Totalitarian regimes replace external opposition with enforced internal self-surveillance.

Evidence

We have been unable to track down any example of the use of this word in fascist Italy, but it seems clear that it must have been used, in arguments destined to counter the charge that opposition parties were necessary to ensure criticism— and hence efficiency. Precisely this kind of argument occurs in one of Mussolini’s speeches on 26 May 1927: “Here the problem arises: but how do you manage to do without an opposition? … Opposition is not necessary to the functioning of a healthy political regime. Opposition is stupid, superfluous in a totalitarian regime like the Fascist regime. Opposition is useful in easy times, academic times, as was the case before the war, when there were discussions in the Assembly about if, how and when socialism would be achieved, and indeed a whole debate about this—though this was clearly not serious, despite the men who took part in it. But we have the opposition within ourselves, dear sirs, we are not old nags who need a touch of the spur. We keep a strict check on ourselves …” — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2334

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the Orientalism/hegemony toolkit: the fascist state’s claim to ‘keep a strict check on ourselves’ is the template for how modern bureaucratic power internalizes discipline in the subject, as later readings on biopolitics and racialized selfhood will assume.
• DEFINE: Gramsci is here pinning down ‘self-criticism’ as a term whose fascist usage must be distinguished from the communist one — a vocabulary distinction the reader is meant to carry forward.
• SHARE: Mussolini’s ‘we are not old nags who need a touch of the spur’ is the kind of quoted line that lands with anyone working on totalitarian rhetoric.