ross class lines. Alongside the question of the Vatican, he maintained that the Southern Question was one of the most important issues for the prospects for successful revolution. When he launched the communists' paper L'Unita, he chose the title because of the centrality of the South. Gramsci was no doubt attuned to the debates on the shared interests of the peasantry and the workers which had arisen from the marxist split from Russian populism, debates which had animated Plekhanov, Kautsky and Lenin. And when Gramsci comes to this subject, he takes an orthodox 'old Bolshevik' approach, which held that one could not build a revolution without the active material support of the working majority, but that the working class had to be in the leadership. But, precisely because of the historically produced cultural and regional particularities, he was not content to speak of the agrarian question in general, or of combined and uneven development in general - it was a problem of the Italian national political context. Thus, Gramsci's answers to this question focused on national specificity, and offered a way of theorising such specificity, the particular importance of complex regional and social differentiation, in the context of hegemonic battles.
For revolutionary socialists operating today, while the class system has been simplified and the question of the alliance between workers and peasants is largely passe in most advanced capitalist societies - not in Egypt, however! - the questions of regional differentiation, of alliances between different class fractions, of sectionalism (the attempt to divide private and public sector workers in this country is very noticeable), and above all of racist, sexist and homophobic division, remain pertinent. For example, consider the regional disparities in the United States, and the importance of these in maintaining a hegemonic anti-socialist alliance throughout the twentieth century; consider how the southern question there saw white workers bound to their masters, and antipathetic to trade unions and northern workers; consider how the absence of a potentially hegemonic socialist alternative not only kept the oppressed under thumb, but also was ultimately used to blunt and weaken the power of even the advanced, industrial, northern working class. Revolutionary strategy must still be oriented toward the most advanced sectors of the working class, who must universalise their struggle precisely by adopting the purview of subaltern groups, taking up their cause and showing that only a mutually beneficial alliance led by workers can solve their social problems.