[FE] 1.3 Gramsci and the Struggle for Cultural Hegemony
The Long War: How Culture Became the Battlefield
This is the condensed, free edition of Chapter 1.3 from the book project The Return of the Duopoly by The Duopolist, which traces how Oppressionism is transforming liberal democracy and driving today’s “woke” politics and culture wars. The complete version is available here. Free readers see the core argument, while paid subscribers unlock the full text with references, notes, and extended analysis. For an overview of all chapters, see the table of contents at TheDuopolist.com, and for a more in-depth look at how Oppressionism is reshaping liberal democracy, visit Oppressionism.com.
Gramsci’s Cultural Turn
If Carl Schmitt revealed that politics was defined by the distinction between friend and enemy, Antonio Gramsci offered a different lens. He showed that power is sustained not only by confrontation but also by shaping what people accept as normal and inevitable. Politics, in his view, is fought as much in classrooms, newspapers, and churches as it is in parliaments or on battlefields.
Gramsci called this process hegemony. A ruling class or dominant ideology secures authority not through constant force, but by embedding its values into culture. Hegemony works through norms, education, language, art, and everyday assumptions. It does not present itself as one perspective among many. It appears as reality itself. Think of the way the nuclear family in the mid-twentieth century was widely treated as the natural order rather than a social convention.
Yet hegemony is never absolute. It is always contested, challenged by counter-hegemonic forces that propose a different vision of common sense. Socialist and communist movements in industrial Europe, for instance, offered a cultural and moral challenge to the liberal order. For Gramsci, the survival of any ruling order depended on whether it could maintain not only its institutions of coercion but also its claim to leadership in culture and ideas.
Gramsci came to this conclusion in the aftermath of failure. After the First World War, many expected revolution to sweep across Europe. Instead, liberal democracies endured, and in Italy fascism rose to power. As a leader in the Italian Communist Party, Gramsci was arrested by Mussolini’s regime in 1926 and imprisoned for over a decade. It was from prison, facing defeat, that he began to rethink how power truly operates in the modern world.
The Architects of Hegemony
Hegemony does not arise on its own. It is constructed and maintained by a social group Gramsci called intellectuals. He gave this term a broader meaning than we usually attach to it. For him, all people possess a worldview, but only some take on the role of shaping, organizing, and articulating that worldview for others.
Gramsci distinguished between two kinds of intellectuals. Traditional intellectuals see themselves as independent and detached from class, floating above the conflicts of society. Priests, academics, and artists often fall into this category. Yet by upholding prevailing cultural standards, they end up legitimizing the order they claim to stand outside of.
Organic intellectuals, by contrast, arise directly from a fundamental social class. They act as its organizers and thinkers. The business leader who promotes free-market ideology, the union organizer who gives voice to workers, and the rural elite who defend landed property all serve this function. They provide their class with coherence, a language, and a vision.
For a rising class to succeed, it must cultivate its own organic intellectuals. These figures build the alternative worldview that can challenge the dominant order. Gramsci pointed to the thinkers of the Enlightenment as organic intellectuals of the emerging bourgeoisie, dismantling the common sense of aristocracy and establishing a new moral and cultural foundation for society.
The Battlefield Expanded: Civil Society and the “Integral State”
Gramsci expanded the way we think about the modern state. In the West, he argued, the state cannot be understood only as government, courts, police, and armies. These are important, but they represent only the sphere of political society. Alongside them lies civil society, made up of schools, churches, trade unions, the press, and political parties. These institutions do not rule by force. They cultivate consent by teaching and reinforcing the values of the dominant order until they seem like common sense.
Civil society, in Gramsci’s view, is not a counterweight to the state. It is its outer fortification. In stable times, power is maintained more by the slow, persuasive work of civil society than by the coercion of political society. Only when consensus breaks down, in times of deep crisis, does the coercive arm step forward more aggressively.
This recognition led Gramsci to a striking conclusion. A direct assault on the state, what he called a war of maneuver, was doomed to fail in the West. Revolutions that seize ministries or parliaments but leave the cultural fortresses of civil society intact cannot endure.
What is required instead is a war of position, a long struggle to construct an alternative hegemony within civil society itself. Victory in modern conditions depends on gaining influence in schools, the press, the church, and the associations of daily life. Only by shifting the terms of public discourse and forging a new moral and intellectual consensus can political power truly be secured.
The Strategy: War of Position vs. War of Maneuver
The war of maneuver is the classic image of revolution: insurrections, barricades, storming palaces. It depends on speed and decisive force, overwhelming the state before it can recover. This strategy has plausibility where civil society is weak and the ruling order relies mainly on police and army. Russia in 1917 remains the best-known example, where a collapsing autocracy was swept away in a sudden strike.
In Western Europe, however, the state was not exposed in this way. It was shielded by the trenches of civil society. Even when protesters seized government buildings or forced leaders to resign, the deeper loyalties nurtured in schools, pulpits, unions, and the press quickly restored order. The failed uprisings in Italy and Germany after the First World War confirmed the limits of maneuver.
The war of position, by contrast, is slower and more cumulative. It does not aim to storm the fortress but to tunnel into the trenches. Its task is to reshape common sense, gradually turning fragments of dissent into a coherent worldview. This requires building and sustaining institutions: newspapers, schools, unions, cultural organisations. It also requires training intellectuals who can spread new vocabularies and create solidarities that last beyond moments of protest.
For Gramsci, no strategy was universally valid. The structure of society imposed the form of struggle. In Russia, with its thin civil society, maneuver could succeed. In the advanced states of the West, thick with institutions that organized consent, only position offered the possibility of transformation. This insight redefined what revolution meant. To win by maneuver was to overthrow. To win by position was to persuade.
The Tactics: Transforming “Common Sense” into “Good Sense”
The war of position is won not in a single battle but through a slow, almost invisible process of changing minds. Its central task is to transform society’s common sense. For Gramsci, common sense was not a positive term. It described the patchwork of folk wisdom, prejudices, and assumptions that people inherit. It helps them navigate daily life, but it also stabilizes the status quo.
The challenge for counter-hegemonic movements is to draw out the more progressive elements within common sense and develop them into a coherent, critical philosophy. Gramsci called this good sense. Achieving it requires patient educational work: creating new vocabularies, reframing debates, and giving people tools to interpret the world differently. This is not abstract theory. It unfolds in classrooms, newspapers, sermons, union meetings, and everyday conversations.
Gramsci stressed that language was never neutral. Words such as justice, family, or freedom already carry ideological weight. What matters is not just events themselves, but how those events are framed. To change society requires changing the vocabulary through which people interpret their lives.
By lifting popular consciousness from passive acceptance to critical awareness, movements can forge a new collective will. Political change then becomes possible. And when common sense no longer convinces, the very foundations of hegemony begin to crack. This is the moment when stability gives way to vulnerability, which is where Gramsci’s analysis next takes us.
This is the condensed, free edition of Chapter 1.3 from the book project The Return of the Duopoly by The Duopolist, which traces how Oppressionism is transforming liberal democracy and driving today’s “woke” politics and culture wars. The complete version is available here. Free readers see the core argument, while paid subscribers unlock the full text with references, notes, and extended analysis. For an overview of all chapters, see the table of contents at TheDuopolist.com, and for a more in-depth look at how Oppressionism is reshaping liberal democracy, visit Oppressionism.com.