Gramsci Meets Veblen: On the Search for a New Revolutionary Class

Thorstein Veblen's class analysis implicitly was a critique of the class analysis of some Marxists, who reduced the interdependence of economic base and ideological superstructure to a causal link from the former to the latter. Veblen's emphasis on the directive to take culture into account occurs later in Antonio Gramsci's theoretical innovations: namely, class struggle for cultural hegemony and the importance of the organic intellectual as ferment for class emergence. Gramsci was experiencing the mass movement of fascism, and the (now) classic analysis of social classes became an urgently needed extension to explain class evolution. Today, capitalism is in deep crisis once again. This paper argues that the drivers of the next revolutionary upheaval will, once more, be the social classes — particularly, the newly emerging ones. We graft ideas of Veblen onto concepts suggested by Gramsci to enhance the theoretical toolbox necessary to understand contemporary global class dynamics.