Meridionalist equality among urban elites was historical fiction masking northern domination

Evidence

The urban forces are socially homogeneous, hence must occupy positions of perfect equality. That was theoretically true, but historically the question posed itself differently: the urban forces of the North were clearly at the head of their national sector, while for the urban forces of the South that was not true, at least not to the same extent. The urban forces of the North had therefore to persuade those of the South that their directive function should be limited to ensuring the “leadership” of North over South in a general relation of city to countryside. In other words, the directive function of the Southern urban forces could not be other than a subordinate moment of the vaster directive function of the North. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 532

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates Gramsci’s core distinction between a merely theoretical/abstract relation and its concrete historical form — the same method he applies to hegemony and leadership elsewhere.
• XREF: Plugs directly into the reader’s toolkit as a case of how formal equality masks substantive subordination — prefigures how colonial/liberal universalism papers over racialized hierarchy in Islamophobia scholarship.