Antonio Gramsci 1926
Some Aspects of the Southern Question
Unfinished, October 1926
Text from Antonio Gramsci “Selections from political writings (1921-1926)”, translated and edited by Quintin Hoare (Lawrence and Wishart, London 1978). Transcribed to the www with the kind permission of Quintin Hoare.
These notes were initially stimulated by the publication of an
article on the Southern question by “Ulenspiegel” in the 18
September issue of the journal Quarto Stato, and by the
somewhat comical editorial presentation which preceded
it. “Ulenspiegel” informed his readers of Guido Dorso’s recent
book La Rivoluzione meridionale (pub. Piero Gobetti,
Turin, 1925), and alluded to the author’s assessment of our
party’s position on the southern question. In their
presentation, the editors of Quarto Stato – who proclaim
themselves to be “young people who know the Southern problem
thoroughly in its general lines” [sic] – protest
Collectively at the idea that the Communist Party can be accorded
any “merits". Nothing wrong so far: young people of the Quarto
Stato type have always and everywhere expressed extreme
opinions and violent protests on paper, without the paper
rebelling. But then these “young people” add the following words:
“We have not forgotten that the magical formula of the Turin
Communists used to be: divide the big estates among the rural
proletariat. This formula is at the antipodes from any sound,
realistic vision of the Southern problem.” And here it becomes
necessary to set the record straight, since the only thing that is
“magical” is the impudence and superficial dilettantism of the
“young” writers of Quarto Stato.
The “magical formula” is a complete invention. And the “young
people” of Quarto Stato must have a low opinion indeed of
their extremely intellectual readers if they dare to distort the
truth in this way, with such garrulous presumption. Here, in fact,
is a passage from L’Ordine Nuovo, no. 3, January 1920,
which sums up the viewpoint of the Turin Communists:
The Northern bourgeoisie has subjugated the South of Italy and
the Islands, and reduced them to exploitable colonies; by
emancipating itself from capitalist slavery, the Northern
proletariat will emancipate the Southern peasant masses enslaved
to the banks and the parasitic industry of the North. The economic
and political regeneration of the peasants should not be sought in
a division of uncultivated or poorly cultivated lands, but in the
solidarity of the industrial proletariat. This in turn needs the
solidarity of the peasantry and has an “interest” in ensuring that
capitalism is not reborn economically from landed property; that
Southern Italy and the Islands do not become a military base for
capitalist counterrevolution. By introducing workers’ control over
industry, the proletariat will orient industry to the production
of agricultural machinery for the peasants, clothing and footwear
for the peasants, electrical lighting for the peasants, and will
prevent industry and the banks from exploiting the peasants and
subjecting them as slaves to the strongrooms. By smashing the
factory autocracy, by smashing the oppressive apparatus of the
capitalist State and setting up a workers’ State that will subject
the capitalists to the law of useful labour, the workers will
smash all the chains that bind the peasant to his poverty and
desperation. By setting up a workers’ dictatorship and taking over
the industries and banks, the proletariat will swing the enormous
weight of the State bureaucracy behind the peasants in their
struggle against the landowners, against the elements and against
poverty. The proletariat will provide the peasants with credit,
set up cooperatives, guarantee security of person and property
against looters and carry out public works of reclamation and
irrigation. It will do all this because an increase in
agricultural production is in its interests; because to win and
keep the solidarity of the peasants is in its interests; because
it is in its interests to orient industrial production to work
which will promote peace and brotherhood between town and
countryside, between North and South.
That was written in January 1920. Seven years have gone by and
we are seven years older politically too. Today, certain concepts
might be expressed better. The period immediately following the
conquest of State power, characterized by simple workers’ control
of industry, could and should be more clearly distinguished from
the subsequent periods. But the important thing to note here is
that the fundamental concept of the Turin communists was not the
“magical formula” of dividing the big estates, but rather the
political alliance between Northern workers and Southern peasants,
to oust the bourgeoisie from State power. Furthermore, precisely
the Turin communists (though they supported division of the land,
subordinated to the solidarity action of the two classes) themselves
warned against ‘miraculist’ illusions in a mechanical sharing out
of the big estates. In the same article of 3 January, we find:
“What can a poor peasant achieve by occupying uncultivated or
poorly cultivated lands? Without machinery, without accommodation
on the place of work, without credit to tide him over till
harvest-time, without cooperative institutions to acquire the
harvest (if – long before harvest time – the peasant has not hung
himself from the strongest bush or the least unhealthy-looking
wild fig in the undergrowth of his uncultivated land!) and
preserve him from the clutches of the usurers – without all these
things, what can a poor peasant achieve by occupying?”
We were still for the very realistic and in no way “magical"
formula of land to the peasants. But we wanted it to be
incorporated in a general revolutionary action of the two allied
classes, under the leadership of the industrial proletariat. The
writers of Quarto Stato have invented entirely the
“magical formula” they attribute to the Turin Communists; they
have thus revealed their journalistic unseriousness and a lack of
scruple proper to village pharmacy intellectuals (and these too
are significant political factors, which bring their own
consequences).
In the proletarian camp, the Turin communists had one
undeniable “merit": that of bringing the Southern question
forcibly to the attention of the workers’ vanguard, and
identifying it as one of the essential problems of national policy
for the revolutionary proletariat. In this sense, they contributed
in practice to bringing the Southern question out of its
indistinct, intellectualistic, so-called “concretist” phase and
impelling it into a new phase. The revolutionary worker of
Turin and Milan became the protagonist of the Southern question,
in place of the Giustino Fortunatos, the Gaetano Salveminis, the
Eugenio Azimontis and the Arturo Labriolas – to mention only the
names of the patron saints beloved of the “young people” of
Quarto Stato.
The Turin communists posed concretely the question of the
“hegemony of the proletariat": i.e. of the social basis of the
proletarian dictatorship and of the workers’ State. The
proletariat can become the leading [dirigente] and the
dominant class to the extent that it succeeds in creating a system
of class alliances which allows it to mobilize the majority of the
working population against capitalism and the bourgeois State.
In Italy, in the real class relations which exist there, this
means to the extent that it succeeds in gaining the consent of the
broad peasant masses. But the peasant question is historically
determined in Italy; it is not the “peasant and agrarian question
in general". In Italy the peasant question, through the specific
Italian tradition, and the specific development of Italian
history, has taken two typical and particular forms – the Southern
question and that of the Vatican. Winning the majority of the
peasant masses thus means, for the Italian proletariat, making
these two questions its own from the social point of view;
understanding the class demands which they represent;
incorporating these demands into its revolutionary transitional
programme; placing these demands among the objectives for which it
struggles.
The first problem to resolve, for the Turin communists, was how
to modify the political stance and general ideology of the
proletariat itself, as a national element which exists within the
ensemble of State life and is unconsciously subjected to the
influence of bourgeois education, the bourgeois press and
bourgeois traditions. It is well known what kind of ideology has
been disseminated in myriad ways among the masses in the North, by
the propagandists of the bourgeoisie: the South is the ball and
chain which prevents the social development of Italy from
progressing more rapidly; the Southerners are biologically
inferior beings, semi-barbarians or total barbarians, by natural
destiny; if the South is backward, the fault does not lie with the
capitalist system or with any other historical cause, but with
Nature, which has made the Southerners lazy, incapable, criminal
and barbaric – only tempering this harsh fate with the purely
individual explosion of a few great geniuses, like isolated
palm-trees in an arid and barren desert. The Socialist Party was
to a great extent the vehicle for this bourgeois ideology within
the Northern proletariat. The Socialist Party gave its blessing to
all the “Southernist” literature of the clique of writers who made
up the so-called positive school: the Ferri’s, Sergi’s,
Niceforo’s, Orano’s and their lesser followers, who in articles,
tales, short stories, novels, impressions and memoirs, in a
variety of forms, reiterated one single refrain. Once again,
“science” was used to crush the wretched and exploited; but this
time it was dressed in socialist colours, and claimed to be the
science of the proletariat.
The Turin communists reacted energetically against this
ideology, precisely in Turin itself, where war veterans’
reminiscences and descriptions of “banditry” in the South and the
Islands had most powerfully influenced the popular traditions and
outlook. They reacted energetically, in practical forms, and
succeeded in achieving concrete results of the greatest historical
significance. They succeeded in achieving, precisely in Turin,
embryonic forms of what will be the solution to the Southern
problem.
Moreover, even before the War, an episode occurred in Turin
which potentially contained all the action and propaganda carried
out by the communists in the post-war period. When in 1914 the
death of Pilade Gay left the city’s fourth ward vacant and posed
the question of a new candidate, a group in the Socialist Party
section which included the future editors of L’Ordine
Nuovo floated the idea of putting up Gaetano
Salvemini. Salvemini was at the time the most radical spokesman
for the peasant masses in the South. He was outside the Socialist
Party, indeed was waging a vigorous campaign against the Socialist
Party, and one that was extremely dangerous, since his assertions
and accusations aroused in the working masses of the South hatred
not simply for such individuals as Turati, Treves and D’Aragona,
but for the industrial proletariat as a whole. (Many of the
bullets discharged by the royal guards in 1919, 1920, 1921 and
1922 against the workers were cast from the same lead which served
to print Salvemini’s articles.) Nevertheless, the Turin group
wanted to take a stand on Salvemini’s name, in the sense which was
explained to Salvemini himself by comrade Ottavio Pastore, who had
gone to Florence to obtain the former’s agreement to the
candidature.
"The Turin workers want to elect a deputy for the peasants of
Apulia. The Turin workers know that in the general elections of
1913, the peasants of Molfetta and Bitonto were overwhelmingly in
favour of Salvemini. But the administrative pressure of the
Giolitti government, and the violence of hired thugs and police,
prevented the Apulian peasants from expressing their wishes. The
Turin workers do not ask Salvemini for guarantees of any kind:
neither to the party, nor to a programme, nor to the discipline of
the Socialist parliamentary group. Once elected, Salvemini will be
answerable to the Apulian peasants, not to the workers of Turin,
who will carry out electoral propaganda according to their own
principles and will in no way be committed by Salvemini’s
political activity.”
Salvemini did not agree to stand, although he was shaken and
even moved by the proposal (in those days, no one yet spoke of
communist “perfidy", and manners were honourable and
unconstrained). He proposed that Mussolini should be the
candidate, and promised to come to Turin to support the Socialist
Party in the electoral campaign. In fact he held two huge
meetings, at the Chamber of Labour and in Piazza Statuto, where he
spoke to mass audiences who saw and applauded in him the
representative of the Southern peasants, oppressed and exploited
in yet more odious and bestial ways than the Northern
proletariat. The approach that was potentially contained in this
episode, and which was not developed further purely because of
Salvemini’s decision, was taken up again and applied by the
communists in the postwar period. Let us recall the most
significant and symptomatic facts.
In 1919 the Giovane Sardegna association was formed,
first prelude of what was later to become the Sardinian Action
Party – Giovane Sardegna aimed to unite all Sardinians –
both on the island itself and on the mainland – into a regional
bloc capable of exerting effective pressure on the government, to
ensure that the promises made during the War to the soldiers were
kept. The organizer of Giovane Sardegna on the mainland
was a certain professor Pietro Nurra, a Socialist, who is
very probably today a member of the group of “young people” who
discover each week in Quarto Stato some new horizon to
explore. The association was joined – with the enthusiasm which
every new chance to get hold of badges, titles and little medals
arouses – by lawyers, teachers and civil servants. The constituent
assembly held in Turin, for Sardinians living in Piedmont, saw an
impressive roster of interventions. The majority was made up of
humble folk: men of the people with no discernible qualifications;
unskilled labourers; retired people living on pensions; former
carabinieri, former prison warders and former frontier
guards now engaged in a wide variety of petty commercial
enterprise. All of these were fired with enthusiasm by the idea of
finding themselves among fellow-countrymen and hearing speeches
about their native land, to which they remained bound by
innumerable bonds of kinship, friendship, memory, suffering and
hope: the hope of returning to their country, but to a country
more prosperous and wealthy, which would offer conditions for
living, albeit modestly.
The Sardinian communists, who numbered precisely eight,
attended the meeting, presented a resolution of their own to the
Chair, and asked to be allowed to make a counter-report. After the
fiery rhetoric of the official report, embellished with all the
Venuses and Cupids of provincial oratory; after those who
intervened in the debate had wept at the memories of past griefs
and of the blood spilled in battle by the Sardinian regiments, and
had been fired with enthusiasm to the point of delirium at the
idea of a united bloc of all the generous sons of Sardinia – after
all this, it was very difficult to “pitch” the counter-report
right. The most optimistic forecasts were for – if not a lynching
– at least a trip to police headquarters, after being rescued from
the “righteous indignation of the crowd". However, the
counter-report, though it provoked great astonishment, was in fact
listened to attentively. And once the spell had been broken, the
revolutionary conclusion was reached swiftly and methodically. The
dilemma – Are you poor devils from Sardinia for a bloc with the
gentry of the island, who have ruined you and who are the local
overseers of capitalist exploitation? Or are you for a bloc with
the revolutionary workers of the mainland, who want to destroy all
forms of exploitation and free all the oppressed? – this dilemma
was rammed into the heads of all those present. The vote, by
division of the assembly, was a tremendous success: on one side,
there was a handful of smartly dressed gentry, top-hatted
officials, professional people, livid with rage and fear, with a
circle of forty-odd policemen to garnish the consensus; on the
other side, there was the whole mass of poor folk, with the women
dressed up in their party best, clustered around the tiny
communist cell. An hour later, at the Chamber of Labour, the
Sardinian Socialist Education Circle was set up, with 256
members. The founding of Giovane Sardegna was put off
sine die, and never in fact took place.
This was the political basis for the activity carried out among
the soldiers of the Sassari Brigade, a brigade with an almost
totally regional composition. The Sassari Brigade had taken part
in the repression of the insurrectional movement of August 1917 in
Turin. It was confidently believed that it would never fraternize
with the workers, because of the legacy of hatred which every
repressive action leaves behind it – both in the masses, as a
hatred which is also turned against the material instruments of
the repression, and in the ranks, because of the memory of the
soldiers who have fallen beneath the blows of the insurgents. The
Brigade was welcomed by a throng of ladies and gentlemen, who
offered the soldiers flowers, cigars and fruit. The state of mind
of the soldiers is well captured by the following account, given
by a tannery worker from Sassari involved in the first
propagandistic soundings: “I approached a bivouac on X Square (in
the first days, the Sardinian soldiers bivouacked in the squares
as if in a conquered city) and I spoke with a young peasant, who
had welcomed me warmly because I was from Sassari like him. ‘What
have you come to do in Turin?’ ‘We have come to shoot the gentry
who are on strike.’ ‘But it is not the gentry who are on strike,
it is the workers and they are poor.’ ‘They’re all gentry here:
they have collars and ties; they earn 30 lire a day. I
know poor people and I know how they are dressed, yes indeed, in
Sassari there are lots of poor people; all of us “diggers” are
poor and we earn 1½ lire a day.’ ‘But I am a worker too and I
am poor.’ ‘You’re poor because you’re a Sardinian.’ ‘But if I go
on strike with the others, will you shoot me?’ The soldier
reflected a bit, then put a hand on my shoulder: ‘Listen, when you
go on strike with the others, stay at home!’.”
Such was the attitude of the overwhelming majority of the
Brigade, which contained only a small number of mine-workers from
the Iglesias field. And yet, within a few months, on the eve of
the general strike of 20-21 July, the Brigade was moved away from
Turin, the older soldiers were discharged and the unit was split
into three: one third was sent to Aosta, one third to Trieste and
one third to Rome. The Brigade was moved out at night, without
advance warning. No elegant throng applauded them at the
station. Their songs, though still songs of war, no longer had the
same content as those they sang on their arrival.
Did these events have no consequences? On the contrary, they
have had results which still subsist to this day and continue to
work in the depths of the popular masses. They illuminated, for an
instant, brains which had never thought in that way, and which
remained marked by them, radically modified. Our archives have
been scattered, and we have destroyed many papers ourselves for
fear they might lead to arrests and harassment. But we can recall
dozens and indeed hundreds of letters sent from Sardinia to the
Avanti! editorial offices in Turin; letters which were
frequently collective, signed by all the Sassari Brigade veterans
in a particular village. By uncontrolled and uncontrollable paths,
the political attitude which we supported was disseminated. The
formation of the Sardinian Action Party was strongly influenced by
it at the base, and it would be possible to recall in this respect
episodes that are rich in content and significance. The last
verifiable repercussion of this activity occurred in 1922, when,
with the same aim as in the case of the Sassari Brigade, 300
carabinieri from the Cagliari Legion were sent to
Turin. At the editorial offices of L’Ordine Nuovo we
received a statement of principle, signed by a large proportion of
these carabinieri. It echoed in every way our positions
on the Southern problem, and was decisive proof of the correctness
of our approach.
The proletariat had itself to adopt this approach for it to
become politically effective: that goes without saying. No mass
action is possible, if the masses in question are not convinced of
the ends they wish to attain and the methods to be applied. The
proletariat, in order to become capable as a class of governing,
must strip itself of every residue of corporatism, every
syndicalist prejudice and incrustation. What does this mean? That,
in addition to the need to overcome the distinctions which exist
between one trade and another, it is necessary – in order to win
the trust and consent of the peasants and of some semi-proletarian
urban categories – to overcome certain prejudices and conquer
certain forms of egoism which can and do subsist within the
working class as such, even when craft particularism has
disappeared. The metalworker, the joiner, the building-worker,
etc., must not only think as proletarians, and no longer as
metal-worker, joiner, building-worker, etc.; they must also take a
further step. They must think as workers who are members of a
class which aims to lead the peasants and intellectuals. Of a
class which can win and build socialism only if it is aided and
followed by the great majority of these social strata. If this is
not achieved, the proletariat does not become the leading class;
and these strata (which in Italy represent the majority of the
population), remaining under bourgeois leadership, enable the
State to resist the proletarian assault and wear it down.
Well, what has occurred on the terrain of the Southern question
shows that the proletariat has understood these duties. Two events
should be recalled: one took place in Turin; the other occurred at
Reggio Emilia, i.e. in the very citadel of reformism, class
corporatism and working-class protectionism which is cited as a
prime example by the “Southernists” in their propaganda among the
peasants of the South.
After the occupation of the factories, the Fiat board proposed
to the workers that they should run the firm as a
cooperative. Naturally, the reformists were in favour. An
industrial crisis was looming; the spectre of unemployment
tormented the workers’ families. If Fiat became a cooperative, a
certain job security might be obtained by the skilled workers, and
especially by the politically most active workers, who were
convinced that they were marked out for dismissal. The Socialist
Party section, led by the communists, intervened energetically on
the question. The workers were told the following:
"A great firm like Fiat can be taken over as a cooperative by
the workers, only if the latter have resolved to enter the system
of bourgeois political forces which governs Italy today. The
proposal of the Fiat board forms a part of Giolitti’s political
plan. In what does this plan consist? The bourgeoisie, even before
the War, could not govern peacefully any longer. The rising of the
Sicilian peasants in 1894 and the Milan insurrection of 1898 were
the experimentum crucis of the Italian bourgeoisie.
After the bloody decade 1890-1900, the bourgeoisie was forced to
renounce a dictatorship that was too exclusive, too violent, too
direct. For there had risen against it simultaneously,
even if not in a coordinated fashion, the Southern peasants and
the Northern workers.
“In the new century, the ruling class inaugurated a new policy
of class alliances, class political blocs: i.e. bourgeois
democracy. It had to choose: either a rural democracy, i.e. an
alliance with the Southern peasants, a policy of free trade,
universal suffrage, administrative decentralization and low prices
for industrial products; or a capitalist/worker industrial bloc,
without universal suffrage, with tariff barriers, with the
maintenance of a highly centralized State (the expression of
bourgeois dominion over the peasants, especially in the South and
the Islands), and with a reformist policy on wages and trade-union
freedoms. It chose, not by chance, the latter solution. Giolitti
personified bourgeois rule; the Socialist Party became the
instrument of Giolitti’s policies.
“If you look closely, it was in the decade 1900-1910 that the
most radical crises occurred in the socialist and working-class
movement. The masses reacted spontaneously against the policy of
the reformist leaders. Syndicalism was born: the instinctive,
elemental, primitive but healthy expression of working-class
reaction against the bloc with the bourgeoisie and in favour of a
bloc with the peasants – and first and foremost with the
Southern peasants. Precisely that. Indeed, in a certain
sense, syndicalism is a weak attempt on the part of the Southern
peasants, represented by their most advanced intellectuals, to
lead the proletariat. Who forms the leading nucleus of Italian
syndicalism, and what is its ideological essence? The leading
nucleus of syndicalism is made up almost exclusively of
southerners: Labriola, Leone, Longobardi, Orano. The ideological
essence of syndicalism is a new liberalism, more energetic, more
aggressive, more pugnacious than the traditional variety. If you
look closely there are two fundamental themes around which the
successive crises of syndicalism and the gradual passage of the
syndicalist leaders into the bourgeois camp took place: emigration
and free trade, two themes closely bound up with Southernism. The
phenomenon of emigration gave birth to the idea of Enrico
Corradini’s ‘proletarian nation’; the Libyan war appeared to a
whole layer of intellectuals as the beginning of the ‘great
proletariat’s’ offensive against the capitalist and plutocratic
world."’ A whole group of syndicalists went over to nationalism;
indeed the Nationalist Party was orginally made up of
ex-syndicalist intellectuals (Monicelli, Forges-Davanzati,
Maraviglia). Labriola’s book History of Ten Years (the
ten years from 1900 to 1910) is the most typical and
characteristic expression of this anti-Giolittian and Southernist
neo-liberalism.
“In the ten years in question, capitalism was strengthened and
developed, and directed a part of its activity towards the
agriculture of the Po Valley. The most characteristic feature of
those ten years was the mass strikes of the agricultural workers
of the Po Valley. A profound upheaval took place among the
Northern peasants: there occurred a deep class differentiation
(the number of braccianti [landless labourers] increased
by 50 per cent, according to the 1911 census figures), and to this
there corresponded a recasting of political currents and spiritual
attitudes. Christian democracy and Mussolinism were the two most
outstanding products of the period. Romagna was the regional
crucible of these two new activities; the bracciante
seemed to have become the social protagonist of the political
struggle. The left organs of social democracy (like
Azione in Cesena) and Mussolinism too soon fell under the
control of the ‘Southernists’. Azione in Cesena was a
regional edition of Gaetano Salvemini’s
Unitià. Avanti!, under Mussolini’s
editorship, slowly but surely became transformed into a tribune
for syndicalist and Southernist writers. People like Fancello,
Lanzillo, Panunzio and Ciccotti became frequent
contributors. Salvemini himself did not hide his sympathies for
Mussolini, who also became the darling of Prezzolini’s
Voce. Everyone remembers that, in fact, when Mussolini
left Avanti! and the Socialist Party, he was surrounded
by this cohort of syndicalists and Southernists.
“The most notable repercussion of this period in the
revolutionary camp was the Red Week of June 1914: Romagna and the
Marches were the epicentre of Red Week. In the field of bourgeois
politics, the most notable repercussion was the Gentiloni
pact. Since the Socialist Party, as a consequence of the rural
movements in the Po Valley, had returned after 1910 to an
intransigent tactic, the industrial bloc supported and represented
by Giolitti lost its effectiveness. Giolitti shifted his rifle to
the other shoulder. He replaced the alliance between bourgeoisie
and workers by an alliance between bourgeoisie and the Catholics,
who represented the peasant masses of Northern and Central
Italy. As a result of this alliance, Sonnino’s Conservative Party
was totally destroyed, preserving only a tiny cell in Southern
Italy, around Antonio Salandra.
“The War and post-war period saw a series of molecular
processes of the highest importance take place within the
bourgeois class. Salandra and Nitti were the first two Southern
heads of government (leaving aside Sicilians, of course, such as
Crispi, who was the most energetic representative of the bourgeois
dictatorship in the nineteenth century). They sought to realize
the industrial bourgeois/Southern landowner plan – Salandra on a
conservative basis, Nitti on a democratic one. (Both these heads
of government were solidly assisted by Il Corriere della
Sera, i.e. by the Lombard textile industry.) Salandra was
already trying during the War to shift the technical forces of the
State organization in favour of the South: i.e. to replace the
Giolittian State personnel with a new personnel which embodied the
bourgeoisie’s new political course. You remember the campaign
waged by La Stampa, especially in 1917-18, for close
collaboration between Giolittians and Socialists to prevent the
‘Apulianization’ of the State. This campaign in La Stampa
was led by Francesco Ciccotti, i.e. it was de facto an
expression of the agreement which existed between Giolitti and the
reformists. I The question was not a small one, and the
Giolittians, in their defensive obstinacy, went so far that they
passed the limits allowed to a party by the big bourgeoisie; they
went as far as those demonstrations of anti-patriotism and
defeatism which are fresh in every memory.
“Today, Giolitti is once more in power, and once more the big
bourgeoisie is putting its trust in him, as a result of the panic
which has filled it before the impetuous movement of the popular
masses. Giolitti wants to tame the Turin workers. He has beaten
them twice: in the strike of last April, and in the occupation of
the factories – with the help of the CGL, i.e. of corporative
reformism. He now thinks that he can tie them into the bourgeois
State system. What in fact will happen if the skilled workforce of
Fiat accepts the board’s proposals? The present industrial shares
will become debentures: in other words, the cooperative will have
to pay to debenture-holders a fixed dividend, whatever the
turnover may be. The Fiat company will be cut off in every way
from the institutions of credit, which remain in the hands of the
bourgeoisie, whose interest it is to get the workers at its
mercy. The skilled workforce will perforce have to bind itself to
the State, which will ‘come to the assistance of the workers’
through the activity of the working-class deputies: through the
subordination of the working-class political party to government
policies. That is Giolitti’s plan as applied in full. The Turin
proletariat will no longer exist as an independent class, but
merely as an appendage of the bourgeois State. Class corporatism
will have triumphed, but the proletariat will have lost its
position and role as leader and guide. It will appear to the mass
of poorer workers as privileged. It will appear to the peasants as
an exploiter just like the bourgeoisie, because the bourgeoisie -
as it has always done – will present the privileged nuclei of the
working class to the peasant masses as the sole cause of their
ills and their misery.”
The skilled workers of Fiat accepted almost unanimously our
point of view, and the board’s proposals were rejected. But this
experiment could not be sufficient. The Turin proletariat, in a
whole series of actions, had shown that it had reached an
extremely high level of political maturity and capability. The
technicians and white-collar workers in the factories were able to
improve their conditions in 1919 only because they were supported
by the workers. To break the militancy of the technicians, the
employers proposed to the workers that they should themselves
nominate, through elections, new squad and shop foremen. The
workers rejected the proposal, although they had many points of
difference with the technicians, who had always been an instrument
of repression and persecution for the bosses. Then the press waged
a rabid campaign to isolate the technicians, highlighting their
very high salaries, which reached as much as 7,000 lire a
month. The skilled workers also gave support to the agitation of
the hodmen, and it was only thus that the latter succeeded in
winning their demands. Within the factories, all privileges and
forms of exploitation of the less skilled by the more skilled
categories were swept away. Through these actions, the proletarian
vanguard won its position as a social vanguard. This was the basis
upon which the Communist Party developed in Turin. But outside
Turin? Well, we wanted expressly to take the problem outside
Turin, and precisely to Reggio Emilia, where there existed the
greatest concentration of reformism and class corporatism.
Reggio Emilia had always been the target of the
“Southernists". A phrase of Camillo Prampolini: “Italy is made up
of Northerners and filthy Southerners” could be taken as the most
characteristic expression of the violent hatred disseminated among
Southerners against the workers of the North. At Reggio
Emilia, a problem arose similar to the one at Fiat: a big factory
was to pass into the hands of the workers as a cooperative
enterprise. The Reggio reformists were full of enthusiasm for the
project and trumpeted its praises in their press and at
meetings. A Turin communists went to Reggio, took the floor at
a factory meeting, outlined the problem between North and South in
its entirety, and the “miracle” was achieved: the workers, by an
overwhelming majority, rejected the reformist, corporate
position. It was shown that the reformists did not represent the
spirit of the Reggio workers; they represented merely their
passivity, and other negative aspects. They had succeeded in
establishing a political monopoly – thanks to the notable
concentration in their ranks of organizers and propagandists with
certain professional talents – and hence in preventing the
development and organization of a revolutionary current. But the
presence of a capable revolutionary was enough to thwart them and
show that the Reggio workers are valiant fighters and not swine
raised on government fodder.
In April 1921, 5,000 revolutionary workers were laid off by
Fiat, the Workers’ Councils were abolished, real wages were
cut. At Reggio Emilia, something similar probably happened. In
other words, the workers were defeated. But the sacrifice that
they had made, had it been useless? We do not believe so: indeed,
we are certain that it was not useless – though it would certainly
be difficult to adduce a whole series of great mass events which
prove the immediate, lightning effectiveness of these actions. In
any case, so far as the peasants are concerned, such proof is
always difficult, indeed almost impossible: and it is yet more
difficult in the case of the peasant masses in the South.
The South can be defined as a great social disintegration. The
peasants, who make up the great majority of its population, have
no cohesion among themselves (of course, some exceptions must be
made: Apulia, Sardinia, Sicily, where there exist special
characteristics within the great canvas of the South’s
structure). Southern society is a great agrarian bloc, made up of
three social layers: the great amorphous, disintegrated mass of
the peasantry; the intellectuals of the petty and medium rural
bourgeoisie; and the big landowners and great intellectuals. The
Southern peasants are in perpetual ferment, but as a mass they are
incapable of giving a centralized expression to their aspirations
and needs. The middle layer of intellectuals receives the impulses
for its political and ideological activity from the peasant
base. The big landowners in the political field and the great
intellectuals in the ideological field centralize and dominate, in
the last analysis, this whole complex of phenomena. Naturally, it
is in the ideological sphere that the centralization is most
effective and precise. Giustino Fortunato and Benedetto Croce thus
represent the keystones of the Southern system and, in a certain
sense, are the two major figures of Italian reaction.
The Southern intellectuals are one of the most interesting and
important social strata in Italian national life. One only has to
think of the fact that more than three fifths of the State
bureaucracy is made up of Southerners to convince oneself of
this. Now, to understand the particular psychology of the Southern
intellectuals, it is necessary to keep in mind certain factual
data.
1. In every country, the layer of intellectuals has been
radically modified by the development of capitalism. The old type
of intellectual was the organizing element in a society with a
mainly peasant and artisanal basis. To organize the State, to
organize commerce, the dominant class bred a particular type of
intellectual. Industry has introduced a new type of intellectual:
the technical organizer, the specialist in applied science. In the
societies where the economic forces have developed in a capitalist
direction, to the point where they have absorbed the greater part
of national activity, it is this second type of intellectual which
has prevailed, with all his characteristics of order and
intellectual discipline. In the countries, on the other hand,
where agriculture still plays a considerable or even preponderant
role, the old type has remained predominant. It provides the bulk
of the State personnel; and locally too, in the villages and
little country towns, it has the function of intermediary between
the peasant and the administration in general. In Southern Italy
this type predominates, with all its characteristic
features. Democratic in its peasant face; reactionary in the face
turned towards the big landowner and the government: politicking,
corrupt and faithless. One could not understand the traditional
cast of the Southern political parties, if one did not take the
characteristics of this social stratum into account.
2. The Southern intellectual mainly comes from a layer which is
still important in the South: the rural bourgeois. In other words,
the petty and medium landowner who is not a peasant, who does not
work the land, who would be ashamed to be a farmer, but who wants
to extract from the little land he has – leased out either for
rent or on a simple share-cropping basis – the wherewithal to live
fittingly; the wherewithal to send his sons to a university or
seminary; and the wherewithal to provide dowries for his
daughters, who must marry officers or civil functionaries of the
State. From this social layer, the intellectuals derive a fierce
antipathy to the working peasant – who is regarded as a machine
for work to be bled dry, and one which can be replaced, given the
excess working population. They also acquire an atavistic,
instinctive feeling of crazy fear of the peasants with their
destructive violence; hence, they practise a refined hypocrisy and
a highly refined art of deceiving and taming the peasant
masses.
3. Since the clergy belong to the social group of
intellectuals, it is necessary to note the features which
distinguish the Southern clergy as a whole from the Northern
clergy. The Northern priest is generally the son of an artisan or
a peasant, has democratic sympathies, is more tied to the mass of
peasants. Morally, he is more correct than the Southern priest,
who often lives more or less openly with a woman. He therefore
exercises a spiritual function that is more complete, from a
social point of view. in that he guides a family’s entire
activities. In the North, the separation of Church from State and
the expropriation of ecclesiastical goods was more radical than in
the South, where the parishes and convents either have preserved
or have reconstituted considerable assets, both fixed and
movable. In the South, the priest appears to the peasant: 1. as a
land administrator, with whom the peasant enters into conflict on
the question of rents; 2. as a usurer, who asks for extremely high
rates of interest and manipulates the religious element in order
to make certain of collecting his rent or interest; 3. as a man
subject to all the ordinary passions (women and money), and who
therefore, from a spiritual point of view, inspires no confidence
in his discretion and impartiality. Hence confession exercises
only the most minimal role of guidance, and the Southern peasant,
if often superstitious in a pagan sense, is not clerical. All
this, taken together, explains why in the South the Popular Party
(except in some parts of Sicily) does not have any great position
or possess any network of institutions and mass organizations. The
attitude of the peasant towards the clergy is summed up in the
popular saying: “The priest is a priest at the altar; outside, he
is a man like anyone else.”
The Southern peasant is bound to the big landowner through the
mediation of the intellectual. The peasant movements, insofar as
they do not take the form of autonomous, independent mass
organizations, even in a formal sense (i.e. capable of selecting
out peasant cadres, themselves of peasant origin, and of
registering and accumulating the differentiation and progress
achieved within the movement), always end up by finding themselves
a place in the ordinary articulations of the State apparatus -
communes, provinces, Chamber of Deputies. This process takes place
through the composition and decomposition of local parties, whose
personnel is made up of intellectuals, but which are controlled by
the big landowners and their agents – like Salandra, Orlando, Di
Cesarò.
The War appeared to introduce a new element into this type of
organization, with the war-veterans’ movement. In this, the
peasant-soldiers and the intellectual-officers formed a mutual bloc
that was more closely united, and that was to some extent
antagonistic to the big landowners. It did not last long, and its
last residue is the National Union conceived of by Amendola, which
has some phantom existence thanks to its anti-fascism. However,
given the lack of any tradition of explicit organization
of democratic intellectuals in the South, even this
grouping must be stressed and taken into account, since it might
be transformed from a tiny trickle of water into a swollen, muddy
torrent, in changed general political conditions.
The only region where the war-veterans’ movement took on a more
precise profile, and succeeded in creating a more solid social
structure, was Sardinia. And this is understandable. Precisely
because in Sardinia the big landowner class is very exiguous,
carries out no function, and does not have the ancient cultural
and governmental traditions of the mainland South. The pressure
exerted from below, by the mass of peasants and herdsmen, finds no
suffocating counterweight in the higher social stratum of the big
landowners. The leading intellectuals feel the full weight of this
pressure, and take steps forward which are more remarkable than
the National Union.
The Sicilian situation has very specific features, which
distinguish it both from Sardinia and from the South. The big
landowners are far more compact and resolute there than in the
mainland South. Moreover, there exists there a certain developed
industry and commerce (Sicily is the richest region of the entire
South and one of the richest in Italy). The upper classes feel
very keenly their importance in national life and make its weight
felt. Sicily and Piedmont are the two regions which have played a
preeminent role since 1870. The popular masses of Sicily are more
advanced than in the South, but their progress has taken on a
typically Sicilian form. There exists a mass Sicilian socialism,
which has a whole tradition and development that is peculiar to
it. In the 1922 Chamber, it had around 20 of the 52 deputies who
had been elected from the island.
We have said that the Southern peasant is tied to the big
landowner through the mediation of the intellectual. This type of
organization is most widespread, throughout the mainland South and
Sicily. It creates a monstrous agrarian bloc which, as a whole,
functions as the intermediary and the overseer of Northern
capitalism and the big banks. Its single aim is to preserve the
status quo. Within it, there exists no intellectual
light, no programme, no drive towards improvements or progress. If
any ideas or programmes have been put forward, they have had their
origins outside the South, in the conservative agrarian
politicians (especially in Tuscany) who were associated in
Parliament with the conservatives of the Southern agrarian
bloc. Sonnino and Franchetti were among the few intelligent
bourgeois who posed the Southern problem as a national problem,
and outlined a government plan to solve it.
What was the point of view of Sonnino and Franchetti? They
stressed the need to create in Southern Italy an economically
independent middle stratum which would fulfil the role (as was
said at that time) of “public opinion” – and would, on the one
hand, limit the cruel and arbitrary actions of the landowners, on
the other, moderate the insurrectionism of the poor
peasants. Sonnino and Franchetti had been terrified by the
popularity which the Bakuninist ideas of the First International
had enjoyed in the South. This terror made them make blunders
which were often grotesque. In one of their publications, for
instance, reference is made to the fact that a popular tavern or
trattoria in a village in Calabria (I am quoting from
memory) is named “The Strikers” [Scioperanti], to
demonstrate how widespread and deep-rooted internationalist ideas
are. The fact, if true (and it must be true, given the
intellectual probity of the authors), can be more simply explained
if one recalls that there are numerous Albanian colonies in the
South, and that the word skipetari [Albanians] has
undergone the most strange and bizarre distortions in the various
dialects (thus certain documents of the Venetian Republic speak of
military formations of “S’ciopetà”). The fact
is that it is not so much that Bakunin’s theories were widespread
in the South, as that the situation there was such as to have
probably suggested to Bakunin his theories. Certainly, the poor
Southern peasants were thinking about a “great revolt” long before
Bakunin’s brain had thought out the theory of “general
destruction.”
The government plan of Sonnino and Franchetti never even began
to be put into practice. And it could not be. The nexus of
relations between North and South in the organization of the
national economy and the State is such, that the birth of a broad
middle class of an economic nature (which means the birth of a
broad capitalist bourgeoisie) is made almost impossible. Any
accumulation of capital on the spot, any accumulation of savings,
is made impossible by the fiscal and customs system, and by the
fact that the capitalists who own shares do not transform their
profits into new capital on the spot, because they are not from
that spot. When emigration took on the gigantic dimensions it did
in the twentieth century, and the first remittances began to flood
in from America, the liberal economists cried triumphantly:
Sonnino’s dream will come true! A silent revolution is under way
in the South which, slowly but surely, will change the entire
economic and social structure of the country. But the State
intervened, and the silent revolution was stifled at birth. The
government offered treasury bonds carrying guaranteed interest,
and the emigrants and their families were transformed from agents
of the silent revolution into agents for giving the State the
financial means to subsidize the parasitic industries of the
North. Francesco Nitti, on the democratic level and formally
outside the Southern agrarian bloc, might seem an effective
realizer of Sonnino’s programme; but he was, in fact, Northern
capitalism’s best agent for raking in the last resources of
Southern savings. The thousands of millions swallowed up by the
Banca di Sconto were almost all owed to the South: the
400,000 creditors of the Banca Italiana di Sconto were
overwhelmingly Southern savers.
Over and above the agrarian bloc, there functions in the South
an intellectual bloc which in practice has so far served to
prevent the cracks in the agrarian bloc becoming too dangerous and
causing a landslide. Giustino Fortunato and Benedetto Croce are
the exponents of this intellectual bloc, and they can thus be
considered as the most active reactionaries of the whole
peninsula.
We have already said that Southern Italy represents a great
social disintegration. This formula can be applied not only to the
peasants, but also to the intellectuals. It is a remarkable fact
that in the South, side by side with huge property, there have
existed and continue to exist great accumulations of culture and
intelligence in single individuals, or small groups of great
intellectuals, while there does not exist any organization of
middle culture. There exist in the South the Laterza publishing
house, and the review La Critica. There exist
academies and cultural bodies of the greatest erudition. But there
do not exist small or medium reviews, nor publishing houses around
which medium groupings of Southern intellectuals might form. The
Southerners who have sought to leave the agrarian bloc and pose
the Southern question in a radical form have found hospitality in,
and grouped themselves around, reviews printed outside the
South. Indeed, one might say that all the cultural initiatives by
medium intellectuals which have taken place in this century in
Central and Northern Italy have been characterized by Southernism,
because they have been strongly influenced by Southern
intellectuals: all the journals of the group of Florentine
intellectuals, like Voce and Unità; the
journals of the Christian democrats, like Azione in
Cesena; the journals of the young Emilian and Milanese liberals
published by G. Borelli, such as Patria in Bologna or
Azione in Milan; and lastly, Gobetti’s Rivoluzione
liberale.
Well, the supreme political and intellectual rulers of all
these initiatives have been Giustino Fortunato and Benedetto
Croce. In a broader sphere than the stifling agrarian bloc, they
have seen to it that the problems of the South would be posed in a
way which did not go beyond certain limits; did not become
revolutionary. Men of the highest culture and intelligence, who
arose on the traditional terrain of the South but were linked to
European and hence to world culture, they had all the necessary
gifts to satisfy the intellectual needs of the most sincere
representatives of the cultured youth in the South; to comfort
their restless impulses to revolt against existing conditions; to
steer them along a middle way of classical serenity in thought and
action. The so-called neo-protestants or Calvinists have failed to
understand that in Italy, since modern conditions of civilization
rendered impossible any mass religious reform, the only
historically possible reformation has taken place with Benedetto
Croce’s philosophy. The direction and method of thought have been
changed and a new conception of the world has been constructed,
transcending Catholicism and every other mythological religion. In
this sense, Benedetto Croce has fulfilled an extremely important
“national” function. He has detached the radical intellectuals of
the South from the peasant masses, forcing them to take part in
national and European culture; and through this culture, he has
secured their absorption by the national bourgeoisie and hence by
the agrarian bloc.
L’Ordine Nuovo and the Turin communists – if in a
certain sense they can be related to the intellectual formations
to which we have alluded; and if, therefore, they too have felt
the intellectual influence of Giustino Fortunato or of Benedetto
Croce – nevertheless represent at the same time a complete break
with that tradition and the beginning of a new development, which
has already borne fruit and which will continue to do so. As has
already been said, they posed the urban proletariat as the modern
protagonist of Italian history, and hence also of the Southern
question. Having served as intermediaries between the proletariat
and certain strata of left intellectuals, they succeeded in
modifying – if not completely at least to a notable extent – their
mental outlook.
This is the main factor in the figure of Piero Gobetti, if one
reflects carefully. Gobetti was not a communist and would
probably never have become one. But he had understood the social
and historical position of the proletariat, and could no longer
think in abstraction from this element. Gobetti, in our work
together on the paper, had been brought by us into contact with a
living world which he had previously only known through formulae
in books. His most striking characteristic was intellectual
loyalty, and the total absence of every kind of petty vanity or
meanness. Therefore, he could not fail to become convinced of the
way in which a whole series of traditional ways of viewing and
thinking about the proletariat were false and unjust.
What consequence did these contacts with the proletarian world
have for Gobetti? They were the source and stimulus for a
conception which we have no wish to discuss or develop: a
conception which is to a great extent related to syndicalism and
the way of thinking of the intellectual syndicalists. In it, the
principles of liberalism are projected from the level of
individual phenomena to that of mass phenomena. The qualities of
excellence and prestige in the lives of individuals are carried
over into classes, conceived of almost as collective
individualities. This conception usually leads, in the
intellectuals who share it, to mere contemplation and the noting
down of merits and demerits; to an odious and foolish position, as
referees of contests or bestowers of prizes and punishments. In
practice, Gobetti escaped this destiny. He revealed himself to be
an organizer of culture of extraordinary talents, and during this
last period had a function which must be neither neglected nor
under-estimated by the workers. He dug a trench beyond which those
groups of honourable, sincere intellectuals who in 1919-1920-1921
felt that the proletariat would be superior as a ruling class to
the bourgeoisie did not retreat.
Some people in good faith and honestly, others in extremely bad
faith and dishonestly, went around saying that Gobetti was nothing
but a communist in disguise: an agent, if not of the Communist
Party, at least of the Ordine Nuovo communist group. It
is unnecessary even to deny such fatuous rumours. The figure of
Gobetti and the movement which he represented were spontaneous
products of the new Italian historical climate. In this lies their
significance and their importance. Comrades in the party sometimes
reproved us for not having fought against the Rivoluzione
liberale current of ideas. Indeed, this absence of conflict
seemed to prove the organic relationship, of a Machiavellian kind
(as people used to say), between us and Gobetti. We could not
fight against Gobetti, because he developed and represented a
movement which should not be fought against, at least so far as
its main principles are concerned.
Not to understand that, means not to understand the question of
intellectuals and the function which they fulfil in the class
struggle. Gobetti, in practice, served us as a link: 1. with those
intellectuals born on the terrain of capitalist techniques who in
1919-20 had taken up a left position, favourable to the
dictatorship of the proletariat; 2. with a series of Southern
intellectuals who through more complex relationships, posed the
Southern question on a terrain different from the traditional one,
by introducing into it the proletariat of the North (of these
intellectuals, Guido Dorso is the most substantial and interesting
figure). Why should we have fought against the Rivoluzione
liberale movement? Perhaps because it was not made up of pure
communists who had accepted our programme and our ideas from A to
Z? This could not be asked of them, because it would have been
both politically and historically a paradox.
Intellectuals develop slowly, far more slowly than any other
social group, by their very nature and historical function. They
represent the entire cultural tradition of a people, seeking to
resume and synthesize all of its history. This can be said
especially of the old type of intellectual: the intellectual born
on the peasant terrain. To think it possible that such
intellectuals, en masse, can break with the entire past
and situate themselves totally upon the terrain of a new ideology,
is absurd. It is absurd for the mass of intellectuals, and perhaps
it is also absurd for very many intellectuals taken individually
as well – notwithstanding all the honourable efforts which they
make and want to make.
Now, we are interested in the mass of intellectuals, and not
just in individuals. It is certainly important and useful for the
proletariat that one or more intellectuals, individually, should
adopt its programme and ideas; should merge into the proletariat,
becoming and feeling themselves to be an integral part of it. The
proletariat, as a class, is poor in organizing elements. It does
not have its own stratum of intellectuals, and can only create one
very slowly, very painfully, after the winning of State power. But
it is also important and useful for a break to occur in the mass
of intellectuals: a break of an organic kind, historically
characterized. For there to be formed, as a mass formation, a left
tendency, in the modern sense of the word: i.e. one oriented
towards the revolutionary proletariat.
The alliance between proletariat and peasant masses requires
this formation. It is all the more required by the alliance
between proletariat and peasant masses in the South. The
proletariat will destroy the Southern agrarian bloc insofar as it
succeeds, through its party, in organizing increasingly
significant masses of poor peasants into autonomous and
independent formations. But its greater or lesser success in this
necessary task will also depend upon its ability to break up the
intellectual bloc that is the flexible, but extremely resistant,
armour of the agrarian bloc. The proletariat was helped towards
the accomplishment of this task by Piero Gobetti, and we think
that the dead man’s friends will continue, even without his
leadership, the work he undertook. This is gigantic and difficult,
but precisely worthy of every sacrifice (even that of life, as in
Gobetti’s case) on the part of those intellectuals (and there are
many of them, more than is believed) – from North and South – who
have understood that only two social forces are essentially
national and bearers of the future: the proletariat and the
peasants.