Suffering obscured from view is as necessary to history as heroic action.

Evidence

Before, they all wanted to be the ploughmen of history, to play the active parts, each one of them to play an active part. Nobody wished to be the ‘manure’ of history. But is it possible to plough without first manuring the land? So ploughmen and ‘manure’ are both necessary. In the abstract, they all admitted it. But in practice? Manure for manure, as well draw back, return to the shadows, into obscurity. Now something has changed, since there are those who adapt themselves ‘philosophically’ to being ‘manure’, who know this is what they must be and adapt themselves. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 237

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Gramsci’s ‘manure of history’ inverts the heroic ploughman metaphor to name the unglamorous, enduring, anonymous work that underlies visible historical action.
• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely unusual reframing: consenting philosophically to be anonymously consumed for a cause you will never see bear fruit — an ascetic self-understanding with real theoretical weight.