Rural conflicts turn acute and personal because economic margins are absent

Evidence

Power in the towns automatically becomes power in the countryside. But the absence of economic margins and the normally heavier repression exercised from the top downwards in the countryside cause conflicts there immediately to assume an acute and “personal” form, so that counterattacks have to be more rapid and determined. The stratum under consideration understands and sees that the origin of its troubles is in the towns, in urban power; it therefore understands that it “must” dictate a solution to the urban ruling classes, so that the principal hot-bed will be extinguished—even if this does not immediately suit the urban ruling classes themselves, either because it is too costly, or because it is dangerous in the long term (these classes see longer cycles of development, in which it is possible to manoeuvre, instead of simply following “material” interests). — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 839

Categorization

• XREF: This line about town power automatically being countryside power and rural conflict taking acute ‘personal’ form prefigures the city/country dynamics relevant to how colonial and postcolonial administrations encounter peasant resistance.