It is the basis of such an analysis and strategy that Gramsci sought to develop in the prison notebook. One important strand of this work was theoretical. The Marxist tradition in which he had matured as a political militant was strong on general predictions about the course of capitalist development and about connections between economic crises and political transformation. But it was weak on detailed analyses of the forms of political power, the concrete relation between social classes and political representation and the cultural and ideological forms in which social antagonisms are fought out or regulated and dissipated . There was no adequate Marxist theory of the state or of what Gramsci called the ‘sphere of the complex superstructure’. Political, legal, cultural. In order to conduct his analysis, therefor, Gramsci needed to make a theoretical critique of mechanistic forms of historical materialism, most notable ’economism’. He then needed to expand the space occupied by politics in the Marxist tradition.