Gramsci's Southern question, between egemny and revolution in West

Abstract

If an incomplete work, Appunti sulla quistione meridionale (“Notes on the Southern Question”) was the first “organic” and “conceptual” text by Gramsci, outside of party documents, to appear in the PCd’I’s theoretical review Lo Stato Operaio (“The Workers’ State”). In particular, Gramsci’s text denounced the Italian Socialist Party’s failure to develop its own policy of politicising and mobilising the Southern peasantry. Because of these characteristics, in the aftermath of World War II, with the creation in Italy of Togliatti’s “new party”, the text was included and accepted within the tradition of political and cultural reflection on the relationship between North and South. Given this focus on overcoming the territorial imbalance between the two realities, it was placed within the tradition of the meridionalismo (“Southern-ism”) of Italy’s pre-fascist liberal period. Yet, notwithstanding this connection with the meridionalista tradition, recent studies have shown that in reality the Appunti sulla questione were integral to the problem of “translating” the Bolshevik revolution to the West. Here, the approach to the peasant world was articulated starting from the relationship with Lenin’s thought on the central importance, for the success of the revolution, of the conquest of the countryside and its mobilisation. Indeed, as of 1926 Gramsci thought that a successful revolutionary path was still possible in the Southern European context so long as the Communist movement knew how to transpose and translate the teachings of the Russian experience into its own national language, starting precisely from the concept of “hegemony”.