ence between Russia and Western Europe was in the relative strengths of state and civil society.In Russia,the administrative and coercive apparatus of the state was formidable but proved to be vulnerable,while civil society was undeveloped. A relatively small working class led by a disciplined avant-garde was able to overwhelm the state in a war of movement and met no effective resistance from the rest of civil society.The vanguard party could set about founding a new state through a combination of applying coercion against recalcitrant elements and building consent among others.(This analysis was particularly apposite to the period of the New Economic Policy before coercion began to be applied on a larger scale against the rural population.) In Western Europe,by contrast,civil society,under bourgeois hegemony,was much more fully developed and took manifold forms.A war of movement might conceivably,in conditions of exceptional upheaval,enable a revolutionary vanguard to seize control of the state apparatus;but because of the resiliency of civil society such an exploit would in the long run be doomed to failure. Gramsci described the state in Western Europe(by which we should read state in the limited sense of administrative,governmental and coercive apparatus and not the enlarged concept of the state mentioned above)as 'an outer ditch,behind which there stands a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks'. In Russia,the State was everything,civil society was primordial and gelati- nous;in the West,there was a proper relation between State and civil society,and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed.10 Accordingly,Gramsci argued that the war of movement could not be effective against the hegemonic state-societies of Western Europe.The alternative strategy is the war of position which slowly builds up the strength of the social founda- tions of a new state.In Western Europe,the struggle had to be won in civil society before an assault on the state could achieve success.Premature attack on the state by a war of movement would only reveal the weakness of the opposition and lead to a reimposition of bourgeois dominance as the institutions of civil society reasserted control. The strategic implications of this analysis are clear but fraught with difficulties. To build up the basis of an alternative state and society upon the leadership of the working class means creating alternative institutions and alternative intellec- tual resources within existing society and building bridges between workers and other subordinate classes.It means actively building a counter-hegemony within an established hegemony while resisting the pressures and temptations to relapse into pursuit of incremental gains for subaltern groups within the framework of bourgeois hegemony.This is the line between war of position as a long-range revolutionary strategy and social democracy as a policy of making gains within the established order. Passive Revolution Not all Western European societies were bourgeois hegemonies.Gramsci dis- tinguished between two kinds of societies.One kind had undergone a thorough 165 Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at LIB SHANGHAI JIAOTONG UNIV on Oclober 10.2010Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at LIB SHANGHAI JIAOTONG UNIV on October 10, 2010