramsci’s views on education, and takes
up subsequent scholarship that has elaborated Gramsci’s original formula-
tions, building a radical pedagogy that also serves as a critique of capitalist
hegemony in educational relationships, North and South. If Gramsci’s views
on education emphasized the development of ‘good sense’ and intellectual
self-discipline through dialogical practices, Mayo shows how far the con-
temporary neoliberal university has departed from that conception. While
a few elite universities continue to discharge their function of providing the
ruling class’s next generation with the needed elite habitus and skill-set, mass
universities, largely serving the requirements of industry, ‘have morphed into
glorified training agencies’ (this volume, p. 342) – which is not to say that
campuses are no longer contested ideological terrain. As a leading advocate of
critical pedagogy, Mayo concludes with a reminder that such pedagogy must
continue the struggle to become less Eurocentric. In this, he recommends,
as a theoretical/practical companion to Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis, the
pedagogy of praxis that Brazilian activist-scholar Paulo Freire pioneered in the
1960s (see Mayo 1999).
If, as Adam Morton shows in Chapter 10, the Southern Question and the
issue of uneven and combined development were strategically central for
Gramsci, a century later they are all the more urgent, at global scale. Centuries
of Euro-centred colonialism and imperialism have established sturdy trans-
national structures of political, economic and cultural power, punctuated
and sometimes punctured by ongoing decolonizing struggles. In Chapter 20,
Sourayan Mookerjea engages with Subaltern Studies, an influential stream of
post-colonial thought whose initial formulation made creative use of Gramsci’s
insights on hegemony and the Southern Question. Rereading Ranajit Guha’s
masterwork, Dominance without Hegemony (1997), a definitive contribution
to Subaltern Studies, Mookerjea strives to historicize the concept of hegem-
ony in our current setting. He incorporates insights from social reproductive
feminism; indeed the chapter forms a good companion piece to Sturman’s
analysis in Chapter 17. For Mookerjea (following Silvia Federici, 2004), in
the formative era of capitalism, the dispossession of direct producers from the
land contained at its heart a violent subalternization of social reproduction.

The latter set the stage for multiple colonialisms, their many wars against
subsistence, and ‘their accumulated violence of interlocking oppressions on
which contemporary racial capitalist class power and the racial capitalist
interstate system still depend’ (this volume, p. 361). From this vantage point,
the traditional concept of civil society as a field of predominantly non-coercive
relations should be re-thought as ‘a world-ecological labyrinth of colonizing
institutions’ (this volume, p. 362). Moreover, within ‘civil society’, the sub-
alternized field of social reproduction, wherein work directly sustains life,
constitutes an autonomous domain of subaltern class politics, global in scale,
the basis for a many-headed hydra politics portending a decisive break from
the colonizers’ model of the world.
Hegemonic Struggle
In the modern era, social reproduction has been riven with contestation, and
a significant portion of that contention is centred upon social movements.
Gramsci’s problematic has opened historical materialism to the analysis of the
varied popular-democratic movements that have emerged in late capitalism,
highlighting the challenge of articulating a widening range of democratic
struggles into an alternative historical bloc. As Sturman’s analysis of feminism
in Chapter 17 suggests, the ‘new social movements’ that (re)emerged in the
1960s and 1970s are ideologically and politically diverse, rendering them,
according to Joachim Hirsch, a ‘contradictory battlefield in the struggle for
a new hegemony’ (1988, p. 51). In Chapter 21 Laurence Cox considers why
Gramsci matters for social movements, and how some of his fundamental polit-
ical insights can be applied in counter-hegemonic struggle today. Cox devel-
ops a contemporary strategic analysis of what Gramsci (1971, pp. 181–185)
called the ‘relations of forces’ (see also Chapters 5 and 25), how the structure
of alliances sustaining hegemony frays in an organic crisis, and how left
movements can discern the weaknesses in that structure while developing their
own alliances into an incipient historical bloc. Recalling Gramsci’s insistence
that a revolutionary party is indispensable in this process, Cox, in tension with
Chrysis’s Leninist reading of the Modern Prince in Chapter 13, registers some
scepticism based in the ambiguous record of left parties, worldwide.
Of course, a focus on the possibilities of progressive movements, unified
through revolutionary parties, transforming social formations from below,
gives us only part of the picture. Indeed, in the advanced capitalist North,
the contemporary political landscape offers no compelling instances of the
movement/party synergy that was central to Gramsci’s strategic thinking.
As in Gramsci’s time, the deep organic crisis of contemporary capitalism
has offered fertile soil for all manner of right-wing authoritarian movements
and parties, which is not to say that history is repeating itself. In Chapter 22,
Owen Worth traces the war of position in which these parties and movements
have been active, particularly as the utopian promise of a borderless world of
global market society has devolved into increasingly chaotic and degraded
conditions of life. As the morbid symptoms of neoliberal capitalism’s organic
crisis have proliferated, authoritarian populist/neofascist currents have stirred,
particularly across the Global North, and now are shaping the future of class
dynamics and social relations.
Thomas Muhr’s study of movement activism and state power in Latin
America (Chapter 23) complements Lawrence Cox’s discussion of social
movements in Chapter 20, and offers a glimmer of hope for advocates of
social and economic justice. Yet while Cox trains his essay primarily (though
not exclusively) on hegemonic struggle within a given national state, Muhr’s
focus is on the challenge of integrating the national with the transnational
in hegemonic struggle from below. Disputing claims that dismiss Gramsci
as a Eurocentric Northerner, Muhr presents him as ‘a decolonial Global
Southerner’ (this volume, p. 407). Beginning from Gramsci’s (1971, p. 240)
adage that ‘the line of development is towards internationalism, but the point
of departure is “national”’, Muhr discusses the ‘pluri-scalar war of position’
that 21st century formations (in particular the Bolivarian Alliance for the
Peoples of Our America (ALBA)) are conducting, and the barriers they have
faced in attempting to construct a transnational alternative historical bloc.
Initiated by Cuba and Venezuela in 2004, ALBA involves both an alliance
of progressive Latin American governments within a fair-trade bloc and an
articulation of progressive movements in the same countries, reaching across
borders. As Muhr observes (this volume, p. 420), ‘in a globalized world, state
apparatuses, national and transnational civil societies, and institutions of the
global governance regime simultaneously become strategic places, spaces and
scales in/of hegemonic struggle’.
Global Organic Crisis
Our final cluster of chapters in Part III keeps the focus at the transnational
level, but emphasizes the challenges humanity now faces in an era of capital-
ist civilizational crisis that has intensified North/South contradictions while
raising existential threats of an ecological nature. The growing strength of
right-wing authoritarianism that Worth considers in Chapter 22 is placed in
a global political-economic context by Henk Overbeek in his discussion of
transnational neoliberalism in organic crisis (Chapter 24). Overbeek engages
with the influential stream of Gramscian perspectives within International
Political Economy and International Relations, to which he has been a key
contributor (Overbeek, 2004). In the work of Robert Cox (1987), Stephen Gill
(1993), Kees van der Pijl (1998) Andreas Bieler and Adam Morton (2004)
and others, the contours of a hegemonic world order, now in chronic disarray,
have been clearly drawn. Overbeek recounts how, in the globalizing neoliberal
order, ‘workers have been transformed from members of collective work
forces to highly individualized workers or nominally self-employed “entre-
preneurs” beyond the reach of party or union activists’ (this volume, p. 438).
In such conditions as Michael Lebowitz (2020, p. 112) has observed, workers
enact the ‘tragedy of atomism’ as they compete with each other for jobs and
income. As atomized self-seekers, workers come to equate their interest with
that of their employers, ‘thus making every single section of workers into
an auxiliary army for the class employing them’ as Frederick Engels (1976,
pp. 83–84) observed. The political paralysis that issues from neoliberalism’s
intensified atomization is, for Overbeek, one of the factors that pre-empted
the emergence of a rival historical bloc, as neoliberalism consolidated itself
globally in the 1990s. However, the global financial crisis of 2008 signalled
the beginning of the end of neoliberalism as we have known it, and the ensuing
period has witnessed neoliberalism’s delegitimization, together with moves
toward a ‘non-hegemonic global order structured by the strategic rivalry
between the US and China’ (this volume, p. 443). As the world order is trans-
formed in an ongoing war of position, waged at different scales, Overbeek
concludes by taking note of perhaps the greatest challenge: the survival of
post-industrial civilization itself, now posed by the exhaustion and destruction
of the biosphere.
Fittingly, then, our final chapter draws on Gramsci’s conceptions of
human–earth relations, relations of forces and passive revolution, to examine
responses (from above) to the ecological dimensions of organic crisis, and the
emergence (from below) of transformative climate movements. In Chapter
25, Kevin Surprise examines the development of so-called green or ‘climate’
capitalism as a crisis management strategy. As a visibly deepening ecological
crisis favours the rising, globalist fraction of climate capital (including Big
Tech) over the established yet retrograde fossil-capital fraction (including
in its ambit the Military-Industrial Complex), geopolitical rivalries intensify
with the waning of American hegemony and the rise of China (and its allies).
Within this dangerous conjuncture, Surprise discerns some lines of solidarity
among emergent movements for climate justice, including Northern-based ini-
tiatives to rebuild working-class power in strategic sectors as a basis for a just
transition, and Southern-based initiatives collecting around anti-imperialism,
demilitarization and ecologically sound land management.
CONCLUSION
Taken as a whole, the essays in this Companion affirm the continuing power
of Antonio Gramsci’s thought. Rooted theoretically and methodologically in
Marx and historical materialism, Gramsci and the many streams of scholarship
that flow from his work offer tools for taking up the challenges of interpreting
the world of late capitalism while working to change that world into a radically
reconstructed socio-ecological formation in which human beings can thrive
collectively in ecologically healthy conditions. This is not to say that the
ongoing reception and development of Gramsci’s thought have been without
tensions. These have long been evident, for instance, in post-war efforts by
the leadership of the Communist Party of Italy to present a Gramsci attuned to
their programme (Liguori, 2022), in the debate on the meaning of civil society
initiated by Norberto Bobbio at the second convention on Gramsci in 1967
(Vacca, 2020a, pp. 195–198, 256), and in Perry Anderson’s controversial
reading of ‘antinomies’ in Gramsci’s thought (Anderson, 2017; Dal Maso,
2021). Indeed, some of these tensions can be noted across the chapters assem-
bled in this volume.7 Ongoing debates, of course, are indicative of the vibrant
research programme that forms an integral part of the philosophy of praxis.
Without pretending to be comprehensive, in closing, let me recapitulate,
from the chapters herein, some of the key insights guiding that programme:
• the integration of the materialist interpretation of history (including the

critique of capital) with a philological method in analysing labour, politics,
culture, ideology, the encoding/decoding texts, education and pedagogy as
meaningful material practices;
• the comprehension of relations between structure and superstructures as
dialectical, implying the contradiction-ridden formation, within advanced
capitalism, of an integral state comprised of political and civil society and
embedded in a broader historical bloc, whose hegemony is never absolute;
• the anti-deterministic focus on agency in the construction of collective
will from the bottom up (always with capacities and within conjunctures
inherited from past practice), and on the openness of concrete reality to
alternative futures;
• the emphasis on class and the role of ‘fundamental classes’ whose practices
produce and reproduce capitalism as a way of life, and, following from
that, the indispensable role of intellectuals, of media and of education as
agencies on the contested terrain of hegemonic struggle, which, for the
proletariat includes other subaltern and popular-democratic forces whose
participation in counter-hegemonic projects is crucial;
• the strategic importance of wars of position and maneuver, conceptualized
dialectically and implying the need for a transformative political instru-
ment, a Modern Prince, that can provide integrative leadership, including

processes of moral-intellectual reformation and the creation of prefigura-
tive practices that point to an alternative future as they help to construct an
alternative historical bloc;
• equally, in analysis of each given conjuncture, the strategic focus on the
relations of forces – the economic, political, cultural, military/geopolitical
relations between the actors in the field – including their dynamic, dialecti-
cal interrelations and the openings or closures they pose for transformative
praxis;
• the Southern Question which continues to loom as uneven and combined
development, regionally and globally, consigns most of the world to sub-
alternity on the margins, bolstering an imperial mode of living in global
capitalism’s core yet creating a basis for an alternative historical bloc
centred in the global South.
Essays in Part III of this volume apply these insights and others within our
current setting. In these works we find the power of Gramsci’s thought
reflected in critical analyses of media, education and gendered and racialized
aspects of social reproduction, and in hegemonic struggles that engage a tar-
nished neoliberal establishment, an insurgent right-wing populism shading
toward neofascism in some contexts, and a largely disorganized left.8 In these
circumstances of organic crisis, as the neoliberal zombie stumbles onward, the
challenge of rebuilding a socialist left, both within countries and, as in ALBA
and the Progressive International, across them, is daunting. Meeting that chal-
lenge will require an understanding of hegemonic struggles as pluri-scalar,
ranging from the micropolitics of everyday life, through to the transnational.
The practices that sustain hegemony, and that challenge it, are active at all
these levels.9 Analytically, this points to the need for a holistic, dynamic,
multi-scalar mode of analysis. Practically, this calls for a progressive program
that works across these levels transversally, offering strategic guidance,
particularly in view of the massive challenges that a global ecological crisis,
combined with sharpening geopolitical-economic contradictions, presents to
humanity.
Ecological crisis had not reached global scale in Gramsci’s time, but the
power of his reformulation of Marxism is evident in the ways in which his
thought has been applied in understanding the ecological and civilizational
crisis of late capitalism. On this, Brand and Wissen’s closing argument in
Chapter 16 bears repeating: on our finite planet, the imperial mode of living
cannot be sustained, let alone universalized beyond capitalism’s core; indeed,
its generalization within the core as Fordism has provoked climate breakdown
while recruiting many in the Northern middle class and its aspirants to the
ecocidal project of endless accumulation. This verdict underscores the need for
fundamental transformation both in the internal relations that form the mode
of production and, with that, in humanity’s relation to nonhuman nature. Such
an emancipatory socio-ecological transformation will require a shift to a way
of life not driven by private profit but anchored upon care – for fellow humans
and for the rest of nature. This prospect may seem entirely out of reach, as the
window for avoiding ecological catastrophe closes at a worrying pace. Yet, as
Gramsci, following Marx (2002 [1845]), insisted, in human affairs, the future
always depends upon how we make history now.
One can ‘foresee’ to the extent that one acts, to the extent that one applies a vol-
untary effort and therefore contributes concretely to creating the result ‘foreseen’.
Prediction reveals itself thus not as a scientific act of knowledge, but as the abstract
expression of the effort made, the practical way of creating a collective will.
(Gramsci, 1971, p. 438)
In these times, to avoid making a very bad situation much worse, we would be
wise to temper our well-founded pessimism of the intellect with an optimism
of will.
NOTES
1. At the time of writing, the Web of Science lists more than 5,000 scholarly articles
published between 2018 and 2022 featuring the term ‘Marxism’.
2. To create a volume of maximal value and interest to a wide range of readers,
it was also important to avoid repetition with recently published work. Davide
Cadeddu’s edited collection A Companion to Antonio Gramsci (Brill, 2020,
pp. 160) contains insightful essays that are historiographic and biographical in
emphasis. As explained above, this Elgar Companion takes a different approach.
3. As Dustin Stolz (2021) points out, Saussure himself did not make such claims,
but his latter-day interpreters have attributed them to him.
4. The Foundation’s website is at https://www.fondazionegramsci.org/. The
International Gramsci Society is at http://www.internationalgramscisociety.org/
; its refereed journal is at https://ro.uow.edu.au/gramsci/. The Foundation also
maintains the online Gramscian Bibliography, at http://bg.fondazionegramsci
.org/biblio-gramsci/, which was founded by John M. Cammett.
5. For a highly insightful analysis of this dynamic within international relations, see
van der Pijl (1998).
6. The relationship between Michel Foucault’s thought and Gramsci is fraught,
which is not to say that Foucauldian insights cannot be employed in elaborating
Gramscian perspectives on the contemporary world (see, for instance, Joseph’s
and Jessop’s chapters in this volume; Poulantzas, 1978; Fairclough, 2017).
A critic of Marxism, rendering him attractive to a wide range of non-Marxist
intellectuals, particularly in the US, Foucault wrote, in a letter to Joseph
Buttigieg, translator of the Prison Notebooks, that Gramsci is ‘an author who
is cited more often than he is really known’ (Keucheyan, 2016). There is no
evidence that Foucault himself ever read Gramsci, although many of Gramsci’s
concepts anticipate, by decades, Foucault’s problematics (ibid). Late in his life,
Foucault lamented that his own training had entirely excluded engagement with
Critical Theory (Dews, 1989), which, again, anticipated many of his key ideas
but situated them within historical materialism rather than presenting them as
an alternative to it. Foucault’s relationship to the broader left is complex and
ambiguous. For instance, running through Foucault’s late-1970s lectures is
‘a deep affinity’ with neoliberalism, based in ‘a shared suspicion of the state’
(Behrent, 2009, p. 545). Foucault’s oeuvre certainly contains insights on late
modernity, which can harvested in elaborating a Gramscian Marxism, but we
can lament his failure to build on radical perspectives that were available to him.
For a range of positions on Gramsci and Foucault, see the essays in Kreps (2016,
cf. Sanbonmatsu, 2004). All in all, and notwithstanding the insights Foucault
achieved on the ‘how’ of domination (Marsden 2014), Jan Rehmann (2022,
p. 143) makes a good point when he writes, based on extensive philological
reading of Foucault, that ‘it is high time to think about the intellectual and polit-
ical price of Foucault’s “overcoming” of Marxism.’
7. For instance, Reed and Garrido’s interpretation in Chapter 9 (p. 179) of wars
of maneuver and position as distinct strategies that ‘operate in different polit-
ical terrains – the former in the context of revolutionary situations; the latter
in the context of robust civil societies’ – can be compared with Egan’s thesis
that the two types of ‘war’ ‘are inseparable parts of a dialectical process of
revolutionary change’ in Chapter 11 (p. 201). Chrysis’s Leninist interpreta-
tion of Gramsci’s Modern Prince and his critique of autonomist readings of
Gramsci’s politics (Chapter 13) contrasts with Cox’s movement-centred analysis
of counter-hegemony, which registers some scepticism about the leading role of
revolutionary parties (Chapter 21). (On this point, I have suggested elsewhere
that the Leninist/anarchist (or Leninist/autonomist) binary does not exhaust
the possibilities for effective political organization on the left (Carroll, 2006).)
Some contributors to this volume retain Gramsci’s original, context-specific
usage of passive revolution (Antonioni in Chapter 5, Morton in Chapter 10);
others (such as Fonseca in Chapter 8, Brand and Wissen in Chapter 16, Mayo
in Chapter 19 and Surprise in Chapter 25) expand its meaning to other contexts.
As an ontological/epistemological base for the philosophy of praxis, critical
realism (as presented by Joseph in Chapter14) offers scaffolding different from
Guha’s post-colonial critique of capitalist modernity, as probed by Mookerjea in
his discussion of post-Western Marxism (Chapter 20). This collection, and this
essay, cannot resolve these complex debates, but I hope our efforts contribute to
clarifying what is at stake.
8. For an incisive critique of the ‘woke’ politics that now masquerades as left, see
Neiman (2023).
9. I have analysed the multiscalar character of hegemonic struggle in Carroll
(2021).
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PART I
GRAMSCI IN CONTEXT
2. Gramsci: life and times of
a revolutionary
Nathan Sperber and George Hoare
INTRODUCTION
In May 1928, just a few weeks before being sentenced to 20 years in prison,
Gramsci wrote the following to his mother from his cell in Milan:
I am presently under political arrest and will be a political prisoner. I’m not
ashamed, nor will I ever be ashamed of this fact. Basically, I myself willed this
arrest and condemnation. I’ve always refused to compromise my ideas and am ready
to die for them, not just to be put in prison. For this reason, I feel serene and satisfied
with myself. (LP, p. 133)1
Three years later, by now jailed in the Apulian town of Turi and suffering
from steadily deteriorating health, he would once again write to his mother, in
a similar vein: ‘I was a soldier who had bad luck in the immediate battle, and
soldiers can’t (at least they shouldn’t) be pitied when they fight of their own
free will’ (LP, p. 202).
These statements, together with many other letters and with recollections of
inmates who encountered Gramsci in prison, reveal the exceptional stoicism
that he displayed during his years behind bars. In the face of political defeat,
persecution, forced isolation, physical weakness and ill health, he summoned
up the willpower and energy to study and to write as much as his captors
allowed him to, filling out thousands of pages that would become known after
his death as the Prison Notebooks (Quaderni del carcere in Italian).
This chapter traces Gramsci’s trajectory, from his birth in Sardinia in 1891
to his tragic death in Rome in 1937 after a decade in prison. We revisit the
different environments and events that informed his exceptional biography,
including the mass strikes of Turin in 1919–1920, the founding of Italy’s
Communist Party, the politics of the Third International and the advent of
fascism. In so doing, we aim to show that Gramsci’s thought, as it took shape
and matured in the course of dramatic historical developments, is intimately
bound up with the revolutionary cause that defined his life.
31
The following five sections address, in turn: Gramsci’s childhood in

Sardinia; his days in Turin as a young socialist journalist coming to terms with
the Russian Revolution; the involvement of his newspaper L’Ordine Nuovo in
the Turin strike wave of 1919–1920; the early years of the Communist Party of
Italy under fascism and Gramsci’s relations with the Comintern; and finally his
decade of imprisonment leading to his death. A sixth and final section draws
lessons for reading Gramsci in light of his biography. We argue that Gramsci’s
intellectual endeavours in prison were a way for him, after having been forci-
bly cut off from revolutionary action, to continue to engage in politics by other
means.
SARDINIAN BEGINNINGS: ANTONU SU GOBBU

(1891–1911)2
Antonio Gramsci was born on 22 January 1891 in Ales, a small town in

Sardinia. On the matter of his roots, he once wrote to his sister-in-law Tatiana
Schucht from prison in 1931: ‘I myself am of no one race: my father was of
recent Albanian origin … my mother is Sardinian on both sides’. ‘Despite
these things’, he continues, ‘my cultural formation is basically Italian and this
is my world here’ (LP, p. 218). When ‘Nino’ was born, his father Francesco
‘Cicillo’ Gramsci was a bureaucrat in the local civil administration. In 1897,
however, disaster struck the Gramsci family when Francesco was accused of
embezzlement, extortion and counterfeiting. These accusations were never
proved, and it seems Francesco was the victim of a local political vendetta
aimed at punishing him for supporting the wrong candidate at a previous
election.
Francesco was imprisoned from 1898 to 1904, with terrible consequences
for his wife and seven children. The family fell into a dire misery. Having sold
the patch of land she had inherited from her family in order to pay the lawyer’s
fee, Gramsci’s mother, Peppina Marcias, attempted to ensure her children
had sufficient food and a dignified life by working as a seamstress. The harsh
trials of his childhood would leave a mark on Gramsci for the rest of his life.
Among other things, he would develop a deep admiration for his mother, to
whom he would often write letters stamped with tenderness and respect after
his imprisonment.
During his childhood, Nino started to develop symptoms of physical mal-
formation. Seemingly due to Pott’s disease (a variant of tuberculosis), his
spine developed abnormally. Having failed to diagnose the medical cause, the
town’s doctors, in an attempt to cure him, ordered him to be suspended from
a beam in the ceiling, regularly and for long hours. Nino endured the humilia-
tion of this ineffective treatment as well as the bullying of his schoolmates who
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MAP OF
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(Large-size)
London: Edward Arnold.
FOOTNOTES:
[1]1 metre = about 39 inches.

[2]A cubic metre of water equals, roughly, 1 ton.
[3]For the purpose of illustration, it is interesting to compare the
discharge of the Thames at Teddington:
Cubic Metres per
Second.
During June the average discharge for the twenty
35
years ending 1902 was
The average in June, 1903, was 178
The discharge on June 21, 1903, was 387
On February 21, 1900, it was 533
And on November 18, 1894 (greatest on record), it
1,065
was
I have given the discharge in cubic metres per second, the unit
generally in use on the Nile. On the Thames the figures are
usually given in gallons per day, which sounds much more
imposing. If the number of cubic metres per second is multiplied
by about 1,900,000, it gives approximately the number of gallons
per day. But, after all, the discharge of the Thames in June, 1903,
was not so very far below that of the Nile during the same month.
[4]The Egyptian peasant, however, refuses to accept the
prosaic evidence of his eyes about these rats, and, like the stout
conservative he is, prefers to believe the old tradition that they
turn to mud during the flood season. Many a man will gravely
assert that he has himself observed the transformation actually in
progress.
[5]1 Kantar = nearly 100 lbs.
[6]Cf. p. 71.
[7]Estimated. £E1 = £1 0s. 6d.
[8]Estimated.
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The Elgar Companion to Antonio

Gramsci 1st Edition William K. Carroll

ELGAR COMPANIONS TO GREAT THINKERS

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc.

A catalogue record for this book

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023949657

This book is available electronically in the

ISBN 978 1 80220 859 7 (cased)

1 Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for our times 1

PART I GRAMSCI IN CONTEXT

2 Gramsci: life and times of a revolutionary 31

3 Gramsci, Marx, Hegel 48

4 ‘The Revolution against “Capital”’: constancy, change

5 Historico-political dynamics in the Prison Notebooks:

6 Hegemony as a protean concept 99

PART II THE PHILOSOPHY OF PRAXIS: A NEW

7 The historical bloc as a strategic node in Gramsci’s Prison

8 State, capital and civil society 136

9 Intellectuals, ideology, and the ethico-political 152

10 Where Trotsky’s horizons stop, Gramsci’s begin: the

11 War of maneuver and war of position: Gramsci and the

12 Welding the present to the future ... thinking with Gramsci

13 The Modern Prince and revolutionary strategy 219

PART III GRAMSCI FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

SECTION A: PHILOSOPHICAL AND

14 Gramsci, post-Marxism and critical realism 240

15 Hegemonic projects and cultural political economy 261

16 Fordism, post-Fordism and the imperial mode of living 279

SECTION B: SOCIAL AND CULTURAL REPRODUCTION

17 Hegemony, gender and social reproduction 299

18 Cultural studies: the Gramscian current 315

19 Antonio Gramsci and education 334

20 Hegemony without hegemony: Gramsci, Guha and

SECTION C: HEGEMONIC STRUGGLE

21 Social movements and hegemonic struggle 370

22 Hegemonic struggle and right-wing populism 388

23 Gramsci and hegemonic struggle in a globalized world 406

SECTION D: GLOBAL ORGANIC CRISIS

24 Transnational neoliberalism in organic crisis 428

25 Beyond ecocidal capitalism: climate crisis and climate justice 448

Robert P. Jackson is Senior Lecturer in Political Thought in the Department

Markus Wissen is a Professor of Social Sciences at the Berlin School of

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) has been hailed as the ‘theoretician of super-

aimed to an extent unlike that of any previous Marxist at a unitary synthesis of

Building on Marx, Gramsci developed a dynamic and holistic framework for

PART I. GRAMSCI IN THE CONTEXT OF HIS TIME

engaged deeply with a wide gamut of philosophers, from the Renaissance

Boothman calls attention to the emphasis on collective will and transforma-

strategy for managing capitalism without encroaching on its economic nucleus

In the Notebooks, in dialogue with Machiavelli and Croce, he extended and

PART II. THE PHILOSOPHY OF PRAXIS: A NEW

practice’ (p. 55), leading to ‘a seclusion of theorists in universities’ (p. 92).

Fonseca’s engagement with recent literature underlines the continuing rel-

current crisis as well as the ‘joyful alienation’ of atomized individuals in the

some extent through a revolutionary party, enables subalterns to pass from an

warfare, to create the conditions, in an alternative historical bloc, for socialism.

PART III. GRAMSCI FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

Philosophical and Political–Economic Issues

emergent, networked forms of governance disperse power, as an element of

Social and Cultural Reproduction

Marx’s (1967) abstract reproduction schemes, in the second volume of

1 Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for our times 1

2 Gramsci: life and times of a revolutionary 31

3 Gramsci, Marx, Hegel 48

6 Hegemony as a protean concept 99

8 State, capital and civil society 136

9 Intellectuals, ideology, and the ethico-political 152

13 The Modern Prince and revolutionary strategy 219

14 Gramsci, post-Marxism and critical realism 240

15 Hegemonic projects and cultural political economy 261

16 Fordism, post-Fordism and the imperial mode of living 279

17 Hegemony, gender and social reproduction 299

18 Cultural studies: the Gramscian current 315

19 Antonio Gramsci and education 334

21 Social movements and hegemonic struggle 370

22 Hegemonic struggle and right-wing populism 388

23 Gramsci and hegemonic struggle in a globalized world 406

24 Transnational neoliberalism in organic crisis 428

25 Beyond ecocidal capitalism: climate crisis and climate justice 448