People accept necessary sacrifice but revolt against needless or neglectful losses

Evidence

Yet common sense shows that the majority of collective (political) disasters occur because no attempt has been made to avoid useless sacrifice, or because manifestly no account has been taken of the sacrifices of others and their lives have been gambled with. Everyone has heard officers from the front recount how the soldiers were quite ready to risk their lives when necessary, but how on the other hand they would rebel when they saw themselves overlooked. For example: a company would be capable of going for days without food because it could see that it was physically impossible for supplies to get through; but it would mutiny if a single meal was missed as a result of neglect or bureaucratism, etc. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 654

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gramsci distinguishes necessary from avoidable sacrifice as the crux of legitimate leadership.
• ADDENDUM: Connects to the sacrifice article: ‘On Sacrifice’ — here Gramsci provides the inverse mechanism, where perceived uselessness rather than magnitude triggers rebellion.
• XREF: Echoes later hegemony theory: consent depends on perceived rationality of demands, which Islamophobia scholarship applies to manufactured political sacrifice. — connects to: People may revolt whenever they judge oppression grave enough to warrant it. — , Second-Treatise-of-Government-1645716289, 3337