Military leadership cannot be separated from political leadership in national struggles

Evidence

By military leadership should be understood not only military leadership in the strict, technical sense, i.e. with reference to the strategy and the tactics of the Piedmontese army, or of Garibaldi’s troops or of the various militias improvised in the course of local insurrections (Five Days of Milan, defence of Venice, defence of the Roman Republic, Palermo insurrection of 1848, etc.). It should be understood rather in a far wider sense, and one which is more closely connected with political leadership properly speaking. The essential problem which had to be faced from the military point of view was that of expelling from the peninsula a foreign power, Austria, which had at its disposal one of the largest armies in Europe at that time, and whose supporters in the peninsula itself, moreover, even in Piedmont, were neither few nor weak. Consequently, the military problem was the following: how to succeed in mobilising an insurrectional force which was capable not only of expelling the Austrian army from the peninsula, but of preventing it from being able to come back with a counter-offensive—given the fact that the violent expulsion would endanger the complex structure of the Empire, and hence would galvanise all the forces interested in its cohesion for a reconquest. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 490

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gramsci broadens ‘military leadership’ from technical strategy into a category inseparable from political leadership, showing that even apparently military questions are political ones in national-liberation struggle.
• XREF: Connects to the toolkit’s concern with how national-identity and hegemony work through seemingly non-political domains — mass mobilization and expulsion as a dual military-political problem. — connects to: Political struggle, not military force, determines hegemonic outcomes — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 105; Domination without leadership constitutes dictatorship without hegemony — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 551; Military discipline alone cannot create a political body.
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Political struggle, not military force, determines hegemonic outcomes — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 105; Domination without leadership constitutes dictatorship without hegemony — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 551; Military discipline alone cannot create a political body.

Broader Connections

• Political struggle, not military force, determines hegemonic outcomes #complicates (0.75) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 105