Popular political change requires diffuse ideological preparation, not just armed insurrection.

Evidence

However, the main reason for studying Pisacane is that he was the only one who tried to give the Action Party a substantive and not merely formal content—as an antithesis transcending traditional positions. Nor can it be said that, for such an historical outcome to be achieved, a popular armed insurrection was an imperative necessity—as Mazzini believed to the point of obsession (i.e. not realistically, but with the fervour of a missionary). The popular intervention which was not possible in the concentrated and instantaneous form of an insurrection, did not take place even in the “diffused” and capillary form of indirect pressure—though the latter would have been possible, and perhaps was in fact the indispensable premiss for the former. The concentrated or instantaneous form was rendered impossible by the military technique of the time—but only partially so; in other words the impossibility existed in so far as that concentrated and instantaneous form was not preceded by long ideological and political preparation, organically devised in advance to reawaken popular passions and enable them to be concentrated and brought simultaneously to detonation point. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 563

Categorization

• XREF: The diffused/capillary pressure versus concentrated insurrection distinction is the organic preparation for Gramsci’s war of position — prefigures how hegemony is built gradually rather than through single rupture.
• SEED: Angle: how Gramsci’s critique of Mazzini’s insurrectionary obsession parallels critiques of event-rupture models in contemporary social movements.