In September 1920, the workers of Turin occupied the factories.
It had been building for months. The factory councils — elected bodies governing production from the shop floor, not just negotiating wages but running the machinery, maintaining discipline, making decisions — had spread through the industrial north of Italy through 1919 and into 1920. In Turin, the city of Fiat, of large-scale industrial production, of a concentrated and organized working class, the councils had become something more than labor organization. They were practicing a different kind of society inside the existing one.
Picture a Tuesday morning in September, a Fiat plant in Turin. The managers haven't come in — they weren't invited. The workers who arrived at six are running the shift themselves: the council's elected delegates handling scheduling, materials allocation, the disputes that arise between workers on a factory floor. The output is the same. The hierarchy is different. A machinist who has been making the same cut for ten years is now also helping decide who works which machine and when. It is ordinary and extraordinary simultaneously — ordinary because the actual work is the same, extraordinary because the person doing it has been classified, until this week, as someone whose only job was to do what they were told.
Then it collapsed. The Italian Socialist Party leadership, afraid of where it was going, refused to extend the action nationally. The industrialists waited. Within two years, Benito Mussolini was in power. Within four, a young Sardinian journalist and Communist Party leader named Antonio Gramsci was arrested.
He was thirty-five years old. Mussolini's prosecutor told the court: we must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years.
What happened instead is that the brain, supplied with books and exercise notebooks under prison censorship, produced nearly three thousand pages of analysis over the next six years — before his health failed and the writing stopped. He died in 1937, six days after his conditional release, his body destroyed by eleven years of confinement. He was forty-six.
The question he had been trying to answer since Turin was not abstract. It was urgent and personal: why did the councils fail?
Gramsci arrived at the University of Turin in 1911 on a scholarship — into the city of Fiat, of steel and industrial noise and a working class that was nothing like the Sardinian peasants he had grown up among. He discovered Marx and the industrial proletariat in the same semester, in the same city, as though the theory and its subject had been waiting for each other. By 1919 he was at the center of the council movement, theorizing it in real time in L'Ordine Nuovo, the journal he edited, arguing that the councils were the embryonic institutions of a new society.
When the occupations ended, when Mussolini rose, when the left that had seemed so powerful collapsed into its opposite — the same workers who had occupied factories now joining Blackshirt rallies — Gramsci was left with a question that refused release. The material conditions for change had been there. The organizational capacity had been there. The moment had been there. Why had the terrain not held?
Think about a moment when you encountered an idea — maybe about how housing could work, or how a workplace could be organized differently — and your immediate response was that's not realistic, before you'd actually thought about whether it was. Not an argument. A reflex. The kind of dismissal that doesn't feel like a decision because it doesn't feel like anything at all. It just feels like knowing.
That reflex has a history. It was built — in the schools that taught you what counts as common sense, in the institutions of daily life that organized your first understanding of how the world works. None of these conspired. They only kept functioning normally, kept producing the same assumptions, and those assumptions accumulated as the sediment of prior thought that tells you what's natural before you've been asked to decide.
Gramsci had a word for how this works: hegemony. Not force, but the prior production of the terrain on which force operates. The ruling group maintains power not only through the army and the police and the prison. It maintains it by making its worldview everyone's common sense — by shaping what feels realistic, what feels extreme, what a reasonable person thinks. Force is visible. You can resist force because you can see it. Hegemony isn't. It works through the school, the church, the newspaper, the professional association, the family form — not commanding these institutions but needing only them to keep operating normally, producing the same assumptions, until those assumptions are the air everyone breathes.
The state is the armor. Civil society is the consent that makes the armor unnecessary most of the time.
The councils had built something extraordinary inside the factories. They were right — everything about them was right. Workers could govern production. The hierarchy was unnecessary. The demonstration had been made.
And still they fell. Not because they were wrong but because they were isolated. Around them, in the churches and the schools and the newspapers and the forms of daily life, the terrain was organized around assumptions that made the councils seem like a temporary aberration rather than the beginning of something. When the industrial moment passed, the terrain reasserted itself. They had won the factories and built nothing in the ground that surrounds factories.
This was the failure. Not of will or organization or courage. Of territory. And it is the specific failure that the dominant left tradition has kept repeating across a century — winning the state, or the party, or the union, or the moment, and then finding that the terrain of civil society reconstitutes the old order under the new institutional forms. The armor falls. The consent rebuilds it.
The war of maneuver is the frontal assault — the seizure of state power, the revolutionary moment, the assumption that once you hold the state you can transform society from above. The war of position is the alternative: patient, long-term work in the territory that surrounds every site of concentrated power. Building the counter-institutions, the alternative common sense, the organic intellectuals who can translate popular experience into political coherence. Building, gradually, the assumptions that make a different world feel ordinary rather than utopian — so that when the crisis of the old order arrives, there is somewhere for the energy to go, something already built that the opening can fill.
The commons isn't just an economic alternative. It's a hegemonic project.
It's the slow, patient work of building institutions that embody different assumptions — that practice a different common sense until it becomes the terrain the next generation stands on. Not a program. Not a platform. A practice, repeated until it sediments into what feels natural, what a reasonable person assumes, what the next generation inherits as the way things are.
I want to be careful about the word failed. The war of position doesn't end when a specific position is lost. It continues in the next form available.
The restaurant ran for five years. Five years is an average lifespan for a restaurant. Not being able to continue and failing are different things. We could have continued indefinitely, financially, if we had been willing to accept the terms others accept: long hours for little pay, never being able to leave, procedural autonomy in exchange for the real compensation, which is status. Social capital. The sense of being someone in a room. We weren't willing to accept those terms, and so we stopped. That's a different story than failure.
What we left behind is harder to measure. A good story. Scattered seeds. Many of our regulars left Norfolk — the city has a way of not holding the people who are choosing to be there. Some of them came back years later and said they couldn't find anything like what we'd built, not in Seattle, not in DC. As far as I know, none of them started their own.
That's the war of position in its honest form. Not the position you hold — the position you build and then have to leave, and the question of what it does in the hands of the people who passed through it. Gramsci built his position in prison notebooks smuggled out in sections. He never saw what they did. The councils were gone. The terrain had reasserted itself. He built it anyway, in the form available to him, which was sentences. The seeds scatter. You don't always get to see what they become.
Gramsci would recognize everything in this book's Part II.
The Valencia Water Tribunal: a thousand years of common sense about how water is governed, accumulated in practice, surviving every regime that has tried to absorb or replace it — the embodiment of an assumption so long practiced it has become the only thing that feels real in the huerta.
Arizmendi on his bike in the Basque mountains, not petitioning the state but starting a school, building the institutional capacity of a community from the inside, creating the conditions under which five former students could found a cooperative in 1956. He was doing war-of-position work decades before anyone called it that.
The Zapatista autonomous communities, thirty years in: governance structures, schools in indigenous languages, health clinics, cooperative enterprises — the new society built in the territory the old one abandoned. They have not taken state power. They have built something more durable than the state that surrounds them.
Every community land trust that removes housing from the speculative market permanently — a position won. Not a reform of the market. A piece of terrain reorganized under different assumptions, producing different common sense about what housing is for. Every worker cooperative. Every mutual aid network that outlasts the crisis that created it. These are positions in the war of position, accumulated across decades, building the terrain on which a different politics becomes possible.
These are not waiting for the revolution. They are the revolution, happening at the speed that permanent change actually happens.
Gramsci named the strategy. He didn't quite name the subject — the collective form that inhabits the terrain once it's been won, that governs without becoming a party, that holds the position without centralizing the power.
There is a sentence in the Prison Notebooks that has stayed with readers for ninety years: The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
He was writing about Italian fascism. We are in an interregnum now — the old liberal order cracking under the weight of ecological crisis and democratic failure, the new not yet born, the morbid symptoms visible in every news cycle.
It's springtime and I'm drowning in pollen. Standard American arborist practice plants only male trees because no one wants to maintain fruit. There is nowhere in the city limits where I can be outdoors and not hear lawnmowers. Gas is four dollars a gallon and I want it to hit ten — and I know exactly what that means, that there will be neighborhoods where people can't afford it and die of dehydration before the people with lawns stop watering them. The interregnum is not an abstraction. It is what it costs to maintain the old order against the logic of what's actually happening.
But the great crested flycatchers are courting in the canopy. There's a baby mockingbird begging in the church hedges down the street, in the indigenous berry bushes the local ecological gardeners planted, heavy with berries just in time for babies. Life goes on. The morbid symptoms are real. So is everything else that's real.
The builders have not stopped. The war of position has been underway for a long time. The council movement of 1919, the cooperative movement of 1956, the Zapatista uprising of 1994, the municipal land trust movement that took root in Burlington in 1984, the mutual aid networks of 2020 — not separate attempts but a single thread, running through different hands, accumulating. Not every position held. The thread has never broken.
Gramsci died in 1937 with the notebooks smuggled out. The councils were long gone. Fascism was everywhere. He had been in prison for eleven years and would not live to see what the notebooks would do — how they would circulate through the hands of builders doing war-of-position work without quite having the language for it, giving that work a name — the war of position — precise enough to build on.
Right now the thing I'm building is this book. That's the form available. I still make a good curry. I can bake bread and refry beans. The future — who knows. I think we'll be all right. Most of us, at least. I just wish it felt like that more often.
The war of position is not a heroic posture. It is the decision to keep building in the form available to you — sentences, meals, seeds scattered in a neighborhood you're not sure will hold them — against the knowledge that you probably won't see what they become. Gramsci knew this. He built it anyway, in prison, in failing health, in an Italy that was moving in the opposite direction of everything he believed. The thread has never broken. It has passed through many hands that didn't know they were holding it.
Luxemburg's hands were one pair. She knew what she was holding.