structure -- and ideology in the sense of the arbitrary speculations of individuals. This parallels to some extent the opposition we have observed elsewhere between 'ideology' and 'world-view', though we should note that for Marx himself the negative sense of ideology was by no means confined to arbitrary subjective speculation. Gramsci also dismisses any economistic reduction of ideology to the mere bad dream of the infrastructure: on the contrary, ideologies must be viewed as actively organizing forces which are psychologically 'valid', fashioning, the terrain on which men and women act, struggle and acquire consciousness of their social positions. In any 'historical bloc', Gramsci comments, material forces are the 'content', and ideologies the 'form'.

[. . .]

For Gramsci, the consciousness of subordinated groups in society is typically fissured and uneven. Two conflicting conceptions of the world usually exist in such ideologies, the one drawn from the 'official' notions of the rulers, the other derived from an oppressed people's practical experience of social reality. Such conflicts might take the form of what we have seen earlier as a 'performative contradiction' between what a group or class says, and what it tacitly reveals in its behaviour. But this is not to be seen as mere self-deception: such an explanation, Gramsci thinks, might be adequate in the case of particular individuals, but not in the case of great masses of men and women. These contradictions in thought must have a historical base; and Gramsci locates this in the contrast between the emergent concept of the world which a class displays when it acts as an 'organic totality', and its submission in more 'normal' times to the ideas of those who govern it. One aim of revolutionary practice, then, must be to elaborate and make explicit the potentially creative principles implicit in the practical understanding of the oppressed -- to raise these otherwise inchoate, ambiguous elements of its experience to the status of a coherent philosophy or 'world-view'.

[. . .]

To do this, however, means combating much that is negative in the empirical consciousness of the people, to which Gramsci gives the title of 'common sense'. Such common sense is a 'chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions' -- an ambiguous, contradictory zone of experience which is on the whole politically backward. How could we expect it to be otherwise, if a ruling bloc has had centuries in which to perfect its hegemony? In Gramsci's view there is a certain continuum between 'spontaneous' and 'scientific' consciousness, such that the difficulties of the latter should not be intimidatingly overestimated; but there is also a permanent war between revolutionary theory and the mythological or folkloric conceptions of the masses, and the latter is not to be

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