A progressive national bloc requires allying with the peasant masses and lower intellectuals

Evidence

It is obvious that, in order to counterpose itself effectively to the Moderates, the Action Party ought to have allied itself with the rural masses, especially those in the South, and ought to have been “Jacobin” not only in external “form”, in temperament, but most particularly in socio-economic content. The binding together of the various rural classes, which was accomplished in a reactionary bloc by means of the various legitimist-clerical intellectual strata, could be dissolved, so as to arrive at a new liberal-national formation, only if support was won from two directions: from the peasant masses, by accepting their elementary demands and making these an integral part of the new programme of government; and from the intellectuals of the middle and lower strata, by concentrating them and stressing the themes most capable of interesting them (and the prospect of a new apparatus of government being formed, with the possibilities of employment which it offered, would already have been a formidable element of attraction for them—if that prospect had appeared concrete, because based on the aspirations of the peasantry). — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 462

Categorization

• DEFINE: Specifies what ‘being Jacobin in socio-economic content’ means for Gramsci: winning the peasantry through their elementary demands rather than mere form/temperament.
• XREF: This is a core piece of Gramsci’s theory of the national-popular bloc and intellectual hegemony that will resurface in Islamophobia critique as conservative blocs built over subaltern classes. — connects to: Revolutionary movements fail when foreign allies restrain land reform that could win rural support