d 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 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 