Black parliamentarism operates like informal markets, explained through hegemony

Evidence

The entire subject needs re-examining, especially with respect to the “implicit” party system and parliamentarism, i.e. that which functions like “black markets” and “illegal lotteries” where and when the official market and the State lottery are for some reason kept closed. … Theoretically the important thing is to show that between the old defeated absolutism of the constitutional regimes and the new absolutism there is an essential difference, which means that it is not possible to speak of a regression; not only this, but also to show that such “black parliamentarism” is a function of present historical necessities, is “a progress” in its way, that the return to traditional “parliamentarism” would be an anti-historical regression, since even where this “functions” publicly, the effective parliamentarism is the “black” one. … Theoretically it seems to me that one can explain the phenomenon with the concept of “hegemony”, with a return to “corporativism”-not in the ancien regime sense, but in the modern sense of the word, in which the “corporation” cannot have closed and exclusivistic limits as was the case in the past. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 952

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘implicit party system’ / ‘black parliamentarism’ as the informal mechanism that substitutes for formal institutions when those are closed — and explicitly links it to ‘hegemony’.
• XREF: This is Gramsci articulating hegemony as the analytic that explains informal/back-channel power — central to how later theorists (Said’s Orientalism critique, Hall) treat culture as the site of power.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that new absolutism is a ‘progress’ over constitutional parliamentarism and that returning to traditional forms would be ‘anti-historical regression’ inverts the usual progressive/regressive framing of political change — a genuinely paradigm-shifting way to think about institutional evolution.