A party is complete only when it becomes historically redundant

Evidence

It is true that one may say that a party is never complete and fully-formed, in the sense that every development creates new tasks and functions, and in the sense that for certain parties the paradox is true that they are complete and fully-formed only when they no longer exist—i.e. when their existence has become historically redundant. Thus, since every party is only the nomenclature for a class, it is obvious that the party which proposes to put an end to class divisions will only achieve complete self-fulfilment when it ceases to exist because classes, and therefore their expressions, no longer exist. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 674

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gramsci’s core definition of a party as ‘the nomenclature for a class’ — the party is not self-standing but a name/expression for a social class.
• XREF: The idea that a movement achieves fulfilment only by abolishing itself echoes into how the reader might frame religious or nationalist mass movements that claim to supersede sectarian partition.