Ruling-class political blunders are possible and get corrected through successive crises

Evidence

From this it can be deduced that a particular political act may have been an error of calculation on the part of the leaders [dirigenti ] of the dominant classes, an error which historical development, through the parliamentary and governmental “crises” of the directive [dirigenti ] classes, then corrects and goes beyond. Mechanical historical materialism does not allow for the possibility of error, but assumes that every political act is determined, immediately, by the structure, and therefore as a real and permanent (in the sense of achieved) modification of the structure. The principle of “error” is a complex one: one may be dealing with an individual impulse based on mistaken calculations or equally it may be a manifestation of the attempts of specific groups or sects to take over hegemony within the directive grouping, attempts which may well be unsuccessful. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1452

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘principle of error’ against mechanical materialism’s claim that every political act is structurally determined.
• XREF: Connects directly to how Gramsci’s theory of hegemony departs from crude base-superstructure Marxism — a distinction Islamophobia scholars inherit in critiquing economic-reductionist accounts.