and confronted, ideologies are 'born' not in the ISAs but from the social classes at grips in the class struggle: from their conditions of existence, their practices, their experience of the struggle, and so on. ²

AHT indirectly admit that they had some difficulties in fitting Gramsci into their picture -- difficulties avoided in other cases because of AHT's option to remain silent. On the one hand, we are told that Gramsci I probably more than any other theorist [has] contributed to the contemporary dominant ideology thesis', with his 'conceptions of hegemony, and of ideology as cementing and unifying' (p. 14 ). On the other hand, a few lines later on the same page, we learn that Gramsci does not believe that the working class is completely subordinated any more than Marx did. He is no idealist. . . . Indeed, for Gramsci the economy is of prime importance.' ³ Some readers will, no doubt, wonder why Gramsci is included in the DIT company 'any more than Marx'. In fact, AHT proceed to give an answer. For Gramsci, 'despite the fact that there is a working-class consciousness at some level, its incorporation within a dominant ideology tends to produce "moral and political passivity"', which can be broken only 'as a result of struggle encouraged by a mass political party', the success of which 'depends partly on the party's intellectuals' (p. 15 ). Still, AHT would be unwise to make too much of any distinction between class and party or workers and intellectuals. In Gramsci's view, 'parties are only the nomenclature for classes', as the political organization of the latter: 'all members of a political party should be regarded as intellectuals', and between the 'spontaneous feeling' of the masses and the politically conscious leadership' there is but a '"quantitative" difference of degree, not one of quality'. ⁴ We shall consider presently whether Gramsci's view of the production of 'moral and political passivity' justifies AHT's assimilation of it to the 'empirically false and theoretically unwarranted' DIT. Let us just note that AHT do not take Marx to task for having said that 'the advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition, habit, looks upon the conditions of that mode of production as self-evident laws of nature' (quoted on p. 166 ). If Marx escapes their indictment, there seems little reason to incorporate Gramsci into the construct definition of DIT.

It should be conceded that Habermas and Marcuse appear to qualify better for the ranks of the damned. But since that has more to do with their doubts about class struggle under contemporary capitalism than with any denial of ideological class struggle, it would seem preferable to

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