Early Italian socialism fragmented between reformism and revolutionary left currents.

Evidence

When Gramsci arrived in Turin, the two dominant influences on the younger generation of socialists were Salvemini, and Mussolini who was the acknowledged leader of the party’s left wing and the editor of Avanti! , the party newspaper. Salvemini’s impassioned crusading against the indifference of the reformist working-class leaders to the plight of the Southern peasantry has already been discussed. He had violently opposed the imperialist expansion into Libya in 1912, and had been beaten up by government thugs. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 60

Categorization

• XREF: Connects forward to the Southern Question as a precursor to Gramsci’s subaltern analysis, which the Islamophobia readings will build on.