It is not possible to recapitulate Gramsci’s formulations about the state and the superstructures here. All that we can do is to indicate the direction of Gramsci’s thinking in this domain. Much of Gramsci’s work is directed in polemic against economic reductive theories of the superstructures. Hence he argued that the proper posing of the relation between base and superstructures was the seminal issue in a Marxist theory of politics. (See particularly “The Modern Prince,” which composes part of the Prison Notebooks .) Fundamental class relations always, under conditions of developing capitalist relations, extend themselves in and through the “complex spheres of the superstructures”; for only thus could the reproduction of the social relations of capitalism be carried through in such a way as, progressively, to draw civil, social, political, and cultural life into a larger conformity with capital and its needs. In developed capitalist social formations, this enlargement of capital’s sway throughout the social formation as a whole depended, precisely, on the development of the state and of civil society. Here, Gramsci paid close attention to the “ethical” function of the state, by which he meant the “work” which the state performs on behalf of capital in establishing a new level of civilization, creating a new kind of social individual appropriate to the new levels of material existence accomplished by the development of capitalism’s base. It was through the state, through its work in and with the family, the law, education, the multiplicity of private associations, the cultural apparatus, the church, the formation of new strata of the intelligentsia, the formation of political parties, and the development of public opinion—in short, in the complex sphere of the superstructures—that capitalism ceased to be simply a system of production and became a whole form of social life, conforming everything else to its own movement. This expansion of the conception of what it is the superstructures “do” for capital is Gramsci’s first contribution.