The notion of subaltern classes in the thought of Antonio Gramsci

The notion of 'subaltern classes' is one of the notions on which Antonio Gramsci reflects in his Prison Notebooks, a collection of notes he wrote during his years in captivity between June 1929 and 1935. Our work aims at reconstructing what the notion of 'subaltern' is, what its meaning is and what its stakes are for Gramsci. It is a question of discerning its place in the economy of the Notebooks, its overall importance within a project of almost seven years, but also its relationship with the other concepts present in the notes. First of all, it seems to us that the concept that Gramsci arrives at in Notebook 25 is that of 'subaltern classes' or 'subaltern groups'. For this reason, we will speak of 'subaltern classes' and not of the 'subaltern' in relation to Gramsci’s notion.