2025-04-07, The theory that survived the war

I am told that I must be legible. It is demanded from me by settlers, who—whether they mean to or not—imply that colonialism will continue unless I can explain why it shouldn’t. It is demanded from me by Indigenous people who fear that, if we do not make ourselves legible to settlers, our autonomy will become irrelevant. The logic is consistent: if we do not translate our position into terms that can be understood, we will be excluded from the conversation that decides our future.

This thinking runs deep. It has been cultivated across generations of the American left. And it draws heavily on Antonio Gramsci’s theory of the organic intellectual—on the idea that people embedded in struggle must emerge as organizers of thought, translators of material conditions into political strategy. We are told this is how hegemony is contested: by producing clarity.

I think this is absolutely wrong. And in this paper, I’m going to explain why.

It is not that I disagree with Gramsci’s context. His work was produced under fascist incarceration, at immense personal risk, and it remains a foundational contribution to the study of power and ideology. But I believe that the American uptake of his ideas—particularly the concept of the organic intellectual—has functioned as a justification for formatting insurgent knowledge into settler-recognizable forms.

By the time Gramsci’s work was translated into English and widely read in the United States, the U.S. government had already enacted the destruction of the very formations his theory names. The Black Panther Party had been targeted, infiltrated, and dismantled. COINTELPRO had already functionally adopted the logic of counter-hegemonic threat management that Gramsci only theorized. And yet, American radicals embraced his work as a plan.

The result is a confusion of timelines: a theory built for an earlier moment is picked up in a later one, and used to justify practices of visibility and translation that now serve as containment. Gramsci is cited to defend curriculum, explain outreach, and rationalize settler-facing pedagogy. His concept is invoked to authorize actions that move us away from refusal and toward formatting. And because the theory is legible—because it can be cited, taught, and circulated—it is used to validate the very processes that neutralize the political force it once described.

This paper argues that Gramsci’s theory, while produced in resistance, has become legible as a form of after-action rationalization. Its widespread citation marks the survival of a framework, not a movement. Its ability to circulate without resistance suggests its formatting. I suggest that the organic intellectual, as it now appears in American radical theory, is a role of strategic absorption.

What follows is not a rejection of thought. It is an attempt to ask: what kinds of thought survive? What happens when insurgent knowledge becomes teachable? And who benefits when resistance is converted into curriculum?

II. Simulation Begins at Legibility: Gramsci as a Format Gramsci’s concept of the organic intellectual was developed under duress. Writing from prison under Mussolini’s regime, subject to censorship and surveillance, he theorized a model of political transformation in which intellectual labor was embedded within material struggle. The organic intellectual, in his framing, emerged from class formation itself—from the need to produce coherence under conditions of contradiction. Their task was to organize the world's perception from within.

Gramsci’s writing in the Prison Notebooks was necessarily coded, mediated, and general. He was describing a real structure from inside a carceral one. This constraint shaped what he could say and how he had to say it. His work is remarkable for its ability to remain strategic under such constraints—but that same abstraction has made it uniquely portable. The organic intellectual, as a concept, travels well. It can be generalized, cited, and applied in contexts far beyond Gramsci’s own.

This portability has made it powerful—but also vulnerable. Because the more a concept can be translated and applied outside of its originating conditions, the more it is subject to what I call synthetic theory: theory that is preserved through formatting, stripped of its embeddedness, and made survivable through abstraction. Synthetic theory is not false. It is not necessarily wrong. It is simply separable from the conditions that made it necessary.

Gramsci’s theory has survived in precisely this form. It has been turned into a resource for academics, organizers, and institutions alike—largely because it can be deployed without friction. It names something powerful, but in doing so, it allows that power to be absorbed.

What makes a theory legible to multiple audiences—especially across state, academic, and activist lines—is its capacity to function independently of its origins. That is what makes it citeable. It is what makes it fundable. And, as James C. Scott writes in Seeing Like a State, it is what makes it governable.

Scott’s account of legibility is about the state’s need to simplify complexity in order to administer it. Populations must be countable. Land must be mapped. Names must be registered. Legibility is not just about seeing—it is about making visible in a way that permits control.

Gramsci’s theory was never intended to serve the state. But its structure—a general category of political agent that can be abstracted from its specific context—has allowed it to become a form of recognizable insurgency. Not insurgency that threatens the state, but insurgency that can be indexed, referenced, and eventually curated.

That Gramsci’s work survives so broadly is not a sign of its enduring strategic value. It is a sign that the concept of the organic intellectual has been formatted for survivability. And the danger is that this formatting—this readability—now authorizes the kinds of activities that undermine the refusal and embeddedness that insurgent knowledge actually requires.

III. COINTELPRO and the Preemptive Destruction of the Organic Intellectual Between 1956 and 1971, the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted COINTELPRO—the Counterintelligence Program—which sought to monitor, infiltrate, discredit, and dismantle political organizations deemed threatening to domestic order. Although the program officially targeted a range of groups, including anti-war organizers and the American Indian Movement, it focused most intensely on Black radical organizations—chief among them, the Black Panther Party.

What these formations shared was something more structurally dangerous than militant posture or revolutionary rhetoric: they organized theory from within lived struggle. They were internal producers of sense, operating in the middle of contradiction, repression, and survival. They were theorists embedded in practice—what Gramsci, decades earlier, had named the “organic intellectual.”

Figures like Fred Hampton and George Jackson embodied this synthesis. Hampton’s organizing in Chicago united street organizations, provided social programs, and articulated complex ideological positions through accessible language and mutual aid. Jackson, writing from within the California prison system, developed a body of analysis that combined Marxism, prison abolitionism, and Black revolutionary nationalism—without academic mediation. The Party’s survival programs, their publications, their political education structures—these were pedagogy in action, theory under fire.

The FBI recognized this.

A now-declassified 1968 COINTELPRO memo warns of the emergence of a “Black Messiah”—a leader capable of unifying and electrifying the “militant black nationalist movement.” But this language masks a deeper strategy. The concern was ideological articulation: figures capable of converting disparate grievances into systemic analysis, and systemic analysis into coordinated movement.

In short, the FBI was acting on what we now recognize as a Gramscian logic. The Bureau didn’t need to read Gramsci to identify the threat. It understood, at a functional level, that coherence was dangerous. It targeted those who could generate it.

This is important as a timeline.

Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks were not widely available in English until the early 1970s, when Lawrence & Wishart published Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971). But by this point, COINTELPRO had already been active for over a decade. The FBI, through its domestic intelligence efforts, was already practicing a form of epistemic counterinsurgency: dismantling organizations and the very production of insurgent knowledge from within oppressed communities.

It is implausible to assume that no connection existed between Gramsci’s circulation in European Marxist discourse and U.S. state strategies. Western intelligence agencies were and are highly coordinated. MI5 had long monitored leftist publishers, including Lawrence & Wishart. The CIA and other Cold War agencies had extensive cultural fronts that engaged with European theory—especially when it was being used by communists. The idea of the organic intellectual would not have needed to be translated to become actionable. It only needed to be understood.

And it was.

The result is a reversal: the U.S. state enacted Gramsci’s logic of counter-hegemonic threat before radicals in the U.S. had access to the framework. While organizers struggled to make sense of fragmentation and surveillance, the state was already targeting those who dared to create sense within it.

This is the trap: by the time American radicals could read Gramsci, the war had already passed them. The people who embodied his theory were gone, imprisoned, isolated. The state had identified and destroyed the very function Gramsci described—before it was even cited.

What remains is the theory. But it arrived too late.

IV. The Translation Moment: Gramsci as Justification for Our Own Formatting When Gramsci’s work arrived in the Anglophone world in the early 1970s, it was received into that moment's aftermath. The most visible insurgent movements of the 1960s—Black radical, Indigenous, Third Worldist—had been violently disrupted or dismantled. The Panthers were fractured. Malcolm was dead. The state had already shifted from overt repression to subtler regimes of co-optation, surveillance, and reputational containment. And into that vacuum came theory.

Selections from the Prison Notebooks arrived as an authoritative guide to ideological warfare—dense, historical, but modular. It appeared at the very moment the U.S. left was consolidating into something more academic, more nonprofit, more professional. Gramsci’s language—“hegemony,” “intellectual function,” “common sense,” “organic leadership”—offered a way to keep speaking the language of struggle without confronting the violence of its disappearance.

To put it more directly: Gramsci became a way to keep talking as if we were still fighting.

But for that to happen, Gramsci had to be converted. His conditions had to be lifted. His concepts had to be made portable, transportable, compatible with American political institutions. He could no longer be a theorist of Italian fascism. He had to become a theorist of struggle, full stop—useful wherever people wanted to talk about oppression, strategy, or pedagogy.

This wasn’t a misunderstanding. It was a necessity.

In order for Gramsci to be useful to American radicalism post-COINTELPRO, he had to be stripped of specificity. His theory had to become synthetic: survivable across contexts because it no longer made demands on the material world. It became the kind of thought that travels well. And traveling well is not neutral.

The result was a strange reanimation. Gramsci’s theory, produced in prison, under fascism, to explain how movements could build counterpower, was now being used to explain why pedagogy, curriculum development, public-facing education, and institutional legibility were necessary. American radicalism embraced Gramsci not as a theorist of historical defeat—but as a justification for contemporary formatting.

That is, Gramsci began to authorize the very dynamics that replaced the movements his theory once described.

Where refusal had been central, now translation became the work. Where secrecy had once been strategic, now openness was proof of relevance. Where embedded struggle had once generated theory, now the theory could precede the conditions.

Gramsci’s concept of the organic intellectual now appears in:

Mission statements for radical nonprofit programs

Public scholarship fellowships

Justifications for settler-facing pedagogy

Institutional rationales for community-based participatory research

In these settings, the organic intellectual is not dangerous. They are valuable. They are fundable. They are format-compatible.

And the tragedy is that their formatting is defended as strategy—because Gramsci said it mattered.

It is at this point that his theory stops being a tool of insurgency and becomes a mechanism of continuity. It allows radical actors to appear oppositional while participating in the systems that replaced the very figures they invoke. It converts accommodation into historical responsibility. It makes visibility seem like victory.

And it does so because legible theory survives. It is not censored. It is translated. It is circulated. It is taught. And as it travels, it transforms from analysis into affirmation.

So when Indigenous organizers cite Gramsci to justify settler-facing education, when radicals invoke the organic intellectual to explain public visibility, the problem is not misuse—it is function. That is what the theory is now for.

The war already happened. Gramsci's theory survived. And we are using its survival to explain our participation in the system that won.

V. Against Readability: Refusal, Specificity, and Embedded Thought If formatting is the condition of theoretical survival, then the question is no longer whether a theory is true, but whether it can resist use.

The organic intellectual survives because it became usable—by institutions, by funders, by radicals seeking legibility in hostile terrain. It has become a template, not an analysis. And in doing so, it now names a figure who is coherent to the systems that destroyed the people Gramsci originally described. That is the paradox this paper has traced: the theory did not protect its referents. But it outlived them. And now it is used to justify our formatting in the name of struggle.

The alternative is not retreat. It is refusal. But refusal has been misread—flattened into inaction or obscurantism. That is a misreading cultivated by systems that profit from clarity.

In Mohawk Interruptus, Audra Simpson describes refusal as a political act of withholding—not participating in legibility, not submitting to structures that demand explanation. Refusal is not evasion. It is sovereignty. It is a decision about what gets translated, what does not, and who it is for.

Similarly, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes that Indigenous knowledge is not scalable. It cannot be lifted from the relationships that produce it. To extract it into generalized theory is to destroy it. Some stories cannot be shared. Some knowledge cannot be taught without harm. Theory, in this frame, is not a tool—it is a relation. And relations have boundaries.

This is the opposite of synthetic theory. This is embedded thought—the kind that does not travel well, the kind that loses meaning when extracted from its place, the kind that breaks when formatted.

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, in The Undercommons, describe study as that which happens in the breaks, in the margins, in the refusal to submit knowledge to institutional accounting. It is not a curriculum. It is not a deliverable. It is not a strategic communication plan. It is relation and movement and difference, lived together, unrecorded and unrendered.

These thinkers don’t propose a better model of the organic intellectual. They reject the conditions that make that model survivable.

So what would it mean to produce thought that resists use? What would it mean to theorize in a way that cannot be cited in a grant application? That cannot be excerpted in a fellowship? That cannot be adapted into a training module or a settler education program?

It would mean producing knowledge that cannot be circulated without betrayal. Knowledge that cannot be absorbed because it cannot be lifted.

It would mean returning to specificity. To conditions. To relations. To the spaces where thought is for people, not for systems.

It would mean abandoning the fantasy that pedagogy for power is insurgent, and remembering that some of the most powerful knowledge is incommunicable by design.

This is not a call to mystify or to withhold for its own sake. It is a call to recognize that clarity is not always strategy. And legibility is not always survivable.

There are forms of knowledge that should not be read. There are forms of theory that should not be saved. And there are forms of life that will not be understood—because they are not for that.

VI. Conclusion: If They Let You Teach It, It’s Already Too Late Gramsci’s theory is not wrong. But its afterlife is doing something other than what he intended.

He wrote from a prison built by fascists. He wrote without access to his archives, without freedom of speech, and without certainty that anyone would ever read him. He wrote to clarify, under conditions where clarity was criminal. He wrote to imagine a way forward, not to survive his own disappearance.

But his theory did survive. And that survival now functions as evidence. It tells us that insurgent thought can live in the archive. That struggle can be formatted. That resistance can be repurposed. That we can read the Prison Notebooks in a seminar room funded by the same university that contracts with ICE and builds settler futures on stolen land.

That is the problem. Not that Gramsci is being misused—but that his theory survived precisely because it became usable. Legible. Circulable. Familiar.

So when I hear that we must be legible, I think about what survives. I think about what had to be destroyed to make that theory teachable. I think about what it means when the same institutions that hunted the people Gramsci describes now offer fellowships in their name.

And I think about the organizer who told me I had to make us legible. That we had to produce curriculum for settlers. That we had to translate ourselves for the sake of being seen.

I know where that logic leads.

It leads to theory that can be reformatted. It leads to pedagogy that can be adopted. It leads to recognition that feels like progress, but functions like stillness.

The most dangerous thing about the organic intellectual today is that they are expected to be visible. Expected to explain. Expected to be coherent to the structures they were meant to oppose.

This is how formatting wins.

So I return to the central question: What kind of theory survives?

The answer is: the kind that’s allowed to. And the kinds that are allowed to survive often arrive too late to do anything but explain what we’ve already lost.

That’s why this isn’t just about Gramsci. It’s about what we do when theory becomes curriculum. When pedagogy becomes performance. When recognition replaces relation.

If they let you teach it, it’s already too late. If they fund it, they’ve already neutralized it. If it names you, formats you, and circulates you—it’s not yours anymore.

And if the theory survives but the people don’t, we have to stop calling that strategy. We have to call it what it is: a simulation of life, written after the war, for the benefit of the victors.