Episode Transcript
Episode 38.1: Gramsci's Wars of Position, Wars of Maneuver
Audio essay by Matthew Remski
Hello everyone. My name is Matthew Remski, host of Antifascist Dad Podcast, with episode 38.1, Gramsci's Wars of Position, Wars of Maneuver.
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You know, when Leo XIV started his liberation theology posting jag on Twitter, I was pretty swept up. Thrilled even. And I still am, in terms of hearing what I want to hear from any political or religious authority — that humanity is most fulfilled by mutual love and shared material support. That spiritual authority doesn't come from above, it doesn't come from institutions or elites, but from the trouble and joy of everyday life. That Jesus is not a conquering colonizer but a prophet of liberation whose message lives on after his execution by a colonizing empire, through the spirit of solidarity and a perennial yearning for revolution.
Every day when I open Twitter, the Pope's account greets me with some new bit of prophetic poetry. And I first really noticed this back in Holy Week in April, with this tweet: "The cross is part of the mission. The imperialist occupation of the world is disrupted from within. The violence that until now has been the law is unmasked. The poor, imprisoned, and rejected Messiah descends into the darkness of death. Yet in so doing, he brings a new creation to light."
What am I reading on Twitter, I have to ask myself. And then just in the past week I've read — this is early in the morning usually — bangers like this:
"It is important to resist the commodification of basic human needs. Food, water, and healthcare cannot be subordinated to market considerations or geopolitical interests. Access to adequate food is a fundamental human right grounded in the dignity of every person. Meeting this need not only alleviates suffering, but also addresses underlying causes of geopolitical instability. Indeed, food security is an essential component of global and integral security."
And then there's also sometimes these tweets which seem to be actually personally directed — I mean, a lot of people felt this about this one:
"Dear writers, we need your imagination, your narrative creativity, and your lively thinking. We need these to create spaces of freedom and authenticity within which divine grace can make the promise of consolation and peace resound."
I even joked with my kids that the Pope was on Twitter telling me to keep writing. No, he did not slide into my DMs.
And then there's this line in Magnifica Humanitas, the big encyclical, about how no computational system, however sophisticated, can create a heart that gives itself or a conscience that discerns good from evil. Even when machines excel in efficiency, a human face that asks to be gazed upon remains the center of our history.
I mean, wave the incense over me and guide my soul to heaven.
I could wake up every day for the rest of my life and feel nourished by these tweets. I guess it doesn't take much, right? At times it feels like a positive omen, a harbinger of a new time. Surely it must mean something that the foremost religious leader on the planet is knocking out these deeply insightful reflections on the most dystopian hell site ever.
The whole scene reminds me of this bit of Star Wars lore. After Order 66 — this is where the Emperor activates the inhibitor chips in the three million clones that they've grown for the grand army of the Republic, so that he could instantly seize control of them and slaughter the Jedi Order — I mean, first of all, that's like Musk buying Twitter on his arc to becoming the world's first trillionaire. From that point on the universe is almost uniformly dystopian, including the planet Kessel, the slave colony where legions of Wookiees are worked to death mining medicinal spice for drug cartels. But the remnants of the Jedi gather there, in an abandoned mine, for — you guessed it — an event called a conclave. There's actually a comic book issue that unpacks this story. It tells how the Jedi are divided in their politics and strategy. One faction wants to draw the Sith out into open battle. Another wants to gather up all the scattered knights and decamp to a new hiding place. But in my fan fiction version, the council actually does do a conclave, and they choose the American farm boy as their leader, and he decides they'll stay put and generate heat and light and hope from within this darkened planet and its broken machines and satanic mills.
So I hope the Pope keeps it coming. But I'm also noticing, as the tide of gratitude for his voice swells in progressive and many leftist circles, this nagging feeling about the daylight between rhetoric and reality — how easy it is for so many to feel such relief from words, or from scenes in a movie, when all the cruel actions continue.
And that feeling became sharper and more legible for me as I worked on an episode for Conspirituality about the difference between moral and structural critiques of capitalism, and how for 130 years the Roman Catholic Church has mobilized a moral critique in part to diffuse demands for structural change. The news cycle context for that episode was figuring out how J.D. Vance is mobilizing — really weaponizing — Catholic social teaching in his new memoir, campaign-opener book. And looking into the history of Catholic social teaching, I found that its reliance on moral critique derived from its refusal, its adamant refusal, to condemn capitalism as a structure. And I said that when you critique capitalism morally rather than structurally, you pretty much leave it intact. And then you need someone to blame for the suffering it produces. Because if the horrors of capitalism are the product of immorality, there's got to be someone out there — or a group of someones — being immoral. And that someone or those someones become the scapegoat: the usurer, the globalist, the welfare dependent. Structural critique accuses the system, but moral critique accuses the enemy. And accusing the enemy can lead to fascism, or at least not defend against it.
So what does this all have to do with Pope Leo's fantastic tweets and beautiful writing and that big AI encyclical? Well, obviously his arguments remain in the moral register. And while he does draw on the language and spirit of liberation theology, the jagged edges of its original formulation in the 1960s — when its pioneers called for social revolution and provided support for revolutionary movements in the global south — those edges have been smoothed away.
Now, of course, the right wing reads these tweets from Leo and believes they are revolutionary. In response to his declaration that food access is a human right, Mike Cernovich — who's a MAGA blogger and fascist content entrepreneur who has also said a lot of weird things about the naturalness of rape, so make of that what you will — retweeted the Pope saying, "Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and now the Pope." Now what he's missing is that Leo is saying it is important to resist, and then making a series of value statements in the language of persuasion, which keeps the critique of capitalism in the moral register. And that register dates back to the beginning of Catholic social teaching in the late 19th century, when the Church needed to become — wanted to become — a moderating force against revolution. And it told Catholics that class conflict is against natural law and God's intention.
Right wingers can't seem to appreciate this: that Leo is not actually telling 1.4 billion Catholics around the world to revolt against the capital order and redistribute their wealth. Like, he could. I mean, he wouldn't. But let's think about what it means that he doesn't.
Leo is making a moral appeal to powerful people who are selling AI to imperial militaries. But it's also confusing, because in the encyclical itself, Leo writes very aptly: "Nothing in the world of AI is immaterial or magical. Every seemingly immediate and flawless response is the result of a long chain of mediation involving vast networks of natural resources, energy infrastructure, and above all, people. A significant part of the digital economy's functioning relies on the silent work of millions of people engaged in essential yet largely unseen activities such as data labeling, model training, and content moderation, often involving disturbing material. In many cases, these workers are young people, predominantly women, working under demanding conditions for minimal wages."
So that's really, really good writing. But when it came to releasing the encyclical, the guy who stood beside Leo on the dais and was given the microphone to make a speech was Christopher Olah, the 33-year-old co-founder of Anthropic. Not there with him were Mercy Mutemi, the Kenyan lawyer who sued Meta on behalf of content moderators in Nairobi — these African workers who were exposed to videos of beheadings, child sexual abuse, and mass atrocity footage for wages of around two dollars an hour. Also not there was Adrienne Williams, the UC Berkeley researcher whose work on ghost work and AI's invisible labor supply chain is the academic source the encyclical uses to describe the data labelers, the clickworkers, the people whose labor trains the models. These conspicuous absences mean that the Pope is not delivering a structural demand from the poor.
So if Cernovich was smart, he would encourage Leo to keep low-key, steering people away from revolution and letting off steam as they pray for a better world. But Cernovich's aim is to take even this toothless appeal off the table and slide the Overton window farther to the right, by tarring a leader and tradition that's relieving a revolutionary pressure that would otherwise come for him. If Cernovich can get his followers to believe that Pope Leo is a communist, he doesn't even have to think about communists.
But what do actual communists think? I mean, never mind communists — anyone who's a committed socialist or anarchist, antifascist, whatever. Anyone who finds themselves doubtful that the moral critique of capitalism will move any material needle within any reasonable time frame. As temperatures hit 45 degrees Celsius in Paris. As nonviolent protesters against ICE are convicted as terrorists and given sentences of fifty to one hundred years. What are we to think?
My first thought starts with a feeling about the feeling I have in listening to and reading Pope Leo — with this great sense of gratification and warmth — and watching that same sentiment sweep across the internet, drawing out all the lapsed Catholics to say, this guy is making me think about going back to Mass. And the feeling I have is worrying that the appeal to the moral register is weak, because it's not materially confrontational, and because so-called devout Catholics like J.D. Vance and Mark Carney can dialogue comfortably within it while ravaging the planet. Fascists and proto-fascists are allowed to have double lives. It doesn't bother them.
But more than that, I worry that the appeal to the moral register — which I find so enriching, so hopeful — might also be strategically damaging, because it puts the speaker into a disarmed or pacifist position from the outset as they engage capitalism on its own hegemonic terms. It's really this feeling of bringing a knife to a gunfight and hoping you don't get shot.
So how does this feeling interact with a feeling of relief in reading Leo's tweets? There's a contradiction there. And one very cool thing about being a socialist, communist, antifascist, whatever, is that when you discover a contradiction or recognize some kind of cognitive dissonance, chances are good that someone over the past century has spoken precisely to that point. And for a significant number of these issues, when I go to look for some theoretical support, it comes from the notebooks of Antonio Gramsci — sick, disabled, malnourished, scribbling away in his prison cell in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
And one of the many, many things that he says in these notebook fragments is that there is a difference between wars of position, which are the hegemonic struggles over culture, values, and consent — basically the entire discourse, who we describe, who we engage with — and then wars of maneuver, or direct confrontation, or when violence breaks out.
So I'll go into some detail, but the short form is that I have this creeping feeling that the moral critique of capitalism provided by Pope Leo and whoever else is doing similar work is simply part of the war of position. But it can be confused for the end point, and so disarmed from the outset, because we are not prepared for or engaging in the maneuver — we can win hearts and also lose power.
Saying it again: Gramsci warns that the war of maneuver — the frontal attack on capitalist power — can be too easily displaced by the war of position, or the struggle we undergo in civil society.
Now, Gramsci's metaphors are military. This is how he approaches it: "The superstructures of civil society are like the trench systems of modern warfare. In war, it would sometimes happen that a fierce artillery attack seemed to have destroyed the enemy's entire defense system, whereas in fact it had only destroyed the outer perimeter. And at the moment of their advance and attack, the assailants would find themselves confronted by a line of defense which was still effective. The same thing happens in politics during the great economic crises."
So this is the early 1930s, and Gramsci is recalling the Western Front — which he wasn't at, because of his disabilities, but it was fifteen years ago and he knows a lot about it — and he's describing something new about warfare and the modern state. Because in the Napoleonic era, and everything that preceded it, wars were decided on the level of the frontline maneuver: the decisive frontal assault, the pitched battle between lines, and the moment where the enemy's army is broken in the field and then the leader surrenders. And that means that the state, embodied by that frontline and the leader surrendering, has also surrendered.
And this is kind of what I see when I watch these great medieval war films with the ten-year-old — these battles that are vicious and dramatic, but they last for a day or maybe two days at most, with the raw death count providing all we need to know about who has conquered whom.
And this picture didn't really change up until the early 20th century, and revolutionary theorists assumed it would be their model as well. They were obsessed with the storming of the Bastille, the barricades, the insurrectionary moment that would change everything. I find it's a difficult fantasy to shake, because it really unfolds on a very human level. It involves imagining your body crossing over a line and creating a new state of being.
Now at the Western Front, there is a line, and there are breakthroughs, but the lines are networked and intersecting, and the breakthroughs are temporary. World War I demonstrated that in modern industrial societies, the state is not like this thin crust covering class power that can crack if you hit it hard enough. The state is actually backed up by an elaborate system of fortifications that extend way beyond the staging areas and the medical tents in the rear. The supply lines stretch all the way back to the capitals where the arms factories chug within thick layers of cultural support — culture, church, the school, the press, the legal system, the common sense of ordinary people. So if you break through the outer perimeter, you're going to find another line of defense behind it. Behind the line of machine guns is the train of ammo carriers and the forces of production going all the way back to the factory and engineering plans and engineering school. And on that home front, you keep the presses running, you keep the money printing, the factories humming, and all of the parliamentary procedures on time. The war of position continues as the war of maneuver flares up and down. And the war of position is so vast, it can be so disconnected from the front, that soldiers charging over the top of the trench might run into fire because they were too early for the telegram that said the armistice had been signed hundreds of miles away in a train car in a forest.
Okay, so what does all of this have to do with Pope Leo, moral critiques, the world of discourse, dreaming of a better world?
Gramsci says that the reformist or moralist left — which Pope Leo belongs to; he is moralizing, he is making a moral appeal to the oligarchs of the world — that it is common for this group to think of the war of position as the war in total. That if you win cultural ground, if you change hearts and minds, if you make the best moral arguments, that's where it's all going to happen. And I see almost everything around me saying the same thing.
In the vast majority of discourse, I see the proving ground for the position wars believed to be electoral politics. But electoral politics obviously operate within really confined structural limits that prevent fundamental transformation. But nonetheless, those of us who are left of center and invested in electoral politics treat elections as if they were wars of maneuver, as if winning offices changes the terrain, the structure of things. But incipient fascists have always understood elections as simply one instrument in a combined-arms strategy. Trumpism runs on endless maneuvers supported by — but also transcendent of, and sometimes neglectful of — the positions altogether. Which is why he's always pissing off one part of his base or another, and he doesn't care. He's forcing the think tanks to chase their tails trying to keep up with him.
Meanwhile, in that most important existential maneuver category defined by violence: ICE is killing and detaining citizens, recording 47 deaths in custody since January of 2025; 540,000 people have been deported; 221 fishermen have been killed in Caribbean and Pacific strikes on alleged drug vessels; the US-Israeli war on Iran has killed as many as 10,000 people; and the dismantling of US aid is projected to cause over ten million excess deaths globally by 2030.
So think pieces dunking on Chris Rufo, debating trad wives on Jubilee — this is all noise compared to the raw, unmitigated violence raining down on the nation and the world.
Just last week, eight antifascist protesters received sentences of thirty to one hundred years for participating in a noise demonstration in July of last year outside of the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Texas. The convictions were secured in March under the DOJ's new material support for terrorism framework, which is now being applied to members of Antifa — which isn't even a group. I mean, I might be associated with it given the title of the podcast.
The terrorism charges targeted the fact that they dressed in black bloc. They used Signal to plan their protest — I use Signal all the time. They retweeted fascist content — yeah, that's me too. And they distributed antifascist zines. Well, I don't do the zines, but I'm doing this.
Their participation was varied, quite diverse. One of the protesters, Benjamin Song, did bring his rifle and he wound up wounding an officer. His defense said he shot defensively at the ground in front of the officer and the wound was caused by a ricochet. But the prosecution rejected that and said the shot was direct and constituted attempted murder. So Song got the hundred-year sentence. But another defendant who wasn't even present at the protest received thirty years for moving a box of zines after his partner was detained.
So this is a group of people who took the first few steps out of the war of position territory and into a maneuver — albeit for most of them, this was a maneuver protected by the Constitution. Georgetown law professor Arjun Sethi said that anyone who cares about free speech should be aghast at this ruling and sentencing. The National Lawyers Guild documented First Amendment, Sixth Amendment, and due process violations throughout the trial. Texas A&M law professor Jenny Carroll compared the prosecution to the 1918 sedition cases used to suppress socialist and anarchist speech. They noted that terrorism statutes were applied not to acts of violence — except arguably in the case of Song — but to political identity markers, clothing, apps, and literature. In other words, the terrorist charges were applied to the war of position.
Now, considering the difference between the war of position and the war of maneuver invokes the ancient argument between revolutionaries and reformers. And the conflict is about the nature of the capitalist state and whether socialism can meaningfully change it from within. We see this today in the question of whether No Kings Day protests or any nonviolent protests are radical, or whether they do anything at all, or whether they merely absorb and disperse revolutionary energy. We see it in the hypervigilance with which figures like Zohran Mamdani and Avi Lewis and Zach Polanski are scrutinized from the left.
Perhaps the most famous articulation of the dilemma comes from Rosa Luxemburg in 1899, who posed the question of what happens when someone like Mamdani gains a position within the capital order: "With the entry of a socialist into the government and class domination continuing to exist, the bourgeois government doesn't transform itself into a socialist government, but a socialist transforms himself into a bourgeois minister."
So Luxemburg was arguing that the bourgeois state is a form of class power downstream of capitalism, designed to facilitate it, and the minister must function within it. And that means managing capitalism, and not ending it.
Now the instinct to manage as opposed to contain is viewed from the left often as betrayal. And Luxemburg herself was a victim of this betrayal, because in 1918, in a choice to delay revolution and perhaps protect their own skins, the German socialists entered a pre-Weimar coalition with liberals, and then they enlisted right-wing militias to murder rebellious antiwar communists, including Luxemburg.
Now this reform-revolution argument can become very sophisticated. There's a guy named André Gorz who was a New Left Austrian-French philosopher and journalist. And along with the rest of the French New Left in the 1960s, he was troubled by the maximalism of revolutionary Marxism on one side — the notion that nothing can change without everything changing. And the New Left's view of actually existing socialism in the communist projects of Europe was highly critical. But on the other side he was frustrated by the naivety of reformists who failed to change anything at all. He was also a friend of Sartre and an existentialist, which meant that he was depressively pragmatic.
Gorz sought a middle path. And from what I've learned, it's pretty psychologically attuned as a theory of change, recognizing that while capital is all or nothing, the people who fight against it are not. And his most famous idea is also his most contested — that there are actually two categories of reform, and one reproduces capitalism, but what he called the non-reformist reform — which just sounds like wordplay — his point was that it can change both people and structures incrementally over time. And according to Gorz, negotiating with capital is not a zero-sum game, because as you do it you learn more about yourself, your own agency, and the disaster of capital becomes more apparent. So the question isn't whether it changes everything, but whether it opens people and systems to further change over time.
So a non-reformist reform is achievable in the present, Gorz says, but it creates new contradictions. It shifts power toward workers and away from capital. It shifts the Overton window. It expands democracy. It makes further radical demands more plausible.
Now his critics pointed out that no one — including him — could predict which reforms would be non-reformist. They said that he minimized the ability of the state to absorb and control change, and that by de-emphasizing conflict he's abandoning the working class. And I find all of those criticisms to be quite fair. And then there's also this issue that non-reformist reforms are prefigurative — they model a different world in microcosm rather than transitional and building toward revolution. Prefigurative politics can coexist with capitalism indefinitely. But transitional politics require an intensity of crisis and confrontation and rupture that Gorz's framework just does not insist on.
Now I'm writing this at the end of the same week in which New York State Democratic Socialists of America candidates picked up at least six state legislative seats this past Tuesday. And this gives the DSA fifteen or more endorsed lawmakers in Albany. Also, congressional candidates Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Brad Lander all won their House primaries. Chevalier is probably the most radical of the bunch. She's a 32-year-old community organizer and she defeated five-term incumbent Adriano Espaillat, who is the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and backed by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — this is in New York's 13th. Anti-DSA super PACs spent $2.9 million and they just blew it. They failed. So all told, nine of ten New York City DSA candidates won. And these were all Zohran Mamdani's picks. And so his endorsements proved decisive, and anti-AIPAC and genocide litmus-test politics were central to these victories. Chevalier and Lander specifically hammered opponents for connections to the pro-Israel lobby and their unwillingness to use the word genocide.
So these are all good signs, good omens. And already in my iteration of social feeds, the glow is muted by this ancient conflict. Can DSA candidates really retain their values? Have you seen what happened to AOC, who wound up backing Kamala Harris and even lying for her at the convention about working tirelessly for a Gaza ceasefire?
This is a war over the future, both long-term and short-term, about what we're going to do today, what we're going to do tomorrow, and ten years from now. And because no one knows how things will shake out, we can have better and worse guesses based on our reading of history, but no consensus on what will work. We just have to do the best we can.
And for me, what Gramsci makes clearer is that the war is always double. You have to see the difference between the position and the maneuver, how each depends on the other, how the fascists are always using both, and the antifascists, so often playing defense, are often locked into shoring up their position only.
When I think of that conclave on Kessel, I know that Star Wars canon doesn't give the Jedi much time there before Vader arrives with the 501st and massacres all of the Jedi survivors. In my fan fiction version, Pope Leo XIV is the Jedi leader who does have time to contemplate and build his quiet, dignified position within the depths of the abandoned mine on this dystopian planet. But I also know two other things. This isn't a movie, and all of his radiance can easily be snuffed out — unless what he is doing in his radiant meditation is planning the maneuver.
Thanks for listening, everybody. Take care of each other.
