"We Must Stop This Brain from Working for Twenty Years" — Gramsci and the War of Position

1928. A courtroom in Rome.

The prosecutor turns to the defendant and says this.

The defendant's name was Antonio Gramsci.

One of the founders of the Italian Communist Party — and Mussolini's regime put him in prison.

But the irony is that prison did not stop his thinking.

Inside that prison he completed a single concept that would reshape the entire strategy of the postwar Western left.

Its name was the "war of position."

And once you understand it, you begin to see why so much of what we now take for granted as "common sense" was in fact built by someone, over a very long time.

Antonio Gramsci was born in 1891 on the island of Sardinia, Italy.

In 1921 he took part in founding the Italian Communist Party, and later became one of its leaders.

In 1922, Mussolini took power.

The fascist government began removing its opponents one by one, and on 31 October 1926 it outlawed every opposition party outright.

A week later, Gramsci was arrested.

In June 1928 the court sentenced him to twenty years and four months.

The prosecutor's line you heard earlier — "we must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years" — does not come from the trial transcript itself; it reaches us through later scholarly biographies and a contemporary recollection from 1937.

But history was ironic.

Prison held his body. It could not hold his thinking.

From 1929 to 1935, inside that prison, Gramsci filled 33 notebooks — roughly 2,848 manuscript pages.

These are the writings later known as the Prison Notebooks.

To get past the censor, he swapped his terms.

He wrote "philosophy of praxis" where he meant "historical materialism."

His sentence was reduced to twelve years in 1932, but the long imprisonment had broken his health, and in 1937 he died shortly after his release.

And the notebooks he wrote in prison only began to reach the wider world in the 1970s, when the English translations appeared.

So what was the question he held on to so tightly in that cell?

It is simple — "Why did the revolution succeed in Russia and fail in Western Europe?"

In 1917, in Russia, the Bolsheviks stormed state power head-on and seized it.

The October Revolution.

Gramsci and many European communists of the time believed the same method would work in Western Europe.

But in Germany, and in Italy, every comparable attempt failed.

In prison, Gramsci dug into why.

And he took his analogy from how the First World War was fought.

A frontal assault on state power.

Like a war of maneuver across open ground: strike the enemy's headquarters — the state — directly, and it is decided quickly.

The Russian revolution could succeed, as Gramsci saw it, because Russian "civil society" was still weak.

Bring down the state, and that was enough.

But like trench warfare on the Western Front, a frontal breakthrough does not work where the other side has already dug in.

Western European society, Gramsci argued, was exactly such a place.

In other words, in Western societies shaking state power does not bring the whole society down with it.

Schools, the press, churches, trade unions, cultural bodies — this dense web of "civil society" holds the order up in the state's place.

Gramsci's conclusion was this.

"You have to take the web itself first."

And to that long war for the web, Gramsci gave a name.

The war of position.

So what is it that the war of position is actually trying to take?

Not guns, and not buildings.

What Gramsci fixed on was "hegemony" — the feeling that something is simply obvious. Common sense itself.

Gramsci held that a ruling class does not keep power through instruments of coercion alone — the police, the army.

Stronger than those is the power to make people accept, on their own, that "this is just how things are" — the capacity to manufacture consent.

If people come to believe an order is "common sense" without any law compelling them, without any gun pointed at them — that is the most durable rule there is.

So where is this hegemony made?

Gramsci called that arena "civil society."

The space between the state — political society — and economic production: schools, the press, religion, trade unions, the arts.

And the people who actually fight on that stage he called "organic intellectuals."

Intellectuals who articulate the interests of a particular class and rise with it — distinct from "traditional intellectuals," who simply legitimize the existing order.

To put it plainly:

The battlefield of Gramsci's war of position was not the parliament building. It was the classroom, the newsroom, the theater, the lecture hall.

And whichever side accumulates hegemony there, over a long enough period, owns "common sense" before it ever holds political power.

Gramsci died in 1937, and for a time his notebooks lay dormant, available only in Italian.

Then in the 1960s, somewhere else entirely, someone arrived at a strikingly similar idea.

In 1967, the West German student leader Rudi Dutschke put forward this slogan.

Rather than storming political power — parties, parliaments — the strategy was to enter institutions one by one, universities, the press, cultural bodies, take up positions there, and change society over the long run.

It is remarkably close to Gramsci's war of position.

But one thing has to be stated precisely — there is no established evidence that Dutschke drew directly on Gramsci's theory, and none that he reached the conclusion entirely independently either.

The only accurate statement is that the actual relationship between them is unclear — this video does not assert it either way.

Either way, as English translations of the Prison Notebooks spread through Western academia in the 1970s, this idea — a long war fought inside institutions — became core strategic language for the New Left.

And from here, the story branches again.

You have probably heard the term "Cultural Marxism."

It comes up often alongside Gramsci's war of position.

One thing needs to be clear first.

"Cultural Marxism" is not a term Gramsci himself used.

Let us trace how the label came to be attached.

In the 1930s a group of scholars working in Frankfurt, Germany — Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, the so-called Frankfurt School — went into exile, largely to the United States, after the Nazis took power, and developed a current known as "critical theory."

They never called themselves "Cultural Marxists" — in scholarship they are called critical theorists.

Trace how the label "Cultural Marxism" actually got attached, and it goes back further: from the 1970s the circle around the American political activist Lyndon LaRouche published attacks on the Frankfurt School, and that material was picked up in the late 1990s by Paul Weyrich and William S. Lind of the conservative think tank the Free Congress Foundation, who spread the term.

The politician Pat Buchanan came somewhat later, widening the frame into national political discourse through his 2000 campaign speech and his 2002 book.

And there is a point worth noting.

A 2004 pamphlet edited by Lind lines up six figures as the lineage of "Cultural Marxism": Lukács, Gramsci, Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, Marcuse and Adorno.

Which means that from the moment the label was attached, Gramsci — not only the Frankfurt School — was already bound into the same list.

But here is what has to be stated precisely.

That Gramsci's war of position is a real theory, and that various left movements have in fact prioritized institutional and cultural terrain — each of these facts can be verified on its own.

But binding those separate facts into a single sealed conspiracy — that a particular force has plotted for decades in an organized way to bring down Western civilization — that is precisely the point at which scholarship classifies the narrative as a far-right conspiracy theory.

Because the fact that many Frankfurt School scholars were Jewish is often carried, inside that narrative, into the antisemitic implication that "a particular people conspired deliberately."

So what this video covers is clear — Gramsci's war of position as a real theory, and the historical course by which that theory later acquired the name "Cultural Marxism."

It does not deal with narratives that weave assorted facts into one vast organized conspiracy.

Because individual facts, and the narrative that strings them into a conspiracy theory, belong to different orders of claim.

Now let us bring the concept into the present.

Whatever political position you hold, one thing can be observed — once a particular view has soaked through textbooks, the press and popular culture, people stop receiving it as "somebody's argument" and start receiving it as plain "common sense."

That is hegemony in its completed form, exactly as Gramsci described it.

Not winning the argument, but making it look like there was never anything to argue about — that was the aim of the war of position.

Which events a curriculum narrates and from whose vantage point; which phrasings the press treats as "neutral"; which figures popular culture draws as heroes and which as villains — none of this is ever settled by itself.

It is the result of someone occupying those positions, over a long time.

And the figures this channel has covered — the conventional assessment of Syngman Rhee in particular — are not exempt from that mechanism.

If the assessment of a figure has been repeated for decades within an almost fixed frame, that may not be because the assessment is the only truth — it may be because a position has been held, and defended, for a very long time.

That is why this channel goes back to the original sources and looks at these figures again.

Not to accept an already-manufactured common sense, but to start by asking how that common sense was made — that is what this channel is trying to do.

There is one passage from Gramsci's prison writings that is quoted more than any other.

What Gramsci saw from inside that prison was not guns. It was common sense.

And he saw through to this: who holds that common sense, how, and for how long, is what finally decides the world.

Later scholarly biographies report that the prosecutor said this brain must be stopped from functioning for twenty years.

But what never stopped was the question that brain left behind —

"The thing you believe is obvious. Did it really become that way on its own?"

Antonio Gramsci, and the war of position.

Repo Korea will keep examining how this mechanism has worked in modern Korean history and in the shaping of public consciousness.