#gramsci

Recently, I’ve made several posts about the machinations of a certain Cheeto (or Wotsit wearing a Quaver if you’re British), and I felt an urge to write about how I understand power and the systems that uphold it.

1.0 The ruler of the cave

Fundamentally, we are social animals, and this goes back to our origins as a species. The very earliest human remains show us clustered together in groups, and this wasn’t just because we enjoyed the company; it was a matter of survival. 

We are only the ‘apex’ species of this planet because of our brains, as our bodies are frankly a bit rubbish. Unlike other animals, we can’t survive naked anywhere(you don’t see a tiger dripped out, they are naked as the day they were born) nor can we fight 99% of the animal kingdom (man vs bear always ends in a mauling). So we need to be in a group—especially when other humans and humanoids (that we wiped out—good for us) also posed threats.

We also need to be in a group because we require tools, clothing, and hunting, and no one person could do all of that alone. Subsequently, this dependence leads to a constant fear of being ousted by the group, because in early human society, that meant certain death. This primal fear didn’t disappear once societies grew larger; it was baked into the systems that followed. And we see this fear of being ostracised threaded throughout our earliest literature and stories. Adam and Eve are expelled from the garden. Satan is cast down from heaven. In the Ramayana, Rama is banished for fourteen years. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Enkidu is brought in from the wild and made more “human” for it, though he loses his place among the animals. Odysseus wanders the Mediterranean for years, cut off from home and kin. The pattern repeats across cultures: exile, banishment, and wandering are treated not as adventures, but as punishments hovering just above death.

And if being cast out was the ultimate punishment, then the safest option was never to be at risk of it in the first place. One way to guarantee that was to become the person who decided who stayed in and who got thrown out. Power, in other words, became the antidote to vulnerability. If you controlled the food, the fire, or the flow of resources, then you weren’t just safe—you made everyone else’s safety dependent on you. And to keep everyone compliant, you kept an out-group in view. There must always be a “them” (barbarians, heretics, witches, the “undeserving”) to remind the “us” what exile looks like. Fear of becoming that (and losing the protection of the social group) does the work as people focus on not being the scapegoat and, in the process, uphold the structure that makes scapegoats necessary.

2.0 How power becomes common sense

When we moved out of caves and into settlements, we stayed in groups (for safety and the sharing of skills and resources), but we kept the hierarchy of someone being in charge. The names change (chieftain, king, pharaoh, emperor, president), but the general idea doesn’t: keep the enemies out and people’s bellies full, and persuade everyone that you, specifically, should be the one wearing a crown. 

Some of this is achieved through brute force (killing and conquest), but most populations have a hard limit on this. History is littered with moments when tolerance snapped: Boudica’s rebellion, Vercingetorix in Gaul, Spartacus leading enslaved people in open revolt, the Jewish-Roman wars etc. 

The Romans eventually learned how to maintain power in a more subtle way, by making people feel Roman enough that rebellion felt unnecessary. Infrastructure (roads, aqueducts, baths, amphitheatres) signalled order and prosperity, while religious syncretism absorbed local cults into the imperial framework (the spring goddess reclassified as Sulis Minerva), preserving ritual while subordinating it to Roman authority. Legal status and patronage bound populations to the centre: auxiliary service could confer citizenship; local elites were incorporated into municipal councils.

In that sense, panem et circenses (bread and circuses) was less about letting people indulge in carbs while watching a murder, and more about soft power.. Authority has always been made visible through spectacle and display: Tyrian purple reserved for emperors, sumptuary laws dictating who may wear silk or jewels, the theatrics of coronations, dictators with solid gold sinks, and the vast processions of imperial triumphs—all showing off conspicuous wealth (as material resources concentrate at the top of the pyramid). These displays are never incidental. In earlier times, their purpose was to awe; in modern times, under the myth of meritocracy, they exist to give the peasants something to aspire to. The same dynamic plays out in the digital age, with the fake flexing of luxury goods (used as a lure) by get-rich-quick grifters on social media.

But power is maintained not only by uniting people in a shared identity but also by embedding that identity in law and institutional structure, and we also see this throughout history. In ancient societies, this meant priestly castes controlling knowledge; in Rome, it meant citizenship and civic status written directly into law.

 In medieval Europe, the Church’s monopoly on literacy, canon law, and archives made identity itself a clerical matter. But it is most clearly visible in feudal systems, where hierarchy was fixed and identity was inseparable from one’s legal and social rank. A peasant was not simply poor; they were legally bound to the land and to the lord who owned it. A knight’s identity was defined through oaths of service, a noble’s through hereditary titles, and a monarch’s through the “divine right” that placed them above all. The Domesday Book catalogued every holding; manorial courts enforced obligations; the ritual of homage staged hierarchy in public. The structure itself ensured that every individual’s place was predetermined and enforced by custom, law, and theology. In this way, identity was not just a matter of belonging to the community but of occupying a slot in a rigid pyramid—one that maintained power by making the structure feel inevitable, natural, and ordained.

As we moved into the early modern period, the question became how to maintain power and order as the rigid feudal system gave way to urban populations concentrated in cities and city-states. Dante (before writing his self-insert fanfic where he literally roasted his enemies) grappled with this while growing up in Florence, a city divided by violent factionalism between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, and later between the White and Black Guelphs. In his De Monarchia, he argued that only a strong secular authority (a universal emperor) could secure peace, because left to themselves, the city-states would continue to cannibalise one another.

Machiavelli took this further by focusing not on universal authority but on the mechanics of rule within fragile political systems. In The Prince (which I read as a satirical text rather than then how-to guide it has become), he analysed how leaders could preserve power through reputation, the strategic use of fear, and decisive (rather than continual) acts of force. In The Discourses, he highlighted the durability of republics, emphasising the role of civic institutions, shared responsibility, and the management of elites. In both works, the central concern is clear: power is sustained by structures and strategies that ensure stability over time.

3.0 Consent and its dark side

(We are, I admit, spending a lot of time with Italian thinkers here, but allow me my hyperfixation on the Renaissance and, later, my boy Antonio G.)

In the modern age and writing while imprisoned by Mussolini, Antonio Gramsci shifted the focus from princes and city-states to the broader question of how power maintains itself in modern societies. His concept of hegemony explained that domination endures not simply through force but by manufacturing consent—by making the worldview of the ruling bloc feel like “common sense.” Think of schools, churches, newspapers, even the clichés of “hard work pays off” or “respectability” as forms of reinforcement: they naturalise the order so thoroughly it feels inevitable.

This idea (that power needs at least some degree of consent) plays out in revolutions as well. The Russian Revolution began with the overthrow of the Tsar and the promise of worker power, but it consolidated into the Soviet Union, where authority was centralised in the party-state. The French Revolution, launched under the banners of liberty, equality, and fraternity, ultimately produced Napoleon, who channelled revolutionary energies into empire. In both cases, consent was not abolished but redirected, stabilising new systems of power that could claim to embody the will of the people.

But consent has a very dark side. Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the key organisers of the Holocaust, and coined the phrase "the banality of evil." What unsettled her was that Eichmann was not a monstrous figure but an ordinary bureaucrat who followed orders, and “did his job” while coordinating mass deportations to death camps. Atrocity, she argued, is often orchestrated through paperwork, procedures, and individuals who seek to maintain their position within the system.

And here the concept of the out-group reappears. Consent is easiest to sustain when people are reassured they are inside the circle and not the ones being targeted. As long as there is a visible “them” (barbarians, heretics, witches, the “undeserving”), most will accept the bargain of rule. Fear of becoming the out-group outweighs moral objection, and so consent doesn’t just stabilise power; it normalises its violence, turning exclusion and persecution into routine features of order. Additionally, this othering often requires the dehumanisation of the other (through stigma and discrimination).

There's this brilliant Grant Morrison interview in which they were asked how to make sense of Batman and Robin's ages, and they replied "It doesn't matter. You must understand, these people aren't real."

And I think Morrison is criticising a common way which readers fail to critically engage with the literature; forcing your own "common sense" onto even fictional stories to shield yourself from the discomfort of challenging your worldview. Moreover, I'd add, framing this rationalising as an appeal to "objectivity", despite the very subjective subject matter.

Morrison continued "...you know what they always say about kids? That kids can't distinguish between fantasy and reality... that's actually bullshit. When a kid's watching 'The Little Mermaid,' the kid knows that those crabs that are singing and talking aren't really like the crabs on the beach that don't talk... Then you've got an adult... You bring them fantasy, and the first thing they say is 'How did he get that way? Why does he dress like that? How did that happen?' It's not real... We get people reading superhero comics and going, 'Why does that power work? And how can Scott Summers shoot those beams? And what's the science of that?' It's not real! There is no science. The science is the science of 'anything can happen in fiction and paper'!"

It doesn't ultimately matter how let's say Batman stops a train with an explosive pellet in Scottish Connection; it's not the point. The point is that it's a story reckoning with how history makes us and what heroism may mean in the context of historical injustice. But adults can be so resistant to challenging their own assumptions that they'll pedantically concern themselves with reconciling fiction with their "common sense".

I believe Antonio Gramsci actually speaks to something similar in his essay "Socialism and Culture". He wrote, "We need to free ourselves from the habit of seeing culture as encyclopaedic knowledge, and men as mere receptacles to be stuffed full of empirical data and a mass of unconnected raw facts, which have to be filed in the brain as in the columns of a dictionary..."

They are both calling on readers to be inquisitive about the meaning lurking behind every sentence and image and number. They are also both concerned about appeals to "objectivity" that act to rationalise or naturalise one's "common sense". By "common sense", Gramsci meant the generally held assumptions and beliefs of a society, consisting of conclusions which one hasn't arrived at themselves but instead inherited. Hence such appeals to objectivity, as well as closing you off to new ideas, also tends to be reactionary, in rationalising the status quo.

Gramsci also continues, "This form of culture really is harmful... It serves only to create maladjusted people... who believe they are superior to the rest of humanity because they have memorized a certain number of facts and dates... so turning them almost into a barrier between themselves and others."

On the one hand, it is pointless to strive to simply know things, we need to interpret meaning and arrive at our own conclusions. Furthermore, engaging in culture should connect us, not alienate us. While culture can be a springboard for critical discussion and critique of assumptions and debate and communal learning and connection and empathy, many people instead chose to read culture in ways that push them further into themselves. Why get into dialogue with others about what a story means when you can "head canon" away anything that makes you uncomfortable in the isolation of your own head? Because that bloody makes us lonelier!

"Gramsci and the French Revolution"

The book is divided into three parts. In the first, the author analyzes Gramsci’s positions on the French Revolution and, in particular, focuses on the comparison that Gramsci made between the Russian Revolution and the French Revolution, all framed within the historical context of the time. It also explains how the French Revolution can be used as a criterion for comparison to the future revolutions.

In the second part, there is a collection of all the texts in which Gramsci referred to the French Revolution or to its interpreters (Robespierre, the Jacobins, etc.).

In the third part there are the articles written by Albert Mathiez and published in "L’Ordine Nuovo" , edited by Gramsci himself.