National Democratic Revolution, Part 2b
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 and
the Bolshevik revolutionary internationalists who were Gramsci’s actual 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
unfinished 1926 document “Some Aspects of the Southern Question” is the last
that Gramsci wrote before his incarceration. To understand its relevance to the
National Democratic Revolution, one can begin with the beginning of its third
paragraph, where 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 by the first quarter of the twentieth century “developed” in
much the same way as France, Germany and England were. 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. Colonised and
colonisers were present in the same national 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 naturally advocated “the
political alliance between Northern workers and Southern peasants, to oust the
bourgeoisie from State power.” 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 had 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.”
This
introduction has included a lot of quotations, so as to assist readers to
navigate through this text in between the many unfamiliar names that are there.
The simple
lesson is the same as that of Lenin and the Comintern: Class Alliance will
solve the National Question. The Democratic Revolution is a prerequisite for
the building of socialism. This is the nature of the National Democratic
Revolution.
- The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Some Aspects of the
Southern Question, Gramsci.
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