Italian futurism shifted from popular anticultural revolt to fascist nationalism during the war

Evidence

The futurist movement was launched by Marinetti in his Futurist Manifesto of 1909, and celebrated the vitality of the modern age, especially in its technical progress which was seen as sweeping away the old order. Gramsci, in a 1922 letter to Trotsky who had requested information on futurism for his “Literature and Revolution ”, described how the workers before the World War “had seen in futurism the elements of a struggle against the old academic culture of Italy, mummified and alien to the popular masses …”. But during the war the futurists were violent interventionists, and subsequently their positions converged on the one hand with fascism and on the other with d’Annunzio’s nationalism. Marinetti stood as a parliamentary candidate on Mussolini’s list in 1919 Crispi, Pirandello and Gentile were all Sicilians. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1984

Categorization

• XREF: A concrete instance of Gramscian hegemony-formation: a cultural avant-garde being absorbed into ruling-class politics. Connects to the toolkit concept of how modernist/revolutionary aesthetics get co-opted by the state. — connects to: State connivance drove fascism’s rise from marginal to mass scale — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 107; A single regional autonomy movement split along the fascism divide in interwar Italy; Romantic revolt glorified will over intellect and allied with nationalism — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 2637 (+2 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1984

Broader Connections

• Elite avant-garde rejection of liberal hypocrisy enabled attraction to totalitarian movements #expands (0.80)
• A single regional autonomy movement split along the fascism divide in interwar Italy #qualifies (0.75)
• Romantic revolt glorified will over intellect and allied with nationalism #complicates (0.72) — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 2637