Gramsci's Double-field Shift In Civil Society Theory

Civil society is a key concept in Gramsci's political philosophy,it is the logical starting point of intellectual theory and the secular foundation of practical philosophy world view.Gramsci completed the creative construction of this theory by the dual transformation of civil society both the public perspective to the “private” perspective and the economic perspective to the cultural perspective,which is the realistic weapon in response to the second international theorist's paradox of economism.From the source of theory,Gramsci's dual transformation of civil society theory originated from the identity crisis in the late capitalist society.It is embodied in the following two aspects,on the one hand,capitalism in this stage showed the overall trend of production concentration,on the other hand,the deepening of the exploitation of the bourgeoisie has also led to the outbreak of people's doubts and distrust of the capitalist system in the whole society.However,at the same time,the second international theorists tried to replace social revolution by means of increasing productivity in the opposite direction.According to this situation,Gramsci clarified that the essence of economism is the vulgarization of Marxism,and he also proposed to acquire cultural leadership by mastering the civil society as a private and cultural vision in order to take advantage of the identity crisis in the late capitalist period to achieve the ultimate goal of the revolution.The transformation of perspective from public to private is the first shift in Gramsci's theory of civil society.In this process,Gramsci changed the previous tradition exploring the theoretical level of civil society from the perspective of public will or universality.He started with the non-compulsory form of realistic function and incorporated civil society into the private sector,designed trade unions and churches as private organizations constituting civil society from a private perspective.The transformation of perspective from economic to cultural is the second turn of this theory.The cultural perspective is based on Gramsci's summary of the specific content of civil society.In his opinion,civil society and political society correspond to cultural and political fields in real life respectively,so that it can be regarded as the superstructure area including the whole ideology.As a result,the struggle for ideological leadership is handed over to such cultural organizations as party schools and schools in the civil society.In a nutshell,although the private vision and the public vision frame civil society from different dimensions just like form and content,externally and internally.In fact,they are intrinsically consistent----on the one hand,both private and cultural perspectives have completed the reconstruction of the dual relationship between civil society and the state,on the other hand,they have kept the pace with the methodology of Marx's historical materialism.Therefore,for the context of Marxism itself,Gramsci's dual vision transformation of civil society theory can also be seen as Gramsci's opposition to economic determinism,which proves itself to be the impetus for the transformation of Marxism from a one-country theory to a multi-country practice.