Politics of transformation

Gramsci emphasizes the fundamental difference between prediction and prevision. The only predictable thing in politics is struggle, not even its specific moments. There are always alternative roads open to the future. We must prevision their courses to intervene politically in them. Prevision and intervention go hand in hand in turn as a process. One can truly understand the human world by transforming it. This is manifest in political creativity, which is always circumstantially specific action. Gramsci claims that the validity of our predictions of political action are paradoxically based on the assumption that the great numbers remain passive, because they silently obey the logic of a given system and could be assumed to stand on its fixed point. Gramsci conceives elections as a historical processes consisting of many stages over a long span of time. But elections are also, for Gramsci, collective moments of simultaneity in history bringing citizens together nationwide. From his neolinguistic perspective Gramsci conceives political democracy to be a kind of discourse network 1800/1900. His radical democratic alternative to liberalism is based on the living constituent and conflictual power of the people (as a collective will). His goal is a political form for perpetual self-transformation of democracy.