LENIN'S TOMB

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Gramsci on the Southern Question posted by Richard Seymour

Prior to Gramsci's arrest and imprisonment by the Fascists, he wrote an important essay entitled '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 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 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 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.

Labels: capitalism, classes, combined and uneven development, fascism, gramsci, hegemony, italy, regions, revolution, socialism, working class

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Beating them at their own game. posted by Richard Seymour

This is about what Hamid Dabashi calls 'colonial modernity', the strange process in which the practises supposedly associated with Enlightenment, daring to know, using one's own intelligence, were exported by virtue of military force in a way that deprived the supposed subjects of such Enlightenment of the agency to fulfil the Kantian imperative. I do not need to elaborate on the common theme in imperial ideology, from Mill to Whitman Rostow, in which the colonised world was regarded as being in need of a violent military ruler who would impose such Enlightenment until the subjects were of age. But this is particularly about a pre-emptive strike by the targets of colonial powers, by states that sought aggressively to appropriate the forms of colonial modernity before it was imposed on them. This process was an important, if complicated, component of the global challenge to European rule. Gerald Horne writes that the decline of white supremacy as a global system of state organisation was signalled by developments in the 1890s, particularly in the form of an event quite often just overlooked or skated over in the histories of Italy: the Italian defeat at the hands of Ethiopians in 1896. Horne writes that: "at the time there was “no parallel case in modern history” of a “European army . . . annihilated by a native African race.”" Before Ethiopia became a global beacon of resistance to Mussolini, a focal point in the struggle against white supremacy in its most pernicious forms, it had already made anti-colonial history right in the middle of the Scramble for Africa.

Less than a decade later, Japan would prove its mettle against Imperial Russia. The dynamics of state formation are crucial here: Japan had reacted defensively to incursions by the West, specifically Commodore Perry's 'opening' of the country in 1854, by building a form of state capitalism. It had built a modern state, and was admired by American politicians and thinkers for its willingness to imitate the white man. Similarly, Ethiopian modern state formation was driven by self-defense against the forays of European colonial states.

In the north of Africa and parts of western Africa, Islamic reformism provided the legitimising ideology for strategies of state-building and the development of 'legitimate commerce' (which is not to imply that capital accumulation was always coterminous with the development of modern states - it isn't the case with Ethiopia). So, for example, attempts by colonial powers to prevent Egypt from industrialising and maintain it as an agrarian periphery of Manchester (which was, apparently, to its "comparative advantage" in the Ricardian terminology of the time) were resisted by the subalternised elites increasingly under the banner of reviving Islam. Ethiopia was not Muslim but Christian, and according to prevalent raciological assumptions, the 'true' Ethiopians were 'white' since they could trace their descendants to the Hamitic invaders of north Africa. Indeed, Ethiopia was seen by some colonial sources as a welcome bulwark against Arab-Islamic expansion. But, according to the historian Teshale Tibebu, its processes of state formation in the nineteenth century, centralising rule over previously disunited sovereignties, were similarly defensive and similarly offensive. That is, to resist European colonial powers, Ethiopia's rulers understood well enough that a strong state could be built much as they had been in Europe: through territorial conquest, and by integrating parcellised groups and statehoods into a larger polity. The same military build-up and use of imported rifles that enabled the construction of a centralised Ethiopian state also facilitated its victory in the 1896 Battle of Adwa.

The very logic of centralisation and homogenisation - under which Emperor Haile Selassie would later repress regional demands for autonomy and quash the Ethiopian-Eritrean federation, and which validated the destructive centralism of the Derg - would have important consequences for the emergence of Ethiopian nationalism partly as a result of the victory at Adwa. On the one hand, it created a predatory state in which the martial class was at liberty to appropriate from the peasants even during peacetime. It also threatened to undermine the basis for national unity precisely through its repression of regional identities. On the other hand, though a relatively powerful army had been built, the Battle of Adwa was notable for being a popular war. Peasants from across the country, including the 'colonised' domains marched by foot, carrying their own equipment, to deliver a crushing defeat to the Italian would-be colonists. The Ethiopian army was 100,000 strong and, had it not been for the arrogance of the Italians in sending 14,500 troops to fight a vaster army of well-armed Ethiopians, the war may have been won without a shot being fired. The peasants who rallied to the defense of Ethiopia did so not to defend the aspirations of the monarchs. After all, it was Emperor Menelik who had signed a treaty with the Italian rulers, allowing them to rule Eritrea - and it was that treaty which, it turned out, gave all of Ethiopia to Italy in the Italian language version. The peasants had every reason to distrust and despise the Ethiopian ruling class, but they mobilised to resist what they knew would be an even more predatory and oppressive ruler, and thus opened the space for a generalised critique of the oppressive colonial modernity into which they were being integrated. The national identity that emerged after Adwa cannot be read off from 'natural' ethnic allegiances (even supposing such a thing could exist), but from a popular desire for equality and justice that could be turned against the ruling class itself.

This dynamic of national liberation was evident throughout the twentieth century: the attempt to subvert the racial hierarchy (or in the case of Japan, to invert it, to place white Euro-Americans at the bottom of the pyramid) involved a dual process in which national rulers sought to emulate the colonists through the construction of developmentalist states, and at the same time mobilised popular movements who would challenge the colonial model in its entirety. And of course, the model for popular insurgency, or at least the informing lexicon, came from the Russian Revolution. Horne argues that this revolution was by far the key moment in the attack on white supremacy. American race theorists certainly saw it in such terms:

The implications of the Bolshevik Revolution for “white supremacy” were glimpsed early on by Lothrop Stoddard, Madison Grant, and other theorists of “white supremacy.” The latter saw “Asia in the guise of Bolshevism with Semitic leadership and Chinese executioners organizing an assault upon western Europe.” The former saw Lenin as “a modern Jenghiz Khan plotting the plunder of a world”; Bolshevism, he exclaimed, was “in fact, as anti-racial as it is anti-social” and “thus reveals itself as the arch-enemy of civilization and the race. Bolshevism is the renegade, the traitor within the gates, who would betray the citadel. Therefore, Bolshevism must be crushed out with iron heels, no matter what the cost.”

Even racist American rulers entertained respect for 'plucky' little Japan. Theodore Roosevelt admired their martial capabilities a great deal, and there was in fact a brief period of conviviality between the US and Japan after the defeat of Russia, which lasted until Wilson's role in thwarting a clause calling for racial equality at the Paris Peace Conference. But Bolshevism was something different. It was a frontal attack on a whole model, a whole 'way of life' as it would come to be called. It was fundamentally alien and threatening precisely because it sought to revolutionise modernity, to draw out its democratising, egalitarian impulses and bring them to their logical conclusion. There could be no co-existence with it, and no mutual respect, because Bolshevism didn't just mean healthy competition with white ruling classes: it meant death to them.

Labels: colonial modernity, colonialism, ethiopia, italy, white supremacy

Monday, August 04, 2008

Radical Light posted by Richard Seymour

[Subtext: Dreary religious symbolism to one side, the current exhibition at the National Gallery is really fabulous. Forget all the hype about the Hadrian exhibition (which is over-rated, over-priced and boringly over-egged) and spend a Saturday afternoon perusing the Divisionists.]

Labels: divisionism, italy, radical light

Saturday, July 26, 2008

Unequal before the law posted by Richard Seymour

Berlusconi has won legislation that will force illegal immigrants charged with crimes to serve sentences a third longer than Italians. Oh, and they're also going to let soldiers patrol the streets alongside the police. And next year, I'm sure, the camicie nere will be permitted to join them to the soundtrack of Giovinezza.

Labels: berlusconi, fascism, immigration, italy, racism

Sunday, July 06, 2008

What went wrong in Italy? posted by Richard Seymour

A good meeting at Marxism yesterday involved a discussion of what happened to the Italian left in the recent elections, at which the right not only won massively, but the far right groups and particularly the racist Lega Nord made real increases in their vote. The Lega increased its vote by a third, while the left vote organised through the 'rainbow coalition' collapsed so much that for the first time since WWII, the communists have no representation in parliament. This is the third time, meanwhile, the Lega Nord have been participants in a Berlusconi-led government. The focus of the discussion by Tom Behan, and Cinzia Arruzza of Sinistra Critica (formerly a critical marxist group within the Rifondazione Comunista that broke away in December last year to form a new party when it was clear just how much the RC had broke with radical policies), was mainly on the horrendous strategic errors of the radical left. The coalition with a neoliberal government saw the Rifondazione vote to send troops to Afghanistan despite the fact that it had been elected as an antiwar party. As one speaker put it "we went from 'Another World is Possible' to 'it isn't even possible to vote against the war'": a drastic contraction of vision. This is very important for the British left, which risks being pulled down with New Labour if it attaches itself to that sinking vessel. And what consistently came through in the contributions was just how much the left has collapsed after the elections - not in numerical terms, but organisationally. There has been precious little mobilisation against the far right as it has engaged in shocking attacks on immigrants with a more or less free hand, with the centre-left preferring to pander to the rhetoric of the far right. Even the 'neutral' organs of the state, as Alberto Toscano pointed out, are becoming the vectors for these racist attacks, as when a court of appeals kicked out a conviction of a far right activist who had agitating against gypsies as 'thieves', on the grounds that gypsies were indeed all thieves (I paraphrase, but it really was something as toxic as that). Toscano's analysis, described a number of times as pessimistic (usually a curse word in such venues, but not on this occasion), was the best by far. I was without pen and paper, so I am unable to give a detailed description of what he said. Instead, I just wanted to try and pursue some of the themes he raised.

What is distinctive, and dangerous, about the Lega Nord is that it has established a sizeable voting base in the working class, particularly the working class in the northern regions, which they refer to as 'Padania'. As Toscano pointed out, the LN is not just a 'protest' party: it has built up support over successive generations, often where the Italian communist party has collapsed. In traditionally left-leaning regions such as Lombardy and Piedmont, it gained votes sometimes in excess of 25%, and among industrial workers has gained as much as 37% of the vote. Although it has drawn on the iconography of Italian fascism, it is not an Italian nationalist party. Rather it has promised to defend fiscal regionalism and has at times explicitly called for Padanian secession. There is a slightly boneheaded analysis in some left websites, which contends that the LN is really defending the northern industrial ruling class from being taxed to support the poorer south. There is an element of this, and racism toward southern Italians has played a role in LN propaganda, but this doesn't explain how it could have gained the support of industrial workers in the north. In part, the answer is that the LN has successfully vocalised the politics of resentment, often using the methods of street politics learned from the left: house occupations in defense of the rights of 'indigenous' people against immigrants, for example.

Part of LN's strength results from a re-alignment of the Italian right. Regionalist parties had been developing since the 1970s, and Umberto Bossi had founded the Lega Lombardy in 1984, which by 1991 had gained 18.9% of the vote in Lombardy regional elections, prompting him to unite with other regional leagues to form the Lega Nord. By June 1993, the LN had won 40% of the local elections in Milan, and was displacing the Christian Democrats as the dominant party of the north. This was the basis upon which it was able to participate, in a turbulent way, in Berlusconi's first administration. What distinguished the Lega Nord apart from its truculent xenophobia was its successful parlaying of social distress into attacks on the corrupt and inefficient 'palazzo' (loosely, the headquarters of the political class), and the defense of a specifically territorial integrity. From its beginnings, it proved able to weld a cross-class coalition on the basis of this mix. Although, for example, the Lega Lombardy's earliest base of support was among wealthier areas that were abandoning the Christian Democrats, the destruction of several manufacturing areas allowed it to pose as the only party interested in defending the local economy. The LN has frequently complained in its propaganda that northern Italians and businesses based there pay very high taxes and get poor services in return. And a consistent theme, repeated in this 2005 election poster, is that immigrants get first place over the 'indigenous'. It complains that the public sector overtaxes and undermines local dynamism in order to subsidise a southern economy permeated by foreign drug-runners, black marketeers Its territorial solution to the social distress brought about by neoliberal capitalism also allows it to oppose the EU, including the Constitutional Treaty, and while it has been supportive of the 'war on terror' and particularly its Islamophobic thrust, it has frequently opposed US imperialism. In other words, it has occupied some of the political space that parties like the Rifondazione Comunista might otherwise fill. The regionalism, incidentally, is inchoate, with a tendency to subdivide into further localisms (a particular Trento identity, for example). And partially as a consequence of this, the Lega Nord sometimes vacillated between asserting that Padania is a specific territorial-cultural entity that ought to be separate, and asserting that its just a metaphor for the historical and cultural unity of the north.

It's important to recognise that the LN's story is not simply one of unbroken upward ascent. For a long time from 1996, its vote was in serious decline. By 2001, in the wake of the refulgence of mass anticapitalism, the party recorded a vote of 3.9%, down from 10.1% in 1996. Not only was it down nationally, it was substantially abridged in several key areas of the north, its vote halved or worse across Lombardy and slashed by two-thirds in Veneto, Piedmont and Friuli Venezia-Giulia. Even so, it had been instrumental to helping the centre-right Berlusconi-led coalition defeat Massimo D'Alema's Ulivo coalition in regional elections in 2000, and was gaining an important foothold in national right-wing politics, despite its apparent alienation from the political establishment. And despite its electoral decline, it was given a privileged position in the second Berlusconi administration, from 2001-2005, with Bossi enjoying a close relationship with both Berlusconi and his finance minister Giulio Tremonti. A regionalist party participating in a national government has a freight of oppositionism to bear, and in this case Bossi chose to oppose other junior coalition partners such as the 'post-fascist' Alleanza Nazionale rather than the more explicitly pro-business Forza Italia (FI). The Lega's position was improved as it, along with other coalition partners, made up for the declined in FI votes in the 2004 Euro elections. And while it has not yet recovered its 1996 position, it has more than doubled its 2006 national vote of 4.1% to 8.3% in 2008.

The Lega Nord's current strength rests largely on its vociferous, and quite successful, scapegoating of immigrants for Italy's manifest economic woes. Umberto Bossi is demanding 'reforms', and threatening that his supporters will take up arms if they don't come: "We have no fear of taking things to the piazzas. We have 300,000 martyrs ready to come down from the mountains. Our rifles are always smoking." The Lega is using "citizen street patrols" in some areas to terrorise immigrant, and particularly Muslim, communities. Deploying a language of insecurity and tension, it has transposed a class antagonism into a territorial antagonism, and now leads the calls for a purge of that territory. The ease with which this can morph into outright fascist politics is obvious from the fascist salutes and cries of 'Duce' that greeted Rome's neo-fascist mayor. Given the sheer redundancy of the left response so far, groups like Sinistra Critica have to be at the centre of reviving Italy's venerable anti-fascist tradition.

Labels: fausto bertinotti, italy, lega nord, rifondazione comunista, roma gypsies, romano prodi

Saturday, May 17, 2008

"Ethnic Cleansing" in Italy posted by Richard Seymour

Apropos this, this is depressing. 61% of Italians want the Roma expelled. Got that? Ethnic cleansing is a public priority. In Naples, organised thugs are trying to make this a reality by attacking Roma camps with molotov cocktails, and bragging of "ethnic cleansing". Locals allegedly watched and applauded as this happened, after a woman claimed that gypsies had broken into her flat and tried to steal her baby. The idea that gypsies steal babies is quite a common racist claim. Before travelling to Rome myself in 2006, I read several accounts on travel websites which insisted that this was true, and that sometimes they might even chuck the baby at you as a prelude to stealing your stuff. This isn't a joke. People are being murdered because this sort of tale is widely believed.

So what is going on in Italy? The far right Northern League doubled its electorate in the recent elections, gaining 8.3% of the national vote. Rome now has a neo-fascist mayor. He was greeted by cheers of Duce! when he was elected, while Umberto Bossi told reporters: "I don't know what the left wants [but] we are ready ... If they want conflicts, I have 300,000 men always on hand." Berlusconi added: "We are the new Falange." And, on top of it all, he was backed by a sizeable portion of Rome's Jewish population because of his support for Israel. (Importantly, however, the Jewish quarter was also the site of early protests against the new mayor). This is a stunning reversal in a country that has hitherto boasted the biggest anti-capitalist and antiwar demonstrations, and one of the strongest votes for an explicitly anti-capitalist party in Europe. There, Berlusconi's government was broken by waves of mass strike action and protest, and eventually kicked out. Now, he's back and his closest ally in government is Bossi.

In truth, the previous centre-left government had connived in the demonisation and repression of Roma gypsies. It was Prodi who introduced an emergency decree authorising expulsion of the Roma in October 2007. And whereas Berlusconi had been unable to drive gypsies outside Rome's city limits because of protest, Veltroni responded to racist hysteria about gypsy criminality by pledging to drive them into 'solidarity villages' - small camps outside Rome controlled by police. It's hard to imagine a more disgusting politically correct term for such an obscenely racist measure. This followed the rape and murder of one Giovanna Reggiani, it turned out by a Roma gypsy. The reason the police were able to track down the suspect quickly was that a resident of the same camp on which the man was living had alerted them. Still, anxious to jump on the racist bandwagon, Veltroni coyly let it be known that 75% of arrestees came from a "particular country" (absolutely untrue, but it became a reference in the Italian media). And it was widely reported that expulsion plans were being expedited. Police statistics had said that gypsies accounted for just over 15.4% of all murders committed by 'foreigners' in Italy, which was the source of some national outrage, except among those who noticed that Roma gypsies accounted for just over 15% of all 'foreigners' in Italy, and that there was no disproportion. Thanks to this racist climate, Roma gypsies have been made to channel everything that's wrong with Italy. From economic failure to crime, they've been successfully depicted as somehow responsible for it all.

Labels: berlusconi, fascism, italy, roma gypsies, umberto bossi

Monday, March 10, 2008

Mussolini in Africa. posted by Richard Seymour

On March 17, 1937, Mussolini was greeted by notables from Tripoli and presented with a bejewelled sword, that was to symbolise his role as the 'Sword of Islam'. This is an interesting episode, because it is picked on by neoconservative authors such as Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer to give sustenance to their gripes about the Islamification of Europe and its inherent totalitarianism. Of course, it's absolute nonsense, as the notables in question were exhorted to greet Mussolini in this manner (the Duce did enjoy his parades and ceremonies). Libya had by then been re-conquered by Italian forces, and subjected to furious massacres including a bout of genocide. Mussolini's claim to be a liberator of Islam was as meaningful as Napoleon's claim to the same fame when he invaded Egypt in 1798, yet quite often his opportunistic manouevring is taken as a serious policy orientation - "pro-Arabism", it's called. Those lucky Arabs.

There are some reasons why people might feel ill-equipped to deal with this topic. On the one hand, colonial policy, far from being epiphenomenal, was central to Mussolini's ambitions for Italy. On the other, the topic is actually touched on only rather lightly in histories of the Middle East and Africa, as well as in the histories of fascism. In several mainstream histories of the Middle East that I possess, for example, little is even mentioned about the Italian occupation of Libya, and the only one that mentions the genocide is Ilan Pappe's 'Modern History of the Middle East'. It is not discussed at all in Roger Eatwell's book on fascism - Ethiopia is touched upon, Libya glanced toward, but beyond vague adumbrations about 'repression', there is little detail. Even Alexander De Grand's valuable short introduction to the topic of Italian Fascism doesn't spend a great deal of time talking about colonial policy, and has nothing at all about Libya beyond a few references to the 1911 war. Robert Paxton's history, The Anatomy of Fascism, does at least mention some of the policies in both Libya and Ethiopia. In Italian histories, the colonial policy of the fascist regime tended to be overlooked almost entirely right up until the 1970s. It seemed that with the Treaty of Paris in 1947, the Italian elite simply gave up the colonies and agreed not to say too much about it, and the historians followed suit (although there was a fifty volume history produced by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which was ecstatic about the whole business and Italy's civilizing role). Chemical weapons, concentration camps and genocide are apparently touchy subjects. In some cases, this could be related to the disturbing efforts to resuscitate the Duce's reputation. Where there isn't outright resuscitation, there is a general argument that he was a moderate who transcended left and right, and if only he had stopped in 1936 and resisted the Hitlerian nemesis, then all would have been perfectly fine. For an example of the latter, you might consult the Spectator journalist Nicholas Farrell's biography, Mussolini: A New Life, or Richard Lamb's Mussolini and the British, which argues that Mussolini was essentially a good chap who could have been won to the allied side if he hadn't been so bewildered by the unsporting criticism of his invasion of Ethiopia.

In fact, Italy's capacity to wage war for its own glory was at the heart of Mussolini's political transformation. Having been a revolutionary and a pacifist who made his name opposing the 1911 Libyan war, he shifted rapidly to the right during the first few months of World War I, and was taken up and encouraged by sectors of Italian power including corporate interests, as well as by the French and Belgian governments. He advocated 'democratic interventionism' - instead of neutrality, or Italy fulfilling its obligations in the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austro-Hungary, Italy should support the 'democratic' states. There was no democratic content to the war at all, and Mussolini was in reality siding with the most reactionary elements in Italian politics. Once an opponent of the moderate Socialist leader Bissolati, Mussolini came to rely on him to keep him out of the conflict (he didn't personally enjoy the battle, unlike Hitler), and he was returned from battle to work on his paper, Popolo d’Italia, after a relatively slight injury in 1917. The claim to any kind of socialism, 'national' or otherwise, was shortly abandoned. Il Popolo embraced anti-communism and was the first publication to carry John Spargo's hostile accounts of the Russian Revolution. Whatever Mussolini's spurious appeals to the Italian proletariat, neither the Popolo nor the fasci di combattimento formed in 1919 showed much sign of working class involvement. The fascists had essentially shed the assorted socialists and syndicalists that had comprised part of the initial membership base in Milan, and became a pro-monarchical rightist party of petit-bourgeois and agrarian resurgence. Yet the appeal to some specious notion of 'progress' and workerism would stay in his rhetoric long after he had ideologically, formally and organisationally separated himself from radicalism of any stripe. Even in 1940, he was appealling to 'proletarians' to defend the "Revolution" against the "plutocratic and reactionary democracies of the West". The proletarians later killed him and hung him upside down from a meat hook.

I don't need to go into detail about the rise of fascism and the March on Rome, but suffice to say that the reformist Prime Minister Giolitti's attempts to hold the liberal state together in the face of working class insurgency, in part by forming a coalition with the fascists, failed. The elections in May 1921 demonstrated that the Socialists and Communists remained a powerful electoral bloc, and the traditional liberal political class was wilting. Only the fascists could hold back the Left, and when the state began to collapse, the Italian capitalist federation Confindustria indicated support for a combined Mussolini-Giolitti government. Mussolini was able to reassure capital, clergy and monarchy that he was serious and would not attempt any radical experiments, and so he was given permission to sieze power in October 1922. Given difficult international conditions and Fascist Italy's lacklustre economic performance, colonial policy had to be placed on the backburner throughout the 1920s: the siezure of Ethiopia, which Italy had failed to conquer in 1896, would have to wait until 1935. But that didn't mean that Mussolini was uninterested. The Italian Geographical Society (SGI), long a major pillar of the state's expansionist ambitions and provider of explorers to scope out potential territory for conquest (first in Tunisia and Morocco, then Abyssinia/Ethiopia and Somaliland), was patronised early on by Mussolini. Several of its officials were integrated into the administration and the organisation provided much of the vital information for the ongoing wars to reconquer Libya, since Italian control had been reduced to the coastal cities and towns since 1915.

Mussolini's aggressive reassertion of Italian international power began in earnest in 1930 as the depression sank in. In Libya, the colonial authorities finally defeated the insurgency by imprisoning almost the entire "pacified" population in a system of brutal concentration camps from 1930 to 1932. Most of those captured died in the camps. Acting on the military doctrines of General Douhet, a Fascist supporter who advocated gassing, aerial bombardment and 'Total War', the colonialists could pound the 'inferior' natives from the seemingly limitless sky rather than getting down and dirty where the insurgents could mount some resistance. The Arab fighters were attacked with chemical weapons and bombs, destroyed and dispersed into the desert where the Italian air force could finish them off. Official Italian figures estimated a 37% reduction in the population, an authentic colonial genocide. The SGI's explorers were thereafter able to return to Italy with extensive ethnographic, cartographic and anthropological data, in its way 'proving' the progression of what had been a penumbral terra incognita into an enlightened Italian territory. Talk about power-knowledge. They produced studies of race types and a science of colonialism that would come to decisively influence the domestic politics of the Fascists.

Ethiopia, the sweetest plum in East Africa as far as Mussolini was concerned, was one of those territories as yet unoccupied by France, Britain or Germany. It was seen as available - dare I say virgin? - territory. Further, Fascist Italy was still on good terms with Popular Front France, and it would not have expected criticism from Britain for a colonial endeavour of this kind. However, Ethiopia was a member of the League of Nations and could claim its protection. So when Mussolini went to war on October 3 1935, the League voted for sanctions. Britain and France offered a compromise: Italy could have a large part of Ethiopia if it would accept the fiction of a rump Ethiopian state. Italy accepted, but the deal was leaked to the press and died in the exposure. Sanctions were applied, but at any rate without much commitment, and Italian forces proceeded into Addis Ababa to put the crown on a new Italian Empire. The atrocities perpetrated in the war generally passed without comment. Poisonous gas sprayed from airplanes, the bombing of Red Cross hospitals, massacres, summary executions, hundreds of thousands of deaths - these were not matters that other colonial powers had an opinion about unless Mussolini crossed them. Even after WWII, a seventeen-member UN War Crimes Commission specifically excluded Ethiopia, mainly because it was only concerned with crimes committed against European powers, Russia and the United States. How could a British government whose wartime leader approved of gassing natives, and was actually rather fond of Mussolini at times, raise the issue? At any rate, Italy's successes in East Africa radicalised the Fascist regime. Race theory, largely eschewed in its biological variants until 1935, became increasingly important to the regime. The Fascist 'new man' was to be shaped in the new order, and colonial racism became the basis of domestic racism. Just as in Ethiopia racial intermarriage was outlawed, so in 1938 the new 'Manifesto of Fascist Racism' forbade 'racial' intermarriage along the lines of Hitler's Nuremberg Laws. Mussolini had once enjoyed a small amount of Jewish support, and he had no objection to the Zionists - he particularly admired of Jabotinsky, who returned the compliment - but the regime began to discriminate against the country's ancient, well-integrated Jewish community. That persecution, of course, was not to become extermination until the so-called Republic of Salo. Unlike the Nazis, who could buy off business and popular constituencies throughout their spiralling derangement with the booty of pillage in Eastern Europe, Mussolini had little to show for his involvement, and nothing to offer either worker or parasite. The Italian ruling elite, desperate at the failure of supporting the German side in the war, tried in 1943 to oust Mussolini and have him arrested. The Nazis rescued him, occupied the country, and formally restored Mussolini's dictatorship, albeit within the confines of a puppet state. The agents of the Republic were the most radicalised and vicious sections of the fascist elite, and pursued the extermination of the Jews far more vigorously than most Italians were prepared to, and waged an unusually savage war of repression to stymy the leftist insurgency beginning in 1944.

Fascism did not need colonialism in order to be vicious and repressive. But the colonial idea gave it an impulse of radicalisation that led to its most destructive, and self-destructive phase. There could hardly be a more chilling example of Aime Cesaire's reminder that before Europeans were the victims of fascism, they were its accomplices; that "they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps and trickles from every crack."

Labels: colonialism, ethiopia, fascism, genocide, italy, libya, mussolini