A state can defuse revolt by denying radicals the repression that mobilizes masses.

Evidence

All Giolitti, who had become Prime Minister again in June, had to do was to restrain the more hotheaded employers who would have liked the troops sent in — an action which might have provoked precisely the immense mass reaction which alone could have escalated the confrontation to a struggle for state power — and to wait until the workers had fully realised that their leaders’ revolutionary words were empty rhetoric. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 105

Categorization

• CANDY: A crisp insight: sometimes the shrewdest state move is to refuse the crackdown the radicals secretly need.
• XREF: connects to: Revolutionaries can refuse elections as legitimating the state they seek to topple — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 305; State repression of dissent solidifies community solidarity and legitimates even lethal internal enforcement — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 539; People may revolt whenever they judge oppression grave enough to warrant it. — , Second-Treatise-of-Government-1645716289, 3337 (+2 more)