A disciplined centralized party is the prerequisite for Soviet experiments

Evidence

The existence of a cohesive and strongly disciplined Communist Party which, through its factory, trade-union and co-operative nuclei, co-ordinates and centralises within its own executive committee all of the proletariat’s revolutionary activity, is the fundamental and indispensable condition for attempting any Soviet experiment. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 97

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is Gramsci’s core definition of the revolutionary party’s coordinating function—the counterweight to his later elaboration of civil-society hegemony, useful for the toolkit’s scaffolding.
• XREF: This party-centralism thesis forms the background against which Gramsci’s later theory of hegemony as diffuse civil-society leadership is defined — a tension the reader will need when the Islamophobia readings discuss organic intellectuals and counter-hegemony.