A party severed from class roots becomes a rootless volunteer sect.

Evidence

The rather odd designation of Bordiga as “gypsy” can be taken to mean that in Gramsci’s view Bordiga’s conception of the party involved no organic relationship with the proletariat, but made it into a kind of “volunteer” organisation, unattached to any class. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2239

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gramsci’s term ‘organic’ here means a party grown from and answerable to a class, versus a voluntarist organisation with no class base.
• XREF: Feeds directly into the toolkit’s ‘hegemony’ and ‘common sense’ apparatus: organic vs. voluntarist party is the organisational counterpart to consent vs. coercion, and connects forward to later work on how mass consent is organised.