I, Roque Ehrhardt de Campos, am not either marxist or leftist and I don’t think about reality from any perspective that includes the ideas put forth by the left, with the exception of Gramsci’s ideas, and I’ll explain why.
Gramsci’s ideas at its core are neutral and ended up being used by the right
It is a fascinating paradox of modern political theory. While Antonio Gramsci was a founder of the Italian Communist Party, his analytical tools—the “how-to” of gaining and holding power—are structurally neutral.
Think of Gramsci’s theories like a blueprint for a siege. The blueprint doesn’t care if the army attacking the castle is Red or Blue; it simply explains how the walls are built and where the gate is weakest.
Why Gramsci’s Ideas Are “Neutral” Tools
Gramsci moved Marxism away from “economic determinism” (the idea that the economy automatically dictates politics) and toward Cultural Hegemony. He argued that power isn’t just maintained by police and laws, but by consent created through culture, media, and education.
Because these are observations of social mechanics, they can be reverse-engineered:
- The “War of Position”: Gramsci argued that in the West, you can’t just seize the government (War of Movement). You must first “occupy” the institutions—schools, churches, and media.
- The “Modern Prince”: This is the idea of a collective organization that creates a “national-popular will.” While Gramsci meant a Communist Party, the “Prince” can just as easily be a nationalist movement or a corporate interest group.
- Common Sense: Gramsci noted that the ruling class makes its own values seem like “common sense” to the masses. Anyone looking to change society, regardless of their wing, must learn how to redefine what is “sensible” to the public.
How the Right Adopted Gramsci
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, various Right-wing movements realized that while they often won elections, they were “losing the culture.” They began using Gramscian tactics to fight back.
| Concept | Right-Wing Application |
|---|---|
| Metapolitics | The French “New Right” (Nouvelle Droite) argued that political change is impossible without first changing culture. They called this “Gramscianism of the Right.” |
| The “Long March” | Just as the Left sought to enter academia, the Right began building its own “counter-hegemonic” institutions: think tanks, private schools, and alternative media ecosystems (like Fox News or Breitbart). |
| Identity Politics | Gramsci spoke of the “Subaltern” (oppressed groups). Modern Right-wing populism often frames the “silent majority” or “forgotten worker” as the new subaltern, oppressed by a “Globalist Hegemony.” |
The “New Right” Synthesis
Thinkers like Alain de Benoist in France and strategists like Steve Bannon in the US have been described as students of Gramscian strategy. They recognized that to defeat “Liberal Hegemony,” they had to:
- Break the Consensus: Challenge the “common sense” of the ruling elite.
- Build a Counter-Elite: Develop intellectuals and journalists who could tell a different story.
- Capture the “National-Popular”: Use symbols of tradition, religion, and nation to create a unified block of people.
“The Right has been more successful at using Gramsci in the last 30 years than the Left has, because they realized that culture is the lead domino for political power.” — Common observation in contemporary political science.
Gramsci’s relationship to Marx
Gramsci was a faithful Marxist in his fundamental premises — he accepted the primacy of class conflict, the exploitative nature of capitalism, and the ultimate goal of proletarian emancipation. He never abandoned Marx.
But he identified a critical gap in Marx’s framework.
Marx’s model was essentially mechanistic — capitalism generates contradictions, contradictions generate crisis, crisis generates revolution. The economic base determines everything else. Culture, law, religion, philosophy — all of this was superstructure, a reflection of underlying economic relations. Change the base and the superstructure follows automatically.
Gramsci looked at the 20th century and saw that this wasn’t happening. The base had generated the contradictions Marx predicted. The crises had arrived — World War I, the Great Depression. But the revolution hadn’t followed in Western Europe. Workers in England, France and Germany were not revolutionary. They were conservative, nationalistic, often actively supportive of the system that exploited them.
The question was why.
Gramsci’s answer — and his departure from Marx
Gramsci’s answer was that Marx had underestimated the superstructure.
Culture, religion, common sense, moral frameworks, educational institutions — these weren’t just passive reflections of economic relations. They had relative autonomy and genuine causal power. They could stabilize a system even when its economic contradictions were screaming for rupture.
This was a significant revision. For Marx, if you changed the economic base, culture would follow. For Gramsci, you could change the economic base and culture would resist — because culture had its own inertia, its own institutions, its own mechanisms of reproduction.
The concept he developed to explain this was hegemony.
Hegemony — the core mechanism
Hegemony is the process by which a dominant class maintains power not primarily through coercion but through consent — by making its particular worldview appear universal, natural, and inevitable to the dominated classes themselves.
The genius of the concept is the distinction it draws between two forms of power:
Domination — direct coercion through state apparatus. Police, army, prisons, laws. This is what Gramsci called political society.
Hegemony — indirect control through cultural apparatus. Schools, churches, media, family structures, popular culture, professional associations, intellectual life. This is what he called civil society.
Stable ruling class power combines both — but hegemony is the more efficient and durable form because it doesn’t require constant application of force. When dominated groups internalize the values of the dominant class as their own values, as common sense, as natural order, the system reproduces itself almost automatically.
The worker who believes that wealth reflects merit, that inequality is natural, that the nation matters more than class — this worker is not being coerced. He is consenting to his own domination. That consent was manufactured through institutions of civil society over generations.
Why this was a revolutionary strategic insight
Marx’s strategy implied that economic crisis would automatically produce revolutionary consciousness. Gramsci said no — consciousness is produced by cultural institutions, and those institutions are controlled by the dominant class.
Therefore, before you can have a revolution, you need a counter-hegemony — an alternative system of values, interpretations, and common sense that gradually displaces the dominant worldview in the minds of the population.
This requires what Gramsci called organic intellectuals — not detached academics but intellectuals organically connected to a class or movement, capable of articulating its worldview in ways that resonate broadly and eventually become common sense.
And it requires what became his most famous strategic concept — the long march through the institutions. Gradual, patient infiltration and transformation of the institutions of civil society — universities, schools, media, churches, cultural organizations — rather than frontal assault on state power.
Revolution, in this framework, is the final act of a cultural transformation that has already largely occurred. You win the battle of ideas before you win the battle of politics.
Why the mechanism is ideologically neutral
This is the crucial point — and it’s one that both left and right prefer to avoid acknowledging because it’s deeply uncomfortable.
Gramsci described a mechanism of power, not a particular content. He was a Marxist describing how bourgeois hegemony worked and how proletarian counter-hegemony could be built. But the mechanism itself has no ideological loyalty.
The mechanism works like this:
Any group seeking to transform society must first make its worldview appear natural and universal rather than particular and partisan. It must capture the institutions that produce common sense — education, media, culture, professional associations. It must develop organic intellectuals who translate its values into the language of everyday life. It must wage a long patient war of position through civil society before it can achieve decisive political victory.
This process is equally available to the left, the right, nationalists, religious conservatives, libertarians, or anyone else with sufficient resources, patience and strategic consciousness.
Why it works regardless of content
The mechanism works because of how human cognition operates.
We don’t construct our worldviews from scratch through rational deliberation. We absorb them from our environment — from what teachers present as obvious, from what media frames as normal, from what our professional communities treat as common sense, from the stories culture tells about who we are and how society works.
When an institution controls that environment consistently over time, it shapes what feels natural and what feels transgressive — independently of whether its content is left or right, true or false, liberating or oppressive.
Gramsci understood that the most durable form of power is the power to define the boundaries of the thinkable — what counts as reasonable, what counts as extreme, what goes without saying.
Whoever controls that invisible boundary controls the political center of gravity — even before a single vote is cast or a single law is passed.
The contemporary war of positions
What makes the current cultural conflict so intense is precisely that both sides have now understood the mechanism — even when they don’t articulate it in Gramscian terms.
The progressive left spent decades executing the long march through universities, media, corporate HR departments, NGOs and cultural institutions. By the 2010s it had achieved a form of cultural hegemony in elite institutions — its language, its frameworks, its moral priorities had become the default common sense of educated professional classes in Western countries.
The populist right’s response — from Bannon to Bolsonaro, from the British culture wars to the Hungarian model under Orbán — has been consciously counter-hegemonic. Build alternative media. Capture school curricula. Develop organic intellectuals outside the academy. Make your worldview the common sense of a different constituency — the non-college working class, religious communities, nationalist movements.
Both sides are fighting a Gramscian war. The battlefield is the definition of normal.
The deep irony
Gramsci wrote from a fascist prison cell trying to understand why the working class didn’t revolt. His analytical tools have been used to:
Build the progressive cultural hegemony of Western universities. Dismantle it through nationalist populism. Justify identity politics. Justify anti-identity politics. Defend multiculturalism. Defend cultural nationalism.
The prisoner of Mussolini handed both sides of the contemporary culture war their strategic playbook — without either side fully acknowledging the debt.
That is perhaps the most powerful testimony to the quality of his thinking. A framework that transcends its own ideological origins and describes something real about how power actually works is rare. Gramsci achieved that — even if the achievement would have horrified him.
Gramsci under a leftist perspective and the intelectual class
Gramsci’s relationship to Marx
Gramsci was a faithful Marxist in his fundamental premises — he accepted the primacy of class conflict, the exploitative nature of capitalism, and the ultimate goal of proletarian emancipation. He never abandoned Marx.
But he identified a critical gap in Marx’s framework.
Marx’s model was essentially mechanistic — capitalism generates contradictions, contradictions generate crisis, crisis generates revolution. The economic base determines everything else. Culture, law, religion, philosophy — all of this was superstructure, a reflection of underlying economic relations. Change the base and the superstructure follows automatically.
Gramsci looked at the 20th century and saw that this wasn’t happening. The base had generated the contradictions Marx predicted. The crises had arrived — World War I, the Great Depression. But the revolution hadn’t followed in Western Europe. Workers in England, France and Germany were not revolutionary. They were conservative, nationalistic, often actively supportive of the system that exploited them.
The question was why.
Gramsci’s answer — and his departure from Marx
Gramsci’s answer was that Marx had underestimated the superstructure.
Culture, religion, common sense, moral frameworks, educational institutions — these weren’t just passive reflections of economic relations. They had relative autonomy and genuine causal power. They could stabilize a system even when its economic contradictions were screaming for rupture.
This was a significant revision. For Marx, if you changed the economic base, culture would follow. For Gramsci, you could change the economic base and culture would resist — because culture had its own inertia, its own institutions, its own mechanisms of reproduction.
The concept he developed to explain this was hegemony.
Hegemony — the core mechanism
Hegemony is the process by which a dominant class maintains power not primarily through coercion but through consent — by making its particular worldview appear universal, natural, and inevitable to the dominated classes themselves.
The genius of the concept is the distinction it draws between two forms of power:
Domination — direct coercion through state apparatus. Police, army, prisons, laws. This is what Gramsci called political society.
Hegemony — indirect control through cultural apparatus. Schools, churches, media, family structures, popular culture, professional associations, intellectual life. This is what he called civil society.
Stable ruling class power combines both — but hegemony is the more efficient and durable form because it doesn’t require constant application of force. When dominated groups internalize the values of the dominant class as their own values, as common sense, as natural order, the system reproduces itself almost automatically.
The worker who believes that wealth reflects merit, that inequality is natural, that the nation matters more than class — this worker is not being coerced. He is consenting to his own domination. That consent was manufactured through institutions of civil society over generations.
Why this was a revolutionary strategic insight
Marx’s strategy implied that economic crisis would automatically produce revolutionary consciousness. Gramsci said no — consciousness is produced by cultural institutions, and those institutions are controlled by the dominant class.
Therefore, before you can have a revolution, you need a counter-hegemony — an alternative system of values, interpretations, and common sense that gradually displaces the dominant worldview in the minds of the population.
This requires what Gramsci called organic intellectuals — not detached academics but intellectuals organically connected to a class or movement, capable of articulating its worldview in ways that resonate broadly and eventually become common sense.
And it requires what became his most famous strategic concept — the long march through the institutions. Gradual, patient infiltration and transformation of the institutions of civil society — universities, schools, media, churches, cultural organizations — rather than frontal assault on state power.
Revolution, in this framework, is the final act of a cultural transformation that has already largely occurred. You win the battle of ideas before you win the battle of politics.
Why the mechanism is ideologically neutral
This is the crucial point — and it’s one that both left and right prefer to avoid acknowledging because it’s deeply uncomfortable.
Gramsci described a mechanism of power, not a particular content. He was a Marxist describing how bourgeois hegemony worked and how proletarian counter-hegemony could be built. But the mechanism itself has no ideological loyalty.
The mechanism works like this:
Any group seeking to transform society must first make its worldview appear natural and universal rather than particular and partisan. It must capture the institutions that produce common sense — education, media, culture, professional associations. It must develop organic intellectuals who translate its values into the language of everyday life. It must wage a long patient war of position through civil society before it can achieve decisive political victory.
This process is equally available to the left, the right, nationalists, religious conservatives, libertarians, or anyone else with sufficient resources, patience and strategic consciousness.
Why it works regardless of content
The mechanism works because of how human cognition operates.
We don’t construct our worldviews from scratch through rational deliberation. We absorb them from our environment — from what teachers present as obvious, from what media frames as normal, from what our professional communities treat as common sense, from the stories culture tells about who we are and how society works.
When an institution controls that environment consistently over time, it shapes what feels natural and what feels transgressive — independently of whether its content is left or right, true or false, liberating or oppressive.
Gramsci understood that the most durable form of power is the power to define the boundaries of the thinkable — what counts as reasonable, what counts as extreme, what goes without saying.
Whoever controls that invisible boundary controls the political center of gravity — even before a single vote is cast or a single law is passed.
The contemporary war of positions
What makes the current cultural conflict so intense is precisely that both sides have now understood the mechanism — even when they don’t articulate it in Gramscian terms.
The progressive left spent decades executing the long march through universities, media, corporate HR departments, NGOs and cultural institutions. By the 2010s it had achieved a form of cultural hegemony in elite institutions — its language, its frameworks, its moral priorities had become the default common sense of educated professional classes in Western countries.
The populist right’s response — from Bannon to Bolsonaro, from the British culture wars to the Hungarian model under Orbán — has been consciously counter-hegemonic. Build alternative media. Capture school curricula. Develop organic intellectuals outside the academy. Make your worldview the common sense of a different constituency — the non-college working class, religious communities, nationalist movements.
Both sides are fighting a Gramscian war. The battlefield is the definition of normal.
The deep irony
Gramsci wrote from a fascist prison cell trying to understand why the working class didn’t revolt. His analytical tools have been used to:
Build the progressive cultural hegemony of Western universities. Dismantle it through nationalist populism. Justify identity politics. Justify anti-identity politics. Defend multiculturalism. Defend cultural nationalism.
The prisoner of Mussolini handed both sides of the contemporary culture war their strategic playbook — without either side fully acknowledging the debt.
That is perhaps the most powerful testimony to the quality of his thinking. A framework that transcends its own ideological origins and describes something real about how power actually works is rare. Gramsci achieved that — even if the achievement would have horrified him.
O Sentido da Vida - The Meaning of life 