Mature civil society resists economic crises like trench systems resist artillery

Evidence

The same reduction must take place in the art and science of politics, at least in the case of the most advanced States, where “civil society” has become a very complex structure and one which is resistant to the catastrophic “incursions” of the immediate economic element (crises, depressions, etc.). The superstructures of civil society are like the trench-systems of modern warfare. In war it would sometimes happen that a fierce artillery attack seemed to have destroyed the enemy’s entire defensive system, whereas in fact it had only destroyed the outer perimeter; and at the moment of their advance and attack the assailants would find themselves confronted by a line of defence which was still effective. The same thing happens in politics, during the great economic crises. A crisis cannot give the attacking forces the ability to organise with lightning speed in time and in space; still less can it endow them with fighting spirit. Similarly, the defenders are not demoralised, nor do they abandon their positions, even among the ruins, nor do they lose faith in their own strength or their own future. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 892

Categorization

• DEFINE: The war of position vs war of manoeuvre distinction is named and explained — core Gramscian vocabulary.
• XREF: Connects to later readings on hegemony as what makes state power survivable through crises in Western (post-Orientalism, Islamophobia) contexts.
• CANDY: The trench-warfare analogy for civil society surviving economic crisis is a compact, quotable image.