The Indian Bolshevik

  In Marxist theory, society consists of two parts: the base/ substructure and the superstructure. Marx defines the base as the social relations between men which create and produce materials that are eventually put up for the exchange. From the base comes a superstructure in which laws, politics, religion and literature legitimize the power of the social classes that are formed in the base.  Antonio Gramsci divided Marx's superstructure into two elements: political society and civil society. Political society consists of the organized force of society (ex: police and military) while civil society refers to the consensus-creating elements (ex: trade unions, political parties, schools and universities, religious institutions, media, NGOs and all other bodies indirectly associated with the State) that contribute to cultural hegemony. Both constituents of this superstructure are still informed by the values of the base, serving to establish and enforce these values in society....

Antonio Gramsci  (1891 – 1937) was a leading Italian Marxist. He was an intellectual, a journalist and a major theorist who spent his last eleven years in Mussolini’s prisons. During this time, he completed 32 notebooks containing almost 3,000 pages. These notebooks were smuggled out from his prison and published in Italian after the war but did not find an English-language publisher until the 1970s. The central and guiding theme of the Notebooks was the development of a new Marxist theory applicable to the conditions of advanced capitalism. His  Prison Notebooks  are considered a highly original contribution to 20th-century political theory. “Hegemony” was most likely derived from the Greek  egemonia , whose root is  egemon , meaning “leader, ruler, often in the sense of a state other than his own”. Since the 19th century, “hegemony” commonly has been used to indicate “political predominance, usually of one state over another”. Gramsci’s “hegemony” refers to a ...