Fascism represented big capital directly seizing the state apparatus.

Evidence

Moreover, in August Tasca still felt it necessary to write to Gramsci that “The present economic crisis does not find at the helm of State a politically oscillating petit-bourgeois stratum, an easy prey to panic when faced with a situation of such seriousness; it finds a well-defined capitalist group, homogeneous, endowed with a political experience … The typical feature of the present period .. . remains … the direct taking over of the State apparatus by big capital, and the latter’s decisive and commanding role in government policy”. Tasca, characteristically, drew pessimistic conclusions of the type which caused Gramsci to consider him a “liquidator”; but, in the summer of 1926, his pessimism can hardly be regarded as unjustified. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 221

Categorization

• XREF: This ‘direct taking over of the State apparatus by big capital’ thesis is the historical antecedent Gramsci will later complicate with hegemony theory — the economic-reductionist reading of fascism that his prison writings move beyond.