Long-range cultural groundwork is agency no less than the decisive final struggle

Evidence

But what had to happen included all the forms of individual agency, very much including their convictions as to their own freedom and their own efficacity. It is a fable one can tell, the other way round, perhaps, about the Cuban Revolution, in which, notoriously, the old Cuban Communist party failed to participate until very late in the day, owing to its assessment of “objective historical possibility.” One can then deduce a facile lesson about the debilitating effect of a belief in historical inevitability and the energizing capacities of certain voluntarisms. On a larger view, however, it has been argued that whatever the immediate assessment and practical decision of the party in the fire of the event, its own work among Cuban workers in the previous decades played an incalculable part in an ultimate revolutionary victory for which it was not itself immediately responsible. The creation of a revolutionary culture and consciousness -along the lines of Marx’s image of the “mole of history” — is no less a form of agency than the final struggle: but it is also itself part of the objective circumstances and the historical necessities that from a more immediate angle of praxis seem incompatible with action and agency in the first place. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 710

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘mole of history’ and slow cultural groundwork connects directly to Gramsci’s hegemony and to the slow-work themes in Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale about how ordinary labor accumulates into history.
• QUESTION: This reframing of determinism vs voluntarism as non-exclusive could sharpen the reader’s test of whether the cultural-dominant thesis is falsifiable.