Transforming concrete political questions into abstract principles guarantees political failure.

Evidence

On this whole series of problems, the Action Party failed totally. It in fact limited itself to making into a question of principle, and into an essential element of its programme, what was simply a question of the political terrain upon which it might have been possible to focus, and find a legal solution for, such problems: the question of the Constituent Assembly. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 535

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEFINE: A compact illustration of Gramsci’s distinction between raising a question as a ‘question of principle’ versus treating it as a matter of ‘political terrain’ — a conceptual framework worth carrying forward.
• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s broader distinction between organic and conjunctural struggles and to his critique of abstract programmatic demands divorced from actual political terrain.

Related

• Reality never conforms to abstract theoretical schemas. (similarity 0.79)
• The Action Party failed because it had no organic government programme for the peasantry. (similarity 0.78)
• Agitational parties without government programmes serve their rivals. (similarity 0.78)