The war of position is probably the most quoted phrase in Antonio Gramsci’s vocabulary and the least examined. It circulates as a slogan of patience, gets attached to any slow accumulation of influence, and is often paired with its twin, the war of manoeuvre, in summaries that settle both in a sentence apiece. Manoeuvre, the summaries say, means revolution: a rapid assault on state power. Position means reform: the gradual conquest of culture, institutions and opinion until power somehow changes hands by accumulation. That pairing is neat, quotable and wrong in a way that matters, because it converts a distinction about the structure of states into a choice between temperaments. Gramsci’s pair of terms does something more precise and more demanding. It says that the form a struggle must take is dictated by the kind of state it confronts, that in one kind of state a frontal assault can decide everything, and that in another kind the same assault shatters against defences that are not made of soldiers at all.

The one test that this article sets its reader is narrow and worth stating at the outset. Gramsci did not abandon the war of manoeuvre in favour of a permanent gradualism, and the distinction between the two wars rests on an observation about how densely civil society is organised in different states. A reader who holds those two points firmly, and can say why each follows from the other, holds the pair correctly. Everything else in the article is evidence assembled around them: the passage in the prison notebooks where the distinction is grounded, the rule that governs the relation between the two forms, the misreadings that have been built on top of it, and the genuine gap in the theory that its critics have always pressed. The correction of the popular misreading is the first duty here, and it is a correction made by returning to the texts, not by scolding the readers who inherited the shortened version. The shortened version has a history, and the history explains why it was useful to people who were not Gramsci.

A note on what the pair is not will save confusion later. Neither is the war of position a synonym for hegemony, though it is unintelligible without that concept, and the full account of hegemony belongs to the companion guide in this series rather than to this one. Nor is the pair a coded restatement of the older argument between reform and revolution, though it has been conscripted into that argument repeatedly. It is a piece of strategic analysis written in prison, in a vocabulary borrowed from the military catastrophe through which its author had lived, by a man trying to explain why a revolution had succeeded in Russia in 1917 and failed, in country after country, in the Europe he knew. The failures came first chronologically in his thinking. The theory is an attempt to make them intelligible without surrendering the goal they had been fought for.

Where the military metaphor came from

Gramsci wrote as a journalist in Turin while the First World War remade the map of Europe, and the war supplied him with two contrasting spectacles of how states could be fought. On the western front, after the opening offensives of 1914 failed, the armies dug in from the Channel to Switzerland and stayed dug in for years. Movement gave way to siege. Enormous concentrations of artillery, reserves in depth, rail networks feeding a continuous line: the western war became a war of attrition in which a breakthrough, even when achieved, ran into further lines behind the first. On the eastern front the geometry stayed different. The front was longer, thinner, less continuously held, and armies still manoeuvred across great spaces; offensives could tear holes that mattered, and states themselves could crack under a blow, as Russia’s did twice in 1917. A generation of strategists drew the lesson that modern war had two grammars, one of movement and one of position, and that which grammar applied depended on the density and depth of what stood behind the firing line.

The prison notebooks return to that contrast because Gramsci believed the political struggles of his century obeyed an analogous distribution. He had watched the Russian Revolution succeed by something resembling a war of movement: a state apparatus, already hollowed by military defeat, was struck and fell, and there was comparatively little behind it to catch the falling structure. He had then watched the revolutionary wave break against the states of central and western Europe. In Germany, in Hungary, in his own Italy during the factory occupations of 1920, the assault reached the outer works and stopped. Governments fell and were replaced; ministries changed; the deeper order of property, administration, press, church, school and association absorbed the shock and reasserted itself. The question the notebooks ask is what, exactly, did the absorbing. The military vocabulary is his instrument for answering it, chosen because it names kinds of resistance rather than kinds of intention. An army that attacks a position is not more virtuous than one that besieges it. The terrain decides which idiocy is which.

Two cautions belong to the metaphor’s birth certificate. The first is that Gramsci handled the vocabulary as an analogy under discipline, not as an identity: political struggle resembles war in its logic of forces and terrain, but its material is consent, organisation and belief, which do not behave like earthworks under shellfire. He knew the difference and occasionally marks it. The second caution is biographical. He wrote the relevant notes between his arrest in 1926 and his death in 1937, in a fascist prison, under censorship, after the movement he had helped to lead had been destroyed in a country where the frontal strategy had been tried and the positional defences of the old order had proved deeper than the revolutionaries supposed. The theory of the two wars is therefore also a prisoner’s audit of a defeat, conducted with the victor’s state as its standing counterexample. That origin does not make the analysis true. It explains its preoccupations: why the strength of the defence, rather than the courage of the attack, is its central object.

The war of manoeuvre: the frontal grammar

War of manoeuvre, in Gramsci’s usage, names the strategy of frontal assault aimed at the rapid seizure of state power: a concentrated blow, delivered at a moment of crisis, that takes the commanding heights of the state before the defenders can reorganise. Its classic phase in his account is the uprising that storms the seat of government, proclaims a new power and defends it against counterattack. The form presupposes a particular kind of target. Where the state is, in effect, the whole defensive system of the old order, where behind the ministries and the police there stands no dense web of parties, newspapers, churches, schools, professional bodies and associations loyal to the existing arrangement, then taking the state is very nearly taking everything. The garrison is the fortress. Its fall leaves the field open because the field was never separately fortified.

The organisational correlate follows from the geometry. A war of manoeuvre rewards concentration: a disciplined and centralised force, able to decide quickly and strike at a chosen moment, with the mass of its supporters mobilised as a striking army rather than dispersed as a garrison of every institution in society. Its timescale is compressed into days and weeks. Its characteristic risk is symmetrical to its strength: everything depends on the moment, and a blow mistimed or met by unexpected reserves fails completely rather than partially. Gramsci associated the form above all with the Russia of 1917, and through that association with a whole family of insurrectionary strategies in the revolutionary tradition. He also recognised its persistence as a necessary element inside any serious struggle, a point the later sections of this article take up in full, because the popular account routinely loses it.

Is the war of manoeuvre simply another name for violence?

No. Violence can serve either war and belongs to neither definition, because the pair classifies strategies by their relation to the state and civil society, not by their methods. A general strike forcing a government’s fall is manoeuvre even if no shot is fired, while years of organised contention can include violent episodes inside a positional struggle.

The distinction matters because the lazy equation of manoeuvre with bloodshed smuggles a moral verdict into an analytical term. Gramsci’s contrast is between kinds of campaign, not between gentle and rough tactics. A war of position can be punctuated by street fighting, police charges and armed defence of occupied factories; none of that converts it into a war of manoeuvre, because its strategic centre of gravity remains the slow conquest of positions rather than a single decisive blow. Conversely, the purest war of manoeuvre in his gallery, the seizure of power in Petrograd, was famous among contemporaries for how little fighting the taking itself required, the elaborate violence belonging to the civil war that followed rather than to the assault that opened it. Method and form are separate axes, and confusing them is the first step toward the larger confusions catalogued later in this article.

A second precision belongs here. Manoeuvre in Gramsci is not a synonym for any bold, fast or daring action, the way the word is used in ordinary political journalism to praise a leader’s tactical flair. Boldness is a quality an action can have inside either form of war. The term names a specific strategic figure: the attempt to decide the struggle by a frontal attack on the state, in a situation where the state is the decisive and nearly the only fortification. Where that condition fails, bold frontal action is not manoeuvre in his sense at all. It is a category error with a body count, and much of the notebooks’ polemic energy is spent on the revolutionaries who committed it in the West after 1917.

The war of position: the siege grammar

War of position names the opposite strategic figure: a protracted struggle conducted across the institutions of civil society, whose object is to build hegemony, the intellectual, moral and organisational leadership of a rising class and its allies, before and alongside any direct contest for government. Where the war of manoeuvre attacks the fortress, the war of position undermines, surrounds and progressively occupies the system of defences that makes the fortress more than a building. Its terrain is the dense associational life that stands between the individual and the state: trade unions and parties, newspapers and publishing houses, schools and universities, churches, professional orders, cooperatives, cultural societies, the whole sedimented apparatus through which a social order teaches its members what is normal, possible and respectable. To fight positionally is to contest that teaching and to construct, inside the old society, the organised consent on which a new one could rest.

The objective differs accordingly. A positional campaign does not aim, in the first instance, at the ministries. It aims at the balance of allegiance in the society the ministries govern: at detaching intellectuals from the old bloc, at organising subaltern groups into a collective will, at making the rising class’s programme into the common sense of people who do not yet belong to it. Government power, when it comes, confirms a transformation already substantially achieved rather than substituting for one never attempted. The timescale stretches from the days of the assault to years and decades. The organisational correlate is breadth rather than concentration: not a striking force held in reserve for one moment, but a hegemonic apparatus rooted in workplaces, neighbourhoods, classrooms and editorial offices, fighting on terrain that has to be held every day rather than stormed once.

Can a war of position end in a sudden assault?

Yes, and in Gramsci’s scheme the question almost answers itself once dominance is separated from replacement. A siege that transformed the balance of forces leaves the old order’s central defences isolated, and the struggle can then pass to a concentrated blow. The assault is a moment inside the longer war, made possible by it and unintelligible without it.

What the scheme excludes is not suddenness but substitution: the fantasy that the blow can do the siege’s work in advance. A movement that has not contested the trenches discovers, on taking the government buildings, that it governs a society still organised by its opponents, and the discovery has a name in the notebooks’ wider vocabulary of failed transformations. Equally, the scheme excludes the opposite fantasy, that a successful siege renders the final contest unnecessary and power simply ripens into new hands. Gramsci’s political writings are those of a revolutionary who expected the conquest of power to remain an act, with an agent and a date. The positional war prepares and surrounds that act; it does not dissolve it into process. Readers who need the pair to abolish either the long labour or the decisive moment are reading their own strategy into a text that retains both.

There is a texture to positional struggle that the siege image captures well and that definitions usually miss. A siege is mostly not fighting. It is engineering, supply, intelligence and endurance: the slow work of making the besieging force stronger and the besieged position weaker, week by week, in ways that are individually undramatic. Gramsci’s positional war has the same texture. Its victories are a union branch won, a newspaper’s line shifted, a generation of teachers formed, a peasant league organised, a common phrase changed in the mouths of people who have never heard his name. Its defeats are equally molecular. This is why the concept so easily degenerates, in careless hands, into a description of any gradual activity whatsoever, and why the precision work of this article matters: the war of position is defined not by slowness but by terrain and object, by where the struggle is conducted and what it is for.

The East and West passage and what it actually says

The whole distinction rests on one celebrated passage in the notebooks, and it deserves to be handled as a text rather than as a rumour. Writing on the structure of states, Gramsci observes that in the East ‘the State was everything’, while civil society remained ‘primordial and gelatinous’. In the West, by contrast, a proper relation existed between state and civil society, with the consequence that ‘when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed’. The state in such a society, he concludes, was only an ‘outer ditch’, behind which stood ‘a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks’, a system that varied in strength from one country to another and had to be studied country by country before any strategy could be drawn from it.

Every element of the argument is present in that fragment. First, the variable is structural: the difference between the two cases is not the bravery of revolutionaries, the maturity of doctrines or the lateness of the hour, but the organisation of the society behind the government. Second, the state’s apparent strength is decomposed: what looks like one fortress is revealed, at the moment of crisis, as the forward trench of a deep defensive system. Third, the strategic conclusion is conditional: because the defensive system differs, the war that can be fought differs. The passage is, in miniature, a refusal of universal strategy. It says that the Russian experience taught a true lesson about Russia and a potentially fatal lesson about everywhere else, and that the failure to distinguish the two was the characteristic intellectual error of the revolutionary movement after 1917.

The translation history of the passage has helped and hindered its readers. The English rendering gives ‘fortresses and earthworks’ for a phrase whose military register is exact: fixed defences in depth, not a single wall. Some translators and commentators prefer ‘trenches’ for parts of the system, and Gramsci himself uses the language of trenches elsewhere in the notes for the organisations of civil society, the famous comparison of those organisations to the trench systems of modern warfare. The safest reading keeps the whole architecture in view: an outer ditch that can be crossed, successive lines that must each be taken, reserves that arrive while the attacker is still engaged with the first position. That architecture, and not any slogan about slowness, is what the war of position names.

Why is the East and West contrast not a map?

Because its terms are densities, not longitudes. ‘East’ in the passage names a condition in which civil society is gelatinous and the state carries the whole order; ‘West’ names the condition in which associations, press, parties and churches fortify the order behind the state. Either condition can appear on any continent, and the same country can migrate between them.

Russia in 1917 is the passage’s exemplar of the first condition, and the industrial states of western Europe exemplars of the second, but the analytical work is done by the variable, not by the examples. Gramsci’s own Italy straddled the line in ways he knew intimately: a northern industrial society with unions, parties and a Catholic associational world, joined to a southern countryside where the state and the landlord remained nearly the whole of organised power and civil society stayed thin. A strategy drawn from the passage therefore begins with a survey, not with a compass point. The revolutionary who asks ‘which war?’ is really asking ‘how dense, how organised, how loyal is the civil society of this state, and where are its strong and weak sectors?’ Geography is the shorthand the passage uses for a question that has to be re-asked of every society, including societies far from Europe and decades far from the notebooks.

Density, not geography: the real variable

If the East and West passage is the foundation, density is its load-bearing concept, and it is worth specifying what density consists of before the rule built on it is stated. A dense civil society is one in which the space between household and government is filled with durable, organised, self-reproducing institutions that mediate loyalty. Political parties with real memberships and their own presses. Trade unions that negotiate, educate and bury their members. Churches with parishes, orders, schools and youth movements. Universities, professional associations, chambers of commerce, cooperatives, veterans’ leagues, sporting federations, mutual aid societies. Each such body does double work for the order it inhabits. It delivers services and sociability, and it delivers an interpretation of the world in which the existing arrangement of power appears natural, inevitable or at worst reformable. The fortresses of civil society are not conspiracies. They are the ordinary institutions of a developed social life, which is exactly why they hold under fire: people defend the organisations that organise their lives, and a government assaulted at the centre can retreat into them, regroup and counterattack from ground the assailant never thought to contest.

Gramsci’s sustained anatomy of that terrain belongs to his writing on civil society itself, treated at length in the companion article on Gramsci on civil society in this series, and only its strategic consequence is needed here. The consequence is a redefinition of what a crisis of the state means. In a gelatinous society, a crisis of the government is a crisis of the order, because there is nothing else. In a dense society, a crisis of the government is an event the order is specifically built to survive: ministries fall, coalitions recombine, scandals consume leaders, and the system’s deeper allegiances continue undisturbed, rather like a trench line that yields its forward parapet and reveals the second line intact. The revolutionary miscalculation of the postwar years, on Gramsci’s diagnosis, was to keep reading western governmental crises by eastern rules, announcing the final crisis at each tremor, and spending the movement’s assault forces against an outer ditch.

What decides which war a movement faces?

The structure of the state it confronts, surveyed concretely: how much of the social order is carried by autonomous institutions of civil society, how deep their loyalty runs, and how far a governmental crisis would actually propagate. The decision is an empirical finding about a particular society at a particular moment, not a preference a movement brings with it.

Two corollaries sharpen the finding. The first is that density admits of degrees and sectors. A society may be densely organised in its cities and gelatinous in its countryside, fortified in its professions and thin in its peripheries, so a single national strategy may have to combine forms that a simpler theory assigns to different countries. The second corollary is that density changes. War, depression and dictatorship can tear up the associational fabric and re-gelatinise a society whose civil institutions had seemed permanent; peace and prosperity can thicken a thin one within a generation. The survey that decides the war is therefore never finished, and the strategist who performed it once and filed it has mistaken a snapshot for a law. Gramsci’s own analytical notes on the relation of forces, with their successive moments from the economic structure through organised political forces to the military relation proper, are best read as the standing instruction to repeat the survey.

The war of position as the dominant form, not a replacement

Everything so far converges on the claim this article exists to state precisely, which can be given a name: the dominance not replacement rule. Gramsci holds that in states with a dense civil society the war of position becomes the dominant form of political struggle. Dominant is the operative word, and it is chosen against a specific alternative. A dominant form organises the whole campaign: it sets the timescale, absorbs the other forms as subordinate episodes, and determines what victory and defeat consist of. What dominance does not mean is replacement. The war of manoeuvre is not abolished, superseded or declared obsolete in the West. It survives inside the positional war as a moment: the concentrated blow remains possible, remains sometimes necessary, and derives its meaning and its prospects from the siege that precedes and surrounds it. Readings that convert the distinction into a permanent choice of gradualism over rupture have substituted a strategic preference for his analysis, and the substitution, not any phrase of Gramsci’s, is what needs explaining when the gradualist Gramsci is quoted.

The grammar of the rule can be made exact by considering what each of its terms excludes. Dominance excludes parity: the two wars are not equal partners taking turns, because in the western case every manoeuvre is fought on terrain the positional war has prepared or failed to prepare, and its outcome is decided there in advance. Dominance also excludes abolition: a form that survives as a moment has not been retired, and the notebooks’ discussions of insurrection, of the general strike and of the crisis of the state all presuppose that the moment can arrive. Finally, dominance is a claim about a specified condition. It holds where civil society is dense. Where the density fails, through collapse, war or underdevelopment, the rule’s premise fails with it, and the frontal form recovers a standing that the theory never denied it in the first place.

Did Gramsci abandon the war of manoeuvre?

No. He argued that in states with a dense civil society the war of position becomes the dominant form, because a frontal assault meets a system of fortifications behind the state. The war of manoeuvre remains a moment within the struggle rather than being replaced.

Why, then, is the abandonment reading so widespread? Partly because dominance language is easily flattened in transmission: ‘the war of position is the only serious form in the West’ slides, through summaries of summaries, into ‘Gramsci rejected insurrection’, and the flattened version serves polemical purposes for both his gradualist admirers and his revolutionary detractors, who can then fight over a phantom. Partly because the notebooks are fragments, published posthumously and read for decades in thematic selections that foregrounded the siege and backgrounded the retained moment. And partly because the distinction itself is asymmetrical in a way that invites misreading: the war of position receives the richer development in the notes, since it was the under-theorised form, the one his movement lacked. A writer correcting a deficiency writes at length about the deficiency. The length is evidence about his audience, not about a renunciation.

What survives of the war of manoeuvre in the West?

Its moment: the concentrated act in which a crisis of authority is resolved by a decisive bid for power, now fought on ground prepared by positional work and judged by whether that work was done. Also its discipline: the insistence that organisation, timing and the relation of forces, rather than wishes, decide when such a moment exists.

There is a textual point here that rewards closeness. In the notes on political strategy, Gramsci treats the frontal form as historically indexed: as civil societies thicken, pure manoeuvre contracts from being the whole war to being one tactic within it, valuable exactly in proportion as the positional struggle has changed what the frontal blow would meet. The trajectory matters more than any single verdict. A reader who asks whether Gramsci was ‘for’ or ‘against’ the war of manoeuvre is posing a question his framework dissolves. He was for reading the terrain. The two wars name what the terrain permits, and the whole polemical weight of the pair falls on those who choose their war by loyalty, habit or temperament instead of by survey.

Manoeuvre inside position: moments, crises and the united front

The retained moment needs its mechanics specified, because ‘a moment within the struggle’ can sound like a diplomatic formula unless the notebooks’ own strategic discussions are brought to bear. Gramsci’s treatment of Leon Trotsky is the sharpest case. In the notes he reads the theory of permanent revolution as the political counterpart of the war of manoeuvre: a doctrine formed in, and fitted to, a country where civil society had not yet acquired consistency, where the state could be struck and the whole order decided in the ensuing struggle for power. His judgement is not that the theory was foolish. It is that its conditions were local and its export was the error. Carried westward into dense societies, a strategy of permanent frontal pressure misreads every governmental tremor as the eastern signal, and consumes the movement in assaults on positions that were never the decisive ones.

Against that reading he sets the practice associated with Lenin’s last years: the turn to the united front, the patient construction of alliances and hegemonic relations, which Gramsci treats as the corresponding recognition, inside the revolutionary camp itself, that western conditions imposed the positional form. The contrast is doing analytical rather than biographical work. Two strategies descended from the same revolution are sorted by the terrain each presupposes, and the sorting implies a method any reader can apply: when a strategic doctrine is proposed, ask what density of civil society it silently assumes. Doctrines that assume a gelatinous society will advertise speed and decisiveness. Doctrines that assume a dense one will advertise patience, alliance and institutional construction. The advertisement follows from the assumption, and exposing the assumption is most of what strategic criticism, in this tradition, consists of.

Moments of manoeuvre inside a dominant war of position arise, in his scheme, from crises of authority: conjunctures in which the ruling bloc’s hegemony fractures, its parties split, its common sense loses credit and large masses detach from their traditional allegiances faster than any siege, however patient, could have detached them. War and economic catastrophe manufacture such conjunctures; positional work determines whether anybody is organised enough to use them. The relation is therefore not siege first, assault later, in a tidy chronological sequence. It is more like a standing preparedness: the positional war builds the force, the alliances and the alternative common sense that a crisis, arriving on its own schedule, can suddenly make decisive. A movement that has only besieged will watch its moment be used by others. A movement that has only waited for moments will arrive at each one unbuilt. The pair, read whole, is an argument against both single-key strategies.

It follows that the two wars interpenetrate in practice in ways a table can only freeze. A failed manoeuvre can itself be a positional event, educating a generation and redistributing allegiance, as Gramsci believed the defeats of the postwar years had educated his own. A positional gain can force the adversary into manoeuvres of its own, coups and states of emergency that reveal the ditch behind the fortresses. The analyst’s task is not to assign each event to one column but to track which form is dominant in the struggle as a whole, since dominance, and only dominance, is what the rule asserts.

What the besieging side actually builds

Because the war of position is so often glossed as ‘cultural work’, its actual contents deserve an inventory in prose. The besieging force is building hegemony, and hegemony in Gramsci’s sense is a compound of intellectual leadership, moral authority and organisational capacity, exercised through institutions it creates or captures. It requires intellectuals of a specific kind, formed inside the rising class rather than borrowed from the old one’s universities, who elaborate its experience into a coherent conception of the world. It requires a press and an educational effort that treat common sense as the decisive battlefield, criticising the folklore of subordination while respecting the good sense buried inside it. It requires alliances negotiated as hegemonic relations rather than as electoral arithmetic: the capacity to speak for interests beyond one’s own ranks, to make a programme genuinely national and popular rather than corporate. And it requires a political party of a new type, which Gramsci theorises as a collective intellectual, an organism whose internal life is itself an exercise in the leadership it hopes one day to exercise over a society.

The objective that organises all of this is treated in the companion study of Gramsci’s account of hegemony, and the present article needs only the strategic translation of that account: hegemony is what a war of position wins, inch by inch, before it is what a government exercises. This is why the identification of the war of position with ‘culture’ is a half truth that functions as an error. Culture, in the thin sense of books, broadcasts and opinion, is one province of the terrain. The siege also runs through wage bargaining and municipal government, through the cooperative and the professional examination, through every site where the old order’s leadership is either confirmed or quietly withdrawn. A movement that restricts its positional work to the cultural province has abandoned most of the front, usually because that province is where its own members are most comfortable.

Consent is the material being fought over, and this marks the deepest difference from the literal siege the metaphor borrows. Earthworks do not change their minds. The institutions of civil society are held, in the last analysis, by the allegiance of the people who staff and use them, and allegiance can be argued with, educated, disappointed and won. Picture the war of position instead as a contest conducted simultaneously on thousands of small fields, each governed by persuasion as much as by pressure. Gramsci’s insistence that hegemony is exercised through direction rather than domination, through leadership that others experience as their own enlarging interest, is the ethical core inside the military shell of the metaphor. Strip that out and the siege becomes mere encirclement, a strategy of pressure without attraction, which his theory explicitly refuses: a class that can only besiege and never lead has not understood what the fortresses are made of.

The adversary also digs: passive revolution and defence in depth

A one-sided reading of the pair leaves the old order passive, a fortress awaiting its siege. Gramsci’s wider work corrects the picture, because he analysed the defensive and renovating strategies of ruling blocs with the same care as the offensive strategies of their challengers. His concept of passive revolution names a transformation accomplished from above, in which a ruling order modernises itself molecularly, conceding reforms, absorbing demands and rearranging its alliances precisely so that no frontal challenge ever becomes necessary. The Risorgimento, in his account, was such a process: a national state constructed while the popular forces that might have given it a more radical content were kept at the margin, their potential leaders absorbed one by one into the governing bloc by the practice he called transformismo. This is positional warfare conducted by the defence, and it is formidably effective, because every trench the besiegers dig can be answered by a smaller concession dug into the same line.

Who else fights a war of position?

The ruling bloc does, continuously and usually with better resources. Passive revolution, transformismo and the managed concession are its siege craft: reforms granted from above to absorb pressure, opposition leaders drawn into the governing orbit, and the common sense of the order renewed before it can crack. Position is a form of struggle, not a party’s property.

The implication cuts against any complacent use of the concept. If both sides fight positionally, then holding a position is not the same as advancing, and a subaltern movement can find its own institutions slowly integrated into the order they were built to oppose, its unions administering discontent, its parties managing municipalities inside rules they no longer contest, its intellectuals decorating the common sense they were formed to criticise. Gramsci’s historical writing is full of such absorptions, and they are the reason his positional war is never a counsel of comfort. The siege he describes has no guaranteed direction. Trenches change hands in both directions, and the question his theory trains its readers to ask of any institution, including their own, is whose hegemony it is presently serving.

The two wars compared

The two wars compared, in the form this series uses for its findable artifacts, set side by side with the relation between them stated as a third row, because the pair is a relation and not a menu.

Form	Objective	Terrain	Timescale	Organisational requirement	Historical example in Gramsci’s account	Common misreading
War of manoeuvre	Rapid seizure of state power by frontal assault	The state apparatus itself, where civil society is thin	Days to weeks, compressed into a crisis	A concentrated, centralised striking force	The October Revolution in a Russia whose civil society was gelatinous	That it simply means violence, or any bold and rapid action
War of position	Construction of hegemony until the balance of forces is transformed	The institutions of civil society, the fortresses behind the state	Years to decades of protracted siege	A rooted hegemonic apparatus of party, press, schools and alliances	The long labour of western movements inside dense civil societies	That it means parliamentarism, or cultural work alone
Manoeuvre within a dominant war of position	A decisive act taken at a crisis of authority on prepared ground	Prepared positions across civil society, struck at their centre	An episode inside a long struggle	Forces built positionally and able to act together when the moment opens	The insurrectionary episodes Gramsci discusses within western struggles	That Gramsci abolished rupture, or that the moment arrives by timetable

Read the columns as a chain of implications and the table teaches the argument. The objective dictates the terrain: one cannot besiege a state that has nothing behind it, and one cannot storm a society whose allegiances are distributed through a thousand institutions as if it were a ministry building. The terrain dictates the timescale, because allegiance changes at the speed of organisation and education, not at the speed of proclamation. The timescale dictates the organisational requirement, since a force built for a single blow and a force built for a generation are differently recruited, differently led and differently sustained. The misreading column is not decoration. Each error listed there consists of taking one cell of the table as the whole of it: slowness mistaken for the strategy, violence mistaken for the form, a single historical exemplar mistaken for a universal warrant.

The school of failure: what the postwar years taught

The distinction was not spun from military history alone. It was generalised from a sequence of defeats that Gramsci and his generation studied the way engineers study collapsed bridges, and the cases belong in any exact account because they are the evidence the theory claims to organise. In Germany between 1918 and 1923, governments fell, a republic was proclaimed, putsches came from right and left, and armed risings were attempted in the Ruhr, in Saxony and in Hamburg. The state trembled repeatedly and at length. What did not fall was the order: the judiciary, the officer corps, the great industrial combines, the press empires and the churches held their positions through every governmental crisis, and the republic that survived the risings was administered by the personnel of the empire that had preceded it. In Hungary in 1919 a soviet republic actually took state power and held it for months, then collapsed when the social ground beneath it proved to have been commandeered rather than conquered; the seizure had been real, the hegemony absent, and the sequel was a counterrevolution that governed for a generation.

Italy supplied the lesson in its most intimate form. During the two red years after the war, and supremely in the factory occupations of 1920, the Turin workers built in the factory councils something that looked, to the young Gramsci of the Ordine Nuovo, like the embryo of a different order inside the old: organs of production and self-government rooted at the point where the class actually lived its collective life. The occupations ended in negotiated retreat, the movement’s national leadership declined to generalise the strike, and within two years fascism had destroyed the councils, the unions and the parties together. Read through the later notebooks, the episode becomes a study in both wars at once: a positional construction of genuine originality, abandoned at the moment when its own logic demanded either national extension or a political decision, in a country where the adversary’s positional defences, from the prefectures to the parish networks, had never been seriously contested outside the industrial north.

The point of rehearsing the cases is not antiquarian. Each defeat, in Gramsci’s retrospective analysis, has the same signature: the assailants correctly identified a crisis of the state and incorrectly inferred a crisis of the social order. The inference is the eastern inference, valid where the state was everything, fatal where a sturdy structure stood behind it. The theory of the two wars is the generalisation of that signature into a rule of method: never read a governmental crisis as an order’s crisis until the structure behind the government has been surveyed, and never let the calendar of the crisis set the strategy of a struggle whose decisive terrain may be elsewhere.

Turin before the notebooks: the councils as a positional rehearsal

The war of position is sometimes treated as a prison invention, a theory manufactured in a cell to rationalise inaction. Its roots in Gramsci’s practice run the other way. The factory council programme he championed in 1919 and 1920 proposed to build, inside capitalist production itself, institutions through which workers would learn to administer an economy and govern themselves: councils elected by all the workers of a plant, commissioners recallable by their electors, an education in production intended to convert a class defined by its exclusion from command into a class rehearsing command daily. Whatever its fate, the programme was positional in the strict later sense: it aimed at hegemony constructed within the old society’s own institutions, at a transformation of capacity and allegiance preceding and preparing any contest for the state.

The mature theory can be read as the generalisation of that Turin experience under the pressure of its defeat. What the councils were to the factory, the hegemonic apparatus of the war of position is to the society: the school in which a subaltern class becomes capable of ruling, built before rule is possible. The difference between the young journalist and the prisoner is one of scope and of sobriety about the adversary. The prisoner had seen the counterattack, had watched fascism conduct its own ruthless pedagogy through the institutions of civil society, squad by squad and town by town, and had concluded that the defensive system of an established order, and the counter-system required to displace it, were both far deeper than the Turin programme had assumed. Depth, in both directions, is the notebooks’ amendment to the hopes of 1920.

The misreadings, one by one

Cluster by cluster, the concepts in this part of the series share a fate: each carries a dominant popular misreading, and the correction of the misreading is the article’s first duty. The two wars carry several, and they interlock. Correcting them in sequence is the fastest route to the concept itself.

Does the war of position mean working only through parliament?

No. Parliament is one institution among the many that compose the terrain, and Gramsci’s siege runs through unions, schools, press, churches and workplaces as much as through any assembly. Electoral work can serve a war of position, but equating the two converts a strategy for transforming hegemony into a rule about which building to sit in.

The equation arose because the parties that popularised the gradualist Gramsci were themselves parliamentary parties looking for a theoretical warrant, and a warrant reads most easily when it names the activity the seeker already performs. The notebooks’ siege is far less comfortable. It demands organisation in every institution where consent is manufactured, including many, the factory, the parish, the barracks, the professional school, where parliamentary movements have historically been weakest. A party that fights only in the chamber is, in the terms of the metaphor, besieging one gate of a fortress city while leaving the granaries, the wells and the other gates untouched. Gramsci’s respect for legality as a terrain is real, and so is his contempt for the illusion that the terrain is the war.

A companion error holds that the war of position means cultural work only, as if the trenches were made of books and broadcasts and the siege consisted of winning arguments in the media. The error flatters intellectuals, who are the class fraction that writes the summaries. But the institutions of civil society in Gramsci’s anatomy are material organisations with budgets, premises, disciplines and memberships, and the struggle inside them is organisational before it is rhetorical: who runs the union, who sets the school curriculum, who owns the press and on what terms journalists are hired. Arguments matter because organisations carry them. A war of position reduced to commentary is a siege conducted by heralds.

Is the pair just reform against revolution under military names?

No, and the cleanest proof is that both wars are strategies of revolutionaries in the texts: manoeuvre names how a revolutionary seizure proceeds where the state is everything, and position names how a revolutionary transformation is prepared where it is not. The pair classifies situations and the strategies they permit, while reform against revolution classifies aims.

The conflation is tempting because the older debate’s geography overlaps the newer pair’s: reformists cluster where position is preached, revolutionaries where manoeuvre is praised. But the overlap is a fact about the readers, not about the concepts. Gramsci’s own commitments place him unambiguously on the revolutionary side of the older argument: he founded a communist party, led its parliamentary group, and went to prison rather than recant the aim of a radical transformation of the social order. A theory built by such a man, in such a cell, to explain why the transformation had failed in the West, cannot be honestly summarised as a device for avoiding it. What the pair changes is not the aim but the diagnosis of the road, and conflating a dispute about roads with a dispute about destinations is the master error from which the smaller ones descend. The older argument is treated on its own ground in the companion piece on the reform or revolution debate, where the claims of the two destinations are weighed directly.

Did Gramsci rule out a sudden rupture?

He did not. Rupture is the war of manoeuvre’s whole figure, and the dominance rule retains that figure as a moment within western struggle rather than striking it from the record. What he ruled out was the expectation that rupture could substitute for preparation, a different claim that the gradualist reading quietly swaps for the first.

Biography polices this correction as firmly as textual analysis does. The theorist of the siege spent the years of his freedom building a party whose founding documents proclaimed the conquest of power, split that party’s parent organisation at Livorno in 1921 over precisely the question of revolutionary seriousness, and wrote from prison with undiminished hostility to the order that held him. Nothing in that record resembles a man who had concluded that sudden breaks with the existing order were illegitimate or impossible. What the record shows is a man who had concluded that in his part of the world they were insufficient, and who spent his imprisoned decade working out what sufficiency would require. The distance between ‘insufficient’ and ‘ruled out’ is the distance between the theory and its caricature.

One further misreading deserves correction because it inverts the others: the claim that the war of manoeuvre is the authentic Gramsci and the war of position a prisoner’s concession to censorship or despair. The chronology refutes the romance. The positional theme grows directly out of the Turin practice described earlier in this article, and the notebooks develop it with an analytical energy that concession does not produce. Nor does the censorship explanation bear the weight placed on it: Gramsci’s prison writing is coded in places, but its strategic judgements are consistent with the direction of his thinking since the factory occupations. A reader is free to prefer the young insurrectionary. Preference is not evidence, and the theory has to be met where its author in fact left it.

The gradualist reading and how it arose

A misreading this durable has causes, and intellectual honesty requires stating them as causes rather than as crimes. The notebooks reached the public slowly, in thematic volumes prepared after the war by the Italian party Gramsci had founded, and the party that published them had its own strategic journey to legitimate: first the construction of a mass democratic party in a republic, later the search, in the Eurocommunist season of the nineteen seventies, for a road to socialism through the institutions of the western democracies, distinct from the Soviet model and presentable to electorates formed by it. For such a project, a Gramsci who had theorised the long conquest of civil society was a treasure, and a Gramsci who had retained insurrection as a moment was an embarrassment to be edited by emphasis. The editing was mostly not falsification. It was selection, repetition and silence, the normal machinery by which movements manufacture their ancestors, applied across decades of commemoration, schooling and journalism until the selected Gramsci became simply Gramsci for most readers.

The wider career of that reading, including its place in the long argument between Marxism and social democracy, is traced in the companion article on Marxism and social democracy, and the mechanics of the reception, how selections and translations steered generations of readers, are documented in the article on Gramsci’s reception and misreadings. Two features of the process matter for the concept itself. The first is that the gradualist reading has genuine textual hooks, without which it could never have held. The dominance of the war of position in the West is Gramsci’s own claim. His criticisms of frontal voluntarism are severe and quotable. His prison vocabulary, normality, patience, the long haul, invites the flattening. A reading built on real hooks, extended past them, is the hardest kind to dislodge, because every correction can be met with a true quotation that does not settle the point in dispute.

The second feature is the asymmetry of usefulness. A theory that says ‘transform the balance of allegiance across society over decades’ can be quoted with approval by nearly any gradual strategy, including strategies whose authors have quietly dropped the transformation that the theory’s patience was for. The borrowing fastens on the war of position so easily because its visible activity, organising, publishing, educating, contesting institutions, resembles ordinary democratic politics at the surface. The resemblance is real, and only the objective distinguishes them: in Gramsci the activity is ordered toward a rupture in the relations of power and property that ordinary politics exists to administer. Borrowers who keep the activity and drop the objective are not refuted by anything in the activity itself, which is why the correction of the misreading has to be textual and structural, an insistence on the retained moment and on the end the siege serves, rather than an audit of anyone’s sincerity.

The counter-reading: patience as a revolutionary discipline

Against the gradualist appropriation stands a line of interpreters who insist that the war of position, properly read, is a revolutionary’s patience rather than a reformist’s substitute. Their Gramsci is the analyst of a specific historical problem: how a class prepares to rule in societies where ruling requires the active consent of the ruled, and where that consent is organised through institutions that cannot be abolished by decree on the morning after a seizure. On this reading, the siege is not a way of avoiding the conquest of power but the only form in which the conquest, in the West, can be more than a change of management followed by restoration. The factory councils, the party as collective intellectual, the war over common sense: all are technologies for ensuring that when power is taken it can be held and used, because the society beneath it has already been substantially re-founded.

Scholarly criticism complicates both appropriations, and the most influential complication remains the essay by Perry Anderson on the antinomies in Gramsci’s concepts. Anderson argued that key terms in the notebooks slide between senses: hegemony now contrasted with domination, now absorbing it; the state now narrow, now expanded to include civil society; and the war of position itself oscillating between a strategy for the West and a near synonym for the whole revolutionary process. The argument matters here because it warns against the very tidiness this article has been constructing. The notebooks are exploratory drafts, written without the author’s supervision of a final text, and any account that presents the two wars as a finished doctrine with clean edges is imposing a finish the material resists. The dominance not replacement rule is offered as the best-supported reading of the relation Gramsci asserts between the forms, not as a claim that he asserted it everywhere with the same emphasis.

A related caution concerns the prison conditions themselves. Gramsci wrote under censorship, with books obtained through negotiation and a vocabulary that sometimes takes evasive forms, and scholars continue to dispute how much of the notebooks’ indirection is Aesopian and how much is genuine theoretical exploration. For the two wars, the dispute has limited force: the military vocabulary is overt, the East and West passage is among the plainest in the notebooks, and the strategic judgements cohere with his pre-prison direction. But the caution usefully disciplines quotation. Short fragments from the passage have been made to carry whole strategies in the secondary literature, and a reader who wants the concept rather than the slogan should return to the passage entire, in its notebook context, and watch how carefully its conclusions are conditioned. That discipline, applied generally, is the difference between studying Gramsci and citing him.

The criterion objection

The strongest objection to the concept deserves a section of its own and the courtesy of being stated at the full strength its proponents intend. It runs as follows. A strategy that cannot say when it has succeeded is not a strategy but a postponement with a theory attached. Gramsci’s concept provides no criterion by which a movement could determine that the siege has done its work and the moment for decisive action has arrived, and no criterion by which it could determine the opposite, that the siege is failing and must be abandoned or transformed. Every defeat can be absorbed as evidence that more positional work was needed; every crisis can be deferred on the ground that the trenches are not yet taken; the doctrine is therefore unfalsifiable in practice and indefinitely postponing in tendency. And this, the objection continues, is not an accidental flaw but the secret of the concept’s success. A vocabulary that licenses permanent preparation while never requiring the prepared act will be adopted precisely by currents whose real preference is for the preparation, because it allows them to speak the language of transformation while scheduling it beyond any horizon at which they might be held to account. On this account the gradualist misreading is not a misreading at all. It is the concept working as designed, or at least as usable, and the retention of manoeuvre as a ‘moment’ is the doctrinal fig leaf that makes the arrangement deniable.

The objection has force against lazy usages, and anyone who has watched the phrase decorate strategies of pure delay will recognise its target. It also has a distinguished ancestry inside the revolutionary tradition itself, where impatience with hegemonic preparation was never merely temperamental: a movement that defers the decisive contest indefinitely competes for the allegiance of people whose suffering is not deferred, and rival forces, including reactionary ones, will contest the same trenches with fewer scruples about the timetable. Stated this way, the objection is not an external misunderstanding of Gramsci. It is the standing internal problem of any positional strategy, and the notebooks have to be asked directly whether they contain an answer.

What they contain is not a criterion in the mechanical sense, and pretending otherwise would repeat the flattening this article exists to correct. There is no threshold in the notes, no percentage of civil society whose conquest certifies the moment, no timetable against which a leadership could be audited. What there is, instead, is an analytical apparatus for judging situations, developed across the notes on the relation of forces, whose whole purpose is to replace both mechanical criteria and mere intuition with a disciplined reading of a conjuncture. Gramsci distinguishes levels of the relation: the fundamental relation given by the structure of production, which changes slowly and sets the field of the possible; the relation of political forces, the degree of organisation, consciousness and homogeneity achieved by the contending classes, which is the level at which hegemonic work registers; and the relation of military forces in the broad sense, the immediately decisive level at which a crisis is resolved. The siege’s progress is legible at the second level, in the measurable disaggregation of the old bloc and aggregation of the new: parties splitting and forming, intellectuals changing allegiance, institutions of the old order losing their authority to command assent, organisations of the new one acquiring the capacity to lead beyond their own ranks.

He also supplies a phenomenology of the moment at which positional gains become convertible. In a crisis of authority, as he analyses it, the ruling class loses the consent it previously commanded while the rising class has not yet won the consent required to replace it, and the situation can then be resolved by force, by Caesarist arbitration, or by the side whose prior hegemonic work lets it present itself as the general solution. The famous figure of the interregnum, in which ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born’, belongs to this analysis: it names the interval in which the siege’s result is tested. Catastrophic equilibrium, his term for a balance in which the contending forces can destroy but not defeat each other, marks a further condition in which third forces intervene. None of this is a switch that flips. It is a method for reading, and Gramsci plainly believed that strategy in complex societies could have no better instrument, because the reality it tracks is itself the moving product of the struggle being analysed.

When has a war of position been won?

Strictly, never in a form that could be certified in advance. Its victories are legible in the disaggregation of the old bloc, in intellectuals and institutions changing sides, and in the rising force’s demonstrated capacity to lead beyond its own ranks. Gramsci offers a method for reading those signs rather than a threshold at which preparation ends.

The honest verdict on the objection is therefore divided, and the division should be stated without flinching. As a refutation of the gradualist appropriation it fails, because the appropriation depends on deleting the retained moment, and the moment’s textual presence is not in serious doubt. As a demonstration that the concept, by itself, settles the question of timing, it succeeds, because the concept does not settle timing and was not designed to. The absence of a criterion is a real gap in the text. Gramsci leaves the hardest judgement in politics, when preparation must end in decision, to an analysis of situations that he sketches with brilliance and leaves unfinished, in fragments, in a prison notebook. A reader who needs a theory that removes the burden of judgement will find the war of position empty. A reader who thinks the burden of judgement is the substance of strategy will find in the gap not a defect to be excused but the exact contour of the problem itself. Either way, the gap should be conceded as the brief for this concept demands: real, structural, and unfilled by anything its author wrote.

Reading the ground: the analysis of situations

Because the choice between the wars is empirical, the notebooks pair the distinction with a discipline for making it, and that discipline deserves exposition in its own right. Gramsci warns against two opposite errors in reading a situation. The first is economism in its various disguises: the assumption that a crisis in the economic structure automatically produces its political resolution, so that the analyst has only to wait for the collapse and the strategy writes itself. The second is voluntarism: the treatment of a desired outcome as available to sufficient will, so that the assault is ordered because the assailants are ready rather than because the situation is. The two wars map onto the two errors with uncomfortable neatness. Economism produces a parody of the war of position, an endless waiting for the structure to ripen that never examines whether hegemony is actually being built. Voluntarism produces a parody of the war of manoeuvre, frontal assaults whose timing is set by anniversaries and congresses. The genuine concepts stand between the parodies, and the analysis of situations is the practice that keeps them standing.

Within that practice, the distinction between organic and conjunctural movements does heavy work for the pair. Organic movements are the slow, relatively permanent shifts in the structure of a society and in the alignment of its great social forces; conjunctural movements are the immediate, occasional fluctuations of politics, the crises and openings of a season. Strategy fails, on Gramsci’s showing, when the two are confused: when a conjunctural opening is mistaken for an organic shift and a manoeuvre is launched against fortresses that a season’s excitement has not weakened, or when an organic shift is answered with conjunctural tactics and a historic opportunity is processed as routine. Adequate to organic time, the positional form is how a force acts on the slow variables. The war of manoeuvre belongs to conjunctural time, the moment when the slow variables suddenly present a bill or an opening. A leadership’s competence, in this framework, is nothing more exalted than the habit of knowing which clock it is looking at, and the postwar defeats are filed, again and again, as failures to tell the time.

Between the poles: the mass strike and other intermediate forms

Real struggles rarely present themselves in the table’s clean rows, and the notebooks’ readers have always pressed on the forms that sit between the poles. The mass strike is the classical case, debated across the revolutionary movement a generation before the notebooks: a weapon that begins in economic life, generalises across a society, creates organs of dual power in the soviets or councils it throws up, and can pass, under conditions of state crisis, into open contest for power. In the vocabulary of the pair, the mass strike is a hybrid with a positional body and a manoeuvre head. Its strength is accumulated organisation and allegiance, built over years; its decisive episodes are concentrated and frontal. Gramsci’s own formation ran through this debate and through its Turin enactment, and his mature pair can be read as the general theory of which the mass strike discussion was a special case: the question is never which single weapon wins, but which form of war the terrain imposes as dominant, within which every weapon finds its rank.

Other intermediate forms sort themselves the same way once the criterion is terrain rather than temperament. A general strike called to defend a constitution against a coup is manoeuvre in the service of a positional order, frontal in form and conservative in object. A long campaign of municipal government can be positional work or can be mere administration, depending on whether it is organised to shift allegiance and build capacity or simply to hold office. An insurrection prepared by years of clandestine organisation in a society whose civil institutions have been destroyed by dictatorship may recover the logic of manoeuvre even in a formerly dense society, because the dictator has done the terrible service of gelatinising it. The pair’s usefulness lies exactly here: not in labelling movements, but in forcing the survey question, terrain first, that the labels then merely summarise. Analysts who reverse the procedure, attaching the labels by sympathy and shopping for the terrain afterwards, reproduce in scholarship the error the notebooks were written to correct in strategy.

Two cases read through the pair

The contrast between the Russian seizure of power in 1917 and the Italian crisis of 1919 to 1922 rewards a slow reading, because the same concepts that glorified the first were used to misread the second, often by the same people. In the Russian case, the order that fell had concentrated its defences in the state to an unusual degree. The autocracy had kept civil society deliberately stunted, parties illegal or precarious, the press censored, associations supervised; and war had then broken the state itself, army, administration and dynasty together. When the soviets contested power, they contested it with a government whose fall left remarkably little standing behind it: the fortresses were few, their garrisons small, and a frontal strategy corresponded to the actual architecture of the enemy position. Even there, the sequel instructed: the civil war and the long labour of constructing a new order showed how much positional work a seizure postpones rather than completes, a lesson the later Bolshevik debates about culture, education and the peasantry wrote out at length.

The Italian case inverted every term. The liberal state’s crisis after the war was genuine: ministries rotated, the old parties of notables disintegrated, the currency and the public finances shook. Behind the trembling state, however, stood a civil society that the crisis had agitated without disorganising: the great industrial and agrarian associations, the Catholic world with its parishes and its new political party, the bureaucracy and judiciary, the monarchy and the officer corps, a press owned by interests that knew their minds. The revolutionary left, reading the tremor by the eastern rule, announced the order’s terminal crisis at each governmental collapse and spent itself in frontal gestures, while the actual reorganisation of the order’s defences proceeded positionally, through the squads, the syndicates and the syndical legislation of the fascist movement, until the outer ditch itself could be occupied almost without a battle in the march on the capital. Gramsci’s theory is sometimes described as a meditation on that asymmetry. It would be nearer the truth to call it an extraction of the asymmetry’s rule: the state had trembled in both countries, and everything depended on what the trembling revealed.

The besieger’s problem: endurance, supply and morale

Military metaphors earn their keep when their logistics are taken seriously, and the logistics of a siege are mostly about the besieger. A positional war spanning decades makes demands that a frontal strategy never faces: the sustained financing of newspapers, organisers and schools; the reproduction of leadership across generations; the morale of a force asked to win victories too small to celebrate and to treat defeats as tuition rather than as verdicts. Gramsci’s organisational writings are preoccupied with exactly these supply problems, though they are rarely read that way. His insistence on the party as an organism with an internal educational life, on intellectuals formed rather than recruited, on the slow manufacture of a collective will, is the administrative prose of a man who understood that the besieging army starves before the fortress does unless its rear is organised. The history of western movements is littered with positional beginnings that failed as logistics: brilliant journals that folded, schools that graduated one cohort, alliances that dissolved at the first change of ministry.

Endurance has a second enemy besides exhaustion, and the notebooks name it in the discussion of the adversary’s counter-siege: absorption. A force that settles into the trenches of civil society acquires interests there, property, careers, respectability, a stake in the continuation of the very arrangements its positions were dug to undermine. The longer the siege, the stronger the gravitational pull toward becoming part of the landscape. Gramsci’s historical work returns obsessively to this process in the Italian past, the molecular absorption of opposition leaders into governing blocs, and his concept of transformismo is the warning label for every long positional campaign. Honestly expounded, the war of position therefore contains its own pathology report: it is the form of struggle most exposed to corruption by duration, and a movement that adopts it without organs of self-criticism and renewal has chosen the manner of its own domestication. This is a further reason the dominance rule retains the moment of manoeuvre as more than a memory. The retained moment functions inside the theory as a discipline on the siege itself, a standing reminder of what the trenches are for.

One country, several terrains: the Southern Question

The survey logic of the pair finds its most concrete application in Gramsci’s treatment of his own country’s internal geography. His unfinished essay on the southern question, written in the year of his arrest, analyses the Italian South as a distinct social formation inside the national state: a countryside dominated by great landowners and by a stratum of rural intellectuals who mediated between peasant and state, a civil society thin and deformed by the bloc that ruled it, and a peasantry whose discontent was real but organisationally inarticulate. The North, by contrast, had its factories, unions and parties. A revolutionary strategy for Italy therefore could not be uniform. In the industrial cities the struggle would be positional in the developed sense, fought through dense institutions. In the South the decisive tasks were those of alliance and articulation, breaking the agrarian bloc by detaching the peasantry from its traditional intellectuals and joining its demands to the northern workers’ programme.

The lesson generalises beyond Italy, and it rescues the East and West passage from its own shorthand. The relevant unit of analysis is not the nation on a map but the social formation as it actually is, which may contain several densities at once, regions and sectors whose fortresses differ as much as those of separate states. Colonial and postcolonial societies, the terrain on which so many later readers tried the pair, present the mixed case in its extreme form: a modern enclave of dense, imported institutions set in a countryside where the state and the landlord or the party office between them exhaust organised life. Gramsci’s framework instructs such readers to map the densities sector by sector and to expect the war’s dominant form to vary across the map, with the strategic problem becoming precisely the articulation of the different wars into one campaign. The instruction is the opposite of a licence to declare a whole society ‘eastern’ because its capital has fallen, or ‘western’ because its capital has newspapers.

Words and translations: movement, manoeuvre, position

A glossary article owes its readers a short account of the words themselves. In the Italian of the notebooks the pair is guerra di movimento and guerra di posizione, and English-language discussion divides between renderings: the standard Selections from the Prison Notebooks gives ‘war of movement’ and ‘war of position’, while a large secondary literature, following other translations and the French guerre de position tradition, writes ‘war of manoeuvre’. The two English phrases for the frontal form are the same concept wearing different uniforms, and readers searching the literature should treat them as one term with two spellings, since bibliographies split along the line and half the discussion hides under each. ‘Manoeuvre’ carries a useful overtone that ‘movement’ lacks: it suggests deliberate, directed motion by a force under command, which is Gramsci’s meaning, rather than motion in general. ‘Position’, meanwhile, must not be heard as posture or opinion. It names fortified ground, positions in the military sense, trenches and strongpoints that are occupied, held and fought from.

The military lexicon surrounding the pair repays attention for the same reason. Gramsci writes of trenches and fortresses, of attrition and of the ‘sapping’ by which siege works approach a wall, and in the notes on strategy he borrows the older theorists’ distinction between wars of movement and wars of position that European staffs had drawn from the experience of 1914 to 1918. His originality is not the vocabulary but the referent. Where the staffs counted railways and divisions, he counts associations and allegiances; where they asked whether a front could be broken, he asks whether a social order’s reserves of consent can be broken down faster than its institutions can replace them. Keeping both registers in view, the military and the social, is the reliable protection against the two degenerate readings of the pair: the literalist reading that hunts for battles, and the vaporous reading in which the words mean nothing but ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ dressed for a parade.

Timescale, combination and the moving terrain

How long does a war of position take? The honest textual answer is that Gramsci measures it in the units of hegemonic change: the formation of a generation of intellectuals, the slow re-education of common sense, the building of institutions durable enough to survive their founders. His historical examples of completed transformations of allegiance run in decades, and his examples of passive revolution, the defensive analogue, run longer. This is not a counsel of infinite patience disguised as a number. It is a consequence of the object. A fortress system built over a century of associational life is not dismantled in a season, and a strategist who finds the timescale intolerable is really objecting to the density of the society, which no vote of a congress can amend. The practical question the timescale poses is not ‘how long?’ but ‘what would count as progress across a single winter, across a twelvemonth, across a decade?’, and movements that cannot answer it in those graduated terms are not conducting a siege. They are merely waiting, which is the caricature the criterion objection rightly attacks.

Can the two wars be fought at once?

Within one campaign, yes, and in Gramsci’s account they normally are, because dominance is a property of the whole struggle rather than a timetable of its phases. Different sectors of one society can impose different forms simultaneously, and a positional campaign punctuated by crises will generate manoeuvre moments that its leadership must be built to use or to refuse.

The refusal deserves emphasis, because the pair is often read as if every crisis obliges an assault. Nothing in the framework says so. A crisis of authority in a society whose trenches remain in the adversary’s hands is a moment for the adversary, or for a third force, and the positional generalship consists partly in declining battles the terrain has not prepared, however glorious the declining looks in retrospect. The history of the workers’ movement is as full of moments correctly refused as of moments culpably missed, and the notebooks’ analytical apparatus, the patient discrimination of organic from conjunctural, exists to sort one kind from the other. What the framework forbids is only the standing refusal, the elevation of prudence into a doctrine under which the moment is defined as never having arrived. Between the putsch and the permanent postponement runs the narrow ridge of strategy, and the pair, honestly used, is a way of describing the ridge rather than a way of avoiding it.

The terrain itself, finally, is not a constant, and the framework’s last refinement is its account of how density changes under the pressure of events. Dictatorship can tear the fabric: a regime that dissolves unions, parties, press and association by decree re-gelatinises its society as a matter of policy, recreating eastern conditions inside a formerly western state, which is one reason the strategic debates of the nineteen thirties, conducted under fascist and authoritarian governments, could not simply inherit the pair unchanged. War can do the same work faster, destroying the institutions of civil society or discrediting them wholesale, and occupation can import a foreign fortress system overnight. Conversely, a gelatinous society thickens: literacy, urbanisation, association and a free press can construct in a generation the defences whose absence defined the eastern case. The analyst using the pair is therefore committed to re-surveying after every great event, because the event may have changed the very variable on which the strategy rests. A framework that demands its own periodic re-founding is an unusual possession in political theory, and much of the pair’s continuing life derives from it.

Using the pair: a survey before a slogan

For readers who want to work with the concept rather than merely cite it, in historical study or in the analysis of movements safely past, the texts suggest a discipline that can be stated as a sequence of questions, in prose rather than as a checklist, because the sequence is the method. Begin with the state: what, concretely, stands behind this government? Enumerate the institutions through which the existing order secures allegiance, and grade their depth, their autonomy and their loyalty in a crisis, distinguishing those that would defend the order from those that would merely miss it. Then examine the challenger’s own positions with the same cold eye: which institutions does it actually hold, which does it merely address, and what is the quality of the allegiance it commands beyond its own membership? Only then pose the strategic question the pair exists to answer: given this distribution, which form of war is dominant, what would a frontal act meet, and what would a siege have to take first? The questions are Gramsci’s. The answers belong to whoever does the work.

The abuse of the pair in strategic argument follows the reverse sequence, and can be recognised by it. A conclusion is adopted first, from temperament, tradition or the needs of a factional season; the vocabulary is then applied as decoration, ‘positional’ for whatever the speaker already does slowly and ‘manoeuvre’ for whatever the speaker’s rivals do quickly. The companion article on Gramsci and modern politics examines how the vocabulary circulates in that decorative mode and what happens to it there. The test that separates use from decoration is the survey. An argument that cannot name the fortresses, cannot say which are held and which are hostile, and cannot state what a trembling of the state would reveal, is not applying the war of position. It is wearing it.

The integral state: why the siege is no detour

The war of position presupposes a doctrine of the state that Gramsci states in a famous expansion: the state, understood in its integral sense, is political society plus civil society, dictatorship armoured by hegemony, coercion wrapped in consent. The expansion is sometimes read as a definitional flourish. It is better read as the strategic premise of the whole pair. If the state were only its coercive apparatus, the ministries, the police, the army, then every political struggle would reduce to a war of manoeuvre against that apparatus, and the eastern inference would be universal. It is because the integral state includes the hegemonic apparatus, the schools and churches and presses through which consent is organised, that the apparatus’s capture cannot conclude the struggle. The trenches are parts of the state in the integral sense, which is why a strategy that ignores them has not besieged the state at all, merely its forward works. In the integral state there is no road around civil society, because civil society is inside the thing to be transformed.

This also clarifies what victory in a war of position would consist of, insofar as the notebooks allow the word. Not the occupation of the ditch, nor even the accumulation of trenches one by one, but the point at which the rising class’s hegemony has become the society’s operating common sense to a degree that the old order’s coercive remainder stands exposed as mere coercion, indefensible in the language the society speaks to itself. Gramsci’s analysis of crises of authority describes the symmetrical condition from the other side: a ruling class that has lost consent retains force, and governs, for a time, by force and fraud increasingly naked. Victory in the war of position, to the extent that it is ever won in advance of power, comes when that exposure is complete and an alternative direction stands ready, organised and credible, to be consented to. The definition is deliberately unsatisfying to anyone seeking a certificate. It describes a social fact, the migration of allegiance, which like all social facts is real before it is measurable and measurable only in its effects.

The garrisons: intellectuals as the personnel of the siege

Every trench system implies a garrison, and Gramsci’s theory of intellectuals supplies the pair with its personnel. His claim that all human beings are intellectuals, though not all have the social function of intellectuals, redistributes the strategic map: the fortresses of civil society are held, staffed and reproduced by the strata whose work is the elaboration and transmission of conceptions of the world, teachers, clergy, journalists, officials, technicians, organisers. A social class, in his account, creates its own intellectuals organically as it rises, and rules in part through the traditional intellectuals it inherits and wins. In one of its central aspects, therefore, the contest is over intellectuals: over whether the schoolteacher forms her pupils inside the old common sense or inside a criticism of it, whether the parish, the newsroom and the professional journal reproduce the existing order’s account of itself or elaborate an alternative.

Two consequences follow that casual usages of the pair routinely miss. The first is that the contest is slow for a personnel reason and not merely a tactical one: intellectuals are formed in institutions with generational rhythms, universities, seminaries, apprenticeships of the pen, and a siege that needs its own garrisons must run its own schools or capture places in the adversary’s, both of which are works of years. The second is that defection matters more than denunciation. When traditional intellectuals detach from a declining bloc, carrying their prestige and their institutions’ authority with them, the fortress system loses garrisons without a shot, and Gramsci’s histories of Italian unification and of the French tradition are full of such transferences, whole strata of the old order’s servants becoming the new order’s heralds. A war of position is measurable, among other signs, in the movement of these strata, and a would-be besieger who cannot name the intellectuals its adversary is losing, and the ones it is winning, does not know the state of its own siege.

The general staff of the siege: the party as collective intellectual

A siege conducted across a whole society needs a coordinating intelligence, and in Gramsci’s political theory that function belongs to the party, which he reimagines, under the figure of the modern Prince borrowed from Machiavelli, as a collective intellectual. The figure matters for the pair because it specifies what kind of organisation a dominant war of position requires at its centre. Not a general staff in the conspiratorial sense, a small committee hoarding the plan, and not a mere electoral machine aggregating preferences, but an organism that elaborates the experience of a class into strategy, educates its own cadres in the reading of situations, and holds the long campaign’s memory across defeats and generations. The party of the notebooks is the siege’s memory and its school. It is also, crucially, a position in itself: a trench dug inside civil society from which other trenches are supplied, relieved and directed.

This conception explains a feature of the pair that puzzles readers who approach it through the older insurrectionary literature. In a war of manoeuvre, the party’s decisive virtue is concentration at the moment of action. In a war of position, its decisive virtues are continuity, pedagogy and the capacity to lose arguments inside society without losing the war, together with the rarer capacity to recognise the conjuncture in which concentration suddenly matters again. Gramsci’s prison reflections on party life, on bureaucracy as the party’s characteristic disease and on democratic centralism as an organic relation rather than a formula, are the staff papers of the positional war. Bureaucracy, in his diagnosis, is what happens when the coordinating organism hardens into a caste that mistakes the preservation of its own positions for the conduct of the siege. The metaphor again disciplines the concept: a garrison that exists to hold its own quarters has forgotten the fortress it was posted against, and a party can win every internal position while the war is lost outside.

The micro-terrain: common sense, folklore and the battle for words

At its smallest scale, the terrain of the war of position is language itself. Gramsci’s notes on common sense treat the everyday philosophy of ordinary people as a sediment of deposits left by earlier hegemonies: religion and folklore, proverbs and superstitions, the moral furniture of centuries, mixed with what he calls good sense, the practical kernel of criticism that experience teaches. No frontal assault reaches this stratum. It changes molecularly, through education in the broadest sense, through the slow prestige of alternative explanations, through intellectuals who translate a new conception of the world into the vernaculars people actually speak. The famous Gramscian attention to apparently minor cultural materials, serial novels, opera, detective stories, the theatre of Pirandello, belongs to this level of the analysis. He studied them as an engineer studies soil: because the fortress system’s foundations are laid in what a population reads, sings and repeats without thinking.

This micro-terrain explains why the war of position, in serious expositions, never reduces to a contest of institutions in the formal sense. The parish and the school matter partly as organisations and partly as factories of the phrases in which life is narrated. A hegemony is secure when its account of the world is the one that proverbial wisdom confirms, and it is in crisis when the proverbs stop working, when experience visibly contradicts the sayings and a space opens for a new narration to become sayable. Gramsci’s sensitivity to this scale is one reason his prison work has been raided so productively by students of culture. It is also why the crude identification of his siege with a ‘culture war’ of slogans misses the mark in a specific way: the battle for words, in his conception, is won by whoever connects a new vocabulary to the practical experience of the largest numbers, through organisations that embody the connection, and not by whoever shouts the vocabulary loudest from outside those organisations.

The pair among its contemporaries: the strategy debates of the International

The distinction was not produced in a vacuum, and placing it among the strategic arguments of the communist movement between the wars sharpens what was original in it. That movement had inherited from 1917 a prestige-laden model of revolution and spent two decades arguing, often bitterly, about its portability. One pole of the argument generalised the October experience into a standing summons: the crisis of capitalism was permanent, the masses were ready, and only the will and purity of the leadership stood between the movement and power. In the International’s later nineteen-twenties turn, that pole hardened into a doctrine of imminent confrontation, in which compromise formations were denounced and the decisive clash treated as the order of every day. Gramsci, writing in prison and in increasing isolation from the movement’s direction, developed the two wars in the opposite direction: not a denial that the clash could come, but a theory of why, in the societies he analysed, the clash kept failing to arrive on the terms predicted, and of what would have to be different before it could be fought with any prospect.

The other pole of the inheritance came from social democracy’s long practice of institutional accumulation, which had its own implicit theory of the West: that the trenches could be occupied one by one until the fortress found itself administered by its besiegers. Gramsci’s pair refuses this pole as firmly as the first, and the refusal is easy to miss because the activities resemble each other. The social democratic accumulation he knew had, in his judgement, been absorbed by the fortress it meant to take; its parties had become part of the state’s hegemonic apparatus, their positions garrisoned in the old order’s service. What separates the war of position from that practice is its objective and its retained moment, not its daily texture, which is precisely why the distinction has to be policed textually, by the dominance rule and by the end the siege is for, rather than by any visible difference in what the besiegers do on a Tuesday. Few ideas in the Marxist tradition are so dependent on their telos for their identity, and few therefore so easy to counterfeit.

Read against these contemporaries, the originality of the pair comes into focus. It is an attempt to save the revolutionary objective from both of its period falsifications: from the voluntarism that kept spending movements against fortresses it had not surveyed, and from the gradualism that kept converting the survey into a permanent residence. That the attempt was made in a fascist prison, by a man whose own movement had been destroyed between those two falsifications, gives the notebooks’ strategic chapters their peculiar tone, at once analytical and valedictory. He is the only major theorist of the tradition who wrote his strategic masterwork after the total defeat of his own organisation, with the victor’s Italy as the daily evidence outside the walls. The theory of the two wars is what that vantage produced: a refusal to call the defeat either an accident of leadership or a proof that resistance was misconceived, and an insistence on the slower, structural explanation instead.

Reading the texts: where the pair lives in the notebooks

A glossary article should end its exposition by telling the reader where the concept actually sits in its source, because the two wars are more often encountered in quotation than in situ. The relevant material is concentrated in the notebooks’ reflections on politics and the state, above all the notes gathered by the standard English selection under the headings of the modern Prince and of state and civil society, where the discussions of Machiavelli, of the party, of the Risorgimento and of the structure of modern states carry the strategic vocabulary. The East and West passage stands in that company, which is why its neighbours are notes on Caesarism, on passive revolution and on the analysis of situations: the pair belongs to a cluster of concepts with which it must be read, each correcting the simplifications the others invite. The Risorgimento notes supply the historical laboratory, the Italian unification read as a revolution conducted without its Jacobin moment, a transformation accomplished by diplomacy and absorption, against which the failure of the democratic forces to fight their own war of position becomes the standing example of a siege never laid.

Two practical counsels follow for the reader who goes to the source. The first is to distrust any single-sentence version of the argument encountered in the secondary literature, this article’s included, and to test it against the passage entire and its surrounding notes, where the conditions and qualifications live. Gramsci wrote aphoristically under constraint, and his sentences are load-bearing to an unusual degree; removing the conditions from them is the standard industrial process by which the misreadings catalogued here are manufactured. The second counsel is to attend to the editorial history. The notebooks are posthumous fragments arranged by editors, first thematically and later in the critical edition’s chronological order, and the arrangement steers interpretation more than readers usually allow. A concept reconstructed from fragments should be held with the confidence appropriate to fragments: firmly where the texts converge, as they do on the dominance rule, and provisionally where they gesture, as they do on the question of the moment’s recognition, which the prisoner’s unfinished analysis leaves, fittingly and frustratingly, to his readers.

What the metaphor cannot carry

Every metaphor has a frontier where it stops describing and starts deceiving, and a precision article should patrol the frontier of its own. The war figure misleads, first, in suggesting a single adversary with a single command. A social order is not an army. Its institutions have their own interests, its defenders disagree, defect and improvise, and the ‘fortress system’ of civil society is a metaphor for an alignment that nobody designed as a whole. The besieger who imagines a general staff on the other side will misread the defections and accidents through which hegemonies actually change. The figure misleads, second, in implying a final battle in which the question is settled. Hegemonic change has no Austerlitz. Allegiance migrates by accumulation and erosion, punctuated by crises whose verdicts are themselves revised by later ones, and a movement waiting for the decisive day the metaphor seems to promise may underrate the gains that are the actual substance of its victory.

The figure misleads, third and most seriously, in its treatment of the population as terrain. In war, ground is occupied; in politics, the ground is people, whose consent is the object and whose agency is the medium, and a strategy that conceives them as earthworks to be taken has adopted the adversary’s coldest assumption in the act of opposing him. Gramsci’s own theory contains the antidote, in the insistence that hegemony is leadership experienced by the led as their own interest and enlargement, and that a class becomes hegemonic by genuinely universalising its programme rather than by manoeuvring populations into place. But the antidote has to be administered by the reader, because the military surface of the vocabulary constantly invites the colder reading. The best users of the pair have always kept one hand on the correction: trenches do not attend night school, do not change their minds at a sermon, do not write letters to newspapers. People do, and the whole of the war of position happens in that difference.

Is the siege a strategy or only a picture?

It is a strategy stated in a picture’s terms, and the two aspects can be separated by a test. The picture supplies the geometry: ditch, fortresses, reserves, the folly of the frontal rush. The strategy supplies the claims the geometry encodes, about terrain, dominance and the retained moment, which stand or fall as analysis.

Why, then, keep the picture at all? Because the claims, stated abstractly, lose their disciplinary force. ‘Take account of the institutional density of the social formation before choosing a strategy’ is true and forgettable. The fortress system makes the same truth surveyable: it demands to know what stands behind the government, in what depth, held by whom, and it makes the eastern error, the storming of the ditch, visible as an error of reconnaissance rather than of courage. The metaphor also survives because its failures are instructive, as the preceding paragraphs show: each point at which the figure breaks, the enemy’s missing general staff, the absent final battle, the unarmoured humanity of the terrain, marks a place where political strategy exceeds war and must think in its own terms. A metaphor whose limits are this informative has earned its keep, which is the most that can be said for any instrument of thought, and more than can be said for most of the vocabulary of politics.

How each war fails

A typology earns confidence by specifying its own failure modes, and the pair’s are asymmetric in an instructive way. The war of manoeuvre fails, in a dense society, by success at the wrong level: the assault takes the ditch, proclaims the new order, and discovers that it has inherited a government and not a country. Its sequel is either retreat, as the surviving institutions starve and discredit the usurpers, or the attempt to substitute coercion for the missing hegemony, which deforms the victors into a garrison and the revolution into its opposite’s recruiting sergeant. Gramsci’s gallery of eastern-style failures in the West is a set of variations on this sequence, and his severity toward the strategists responsible is the severity of a man adding up its cost in destroyed organisations, including, in the end, his own.

Its characteristic failure is by duration, in the modes catalogued earlier: absorption of the besiegers into the fortress’s service, bureaucratisation of the besieging staff, and the conversion of patience from a discipline into an identity, at which point the siege exists to be conducted rather than to be concluded. Its sequel is quieter and therefore harder to dramatise: no single defeat, only the slow discovery that the positions are held by people who no longer remember the war. The two failure modes are mirror images, and movements characteristically flee one into the other: a generation burned by absorption turns to the rhetoric of the frontal assault; a generation decimated by failed assaults settles into the trenches and calls the settling wisdom. The notebooks’ pair, used as designed, is the refusal of that oscillation. Dominance assigns each form its rank and its conditions, so that neither failure can present itself as the other’s cure. The strategist’s maturity, in this tradition, is recognisable by a single trait: an unwillingness to let the last disaster choose the next strategy.

The eastern exemplar re-examined: what the October seizure proves and does not prove

Because the Russian case carries so much weight in the pair, its exact lesson deserves one more pass at a slower speed. The seizure of power in Petrograd in October 1917 was a frontal act of classic form: an insurrectionary committee, a plan, a night of occupied bridges, telegraph offices and stations, a government arrested in its palace. What made the act available was the preceding collapse of the state’s supports, and what made it durable, insofar as it was durable, was a series of improvisations that the frontal model does not describe. The soviets, which gave the insurrection its institutional lever and its legitimacy, were not built by the party that used them; they were thrown up by the crisis itself, organs of a civil society being improvised at wartime speed in a country where such organs had been suppressed for generations. The new power’s first decrees, on peace and on land, worked by adopting the demands and even the programme of rival currents, an exercise in hegemonic concession performed at the moment of seizure, because the seizers understood that a proclamation is not an allegiance. The frontal act, in other words, opened a positional war that then had to be fought for years, through civil war, famine and the long argument about culture and the peasantry that fills the record of the following decade.

Gramsci drew from the case the conclusion the pair encodes, and also registered, in his early journalism, the enthusiasm of a contemporary who saw in October the proof that a determined minority could break the fatalism of stages. The mature theory does not renounce the enthusiasm; it rehouses it. What October proved, on the notebooks’ reading, is that a state of the eastern type can be taken frontally when war has broken it, and that everything after the taking is hegemony or its absence. What it did not prove is that the sequence can be generalised to states of the western type, or that the positional labour can be skipped where the institutions are dense, since even in Russia it could not be skipped but only deferred at a price. The distinction between proving and not proving is the whole content of the dominance rule applied retrospectively, and it is why the notebooks return to 1917 with a respect entirely free of imitation.

The French preparation: a siege conducted by philosophes

If Russia supplies the exemplar of manoeuvre, the notebooks find the great historical exemplar of positional preparation in the long prelude to the French Revolution. Gramsci returns repeatedly to the observation that the France of 1789 had been preceded by a vast molecular transformation of culture and allegiance, in which the writers of the Enlightenment and their successors had, over generations, dissolved the old order’s authority in the minds of the classes that would make and staff the new one, so that when the political crisis arrived the ideological fortress system of the monarchy was already substantially evacuated. The revolution’s leaders appear, in this reading, less as improvisers of a new world than as the executors of a hegemony prepared by a century of intellectual work, and the contrast with Italy’s unification, where no comparable preparation had been made and the transformation was accomplished passively, from above, becomes the notebooks’ master comparison in the history of state formation.

The comparison does double duty for the pair. Historically, it shows the war of position operating long before the term existed, and conducted by the rising class of that epoch with a completeness that later movements rarely matched: an entire civil society, its academies, salons, presses and professions, turned over to a new conception of the world before the old regime’s political defences were seriously engaged. Analytically, it corrects a possible misreading of the siege as a strategy only of the left or only of the industrial age. Positional war, in Gramsci’s historical sociology, is the general form by which fundamental classes prepare fundamental transformations in societies dense enough to require preparation. The bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century is his standing proof that the form works, and the proof carries an implicit rebuke to his own camp: the class that invented the method used it without illusions about its timescale, and expected its political victories to be the ratification of a cultural fact, not a substitute for one.

The national-popular condition: a siege must speak the country’s language

Among the conditions the notebooks attach to positional success, one is so regularly omitted from summaries that it deserves separate statement. A war of position is fought for a people’s allegiance in the medium of that people’s actual life: its language, its history, its religious and regional textures, the specific composition of its classes and their memories. Gramsci’s term for the quality a programme must acquire is the national-popular, and his Italian examples are unsparing. A movement whose culture is imported, whose slogans translate foreign debates into a vernacular nobody speaks at home, whose intellectuals feel more kinship with their counterparts abroad than with the peasants of their own South, cannot conduct a siege, because it is not present on the terrain where the siege is fought. It can conduct a manoeuvre, perhaps, in a capital. The fortresses will not notice.

His own formation illustrates the condition. The theorist of hegemony was a Sardinian, formed at the periphery of the Italian state, who wrote on the Southern Question, on the language question and on the gulf between Italy’s literary culture and its people’s speech, and who understood the Risorgimento’s failure as, in large part, a failure of the national-popular kind: a unification conducted by a stratum that spoke French to itself and Piedmontese decrees to the South, and never became the collective will of the nation it had assembled. Generalised, the war of position is the strategy of movements that refuse that failure in advance. It commits them to the slow acquisition of a country, region by region and idiom by idiom, which is one more reason its timescale is measured in decades and its personnel in schoolteachers as much as in agitators. A glossary that defines the pair without this condition leaves out the reason the siege, in Gramsci’s hands, is a cultural project in the deep sense and not a technique of encirclement.

The neighbouring concepts: the cluster the pair belongs to

No concept in the notebooks works alone, and the pair’s meaning is stabilised by its neighbours, three of which have appeared in passing and should now be set in their places. Passive revolution, the transformation accomplished from above without the popular protagonist, is the pair’s shadow: it is what happens to a society whose subaltern classes failed to conduct their war of position, leaving the initiative of change to the old order’s own renovators. Transformismo is passive revolution’s personnel policy, the digestion of the opposition’s leaders into the governing bloc, and it is the standing temptation of every garrison the besiegers post inside the institutions. Caesarism names the arbitration that supervenes when the contending forces balance catastrophically, neither able to prevail, and a third force, a leader or a bureaucracy or an army, resolves the crisis in its own name; it is the pair’s warning about what fills a vacuum left by two failed wars, the frontal one defeated and the positional one unbuilt.

Set in the cluster, the pair’s distinctness sharpens. Hegemony names the stuff being fought over, consent organised as leadership. Civil society names the ground. Position and manoeuvre name the two forms the fighting takes on that ground for that stuff, and the dominance rule assigns their ranks by the ground’s density. The cluster also explains the concept’s notorious slipperiness in quotation, the antinomies Anderson catalogued: lift the pair out of the cluster and it floats free, available for the gradualist and the putschist alike. Restore the cluster and the floating stops, because every term a borrower might drop is load-bearing in some neighbour. This is the scholarly ground for the practice this article has followed throughout: whenever the pair is at risk of becoming a slogan, reattach it, to the passage, to the density variable, to the objective of hegemony and to the retained moment, and let the reattachment do the arguing.

A worked miniature: one crisis read twice

Take a single conjuncture, the German autumn of 1923, and read it twice, as a discipline in applying the pair. The facts available to contemporaries included a currency annihilated by inflation, the Ruhr under foreign occupation, separatist movements in the Rhineland, a national government lurching between coalitions, communist-led governments briefly formed in two German states and then removed, and, in November, an attempted putsch by the nationalist right in Munich. Read by the rules of manoeuvre, the season looks like the eastern signal: the state trembling on every front at once, the possessing classes divided and frightened, the moment for a frontal bid announcing itself in the newspapers. An insurrection was indeed prepared on that reading, scheduled, postponed and finally attempted in isolation in Hamburg, where it was crushed within days by forces the central government had no difficulty concentrating.

Read by the rules of position, the same season shows the fortress system intact beneath the trembling. The judiciary and the higher bureaucracy were continuous with the empire’s and hostile to the republic’s left; the officer corps preserved its autonomy and its allegiances; the great press empires commanded the narration of events for the decisive middle strata; the churches, the universities and the professional associations transmitted the old order’s common sense undisturbed by the currency’s collapse; and the organised working class was divided between two parties whose mutual hostility was itself a fortification of the status quo. On this reading, the state’s crisis was real and the order’s crisis was not, and the Hamburg rising’s fate is not a mystery of timing or betrayal but the predictable result of assaulting a ditch. The miniature is offered as a model of the pair’s use in historical analysis, the purpose for which this series chiefly commends it: the same evidence, two strategies of reading, and a verdict that follows from the survey rather than from sympathy with either the assailants or the defenders.

The school as fortress: education in the siege

No institution receives more sustained attention in Gramsci’s prison work, after the party and the press, than the school, and the reason is positional arithmetic. A school system is where a social order manufactures its next generation of consent and its next cohort of intellectuals at the same time, and it does so on a timescale, the twelve or twenty years of a pupil’s formation, that matches the war of position’s own. His notes on education defend, against progressive reformers of his day, the rigour of the traditional common school, its Latin and its grammar and its discipline of effort, on grounds that surprise readers who expect a revolutionary to favour spontaneity in the classroom. The defence is strategic. A school that spares subaltern children the laborious acquisition of the dominant culture’s instruments does not liberate them; it leaves them permanently disarmed before the classes whose children acquire those instruments at home. The fortress must be taken seriously enough to be stormed on its own syllabus.

The same arithmetic explains his attention to the formation of teachers, to curricula, and to the divide between the classical education reserved in practice for the children of the ruling strata and the vocational tracks designed for the ruled. Each curricular decision is a small disposition of the siege: which history the nation’s children narrate to themselves, which language, the dialect of home or the standard of the state, counts as educated speech, whether the peasant’s child meets the world as an object of pity, of folklore or of analysis. A movement conducting a war of position reads a ministry’s school reforms the way a staff reads the enemy’s engineering works, for signs of which allegiances are being entrenched and which quietly abandoned. And it builds its own educational positions with matching patience: the party school, the union’s evening classes, the publishing programme that puts the instruments of high culture into cheap editions, all the unglamorous works by which a class manufactures the intellectuals it was not born with.

The oldest fortress: religion and the Church in his analysis

Gramsci’s treatment of Catholicism is among the most instructive parts of the notebooks for the pair, because it is a study of the strongest positional machine he knew, conducted by an atheist with undisguised professional admiration. The Roman Church, in his analysis, had solved the central problem of hegemony across two millennia: how to keep the intellectuals and the simplest faithful inside one conception of the world, so that the religion of the educated and the religion of the peasantry remained, however uneasily, one religion. Its organisational genius, the orders, the parishes, the seminaries, the lay associations of Catholic Action, constituted a fortress system of unmatched depth, with garrisons in every village and a general staff of legendary patience. Against it, the Italian state and its liberal ruling class had never mounted a serious war of position at all, preferring an anticlericalism of gestures that left the parishes untouched, and the price of that omission was a nation whose deepest allegiances were administered by an institution its rulers did not control.

The lessons he drew were structural, not confessional. A worldview that exists only among intellectuals is not yet a hegemony; it becomes one when it is embodied in organisations that reach the simplest believer without ceasing to engage the most sophisticated, and when its intellectual strata accept the discipline of remaining in contact with the base rather than emigrating into pure doctrine. He measured his own movement against that standard and found it wanting, which is one source of the notebooks’ severity about the quality of the party’s cultural work. For the pair, the Church analysis supplies the limiting case that keeps the density variable honest. Here is a fortress system that survived the fall of every state that housed it, that outlasted empires and republics, that treated centuries as its natural unit. A strategist who has contemplated it will not again mistake a government’s trembling for an order’s crisis, nor suppose that positions of this depth yield to anything less than an equally deep counter-organisation of allegiance.

An American survey: the density variable abroad

The notebooks contain a sustained experiment in applying the survey outside Europe, in the notes on Americanism and Fordism, and the experiment shows the density variable doing work its shorthand geography cannot. Gramsci’s America is a society without many of the traditional sediments of the European fortress system: no feudal past encrusted in its institutions, a relative scarcity of the parasitic strata of traditional intellectuals who lived off inherited position, and, in his striking formulation, a hegemony that begins in the factory, with the organisation of production itself as the primary school of the new order’s common sense. Rotary clubs and freemasonry catch his eye as the associational forms of a civil society being built at industrial speed, thinner in some dimensions than Europe’s and in others, the corporation, the foundation, the mass circulation press, formidably dense. The survey does not return a simple verdict of East or West. It returns a map of a different fortress system, newer, less ecclesiastical, more industrial, against which the strategic commonplaces imported from Europe would misfire in instructive ways.

His interest in the case was diagnostic rather than touristic. America represented for him the possible future of the European fortress system itself: an order whose hegemony rested less on inherited deference and more on the organisation of work, consumption and respectability, and whose defences would therefore have to be read differently by any besieger. The notes’ attention to prohibition, to the campaigns over private morality, to the high wage as an instrument of consent, is the attention of a siege engineer examining a new kind of wall. For the reader of the pair, the American notes perform the essential service of proving the framework’s portability by showing its author failing, productively, to make it simple: the variable travels, the verdicts do not, and each society’s survey has to be done on the ground.

Journalism as siege craft: the press in the notebooks

Gramsci was a working journalist before he was a theorist, founded and edited newspapers across his whole political life, and wrote in prison a small treatise’s worth of notes on the types of periodical publication and their functions. The press, in his treatment, is not the megaphone of a strategy decided elsewhere. It is one of the siege’s principal engines, the daily manufacture of a conception of the world in instalments, and its typology maps the war of position’s levels with unusual concreteness. The newspaper of information forms the common sense of readers who will never open a theoretical journal; the review of culture contests the allegiance of intellectuals; the theoretical journal elaborates the doctrine in which a movement’s cadres are schooled; and the art of the whole apparatus lies in keeping the levels in communication, so that the doctrine is constantly translated downward into common sense and experience is constantly reported upward into doctrine. A break in that circuit, a theory that never reaches the newspaper or a newspaper beneath the notice of theory, is a breach in the besieger’s own lines.

The point generalises to every medium a period affords, and it is why his notes on theatre, on the serial novel and on popular taste belong to the same dossier as his notes on party organisation. In the terms of the pair, media are not the message’s neutral carriers but fortifications that somebody holds: each serial, each column, each editorial line is a small position, garrisoned by habits of reading formed over years, from which the world is narrated before it is argued about. A war of position that neglects this level leaves the daily narration of events to the adversary and then wonders why its set piece arguments, however sound, arrive in minds already furnished against them. The prisoner’s attention to such humble materials is sometimes mistaken for the eclecticism of a man with a library and no politics. It is the opposite. It is the politics, observed at the resolution at which hegemony is actually decided.

Trenches with two masters: the trade unions

Trade unions occupy a deliberately uncomfortable place in the framework, and the discomfort illuminates the pair better than another celebration would. A union is a fortress of the workers’ movement, an institution of civil society built and garrisoned by the subaltern class itself, and simultaneously, in Gramsci’s analysis, an organisation whose ordinary functioning integrates its members into the existing order’s terms, bargaining over the price of labour power inside a system it thereby helps to reproduce. He inherited from the older tradition the distinction between trade union consciousness, the awareness generated by the economic struggle alone, and a wider political hegemony, and the pair gives that distinction its spatial form: a union is a trench, and a trench can be a position from which a siege is supplied or a hole in which a war is buried. Everything depends on whether the institution is connected, by its leadership, its education and its alliances, to a strategy beyond itself.

This is why his writing on syndicalism is so much more ambivalent than the polemics of his contemporaries. He had seen, in Turin, the union bureaucracy hesitate at the factory occupations’ decisive hour, and he had also seen the councils, his own alternative, fail to survive without the unions’ machinery. The mature view declines to choose between the trench and the open field in the abstract. Institutions of the economic struggle are necessary positions and insufficient ones, fortresses that must be held and cannot be the war. Readers who use the pair to dismiss economistic organisations as mere reformism repeat, in mirror image, the error of the syndicalists who used the economic struggle to dismiss politics: both freeze one level of a multi-level war into the whole of it. The dominance framework exists to prevent exactly that freezing, at every level from the union branch to the philosophy seminar.

The afterlife in scholarship: editions, and what they made arguable

The concept’s career in scholarship tracks the material history of its text, and a reader meeting the pair in modern debates should know the main stations. The first postwar editions of the notebooks, arranged thematically by editors working under the direction of the party Gramsci founded, made the strategic writings available inside a frame that privileged certain themes and a certain image of their author; the war of position travelled widely in those decades, though often, as the reception history shows, in the gradualist luggage described earlier. The critical edition of the notebooks published in the nineteen seventies, which restored the fragments to their chronological order and printed the variants between his first drafts and his revisions, changed the scholarly ground. Readers could now watch the strategic vocabulary forming, distinguish the notes written in the first prison years from the later reworkings, and test interpretive claims against the sequence of the writing itself. Much of the best subsequent work on the pair, in Italy and internationally, is unintelligible without that editorial event, because claims about what Gramsci ‘held’ became, for the first time, claims that could be dated.

The scholarly debates that followed have a pattern worth naming. Each advance in the text’s availability has narrowed the space for the slogans. The dating of the East and West passage among the early prison notes, its proximity to the notes on the Risorgimento and on the French preparation, the recurrence of the dominance pattern across the strategy notes, the consistent retention of the frontal moment: these are findings of a philological kind, and they constrain interpretation as firmly as findings constrain it in any historical science. Against them, the looser usages persist in political journalism, where no editor enforces the text. The pair thus lives a double life, unusually well policed in the scholarship and unusually unpoliced in the slogan market, and the practical counsel for any reader is to know which of the two lives a given usage belongs to before deciding how much weight it can bear. This article has been written, deliberately, in the first life, on the principle that a glossary’s loyalty is to the policed version.

What a trench taken looks like: indicators at the level of political forces

The criterion discussion conceded that the notebooks supply no threshold, but it would be a further error to conclude that they supply no evidence. At the middle level of the relation of forces, the level of political organisation and allegiance, the siege’s progress leaves traces that a disciplined observer can learn to read, and assembling them is the closest the concept comes to a dashboard. A ruling bloc’s parties begin to split along lines that reproduce, inside the fortress, the argument the besiegers are making outside it. Intellectuals formed inside the old order’s institutions start to defect, not as isolated converts but in cohorts, carrying journals, chairs and professional authority across the lines. Institutions that once transmitted the official common sense automatically begin to hedge, to host the argument, to lose the power of deciding in advance which questions are respectable. Subaltern organisations acquire the specific capacity Gramsci treated as hegemony’s signature: they are consulted, feared and imitated as a possible government of society and not merely as a pressure upon its present one, so that even their adversaries start to define their own programmes against the besiegers’ alternative.

Each indicator has its counterfeit, and the notebooks’ histories are largely a training in telling them apart. A ruling party’s split can be a mere circulation of elites, transformismo wearing the mask of crisis. A defection of intellectuals can be careerism changing trains. A season of official tolerance can be the fortress’s method of domesticating the siege by inviting it indoors. The genuine article is distinguished, in Gramsci’s case studies, by depth and irreversibility: changes that reach the organisations’ base rather than their letterheads, that survive a change of ministry, that alter what the next generation is taught. The analyst’s craft is slow because the evidence is slow, and a reader impatient with that slowness should suspect, in himself, the voluntarist temptation the pair was built to school. The dashboard exists. It is written in institutions rather than in numbers, and it rewards exactly the kind of attention the rest of this article has been describing.

The strategists’ ancestry: annihilation and attrition

The pair’s military parentage is more specific than a general borrowing from the Great War, and intellectual historians have long noted its kinship with the debate among European strategists between a strategy of annihilation, which seeks the enemy’s armed force in a decisive battle, and a strategy of attrition, which seeks to exhaust the enemy’s capacity and will across a whole theatre and a long duration. The kinship is illuminating in both directions. It explains the pair’s most distinctive feature, its insistence that the choice between the forms is dictated by the relation of forces and not by doctrine: the strategists had learned the same lesson from the same war, at the cost of the same generation. And it marks the exact point of Gramsci’s departure from his sources. The strategists’ attrition wears down an army. His war of position wears down, and builds up, something the strategists had no concept for: the allegiance of a civil population, organised in institutions that are simultaneously the war’s terrain, its prize and its principal weapon.

There is a further figure in the ancestry worth rescuing from footnote status, because Gramsci’s generation knew it well: the partisan. Irregular warfare, the war of the weak who cannot meet the enemy in the open field and therefore fight from within the population’s own life, is the military form that most resembles his siege in its dependence on the allegiance of the terrain’s inhabitants. The resemblance should not be inflated into an identity; Gramsci’s besiegers are parties, unions and presses, not guerrilla bands, and his theatre is the parliament and the parish rather than the mountain. But the partisan comparison catches something the siege image alone can miss, which is that in this kind of war the population is not the prize of the fighting but its medium and its judge, and a force that loses the population’s allegiance has lost the war whatever positions it formally holds. The notebooks’ politics begin from that insight, and the military vocabulary is everywhere bent to its service.

The counter-siege he watched: fascism’s own war of position

The notebooks’ analysis was sharpened by an involuntary advantage: their author spent a decade as the prisoner of a regime that understood, in its own brutal idiom, much of what he was theorising. Italian fascism did not rest with the occupation of the state in 1922, dramatic as its arrival had been. It proceeded to conduct a systematic occupation of civil society: the dissolution of independent unions and their replacement by state syndicates, the organisation of leisure itself in the dopolavoro, the capture of youth through the regime’s balilla organisations, the concordat that settled the Church’s place inside the new order, the steady colonisation of the press, the universities and the professions. Read through the pair, the ventennio is a counter-siege conducted from the fortress outward, the regime digging itself into every trench from which a future challenge might have been mounted, until Italian society’s autonomous associational life had been largely replaced by the state’s own simulacra of it.

The spectacle taught two lessons that run through the notebooks’ strategic chapters. The first is that the density of civil society is a prize and not a given: a determined state can thin it deliberately, and the eastern condition can be manufactured in the West by decree, terror and time, which means the survey on which strategy rests must grade not only how much civil society exists but how much of it is genuinely autonomous and how much is already the state’s outerworks wearing civilian dress. The second lesson concerns fascism’s own arrival, which Gramsci refused to file as a simple war of manoeuvre. The squads’ violence and the march on the capital were the visible drama, but the regime’s durability was built positionally, before 1922 in the destruction of the socialist movement’s rural and urban positions, and after it in the patient manufacture of consent his prison notes anatomise. His mature framework is thus also an autobiography read backwards: the young organiser had watched a movement lose a war of position it did not know it was fighting, to an adversary who, whatever else he was, knew.

Pessimism of the intellect: the ethics of a long war

A strategy measured in decades makes moral demands that a strategy of the moment escapes, and Gramsci’s adopted motto, pessimism of the intelligence joined to optimism of the will, is best read as the war of position’s ethic in miniature. The first half forbids the consolations on which long struggles rot: the intelligence must register the fortress system’s depth, the adversary’s competence, the besiegers’ own corruptions and the absence of any guarantee, without discounting a single inconvenient fact for morale’s sake. The second half locates the ground of action elsewhere than in prediction. The will is not optimism that things will go well; it is the discipline of continuing to build as if the building mattered, in full knowledge that it might not be enough. The motto’s pairing is exact for the siege. Despair is a luxury of those who expected the ditch to be the fortress. Sentimental optimism is the same error with the sign reversed. What remains is the engineer’s temperament: survey honestly, dig anyway.

The ethic has an institutional corollary that the notebooks draw out in their reflections on party life. A movement conducting a long war must find ways to honour its intermediate labours, the school built, the journal sustained, the generation educated, without mistaking them for the war’s conclusion; and it must protect, against the understandable hunger for a decisive event, the slow workers whose product is invisible in any single season. Movements are as liable as armies to decorate the wrong virtues, celebrating the charge and pensioning the sapper, and a tradition that does so will reliably produce charges. Gramsci’s prison letters, with their patient attention to study plans, to the education of his sons at a distance, to the husbanding of his own ruined health for the work of the notebooks themselves, enact the ethic at the smallest scale. Nor was the war of position only his theory. It was, in the end, his description of how he spent the last decade of his life: besieging, from a cell, the common sense of a century, with no expectation of being present at any assault, and no doubt that the digging was the point.

Sapping: the micro-operations of the siege

Siege warfare in its classical form was won by sappers, engineers who drove galleries under walls and trenches toward them, unglamorous men whose progress was measured in metres. Sappers belong to the war of position as much as to any siege, and naming their operations completes the concept’s inventory. Translation is one: the labour of rendering a new conception of the world into the idioms of a region, a trade, a faith, a generation, without which the conception remains a foreign garrison in the movement’s own camp. Gramsci, who thought hard about language and translatability, understood that every hegemonic project is partly a translation project, and that the failure to translate is a strategic fact disguised as a cultural one. Education is a second sap, already treated through the school: the slow gallery driven under the fortress of inherited common sense by every teacher who takes the subaltern child’s intellect seriously. Alliance work is a third: the patient negotiation by which neighbouring positions, the peasantry, the urban middle strata, the southern countryside, are detached from the adversary’s system and connected to the besieger’s, gallery by gallery, until the fortress’s supply lines run through friendly country.

A fourth sap deserves its own sentence because it is the one movements most often refuse to dig: the gallery driven under their own illusions. The analysis of situations, applied honestly, is an operation conducted against the besieger’s self-deceptions as much as against the enemy’s walls, and Gramsci’s prison self-discipline, the ruthless inventory of his own movement’s errors that fills the notebooks, is its model. A siege in which the engineers are forbidden to report that the wall is thicker than headquarters wishes will end the way such sieges always end. As a condition of its conduct, the war of position demands an internal culture in which bad news travels upward faster than good, which is one more reason its organisational form, the party as collective intellectual rather than as command, is not an ornament of the theory but a load-bearing part of it.

The pair restated

The concept, disciplined by its texts and its neighbours, can now be restated in the form this article has defended. War of manoeuvre and war of position are the two forms political struggle takes according to the structure of the state it confronts. Where the state is nearly everything and civil society gelatinous, the frontal form can decide the whole question, and did, in the case from which the theory learned it. Where civil society is dense, its institutions forming a system of fortresses and earthworks behind the state, the positional form becomes dominant: the struggle’s centre of gravity moves to the conquest of hegemony across those institutions, on a timescale of decades, by an apparatus built for endurance and education, against an adversary who conducts his own positional defence through passive revolution and absorption. Within that dominance the frontal form survives as a moment, the decisive act at a crisis of authority for which the siege has prepared the ground and against which the siege itself must be disciplined, lest preparation curdle into permanence. The choice between the forms is therefore never a preference. It is a finding, renewed by survey, about the density of a particular society’s defences and the state of the besieger’s own positions; and the theory’s measure, finally, is whether its user has actually performed the survey, or merely learned the words.

That restatement carries the article’s obligations with it. The misreadings corrected along the way, position as parliamentarism, position as culture, manoeuvre as violence, the pair as reform against revolution, Gramsci as the man who ruled out rupture or who licensed endless delay, are not random errors but the predictable products of lifting the pair out of its conditions. Each survives by deleting something: the terrain, the objective, the moment, the survey. The concept restored is less portable and more useful, as befits an instrument built by a prisoner who had watched portable slogans destroy the movement he loved, and who spent his remaining strength on the slower, harder task of making the next one see the ground it stood on.

One measure of the restoration is how the concept behaves when carried back to the cases that formed it. Set beside the Turin of the factory councils, the pair explains both the originality of what was attempted there and the precise joint at which it broke. Set beside the Germany of the failed risings, it converts a chronicle of alleged betrayals and offered alibis into a survey that can be checked. Set beside the France of the long preparation, it shows a siege succeeding so completely that its victors could mistake their hegemony for nature. A concept that improves the reading of its own origin cases, in three different registers, has passed the test its author would have set for it: not elegance, not quotability, but the capacity to render defeats and victories legible as the working of identifiable structures, on ground that can be walked again by anyone willing to survey it.

The antecedent in uniform: Kautsky’s strategy of attrition

The pair had a dress rehearsal inside Marxism a generation before the notebooks, in a debate whose military vocabulary Gramsci’s generation knew by heart. In the years before the First World War, Karl Kautsky, then the leading theorist of German social democracy, argued against Rosa Luxemburg over the mass strike and the road to power, and he cast his position in the strategists’ own terms: between a strategy of overthrow, modelled on the decisive battle, and a strategy of attrition, modelled on the wearing down of an enemy’s forces, cohesion and will across a long contest. Kautsky’s attrition was not cowardice in its author’s mind. It was a reading of the modern state’s strength, an insistence that the fortress of a developed capitalist order could not be rushed and that the movement’s task was to grow, organise and erode until the relation of forces itself had changed. Luxemburg’s reply charged that attrition, so conceived, dissolved the revolutionary objective into the erosion, and that a strategy which could not name its decisive act would be administered by officials for whom the act’s absence was a career.

The debate matters to the pair for two reasons. It proves that the military grammar of the two wars was the common property of the tradition Gramsci inherited, not his prison eccentricity; he refined a distinction his teachers had already drawn in the same vocabulary. And it locates, with great precision, the point at which his version departs from the rehearsal. Kautsky’s attrition lacked what the war of position possesses: an account of the terrain as civil society’s institutions, of the object as hegemony, and, above all, of the retained decisive moment as an internal necessity of the strategy rather than as its embarrassing relative. Where Kautsky’s two strategies faced each other as rival doctrines to be chosen by temperament or by reading of the epoch, Gramsci’s two wars are ranked by a survey and bound in one campaign, dominance assigning each its place. The distance between the debate of 1910 and the notebooks of the nineteen thirties is the distance between a metaphor used to justify a preference and a metaphor disciplined into an analysis. It is also a standing warning, since Kautsky’s attrition is exactly what the criterion objection fears the war of position will become. Gramsci’s answer to that fear is not to deny the resemblance but to specify the differences, and to let the specification carry the weight.

What the siege builds toward: the historic bloc

The war of position has a product, and the notebooks give it a name that completes the concept’s architecture. A historic bloc is the achieved unity of a social formation around a hegemonic project: a set of alliances among classes and strata, a conception of the world that articulates their interests as one interest, and institutions through which the unity is lived rather than merely proclaimed. Where such a bloc exists on the adversary’s side, his fortress system has its garrisons and its morale; where the besieger succeeds in constructing one, the siege has its decisive result, a new social subject capable of ruling because its rule is already, in embryo, the form of its cooperation. The concept disciplines the pair at both ends. It tells the besieger what counts as the objective, not this or that institution but the bloc their allegiance composes; and it tells the analyst why single trenches, however gallantly taken, change so little when the bloc behind them remains intact and capable of retaking the ground by absorption.

Gramsci’s historical writing applies the idea with a consistency that amounts to a method. The Risorgimento failed, in his account, to construct the bloc that would have made Italy a genuinely national and popular state, because the moderates who accomplished unification declined the alliance with the peasantry that a Jacobin policy would have required, and built instead a narrower bloc held together by transformismo. The consequence was a fortress system with a permanent weakness at its southern wall, a state whose hegemony never reached its own countryside. France’s revolutionaries, by contrast, are read as bloc builders of genius, binding town and peasantry into a formation whose conceptions ruled long after its governments fell. Read through the pair, these judgements are the surveyor’s reports on two completed campaigns, one positional war declined and one conducted to the end. They also state, by example, the standard against which any contemporary user of the pair, in the study of safely historical movements, should be measured: not the elegance of the vocabulary but the willingness to name the bloc, its composition, its fractures and its missing members, before pronouncing on the war.

The schism the pair predicts: splits over the moment

A theory of two ranked forms predicts a characteristic pathology in the movements that adopt it, and the prediction has been confirmed often enough to count as evidence. If the whole difficulty of strategy is compressed into the judgement of the moment, when preparation is sufficient and decision is due, then movements organised around the pair will split precisely there, into a wing for which the moment is perpetually premature and a wing for which it is perpetually overdue. Each wing can quote the theory honestly. The patient cite the dominance of position and the depth of the fortresses; the impatient cite the retained moment and the text’s scorn for permanent postponement; and the organisation discovers that its founding concept has supplied both factions with their charters. Gramsci knew the pathology from inside, having lived through the splits of Italian socialism in which he was himself a protagonist, and the notebooks’ reflections on party unity, on bureaucratism and on the education of cadres can be read as an attempt to build an organism capable of containing the argument rather than being consumed by it: a party whose internal life trains the judgement that the theory cannot supply mechanically.

The schism pattern also serves the historian as a diagnostic. Where a movement’s split follows the predicted line, the analyst learns that the argument was genuinely strategic, a disagreement about the survey and the moment, and not merely a contest of persons dressed in doctrine. Where the survey itself is disputed, where the factions disagree about the density of the fortress system and the state of their own positions, the theory has done its proper work even in dividing its adherents, because it has forced the disagreement onto the empirical ground where evidence can, in principle, arbitrate. The cases in which the pair fails as a discipline are the cases in which both wings skip the survey and proceed directly to the quotations. At that point the concept has suffered the fate it was built to prevent, and has become, in the strict sense his reception history documents, a misreading with footnotes.

Sorel, myth and the romance of the frontal act

One tributary of the frontal tradition deserves a section because Gramsci drank from it early and spent part of the notebooks settling the account. Georges Sorel, the French theorist of syndicalism, had given the revolutionary general strike the status of a myth: an image of total confrontation whose function was not to predict an event but to organise the will of the producers in the present, to keep the movement’s moral energy at the pitch of battle rather than of bargaining. The young Gramsci read Sorel with profit, and traces of the encounter persist in his lifelong insistence that a movement without a unifying conception of its own future dissolves into administration. The mature notebooks, however, submit the myth to the survey’s discipline. An image that organises the will is a hegemonic instrument, a piece of the war of position’s own machinery, whatever its content; and when the content is a frontal act unsuited to the terrain, the myth becomes a machine for manufacturing glorious defeats, its moral energy spent in proportion to its unreality.

The settlement with Sorel clarifies the pair’s deepest stratum. Gramsci never doubted that will, morale and the image of a coming order were material forces; his whole theory of hegemony is built on the premise. What the two wars add is the insistence that these forces obey the same terrain logic as armies: morale expended against an unsurveyed fortress is not courage rewarded but a resource destroyed, and the leader who spends it so bears responsibility for the spending. Against the romance of the frontal act, Sorel’s included, the notebooks set an ethic of reconnaissance. It is a colder ethic, and it has been resented by romantics in every decade since, but it is the ethic of a man who had counted the cost of its absence in comrades imprisoned, exiled and shot, and who declined, in his cell, to let the next generation pay it again for the same beautiful reason.

The countryside decides: the peasantry and the siege’s widest front

No survey conducted in Gramsci’s spirit can stop at the city walls, and his own most sustained piece of strategic analysis before prison, the essay on the southern question, is a reminder that the widest front of a western war of position is usually rural. The peasantry of the Italian South lived under a bloc composed of great landowners, their intellectuals and the state, a bloc that organised the countryside’s consent through the priest, the lawyer, the notable and the carabiniere, and that delivered the South’s votes and its quiet to the governing order in Rome. Against that bloc, the industrial workers of the North could not simply proclaim solidarity across the distance. The alliance had to be built, demand by demand and prejudice by prejudice dismantled, beginning with the recognition that the southern peasant’s suspicion of the northern state and of northern workers alike was an artefact of the bloc that ruled him, and was itself one of its fortifications. Gramsci’s strategic writing returns to this case so often because it concentrates the pair’s whole logic in one national territory: here a fortress system with its garrisons named, here a subaltern population whose allegiance is the prize, here a siege whose sapping consists of a land programme, a fiscal policy and a generation of organisers willing to learn the terrain.

The general lesson is about the unit of the survey once more. Class societies are not divided into a political capital where the wars are decided and a hinterland that follows. They are patchworks of blocs, each with its own density and its own decisive stratum of intellectuals, and the campaign that integrates them is won or lost in the articulation between the patches. A frontal seizure in the capital of such a patchwork changes the flag over the ministries and leaves the patches as they were, which is why the history of seizures in predominantly peasant countries reads so often as a prologue to a second, longer war that the seizers had not planned. A war of position that ignores the countryside has besieged the suburbs and called it the city.

Economism: the refusal of the survey in both its forms

Running beneath both misreadings of the pair is a single disposition that Gramsci fought under the name of economism, and naming it explains why the misreadings are twins. Economism, in his usage, is the belief that the economic level of struggle carries its own sufficiency: in one form, the trade unionist’s faith that the daily contest over wages and conditions will generate, unaided, the politics and the consciousness the movement needs; in another, the stage theorist’s faith that economic development will deliver the political result by timetable, the fortress emptying itself as the structure matures. Both forms share the operative feature: they excuse their holders from the survey. If the result is guaranteed by the economy, in the workshop or in the epoch, there is no need to enumerate the fortresses, grade their garrisons or ask what a governmental crisis would reveal. The positional war is the survey’s revenge. It begins exactly where economism stops, with the discovery that between the economy and power stands the whole organised life of a society, which has to be fought for on its own ground or not at all.

The point has a polemical edge that the reception history confirms. Currents formed by economism in its stage version found the gradualist Gramsci easy to absorb, because his siege could be misread as the timetable wearing a uniform: wait, organise, and history delivers. Currents formed by economism in its syndicalist version found the manoeuvre passages equally absorbable, as warrants for the frontal sufficiency of the economic weapon raised to insurrection. The notebooks resist both absorptions with the same move, the restoration of the political and cultural levels to their full weight and of strategy to its status as a judgement made on surveyed ground. That is why the precision work of a glossary is not pedantry here. Every clause restored, dominance rather than replacement, terrain rather than temperament, the moment retained and the criterion honestly conceded missing, is a clause the economistic absorptions had deleted, and the deletions, not the texts, are what most readers have been arguing about ever since.

The English comparison: the fortress that never needed a ditch

Gramsci’s comparative eye frequently travels to England, and the case is worth a section because it tests the density variable at its maximum. In his comparative remarks on the European state formations, England figures as the society in which the old ruling stratum accomplished the most complete absorption of the rising one: an aristocracy that took the bourgeoisie into partnership across centuries, modernised its own economic base, conceded reforms in sequence and never allowed a frontal confrontation of the continental kind to become necessary. The result, on his reading, was a fortress system of unusual depth and unusual flexibility, in which the outer ditch of the state was almost an afterthought because the earthworks extended through the whole society, its schools, its civil service, its established church, its cult of amateur administration, its very style of understatement as a technology of rule. English history, for the comparative tradition he worked in, is the standing demonstration that a ruling order’s survival can be a hegemonic achievement rather than a coercive one, purchased by concessions timed before they could be exacted.

For the pair, the case refines the survey’s grading. Density is not only a count of institutions but a quality of their interconnection and of the ruling bloc’s skill in operating them, and two societies with similar associational inventories can present fortresses of very different strength according to the historic bloc that commands them. It also supplies the complementary warning to the one drawn from Russia. If the eastern error is to storm a ditch mistaken for the whole defence, the English error is the opposite complacency: to conclude, from the absence of ditches worth storming, that no war is in progress at all, when in fact the war of position has been conducted by the defence, successfully, for three hundred years. Gramsci’s lifelong interest in the comparison suggests he thought the second error the more characteristically modern one, and the harder to correct, because its victims mistake the fortress’s quiet for the world’s peace.

Where the two wars touch: dual power

The forms meet most visibly in the phenomenon the revolutionary tradition calls dual power: the emergence, inside a crisis of the old order, of alternative institutions, soviets, councils, committees, that exercise fragments of sovereignty alongside the official state. Read through the pair, dual power is the moment a war of position acquires organs capable of becoming a war of manoeuvre, and its analysis disciplines both enthusiasms that gather around it. The councils of Russia in 1917 and of Turin in 1919 and 1920 were positional constructions in the strict sense, built inside the old society’s workplaces, garrisoned by the class’s own delegates, schools of administration and allegiance. They became strategically decisive only when the state’s crisis made their parallel sovereignty a question that had to be answered in days. The tradition’s errors divide along the seam. One error worships the organs and forgets the crisis, expecting the councils to grow by their own logic into power, an economism of institutions. The other worships the crisis and forgets the organs, attempting the decisive act with whatever crowd the morning provides. Gramsci’s framework holds both halves in one sentence: the siege builds the alternative’s organs and allegiance; the crisis decides whether they become a state; and neither half, repeated as a slogan, will do the other’s work.

His own biography gave the doctrine its pathos, because he had stood at the seam in Turin and watched the halves fail to meet. The councils existed; the national crisis of 1920, when the occupations spread and the government of the day confessed its impotence, was real; what was missing was the connective tissue between them, a national hegemonic apparatus that could have converted the factory positions into a political decision, and a leadership that had surveyed the country’s fortresses and knew which of them the council movement had not even approached. The notebooks generalise the failure into method. Before any future seam is reached, the survey must have mapped not only the enemy’s positions but the besieger’s own connectivity: whether the trenches communicate, whether the garrisons recognise one command, whether the alternative institutions can speak to the countryside and the capital in one voice. Dual power, so prepared, is the hinge of the whole theory, the point at which dominance passes, for an interval, from the siege to the act.

The international problem: one theory, many surveys

The pair was born inside an international movement, and its logic contains a quiet revolution in how such a movement should think. If the dominant form of struggle is assigned by the density of each national civil society, then strategy cannot be exported as a finished article, and an international centre that prescribes one war for all its sections is prescribing error somewhere as a matter of arithmetic. Gramsci’s strategic writings press this implication steadily: the phases through which the movement had passed, the war of manoeuvre generalised from Russia, then the united front generalised as its correction, are treated as successive approximations, each true of the terrain that produced it and false as a universal. His own relation to the International’s later turns was strained by exactly this point, since a theory of nationally specific surveys sits awkwardly beside a discipline of uniform lines, and historians of his last active years have documented the friction without needing to invent it.

The implication reaches further than organisational politics. It assigns the national analysis a dignity that the cruder internationalisms of the period denied: the survey of one’s own society, its classes, its regions, its intellectual strata and its common sense, becomes the primary scientific act of a movement, prior to any slogan received from abroad. Gramsci’s unfinished southern essay is the model of the act, an internationalist writing about his own country’s internal colony with a concreteness no imported schema supplied. Later traditions that took up the pair, in the study of colonial and postcolonial societies above all, found in this implication the concept’s most portable element: not the answer for any country, but the obligation to produce the answer country by country, fortress by fortress, in the knowledge that the fortresses differ. A glossary can ask no better fate for the distinction than that it be used, in that spirit, as a set of questions addressed to ground the reader actually knows.

The Machiavelli frame: why the strategy notes wear a Renaissance mask

The strategic chapters of the notebooks are formally a commentary on Machiavelli, and the frame is not decoration. Gramsci read The Prince as the work of a man who, confronting a fragmented Italy of city states and foreign garrisons, had tried to will into existence the collective agent, the new prince, capable of founding a national state where none existed. His own modern Prince, the party as collective intellectual, is the twentieth century’s answer to the same structural problem: the agent does not pre-exist the strategy that requires it, and must be constructed, educated and held together across the whole duration of a war of position. Machiavelli also supplied the young science of politics with its founding example of the survey ethic, the insistence that the effectual truth of a situation, not its imagined form, is the strategist’s only honest starting point. The two wars are that ethic applied to the states of the twentieth century: a refusal, Florentine in pedigree, to let the wish prescribe the terrain.

The frame carries one more implication that summaries usually drop. For Machiavelli, the founder’s violence and the lawgiver’s fraud were founding acts whose legitimacy was judged by the order they made durable; force founded, but only hegemony, though he lacked the word, preserved. Gramsci’s pair inherits the structure of that judgement. The frontal act is judged, in the notebooks’ histories, not by its daring but by what it founded: a durable bloc or an exposed garrison. The positional war is judged, conversely, not by its patience but by whether it ever ripens into founding. Between those two judgements the entire strategic ethics of the notebooks resides, and it is why the text keeps disappointing readers who arrive looking for a hero. Its hero is a relation between force and consent, correctly surveyed, correctly timed, and its villain is the beautiful act performed on the wrong ground.

A strike read as a campaign: the general strike in a fortified society

The British General Strike of 1926, called in support of locked out miners and abandoned by its own leadership after nine days, offers the pair a case from a society Gramsci’s comparativism treated as the fortress system’s most finished European example, and the reading is instructive precisely because no revolution was on the agenda of its protagonists. The strike had the form of manoeuvre: a concentrated withdrawal of labour intended to compel a government by paralysing the country’s life. What it met was the fortress system in working order. The government had prepared its own positional machinery in advance, emergency organisation, volunteer networks, a state newspaper produced when the printers joined the strike, and it framed the contest, through every channel of respectable narration, as a constitutional defence rather than a wage dispute, detaching the middle strata’s allegiance from the strikers before the economic pressure could bite. The strike’s leaders, commanding enormous forces on the industrial terrain and almost none on the terrain of narration and legitimacy, discovered the ditch and the fortresses in sequence and surrendered the action to escape its logic.

The case is doubly useful. It shows the pair operating where no party sought state power, which proves the framework is about the structure of contests and not only about revolutions; and it shows a government conducting the war of position as a conscious art, preparing its trenches in peacetime against a named contingency, exactly as the notebooks say ruling blocs do. For the historian, the nine days are a controlled experiment in the density variable: a frontal instrument of the first magnitude, deployed by a movement of millions, defeated without a battle by the reserves of consent stationed behind the state. Gramsci, writing as the decade turned, had no need of the lesson; his own country’s movement had already taught it to him at higher cost. But the case remains the cleanest classroom demonstration in the European record that the fortress system is not a metaphor for the analyst’s convenience. It files communiqués, prints newspapers and wins.

Catharsis: the hinge between the economy and the siege

One further concept locks the pair into the notebooks’ deepest stratum, and a precision article should not close its exposition without it. Gramsci borrows the term catharsis for the passage, in a class’s development, from the purely economic and corporate moment, in which a group defends its immediate interests, to the ethico-political moment, in which its interests are universalised into a conception capable of leading a whole society. That passage has the war of position as its strategic form. Its trenches are where the catharsis is accomplished, in the slow work by which a class’s intellectuals elaborate its experience into a programme others can inhabit, and its measure is precisely the distance travelled between the corporate and the hegemonic. A movement that has not made the passage can win strikes, seats and even, in a crisis, ministries, without ever becoming a candidate for the leadership of the society; a movement that has made it possesses the one asset no coup can manufacture and no defeat wholly destroys.

The hinge also explains the pair’s asymmetry of difficulty, which summaries flatten. Manoeuvre, for all its dangers, makes the simpler demand: concentration, courage and timing from a force that may remain, in its self-understanding, exactly what it was before the assault. Position demands that the force become something else while fighting: that the class educate itself out of its corporate limits, produce intellectuals who think in terms of the whole society, and learn to lead allies whose interests are not its own immediate ones, all under fire and across decades. Gramsci’s prison revaluation of education, of culture, of the party’s internal life, flows from this asymmetry. The siege is not the slow version of the assault. It is a different and harder operation, in which the besieger is among the things being transformed, and the notebooks’ famous patience is less a temperament than a recognition of how long self-transformation on that scale actually takes.

One fortress biographed: how to read a single institution positionally

The survey method can be taught on a single institution, and the exercise is worth describing because it converts the pair from a vocabulary into a craft. Take a great metropolitan newspaper of the old order, the kind Gramsci himself wrote for and against. Its positional biography begins with ownership, not as a scandal but as a structure: whose capital sustains it, whose advertisements feed it, which interests its losses, if it runs at a loss, are a subscription to. It proceeds to the garrison: where its editors were educated, from which class fractions its correspondents are drawn, what a young journalist must believe, or learn to perform, to rise. It maps the readership as a formation of allegiance rather than a market: the breakfast tables on which the paper’s version of the world becomes the furniture of respectable opinion, the provincial sheets that copy its line, the agencies that wire its judgements into a hundred local common senses. Only then does it ask the strategic questions. What would this fortress do in a crisis of the state? Whose communiqués would it print as news and whose as sedition? What would its defection be worth, and what, in twenty years of sapping, might conceivably detach its younger garrison from its owners’ line?

The exercise repays the effort because every institution on the terrain answers to the same biography with local variations: the university with its chairs and its examinations, the church with its seminaries and its orders, the professional association with its journals and its codes. A reader who has written one such biography possesses the war of position as a skill rather than as a phrase, and will never again be satisfied with the summary that calls it cultural work. The fortresses are not metaphors to the people who staff them. They are workplaces, vocations and worlds, and it is exactly their reality as worlds, reproducible and habitable, that makes them fortifications. The besieger’s counter-institutions must be worlds too, which is the final reason the siege takes the time it takes, and why its chroniclers keep returning, as this article has, to schools, presses, parties and parishes: the places where worlds are made.

For students and exam candidates

Examination answers on this pair fail in a predictable way: they recite the definitions, manoeuvre fast and position slow, and stop. The marks lie in the conditions and the rule. State the East and West passage as the basis, name density of civil society as the variable, and then give the dominance not replacement rule in so many words, with the retained moment of manoeuvre as the proof that the gradualist summary is wrong. Correct the equation of the pair with reform against revolution early, since setters plant it deliberately. Where a question invites evaluation, use the criterion objection and concede the gap honestly; a scripted concession, answered with the relation of forces, outperforms a defence that pretends the gap is not there. Build your revision as a two-column comparison of the wars across objective, terrain, timescale and organisation, and keep it beside the other Gramsci cards in the VaultBook study notes so the pair can be tested against hegemony and civil society rather than memorised in isolation.

For teachers and seminar leaders

The two wars table in this article is designed to be taught against itself. Distribute it with the misreading column blanked and have the seminar supply the errors from the secondary literature before revealing the originals; students discover that they already hold several. A productive second exercise assigns the German autumn miniature as a double reading, half the room arguing the manoeuvre interpretation of the evidence and half the positional one, with marks for the quality of the survey rather than for the side chosen. The liveliest discussions reliably come from the criterion objection, because it divides students who trust texts from students who trust timetables, and both can be brought to see that Gramsci’s framework was built in awareness of their quarrel. Close by asking which of the concept’s neighbouring terms, passive revolution, transformismo, Caesarism, the group would need next; the question teaches the cluster as a system and prevents the pair from being carried away as a slogan.

For researchers, historians, and journalists

Three cautions govern serious work with this pair. Textually, the fragments must be read in the critical edition’s sequence where possible, since the dating of the strategy notes among the early prison writings, and their proximity to the Risorgimento and French materials, constrains what the dominance claim can mean; thematic selections remain serviceable for quotation and treacherous for argument. Interpretively, Anderson’s antinomies thesis still sets the terms of scholarly caution, and any strong reading should state where it stands on the sliding he charged the concepts with, rather than writing as if the charge had never been made. Historiographically, the pair is at its best as an instrument for reading movements and state formations whose records are closed, applied as a set of survey questions about institutions, allegiance and crisis, and it degrades fastest when used to decorate verdicts reached on other grounds. Researchers should also note how much of the apparent secondary consensus descends from the first thematic editions’ arrangement and emphases, a dependence the reception scholarship has documented and which new work ignores at its peril.

The coercive frame: the siege is fought under law and against it

One boundary of the war of position is easy to forget from the armchair of the seminar room: the besiegers dig inside a legal and coercive order that the adversary administers. The trenches of civil society exist on sufferance of laws governing association, assembly, publication and combination, and those laws are themselves positions, written by earlier hegemonies and defended by courts. A positional campaign therefore always has a juridical front, contests over the freedom to organise, to publish, to teach and to strike, which are simultaneously defensive necessities and hegemonic arguments conducted before the whole society: every prosecution of a newspaper is also a lesson, delivered by the state at its own expense, in what the state is. Gramsci’s movement had been educated on this front in the hardest school, as the liberal Italy of his youth gave way to squad violence tolerated by the authorities and then to a dictatorship that abolished the legal frame altogether, and the notebooks’ reflections on law, on the state’s educative function and on the night watchman conception of government all carry the mark of that education.

The boundary cuts in the other direction as well, and the symmetry completes the framework’s realism. A ruling bloc whose hegemony is intact rarely needs its coercion in the foreground; the fortress system does its work through consent, and the police remain, so to speak, in the rear trenches. Coercion comes forward exactly when hegemony fails, in the crisis of authority, when the order’s account of itself no longer commands assent and force must substitute for the missing allegiance. The forward movement of coercion is therefore itself one of the siege’s indicators, legible in the survey: a state obliged to govern its own civil society by decree and prosecution is a state whose fortresses are emptying, however forbidding its ditch appears. The war of position’s deepest claim about power is compressed in that indicator. Force is what hegemony looks like when it is losing, and consent, patiently organised and patiently contested, is what decides, in the dense societies, whose force will finally matter.

The Italian debts: Labriola, Croce and the education of a strategist

The pair’s intellectual ancestry inside Italian thought explains features of it that the military vocabulary alone cannot. From Antonio Labriola, the first Italian Marxist philosopher of stature, Gramsci inherited the conception he called the philosophy of praxis: a doctrine that is not a spectator’s system but the self-consciousness of a historical movement, obliged to understand the terrain it acts on as part of its own substance. From Benedetto Croce, the dominant Italian philosopher of the age and in many ways his adversary, he took and fought a whole education at once: the insistence that history is made by ethico-political forces and not by economic automatism, the model of the intellectual as a public power, and, negatively, the spectacle of a liberal culture that had made its peace with every successive Italian order and thereby taught him what a hegemonic apparatus looks like when it serves whoever holds the state. The notebooks’ long reckoning with Croce, whom he treated as the greatest Italian intellectual of the epoch and as a kind of lay pope of the established culture, is a war of position conducted inside philosophy itself, an attempt to detach the prestige of the national culture from the bloc that administered it.

This ancestry clarifies the pair’s most misunderstood emphasis. A strategist formed by that tradition does not experience the cultural and institutional levels as a soft supplement to the real struggle over production and the state. He experiences them as the medium in which Italian history had actually been decided: a unification made by diplomats and intellectuals rather than by peoples, a liberal order sustained by a mandarin culture, a fascism that marched with its own intellectuals in the van. An Italian’s education in how his own country worked finds its strategic generalisation in the war of position. Its universal career since, in societies his survey never reached, testifies that the education generalised well. But readers who skip the ancestry reliably misjudge the concept’s register, hearing a metaphor where its author heard a national history, and a technique where he intended a civilisation’s slow contest with itself.

What the pair does to the word revolution

Followed to its end, the framework quietly redefines the noun around which the whole tradition turns. In the frontal imagination, a revolution is an event: it has a date, a storming, a before and an after divided by a night. In the positional framework, a revolution is a process with a moment inside it: a long transformation of a society’s allegiances and capacities, within which the transfer of state power appears as one decisive episode, neither the whole nor a dispensable formality. The redefinition is not a softening. It is a claim about where the difficulty lives. The frontal imagination locates the difficulty in the night’s courage and logistics, and is perpetually surprised by the morning after, when the unconverted society begins its long refusal. The positional account locates the difficulty in the decades, and treats the night, when it comes, as the least mysterious part of the story, which is why its literature can seem, to readers formed by the other account, to be always discussing something else: schools, sermons, newspapers, proverbs, the price of bread and the staffing of courts. It is discussing the revolution, at the resolution at which, in dense societies, revolutions are decided.

That redefinition also settles the pair’s relation to the oldest strategic question in the tradition, the one the reform and revolution debate posed as a choice of destinations. If a revolution is a process with a moment, then preparation and act are not rival goods between which a movement chooses its identity; they are phases of a single undertaking whose proportions are set by the ground. The gradualist who amputates the moment and the insurrectionist who amputates the process have each mistaken a phase for the whole, and the notebooks’ two wars, restored to their conditions, are the standing refusal of both amputations. A glossary can do its subject no better service than to hand it back in that restored form, less quotable than the slogans it replaces and more difficult to misuse, which in this concept’s history has always been the same thing.

The survey can be wrong: a last discipline

The framework’s ethic of reconnaissance carries its own final caution, without which it hardens into the dogma it was built to dissolve. Surveys are performed by interested parties, from inside the struggle they describe, with categories inherited from the last war. A movement’s map of the fortresses will flatter its own positions and exaggerate the adversary’s decay, because the map’s makers need the encouragement; its grading of density will drift with its hopes, calling the civil society gelatinous in the season when it craves a frontal act and impregnable in the season when it craves an excuse. Gramsci’s analytical notes are alert to the corruption, insisting that the relation of forces be established with the coldness of a science and warning that the commonest strategic error is to mistake one’s own propaganda for reconnaissance. His prison vantage gave the warning its weight. He had the leisure, purchased at the highest price, to re-survey the campaigns he had fought in and to record, without sparing himself, where the maps had been wishes. A reader who finishes this article with a fluent command of the vocabulary and no increased suspicion of his own side’s maps has acquired the words and missed the discipline, and the discipline, in the end, is the concept.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is the war of position in Gramsci?

It is his name for a protracted form of struggle in which a rising class builds leadership across the institutions of civil society before it can hope to hold power. Instead of concentrating everything on a single blow against the government, the movement contests unions, schools, newspapers, churches and associations, detaching their allegiance from the old order and assembling a new common sense. The form is prescribed by its terrain: where a state is backed by this dense institutional life, governmental power alone changes little. Its object is hegemony, its pace is set by organisation and education, and it keeps a decisive act in reserve as its concluding moment.

Q: What does the war of manoeuvre mean?

It names the strategy of deciding a struggle by frontal attack: a concentrated force strikes at the seat of government at a moment of crisis and takes state power in a single campaign. Gramsci treats it as the appropriate form where the state concentrates the old order’s whole defence and little organised society stands behind the ministries, the situation he found in wartime Russia. The term describes a campaign’s shape, not its violence or its speed in the journalistic sense. A rapid action inside a long hegemonic struggle is not manoeuvre in this usage, and neither is any daring tactic; the word is reserved for the frontal strategy and the kind of state that makes it rational.

Q: Why does the West require a war of position?

Because of what stands behind its governments. In the western states of his analysis, parties, unions, churches, universities, the press and the professions form a layered system that absorbs shocks: ministries can fall, scandals can consume leaders, and the deeper allegiances that reproduce the order continue untouched. An assault therefore captures the forward trench and meets fresh lines behind it, as the failed risings after the First World War demonstrated in country after country. The siege is required not by doctrine but by architecture. Until the institutions that manufacture consent have been contested and partly won, a change of government leaves the social order’s foundations in the same hands.

Q: Did Gramsci abandon the war of manoeuvre?

No, and the distinction he actually draws is between dominance and abolition. In societies whose civil institutions are thick, he argues, the positional form organises the whole campaign and sets its timescale, while the frontal form continues inside it as a possible and sometimes necessary episode, the act by which a crisis of authority is settled on ground the siege has prepared. What he rejected was the frontal act as a universal recipe, prescribed regardless of terrain. The widespread contrary impression comes from later readings that needed a theorist of pure gradualism and quietly deleted the retained episode from his scheme.

Q: What does the East and West distinction mean?

It is a contrast between two structures of state, expressed in a geographical shorthand. In the first, the government carries the social order almost alone, because associations, parties and an independent press are embryonic; in the second, a developed civil society fortifies the order behind the government, so that a political crisis at the centre does not become a crisis of the whole system. The labels name conditions rather than continents. Either condition can in principle appear anywhere, mixed societies display both at once across regions and sectors, and the strategic consequences follow from the condition found, never from the label on the map.

Q: Is the war of position the same as electoralism?

No. Elections and parliaments form one province of the terrain among many, and a movement confined to them has, in the terms of the framework, besieged a single gate while the granaries and the other gates stayed in the adversary’s hands. The siege as Gramsci describes it runs through the factory, the school, the parish, the newsroom and the professional body, because those are the places where consent is manufactured daily. Electoral work can belong to it when it serves the larger transformation of allegiance; it becomes something else, mere administration of a share in the existing order, when it replaces that transformation as the movement’s horizon.

Q: How long does a war of position take?

Gramsci gives no timetable, and the absence is principled rather than evasive. The process he describes, the formation of new intellectual strata, the re-education of common sense, the construction of institutions that outlive their founders, runs in decades and generations, as it did in the long cultural preparation he admired before the French Revolution. What he offers instead of a schedule is a way of judging progress: the disaggregation of the old bloc, the defection of its intellectuals, the growth of the challenger’s capacity to lead beyond its own ranks. A siege that cannot show movement on those measures is not enduring. It is merely lasting.

Q: What are the fortresses of civil society?

They are the durable institutions through which a social order secures the allegiance of its members: political parties with real roots, trade unions, churches and their schools and orders, universities, newspapers and publishing houses, professional associations, cooperatives and cultural societies. Gramsci’s image is of defences in depth. Each body delivers services and fellowship, and each also delivers an account of the world in which the existing distribution of power appears natural or at worst improvable. Their strength in a crisis is that people defend the organisations that organise their lives, so a government driven from its ministries can retreat into them, regroup and return.

Q: Can you fight both wars at once?

Within a single campaign the two forms coexist whenever the positional struggle throws up, or is struck by, a crisis that demands a concentrated act. Dominance describes the campaign as a whole, not a sequence in which one form is used up before the other begins. A movement may be besieging in one region or sector while facing a decisive episode in another, and its leadership’s quality shows in holding both registers together: refusing episodes the ground has not prepared, and being built, organised and allied well enough to use the episodes that preparation and events jointly offer. The error is to make either register the whole art.

Q: Is the military metaphor still useful?

As an analytical device, its usefulness survives wherever it is made to do its original work: forcing attention to the ground before the blow. It asks what stands behind a government, in what depth, held by whom, and it makes the folly of storming an outer work visible as a failure of reconnaissance. It misleads when it is literalised, when populations are treated as terrain and allegiance as a wall that shells can breach, and when its vocabulary is used as decoration for decisions taken on other grounds. Gramsci’s own usage keeps the correction inside the figure: his fortresses are made of consent, and consent has to be won by leadership, not merely outlasted by besiegers.

Q: How does the dominance not replacement rule change the two wars?

It converts them from rival doctrines into ranked elements of one campaign. Without the rule, readers sort themselves into parties of the siege and parties of the assault, each armed with genuine quotations, and the argument becomes a contest of temperaments. With it, the question changes its grammar: not which form one favours, but which form the surveyed structure of a given state makes dominant, and how the subordinate form survives within it. The rule also reallocates the burden of proof. A strategist proposing frontal action in a dense society must answer for the fortresses; a strategist proposing indefinite preparation must answer for the moment the preparation is for.

Q: What should a student separate between a metaphor and a strategy in this pair?

Separate the picture from the claims it encodes, and examine each at its own standard. The picture, ditches, trenches, fortresses, a besieging army, is judged by vividness and by how far its geometry matches the relations it pictures. The strategy is a set of assertions that can be true or false independently: that states differ in the density of organised society behind them, that this difference governs which form of struggle can succeed, and that in the dense case the frontal form survives as a subordinate moment. Confusing the two levels produces the standard errors: refuting the concept by mocking the imagery, or defending a weak analysis by pointing to the imagery’s power.

Q: Why did the eastern and western cases differ in Gramsci’s account?

The difference he insists on is institutional, not national or moral. In the Russia he analysed, the autocracy had deliberately kept independent association stunted: parties were illegal or fragile, the press was censored, the church was a department of the state, and war then shattered the state itself, army, administration and dynasty together. Very little organised society remained to catch the order when its government fell. In the western states, by contrast, a century of association had built the layered defences described throughout this article. The same frontal act therefore met, in the two settings, two different objects, and drawing one strategy from both cases was the period’s characteristic mistake.

Q: How does civil society’s density decide which war applies?

Density measures how much of a social order is carried by autonomous institutions between the household and the government, and how deep their hold on allegiance runs. Where the measure is low, the state is the order’s principal fortification, its fall is the order’s fall, and frontal strategy addresses itself to the decisive point. Where the measure is high, power is distributed through the institutions, a fallen government is replaceable from the reserves behind it, and the struggle’s centre of gravity shifts to those institutions and the allegiance they organise. The measure is empirical, it varies by region and sector within one country, and it changes under war, dictatorship and development, which is why the framework demands repeated surveys.

Q: What did the manoeuvre reading get wrong about the western states?

It mistook the visibility of the state for its weight. Governments in the western societies looked like the whole of power because they monopolised its ceremonies, and their frequent crises looked like the order’s crises because they were dramatic, dated and reported. What the reading missed was the distribution of the order’s real defences across institutions that do not fall when ministries do: courts and bureaucracies staffed across generations, churches and schools forming the next cohort of the loyal, presses narrating each crisis in the order’s own vocabulary. Assaults planned on the misreading spent themselves at the ditch and were then described, by their own strategists, as betrayals or as bad luck, rather than as surveys that had never been made.