Revolutionary parties can be verbally maximalist while unprepared to act

Evidence

After the event, commentators of every political persuasion were united in the view that the party had never at any moment seriously considered the problem of how to make the revolution, nor made any serious preparations for it. However, at the time, the verbal statements of its leaders and the party’s adhesion to the Third International created a very different impression. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 87

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies what ‘maximalism’ means analytically: the gap between verbal extremism and actual revolutionary preparation.
• XREF: Speaks to the interest/ideology and common-sense toolkit — how appearances and discourses diverge from real capacity, a lesson for reading performative political language in Islamophobia discourse. — connects to: Marginal outcasts are revolutionary even without revolutionary consciousness — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2584