Refusing to ally with radicalized petty-bourgeois strata delivers them back to the ruling class.

Evidence

It was obvious that the war, with the immense economic and psychological upheaval which it had brought about especially among the petty intellectuals and the petits bourgeois was going to radicalise these strata. The party turned them gratuitously into enemies, instead of making allies of them, i.e. it threw them back towards the ruling class. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2276

Categorization

• XREF: A concrete case for the hegemony framework: consent is won or lost through alliance choices, not just through propaganda — relevant to how anti-racist movements either absorb or repel anxious middle strata.
• QUESTION: Does the same mechanism explain the recurring failure of left politics to hold petit-bourgeois voters against racialized appeals in later periods?