6 Gramscian intervention, hegemony and domination

Varun Patil

Gramscian intervention, hegemony and domination

Chantal Mouffe rightly notes that, if the history of Marxist theory during the 1960s can be characterised by the reign of ‘althusserianism’, then we have now, without a doubt entered a new phase: that of ‘gramscism (1979: 1). Gramsci’s thought represents a major innovation in Marxism, as ittries to move it from an excessive focus on questions of political economy to questions of culture in the analysis of power. In this module we will examine Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, put forward by the Italian scholar to understand the working of ruling class domination in western democratic societies. We also look at his other famous concepts like civil society, common sense, role of intellectuals to understand how hegemony is exercised. We will also examine the possibilities of resistance against the ruling class within a Gramcian framework of power. Finally we will end the module by looking into the criticisms of Gramsci’s work and his tremendous impact on social science studies.

Multiple interpretations of Gramsci

Before we begin to sketch Gramsci’s contribution to Marxist theory and on thinking about power, it has to be acknowledged that there are multiple and contradictory interpretations of his work, linked to the political line of those who claimed or disclaimed him. As Chantal Mouffe points out, ‘we have had the libertarian Gramsci, the stalinist Gramsci, the social democratic Gramsci, the trotskyist Gramsci and so on’ (1979: 1).

Some Gramcian scholars like Richard Bellamy, argue that Gramsci’s work has been misinterpreted as a general theory of ideological power in western democracies and argues for historicizing Gramsci (1994). For Bellamy, Gramsci was reinvented by the Euro-communist movement of the 1970s as a Marxist democrat whose work offered a ‘third way’, falling between social democracy on the one hand and totalitarian communism on the other. For Bellamy however Gramsci’s theories evolved as a way of understanding Italy’s relative backwardness, and of formulating revolutionary strategies specific to the country’s exceptionality. He maintains that only by returning Gramsci to post-Risorgimento Italy can we discover his true value as an analyst of peripheral capitalist states.

The problem of multiple interpretations of Gramsci is partly due to the production of Gramsci’s main work, The Prison Notebooks, from where much of his concepts are derived. Antonio Gramsci’s work may never have been published as he was jailed by the Mussolini regime. However his well-wishers eventually smuggled Gramsci’s writings (the form of 33 notebooks, a total of nearly 3,000 pages of tiny, meticulous handwriting) and attempted to publish them. The Prison Notebooks as many scholars like Perry Anderson point outare a fragmentary, incomplete record of Gramsci’s mental efforts over a decade, written under the watchful eye of the prison censor, and reassembled years later by editors and translators. He describes it as ‘a work censored twice over: its spaces, ellipses, contradictions, disorders, allusions, repetitions, are the result of its uniquely adverse and thus warns against ‘facile and complacent readings’ based on partial editions of his work (Anderson 1976: 6) Given such problems rather than search for an authentic interpretation of Gramsci this module aims to give a general sketch of his ideas on which there is some sort of an acceptable consensus. Before we introduce the concept of hegemony it is important to understand the socio-historical conditions during Gramsci and the prevailing Marxist theorising which he sought to innovate.

Socio-historic context of Gramsci

It is a well-known assertion that our ideas are a product of our age. Sociology was born to make sense of the tumultuous changes of the French and industrial revolution. Similarly to understand Gramsci we have to see the development of his thought within the context of wider political developments in Italy and Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Gramsci’s thoughts on politics and culture were formed during a period of defeat: the crushing of workers’ revolts in Europe, and the failure of the Italian working-class movement in its struggles with factory owners, with the Italian state and with Mussolini’s Fascists. Between 1918 and 1920, short-lived socialist revolutions in Germany, Austria and Hungary were suppressed with exceptional brutality. Only the Russian Revolution succeeded in forming a workers’ state, and that in a country which had not reached the level of industrial development predicted by Marx as a prerequisite of socialist revolution. Elsewhere in the industrialized world, capitalist economies and parliamentary democracies retrenched themselves, at least until the rise of fascism. It was the manifest durability of capitalism that directed the attention of many scholars to study ideology and “super-structure.”

Gramsci’s diagnosis of this defeat focused on the inability of the working class to form alliances with other subordinate groups, particularly the peasantry and the intellectuals. It was also clear to Gramsci that the revolutionary strategy adopted in Russia would not work in more mature democracies. In Russia, the political superstructure was very poorly developed, ‘primordial and gelatinous’ as he puts it, and consequently there was little in the way of intermediaries between the Tsarist regime and its revolutionary opponents. The Bolsheviks did not have to win over these intermediaries and could therefore concentrate their efforts in taking control of the state. To this all-out frontal attack, Gramsci gives the name ‘war of manoeuvre’. He argues that such sudden transformations and lightning victories are rare. Most revolutions Gramsci says have to proceed via a war of position fought out over a long period in the superstructure, in which meanings and values become the object of struggle. This is because in undeveloped societies there was an absence of intermediaries but modern capitalist regimes have developed a tightly woven network of practices and institutions which guard against internal disintegration and make revolution a political and psychological impossibility. Gramsci notes that in Western Europe there were trade unions, social-democratic parties and a well-paid ‘labour aristocracy’. The presence of these ‘political super-structures’ provided a brake on direct action and required the Italian revolutionary party to adopt a more long-term strategy than had been necessary for the Bolsheviks (Gramsci 1971: lxvi).

Apart from the Failure of socialism in Europe and its success in Russia, Gramsci also looked deeply into the history of his own nation to see how the ruling class secured its power in modern democratic regimes. As he famously argued, ‘the starting-point of critical elaboration is knowing thyself as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces’ (Gramsci, 1971: 324). Gramsci attempted to evaluate those strategies by which different groups attempted to form hegemonic blocs in Italy’s past. He held that self-rule in Italy came piecemeal, through three wars of unification known collectively as the Risorgimento (‘the Resurgence’). However, once Italy had established a parliamentary democracy, the policies of the ‘right-wing’ Moderates and ‘left-wing’ Action Party were largely identical, with both parties committed to a programme of industrial modernization, political reform and imperial expansion. Gramsci saw the Risorgimento and its aftermath as a key example of how a governing power absorbs its political antagonists and institutes reform, without expanding its programme to involve full democratic participation. Over time, Italy became governed by a variety of Left–Right coalitions in a period known as the Trasformismo, after the policy of ‘transforming’ the party conflicts of the Risorgimento into a centrist consensus. While these adventures appeared to have a popular and national dimension to them, they were actually deeply inimical to the interests of the working class and agricultural labour. Based on his reading of Italian and European history Gramsci put forward his theory of hegemony to explain the workings of power in advanced capitalist countries.

A critique of economic determinism

Gramsci found the existing Marxist theories unable to grasp the functioning of power in modern democratic regimes and stressed the need to innovate. This is because of the economic determinism prevalent in Marxist theory; the idea that it is the base which determines the superstructure and that culture was largely an epiphenomenon reducible to economic base. In the German Ideology Marx argues that ‘Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life’ (1977: 164). He also observed that the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas and that the class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production (ibid.: 176). To truly change society, the base would have to be fundamentally changed and this for Marx, writing in the context of industrial society, entailed workers seizing control of the ‘means of production’ (above all, the factories). Gramsci questioned the notion that the economic base determines the operations of an ideological and cultural superstructure. He developed the notion of ‘the historical bloc’to explain that base and superstructure have a ‘dialectical’ or ‘reflexive’ relationship. Gramsci argues that culture, politics and the economy are organized in a relationship of mutual exchange with one another, a constantly circulating and shifting network of influence. To change society involves a protracted period of negotiation carried out in all the institutions of society and culture. However it must be stressed that Gramcian intervention is not an abandonment of questions of political economy and class struggle. It is not a substitution of a kind of ideological determinism for earlier material determinism. Within his thought, ideas are generally tied to the state of productive forces within a particular epoch, and are therefore ‘historically necessary’. Gramsci is a sufficiently orthodox Marxist to argue that crises within the economic structure generate new forms of organization and consciousness, though they do not determine their exact form. It is the logic of capitalist development for both Marx and Gramsci that it generates ‘political, religious, aesthetic or philosophical . . . forms in which men become conscious of conflict and fight it out’ (Marx 1977: 389–90). Gramsci’s intervention is not, finally, a form of relativism in which all struggles are equal. Nor can it depart from the idea of an ongoing struggle for change, by working men and women acting in concert against the organized, durable and global system of exploitation and oppression that is capitalism.

Domination and hegemony

After asserting the importance of superstructure Gramsci then goes on to elaborate on the organization of consent in modern capitalist democracies. Gramsci challenges a simplistic opposition between domination and subordination or resistance. Instead he recasts domination as hegemony: the process of transaction, negotiation and compromise that takes place between ruling and subaltern groups. Gramsci separates hegemony into various ‘regions’, ideological, economic, political and juridical. Earlier paradigms accepted the existence of ‘a dominant ideology, essentially and monolithically bourgeois in its characteristics, which, with varying degrees of success, is imposed from without, as an alien force, on the subordinate classes’. Gramsci recognized that social power is not a simple matter of domination and rather than imposing their will, ‘dominant’ groups within democratic societies generally govern with a good degree of consent from the people they rule, and the maintenance of that consent is dependent upon an incessant repositioning of the relationship between rulers and ruled. Only in anticipation of moments of crisis and command, when spontaneous consent has failed, is force openly resorted to.

Hegemony is a more sensitive and therefore useful critical term than ‘domination’, which fails to acknowledge the active role of subordinate people in the operation of power. We can see this in the work of Paul Willis, whose Learning to Labour examines the role of working-class culture, and particularly the ‘counter-school culture’ of secondary education in shaping working-class boys’ expectations about their future in the world of work. ‘The most difficult thing to explain about working-class kids’, he argues, ‘is why they allow themselves to get working class jobs’ (Willis 1977: 1). The answer to this question, for Willis, lies in the way they claim a dominated identity for themselves by recasting their subordinated status as something else, ‘as true learning, affirmation, appropriation and as a form of resistance’ (ibid.: 3). In a mirror image of the expansive moment of hegemony, the most disruptive group of boys seize their domination as an expression of their real interests.

Hegemony is also a process without an end. Hegemony is a reflexive process in which the values of the power bloc, subalterns and counter-hegemonic forces are in a constant state of negotiation, compromise and change. A social group, Gramsci writes, has to exercise leadership before it wins power, but even when it has won power ‘it must continue to “lead” as well’ (1971: 58). The struggle for hegemony takes place across the full range of social practices – within consumption, production, identity, regulation and representation. To be successful, a dominant power must reach into the culture of its subalterns, but within this contact zone its ambitions and strategies will be reflexively altered. Ideologies are thus themselves in process: in a state of constant formation and reformation. Gramsci thus rejects the notion that power is something that can be achieved once and for all. Instead he conceives of it as an ongoing process, operative even at those moments when a ruling class or group can no longer generate consent.

For Gramsci forming a hegemonic block is the key to exercising power. Thus Hegemony is a project that involves the formation of moral and intellectual consensus, under the leadership of a particular social group. Hegemony also involves compromises and that ‘the leading group should make sacrifices of an economic-corporate kind (Gramsci, 1971: 161). Far from dominating its junior partners, therefore, a successful hegemonic group has to thoroughly recreate itself. It is not a question of cynically speaking on behalf of other groups’ desires in order to capture their vote, or of selecting certain issues in order to appeal to a broader constituency; a truly hegemonic group or class really must make large parts of its subalterns’ worldview its own. In the course of this, the leading group will itself become changed, since its narrow factionalism (what Gramsci calls ‘corporatism’) has been translated into a much broader, even universal, appeal.

Achieving such an alliance means overcoming the mutual misunderstandings and hostilities that separate these different groups. Gramsci argues that it is necessary to surmount these deep divisions in order to form a genuinely popular national organization which can defeat fascism and achieve a transformation of society. Gramsci puts forward the concept of national-popular which involves elaborating subaltern and subordinate elements into a broader cultural and political project without dismissing their cultural distinctiveness. Looking at his own country of Italy Gramsci argues for a construction of a national-popular necessitated two linked operations. First was to answer the Southern Question by synthesizing the cultures of North and South which involved abandoning any assumptions about the superiority of Italian high culture, and the primitivism of the South. The second was to find currents within the culture of all the popular classes that had the potential to provide an alternative conception of the world. A cultural project, wrote Gramsci, could not be some avant-garde movement imposed upon people, instead it had to be rooted in the ‘humus of popular culture as it is, with its tastes and tendencies and with its moral and intellectual world, even if it is backward and conventional’ (ibid.: 102). Thus the working-class movement had to understand those issues that were culturally important to the peasants, and make them their own. Crucially, however, this alliance is not simply a federation of factions that carry equal weight. The industrial working class lead their allies (or, more precisely, their subalterns) through ideological means and provide the centre of any progressive movement. As Gramsci says the communist Party must become a ‘Modern Prince’ in uniting the popular currents within Italian national life.

Finally Gramsci says hegemony can be of two types depending on the extent to which the hegemonic block is successful. First is the case of Limited hegemony where the hegemonic class has failed to genuinely adopt the interests of the popular classes and simply neutralized or ‘decapitated’ them through depriving them of their leadership. The recourse to coercive and authoritarian means of enforcing a group’s rule is evidence that it has failed in its attempt to construct an expansive hegemony. Second is the case of ‘Expansive’ hegemony a situation in which a hegemonic group adopts the interests of its subalterns in full, and those subalterns come to ‘live’ the worldview of the hegemonic class as their own.

Civil society, Common sense and intellectuals

For Gramsci, one of the key elements of any hegemonic strategy is the formation of links with existing elements of culture. To further elaborate how hegemony of ruling class is secured in modern societies Gramsci looks to the phenomena of common sense and civil society, and the role of intellectuals.

Gramsci says that the key area in which we can see the working of hegemony is civil society. In modern democratic regimes the individual, writes Gramsci, must come to ‘govern himself without his self-government thereby entering into conflict with political society – but rather becoming its normal continuation, its organic complement’ (1971: 268). Civil society becomes the private ‘network’ of the state through which it organises the whole of social reproduction, permeating all forms of organisations and mass-consciousness and provoking a ‘diffusion of hegemony’ at all levels of society. In Gramsci’s widest definition of the term it is ‘the ensemble of organisms commonly called “private”’ (ibid: 12). Civil society includes political organizations, the church, the school system, sports teams, the media and the family. For Gramsci Civil society is a key mechanism for the maintenance of authority as its effectiveness lies in the way it blurs the distinction between political authority and everyday life. It is precisely in this private realm that ruling values seem most natural and therefore unchangeable.

While civil society corresponds to the function of hegemony, Political Society corresponds to ‘domination’. Gramsci writes that while a hegemonic bloc leads coalition groups, it ‘dominates antagonistic groups, which it tends to “liquidate”, or to subjugate perhaps even by armed force’ (1971: 57). If consent is organized through civil society, then coercion is the responsibility of what Gramsci calls political society. He defines political society as the set of apparatuses which legally enforce discipline on those groups who do not give their consent during a normative period, and which dominate the whole of society in periods when consent has broken down. This suggests that the cultural, economic and political aspects of hegemony are, in the last instance, always underpinned by the threat of violence.

Another integral part to the working of hegemony is the institution of Common sense. Gramsci says it is indeed ‘the “folklore” of philosophy’, since, like philosophy; it is a way of thinking about the world that is grounded in material realities. Unlike philosophy, however, common sense is unsystematic, heterogeneous, spontaneous, incoherent and inconsequential, a ‘chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions’ that holds together ‘Stone Age elements’, the principles of advanced science and ‘intuitions of a future philosophy’ (1971: 324). Gramsci emphatically does not conceive of common sense as practical wisdom that contradicts theorizing or dogma. Instead it is literally thought that is common – common to a social group, or common to society as a whole. Common sense offers a deeply held guide to life, directing people to act in certain ways and ruling out other modes of behaviour as unthinkable. Gramsci opposes common sense to good sense, one which the working class led hegemonic block counteracts with. He says that a more expansively hegemonic project would attempt to disarticulate the reactionary elements of common sense from the positive strands within it.

Gramsci also looks into the role of intellectuals in the functioning of hegemony. Gramsci distinguished between a “traditional” intelligentsia and organic intellectuals. Traditional Intellectuals think of themselves as autonomous: gramsci thinks of them as tied to material conditions and interests. Organic intellectuals are the thinking groups which every class produces from its own ranks “organically”. Thus, if the working class wants to succeed in becoming hegemonic, it must also create its own intellectuals to develop a new ideology. He critiques both Lenin and Kautsky who emphasise the Revolutionary Party and traditional intelligentsia over the organic intellectuals of the working class. He claims that modern intellectuals were not simply talkers, but practically-minded directors and organisers who helped to produce hegemony by means of ideological apparatuses such as education and the media. For example in India we can say that Shankar Guha Niyogi, founder of Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha, a labour union run in the town of Dalli Rajhara Mines in Chhattisgarh as an organic intellectual par excellence. Under Niyogi’s leadership, over 8,000 iron-ore miners of Dalli Rajhara in Durg district not only improved their working and living conditions but also participated in a wide range of socially constructive activities, including an anti-liquor campaign, an expanded health programme and the building of a hospital called the Shaheed Hospital, which now has 100 beds.

Resistance to hegemony

As we have seen above power of ruling class in advanced democratic regimes, rather than a simple matter of domination is actually exercised through consent and co-operation of the subaltern groups. How then do we conceive of resistance in such a scenario where the ruling social group has at its disposal a formidable array of institutions and techniques for maintaining its authority and the task of disentangling these interlinked defences can be a daunting one for counter-hegemonic forces?

The way of challenging the dominant hegemony is political activity. Gramsci proposed a distinction between two different kind of political strategies to achieve the capitulation of the predominant hegemony and the construction of the socialist society. One was the War of manoeuvre consisting of Frontal attack whose main goal is winning quickly. This strategy was especially recommended for societies with a centralised and dominant state power that have failed in developing a strong hegemony within the civil society (i.e. Bolshevik revolution, 1917). Second was the War of position which was a Long struggle, primarily, across institutions of civil society. Here the socialist forces gain control through cultural and ideological struggle, instead of only political and economic contest, especially suggested for the liberal-democratic societies of Western capitalism with weaker states but stronger hegemonies (i.e.: Italy). Gramsci also talks about the importance of crisis in breaking the hegemony of the ruling class. Crisis occurs either because the ruling class has failed in some major political undertaking for which it has requested, or forcibly extracted, the consent of the broad masses (war, for example), or because huge masses have passed suddenly from a state of political passivity to a certain activity, and put forward demands which taken together, albeit not organically formulated, add up to a revolution (Gramsci 1971: 210).

Many empirical studies show that resistance to hegemony is indeed possible as the dominated groups are rarely completely hegemonised. James Scott’s work among the peasantry in Sedaka shows that the poor are not much mystified about their situation. He argues that the poor, when they may do so with relative safety, display an impressive capacity to penetrate behind the pieties and rationales of the rich farmers and to understand the larger realities of capital accumulation, proletarianization, and marginalization. And within the narrow limits created by the fear of repression and the “dull compulsion of economic relations,” they act to defend their interests by boycotts, quiet strikes, theft, and malicious gossip (Scott, 2008: 304).

The impact of Gramsci’s work

Since his prison writings became widely known, Gramsci’s ideas have had huge impact within Marxism, cultural studies and in social sciences in general.

Firstly Gramsci’s work has had a huge impact on Marxist theorising. Marxist scholars, including Althusser, Miliband, Poulantzas, Habermas, and Marcuse have used Gramsci to study questions of power in Modern society. For Bobbio (1979) in Gramsci’s work there is a double inversion in relation to the Marxist tradition; one the primacy of the ideological superstructures over the economic structure; and second the primacy of civil society (consensus) over political society (force). Gramsci is seen as the Marxist theorist whose principal contribution was to have broken with the economic determinism of Marx and the authoritarianism of Lenin and to have insisted upon the role of human will and ideas. Gramsci also sought to re-establish the link between theory and practice lost in the economistic interpretations of Marx’s thought and to formulate an interpretation of historical materialism which would relocate it as a mode of intervention in the course of the historical political process. In fact, any interpretation of historical materialism which reduces it to a simple methodology of sociological research and which separates it from praxis, is considered by Gramsci to be a form of economism.

As a critique of class essentialism Hegemony also opened up the possibility of studying non-class forms of antagonism within a Marxist framework. It opens up the possibility of considering other forms of social and cultural relationship (gender, ‘race’, sexuality, religion, environmentalism and so on) as matters for analysis in their own right. But, crucially, it does not do so by abandoning the question of class. Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) explorations of taste and of the emergence of new class groupings have been shown to be invaluable additions to Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. Marxist historian Hobsbawm also argues that the ‘national question’ is in fact one of the areas where Marxist theory was most seriously lacking and Gramsci’s conception of the working class as a” part of the nation ‘makes him the only Marxist thinker to provide us with a basis for integrating the nation as’ a historical and social reality within Marxist theory.

Gramsci’s work had a huge impact on the formation of Cultural Studies in the 1970s. Taking a Gramscian approach involves neither celebrating nor condemning popular texts. As Gramcian scholars ask: how could a popular film, song or novel that simply reproduced the worldview of a dominant social group ever hope to live in the imaginations of its subalterns. Instead, they say culture could be seen as an arena in which dominant, subordinate and oppositional cultural values meet and intermingle, vying with one another to secure the spaces within which they can [frame and organize] popular experience and consciousness. As a consequence, issues that had previously been seen as irredeemably ‘dominant’ – national identity, for example, could potentially be reclaimed for a progressive politics.

Criticism of Gramsci’s work

Gramsci has been criticised by many orthodox Marxists for deviating from Marx’s formulations. Marxist theorist Poulantzas critiques Gramsci’s work for being historicist. He is highly suspicious of the privileged role that Gramsci’s work apparently grants to consciousness. Poulantzas says that it is not the consciousness of the hegemonic class which secures the dominated classes’ ‘active consent’ but the ‘social formation’ (the specific combination of economic forces and social ‘regions’ such as religion and the law) at any particular historical moment. For him, historicist Marxism is ultimately idealist in its assumption that ideas produce social and moral unity. Instead the dominant ideology reflects that unity, and cannot therefore be some pure expression of the mind-set of the ruling social group. Among other things, the ‘dominant ideology’ is the outcome of unequal relationships between the classes. Hence, he argues, we can understand not only why subaltern groups take on some of the ideas of the ruling class, ‘but also why this discourse [the dominant ideology] often presents elements borrowed from ways of life other than that of the dominant class’. Paul Gilroy (1987) argues that Gramsci is insufficiently critical of the concept of nationhood, the ways in which national identity is frequently saturated with racial connotations. He says that national-popular projects can be typically ethnically exclusive.

Conclusion

As we have seen in this module Gramsci’s theory with its re-conception of relation between base and superstructure as an interacting circuit and recasting power as hegemony marks a major breakthrough in Marxist theory. Gramsci’s major contribution to social sciences has been in demonstrating the need to innovate existing theoretical frameworks to make sense of contemporary problems. These innovations have been very productive for Marxists as well as non-Marxists in the analysis of power in western societies. As the British cultural theorist Stuart Hall has suggested, the Gramscian tradition’s strength lays less in concrete and invariable propositions than in a willingness to revise and renovate theoretical frameworks of all kinds. ‘[Gramsci’s] work’, he argues, ‘is of a “sophisticating kind” . . . it has a direct bearing on the question of the “adequacy” of existing social theories, since it is precisely in the direction of “complexifying existing theories and problems” that his most important theoretical contribution is to be found’ (Hall, 1996: 411).

Further Reading

Anderson Perry. (1976). “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” New Left Review 100: 6.18.
Bellamy, R. (1994).Antonio Gramsci: Pre-PrisonWritings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bobbio, N. (1979) ‘Gramsci and the Conception of Civil Society’ in C. Mouffe (ed.) Gramsci and Marxist Theory, London: Routledge.
Bourdieu Pierre. (1984). Distinctions. A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Conclusion.
1984, translated by Richard Nice, published by Harvard University Press.
Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence &Wishart.
Hall Stuart (1996) ‘Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity’ in D. Morley and K.-H. Chen (eds) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in CulturalStudies, London: Routledge
Marx and Engels. (1965). The German Ideology. London: Lawrence &Wishart.
Mouffe Chantal. (1979). Gramsci and Marxist Theory. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Scott James. (2008). Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. Yale University Press.
Gilroy Paul. (1987). There Ain’t No Black In the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. London: Hutchinson Willis Paul. (1977). Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs Columbia University Press.

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