War of Position

In The You On AI Encyclopedia

Gramsci drew the military metaphor from World War I trench warfare. The war of maneuver resembled classical military engagement — concentrated force at a decisive point. The war of position resembled the sustained positional warfare of the Western Front, where victory came not through dramatic breakthroughs but through the grinding accumulation of tactical advantages. The metaphor captured something essential about political struggle in societies with dense civil societies: no single confrontation could decide the outcome because power was distributed across thousands of institutional points.

The strategic conclusion Gramsci drew was that counter-hegemonic transformation in developed societies requires the patient construction of what he called a historical bloc — an alliance of classes, institutions, and intellectuals capable of producing an alternative common sense across the whole terrain of civil society. This cannot be accomplished by a vanguard seizing state power. The common sense would persist in civil society's institutions and would eventually restore the old order. The institutions themselves must be transformed.

In the AI age, the institutions of civil society that constitute the terrain of the war of position include: research laboratories (whose funding comes from corporate sponsors and who produce research reflecting corporate priorities); universities (whose curricula are shaped by employer demand and who produce graduates embodying the technology class's worldview); regulatory agencies (whose expertise depends on industry secondments and who produce regulation reflecting industry preferences); media organizations (whose revenue depends on technology advertising and who produce coverage reproducing the sector's self-understanding); and the platforms themselves, which now perform the hegemonic functions previously distributed across these older institutions.

The concrete counter-hegemonic interventions include: alternative media funded through subscriptions and cooperative ownership rather than engagement-optimized advertising; publicly funded research institutions pursuing agendas determined by democratic processes rather than market incentives; independent governance institutions with their own technical expertise; and alternative economic forms — worker-owned cooperatives, data trusts, public AI utilities — that embody different principles of ownership and distribution. The EU AI Act represents one attempt at institutional construction; its limitations illustrate the scale of the challenge without diminishing its necessity.

Origin

The concept appears most systematically in Notebook 7, composed between 1930 and 1932. Gramsci was drawing lessons from the failure of the 1919-1920 factory council movement in Turin and from his broader analysis of why the Russian revolutionary model had not succeeded in Western Europe.

The phrase "long march through the institutions" — often associated with Gramscian strategy — was coined by Rudi Dutschke in the late 1960s and popularized in the New Left milieu. It captures the practical implication of the war of position for social movements operating in societies with strong civil societies.

Key Ideas

Strategic patience. The war of position operates on generational timescales and produces no dramatic victories — only the gradual accumulation of institutional capacity.

Institutional focus. Transformation proceeds through the institutions of civil society, not through the frontal assault on state power alone.

Historical bloc. The strategy requires building alliances across classes, institutions, and intellectuals capable of producing alternative common sense across the whole terrain of civil society.

Concrete institution-building. Alternative media, alternative research, alternative governance, alternative economic forms — each is a specific institutional project, not merely a rhetorical stance.

Precedent in labor history. Every structural limit on capital — the eight-hour day, the weekend, the minimum wage — was won through equivalent institution-building, not through individual adaptation.