For Gramsci, hegemony is the exercise of the functions of intellectual and moral direction together with that of the domain of political power. The problem for Gramsci is to understand how the proletariat or a dominated, subordinate class in general, can become a ruling class and exercise political power, or become a hegemonic class.
The crisis of hegemony manifests itself when, while maintaining their own dominance, the politically dominant social classes cease to be leaders of all social classes, that is, they fail to solve the problems of the entire community and impose their own complex on the entire society. conception of the world. The subaltern social class, if it manages to provide concrete solutions to unsolved problems, becomes the ruling class and, increasing its own worldview to other social strata as well, creates a new social block, becoming hegemonic. The revolutionary moment appears initially, according to Gramsci, at the level of superstructure, in a Marxist sense, that is, political, cultural, ideal, moral, but it penetrates society in its complexity, ramming up to its economic structure,
In Italy, the ruling class is and has been partial: among the forces that contribute to the preservation of the social block are the Catholic Church, which struggles to maintain doctrinal union in order to avoid irremediable fractures among the faithful that nevertheless exist and that the former is not in a position to correct, but only to control: "The Roman Church has always been the most tenacious in the struggle to prevent the official formation of two religions, that of intellectuals and that of simple souls", a struggle that although, it has also had serious consequences, connected "to the historical process that transforms the entire civil society and that as a whole contains a corrosive critique of religions", however,has highlighted "the organizing capacity in the sphere of the culture of the clergy" that has given "certain satisfactions to the demands of science and philosophy, but with such a slow and methodical pace that the mutations are not perceived by the mass of the simple, although they seem revolutionary and demagogic to the integralists "
Nor has the idealist culture in Gramsci's time, dominant and exercised by the Croatian and Gentilian philosophical schools, has not "managed to create an ideological unity between the low and the high, between the simple and the intellectuals", so much so that this culture , although considering religion a mythology, he has not even "tried to build a conception that could replace religion in early childhood education", and these pedagogues, although without being religious, confidential and atheists, "grant the teaching of religion because religion is the philosophy of the childhood of humanity, which is renewed in each non-metaphorical childhood ”. Thus, the "dominant" secular culture also uses religion, because it does not pose the problem of raising the popular classes to the level of the dominant one but, on the contrary,
See also: Meaning of subaltern explained
