Gramsci’s hegemony is a produced unity, never automatic or given

Evidence

Gramsci then differentiates the “relations of force” into its different moments. He assumes no necessary teleological evolution between these moments. … The important thing here is that so-called “class unity” is never assumed, a priori. It is understood that classes, while sharing certain common conditions of existence, are also crosscut by conflicting interests, historically segmented and fragmented in this actual course of historical formation. Thus the “unity” of classes is necessarily complex and has to be produced—constructed, created—as a result of specific economic, political, and ideological practices. It can never be taken as automatic or “given.” … He notes the different stages through which class consciousness, organization, and unity can—under the right conditions—develop. There is the “economic corporate” stage, where professional or occupational groups recognize their basic common interests but are conscious of no wider class solidarities. Then there is the “class corporate” moment, where class solidarity of interests develops, but only in the economic field. Finally, there is the moment of “hegemony,” which transcends the corporate limits of purely economic solidarity, encompasses the interests of other subordinate groups, and begins to “propagate itself throughout society,” bringing about intellectual and moral as well as economic and political unity, and “posing also the questions around which the struggle rages … thus creating the hegemony of a fundamental social group over a series of subordinate groups.” — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 104

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes the three stages of class consciousness (economic corporate, class corporate, hegemony) and redefines class unity as constructed rather than automatic — core scaffolding vocabulary.
• XREF: Coultures the later move from Gramsci’s class-consciousness stages to postcolonial biopolitics; also the ‘unity is produced, never assumed’ move recurs in race/anti-racist formation theory in the Islamophobia canon.