'Some Aspects of the Southern Question'. What was the southern question? Essentially this: the bourgeoisie of Italy's north had subjugated not only the working class of the north but the peasants of the south, and Gramsci and the Italian communists were fighting to build a hegemonic alliance of the subaltern classes to overthrow this bourgeoisie. The south, Gramsci asserted, had been reduced to a colony of northern capital, and the peasants had a vested interest in supporting a workers' state that would do away with parasitic banks and industry. He quotes from L'Ordine Nuovo, in January 1920:
By introducing workers' control over industry, the proletariat will orient industry to the production of agricultural machinery for the peasants, clothing and footwear for the peasants, electrical lighting for the peasants, and will prevent industry and the banks from exploiting the peasants and subjecting them as slaves to the strongrooms. By smashing the factory autocracy, by smashing the oppressive apparatus of the capitalist State and setting up a workers' State that will subject the capitalists to the law of useful labour, the workers will smash all the chains that bind the peasant to his poverty and desperation. By setting up a workers' dictatorship and taking over the industries and banks, the proletariat will swing the enormous weight of the State bureaucracy behind the peasants in their struggle against the landowners, against the elements and against poverty. The proletariat will provide the peasants with credit, set up cooperatives, guarantee security of person and property against looters and carry out public works of reclamation and irrigation. It will do all this because an increase in agricultural production is in its interests; because to win and keep the solidarity of the peasants is in its interests; because it is in its interests to orient industrial production to work which will promote peace and brotherhood between town and countryside, between North and South.
The argument is thus one about hegemony, and revolutionary strategy. For the sake of clarity, I'll outline what I understand by Gramsci's conception of hegemony. Hegemony is political class leadership, in two senses: 1) leadership within a class alliance, either bourgeois or proletarian; 2) dominance over other classes. For the purposes of communist struggle, the working class seeks to take leadership of (hegemonise) an alliance of subaltern classes. It does this principally through the exertion of consensual power, negotiating between the classes, making the case for a mutually beneficial alliance with the working strategically in the forefront. This does not mean manipulatively taking up certain slogans to temporarily coopt other classes or class fractions, but actively modifying the perspective of the would-be hegemonic class itself so that it internalises parts of the perspective of subaltern groups. It is through this process that the working class ceases to be fighting a sectional battle and becomes a universal class. Yet its ability to do so depends on its ability to use coercion, to coordinate the struggle against and finally domination over the opposing classes. Previously dominant interpretations of Gramsci's argument assumed that he opposed hegemony to coercion in the form of a 'dictatorship of the proletariat', thus providing the basis for left social democratic and, later, Eurocommunist strategies for struggles against the Right. The argument runs that in Gramsci, the proper terrain for hegemonic struggles is in civil society, while the state is the zone of authority and coercion. Thus, hegemonic struggles must take place below the surface Peter Thomas' The Gramscian Moment shows that these interpretations misleadingly ignore key aspects of Gramsci's exposition, wherein he maintains that coercion and consent are different moments in a unitary political process: consensual power is exerted within the subaltern class alliance that seeks to assume leadership of society; coercive power is exerted over the defeated, previously ruling, classes once