Capitalist reform gestures aim to absorb workers’ self-organization into management goals

Evidence

Giovanni Agnelli, the “progressive” head of FIAT, made various attempts in the immediately post-war years to buy off the intense militancy of the workers and enlist support for the rationalisation and intensification of production in the FIAT works in Turin. In October 1920, after the occupation of the factories, he went so far as to put forward a scheme of co-operative management, which was decisively rejected by the workers under Communist leadership. The Communist workers, centred around the “Ordine Nuovo”, had been in the forefront of the struggle setting up the Workers’ Councils which took over the running of the factory during the September occupation, and it was Agnelli’s hope that the Ordine Nuovo group could be won over to his own class-collaborationist version of the councils. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2391

Categorization

• XREF: Hegemony secured not by coercion but by co-opting the leadership of subordinate groups — the core mechanism of consent that later Islamophobia readings deploy when explaining how liberal states enroll minority spokespeople.
• DEFINE: Concretely illustrates Gramsci’s ‘transformism’ and class-collaborationist hegemony as a mechanism: the ruling class adopts elements of the subaltern programme to demobilize it.