A state can defuse revolution by restraining provocation and waiting out empty rhetoric.
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
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Connects forward to Gramsci’s hegemony concept: the state rules partly by not overplaying coercion, letting the subaltern class exhaust itself.
- DEEPTHINKING: A compact mechanism of how dominant groups neutralize insurrection without direct force — the exact strategic logic behind ‘common sense’ and bourgeois pragmatism Gramsci theorizes elsewhere.