Workers championed industrial modernity before industrialists co-opted the movement

Evidence

A careful analysis of Italian history before 1922, or even up to 1926, which does not allow itself to be distracted by external trappings but manages to seize on the essential moments of the working-class struggle, must objectively come to the conclusion that it was precisely the workers who brought into being newer and more modern industrial requirements and in their own way upheld these strenuously. It could also be said that some industrialists understood this movement and tried to appropriate it to themselves. This explains Agnelli’s attempt to absorb the Ordine Nuovo and its school into the FIAT complex and thus to institute a school of workers and technicians qualified for industrial change and for work with “rationalised” systems. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1089

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates Gramsci’s method: reading beneath surface appearances to capture essential moments of class struggle — a key scaffold concept when applied to other domains.
• XREF: Echoes the co-optation dynamic in Orientalism where the subaltern’s own claims get absorbed by hegemonic institutions.