What a breath of fresh air, this Gramsci reading. It's like an escape from the determined stranglehold of Althusser's structural Marxism. I mean, I don't want to come off as some dilettante Marxist marching off half-cocked on a diatribe against Althusser. But for as brilliant a guy as he was, Louis was also kind of a downer, so you can understand why I might relish the "wiggle room" offered by Gramsci's conception of society and hegemony. I appreciate the needs for a theoreticist or abstract model, which allows someone to look at any society and identify the aspects of the base and superstructure and how they interact. Just as important, however, is an historically specific model which allows me to understand at my society, in its moment, as opposed to every other society at any other time.

I think the most elegant aspect of Gramsci's formulation of base and superstructure is hegemony. The term has always sounded dirty to me, probably because I always heard it in discussions about American hegemony in a global context. It seemed big, oppressive, and inescapable. However, Gramsci makes clear that hegemony has a shelf-life. It is, by definition, only a temporary state of affairs, constantly repositioning itself against upstart forces gunning for its place in the field of struggle.

What's particularly satisfying about Gramsci's thinking is the fact that it is not only historically grounded, but that is seems to speak directly to societies in that critical Marxist historical stage, (no, not Oriental despotism, but [you guessed it]) capitalism. In other words, us. Now forget for a minute all the economic craziness going on right now and grant me the following: we live in a relatively stable civil society. We have the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, participatory democracy, and a Congressional system, the sum of which (almost all of the time) keeps us from being gulaged, or some such nonsense. We (which is to say the popular masses and forgive me if you don't think you belong under this heading) have before us a "field of struggle" on which the ruling class (which is not a class, per se, but a cohort of cooperative forces) must constantly prove itself. As a side note, and I'm not sure how Gramsci feels about it, but I think this pretty much implies that socialism is its own distinct stage through which a capitalist society must pass on its glorious march toward communism. Thoughts?

One final jab at Louis before we move on. Pictured is one of E.P. Thompson's satirical diagrams of Althusserian Marxism: "The Motor of History - Class Struggle." The diagram reads, "The motor...is operated by four simple levers at the base: these activate respectively the four gears of bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, proletariat, and peasantry. When left to run automatically, the motions are governed by four globes (two above, two at base) of the true and false consciousness of bourgeoisie and proletariat. In both cases the true and false globes are held in tension by a spring (ideology), and the resultant torsion regulates the motor."