Protectionism forged capitalist-class alliance while devastating the Italian peasantry.
Evidence
In general, the conflicts between industrial “North” and rural “South” tended to obscure more basic class questions. Since 1887, the growing industry of the North had been favoured by protectionist policies which kept out foreign capital, and secured its dominance of the domestic market. This protectionism provided the basis of an effective community of interests between big industrial capital and the reformist working-class organisations-a community of interests which was fostered by the policies of Giovanni Giolitti, the dominant bourgeois politician of the years preceding the First World War. But its impact on agricultural Italy was, with the exception of the cereal-producers in the Centre and North, calamitous: the peasants were no longer able to export their produce, and at the same time were forced to buy the products of Italian industry rather than the far cheaper goods made in the more advanced industrial countries. This was the main basis of what became the “Southern Question”. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 41
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: The mechanism of class alliance via shared economic interest prefigures hegemony-as-alliance, and internal peripherality parallels how Islamophobia studies treat Muslim populations as internal others.
- DEFINE: Concretely grounds the ‘Southern Question’ — a concept Gramsci’s hegemony theory later builds on.