The Classics, 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.
But 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 on the face of it
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 in Italy 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 simultaneously 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.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Some Aspects of
the Southern Question, 1926, Gramsci.
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