which Gramsci had himself encountered among the most advanced sectors of the working class in Turin, and which the communists had placed a premium on combatting, to the extent of seeking an alliance with the radical, but sectarian, peasants' leader Gaetano Salvemini. But in addition, the communists in the south had to counteract tendencies toward regional solidarity between peasants and the gentry, and pose the question very concretely of whether they would support a class that has ruined them or a class that is their legitimate ally. This is precisely the sort of hegemonic struggle that is described in formal language above, as Gramsci goes on to make clear:
The proletariat, in order to become capable as a class of governing, must strip itself of every residue of corporatism, every syndicalist prejudice and incrustation. What does this mean? That, in addition to the need to overcome the distinctions which exist between one trade and another, it is necessary - in order to win the trust and consent of the peasants and of some semiproletarian urban categories - to overcome certain prejudices and conquer certain forms of egoism which can and do subsist within the working class as such, even when craft particularism has disappeared. The metalworker, the joiner, the building-worker, etc., must not only think as proletarians, and no longer as metal-worker, joiner, building-worker, etc.; they must also take a further step. They must think as workers who are members of a class which aims to lead the peasants and intellectuals. Of a class which can win and build socialism only if it is aided and followed by the great majority of these social strata. If this is not achieved, the proletariat does not become the leading class; and these strata (which in Italy represent the majority of the population), remaining under bourgeois leadership, enable the State to resist the proletarian assault and wear it down.
Born in Sardinia, Gramsci was always acutely sensitive to the centrality of regional and cultural cleavages which cut across 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 antipat