Revolutionary rhetoric can galvanize mass imagination without any concrete preparation

Evidence

The impact of the Russian revolutions of 1917 was perhaps more rapid in Turin than anywhere else in Europe. Hostility to the war had been general in the city from the start, and had grown in intensity as the conflict continued. The first months of 1917 were punctuated by numerous industrial struggles launched to counter the effects of food shortages and rising prices; in the vanguard were the women workers, above all in the textile factories. As soon as the news of the February Revolution began to filter through, the idea of “doing the same as in Russia” spread like wildfire. … These fiery words were not in fact accompanied by any serious concrete preparation for any such course of action on the part of the socialist leaders, but they seized the imagination of the mass of workers in Turin, and of many workers in the other Italian cities. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 76

Categorization

• XREF: Speaks directly to the Gramscian distinction between spontaneous ‘common sense’ enthusiasm and the organized, hegemonic will that real revolution requires — a tool that carries forward into how later Islamophobia readings distinguish moral outrage from organized political projects. — connects to: Marginal outcasts are revolutionary even without revolutionary consciousness — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2584
• SEED: An essay on how words ignite collective action while organization decides its fate — using the Turin 1917 case as the opening example of the gap between revolutionary imagination and revolutionary capacity.