The reality in which Gramsci found himself after 1926 was one in which socialist revolutions had either been defeated or had failed to take place in the West, where capitalism had managed to survive the post-war economic crisis and stabilize itself, where parliamentary regimes had stood firm or had been replaced with authoritarian ones. These conditions were very different from those of the phase of revolutionary offensive between 1917 and 1921. They demanded a new analysis of the political and ideological resources of capitalist societies, the source of their extraordinary resilience. They also demanded a new strategy, one which would be different from that which had worked in Russia in 1917.