A state’s consent is organised and educated through associations, not merely election moments

Evidence

Hegel’s doctrine of parties and associations as the “private” woof of the State. This derived historically from the political experiences of the French Revolution, and was to serve to give a more concrete character to constitutionalism. Government with the consent of the governed—but with this consent organised, and not generic and vague as it is expressed in the instant of elections. The State does have and request consent, but it also “educates” this consent, by means of the political and syndical associations; these, however, are private organisms, left to the private initiative of the ruling class. Hegel, in a certain sense, thus already transcended pure constitutionalism and theorised the parliamentary State with its party system. But his conception of association could not help still being vague and primitive, halfway between the political and the economic; it was in accordance with the historical experience of the time, which was very limited and offered only one perfected example of organisation—the “corporative” (a politics grafted directly on to the economy). Marx was not able to have historical experiences superior (or at least much superior) to those of Hegel; but, as a result of his journalistic and agitational activities, he had a sense for the masses. Marx’s concept of organisation remains entangled amid the following elements: craft organisation; Jacobin clubs; secret conspiracies by small groups; journalistic organisation. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 961

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces a core Gramscian idea that will feed ‘educating consent’ and civil society later: consent is something the state actively organizes and shapes, not passively receives.
• XREF: This ‘educated consent’ seeds the later hegemonic mechanism where private associations of the ruling class organize popular consent — the machinery an Islamophobia analysis would map onto state-civil-society mediation of anti-Muslim attitudes.