The Theoretical Legacy of Antonio Gramsci in Marxist Thought

When most people picture a revolution, they think of barricades, strikes, and the dramatic seizure of power. Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), the Italian Marxist thinker, asked a far more uncomfortable question: why do most revolutions never happen at all? Why do workers and the poor, who vastly outnumber the wealthy, so often consent to a system that disadvantages them? His answers reshaped Marxist theory and gave us a vocabulary-hegemony, organic intellectuals, the war of position-that scholars still use to analyse power, media, and politics today.

Who was Antonio Gramsci? 🔗

Gramsci was an Italian Marxist theorist, journalist, and one-time leader of the Italian Communist Party. Born in Sardinia in 1891, he worked as an activist and editor before Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime imprisoned him in 1926. The state’s intent was famously summed up by the prosecutor’s demand to “stop this brain from functioning.”

The irony is that prison produced his most important work. Between 1929 and 1935, Gramsci filled more than thirty notebooks with roughly 3,000 pages of analysis on history, philosophy, culture, and politics. These became the Prison Notebooks, written under censorship and poor health, and published only after his death in 1937. Though fragmented and unsystematic, they are regarded as a highly original contribution to twentieth-century political theory.

What makes Gramsci distinctive within Marxism is his break from a purely economic explanation of society. Classical Marxism argued that the economic “base” determines the cultural and political “superstructure.” Gramsci flipped the emphasis. He insisted that culture, ideology, and ideas are not just reflections of economic interests-they are active forces that hold a society together and keep a ruling class in power.

Hegemony: ruling through consent, not just force 🔗

The concept at the heart of Gramsci’s legacy is hegemony. The word signifies both leadership and domination. In earlier Russian Marxist debates it described the leading role of one group over others. Gramsci transformed it into something larger: an explanation of how a ruling class maintains control across an entire society.

His central insight is that the dominant class does not rule by force alone. It rules primarily by securing the consent of the masses through cultural and ideological means. The values, beliefs, and assumptions of the ruling class come to be accepted as ordinary common sense-the natural way things are. When this happens, coercion becomes unnecessary most of the time. People police themselves.

How hegemony works in everyday life 🔗

Consider how certain ideas circulate in a capitalist society. The emphasis on individualism, competition, and free markets is presented through schools, media, and popular culture as the only sensible way to organise economic life. Over time, these ideas stop looking like one option among many. They start to feel like reality itself. This is hegemony in action: domination that feels like agreement.

Gramsci argued that modern states since the mid-nineteenth century cultivate consent across civil society, so that force becomes the primary tool only during moments of crisis when consent breaks down. A ruling class even compromises some of its immediate interests to keep the broader support of potentially hostile groups. Domination, in this reading, is a constant process of negotiation rather than a fixed fact.

The integral state: coercion plus consent 🔗

This led Gramsci to redefine the state itself. In a now-famous formulation, he described the state as “political society + civil society”-hegemony protected by the armour of coercion. Political society includes the coercive institutions: the police, the army, the courts. Civil society includes the institutions that shape ideas and win consent: schools, religious organisations, the press, trade unions, and cultural bodies.

This “integral” view of the state matters enormously. It means that real power is not concentrated only in government buildings. It is dispersed throughout the institutions of everyday life, where consent is manufactured. To understand domination, you have to look at the classroom and the newspaper as much as the parliament.

The role of intellectuals 🔗

If hegemony is built through ideas, then the people who produce and spread ideas become politically crucial. This is why Gramsci devoted so much attention to intellectuals. He rejected the romantic notion of the intellectual as a detached genius floating above society. For Gramsci, the category of intellectual is defined by social function, not by intelligence.

He argued that all people are potentially intellectuals in the sense of having and using an intellect, but not all perform the social function of intellectuals. Those who do are people whose role is to communicate with, educate, and organise others.

Traditional versus organic intellectuals 🔗

Gramsci drew a key distinction between two types.

Traditional intellectuals are figures like priests, philosophers, scholars, and writers who appear to stand outside class divisions and above politics. They carry social prestige and seem independent. But Gramsci argued this independence is largely a myth; their position is a leftover from earlier historical and class arrangements, and they often help legitimise the existing order by making it appear natural and timeless.

Organic intellectuals emerge directly from a particular social class and give that class self-awareness and direction. The rise of capitalism, for example, produced its own organic intellectuals-industrial technicians, managers, entrepreneurs, bureaucrats, and scientists-who articulate the interests of the capitalist class and translate them into general principles for society.

The radical implication is this: just as the ruling class produces its own organic intellectuals, so must the working class. For Gramsci, a successful revolutionary movement needs thinkers and organisers who rise from within the working class itself-people who can challenge dominant ideas, critique common sense, and build an alternative worldview. These organic intellectuals do not simply theorise; they educate and mobilise.

War of position versus war of manoeuvre 🔗

Gramsci’s analysis of how power works led directly to a new theory of how it might be changed. He distinguished between two revolutionary strategies, borrowing military language.

A war of manoeuvre is a frontal assault-a rapid, direct seizure of state power, like the storming of the Winter Palace in the Russian Revolution of 1917. Gramsci believed this strategy could succeed where civil society was weak and the state rested mainly on coercion, as in Tsarist Russia.

A war of position is something quite different. In Western societies, where civil society is dense and the ruling class enjoys deep hegemonic consent, a sudden frontal attack would fail because the system has too many cultural defences. Here, change requires a sustained, multi-front counter-cultural and educational struggle-a slow campaign to win hearts and minds across schools, media, and community life before political power can be taken or held.

The goal of the war of position is to build counter-hegemony: an alternative set of values and a rival common sense that gradually erodes the dominant worldview. This idea has had a long reach, helping later thinkers analyse struggles against not only capitalism but other entrenched systems of domination as well.

The Modern Prince: the party as collective leader 🔗

Who leads the war of position? In a notable section of the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci returned to Niccolò Machiavelli’s classic text The Prince. Where Machiavelli imagined a single ruler who could unify Italy, Gramsci reimagined the “Prince” for the modern age.

The Modern Prince, he argued, can no longer be an individual. It must be the political party, which formulates a national-popular collective will and works to secure mass consent for transformation. The party becomes the organising force that gathers organic intellectuals, develops a coherent worldview, and embeds itself in the everyday life of the people it hopes to lead.

This reflects what Gramsci called the dual nature of politics, captured in the image of Machiavelli’s Centaur-half-beast and half-human-representing the two levels of force and consent, authority and hegemony. Effective political leadership must combine both, though Gramsci placed his greatest emphasis on building consent.

Why Gramsci still matters 🔗

Gramsci’s influence spread far beyond his own time and country. After the English translation of his selected writings appeared in the 1970s, his ideas went global, shaping fields as varied as political theory, sociology, cultural studies, and education.

His framework gives us sharp tools for understanding the present. When we analyse how media narratives shape public opinion, how populist movements build mass support, how social movements try to change cultural attitudes before changing laws, or how dominant ideologies present themselves as plain common sense, we are using a recognisably Gramscian lens. His concepts apply not only to class but to many systems of social dominance-the way certain caste, gender, or social hierarchies can become so normalised that they appear to be the natural order rather than structures that can be questioned and changed.

Perhaps Gramsci’s deepest contribution is his refusal to separate thinking from doing. He treated theory as a guide to practice and saw intellectual work as central to both maintaining power and transforming it. That is why a man imprisoned to silence his brain ended up producing one of the most enduring legacies in modern political thought.

What do you think? Can you identify the “organic intellectuals” of a movement you care about-the people who give it ideas and direction from within? And in your own daily life, which beliefs feel like simple common sense, but might actually be a form of hegemony you have absorbed without noticing?

References

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gramsci/
2. https://cup.columbia.edu/book/prison-notebooks/9780231060820/
3. https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2025/02/18/review-of-prison-notebooks-by-antonio-gramsci/
4. https://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/prison_notebooks/problems/intellectuals.htm
5. https://asitoughttobemagazine.com/2009/09/01/critical-theory/
6. https://www.academia.edu/33498123/The_Prince_and_the_Modern_Prince_pdf
7. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/molyneux/1978/party/ch06.htm