The Southern Question

ANTONIO GRAMSCI’S SOUTHERN QUESTION
An Introduction to the Translation by Pasquale Verdicchio

Antonio Gramsci's Notes on the Southern Problem and on the Attitudes Toward it of Communists, Socialists and Democrats was penned shortly before his imprisonment at the hands of Benito Mussolini's Fascists in November 1926 in an attempt to "stop his mind from working".1 Written in October of that year as a response to Guido Dorso's book The Southern Revolution (Gobetti Ed., 1926), this essay represents the culmination of what had been an intense five year period of political and theoretical writings on the part of the Sardinian intellectual (the foundation of the PCI is in 1921, and the Fascists' march on Rome takes place in 1922).2 Held until after Gramsci's trial and eventual imprisonment, the essay was first published in 1930 as "Some themes regarding the Southern Question" in the pages of Lo stato operaio (The Workers’ State), the Italian Communist Party's theoretical journal produced in exile in Paris. Further elisions of the title have brought it down to our day simply as The Southern Question, possibly the most recognizable of Gramscian locutions.
Gramsci's essay remains as provocative today as it was when it was written. During ten years of political imprisonment, Gramsci continued to meditate on subjects and relationships first proposed within the pages of The Southern Question. In the Quaderni del carcere3 (The Prison Notebooks), written during his imprisonment, Gramsci elaborated a notable series of observations and commentary on Italian and world issues. Among the varied list of subjects with which he concerned himself were the relationship between the city and the countryside (North/South), the potentially revolutionary alliance between Northern workers and Southern peasants, and the role and position of intellectuals within the narrative spaces provided by the interaction of diverse polities. Testimony to this work's continued importance is Edward Said's observation that "under-read and under-analyzed ["The Southern Question" ...] goes beyond its tactical relevance to Italian politics in 1926. [It is] a prelude to The Prison Notebooks in which [Gramsci] gave, as his towering counterpart Lukacs did not, paramount focus to the territorial, spatial, geographical foundations of social life." (Culture and Imperialism, 48/49)4 My own purpose in re-introducing the essay is to emphasize how Gramsci's analysis of social stratifications of Northern and Southern Italy in 1926 is relevant to current discussions about state formation, diasporas, and strategic alliances. Gramsci's works in general, and The Southern Question in particular, have been relevant in Liberation Theology movements from Central and South America to the Indian sub-continent, in the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, and in the continuing debate between the Italian North and South. For Italy, the terms of this debate are now in part defining its role within the European Union.
Gramsci's discourse on the South had its formal beginnings in "Workers and Peasants," an article (also translated herein) published in L'Ordine Nuovo in 1920 and quoted early within the pages of The Southern Question.5 The citation serves to establish the stance of the Turin Communists regarding the Southern Question, and provides a summary outline of the alliances that must take place in order to "promote peace between the city and the countryside, between the North and the South." (8) It was with such proposals that Gramsci broke with the "southernist" (a term clarified by the second quote to follow) tradition that prevailed among Southern intellectuals. Many "southernists" were members of the Socialist Party whose view of Italian unity was limited to the exploitability of the nation's resources for the benefit of the bourgeoisie. (18-21) Most importantly, however, within the pages of The Southern Question Gramsci exposed the racist views vis-à-vis the South that reformist Socialists had helped diffuse:

[...] the South is the ball and chain that prevents a more rapid progress in the civil development of Italy; Southerners are biologically inferior beings, either semi-barbarians, or full out barbarians, by natural destiny; [...] The Socialist Party was in great part the vehicle of this bourgeois ideology among the Northern proletariat; the Socialist Party gave its blessing to all the "southernist" literature of the clique of writers of the so-called positivist school, such as Ferri, Sergi, Niceforo, Orano, and their lesser followers, who in articles, in sketches, in stories, in novels, in books of impressions and memoirs, repeated the same tune in different form. (17)

The discrepant and contradictory relationship of "southernists" with the Southern masses is representative of what Gramsci described as "a great social disintegration."(25) Within that optic he emphasized the need for an analysis of social stratification as it functioned within Southern society:

Southern society is a large agrarian bloc, made up of three social strata: the large peasant mass, amorphous and disintegrated; the intellectuals of the petty and medium rural bourgeoisie; and the large landowners and the great intellectuals. Southern peasants are in perpetual ferment, but as a mass they are unable to give a centralized expression to their aspirations and needs. The middle strata of intellectuals receives the impulses for its political and ideological activity from the peasant base. In the last stage of analysis, the large landlords in the political field, and the great intellectuals in the ideological field, centralize and dominate the whole complex of manifestations. (25)

The Southern peasants' relationship to the landlords is described as being mediated by the intellectuals, who originated within the rural bourgeoisie; their role being to centralize and dominate both political and ideological trends. Such a relationship facilitated the creation of "a monstrous agrarian bloc which functions wholly as intermediary and overseer for Northern capitalism and the large banks. Its only goal is to preserve the status quo."(25-29) The historical objective of the proletariat, on the other hand, is to destroy the agrarian bloc by forming a revolutionary alliance between Northern workers and Southern peasants. (8)
Gramsci's analysis of North/South relations implicates involves the history of Italian unification, the first phase of which took place in 1860 with Garibaldi's "liberation" of Sicily and the South from Bourbon rule. It soon became obvious to the Southern masses that the effort was to benefit them much less than they had been led to believe. The collaboration of Northern "liberators" with Southern land-owners further rooted the imbalances that had existed under the Bourbons. Rebellion against the "liberating" troops was branded as criminal (brigantaggio) and was strongly repressed, with the engagement of more than half of the young national armed forces.
With the failure of unification at its primary stage, Gramsci’s analysis continues to identify potential alliances that might set the national project on a more equitable track. Two incidents in particular serve to illustrate the uneasy state of the Italian nation. The first is the set of events surrounding the 1919 formation and activity of the Young Sardegna Society. This Society was organized in an attempt to form a regional bloc including "all Sardinians on the island and on the mainland [...] capable of exercising useful pressure on the government to maintain the promises made to the soldiers during the war."(9) However, the regional alliance was undermined by the proposal made by the attending group of Sardinian Communists, who presented the options for an alliance either with "the gentry of Sardegna [who] are the local overseers of capitalist exploitation [or] with the workers of the mainland, who are for the abolition of exploitation and emancipation of all who are oppressed."(11) Sardinian workers sided with the latter, denying the regional bloc and embarking on the more treacherous road of an inter-regional workers alliance.
The second event that offers the occasion to be rather optimistic for the development of alliances between groups with similar interests is that of the Sassari Brigade. The Brigade was made up of Sardinian soldiers who were sent into Turin in August of 1917 to quell a worker's insurrection. While the Brigade was welcomed by "ladies and gentlemen who offered the soldiers flowers, cigars and fruit,"(11) the soldiers, coming in contact with the protesting Sardinian workers, underwent a change of heart and became educated as to the conditions of the workers and the situation. Such was the effect of the workers on the Brigade that "on the eve of the general strike of July 20-21, the Brigade was removed from Turin, the older soldiers were discharged and the unit was split into three."(12)
In fact, these incidents illustrate the struggle for power as it took place between the Moderates and the Liberal Democrats in the process of unifying Italy. The latter, represented by Action Party of Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi, failed to formulate a program in answer to the needs of the popular masses, in particular the peasantry, just as the Sardinian Action Party (or Young Sardegna) failed to support the workers and peasants in the first anecdote recounted. The victory of the Moderates, under the leadership of Count Cavour, was achieved by gaining the collaboration of intellectuals and the bourgeoisie, both of whom came to dictate the choices that determined the direction in which both state and society developed post-unification. Viewed within this context, the Southern Question could no longer merely be viewed as the history of Southern backwardness, but was expanded to implicate the choices made by the ruling class regarding particular interests in the development of the nation. Thus, Gramsci's view of the Southern Question as a product of capitalism resolvable only through socialist revolution, differentiated itself from the traditional "southernist" view.
Of course, the alliance proposed by Gramsci and the Torino Communists in L'Ordine Nuovo (SQ, 2) did not take place. This was mostly due to the already stated prejudice that "the South represented a 'lead-ball' for Italy, and that the modern and industrial northern civilization would have fared better without this 'lead-ball' dragging it down [...]." (Il Risorgimento, 80-81)6 Instead of an alliance, the industrial development of the country created an inversion by which Southerners emigrated North and provided the direly needed labour force for northern industries. This short-circuit, along with the massive emigration outside of Italy that preceded and continued alongside of the internal exodus, seemed to negate the possibility of a development such as Gramsci had imagined. Even as southern workers in the North resisted exploitation by taking active part in the great protests and industrial rebellions of the 1960s and 1970s, thereby providing a commonality between the two poles of northern and southern workers within the labour force, the alliance remained incomplete.7

Today's Southern Question, though no longer easily classifiable by the parameters of city/countryside or peasant/industrial worker, nevertheless persists in the conditions that influence civil life, "meaning, the state of public services and administration, the political system." (Bevilacqua, 122)8 Now, more than seventy-five years after the composition of The Southern Question, many of the problematics regarding the relationship of the South to the North remain unresolved. The terms of the equation have, over the last decade or so, have been complicated by a number of factors, among which is Italy's transformation from a country of emigration to a country of immigration.
In a 1971 speech on the Southern Question, in the city of Palermo, Enrico Berlinguer, then secretary of the PCI, related how "the degradation of the South consists not in [its being] forgotten, but in [its being] utilized so as to guarantee and exalt the economic development of the nation."9 Berlinguer also noted an interesting appropriation of Gramsci's exhortation to Northern workers to unite with Southern peasants by La Malfa, then secretary of the PRI (Italian Republican party). La Malfa had extended an invitation "to the workers of the North to show solidarity with Sourthern populations [...]" (4). His suggestion, while appearing to mirror Gramsci's call for an alliance, merely implied that Northern workers could, by tightening their belts, allow corporations and industries to increase their earnings, which, in turn, would provide capital for investment in the South. The blatancy of such a proposal, which works not to the interests of either Northern or Southern populations, "to orient industrial production to useful work that will promote peace between the city and the countryside, between North and South," (3) but for the benefit of industries and corporations, reflects a modern-day "southernist" stance and needs no further elucidation.
Even today the degradation of Southerners persists in the political discourse of such groups as the Lega Nord (the Northern League), a autonomist/separatist party, much of whose rhetoric is based on positivist constructions of Northern racial superiority and Southern inferiority.10 According to some commentators, the success of the Lega in the elections of June 1993 was indicative of the fact that Northern hegemony over the South had not really changed since unification.11 It might in fact appear that, within the rhetoric of federalism, Umberto Bossi’s expressions regarding the North/South relationship reserve the misconceptions of a majority of Northern populations regarding the South. By injecting his view of history with a hint of altruism, Bossi spews his prejudices in statements such as:

We are tired of being a land of invasion, first from the South and now from the Third World. There is no work, and opening our doors to immigrants to then leave them in miserable conditions is a crime. (36)12


And:

In these less than disastrous conditions, we witness day after day the imbalanced conflict between an Italy that aspires to become European with its head held high, creating a modern nation, democratic and civil, and the forces that orbit around the public machinery and are fed by it, the forces whose objectives are to become part of the African peninsula. (53)

Today, though having unsuccessfully tried to tone down its rhetoric, the Lega in all its Northern manifestations is well represented in politics and a force to be dealt with. Berlusconi's Forza Italia has chosen to ally itself with the divisive forces of the Lega and Alleanza Nazionale (the contemporary manifestation of the Italian Fascist party) in its rabid cold-war anti-Communist style campaign. With increase in immigration the North has grown more and more xenophobic, and the presence of markedly different populations has made the xenophobia that much more explicit. In a recent incident of late 2000, a group of League supporters invaded a plot of land that had been set apart by the government to enable a Muslim community to construct a mosque. These individuals showed their disdain for the beliefs of Islam and their disrespect and hate of those who they conceive as irreconcilably different by bringing hogs to urinate and defecate on the apportioned land. Such events call for a reconsideration of Gramscian writings in a contemporary context that not only enables, but indeed requires, us to envision a potential redrawing of alliances, either nationally or toward an extra-national sphere.
The events of 1994 have come to represent a moment of convergence for the issues addressed by Antonio Gramsci in the pages of The Southern Question. The results of the 1994 elections, in which a right-wing alliance came to power, further go to emphasize a North/South division and the exertion of Northern hegemony. The victorious alliance between the then newly formed Forza Italia, representative of Northern industrialism, the neo-fascist MSI (Movimento Sociale Italiano), reborn as Alleanza Nazionale (National Allliance), and the Lega Lombarda defeated a Left that, although fragmented, not only held its ground but actually gained in the Southern regions. Such developments seemed to reflect the situation around the time when Gramsci found it necessary to address the issues contained in the pages of The Southern Question. The triumvirate of this more contemporary alliance, while having quickly failed due to internal discord, was as threatening an alliance as the one formed in the early twenties which allowed the rise of Fascism. In many terms, the search for national stability by turning emphatically to the right, pointed to issues that promised a certain parallelism between Italian unification and European unity.
Today, after years of governmental stability under the leadership of Romano
Prodi's PDS, followed by a progression of insipid center-left politics under Massimo D'Alema, the Right has regrouped and once again has gained ground through the regional elections of 2000. Newspaper headlines on the day following the elections of April 16, 2000 blare TUTTO IL NORD AL POLO E LEGA ("The North Goes to the League and Pole")(La Repubblica). Forza Italia, the Lega Nord and Alleanza Nazionale once again formed an alliance ready to declaim victory. Berlusconi, leader of Forza Italia, and his allies have instituted a politics of extremes in which their main electoral platform has been "freedom". Wholly dismissing the historical record, and the fact that Christian Democrats and a variety of center-right coalitions had kept the Italian Communist Party out of government since 1948, Berlusconi has succeeded in painting for his followers an Italy that is some sort of Gulag in which Communists have been suppressing the democratic freedoms of Italians for the past 50 years.
Berlusconi's rhetoric and the foundation of "La casa della libertà" (The House of Freedom), an imaginary site in which to house and protect the freedoms supposedly under threat, may sound ludicrous but they had their effect. And yet, these elections serve once more to consolidate a view of Italy that is useful in its unfortunate repetition. The spring 2000 Regional elections made the divisions clear. While in 1994 the gains of the Left in the South might have been veiled by the size and specificity of some of the parties, in the 2000 elections they could not have been more evident. The Left that gained support in the South was not the old internationalist PCI, but rather a Left rooted in the local as its point of departure.
The most notable of these cases was that of Mayor Giovanni Bassolino of Naples. Elected with a clear and large majority in 1994, his mandate as mayor of the problematic city was renewed by re-election with 73% of the vote in 1999. In the Spring 2000 elections, Bassolino brought to the Campania Region a similarly strong politics with a decisive victory as Regional President. Bassolino's book, La repubblica delle città ("The Republic of Cities") (Rome: Donzelli, 1996), outlines concepts that he brought to bear as Mayor of Naples in the transformation of that city. His example goes hand in hand with a number of other positive results in the renovation of the South’s self-image, civic and social life. Among the important publications that have joined the dialogue lately are Mario Alcaro’s Sull’identità merdionale: Forme di una cultura mediterranea (On Southern Identity: Forms of a Mediterranean Culture), Franco Cassano’s Il pensiero meridiano (Meridian Thought), and Franco Piperno’s Elogio dello spirito pubblico meridionale: genius loci e individuo sociale (In Praise of the Southern Public Spirit: genius loci and Social Individual). The overall consensus among contemporary intellectuals is that the Southern Question must be considered not in terms of Northern development but on its own terms. These publications and their authors engage not in qualitative comparisons but in assessing the viability of Southern elements that may lead to the application of new terms of development based on alternative values.
Nevertheless, the stark divisions illuminated by the 2000 elections were emphasized by the apparent xenophobia that took the upper hand in the 2001 national elections. The re-emergence of the Berlusconi-Bossi-Fini triumvirate represents an unfortunate turn for the case not only of Italian unity but for the European turn as well. Hedging on its own convictions, the North plays a game of chicken on the moral ground of immigration issues as long as it keeps one eye shut toward Italy's own emigrant history. The right has chosen to revisit this history in the form of giving the vote to Italians abroad. The Center-right views this generally unknown mass of "foreign Italians" as their constituents. Until recently, this is also how the South was regarded. Having taken for granted one group and lost a large portion of it, the Center-right is making similar assumptions vis-a-vis emigrated Italians, counting their votes before they are cast. Historically, no attempt has ever been made to know the emigrated reality. Assumptions about its political character are made that may or may not meet expectations. In the case of this newly devised contingent, its true political nature remains to be seen. However, what is most painfully obvious is that, once again the same people are being tapped as a token resource to maintain a political and social system that has failed them and their kin repeatedly.

The Southern Question Beyond Italy

To truly appreciate the breadth and import of The Southern Question, I believe that another inextricable, yet neglected, component of the Southern Question must be addressed. I am referring to the Southern Italian emigrant diaspora. Given the extensive emigration from the South to foreign lands, I believe that it is possible to recuperate various aspects of Gramsci's critique of the Italian nation-state by viewing emigrants as a decontextualized expression of the contradictory process of Italian state formation.13 The inclusion of those externalized histories into the equation of both country of origin and receptor country enables us to rethink concepts of nation, race and ethnicity, their role in the construction of Italian unification and their influence on international relations.
Individuals of various Italian expatriate generations are renewing contact with their cultural background, which necessitates a critical encounter with the history of Italian emigration on terms that have never before been approached, that is, from the perspective of the e/im-migrants themselves. Only as that decontextualized component of the South grows in its awareness of its background and history, and with a re-assessment of the national conditions that engendered emigration, can a fully operable critique of the Italian nation and all its myths truly be undertaken.
The elaboration and historicization of the Italian immigrant experience will invariably bring to light the commonalities that tie Italians to minority and immigrant groups that are marginal to the official power structure of various nations. While over the decades the history that Italian immigrants have shared with other ethnic and minority groups in North America has been greatly voided by pressures to assimilate to dominant cultural norms, a potential realignment with non-dominant (subaltern) groups may still be possible. As a Southern Italian e/im-migrant, I offer this new translation of The Southern Question in the spirit of alliance to groups who are today living the history that the Italian immigrant community seems to have long denied. I also offer it up to Italian immigrants to all parts of the globe as a path through which to revive and acknowledge a neglected history. Finally, that I can now translate this critical piece of writing by one of the South's great intellectuals represents in itself a coming to full circle for the importance of the piece and the maturation of certain attitudes and historical perspectives within Italian immigrant communities.
While The Southern Question deals particularly with the North/South relationship in Italy, its usefulness as a tool of analysis should not be limited to the Italian context. Antonio Gramsci's concerns are to promote a "national popular" culture which would reflect the peculiarities of Italian cultural diversity and to enable different social strata in the North and South to form new alliances, ones that would defy the cultural hegemony consolidated at the time of national unification.14 In addition, Gramsci's concept of new alliances has been influential for a number of movements and intellectuals, such as those associated with the Birmingham Cultural Studies Collective. Stuart Hall, in his "Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity," as elsewhere, offers useful examples of Gramscian application to contemporary situations concerning issues of race, ethnicity, and colonialism.15 Renate Holub, in her Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism (Routledge, 1992), outlines lines of resistance made available to feminist thought through Gramscian elaborations. Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum has analyzed sites of resistance to cultural officialdom through long-standing popular rituals and “spiritual” representations in Black Madonnas: Feminism, Religion and Politics in Italy (Northeastern University Press, 1993). And Cornell West, Gramscian by self-definition is adamant on the importance of Gramsci's concepts for African Americans, and as aids in a transition toward inclusive and collaborative politics and human relations.
These applications do not mean to suggest a simple overlaying of Gramscian ideas on separately evolved historical situations. Rather, it is merely one view of national struggle as it is carried out by non-dominant groups within the boundaries of a single nation that may illuminate parallel patterns in varying situations. It is only logical that the Gramscian concept of new alliances should become relevant now to Italian Americans who, as they slowly acknowledge their historically dysfunctional relationship to so-called "white" America, are following the lead of Latino and Latinas, Asian and African Americans and others in their reflections on cultural specificity.
The circumstances that condition the relationship between industrial and non-industrial societies, or First and Third-World societies, as well as the inequities extant between populations within the First-World, are consistently comparable, even in their differences, with the North/South relationship in Italy. Much as it functioned, and to some extent continues to function, in the North/South binarism, oppositions such as First World/Third World, Black/White, etc. are similarly limited in scope because they are based upon, and therefore tend to validate conditions predicated by the backwardness of one of the elements vis-à-vis the superiority of the other. Gramsci's relevance resides in the concrete possibilities opened by his theories; always breaking down bipolar representations of the North/South relation into a more complex view of social stratification; Gramsci provides more constructive designations that unveil new and pertinent grounds for activist strategies and alliances.


Pasquale Verdicchio
San Diego


ANTONIO GRAMSCI

Born in Sardegna and educated on the Italian mainland, Antonio Gramsci (1891 - 1937) is among the leading thinkers of the twentieth century. As a Marxist, Gramsci is a figure that has come to represent the open mindedness of Marxism; to emphasize the difference between those who have made of Marxism a dogma and those who have carried on its open ended research. He helped found the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1921 and was its Secretary. Gramsci was also the founder and editor of the newspapers L’ordine nuovo and L’unità, the latter being the organ of the PCI.
On the mainland of Italy, in Turin, Gramsci quickly became involved in the workers’ movement. One of his principal areas of concentration, both on the practical and theoretical levels, was the relationship between the Italian North and its Southern regions and Islands. It was within that framework, established in the earlier The Southern Question (1926) that much of the writing contained in his Prison Notebooks developed. Written during his incarceration by Mussolini’s Fascists from 1926 to 1937, the Notebooks have become a major point of reference not only in Italian cultural politics but also throughout the world in their usefulness for the analysis of national situations. By offering an enlarged view comprehensive not only of class but also of cultural relationships as these condition economic structures, Gramsci’s concepts have been used, most notably, within the parameters of Liberation Theology, by members of the “Birmingham Cultural Studies Collective” and the “Indian Subaltern Studies Group.”
I would briefly like to note that, while many have recognized Gramsci's importance for the study of race and ethnicity, a certain distance remains in relation to his work when it comes to recognizing that his analysis of the North/South situation was also a critique of constructions of race and ethnic differences as found in the work of positivist anthropologists, followers of Lombroso's systems of categorization. I would add that recognition of such subtleties within what is referred to as "white" might in fact be a useful way to undermine that category from within. The failure to acknowledge this aspect of Gramsci's writings may indeed be related to a perceived necessity to maintain, at least on a subliminal level and within situations such as the U.S., an image of Italy as a homogeneous nation without racial or ethnic difference. This, however, precludes the possibility of understanding the racial foundation of Italian nationhood, the very basis from which Gramscian thought