Marx explained why the working class must revolt. Gramsci, writing in a fascist prison after it had not, explained why: because rule in a developed society is secured by consent, and consent has to be defeated before power can be.
This is chapter 13 of the PSIR Optional Notes, from the part on Western Political Thought in the Paper I syllabus. The complete book is a free download.
UPSC syllabus
Western Political Thought: Marx, Gramsci.
In one page
- Historical materialism is the method: the mode of production conditions social, political and intellectual life, and social being determines consciousness rather than the reverse.
- The dialectic is taken from Hegel and inverted. Hegel found it in the movement of spirit; Marx locates it in the material contradiction between forces and relations of production.
- Alienation, from the 1844 Manuscripts, has four dimensions: from the product, from the act of labour, from species-being, and from other people. This is the humanist register.
- Surplus value is the mature economic argument: labour power is bought at its value, creates more value than it costs, and the difference is appropriated.
- Class struggle is the motor of history; the state is the instrument of the dominant class; revolution gives way to the dictatorship of the proletariat and eventually to a classless, stateless society.
- Gramsci adds hegemony: in the West the ruling class governs through moral and intellectual leadership exercised in civil society, so that its worldview becomes common sense.
- Therefore the strategy changes. The war of manoeuvre, the frontal seizure of the state, suits societies where the state is everything; the war of position, a long contest for cultural leadership, suits those with dense civil societies.
- Organic intellectuals, the historic bloc and passive revolution are the derived concepts, and the last has been used extensively to describe the Indian trajectory.
Marx
Thinker
Karl Marx (1818–1883)
Key works. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844), The German Ideology (1845–46), The Communist Manifesto (1848), A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Capital, Volume I (1867)
Core claim. Human history is the history of class struggles, driven by the contradiction between developing forces of production and the property relations that fetter them. Under capitalism, labour is alienated and surplus value appropriated; the proletariat, produced by capitalism itself, becomes the agent of its supersession.
Standard critique. The predicted polarisation and immiseration did not occur in the advanced economies, which is Bernstein’s revisionist point; the theory underdetermines the superstructure, which is why Engels had to qualify it; and Popper argues the framework absorbs every disconfirmation.
Exam hook. Marx appears in three syllabus places: as Western political thought here, as ideology in Chapter 8, and as a theory of the state in Chapter 2. Keep the registers distinct.
The inversion of Hegel
Hegel’s dialectic is a movement of contradiction and resolution in the development of Spirit toward self-consciousness, with history as its unfolding and the state as its highest ethical realisation. Marx retains the structure and rejects the content. With Hegel, he wrote, the dialectic is standing on its head; it must be turned right side up again to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.
Dialectical materialism thus locates contradiction in material conditions rather than in ideas, and treats ideas as arising from those conditions. From Feuerbach he takes the critique of religion as human self-alienation projected onto a deity, and generalises it: religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the opium of the people. But Feuerbach’s materialism remains contemplative, and the eleventh of the Theses on Feuerbach (1845) states the correction that defines Marxism as praxis.
Alienation
The young Marx’s category, recovered when the 1844 Manuscripts were published in 1932, and the reason a humanist Marxism was possible in the twentieth century. Under conditions where the worker sells labour power:
- From the product. What the worker makes belongs to another and confronts them as an alien power; the more they produce, the poorer their inner world becomes.
- From the act of production. Labour is not the satisfaction of a need but a means to satisfy needs external to it; the worker feels at home only when not working.
- From species-being. Free, conscious, creative activity is what distinguishes human from animal life; when that activity becomes a mere means to existence, the human essence is inverted.
- From other human beings. Each confronts others as competitors, and the relation between people takes the form of a relation between things, which the mature work calls commodity fetishism.
Historical materialism and the mature system
The 1859 Preface is the canonical statement and should be paraphrased accurately: in the social production of their existence people enter into definite relations independent of their will, namely relations of production corresponding to a given stage of the material forces of production; the totality of these constitutes the economic structure, the real foundation on which rises a legal and political superstructure; and it is not the consciousness of people that determines their being but their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage the material forces come into conflict with the existing relations, which turn into fetters, and an epoch of social revolution begins.
The economics: the value of a commodity is determined by the socially necessary labour time required to produce it. Under capitalism the worker sells not labour but labour power, whose value is what it costs to reproduce it. The working day exceeds the time needed to reproduce that value, and the excess is surplus value, the source of profit. Competition drives capitalists to raise the organic composition of capital, which Marx argues produces a tendency of the rate of profit to fall, recurrent crises of overproduction, concentration and centralisation of capital, and a growing reserve army of labour.
The politics: the state as the executive committee of the bourgeoisie, treated in Chapter 2; revolution; the dictatorship of the proletariat as a transitional form; and, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), the two phases of communist society, the first distributing according to labour contributed and the higher according to the principle from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Gramsci
Thinker
Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937)
Key works. Prison Notebooks (written 1929–35)
Core claim. Domination in developed societies is secured less by coercion than by hegemony: the moral and intellectual leadership by which a class makes its own worldview appear as common sense. The state is properly political society plus civil society, force armoured by consent, so revolutionary strategy must be a long war of position for cultural leadership rather than a frontal assault.
Standard critique. Hegemony is elastic enough to explain any outcome, which weakens it as an explanation; and it may understate the extent to which subordinate groups comply outwardly while dissenting, the point James Scott developed as the hidden transcript.
Exam hook. The most examined neo-Marxist. UPSC has asked hegemony directly, and it is the historical version of Lukes’s third dimension of power from Chapter 7.
Why hegemony was needed
Gramsci’s problem is empirical: the objective conditions Marx specified were present in Western Europe after 1917, yet revolution succeeded only in Russia, the least developed case. His explanation is that state and society stand in different relations in the two settings. In Russia the state was everything and civil society primordial and gelatinous; in the West there was a proper relation between state and civil society, and when the state trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The bourgeoisie in the West rules not only through the apparatus of coercion but through a whole network of schools, churches, newspapers, associations and cultural forms that manufacture consent.
Hegemony is therefore not propaganda and not false consciousness in the crude sense. It is leadership: the dominant group presents its particular interests as the general interest convincingly enough that subordinate groups adopt them as their own common sense, and it makes real concessions in order to do so.
The derived concepts
- War of manoeuvre and war of position. The first is the direct assault on the state, appropriate where civil society is weak. The second is the protracted struggle within institutions of civil society to build an alternative common sense before power is taken.
- Organic intellectuals. Every class creates intellectuals who give it homogeneity and awareness of its function; the working class must produce its own, rather than borrowing traditional intellectuals who imagine themselves independent of class. Gramsci adds that all men are intellectuals, though not all have that social function.
- Historic bloc. A durable fusion of base and superstructure, of economic, political and ideological forces, in which a class exercises hegemony through alliance rather than by itself.
- Passive revolution. Change directed from above that modernises social relations while preventing the subordinate classes from acting as an independent force; his cases are the Italian Risorgimento and fascism. Indian scholars, from Kaviraj to Chatterjee, have used it to characterise both the later national movement and post-1947 state-led development.
- Common sense and good sense. Common sense is the incoherent, sedimented worldview of ordinary life, containing elements of good sense that a counter-hegemonic project must work with rather than sweep away.
| Marx | Gramsci | |
|---|---|---|
| The state | Instrument of the dominant class; coercive | Political society plus civil society; force armoured by consent |
| Ruling class rules by | Control of the means of production and the state | Hegemony: moral and intellectual leadership |
| Superstructure | Determined by the base, in the last instance | Relatively autonomous; the terrain on which rule is actually won |
| Ideology | Distorted consciousness serving class interest | A material force, organised through institutions, containing good sense |
| Strategy | Revolution when contradictions mature | War of position first; power follows cultural leadership |
| Intellectuals | Not a distinct problem | Organic to a class; central to any counter-hegemony |
Debate: Did Gramsci rescue Marxism or dissolve it?
Rescued. He solved the problem that would otherwise have falsified the theory: why advanced capitalism produced no revolution. By showing that the superstructure is where rule is actually secured, he explained the delay without abandoning class analysis, and he supplied a strategy for societies where the frontal assault was suicidal. Every later account of ideology, from Althusser to cultural studies, depends on him. Dissolved. Once consent, culture and ideas do the explanatory work, the economic base is no longer determining in any meaningful sense, and what remains is a general theory of power that happens to use Marxist vocabulary. If hegemony explains both quiescence and revolt, it explains neither, and the class subject quietly disappears into an alliance held together by discourse. The examiner’s line. Both, and the tension is productive rather than fatal. Gramsci preserved the class analysis but made the superstructure autonomous enough that later writers could keep the autonomy and drop the class, which is exactly what post-Marxist theory did with him. Judge him by the work the concept does: hegemony explains caste and communal consent in India better than any purely economic account, which is why Indian scholarship adopted him so early and so thoroughly.
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it
Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, 1845
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people
Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1844
The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear
Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 1929–35
Where answers lose marks
- Writing Marx as an economist only. The 1844 Manuscripts, alienation and species-being are examined as often as surplus value, and they are what connect him to Roy and the Frankfurt School.
- Stating base and superstructure as mechanical determination. Engels’s 1890 letter to Bloch concedes determination only in the last instance, and that the superstructure reacts back.
- Confusing dialectical materialism with historical materialism. The first is the method, the second its application to history.
- Treating hegemony as propaganda or brainwashing. It works through institutions of civil society and involves real concessions; it feels like common sense, which is why it is effective.
- Giving war of position and war of manoeuvre as tactics without the reason for the distinction: the different relation of state to civil society in Russia and the West.
- Using passive revolution loosely. It has a definite meaning, modernisation from above that forestalls independent action from below.
Asked before
- Marxism is a political theory of action demanding strict compliance with its core principles. Comment. (2024, Paper I, 15 marks)
- Linkage between Power and Hegemony. (2024, Paper I, 10 marks)
Answer skeleton
Linkage between Power and Hegemony. (10 marks, 150 words)
Frame. Hegemony is not a synonym for power; it names a mode of it, in which compliance is secured through leadership rather than command.
The problem it answers. Marx’s conditions for revolution were present in the West after 1917 and produced none. Gramsci’s explanation: in the West a sturdy civil society stands behind the state.
The concept. The state is political society plus civil society, force armoured by consent. The dominant class makes its particular worldview into common sense through schools, church, press and culture, and makes real concessions to do so.
Link to the theory of power. This is Lukes’s third dimension given a historical and institutional account: power that shapes what people want, so that grievance does not arise. Name the connection explicitly.
Strategic consequence. War of position before war of manoeuvre; organic intellectuals; the historic bloc.
Application. Say where it explains something a purely coercive account cannot. Caste legitimated through religious sanction, which is why Ambedkar attacked the sanction before the politics.
Close with the limit. If hegemony explains both compliance and revolt it risks explaining neither; Scott’s hidden transcripts suggest outward conformity is often not consent at all.
Last-mile revision
- Marx inverts Hegel’s dialectic: rational kernel, mystical shell. Feuerbach on religion as self-alienation; eleventh thesis, 1845.
- Alienation, four dimensions: product, act of labour, species-being, other people. Commodity fetishism in the mature work.
- 1859 Preface: forces and relations of production, base and superstructure, social being determines consciousness, relations become fetters, epoch of social revolution.
- Labour power against labour; surplus value; falling rate of profit; concentration and centralisation; reserve army.
- Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875): dictatorship of the proletariat; two phases, to each according to labour, then according to needs.
- Gramsci’s problem: revolution in backward Russia, not in the developed West. Answer: state is everything in Russia, civil society sturdy in the West.
- Hegemony as moral and intellectual leadership; state as political society plus civil society; force armoured by consent.
- War of position and manoeuvre; organic against traditional intellectuals; historic bloc; passive revolution; common sense and good sense.
Read the rest. This chapter is one of 58 in the complete PSIR Optional Notes, covering Paper I and Paper II in full — free to download.
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