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Ken Spours 2025
Neo-Gramscian thinking for
21st-century progressive politics
Sustainability
The evolving theories of Antonio Gramsci - from 1.0 to 2.0
Source. Institute of Export and International Trade
Gramsci's Marxist political theory and its relevance today
Antonio Gramsci - Italian communist and Marxist theorist - was arguably one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th Century. In his Prison Notebooks, he reflected on the defeat of revolutions in the West following WW1 to produce a new Marxist political theory and a different revolutionary direction than Leninism in conditions of capitalist resilience and innovation.
In the years since, Gramsci's work has inspired revolutionaries worldwide to develop democratic roads to socialist change. Attuned to the challenges of 21st-century neoliberalism and fascism and the promises of insurgent environmental and social movements, here on Ken Spours 2025, you will find his original core concepts (Gramsci 1.0) comprehensively reinterpretated and applied to diverse fields - Gramsci 2.0.
This is intended as a comprehensive analytical toolkit to help move beyond neoliberal hegemony and towards a 'new progressive settlement' based on fairness, democracy, and sustainability amidst the challenges of climate breakdown and the rise of far-right national populism.
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While his original theoretical reflections were a product of their time, their analytical capabilities have proven to be both enduring and capable of elaboration. In recent decades, Gramsci's concepts of - hegemony, political party, state & civil society, and historical blocs - have been revisited and extended to analyze complex and rapidly changing 21st-century conditions, including works by:
Peter Burnham (1991) Neo-Gramscian analysis of capitalist restructuring and the new neoliberal world order.
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Bob Jessop (2008) A Neo-Gramscian state relational approach and (2005) Gramsci as a spatial theorist develop new perspectives on his political theory.
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Peter Thomas (2009) The Gramscian Moment re-establishes Gramsci's theory and politics in mainstream Marxism, following decades of a contested theoretical legacy.
Adam Morton (2010) International political economy.
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Harald Winkler (2020) Neo-Gramscian approaches to the Just Transition and climate change politics.
Panagiotis Sotiris (2022) Revisiting the concept of 'Passive Revolution' and (2018) Historical Bloc as a political strategy.
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Marco Guigliamo (2025) The Left and digital politics.
This evolving Neo-Gramscian literature demonstrates its continued relevance for understanding the challenges of our times and seeking paths to societal transformation (see Section - Gramsci 2.0: a comprehensive analytical toolkit).
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​Politics and the Just Transition
Additionally, there are related webpages on progressive political strategy written in collaboration with Compass. These cover an evolving study of the political Right - previously the Conservative Party and now Right national populism - driven by the desire to know the political adversary. Conversely, there are deliberations on progressive politics through think pieces on the 21st Century political party, alliance-based politics, transitioning and new settlements and, most recently, the need for a political and cultural reset for a failing British Labour Party.
There are also webpages on the Just Transition that combine sustainability and social justice, education for 21st-century conditions, and, most recently, notes on dialectical cosmology and the cosmological structural intellect that applies a range of Marxist concepts to conceptualise an evolving universe.
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​​Current political writing
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​​​The New Mainstream: Radical realism to unite a fractured Labour Party and a divided nation - Ken Spours, 24 September, 2025
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​​​​This latest blog published by Compass argues that Labour factionalism always leads to political failure and that the initiative and movement 'Mainstream' can help reunite Labour and provide a dynamic platform to defeat the Far Right. The blog also contains a brief analysis of Mainstream as an alliance-based idea and strategy.
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​Current research - socialised GenAI
​​Ken's current academic work concerns the conceptualisation of socialised large language models (LLMs) and collaborations between human and machine 'intellects' to assist with complex problem solving and progressive socio-technological outcomes.
Below, you will find pre-publication drafts of two articles that are forthcoming in journal form. The first, created with colleagues at Capital Normal University (CNU), Beijing, reports recent research with members of academic staff concerning their experience of LLMs in research and teaching in early 2025.
Building on the first, the second article proposes an alternative socialised system of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), seen as an infrastructure of progressive mediation. Both foundational pieces will inform the 'Large Language Model Development Programme' at CNU in November 2025 to be offered to both staff and students at its College of Education.
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Gramsci 2.0 - a comprehensive analytical toolkit for 21st-century progressive politics
Building on recent neo-Gramscian literature, Gramsci 2.0 represents a fusion of the original Gramsci 1.0 corpus and neo-Gramscian revisions with 45-degree political economy-ecology analysis and social ecosystem theory to produce a comprehensive analytical toolkit. The key aim of the toolkit is to assist in the development of 21st-century progressive politics.
Below you will find 10 new interrelated themes comprising the movement from Gramsci 1.0 to 2.0. Each of the 10 themes is connected to relevant webpages or documents.
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1. National organic crises (1.0) to global existential polycrisis (2.0) - crises become increasingly interrelated, globalised and existential, demanding a multi-dimensional long-term response.
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2. National hegemony to global hegemonic layers - in the globalised context, neoliberal hegemony becomes multi-layered and interlocking, suggesting that a counter-hegemony has to be multidimensional and functioning as a coherent socio-political ecosystem.
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3. Historical bloc to vertical/horizontal assemblages, sub-blocs & bloc contestation and 45-degree mediation - arguably Gramsci's most important Marxist concept, historical blocs are conceptualised here as multi-dimensional - vertical and horizontal assemblages that are entangled and mediated by organic intellectuals, both regressive and progressive. The concept of a sub-bloc is introduced to explain how new modes of production (e.g. Platform Capitalism) can lead the overall neoliberal bloc (see Theme 10).
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4. State & civil society to vertical & horizontal assemblages - these assemblages represent expanded versions of the state and civil society and are tied to the extended concept of historical bloc.
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​5. Organic intellectuals to 21st Century connective intellectuals and the Organic Intellect - the concept of organic intellectuals is elaborated in 21st century contexts and applied particularly to the world of generative artificial intelligence. The Organic Intellect is introduced as a new theoretical category resulting from the fusion of a horizontal social general intellect and progressive connective specialisation that links societal and economic/technological change.
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6. Political party (Modern Prince) to the 45-degree political ecosystem (Very Modern Prince) - Gramsci's concept of the political party 'organism' is elaborated as a combination of horizontal and vertical features that function ecosystemically to heighten political effectiveness. Feast concert.
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7. Equilibria to 'Double Shuffle settlements' - Gramsci's concept of 'equilibria', which represents 'settlements' - unstable and stable - in a long 'war of position', is elaborated through the adaptation of Stuart Hall's concept of the 'Double Shuffle', in which each 'settlement' comprises a combination of dominant and subordinate elements, allowing for a more granulated analysis of the political terrain.
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8. New civilisation - to post-neo-liberal transitioning - under the conditions of prison censorship, Gramsci could not use the terms 'Communism' or 'Marxism' in his Notebooks. Instead, communism was represented by the term 'new civilisation'. In the difficult neoliberal environment of 21st-century politics and the collapse of state socialism in the Soviet Union, the idea of a future society is conceptualised as 'transitioning away' from the current dominant order towards a fairer, democratic, and sustainable future, in other words, a democratic green socialism.
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9. Historicity to competing temporal models - Gramsci was an 'absolute historicist', believing that every idea could be explained by the time in which it was produced. Here, his historicity is extended into two competing temporal models - neoliberal and progressive concepts of 'time' and history linked to transitioning to new progressive settlements.
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10. Americanism and Fordism to Platform Capitalism 2.0 - Gramsci's only substantive economic work, which analysed the societal and political implications of the new mode of mass production, is reinterpreted here to analyse the latest innovations in US capitalism – Platform Capitalism 2.0 - functioning as a leading 'sub-bloc' in the wider evolving neoliberal economic technological formation.
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Recent publications
Ken Spours. 2025.
Transitioning to socialised systems of generative artificial intelligence in an era of Platform Capitalism 2.0. The role of technological organic intellectuals & the technological general intellect
Article submitted to MDPI journal Systems
Liying Rong, Zhen Zhong and Ken Spours. 2025.
Exploring evolving ‘problem spaces’ of large language models: mediation relationships between users and the new technology in teaching and research in Chinese higher education - forthcoming journal article
Ken Spours. 2025.
National Populism and the Political Three Body Problem. Compass publications
Ken Spours. 2025.
Social Ecosystem Thinking 2.0.
Redrafted Stimulus Paper of the Workshop on 'Skills Ecosystems and the Just Transition'. Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg, 20-24 November 2023.
Ken Spours & Neal Lawson. 2023.
The Ship and the Sea. The Framework for a New Settlement. Compass Publications.
Ken Spours & Paul Grainger. 2023.
The mediating role of further and higher education in a Just Transition social ecosystem Journal of Vocational Education and Training.
Ken Spours. 2022.
Hegemony Lost. The decline of the Tory historical project. Compass Publications.
'An English Education Revolution' (2011)
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This TED talk focused on the 'revolutionary' idea that English education should be free from ministerial political interference. Delivered in the aftermath of the Gove/Cummings 2010 Tory Education Act and New Labour's top-down managerial governance approach, it suggested that treating education like a 'political football' should be replaced by a 'partnership covenant' between governments and the education profession. Only this kind of collaboration can usher in a new era of both policy stability and innovation. While this message was delivered nearly 15 years ago it remains highly relevant today as we think about ways of rebuilding an education system undermined by Conservative government policy and austerity and, more recently, the Labour Government's policy hesitancy and lack of vision.
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