Revolutionary mass parties can fail insurrection by neglecting alliances with peasants

Evidence

In the November 1919 general elections, the P.S.I. received almost two million votes, and returned 156 deputies to parliament, out of a total of 508 seats. Party membership rose from 20,000 at the end of the war to 87,000 in 1919, 180,000 in 1920; membership of the C.G.L. rose in the same period from 250,000 to two million. But despite its revolutionary language, the P.S.I. neither organised itself for insurrection, nor sought allies for the industrial proletariat (four million strong at this time) among the peasants or agricultural labourers (each of whom represented a further four millions, approximately). Although the peasants were occupying feudal estates in the South throughout the revolutionary years, the party made no attempt to co-ordinate their struggles. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 88

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s scaffold on hegemony: the PSI’s failure to forge a peasant-proletariat alliance prefigures Gramsci’s argument that a class must become ‘leading’ by winning allies, not merely dominate. Also the ‘war of position’ subtext — mass organization without strategic alliance-building. — connects to: Mazzini-inspired insurrection failed because aristocrats withheld support; Revolutionary movements fail when foreign allies restrain land reform that could win rural support