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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.
Word Count: 774
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