Displaced rural petit-bourgeois intellectuals become ready volunteers for subversive movements.

Evidence

This factor is especially important in the case of Italy: 1. on account of the traditional apoliticism and passivity of the great popular masses; the relative ease with which “volunteers are recruited” is a natural reaction to these phenomena; 2. on account of the social composition of Italy, one of whose features is the unhealthy quantity of rural (or rural-type) middle and petits bourgeois, who produce a large number of dissatisfied intellectuals— hence ready “volunteers” for any enterprise (even the most bizarre) which is vaguely subversive (to the Right or to the Left); 3. on account of the mass of rural wage-labourers and of Lumpenproletariat —called in Italy by the picturesque name of “morti di fame ”. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 817

Categorization

• XREF: This mechanism — surplus intellectuals seeking any vaguely subversive cause — echoes in analyses of radicalization and of who staffs populist movements today.