ABSTRACT
"Culture" has posed special difficulties for the study of state socialism, and scholarship has been much less successful in dealing with them than it has been with other problems such as political economy, elite politics, or, for some countries, local politics. Explanations of the preservation of the family under Chinese state socialism have taken functionalist and feminist forms. Some scholars in comparative politics have tried to recast inquiry in ways which begin with a conceptualization of culture and power as interpenetrating and mutually constitutive. "The hegemony of a political class meant for Gramsci that class had succeeded in persuading the other classes of society to accept its own moral, political and cultural values." The class-based hegemonic project also involved the construction around class of a form of social consciousness and self-consciousness that seems to persist even to the present day despite the concerted efforts of reformist leaders to eradicate it.
