Vivek's notes on Gramsci
Created Tuesday 03 March 2026
Gramsci is widely understood to be one of the most brilliant Marxists of his era. I agree with that. The Prison Notebooks are an incredible source of insight and new ideas into the capitalism of Gramsci’s time and of our own.
I also think that he’s been quite commonly misunderstood. The most common understanding of Gramsci today is that he was a prefigurative proponent of the cultural turn. The Prison Notebooks as we know them, at least in the English language, are centrally concerned with the idea of how modes of production stabilize themselves, and where the source of stability is in any given mode of production.
Supposedly, Gramsci’s answer is that stability exists in the superstructure, in civil society, etc. This appears to anticipate the arguments that the New Left proposed in the postwar era. It’s no surprise that Gramsci became the most widely touted classical Marxist within the New Left, given his supposed attention to superstructure.
The minority view, which I also uphold, was available in the ’80s and ’90s but never gained the traction that the culturalist interpretation of Gramsci had. This view is that Gramsci was in fact as much a materialist as Lenin, Marx, or Luxemburg. So the New Left was correct in proposing that Gramsci had a theory of how capitalism stabilizes itself — the theory of hegemony. This theory is that workers are absorbed into the system through the engineering of consent to the system.
But the New Left interpreted Gramsci to be arguing that consent comes through intellectuals and cultural institutions. In fact, if you read the Prison Notebooks, it’s pretty clear that Gramsci didn’t believe that. In his theory, just like the theory of every other classical Marxist of his generation and earlier, the source of consent is based on how the ruling class manages the material interests of the subordinate classes — not through ideological indoctrination.
The way that the ruling class manages these economic interests is by presiding over the development of the productive forces, resulting in an ever-increasing level of economic welfare for workers. The workers consent to the system because they see themselves benefiting from it.
This goes against the culturalist interpretation of Gramsci, but in my view, it’s hard to read the Prison Notebooks and not come away with this more materialist interpretation. The interesting question is how the culturalist interpretation became so widespread.
The cultural turn fueled a hubris on the part of intellectuals: if workers don’t behave and act in the way intellectuals predicted they should, it’s because they don’t understand their own circumstances.
But while I defend the materialist reading of Gramsci, I also believe that that theory, the materialist one, cannot suffice as an explanation for capitalism’s durability. Gramsci’s error, or at least the error of the way in which he approaches the question of hegemony, is that he collapses the question of capitalist stability into the question of hegemony.
There is an apparent assumption in the Prison Notebooks that once you’ve answered where consent comes from, you’ve also answered the New Left’s question: Why is capitalism stable? This is only possible if you think that stability is brought about exclusively by working-class consent. After forty years of neoliberalism, we have to doubt this argument.
The reason is that it’s hard to make the case that in the neoliberal era, from Margaret Thatcher to Ronald Reagan, the model of economics was popular with the population. It seemed that way in the early ’80s; it seemed like Thatcher and Reagan rose to power through a powerful electoral wave. But by the ’90s, it was becoming clear that the sense of cynicism, unhappiness, and basic alienation felt by much of the population was growing, not abating.
Suppose this is true. If it’s true, it means that even as capitalism was stable across almost five decades, consent was actually weakening, not strengthening. What would explain, then, the system’s stability, if consent is actually waning? The argument I’ve proposed is that workers accept the system not because they find it legitimate or desirable but because they see no other choice. In other words, they resign themselves to it.
This takes us back to what Marx called “the dull compulsion of economic relations.” It’s true that, at certain periods, the incidence of consent within the working class grows. This happens during periods of high growth, periods of increasing welfare, especially when you have an organized working class that can engineer a bargain for itself with its employers.
By now, we know two things. In the history of capitalism, this is more an episode than the norm in the West. In global capitalism, much of the working class has never been organized to the point where it can negotiate an exchange for itself of this kind. How, then, can capitalism remain stable? It remains stable because the “dull compulsion of economic relations” keeps bringing workers back to their jobs every day, whether or not they’re happy, whether or not they’re satisfied.
Stability, therefore, is aided and made easier through consent, but does not rely on it. It relies on material facts of the working class’s own situation, the difficulties of organizing themselves, and the fact that, at the end of the day, they need the job — even though they hate the job. Consent becomes a secondary mechanism to resignation when you answer the question that the New Left posed.