Gramsci’s worker-peasant alliance strategy originated in the Southern Question

Evidence

What Gramsci proposed as a way out of the impasse in which the P.C.I. found itself was a new strategy for the party in Italy, a strategy with close affinities with the old Ordine Nuovo thematic of 1919-20, and also a thorough-going renovation of the party itself, inspired by a quite different conception from that of Bordiga. As early as September 1923, in a letter to the P.C.I. executive written from Moscow on the subject of a proposal to found a new working-class daily newspaper in collaboration with the “third-internationalist” current which was in the process of being expelled from the P.S.I., Gramsci began to evoke some of the themes which were to inspire both his political practice between 1924 and 1926 and also his prison writings. He suggested Unita as the name of the new paper (see p. xxvi above), and proposed the slogan of a “federal republic of workers and peasants” as an intermediate “ideological preparation” for a soviet regime; this concern with the “Southern Question” and with the concrete form which the alliance of workers and peasants might take in Italy represented something quite new in the Italian party at that time. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 153

Categorization

• XREF: Gramsci’s ‘federal republic of workers and peasants’ and the Southern Question prefigure later theories of subaltern alliance — connects to the reader’s Islamophobia toolkit via the question of how national-popular alliances are built across class and region. — connects to: Gramsci saw northern industrial workers’ revolution as ending the colonization of southern Italy — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 1678
• SEED: The Southern Question as an early template for how a segmented working class is organized across regional and ethnic lines — an angle on how ‘the people’ gets constructed politically.