Politics sustains permanent organizations by identifying with economics while transcending it

Evidence

If the Crocean concept of passion as a moment of politics comes up against the difficulty of explaining and justifying the permanent political formations, such as the parties and still more the national armies and General Staffs, since it is impossible to conceive of a passion being organised permanently without its becoming rationality and deliberate reflection and hence no longer passion, the solution can only be found in the identification of politics and economics. Politics becomes permanent action and gives birth to permanent organisations precisely in so far as it identifies itself with economics. But it is also distinct from it, which is why one may speak separately of economics and politics, and speak of “political passion” as of an immediate impulse to action which is born on the “permanent and organic” terrain of economic life but which transcends it, bringing into play emotions and aspirations in whose incandescent atmosphere even calculations involving the individual human life itself obey different laws from those of individual profit, etc. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 635

Categorization

• DEFINE: The ‘political passion’ concept resolves the paradox that permanent institutions can’t be built on transient passion: passion organizes itself where politics fuses with economics.
• XREF: This links to later Gramsci readings on hegemony as the moment politics organizes itself on economic terrain. Also contrasts with Weber’s rationalization of organized action. — connects to: Business investment in capturing parliaments proves those institutions matter — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1681