Economic struggle becomes political when class fights for its very organization.

Evidence

One point of reference for the study of economism, and for understanding the relations between structure and superstructure, is the passage in The Poverty of Philosophy where it says that an important phase in the development of a social class is that in which the individual components of a trade union no longer struggle solely for their own economic interests, but for the defence and the development of the organisation itself. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 706

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gramsci’s key phase-transition: the passage from economic-corporate to political class consciousness, foundational for his fuller hegemony argument.
• XREF: This ‘defence of the organisation itself’ step is the same structure later Islamophobia scholarship maps where identity groups organize politically beyond immediate material interests.