The Classics, Development, Part 10c
Some Aspects of
the Southern Question
It is a
mistake to treat Antonio Gramsci’s contribution to political thought as
substantially separated in time, or in content, from that of Vladimir Lenin,
Rosa Luxemburg, and the other revolutionary internationalists who were
Gramsci’s classic contemporaries.
Gramsci was
in Moscow in 1922 and 1923 and met and married his wife there. As a
representative of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), he was familiar with the
workings of the Comintern. Lenin died in 1924. Gramsci was imprisoned by the
Italian fascists in November, 1926, and was not released until just before his
death, eleven years later, in 1937.
The great
revival in his reputation came with the publishing of Gramsci’s “Prison
Diaries” not long after the 1945 defeat of fascism in Europe. The problem with
these diaries is that they are voluminous, and were not edited by the author
for publication. Hence there have been disputes and rival claims as to what
Gramsci stood for, and about what his precise contribution to classical
political theory was.
There is a Gramsci Archive here, on MIA.
The 1926 document
“Some
Aspects of the Southern Question” (download linked below) is the last
that Gramsci wrote before his incarceration. Although nominally unfinished, yet
it is certainly a classic, and it has great relevance to the National
Democratic Revolution, whether in South Africa or elsewhere. In the beginning
of its third paragraph, Gramsci says:
“The Northern bourgeoisie has subjugated the
South of Italy and the Islands, and reduced them to exploitable colonies…”
Northern
Italy, where there are many great cities including Turin, home of the giant
Fiat company, was as “developed” as France, Germany and England were in the
first quarter of the twentieth century. But south of Rome, and on the large
Italian islands of Sardinia and Sicily, the people lived very differently. In
many ways the situation resembled the “Colonialism of a Special Type” that was
maturing in South Africa in the same period, and which lasted until the South
African democratic breakthrough of the 1990s. Colonised and colonisers were
present in the same territory.
The Italian
Southerners were even subjected to racial contempt, such that, as Gramsci
records: “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…” and so on.
As a
communist, Gramsci advocated “the
political alliance between Northern workers and Southern peasants, to oust the
bourgeoisie from State power.” But he follows this bare formulation with
many fascinating incidences and details about the class structure and class
dynamics of Italy at the time and during the preceding three decades, which
included the first world war and the subsequent rise of Mussolini’s fascists.
Gramsci accompanies these narratives with an exceptional sensitivity towards
the role of intellectuals, whom he comes close to treating as a distinct class.
Gramsci
writes: “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.”
Yet Gramsci
regards such an intellectual break as crucial, saying: “This is gigantic and difficult, but precisely worthy of every
sacrifice on the part of those intellectuals - 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.”
It is
fitting that the last of the classics in our ten-part series on “The Classics”
includes such words as these from Gramsci, reminding us that for as much as the
“classics” provide us with a foundation, yet there is “gigantic and difficult”
intellectual work still ahead, so that we should never treat our classics as
dogma, and their authors as eternal authorities. To do so would be to betray them.
Please download and read the text via the following
link:
Some Aspects of the
Southern Question, 1926, Gramsci (9675 words)
Further
reading:
No comments:
Post a Comment