War of position and war of manoeuvre (Gramsci)
진지전과 기동전 (그람시)
A pair of concepts Antonio Gramsci borrowed from military language in his Prison Notebooks to distinguish political strategies. The war of manoeuvre is the frontal assault on state power, a direct seizure of power like the Russian Revolution of 1917. The war of position is the long struggle to win the many trenches of civil society (parties, trade unions, schools, the press, culture) one by one and so undermine the ruling class's hegemony. Gramsci held that in the West, where a sturdy civil society stood behind the state, unlike the East where the state was everything, the war of position was the only possible way.
In depth
Where the notes start
Gramsci, imprisoned in 1926, discussed the distinction several times in the notebooks he wrote in prison. Notebook 7 §16 is headed "War of position and war of manoeuvre, or frontal war". He wrote that one should examine whether Bronstein's (Trotsky's) famous theory of the permanence of the movement was the political reflection of the theory of the war of manoeuvre, and that Ilyich (Lenin) had understood the need to change from the war of manoeuvre, applied victoriously in the East in 1917, to the war of position, the only one possible in the West; the formula of the "united front" meant just this. He then drew the contrast: "In the East the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West there was a proper relation between State and civil society, and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks."
The most important question of political theory
In Notebook 6 §138 Gramsci called the passage from the war of manoeuvre (and frontal attack) to the war of position, in the political field too, the most important question of political theory posed by the post-war period, and the hardest to solve correctly. The war of position demands enormous sacrifices from vast masses, so an unprecedented concentration of hegemony is needed; once won, it is won decisively. The link to the military field, he added, was only indirect.
Interpretation and use
For Gramsci the war of position did not abandon revolution but prepared its conditions: the working class and its "organic intellectuals" had to build a counter-hegemony against bourgeois hegemony, and in advanced capitalist societies a final war of manoeuvre was possible only once the war of position had been won; this is the common reading. The post-war Italian Communist Party used the concept to ground a strategy of building consent in parliament and civil society, and Eurocommunism in the 1970s drew on it. Rudi Dutschke's "long march through the institutions" (1967) in the West German student movement is described as a gloss on the war of position. Others criticise such uses for turning Gramsci's theory of revolution into gradual reformism.