Gramsci, Lukács, and Early Influences of fhe Frankfurt School

The Search for a New Marxism After the Catastrophe

In the wake of the First World War, European Marxists faced an uncomfortable reality: the long-predicted revolution had failed to erupt across the industrialized world. While the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, the working classes of Western Europe did not overthrow their ruling classes. The very societies that had seemed on the brink of collapse instead reconstructed themselves, often through reactionary or authoritarian means.

In this climate of disillusionment, certain Marxist thinkers began to rethink the foundations of revolutionary theory. Among them, Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács stand out as early figures who recognized that a new form of critical theory was needed—one that took seriously the power of culture, consciousness, and ideology in sustaining social order.

Their work planted seeds that would profoundly shape the Frankfurt School’s project and the wider tradition of Western Marxism.

Georg Lukács: Reification and the Awakening of Consciousness

In 1923, Georg Lukács published History and Class Consciousness, a book that would become one of the cornerstones of Western Marxism. Lukács diagnosed a profound condition he called "reification" (Verdinglichung): under capitalism, social relations become thing-like, appearing natural, inevitable, and outside human control. People experience themselves and others not as dynamic agents, but as fixed objects within an alien system.

For Lukács, this reified consciousness was the true obstacle to revolution. Exploitation alone was not enough to provoke resistance; the structures of everyday experience masked the possibility of change. Revolutionary action would require an act of consciousness: the proletariat needed to recognize its own historical situation as constructed, contingent, and therefore transformable.

This emphasis on subjective awakening, on the necessity of developing a critical historical consciousness, deeply influenced the Frankfurt School’s later work—especially its focus on ideology, culture, and the subtle mechanisms by which domination sustains itself.

Antonio Gramsci: Hegemony and the Cultural Struggle

Around the same time, in the prisons of Mussolini's Italy, Antonio Gramsci was developing a parallel and equally radical rethinking of Marxist theory. In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci introduced the concept of "hegemony"—a way of understanding how ruling classes maintain power not just through coercion, but through the consent of the dominated.

Hegemony, for Gramsci, was built through institutions like schools, churches, newspapers, and popular culture, which gradually shape common sense and social norms. In modern societies, control is exercised not merely at the point of a gun but in the minds and habits of everyday life.

Gramsci’s insight redefined the battlefield of politics. Winning power required not only seizing the state but transforming the cultural terrain itself. Revolution became a long, patient struggle for intellectual and moral leadership—a "war of position" rather than a "war of maneuver."

The Frankfurt School, with its intense interest in media, mass culture, and education, would absorb and elaborate Gramsci’s vision, even when their paths diverged in other respects.

Early Intellectual Influences: Marx, Weber, Freud

Gramsci and Lukács did not emerge from a vacuum. They were heirs to a complex intellectual legacy that deeply shaped early Critical Theory.

Karl Marx, of course, remained the foundational figure. His analysis of capitalism as a system driven by internal contradictions, his theory of alienation, and his vision of human emancipation remained essential. But Marx’s emphasis on material conditions was now read alongside newer understandings of culture and subjectivity.

Max Weber’s work also exerted a strong influence, particularly his analysis of rationalization and bureaucracy. Weber’s vision of a "disenchanted" modern world—where instrumental rationality dominates and values are eroded—resonated deeply with thinkers seeking to understand why freedom did not automatically emerge from economic development.

Finally, Sigmund Freud opened a new dimension: the unconscious. Freud’s insights into repression, desire, and the irrational forces shaping behavior suggested that ideology was not merely a matter of false ideas but involved deep psychic investments. Critical Theory would come to integrate these psychological dimensions into its understanding of domination.

Toward a New Critical Tradition

The early work of Gramsci and Lukács, along with these broader intellectual influences, marked a decisive break from the economic reductionism that had characterized much of nineteenth-century Marxism. They showed that modern domination was cultural, psychological, and subjective as much as it was economic—and that revolutionary change would require a revolution in thought, imagination, and everyday life.

The Frankfurt School would inherit these challenges, deepening them into a vast, interdisciplinary project of critique. But it was Gramsci and Lukács who first pointed the way: toward a Marxism that could reckon with failure, complexity, and the stubborn resilience of the status quo.

Their work remains a call not just to change the world, but to understand why it resists change—and how, even so, emancipatory possibilities might still be grasped.

Next article: Horkheimer's Shift from Traditional to Critical Theory

Back to: The Complete Introduction to the Frankfurt School

Gramsci on The Subaltern Classes

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

Gramsci on Intellectuals, society and education - short summary

Neo-Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci took a keen interest in the role of intellectuals in society. He said in particular that all men are intellectuals, but that not all have the social function of intellectuals. He put forward the idea that modern intellectuals were not content to produce discourse, but were involved in the organization of social practices and take part in the formation of cultural hegemony. They would produce common sense, that is to say, what goes without saying. Thus the intellectuals engaged alongside the working class would play a major role in producing evidence that would destroy the common sense produced, according to him, by the bourgeoisie.

He further distinguished between a “traditional intelligentsia” which (wrongly) thinks of itself as a distinct class of society, and the groups of intellectuals that each class generates “organically”. These organic intellectuals do not simply describe social life according to scientific rules, but rather express the experiences and feelings that the masses could not express on their own. The organic intellectual would understand by theory but also feel by experience the life of the people.

The need to create a culture specific to workers is linked to Gramsci's call for a type of education that allows the emergence of intellectuals who share the passions of the masses of workers. Supporters of adult and popular education consider Gramsci to be a benchmark in this regard.

Meaning of Gramsci's Cultural Hegemony Explained (definition and summary)

Cultural Hegemony is a concept developed by Marxist Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci. It starts from the postulate that the conquest of power presupposes the conquest of public opinion.  Hegemony describes the cultural domination of the ruling class, as well as the role that daily practices and collective beliefs play in establishing systems of domination.

The analysis of hegemony was first formulated by Antonio Gramsci to explain why the communist revolutions predicted by Marxin industrialized countries had not happened. Marx and his successors had indeed claimed that the growth of industrial capitalism would produce a gigantic working class and cyclical economic recessions. Added to the other contradictions of capitalism, these recessions would lead an overwhelming majority of the population, the workers, to develop, in order to defend their interests, organizations, in particular unions and political parties. The succession of economic crises would finally lead the working class to overthrow capitalism in a revolution, to restructure the economic, political and social institutions, on the basis of scientific socialism, and to begin the transition to a communist society . Although Marx and Engels predicted this scenario in the famous Communist Party Manifesto ( 1848 ), workers in industrialized countries still had not completed this "mission" decades later.

Gramsci believed that the failure of the workers to make the socialist revolution was due to the hold of the bourgeois hegemonic culture on the ideology and the organizations of the workers.

In other words, the cultural representations of the ruling class, that is, the ruling ideology, had rubbed off more than Marx could have thought on the masses of workers. In "advanced" industrial societies, hegemonic cultural tools such as compulsory schooling, mass media and popular culture had instilled a "false conscience" in workers. Instead of bringing about a revolution that would truly serve their collective needs (according to Marxists), workers in "advanced" societies gave in to the sirens of nationalism, consumerism and social advancement, embracing an individualistic ethos of competition and personal success or even lining up behind bourgeois religious leaders.

Noting the relative failure of economic determinism in the face of the strength of the dominant ideology, Gramsci proposed a distinction between “war of position” and “war of movement”. The "war of position" is a cultural war against bourgeois values ​​which present themselves as "natural" or "normal". The socialist elements must therefore seek to break into the news media, mass organizations and educational institutions in order to propagate revolutionary analysis and theory, to increase class consciousness.and to push for revolutionary engagement. This cultural struggle must allow the proletariat to attract all the oppressed classes in its struggle for the seizure of political power. For Gramsci, any class that aims at the conquest of political power must indeed go beyond its simple "economic" interests, take moral and intellectual leadership, and make alliances and compromises with a number of social forces. Gramsci calls this union of social forces a “historical bloc” (term borrowed from trade unionist Georges Sorel ).

Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks - summary of main ideas

Antonio Gramsci ( 1891 - 1937 ) was an Italian thinker , leader and socialist-communist theorist who opposed fascism  during the Benito Mussolini era . Today Gramsci's "Prison Notebooks" are considered to be one of the main contributions to socialist political thought, although they defer from classical Marxism.

Gramsci was prisonned by the Fascists, during his time in prison he wrote over thirty of notebooks that include political and historical analysis. These writings, known as the "Prison Notebooks," include Gramsci's reflections on the history of Italy and nationalism , as well as ideas in the study of Marxism , critical theory, and the educational theory associated with his name. The notebooks were written in a conscious attempt to leave an intellectual will with an overall worldview, and even in the hope that if he could get out of jail he would have a real plan of action.

Only after the defeat of fascism in Italy, and after World War II could Gramsci's notebooks be published. The main ideas Gramsci developed in these notebooks are:

• Cultural hegemony as the main means of preserving the capitalist state .
• The need for education for the working masses in order to encourage the creation of working class intellectuals.
• The distinction between political society (police, military, legal system, etc.), which directly controls, and civil society (family, education system, trade unions), where leadership is voluntary and non-coercive.
• The historicist absolute.
• The critique of economic determinism .
• The critique of philosophical materialism . .

Although Gramsci's thought originated with the organized left, he became an important figure in academic analyzes of the cultural sciences and critical theory. Members of the Political Science from the center and the right have adopted that ideas about hegemony, for example,= and these ideas are quoted and analyzed in the writings. His influence was great in the field of political science, and in the study of popular culture. The concept of " political correctness " seems to echo a cultural struggle in the spirit of Gramsci's thought.

However, most of Gramsci's influence is on left-wing thinking, especially among thinkers belonging to the school of neo-Marxism .

see also: Gramsci on Intellectuals, society and education