Rethinking Gramscian Power Analysis in Light of Bogdanov’s Tektology
* Article: Şenalp, Örsan. 2026. “Organizational Hegemony: Rethinking Gramscian Power Anaysis in Light of Bogdanov’s Tektology.” Marxism & Sciences 8: 147–197. doi
Contextual Quote
"While Bogdanov’s universal science of organization—developed from a working-class perspective while remaining faithful to the essence of Marxism (Rowley 2024a, b, c)—was suppressed and forgotten, the impact of cybernetics, systems, and complexity theories, developed from a managerial class perspective abstracted from this radical transformative vision, underscores the significance of Bogdanov’s legacy. The same can now be said for the impact of Gramsci’s complex power analysis and hegemony theory. We believe that the open and complete reintegration of these two cultural legacies holds strong potential for constructing and implementing a radical counter-hegemony project. Such a synthesis would enhance Marxism’s capacity, as a radical social critique, to respond to contemporary global capitalism and its crises, and it would aid in creating renewed theoretical tools for mobilizing oppressed masses in future struggles."
- Orsan Senalp [1]
Abstract
"This text explores the profound intellectual relationship between Antonio Gramsci and Alexander Bogdanov, two pivotal figures of 20th-century Marxism whose legacies have historically been viewed as parallel but independent. Recent discoveries, most notably Gramsci’s 1920s Italian translation of Bogdanov’s science fiction novel Red Star, conclusively prove that Gramsci directly and deeply engaged with Bogdanov’s ideas during a critical phase of his own theoretical development even though explicit references are missing. Central to the text is the reconstruction of Gramscian hegemony through Bogdanov’s Tektology (Universal Organizational Science). ‘Organization’ is identified as the primary point of convergence. By integrating Gramsci’s power analysis with Bogdanov’s systemic insights—which pioneered the ‘systems paradigm’, the text proposes a new framework: Organizational Hegemony. This synthesis offers a sophisticated methodology for analyzing the complex, data-driven power structures of contemporary neoliberal globalization and provides a renewed foundation for revolutionary socialist strategy."
Excerpts
The Deep Traces of Bogdanov’s Organizational Thought in Gramsci
Orsan Senalp:
The discussion above aimed to uncover the historical connections, long lost until recently, that indicate the need for a more systematic and in-depth comparison of the similarities and differences between Gramsci’s and Bogdanov’s thought. The following two sections continue to point toward directions for new research while serving as a call to reintegrate and apply the ideas of these two figures to contemporary conditions for the reconstruction of socialist theory and practice.
At this stage, it is essential to focus on the primary convergence that suggests Gramsci was influenced by Bogdanov’s thought. This convergence centers on the concept of organization, which lies at the heart of both thinkers’ ideas and represents the most significant link between their legacies. This observation was first made by Riechers in his book mentioned earlier (Riechers 1970). In the subsection titled “Marxism as Idealism, Socialism as Organization,” the German author claims that Gramsci’s early Marxist thought was shaped by the influence of idealist bourgeois thinkers such as Garofalo, Mondolfo, Croce, and Gentile, leading him to reduce historical materialism to idealism. He then asserts that Bogdanov’s concept of organization was also central to Gramsci’s thought.
According to Riechers: “For Gramsci, organization becomes, as it did for Bogdanov and his followers in the Russian revolutionary movement during the same period, a similarly independent and fetishized umbrella term” (Riechers 1970, 51). He further states: “Although the first traces of a Bogdanov-style organization theory appear only in the prison writings, Gramsci is already following a path similar to Bogdanov’s.” In other words, according to Riechers, even before the Notebooks, Gramsci employed a concept of organization akin to Bogdanov’s, and in his prison notes, there are traces of a theory resembling the one Bogdanov developed in Tektology. Though his intent is negative, we believe Riechers’ observation is highly significant, and this claim requires thorough and systematic investigation. We will examine the basis of this claim in the Notebooks more closely in the next section.
In the continuation of the paragraph, Riechers argues that in Gramsci, as in Bogdanov, the concept of socialism is overshadowed by the concept of organization, which is primarily tied to culture. This inference is drawn from the following quote from Gramsci: “Socialism is an organization, and not only a political and economic organization, but also and especially an organization of knowledge and will, sustained through cultural activity” (p. 51).
Riechers further explains the cultural purpose of organization—or its synonymous term, unity—through another quote from Gramsci:
Within the class, organization necessarily takes the place of individualism for the proletariat, absorbing its energy and rationality. (...) The fundamental purpose of unity is to accustom people to selflessness: honesty, work, and initiative become ends in themselves; they provide individuals only with intellectual satisfaction and moral joy, not material privileges... Work has now become a moral duty. (Riechers 1970, 51)
Indeed, we observe that, starting from 1916, Gramsci began to use the concept of organization—crucial to his own intellectual and practical experience—in a manner approaching, though not fully coinciding with, the meaning Bogdanov formulated in its most mature form during 1911–12 while writing Tektology. The quotes provided by Iacarella (2025) confirm this:
We must break this habit and stop perceiving culture as encyclopedic knowledge, where a person is seen merely as a vessel to be filled and stored with empirical data (...). Culture is something very different. Culture is organization, the discipline of one’s inner self, the appropriation of one’s personality, the conquest of a higher consciousness through which one understands one’s historical value and function in life.” (Gramsci 2019, 128–9)
In this passage, in alignment with Riechers’ quote above, we see Gramsci defining culture as organization, much like Bogdanov. And a year later, in The City of Future, Gramsci uses the concept of organization in the context of socialism and culture, reminiscent of the future society described in Bogdanov’s RS, while also linking it to the concept of free will:
I give culture this meaning: the exercise of thought, the acquisition of general ideas, the habit of connecting causes and effects. For me, everyone is already cultured, because everyone thinks, everyone connects causes and effects. But they are so empirically, primordially, not organically. (...) And since I know that culture is also a basic concept of socialism, because it integrates and concretizes the vague concept of freedom of thought, I would like it to be enlivened by the other, by the concept of organization. (...) Is this need widespread or limited to a few? Let the few begin. (Gramsci 2015, 673–4)
Here, too, we see Gramsci proposing to “enliven” the concept of culture by equating it with the concept of organization. Remarkably, though the term was not widely used at the time in this sense, he calls for initiating this conceptual identification, even if it starts only with a few people. Even at this point, we can see Gramsci closely aligning with Bogdanov.
What we consider decisive is Bogdanov’s emphasis on the universal meaning of the concept, which aligns with Riechers’ commentary cited above. In the first section of Tektology, written in 1911–12, where Bogdanov lays out its conceptual and methodological foundations and main principles, he discusses why this universality is crucial, addressing how bourgeois culture and science, rooted in individualism, fail to recognize it (Bogdanov 1980 and 1996). At the beginning of his introduction, Bogdanov complains that the term “organization” is misused in both scientific and everyday language, narrowly applied to human and social institutions. According to him, every kind of physical or mental “complex whole” or “system” can be seen as an organizational process and analyzed on this basis; from atoms and molecules to celestial bodies and star systems, from organic and living organisms to humans, societies, economies, languages, ideas, and all processes of formation, transformation, and dissolution in the universe should be fundamentally treated as organizational processes. He argues that, based on this principle and the method of natural sciences, the most general science can be constructed. The failure to grasp this universality of the organization concept remains a significant issue even today (Rispoli 2012 and 2015, Şenalp and Midgley 2023). Therefore, Gramsci’s recognition of this generality at that time represents significant convergence.
Again, as Iacarella quoted from Bergami (2025), Gramsci writes in a letter to Lonetti:
Education, culture, and the widespread organization of knowledge and experience ensure the independence of the masses from intellectuals. (...) This work cannot be postponed until tomorrow, until we are politically free. This work is itself freedom, it stimulates action and is a condition for action (...); socialism is organization, and not only political and economic, but also and especially an organization of knowledge and will, achieved through cultural activity (Gramsci 2023, p. 622).
Here, too, confirming Riechers’ claims cited above, we see that as early as 1918, Gramsci’s conception of the term aligns with Bogdanov’s. In Bogdanov’s view, various forms of ideology—such as mythologies, religions, philosophy, and science—as well as language and social institutions, which are part of culture (i.e., superstructural forms), are developed tools or new organs (resulting from evolutionary selection) for organizing life experience (Bogdanov 1996). From this perspective, praxis itself is always organizational: it aims to organize (or, conversely, disorganize, i.e., disrupt or transform existing organizational forms) reality and its perception, i.e., “experience” (Bogdanov 2015 and 2019). In the passage above, we see Gramsci using the concept of organization in a manner very close to Bogdanov’s expressed meaning, particularly in associating knowledge and culture with the “organization of experience,” the source of which directly stems from Bogdanov.
Beyond the quotes above, looking at Gramsci’s pre-Notebooks writings, the following lines from a programmatic text published around the time of the Italian Communist Party’s founding in 1920 are particularly striking: “In the Communist Party, the worker thus transforms from an executor to an initiator, from a mass to a leader... from being organized to becoming an organizer” (Gramsci 1920). The expression of workers transitioning from executors to initiators, from “being organized” to “becoming organizers,” clearly bears traces of Bogdanov’s ideas, articulated in connection with his cultural revolution perspective. According to Bogdanov, class struggles take place between organized classes and the classes that organize them and is essentially a struggle between organizational forms (Sochor 1988). The Russian revolutionary expresses this as follows:
If classes and groups in society clash destructively and subvert one another, it is precisely because each collective aims to organize the world and humanity according to its ideals, for itself. This is a result of the organizing forces being separated and isolated; it is a result of the lack of unity and a common, harmonious organization. This is a struggle of organizational forms. (Bogdanov 1980, 4)
It is possible that Gramsci drew this final conceptualization from Bogdanov’s article “Proletarian Poetry,” published in ON as mentioned above. However, an undeniable alternative is that Gramsci may have been aware of the expanded text of Bogdanov’s book, published as a series of articles in Proletarskaya Kultura between 1919 and 1921 and compiled in 1921 under the title Essays in Tektology (Bogdanov 1980). In connection with the quote above, in the lines where Gramsci outlines the ideas he considered as slogans for the Communist Party, we see him almost using Bogdanov’s terminology, which Lenin had dismissed as “organizational nonsense”: “Organization, the maximum effort of organization, structuring the new party, and maximum speed in organization” (Gramsci 1990, 3).
We see that Riechers’ claims hold some truth. Gramsci’s thought bears deep traces of the universal concept of organization. Although Gramsci does not imbue the concept of organization with the same breadth and universality as Bogdanov and primarily uses it in the context of human institutions and organizations, his frequent generalization of the term to encompass culture and ideology, and his view of education and knowledge as the organization of experience, demonstrates his close alignment with Bogdanov. Additionally, confirming Riechers, we must note that the concept of organization, along with other terms from Bogdanov’s organizational vocabulary, is among the key concepts in the Notebooks.[26]
Gramsci’s tendency to limit the application of the organization concept to phenomena within the realm of social and human sciences can largely be explained by his linguistic education and his critical stance against positivism, empiricism, and the natural-scientific approach (i.e., the idea of applying the methods of natural sciences to social sciences), influenced by his readings of Labriola and Croce. However, it is also true that if Gramsci had gone further and applied the concept of organization to physical reality, which is the domain of natural sciences, and had taken it to its fullest meaning as universal, this would have meant that his ideas would have coincided to a greater extent with Bogdanov's, and this coincidence would have reached an undeniable level. In fact, we know that Gramsci did not completely reject the idea of overcoming the distinction between natural sciences and social and human sciences, which underlies the distinction between base and superstructure. We can deduce this from the note he took in the context of Lukács's critique of Engels (Quaderni, Notebook 4, note 43).
Before concluding this section, we reiterate the importance of tracing the ideas Gramsci may have presented indirectly or covertly, for the reasons outlined in previous sections. Therefore, to clarify the relationship between the two legacies, systematic studies aiming to deepen this inquiry, particularly to textually and theoretically establish whether Gramsci developed a general organization theory reminiscent of Bogdanov’s in the Notebooks, as Riechers suggested, are essential."
Conclusion: Reuniting Bogdanov with Gramsci for the victory
The relationship between Gramsci and Bogdanov has great potential for the reconstruction of Marxist theory. The RS translation, which emerged from the work of Righi and Ghetti has proven that there is a direct link between these two revolutionary thinkers and has brought the discussions that had remained at the level of speculation for years to a new level. Gramsci was directly and indirectly influenced by Bogdanov's organizational thinking, and this influence was not limited to issues such as hegemony, culture and proletarian consciousness it was an influence that affected Gramsci’s general Machiavellian analysis of power. However, Lenin and Stalin's ideological condemnation of Bogdanov prevented this influence from being clearly expressed and led Gramsci to conceal his interest in Bogdanov.
It is now clear that Bogdanov’s Tektology was a forerunner of the scientific paradigms of the 20th century such as cybernetics, systems theory and complexity science. When combined with Bogdanov’s universal science of organization, Gramsci’s power analysis and theory of hegemony offers a powerful tool for analyzing the complex hegemony of neoliberal globalization its organic crisis as well as constructing a counter-hegemonic line and project from the perspective of workers and other oppressed classes. The MEGA project, along with new sources such as English translations of Bogdanov's works[28] and critical editions of Gramsci's writings, creates a unique opportunity to reassess these two legacies. In this context, the systematic integration of Gramsci and Bogdanov's ideas will strengthen Marxism's capacity to respond to contemporary global capitalism and open a new theoretical horizon for the future of socialist strategy."