Bayliss—Marx had predicted that revolution, and the transition to socialism, would occur

first in the most advanced capitalist societies, But, in the event, it was the Bolsheviks of
comparatively backward Russia that had made the first ‘breakthrough’, while all the
subsequent efforts by putative revolutionaries in Western and Central Europe to emulate their
success had ended in failure. The history of the early twentieth century seemed to suggest,
therefore, that there was a flaw in classic Marxist analysis.
For Gramsci, hegemony reflects his conceptualization of power. He develops
Machiavelli’s view of power as a centaur, half beast, half man: a mixture of coercion
and consent. In understanding how the prevailing order was maintained, Marxists had
concentrated almost exclusively on the coercive practices and capabilities of the state. On
this understanding, it was simply coercion, or the fear of coercion, that kept the exploited and
alienated majority in society from rising up and overthrowing the system that was the cause
of their suffering. Gramsci recognized that while this characterization may have held true in
less developed societies, such as pre-revolutionary Russia, it was not the case in the more
developed countries of the West. Here the system was also maintained through consent.
Consent, on Gramsci’s reading, is created and re-created by the hegemony of the ruling
class in society. It is this hegemony that allows the moral, political, and cultural values
of the dominant group to become widely dispersed throughout society and to be
accepted by subordinate groups and classes as their own. This takes place through the
institutions of civil society: the network of institutions and practices that enjoy some
autonomy from the state, and through which groups and individuals organize, represent, and
express themselves to each other and to the state.
Heywood ideology – Gramsci argued that the capitalist class system is upheld not simply by
unequal economic and political power, but by the ‘hegemony’ of bourgeois ideas and
theories. Hegemony means leadership or domination, and in terms of ideology, hegemony
refers to the capacity of bourgeois ideas to displace rival views and become, in effect, the
commonsense of the age. hegemony operates through a mixture of coercion and consent,
highlighting the interplay between economic, political, military and ideological forces, as
well as interaction between states and international organizations. He highlighted the degree
to which ideology is embedded at every level in society, in its art and literature, in its
education system and mass media, in everyday language and popular culture. This bourgeois
hegemony, Gramsci insisted, could only be challenged at the political and intellectual level
through the establishment of a rival ‘proletarian hegemony’, based on socialist principles,
values and theories.
Gramsci tried to redress the emphasis within orthodox Marxism upon economic or material
factors. He rejected any form of ‘scientific’ determinism by stressing, through the theory of
hegemony, the importance of the political and intellectual struggle. Gramsci remained
throughout his life a Leninist and a revolutionary. His stress on revolutionary commitment
and ‘optimism of the will’ also endeared him to the new left.
Vincent-- Power is not just crude legal or physical coercion but domination of language,
morality, culture and common sense. The masses are quelled and co-opted by their
internalization of ideational domination. The hegemonic ideas become, the actual
experiences of the subordinate classes. Traditional intellectuals construct this complex
hegemonic apparatus. Bourgeois hegemony moulds the personal convictions, norms and
aspirations of the proletariat. Gramsci thus called for a struggle at the level of ideology.
Organic intellectuals situated within the proletariat should combat this by constructing a
counter-hegemony to traditional intellectuals upholding bourgeois hegemony applicable to
political doctrine.
Maclellan-- This tendency both to pay more attention to ideology and to treat it as more a
matter of theoretical discussion than practical political activity is characteristic of Western
Marxism as a whole. He rejected the negative concept of ideology was too reductionist. –
organic ideologies 'organise human masses, and create the terrain on which men move,
acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, etc. Gramsci's paradigm for this broad
sense of ideology was religion which he saw, like ideology, as producing 'a unity of faith
between a conception of the world and a corresponding norm of conduct'. he also laid
stress on the role of intellectuals in almost creating ideology. Here Gramsci drew a
distinction between 'traditional' and 'organic' intellectuals. Traditional intellectuals were
intellectuals who, mistakenly, considered themselves to be autonomous of social classes and
who appeared to embody an historical continutity above and beyond socio-political change.
Examples would be writers, artists, philosophers and, especially, ecclesiastics. They were
those intellectuals who survived the demise of the mode of production that gave them birth.
The fact that they were linked to historically moribund classes, and yet pretended to a certain
independence, involved the production of an ideology, usually of an idealist bent, to mask
their real obsolescence. While the notion of a traditional intellectual was primarily an
historical one, that of an organic intellectual was much more sociological. represented.
Organic intellectuals articulated the collective consciousness or ideology of their class in
the political, social and economic sphere. This conception of ideological hegemony was
Gramsci'S answer to the puzzle of how capitalism had been able to survive in the
bourgeois democracies of the West.
Oxford handbook-- From being an infrequent and underdeveloped topic of discussion in
Marx’s own work, ideology moved centre stage in the subsequent Marxist tradition. For
example, it formed one of the characteristic preoccupations of the intellectual current now
known as Western Marxism. wider intellectual reaction to the background of socialist defeat
that characterizes much of our chosen historical period (Anderson 1976). The Prison
Notebooks can be seen as an intellectual response to the historical background of
socialist defeat. That historical background includes both the failure of socialist
revolution to spread beyond Tsarist Russia, and the subsequent deformation of
socialism inside the Soviet Union. Gramsci saw a need to reassess the various sources of
the unexpected resilience of established capitalist societies in the face of socialist challenges.
It is in this context that he develops his concept of the ‘integral state’ as combining
political society’ and ‘civil society. The political state, in this expanded sense, includes the
various practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class justifies and maintains
its ascendency. Gramsci emphasizes that this ascendency involves ‘consent as well as
‘coercion’ (or ‘dominance’), and locates civil society as the predominant location of the
former and the political state as the predominant location of the latter. His much-heralded
use of the concept of ‘hegemony’ denotes, roughly speaking, the intellectual and moral
leadership exercised predominantly, but not solely, in civil society. It includes the various
ways in which leading social groups integrate subaltern classes into their political
projects, generating and reinforcing a kind of consensus around the basic structure of
the existing society. Gramsci’s reassessment of the importance of ‘consent in explaining the
resilience of capitalist society includes reflections on both the strategic consequences for
socialism, and the importance of ‘intellectuals’. What had made the seizure of power in the
‘East’ easier was that these consensual aspects of the integral state were relatively
underdeveloped (civil society was ‘primordial and gelatinous’) by comparison with the
‘West’ (where civil society consisted of a ‘succession of sturdy fortresses and
emplacements’ standing behind the state). Gramsci defines ‘intellectuals’ expansively to
include all those whose social function is to organize, administer, educate, or lead others.
Intellectuals are the intermediaries who generate the habits and attitudes which either
help sustain an existing social and political order, or foreshadow the emergence of a new
one. uses the term‘ideology in 2 ways-- Ideology, so understood, would seem to function
as the (institutional and ideational) ‘terrain’ on which individuals ‘become conscious of
their social position, and therefore of their tasks. A second ‘narrow’ use of ‘ideology’
refers to certain ‘conceptions of the world’ which are manifested in individual and
collective life, the conceptions that are ‘implicit’ in an individual’s ‘activity’ (which
might, for example, challenge the existing social order), and the conceptions that are
apparent in their ‘theoretical consciousness