War of position
What you hear
A military phrase, if anything: trench warfare, an army holding a line. The everyday sense makes it sound like something armies do to each other, far from ordinary life.
The common meaning. This is the cover the redefinition travels under.
What they mean by it
in politics the “war of position”, once won, is decisive definitively
Source: Prison Notebooks (Quaderni del carcere), Einaudi, {"offset":919966}
Documented
In plain English
The slow way in, and the one that does not reverse. The state can repel a frontal assault. It cannot remove a position dug into the schools, the professions and the press. Taking it back would mean tearing down the institution itself.
The archive’s reading. The definition above is the citable one.
Assessed
Why it works
The military sound of it is the disguise. It reads as a metaphor about armies, so nobody hears it as a hiring committee, an accreditation body or a teacher-training course. Those are what it names. The movement announces the strategy in its own books, and it still arrives as a surprise. The words for it sit under war rather than under work.
Assessed
The claims ledger
The citable statements behind this term, each tied to the movement source filed in the Vault.
Gramsci holds that in the West the war of position, unlike the war of manoeuvre, is decisive once won.
- Prison Notebooks (Quaderni del carcere)Einaudi, Turin
{"offset":919966}
Plain English for “War of position”: The slow way in, and the one that does not reverse. The state can repel a frontal assault....
- Prison Notebooks (Quaderni del carcere)Einaudi, Turin
{"offset":919966}