Italy’s non-hegemonic, unevenly developed history makes Gramsci apt for analyzing colonial societies.
Evidence
Third, Gramsci viewed the problem of “hegemony” from within the specific history of the Italian social formation. This gave him a particular, and highly relevant, perspective on the problem. For long periods Italy was marked precisely by the absence of “hegemony”: by an alliance of ruling classes governing through domination rather than through hegemonic class leadership (direction). So his work is equally relevant for societies in which, according to the rhythm and punctuation of the class struggle, there have been significant movements into and out of a phase of “hegemonic direction.” Moreover, Italy was/is a society brutally marked by the law of uneven development: with massive industrial capitalist development to the north, massive underdevelopment to the south. This raises the question of how the contradictions of the Italian social formation are articulated through different modes of production (capitalist and feudal), and through class alliances which combine elements from different social orders. The problem of the state, and the question of strategic alliances between the industrial proletariat and the peasantry, the “play” of traditional and advanced ideologies, and the difficulties these provide in the formation of a “national-popular will” all make his analysis of Italy specially relevant to colonial societies. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 627
Categorization
Category: Connection Points
- SEED: North-south uneven development of Italy as a model for colonial difference lends itself to an essay on ‘internal colonies’ and regional unevenness.
- QUESTION: Worth probing: how far can Italy’s feudal-capitalist mixture actually analogize to actually colonial modes-of-production coexistence?