Successful insurrection must prevent the expelled power from staging a counter-offensive.

Evidence

The essential problem which had to be faced from the military point of view was that of expelling from the peninsula a foreign power, Austria, which had at its disposal one of the largest armies in Europe at that time, and whose supporters in the peninsula itself, moreover, even in Piedmont, were neither few nor weak. Consequently, the military problem was the following: how to succeed in mobilising an insurrectional force which was capable not only of expelling the Austrian army from the peninsula, but of preventing it from being able to come back with a counter-offensive—given the fact that the violent expulsion would endanger the complex structure of the Empire, and hence would galvanise all the forces interested in its cohesion for a reconquest. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 490

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth tracing how this expulsion-without-counterattack logic maps onto later anticolonial and postcolonial frameworks.
• DEFINE: Gramsci widens ‘military leadership’ beyond tactics into political leadership — an important definitional move.