An effective revolutionary strategy required a worker-peasant alliance spanning North and South Italy.

Evidence

The main objective should be to win for the P.C.I. a genuine mass base. To this end Gramsci proposed, on 1 March, four main areas of initiative: 1. intensive propaganda around the slogan of a worker and peasant government; 2. a struggle against the labour aristocracy, i.e. against reformism, aimed at cementing an alliance between the mass of workers in the North and the peasant masses in the South; the creation of a special organising committee for the South, and a study of the possibilities for organising an armed insurrection in the South; 3. an intensive programme of political education within the party— with the object of superseding the existing internal divisions—and the enlargement of the leadership; 4. the stepping up of communist activity among the émigré population, above all in France. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 155

Categorization

• XREF: The North-South worker-peasant alliance and ‘labour aristocracy’ concept foreshadows the Southern Question essay and Gramsci’s analysis of how ruling blocs fracture subaltern groups — a mechanism later readings on how dominant coalitions divide the oppressed can reuse.