This article defends the hypothesis that the strategic moment in the class struggle to construct an alternative hegemony is when a hegemonic apparatus is created outside of the functional structures and institutions of the capitalist state. Therefore, it is necessary to consider the potential for the expansion of the political practices of the working classes beyond the limits of bourgeois institutions. It is by debating between the Gramscian perspective of the concepts of hegemony and ideology, on the one hand, and the reading of those same ideas by structural Marxism, on the other, that we expect to find the appropriate theoretical framework for the approach suggested here.