Real political progress unifies theory with practice and rulers with ruled.

Evidence

This continuous effort to separate out the “international” and “unitary” element in national and local reality is true concrete political action, the sole activity productive of historical progress. It requires an organic unity between theory and practice, between intellectual strata and popular masses, between rulers and ruled. The formulae of unity and federation lose a great part of their significance from this point of view, whereas they retain their sting in the bureaucratic conception, where in the end there is no unity but a stagnant swamp, on the surface calm and “mute”, and no federation but a “sack of potatoes”, 241 i.e. a mechanical juxtaposition of single “units” without any connection between them. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 780

Categorization

• DEFINE: The ‘sack of potatoes’ metaphor defines what pseudo-federation looks like — disconnected units lacking organic unity.
• XREF: The ‘sack of potatoes’ is Marx’s image of the French peasantry — relevant to mass exclusion and failed collectivity in later readings.