A movement gains autonomy only by learning that existing conditions are contingent, not natural.

Evidence

Hence the conclusion that in building a party, it is necessary to give it a “monolithic” character rather than base it on secondary questions; therefore, painstaking care that there should be homogeneity between the leadership and the rank and file, between the leaders and their mass following. If, at the decisive moments, the leaders pass over to their “true party”, the rank and file militants are left suspended, paralysed and ineffective. One may say that no real movement becomes aware of its global character all at once, but only gradually through experience—in other words, when it learns from the facts that nothing which exists is natural (in the non-habitual sense of the word), but rather exists because of the existence of certain conditions, whose disappearance cannot remain without consequences. Thus the movement perfects itself, loses its arbitrary, “symbiotic” traits, becomes truly independent, in the sense that in order to produce certain results it creates the necessary preconditions, and indeed devotes all its forces to the creation of these preconditions. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 695

Categorization

• DEFINE: The ‘monolithic’ party ideal and the claim that movements mature by discovering the non-naturalness of conditions — a core mechanism in Gramsci’s thought for how subaltern groups become aware.
• XREF: The ‘nothing which exists is natural’ discovery is Gramsci’s anti-naturalizing gesture, resonating with Said’s critique of Orientalism’s naturalized essences.
• DEEPTHINKING: The idea that a movement only becomes truly independent when it creates its own preconditions rather than reacting symbiotically — a paradigm-shifting account of political maturity.