FREE ESSAY ON GRAMSCI

GRAMSCI

Final Exam
1. Gramsci's concept of critical understanding states that all 
men are philosophers, and that the inherent common sense that 
the average individual has is not critical and coherent but 
disjointed and episodic. Political education can transform this 
common sense into critical understanding. Individuals of the 
subordinate class look to organic individuals within their own 
class for leadership in order to be able to construct 
oppositional conceptions of life that would become popular and 
hegemonic. Critical understanding is dependent on three mutually 
supportive conditions. One being free spaces, where workers and 
organic individuals come together, serving as a reference group, 
to create an autonomous culture which is dedicated to 
challenging capitalist, political, and ideological rule. The 
second condition is that there must be organic individuals 
committed to help form alternative perspectives which challenge 
the status quo, working to educate the subaltern class. Lastly, 
there must be plausibility which sustains these alternative 
perspectives. These organic individuals take the collective 
framework of the subaltern class and present it in a way that 
helps provide some realization of what is already understood 
about the world, and their economic exploitation.
The concept of critical understanding is similar to the 
quest dimension of individual in a few distinct ways. One way 
is that there is a questioning quality in both in which there is 
a willingness to seek change. The leadership of organic 
individuals make it possible for members of the subaltern class 
to change their religious worldviews. The quest dimension is 
commited to questioning existing social systems and 
institutions to pave the way for social change through an open-
ended dialogue. Critical understanding looks to challenge the 
existing social realities and the hierarchy of the dominant 
group in this way. Secondly, the quest dimension is commited to 
abstract moral prinsiples and a higher social well-being. This 
is similar to critical understanding in that there is a struggle 
for economic and social justice from a disjuncture between the 
ideal and what is real. Lastly, the quest dimension combines 
both an open ended skepticism with a higher commitment to social 
well-being to make a stand on behalf of the oppressed in order 
to be commited to social and economic justice. This is similar 
to critical understanding in that the coersive, ideological, and 
hegemonic power that the dominant society has over the subaltern 
class is used as a form of discourse which directs action to 
creating alternative worldviews for themselves.
An individual could use the concept of critical 
understanding and the quest dimension to develop an oppositional 
religious perspective that could promote resistance to 
domination. Discursive resources as a means of transforming 
dominant beliefs and ideologies can serve as resistence to 
domination in which subaltern classes and questers take the 
dominant ideologies, which is possible because of the open-ended 
dialogue with the comlexity of life's existential issues, and 
shape them to combat the dominant group.
2. Religion provideed the miners with the social reference 
groups and plausibility structures required to develope a 
critical undertanding of their social and economic situation in 
a few distinct ways. Providing group resources within the free 
spaces as a form of plausability. These group resources 
included affirmative therapies (designed to halt any doubts in 
the belief system), rituals (that reiterate their beliefs), and 
idological legitimation (which confirmed these beliefs). In 
addition, religion served as a mediating variable in the social 
conflict of economical power and a catalyst for change, as well 
as a significant dimension of the politics of class formation. 
Also, religious leaders took an educative role as organic 
individuals in the struggle to create alternative worldviews by 
replacing the dominant worldviews of the hierarical dominant 
class.
Miners rewrote hymns to proclaim their ideas and feelings 
towards unionization in order to put into words what the 
community already knew, somewhat like the Objibwa hymn singers. 
They also sang to help sustain the plausibility of miners' 
belief in the efficacy of collective struggle. In addition, 
the miners' transformed religiosity gave cohesion and strength 
to a social class, and permitted the miners to resist the 
servility and feelings of inferiority that class oppression 
often breeds in the oppressed. The miners questioned religious 
orthodoxies that told them they had to adhere to the ideologies 
of the dominant class, thus using these orthodoxies and using 
them as discursive resources in order to form their own 
religious ideologies. They took discursive assumptions about 
what their religion told them, shaped their perspective in order 
to direct their actions to form their own beliefs about their 
economic situation. These instances are examples of how 
religious rituals added to the plausibility structure required 
to develop a critical understanding of their situation.