Gramsci (RLE: Gramsci)

And Italy's Passive Revolution

John Davis, John A. Davis

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317744528
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Antonio Gramsci used the term 'passive revolution' to describe the limitations and weaknesses of the 19th century bourgeois state in Italy which permitted economic development whilst thwarting social and political progress. This detailed study consists of seven essays each exploring a different theme of the economic and social basis of the Liberal state, providing a broad understanding of the background against the emergence of Italian fascism and present a number of debates and controversies amongst Italian historians. By critical discussion of Gramsci's reading of modern Italian history, the essays present an analysis of the structure and development of social and economic relations in the formation of the Liberal state, illustrating the transition from liberalism to fascism.

1	INTRODUCTION: ANTONIO GRAMSCI AND ITALY’S PASSIVE REVOLUTION
	John A. Davis

In the thirty years since the publication of the Prison Notebooks the interest and importance of Antonio Gramsci’s contribution to Marxist thought and political analysis has become widely recognised. It is in particular on the basis of his analysis of the structure of the capitalist state and his insistence on the essentially political nature of power exercised through what Hegel had termed the ‘institutions of civil society’ that this reputation has been established. Deeply influenced both by Lenin’s appeal for a more revolutionary interpretation of Marx’s writings and by his own aversion to the sterile gradualism of the reformist socialism of the Second International, Gramsci sought to rehabilitate that area of social activity which had been relegated to a subservient and almost irrelevant ‘superstructure’, and to demonstrate the essentially political function and class orientation of culture, ideology and social institutions. It was from this that the now familiar concept of ‘hegemony’ emerged, together with the call for the revolutionary movement to extend the front of its struggle in order to combat the capitalist classes at the level of ideology and civil institutions, as well as in the more traditional and restricted sphere of the so-called ‘state apparatus’.¹

The concern to explore and identify the structures of the capitalist state is not only the principal characteristic of Gramsci’s theoretical and political writings, but also the inspiration for his writings on Italian history. The problem of the nature and structure of the capitalist state in Western Europe is the central theme of those sections of the Prison Notebooks which are devoted to the century of Italian history which witnessed national unification, the formation of the liberal state and the establishment of Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship. Gramsci the historian cannot be separated from, or contrasted to, Gramsci the political theorist or Gramsci the revolutionary. His historical writings were not the product of a retirement from active politics enforced by seclusion in a fascist prison. One of the principal motives for analysing Italy’s immediate past was to reveal to his colleagues the inadequacy of their awareness of the fundamental structures and organisation of the state which they had unsuccessfully attempted to replace.² In his address to the Lyons Congress of the Communist Party in 1926, Gramsci had already pointed uncompromisingly to the ‘political, organizational, tactical and strategic weaknesses of the workers’ party’ as a cause of the success of the fascist movement in Italy.³ It was from this insistence on the need for unsparing and unsentimental self-criticism and reflection that much of the originality of Gramsci’s thought was to derive. And it was along this via crucis that Gramsci embarked on a post mortem not only of Italian socialism, but also of the corpse of the liberal state. Only through careful analysis of the political structures and organisation of that state could a basis be laid for constructing a more effective and realistic revolutionary strategy. This could be achieved only by looking first at the origins and evolution of that state, and then by attempting to assess the relationship between Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship and the earlier liberal state.

At first sight the essentially political emphasis of Gramsci’s historical writings might seem to make them an inappropriate focus for a collection of essays concerned predominantly with economic and social aspects of Italy’s history in this period. One recent Italian commentator, who could not be considered hostile to Gramsci, has indeed claimed that the Prison Notebooks contribute nothing new to an understanding of Italy’s economic development in this period, because this was not Gramsci’s primary concern.⁴ But it is, perhaps, precisely for this reason that so many of the questions and problems which Gramsci raised have shown the need for wider investigation of the economic and social structures around which the political systems of the liberal state were organised. It was certainly no accident that the debate on Italian industrialisation in the late nineteenth century — one of the few aspects of modern Italian history, other than fascism of course, to attract wide attention outside Italy — began with the criticisms which Rosario Romeo levelled against Gramsci’s assessment of the shortcomings of national unification.⁵

It would be wrong to suggest, however, that Gramsci’s analysis is of interest to the economic or social historian for purely negative reasons, or that the problems it poses are simply a matter of filling in gaps or demonstrating incongruencies. Few historical writers have been more impressed than Gramsci by the need to reveal the nature of the relations and inter-relations which united the disparate material, social and political aspects of the historical process both in, and over, time. If Gramsci had little that was new to say about the economic structure and development of the modern Italian state, this structure remained his fundamental point of reference. The alliance between the progressive manufacturing and industrial bourgeoisie of the North and the traditional landowners of the South, the ‘historical alliance’, was the central reality of the Italian state, and the point from which his analysis of its political systems begins. And if much of the originality of Gramsci’s analysis is to be found in the exploration of the ideological aspects of political relations, and in particular the relationship between social forces and forms of political representation, the material basis of those relationships is never called into doubt. Not only, then, are economic structures and relationships an integral part of Gramsci’s historical analysis, but they are also the stuff on which that analysis is founded.

Gramsci was not, of course, the first to have identified the alliance between northern industry and southern landlords as the central and determining feature of the liberal state. Since the adoption of industrial and agrarian protectionism in the 1880s this had been one of the dominant themes in both socialist and free-trade liberal political writing. But Gramsci was the first to argue that the origins and consequences of this alliance constituted the fundamental feature of continuity running through Italy’s political development from unification to fascism. This was the material reality which he set against Benedetto Croce’s claim that the inspiration of the modern Italian state lay in the spirit and ethos of liberalism. Putting Croce through the same undignified exercise to which Marx had earlier subjected Hegel, Gramsci argued that the politics and ideology of Italian liberalism could only be understood in relation to the material and social structure within which they had taken form. Written in the same decade as the publication of Croce’s History of Italy and History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks at times read almost as a dialogue with Croce. But from this dialogue emerged an interpretation of the continuities running through Italy’s history from the Risorgimento to fascism which drew together in a single comprehensive analysis a wide range of earlier socialist and anti-Crocean ideas and writing. And whereas for Croce fascism had represented an irrational and therefore temporary aberration from the guiding tendencies in Italy’s development, for Gramsci it was an explicable, although not inevitable, continuation of the economic and political structure which had been present from the birth of the unified state. It is this alternative interpretation of the fundamental features and tendencies in modern Italian history that has become one of the principal bases for historical debate and discussion in Italy since the publication of the Prison Notebooks.

As Perry Anderson has recently pointed out, few Marxist writers are more difficult to read accurately or systematically than Gramsci.⁶ There are many reasons for this: the appalling circumstances and restrictions under which he was writing; the peculiar economy and terseness of his style, and the rapid juxtaposition of assertion and suggestion; the sheer breadth and complexity of his imagination. At any one moment his analysis develops at a series of levels: the problem of the state in general, that in Italy in particular, the role of ideology and intellectuals in general terms, and in the Italian state in particular; the relations between city and countryside in general, and in the particular circumstances of Italy. The list of problems that are confronted is long, and the relationship between the general and the particular is something that Gramsci rarely loses sight of; in his search for the unity of the historical process, each individual piece of the historical jigsaw is carefully related to a final overall pattern.

Not only does this mean that any descriptive account of necessity loses the richness of Gramsci’s own writing, but it also makes it difficult, and potentially misleading, to single out any one theme of interpretation. There is, however, one theme which recurs time and time again in his analysis of the modern Italian state, and around which his interpretation of the fundamental tendencies in this period is based. This is the ‘passive revolution’. Although the term is used in a number of ways, it is in essence both a description of the nature of the liberal state and an assessment of the shortcomings of that state.

The way in which ‘passive revolution’ was defined by Gramsci shows clearly the inseparability of his political and historical method. The central problem was always the state, and the variety of forms which political power might take within the state. But if the state — and Gramsci was concerned primarily, of course, with the capitalist state, and in particular the Western versions of that state — could in practice take a variety of forms which would differ in important ways from one country to another, so too would the political processes which created the state. Just as there were different types of capitalist state, so there were different forms of bourgeois revolutions. In Italy the form taken by both was ‘passive revolution’.

In theoretical terms Gramsci explained this concept by reference to Marx’s well-known assertion in the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy that ‘no social formation disappears as long as the productive forces which have developed within it still find room for further movement, a society does not set itself tasks for whose solutions the necessary conditions have not already been incubated’.⁷ On one hand, this might seem to provide a good explanation of the type of state which had resulted from unification in Italy. The Italian bourgeoisie of the early nineteenth century had been, in economic terms at least, relatively weak and heterogenous. It would therefore be entirely consonant with Marx’s statement to find ‘pre-capitalist’ groups — in other words, the traditional aristocratic and landowning interests — represented strongly in the new political structure.

But such a definition also presented serious problems for Gramsci, because to define the basis of the Italian bourgeois state in such terms came close to an open invitation to the kind of political gradualism adopted by the Second International. It implied that the bourgeois revolution in Italy had been incomplete, hence introducing endless possibilities of procrastination for the revolutionary parties while they comfortably and inactively awaited the Second Coming. What Gramsci was concerned above all to stress was that such a form of revolution was still revolution. National unification had not simply provided a first step towards the capitalist state in Italy, but had created that state. It had permitted industrialisation, the establishment of bourgeois democracy, and Italy’s elevation to the status of a Great Power (formally recognised in the Versailles Peace Treaty). At the same time, the circumstances in which that state had been created, and the nature of the social forces on which it was based, gave Italian capitalism both its particular, unique form and also determined limits beyond which it could not progress.

The argument becomes clearer if we look at the passage in which Gramsci contrasted the different forms taken by the state in Russia and in the West:

In Russia the state was everything and civil society was primordial and gelatinous: in the West there was a proper relation between the state and civil society, and when the state trembled the sturdy section of civil society was at once revealed. The state was only an outer ditch, behind which was a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks.⁸

It was the presence, for historical and cultural reasons, of these ‘fortresses and earthworks’ in European societies that made ‘passive revolution’ possible. The material weaknesses of the nineteenth-century Italian bourgeoisie, for example, could be compensated by political action directed, consciously or unconsciously, to achieve domination through the institutions of civil society — through culture and literature, through professional institutions and ethos, through education. By achieving ‘hegemonic’ power in this fashion, even a numerically small advanced bourgeois elite could give a decisively ‘capitalist’ imprint to a political revolution which necessitated support from more traditional social forces. This, in Gramsci’s view, was what had occurred in Italy in the nineteenth century, and the alliance between the advanced bourgeoisie of the North and the traditional landowners of the South was both cause and effect of the ‘passive revolution’.

This provides at least one reason for Gramsci’s very detailed analysis of the factors which contributed to the success of the Moderate ‘Party’ (the term is clearly anachronistic), which after 1848 became increasingly identified with the policies of Cavour, in providing the leadership for the national revolution.⁹ They were confronted by ‘very powerful and united forces which looked for leadership to the Vatican and were hostile to unification’.¹⁰ The Moderates had little economic strength and even fewer physical resources. They had, therefore, to seek allies. First they looked to Piedmont and its army to carry through their revolution, and hence the national question became predominant. Secondly they had to choose between alliance either with the more traditional social groups on the peninsula or with the people. For the Moderates, any alliance with the people was out of the question, partly as a result of the terror which French Jacobinism had implanted amongst the European bourgeoisie, and they opted for alliance with the traditional groups. The result was, in Gramsci’s phrase, ‘“revolution” without “revolution”’.¹¹

But revolution none the less, and it is here that the issue of ‘hegemony’ becomes relevant. Although the resources for establishing leadership on the basis of coercion were, in Gramsci’s view, limited, the Moderates succeeded in compensating this by eliciting voluntary support and consensus. The ideology of Moderate liberalism, at once progressive in material terms and conservative in social terms, dominated Italian culture, and won over the professional and bureaucratic classes. Hence the Moderates became ‘hegemonic’, and it was this which constituted the dynamic element of the ‘passive revolution’.

The process of passive revolution had other important features, which Gramsci developed in contrasting the success of the Moderates with the failure of the Radicals — that is, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Pisacane, Ferrari and their followers. At every point they were outmanoeuvred by the Moderates. The Moderate programme had a broad eclectic appeal; the Moderates learned from their mistakes; they used the national question and the external enemy, Austria, to unite a heterogenous following; they were prepared to adopt radical measures such as the expropriation of Church land. The Radicals, on the other hand, were unsure of their radicalism. They did not attempt to counter the ‘spontaneous’ support won by the Moderates with an alternative ‘organised’ political force; they had no unified programme, no understanding of the political forces opposing them. Above all they failed to play the card of agrarian reform, and hence failed to recruit to their platform the vast potential of peasant unrest. Hence the notion of ‘the failed revolution’.

The debate which developed around the ‘failed revolution’¹² has perhaps served to draw attention away from what was undoubtedly Gramsci’s principal concern in examining the relationship b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Introduction: Antonio Gramsci and Italy’s Passive Revolution
• 2. Gramsci and the Era of the Bourgeois Revolution in Italy
• 3. The South, the Risorgimento and the Origins of the ‘Southern Problem’
• 4. Landlords, Peasants and the Limits of Liberalism
• 5. From Sharecropper to Proletarian: the Background to Fascism in Rural Tuscany, 1880-1920
• 6. Agrarians and Industrialists: the Evolution of an Alliance in the Po Delta, 1896-1914
• 7. From Liberalism to Corporatism: the Province of Brescia during the First World War
• 8. Fascist Agrarian Policy and the Italian Economy in the Inter-war Years
• Notes on Contributors
• Index