The State, Crisis, and Working-Class Strategy in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks

Abstract

This article conducts a philological and diachronic reconstruction of the emergence and progressive formation of Gramsci’s theory of the state in the Prison Notebooks, in the process demonstrating its organic nexus with a specific conception of the nature and dynamics of crises, and its implications for working-class strategy in the struggle to construct a hegemonic alternative to the capitalist state. On the basis of this analysis, it seeks to extract the contemporary relevance of Gramsci’s theory of the integral state, political crises and his strategic proposal of the war of position for our contemporary global conjuncture, defined by the simultaneous existence of multiple interlocking crises – economic, public health, ecological and social.