Page 20 - Contemporary Political Sociology Globalization Politics and Power

6 Changing Definitions of Politics and Power

consideration to the role of the state in sustaining capitalism, theorists
such as Kautsky and Plekhanov, concerned above all to establish Marxism
as a rigorous science, worked to discover the historical laws by which the
economy developed. They, therefore, reduced the superstructure – the
political, ideological, and cultural – to emanations of the economic base
(Taylor, 1995 : 24952). It is the neo - Marxist rejection of this simplistic
economism which in recent years has led theorists to consider political
power at the level of the state as relatively autonomous of economic
power.

N eo - M arxism

Writing in the 1920s, Antonio Gramsci was the first Marxist to theorize
the ideological and political superstructures as relatively autonomous of

the economic base. As such, he was a major influence on other neo -
Marxists such as Louis Althusser. The key term for Gramsci is “ hege-
mony ” which means the way in which the dominant class gains consent
for its rule through compromises and alliances with some class fractions
and the disorganization of others, and also the way in which it maintains
that rule in a stable social formation (Gramsci, 1971 ; Simon, 1982 ). In
terms of Dunleavy and O ’ Leary ’ s typology, Gramsci ’ s is an arbiter theory
of the state: the state is formed by the balance of forces achieved in the
struggle for hegemony. For Gramsci, a class does not take state power; it
becomes the state (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985 : 69). However, Gramsci is
innovative in Marxism in not thinking of the state as the institution in
which politics takes place. According to Gramsci, hegemony is gained in
the first place in civil society where ideology is embodied in communal

forms of life in such a way that it becomes the taken - for - granted common
sense of the people. All relations of civil society involve issues of power
and struggle, not just class relations. Politics is more a cultural sensibility
than an institutional activity for Gramsci. In this respect, he has been an
important influence on the political sociology of cultural politics, espe-

cially through the work of Stuart Hall in cultural studies (Morley and
Chen, 1996 ).
Gramsci ’ s thought in this respect was limited, however, by his commit-
ment to economism. Gramsci, like Althusser, saw ideology as practices
that form subjects; for both thinkers, our experience and our relationship
to the world are mediated through ideology. In Gramsci ’ s view, subjects
are not necessarily class subjects, but rather collective political wills
formed by articulating ideas and values in different combinations in order
to draw different groups into the hegemonic project. However, as a