Fascist repression pushed communist recruitment toward the peasantry.

Evidence

During the autumn of 1925, arrests of communists continued steadily, and the party was compelled to reorganise itself almost completely during this period in which it was preparing for its Third Congress—which had been postponed after Terracini’s arrest, but was now scheduled to take place at Lyons in January 1926. It was something of an achievement that during 1925 the P.C.I. maintained its membership under extremely difficult conditions; by the end of the year it had some 27,000 members, largely organised in cells. However, to a considerable extent it had lost working-class members as a result of the repression, and had compensated for this by increased recruitment among the peasantry. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 205

Categorization

• XREF: The Southern Question work builds directly on this recruitment shift — the peasantry becomes a strategic political site Gramsci theorizes as the Southern bloc.