Peasant political autonomy varies inversely with landowner organized strength

Evidence

In this movement, the autonomous importance of the peasant masses decreases progressively from Sardinia via the Mezzogiorno to Sicily, depending on the organised strength, the prestige, and the ideological pressure exercised by the great landowners. In Sicily these are maximally well-organised and united; in Sardinia on the other hand they have relatively small importance. The relative independence of the respective intellectual strata varies in a similar fashion—in inverse proportion, of course, to that of the landowners. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 526

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: this inverse relationship between ruling-class ideological/org pressure and subaltern independent agency seems a generalizable mechanism for how hegemony operates in rural settings.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 526
• XREF: connects to: Pre-industrial village commons in Scandinavia were self-governing teams of landowners. — Emil Sandström and Ann-Kristin Ekman and Karl-Johan Lindholm, Commoning in the periphery – The role…, 30; Some associations merit autonomy so their members can develop their own institutions. — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 5081