Gramsci's historical materialism (which he was careful to distinguish from what he called historical economism'or a narrowly economic interpretation of history),ideas and material conditions are always bound together,mutually influ- encing one another,and not reducible one to the other.Ideas have to be under- stood in relation to material circumstances.Material circumstances include both the social relations and the physical means of production.Superstructures of ideology and political organisation shape the development of both aspects of production and are shaped by them. An historic bloc cannot exist without a hegemonic social class.Where the hegemonic class is the dominant class in a country or social formation,the state (in Gramsci's enlarged concept)maintains cohesion and identity within the bloc through the propagation of a common culture.A new bloc is formed when a subordinate class(e.g.,the workers)establishes its hegemony over other subordi- nate groups (e.g,small farmers,marginals).This process requires intensive dia- logue between leaders and followers within the would-be hegemonic class. Gramsci may have concurred in the Leninist idea of an avant-garde party which takes upon itself the responsibility for leading an immature working class,but only as an aspect of a war of movement.Because a war of position strategy was required in the western countries,as he saw it,the role of the party should be to lead,intensify and develop dialogue within the working class and between the working class and other subordinate classes which could be brought into alliance with it.The 'mass line'as a mobilisation technique developed by the Chinese Communist Party is consistent with Gramsci's thinking in this respect. Intellectuals play a key role in the building of an historic bloc.Intellectuals are not a distinct and relatively classless social stratum.Gramsci saw them as organi- cally connected with a social class.They perform the function of developing and sustaining the mental images,technologies and organisations which bind together the members of a class and of an historic bloc into a common identity.Bourgeois intellectuals did this for a whole society in which the bourgeoisie was hegemonic. The organic intellectuals of the working class would perform a similar role in the creation of a new historic bloc under working class hegemony within that society. To do this they would have to evolve clearly distinctive culture,organisation and technique and do so in constant interaction with the members of the emergent block.Everyone,for Gramsci,is in some part an intellectual,although only some perform full-time the social function of an intellectual.In this task,the party was,in his conception,a 'collective intellectual'. In the movement towards hegemony and the creation of an historic bloc, Gramsci distinguished three levels of consciousness:the economico-corporative, which is aware of the specific interests of a particular group;the solidarity or class consciousness,which extends to a whole social class but remains at a purely economic level;and the hegemonic,which brings the interests of the leading class into harmony with those of subordinate classes and incorporates these other interests into an ideology expressed in universal terms.16 The movement towards hegemony,Gramsci says,is a 'passage from the structure to the sphere of the complex superstructures',by which he means passing from the specific interests of a group or class to the building of institutions and elaboration of ideologies.If they reflect a hegemony,these institutions and ideologies will be universal in form,i.e.,they will not appear as those of a particular class,and will give 168 Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at LIB SHANGHAI JIAOTONG UNIV on Odlober 10,2010Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at LIB SHANGHAI JIAOTONG UNIV on October 10, 2010