ABSTRACT
Antonio Gramsci attributed a meaning to Marx's phrase that it is men who make history in specific conditions, by analysing the moments and phases of the process by which men become aware in the ideological sphere of the historical tasks they must solve and at the same time develop, in the sphere of organisation, the institutions which will enable them to pursue struggles to the end. It can therefore be said that Gramsci was the theoretician of the superstructures, in other words, of political science, of the relations between civil society and the state, of the struggle for hegemony and the seizure of power, of the moments of consensus and force, of the relations between ethico-political and economico-political history, and that he was the theoretician of the function of the intellectuals and the political party. Marxism, writes Gramsci, does not detach the superstructures from the structure and upset the unity of historical reality by transforming the economy into metaphysical cause.
