Dr Takahiro ChinoDept. of Political Science and Economics

t.chino[at]aoni.waseda.jp

Gramsci and Italian Social and Political Problems

My interest in Italian Political Thought(1)

• Less investigated field of study (in Japan and in English-speaking countries)

• The Italian and Japanese situations seem sometimes similar in the 19th-20th centuries

→ They generally shared a question: What is being modern? Modernity: encourages to achieve alternative vision to the existing society

My interest in Italian Political Thought(2)

• Comparative perspective– Examining modern Italian political thought will

lead me to better understand the Japanese thought

– E.g. Similarity between Jun Tosaka （戸坂潤） and Gramsci

Structure of Today’s lecture

1. Who is Antonio Gramsci?

2. Problem (1): The Southern Question

3. Problem (2): The Catholic Church problem

4. Biggest Problem: Low Social Mobility in Italy

Structure of Today’s lecture

1. Who is Antonio Gramsci?

2. Problem (1): The Southern Question

3. Problem (2): The Catholic Church problem

4. Biggest Problem: Low Social Mobility in Italy

Antonio Gramsci (1981-1937)• Born in Sardinia• Hunchback• Studied at the University of Turin • Joined the Factory Council Movement in

1919-20• Co-founder of the Italian Communist Party

(founded in 1921) • Arrested by the Fascist government in 1926 • Wrote his Prison Notebooks, consisting of

29 notebooks, from 1929 to 35 until his health condition became severe

• Died in 1937

Sardinia

Factory Council Movement 1919-20(1)

Background: Ex-soldiers’ motivation that they can do it! This feeling fuelled Socialist, Catholic, fascist movements• First broke out at the Fiat Factory in Turin and spread

to 30 factories, 50,000 people (Sep. 1919)• Aimed to achieve workers’ autonomous production

without bourgeois supervisors • “Internal commission” as a key organisation to

represent workers that could be expanded to achieve their self-governance

Failure of the Factory Council

Intervention of then-PM Giolitti

• Offered the workers a proposal to slightly improve their working conditions

• A part of the workers compromised with his plan

The aim of the FC Movement was to establish workers’ autonomy and independence, but now it failed

Gramsci’s reflection on the Failure

1) It failed to include the majority of Italian masses• it was the movement by the Northern Workers,

but the Southern peasantry (very majority) was not included

2) The separation between revisionists and communists within the socialist camp• compromise or revolution (intransigence)→ Establishment of the Italian Communist Party (1921)

What is Socialist Revolution?: Marx

Marx : capitalism is a flawed system of economyAccumulation and re-investment of capital

→ Further expansion of economyIn this process…1) Bourgeoisie making commodities more2) Consumers without money to buy → 　 Contradiction of capitalism

What is Socialist Revolution?: Gramsci

• “Revolution against Capital”(1917, soon after the Russian Revolution)– Socialist Revolution took place in the less-

developed Russia! – Italian Revolution is likely to take place if the

Italian situation looks like the pre-revolutionary Russian.

→ But the failure of the FCM showed that this assumption is not true!!

What is Socialist Revolution? Revisited

• Italy is different from the developed West and the less-developed East (Russia)

• Need to closely look at the very characteristics of the Italian political and social situation

→ But, Gramsci’s travel to Russia and Austria (1922-24) overlapped the rise of fascism

The Rise of Fascism

• Two tendencies in the fascist movement1) City fascism (Mussolini)

Wants to be a “legal”, parliamentary force2) Country-side fascism (radical nationalists)

Violent, grass-roots level– Underlying feeling is they were abandoned

→ The problems that excluded the Italian masses: the Southern Question and the Catholic Church problem

The Prison Notebooks (2)• 29 individual notebooks• Sketchy ones to

developed and organised ones

• Inspired social sciences and humanities in the post-WWII period until now (E.g. his famous concept of “hegemony”)

Structure of Today’s lecture

1. Who is Antonio Gramsci?

2. Problem (1): The Southern Question

3. Problem (2): The Catholic Church problem

4. Biggest Problem: Low Social Mobility in Italy

The Southern Question (1)

SQ: less-developed South vs. developed North1) The “Southerners” (Sonnino, Franchetti)– Urges the government to remedy the poorness

2) Anthropologists (Sergi, Niceforo)– “Scientifically” justified the Southern poorness

e.g. “phrenology”3) New generation (Salvemini, De Viti de Marco)– North’s “exploitation” of the South

The Southern Question (2)

4) Gramsci• Autonomy of the Southern peasantry? – “agrarian reform” during the Risorgimento– Both liberals and conservatives at that time

ignored their demands due to the peasants’ alleged “violent” character

Gramsci: but, if liberals could have included their demands for “agrarian reform”, then they could have achieved a more democratic Italian unification?

The Southern Question (3)

The Risorgimento: Italy’s turning point• Revolts of the peasantry after the Risorgimento– Represented as “barbarian” without noting their call for

republicanism, agrarian reform etc.– The peasantry as the “subaltern groups”: lacking their

own intellectuals, the ability to describe their own history

– They are only represented and stigmatised by the dominant social groups

– However, it does not mean that they do not have their own demands and autonomy

Structure of Today’s lecture

1. Who is Antonio Gramsci?

2. Problem (1): The Southern Question

3. Problem (2): The Catholic Church problem

4. Biggest Problem: Low Social Mobility in Italy

The Catholic Church (1)

• How the Italian masses were deprived of their autonomy? – Fixed relation between the elites and masses1) The 1929 Concordat between the Church and

the fascist state2) Croce’s misfired critique of the Church3) Gramsci’s proposal of reforming the people’s

“common sense” and elaborating “good sense”

The Catholic Church (2)

Three camps in the Church – how to deal with the modern ideas? 1) Integralists : “non expedit” decree 2) Modernists: Italian People’s Party 3) The Jesuits: Catholic Action - spreading the Church’s influence over the masses→ the Jesuits occupied the centre of the Church

The Catholic Church (3)

Concordat in 1929 – different assumptionsThe Church: the religious sphere over the secular The fascist state: two spheres can be separated independently→ the Church’s intervention into the Italian educational system (religious education became mandatory in secondary education) → this reinforced the Church’s influence

The Catholic Church (4)

Benedetto Croce (1866-1952)• The most influential intellectual of the

time in Italy• “Religion and the Peace of Mind” (1915):

Superiority of philosophy over religion

→ Gramsci discerns that Croce’s proposal is conservative – it is only appealing to his fellow intellectuals, but cannot be people’s action-guiding principle

The Catholic Church (5)

• Croce’s contradictionWhy not support liberal Catholicism (modernism)?- He did not like democracy• Croce rather helped to reinforce the division

between intellectuals and masses→ Despite his harsh criticism, Croce helped the Church’s policy to permeate people’s “common sense”

Croce is, in essence, anti-confessional [...], and for a large group of Italian and European intellectuals his philosophy [...] has constituted a real and proper intellectual and moral reform of a ‘Renaissance’ type. ‘To live without religion’ (and here without confessional religion is meant) was the pith that Sorel elicited from his reading of Croce [...] But Croce has not ‘gone to the people,’ has not wanted to become a ‘national’ element (just as the Renaissance men were not, unlike the Lutherans and Calvinists), has not wanted to create a group of disciples who [...] could popularize his philosophy in his place and try to make it into an educational element right from the primary school state (and thus educational for the simple worker and peasant, that is to say for the simple man in the street)… (cont.)

From the Prison Notebooks

Perhaps this was not possible, but it was worth the trouble of trying to do it, and not having tried is also significant. In one of his books Croce has written something to the effect that ‘One cannot deprive the man in the street of religion without immediately substituting it with something that satisfies the same needs for which religion was born and still persists.’ There is some truth in this assertion, but does it not contain a confession of the impotence of idealist philosophy for becoming an integral (and national) world outlook? For how could one destroy religion in the consciousness of the ordinary person without at the same time replacing it? Is it possible in this case only to destroy without creating? It is impossible.

From the Prison Notebooks

The Catholic Church (6)

Gramsci’s proposal “moral and intellectual reform”• Common sense → good sense• Remedying the gap between intellectuals and

masses– The masses could be a potential part of Italian ruling

class

Structure of Today’s lecture

1. Who is Antonio Gramsci?

2. Problem (1): The Southern Question

3. Problem (2): The Catholic Church problem

4. Biggest Problem: Low Social Mobility in Italy

How to Remedy Italy’s Low Social Mobility ?

• Elitist democracy (Gaetano Mosca)– Every society consists of two fundamental groups:

elites and masses– Elites provide good governance

• Gramsci’s elitist democracy– Mobility between two groups (members of the

groups are not fixed), but prevented by the SQ and the CC

– Masses can be potential part of the Italian ruling class (“everybody can govern”)