Gramsci on fascism

["Bryan A. Alexander" <bnalexan@xxxxxxxxx>]

What follows is my report on Gramsci's pre-imprisonment studies on
fascism.  I'm relying on Richard Bellamy's Cambridge edition, PRE-PRISON
WRITINGS (1994).
        (sorry this took so long - massive flu epidemic in our house,
especially afflicting our daughter on her eight months birthday - calmer
and with both fluid and food within, I post:)

I.  GENERAL NOTES.
        I won't go into a bio or appreciation of Gramsci here, since a)
folks on this list have done so and b) most of them are more qualified.
        What I will do here is offer some general observations about
these writings.  Bellamy collected a series of articles published between
1921 and 1926 (year of imprisonment) in several periodicals.  Louis
Proyect and I picked out the ones that say substantial things about fascism.
        These pieces show tremendous range, addressing topics as narrow
as the style of an opposition editorial to the broad theoretical
questions of the crisi of capital in the 20s.  They include statements in
favor of the Comintern, strategies for party discipline and
configuration, analyses of the Italian national situation, and
observations on struggles in other countries.
        Gramsci continually grounds his thinking in economics.  At every
point in his discussions he returns to trade policy, dropping employment,
massive American investment, individual vs corporation savings.  He
grants the political realm some autonomy within this determinist scheme,
of course, pointing out divergences and temporal unevenness between
parties/ politicians/elections/etc. and economic change.  Furthermore,
Gramsci relies on a complex model of class.  Never do we read of a two-
or three-step socioeconomics; instead there is "a broad band of
intermediate classes" "between the proletariat and capitalism" (298),
"profound" and "lower strata of the working classes" (240-1).
        Perhaps the best known feature of Gramsci's style is his
spatiality.  We find metaphors of centrality, outflanking, manuevering,
striking throughout his prose.  Forces "pivot" (280), move across a
society now seen as a "terrain" (300), even change stance by "capillary
motion" (298).  Besides being an excellent pedagogical and cognitive
tool, this style also suggests the dynamism and fluidity crucial to
Marxist analysis.


II.  MODEL OF FASCISM
        For Gramsci, fascism is a complex movement composed of multiple
forces and stressed by several key contradictions; it responds to a
movement of equal complexity.
        What precedes serious fascism is the threat of massive worker
resistance and uprising, when the proletariat organizes along "both
national and international" lines (206).Additionally, this movement
threatens by building close links between industrial and agricultural
sectors (211).  On the one hand this specter arises as "an autonomous
class party" (209) that successfully fuses economics and politics in a
drive to "smash the bourgeois state" (210); on the other the Comintern
haunts capital, a vigorous synthesis of global and national revolutions
(205-8).  The combined laboring classes can also rule themselves and
their means of production, an immediate danger to capital (217-8).
        A second requirement for the rise of fascism is a crisis of the
ruling class.  When "the task of running the productive forces
[progressively] slips out of the control of the productive forces" (216)
and "these people, who are currently in charge politically, are not and
never will be in charge economically" (217), extraordinary plans and
practices appear and breed.  There is the fantasy of the "Unknown
Leader," a caesar who will appear *from nowhere, or from outside the
system* and fix all problems rapidly, "solving the riddle and killing the
sphinx."  There is the option of a coup d'etat from the right and center
(213-4).  Above all is fascism.

        In July of 1921 we read Gramsci's first take on the enemy.  In
"*La Stampa* and the Fascists" elements of a model appear.  Fascists
need to conduct campaigns of terror and violence independent of the state
or any other institutions.  These beatings of the body politic in turn
necessitate some degrees of complicity: the media must gradually cease
condemning such acts, the courts refrain from energetic prosecution, the
police from vigilance and armed response (219-20).  Over time this
creation of an unusual category - fascist violence - becomes usual and
accepted, allowing greater outrages and a sort of stunned acceptance of
threats to workers and the state (221); Mussolini can speak with literal
impunity of "the military forces of Fascism" and be allowed his state
within a state.  Gramsci never backs away from this two-step dance model.

        The next month (August '21) sees a greater analysis.  "The Two
Fascisms" (227-9) draws out a fundamental contradiction within fascism.  One
component of this movement is "urban, petit bourgeois," "middle class,"
"parliamentary and collaborationist."  This element focuses on political
action, winning state privileges for the movement and, more importantly,
driving the left towards the center and collaboration.  The other part of
fascism is "rural, formed by large and medium-sized landowners and the
farmers themselves."  In the country they attack peasant collectives and
other organizations; in suburbs and urban areas they are used against
socialist and workers' groups.  Their weapon is largely armed terror.
This latter group is stronger (esp in "Emilia, Tuscany, the Veneto,
Umbria"), but alienates the middle and upper classes to a dangerous degree.
        Gramsci forecasts that these contradictory movements will split
apart formally, with Mussolini riding the middle class component to
parliamentary power, and the rural terrorists continuing their acts under
another name.

        Five years later, three months before his arrest, Gramsci
developed this model still further.  In "A Study of the Italian
Situation" he maintains that the urban-bourgeois/rural-agricultural split
persists, although with an added opposition: a tension between landowners
and capitalists caused by the rapid empowerment of finance capital
(291-2).  However, another mode of fascism has appeared, a sort of
parodic popular front.  Gramsci sees the end
of this schism and its transcendence by a coalition of forces, including
parliament, the crown, the military chiefs of staff, and Catholic
Action.  The former model has grown weak and can be easily broken up,
probably as part of the rise of the latter version.
        Another force lurks in this analysis, besides the insurgent
workers and the evolving fascist movement: a democrat-republican "field"
or coalition devoted to appeasing the middle class with a minimum of
fuss, appealing to reactions against violence as well as to "republican
leanings."  Gramsci sees this group as positioning themselves for a post-
Fascist power grab, "designed to take power as soon as Fascism collapses
and to set up a dictatorship opposed to both the reactionary right and
the communist left." (295)  Being rather weak, only a "sudden, lightning
economic crisis" can vault them to power (296).


next post: what is to be done


Bryan Alexander
Department of English
University of Michigan
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