War service gave officers-intellectuals leadership detaching peasants from landowner blocs

Evidence

The enlargement of the suffrage in 1913 had already provoked the first signs of that phenomenon which was to have its maximum expression in 1919-20-21 as a consequence of the politico-organisational experience acquired by the peasant masses during the war—i.e. the relative break-up of the Southern rural bloc, and the detachment of the peasants, led by a part of the intellectuals (officers during the war), from the great landowners. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 523

Categorization

• XREF: The mechanism of war-generated politico-organizational experience turning subaltern classes against their established bloc echoes the reader’s later interest in how colonial/racial subalterns acquire organizing capacity.