Subaltern history must be studied through six ascending formation phases

Evidence

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

Categorization

• DEFINE: The six-phase schema is the concrete methodological model for studying subaltern groups, from economic origins to full autonomy.
• XREF: This is a broadly useful analytic ladder for tracking how any marginalized group moves from clientelism toward autonomy.