Revolutionary strategy shifted from war of movement to war of position after 1870

Evidence

Jacobin experience from 1789 to Thermidor. 307 The formula belongs to an historical period in which the great mass political parties and the great economic trade unions did not yet exist, and society was still, so to speak, in a state of fluidity from many points of view: greater backwardness of the countryside, and almost complete monopoly of political and State power by a few cities or even by a single one (Paris in the case of France); a relatively rudimentary State apparatus, and greater autonomy of civil society from State activity; a specific system of military forces and of national armed services; greater autonomy of the national economies from the economic relations of the world market, etc. In the period after 1870, with the colonial expansion of Europe, all these elements change: the internal and international organisational relations of the State become more complex and massive, and the Forty-Eightist formula of the “Permanent Revolution” is expanded and transcended in political science by the formula of “civil hegemony”. The same thing happens in the art of politics as happens in military art: war of movement increasingly becomes war of position, and it can be said that a State will win a war in so far as it prepares for it minutely and technically in peacetime. The massive structures of the modern democracies, both as State organisations, and as complexes of associations in civil society, constitute for the art of politics as it were the “trenches” and the permanent fortifications of the front in the war of position: they render merely “partial” the element of movement which before used to be “the whole” of war, etc. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 912

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the canonical statement of the war of position versus war of movement distinction Gramsci is famous for.
• XREF: War of position directly prefigures how Islamophobia scholars read state ‘counter-extremism’ and securitization as diffuse civil-society trenches rather than frontal assault.
• ADDENDUM: The civil-society ‘trenches’ idea parallels the ordinary infrastructure framing of the trees essay — diffuse structures doing quiet work.