Subaltern classes lack unity until they achieve statehood, hence history of subalternity

Evidence

The subaltern classes, by definition, are not unified and cannot unite until they are able to become a “State”: their history, therefore, is intertwined with that of civil society, and thereby with the history of States and groups of States. Hence it is necessary to study: 1. the objective formation of the subaltern social groups, by the developments and transformations occurring in the sphere of economic production; their quantitative diffusion and their origins in pre-existing social groups, whose mentality, ideology and aims they conserve for a time; 2. their active or passive affiliation to the dominant political formations, their attempts to influence the programmes of these formations in order to press claims of their own, and the consequences of these attempts in determining processes of decomposition, renovation or neo-formation; 3. the birth of new parties of the dominant groups, intended to conserve the assent of the subaltern groups and to maintain control over them; 4. the formations which the subaltern groups themselves produce, in order to press claims of a limited and partial character; 5. those new formations which assert the autonomy of the subaltern groups, but within the old framework; 6. those formations which assert the integral autonomy, … etc. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 416

The subaltern classes, by definition, are not unified and cannot unite until they are able to become a “State”: their history, therefore, is intertwined with that of civil society, and thereby with the history of States and groups of States. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 416

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the subaltern classes precisely as those that are not unified and cannot unite until they can become a State.
• XREF: This is foundational for Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ and postcolonial/subaltern studies; also connects forward to Islamophobia readings on marginalized Muslim communities.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 416