Social change unfolds across escalating levels of relations of force

Evidence

The specific question of economic hardship or well-being as a cause of new historical realities is a partial aspect of the question of the relations of force, at the various levels. Changes can come about either because a situation of well-being is threatened by the narrow self-interest of a rival class, or because hardship has become intolerable and no force is visible in the old society capable of mitigating it and of re-establishing normality by legal means. Hence it may be said that all these elements are the concrete manifestation of the conjunctural fluctuations of the totality of social relations of force, on whose terrain the passage takes place from the latter to political relations of force, and finally to the military relation which is decisive. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 767

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the relations-of-force spectrum — economic to political to military — that is a cornerstone of Gramsci’s analytic vocabulary.
• XREF: This escalatory schema is essential background for how Islamophobia readings will later discuss the passage from cultural/economic to state and coercive relations of power. — connects to: Political change becomes social change only through redirecting technology — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 801; Social change resists explanation within any single social science — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 28; The same mechanism that unites society also drives its historical change — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at…, 1544