A revolutionary crisis needs a vanguard party already formed to exploit it
Evidence
The debate about whether a revolution was really on the cards in 1919- 20 can of course never be conclusively resolved one way or the other; but what is certain is that even if the ruling class could not go on in the old way, and the oppressed classes were not prepared to go on in the old way, the revolutionary vanguard party which was needed to lead the assault on the bourgeois State did not exist until after the revolutionary crisis was over. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 84
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- DEFINE: Introduces the Gramscian criterion that a failed revolution indicates the absence of a vanguard party, a concept that recurs across his work.
- XREF: Connects to later Gramsci readings on hegemony and the war of position, and to Lenin’s vanguardism that Gramsci both inherits and reworks.