I thought I’d look into Gramsci as an alternative to Althusser (or complement, I don’t know) because he wrote about Marxism and hegemony back in Italy in the early 20th century. Joseph V. Femia, author of Gramsci’s Political Though: Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Revolutionary Process writes:
He saw in a way that no previous Marxist had done that the rule of one class or group over the rest of society does not depend on material power alone; in modern times, at least, the dominant class must establish its own moral, political and cultural values s conventional norms of practical behavior. This is the essential idea embodied in ‘hegemony’, widely accepted as ‘the basic theoretical point of departure for Gramsci’s Marxism,’ the central nucleus of his conceptual system’. (3, also quoting C. Boggs and N. Auciello)
