Having seen the failure of communism in the Soviet Union under Stalin, the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci proposed a new way of introducing Marxist philosophy to Europe. Instead of the traditional style of revolution, in which the revolutionaries would seize a city by capturing the railway station, the post office, and various official buildings, Gramsci advocated a more subtle approach. Marxists would work their way into positions of power in universities, national broadcasters, influential newspapers and other institutions where they could influence first elite, then popular opinion. Rudolf Dutschke, in a book on Gramsci, later dubbed this approach "the long march through the institutions."

This Gramscian approach ensured that, when the discipline of cultural studies began to take shape in British universities in the 1960s, many of those who introduced it were either Marxists or Marxist sympathizers. At the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, one of the pioneering institutions in the field, Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall drew on Gramsci's ideas, as well as those of Althusser and other French Marxists. The rise of cultural studies coincided with the decline of the manufacturing industry in Britain and the concomitant rise of unemployment among the working class. Academics in cultural studies linked literary and cultural themes to current politics from a left-wing perspective, and it quickly became accepted as a matter of course that Marxism would provide the intellectual basis for the new field.