 leadership is attained.
So, the Southern Question is one of how the proletariat can assume hegemony within a "system of class alliances" enabling "the majority of the working population" to take on capitalism, and then assert a dictatorship of the proletariat. It takes the form of the Southern Question because of the particular patterns of capital accumulation which emerge after unification, with the northern bourgeosie the hegemonic force in an historic bloc with southern landlords based on protectionism. The costs of the industrialisation project, undertaken to speed up growth and pay off massive debts incurred during the wars of unification, were borne overwhelmingly by the agrarian poor who had to pay heavy taxes to sustain development. Investments tended overwhelmingly to benefit the north, whose elites dominated in the state and in the great banks that started to develop at the turn of the century. Heavy industry was concentrated in the northern triangle of Turin, Milan and Genoa. Elsewhere, even in the north, industry remained underdeveloped. Most workers operated as artisanal producers or in small factories, and many were peasants sucked into the cities by the disparity of wealth. Their labour was largely precarious. This uneven relationship effectively forced the south and the islands into a position of colonial dependency. Bourgeois hegemony was thus consolidated in part through the colonial ideology known as 'Southernism', propagated both by the bourgeoisie and by reformist socialists: "the South is the ball and chain which prevents the social development of Italy from progressing more rapidly; the Southerners are biologically inferior beings, semi-barbarians or total barbarians, by natural destiny; if the South is backward, the fault does not lie with the capitalist system or with any other historical cause, but with Nature, which has made the Southerners lazy, incapable, criminal and barbaric".
If the working class is to effectively free itself, it must break with these prejudices. These were ideas 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 ac