Journal of Modern Italian Studies

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Reconsidering Gramsci's interpretation of fascism

David D. Roberts

To cite this article: David D. Roberts (2011) Reconsidering Gramsci's interpretation of fascism,
Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 16:2, 239-255, DOI: 10.1080/1354571X.2011.542984

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Journal of Modern Italian Studies 16(2) 2011: 239–255

Reconsidering Gramsci’s interpretation of fascism

David D. Roberts
University of Georgia

Abstract
The increasingly accepted notion that fascism was not merely reactionary but
revolutionary, competing with Marxism, invites reassessment of Gramsci’s inter-
pretation of fascism. With his emphasis on the relative autonomy of political and
cultural factors, Gramsci might have recognized the scope for a competing
revolution, even if only the better to counter it. But though his initial analysis of the
Italian revolutionary situation was almost proto-fascist in certain respects, he
dismissed fascist claims to constitute an alternative revolution, and, partly as a result,
he consistently underestimated fascism prior to 1926. After his imprisonment,
however, he began seeking to devise the categories necessary to understand fascism’s
unanticipated triumph. Although he continued to sidestep aspects of the fascist
challenge, his innovative way of analyzing fascism as a form of Caesarism, engaged in
a war of attrition, enabled him to illuminate the peculiar combination of
accomplishment, limitation and failure that characterized the fascist regime.
Keywords
Antonio Gramsci, fascism, Caesarism, revolution, hegemony, Giovanni Gentile.

A reconsideration of Gramsci’s interpretation of Italian fascism seems warranted

especially in light of the eclipse of communism, which has invited not only a
reassessment of Marxism but also what some view as a de-mythologizing of
Gramsci in particular. His categories no longer seem to have quite the
incantatory power they once did. Moreover, the eclipse of communism has
contributed to the advent of less dismissive and reductionist approaches to
fascism at the same time.
Without claiming desirability or success, many have come to insist that,
rather than merely counterrevolutionary or reactionary, fascism was in some
sense ‘revolutionary in its own right’, to paraphrase Stanley Payne (1995: 494).
In the same vein, fascism was not some revolt against modernity but the quest
for an alternative modernity (see, for example, Morgan 2003: 192). Insofar as it
was such a revolutionary quest, fascism was not merely reacting against
Marxism but competing with it, based on newly developing diagnoses and
prescriptions. Roger Griffin (2008) even proposes that Marxist revolution,

Journal of Modern Italian Studies

ISSN 1354-571X print/ISSN 1469-9583 online ª 2011 Taylor & Francis
http://www.informaworld.com DOI: 10.1080/1354571X.2011.542984
David D. Roberts

both as conceived by Marx and as carried out by Lenin, can be subsumed under
fascist ‘palingenesis’, so that the fascist revolution becomes the archetypal
modern revolution. In terms of Italian fascism specifically, Emilio Gentile
(1996) has influentially portrayed its core as the quest for an anthropological
revolution to produce a ‘new man’ and a newly sacralized mode of politics.
Gramsci is widely viewed as one of the most imaginative of twentieth-
century Marxists, especially in accenting the relative autonomy of political and
cultural factors. As the First World War seemed to open the way to a
revolutionary era, he stressed the distinction between acting and understanding
and insisted, more particularly, that the relationship between the economic and
political spheres could only be assessed case by case, well after the fact (Gramsci
1982: 689, 1984: 204; Adamson 1980: 632). So how autonomous politics and
culture were in any one case was largely contingent, depending on the actual
struggle at hand. By implication, then, even for a Marxist asking why the fascist
direction, why the degree of success, why the limitations and ultimate failure,
the answers were not given beforehand but were determined by history.
In light of such flexibility, Gramsci might seem to have been especially open
to the possibility of a competing revolution, even if only the better to counter
it. So did the flexibility of his Marxism yield particular insight, or, in the last
analysis, did his Marxism entail blinders? Does his account perhaps point us to
an intermediate approach to fascism, between reduction to class reaction and a
possibly excessive willingness to credit fascism’s revolutionary pretensions? In
posing such questions, I hope to contribute to our understanding of the
sources, the possibilities, and the failures of the revolutionary moment that
grew from the First World War.
In one sense, Gramsci’s effort to assess fascism falls into two distinct phases.
He considered fascism first as it was emerging, in the context of the postwar
revolutionary situation. But even after Mussolini was appointed prime minister
in October 1922, and even into the beginnings of dictatorship early in 1925,
Gramsci found fascism sufficiently inchoate that it might be overcome in the
immediate term, yielding not a return to parliamentary democracy but a
renewal of the Marxist revolutionary struggle. So his assessment of fascism
remained bound up with immediate tactical and strategic considerations.
Not coincidentally, the consolidation of the fascist regime led to Gramsci’s
arrest in November 1926 and imprisonment the next month. When he began
his now-famous prison notebooks in 1929, with the regime seemingly well
entrenched, he necessarily became more reflective about fascism’s long-term
meaning as he sought to understand this unanticipated outcome of Italy’s
revolutionary crisis. But, though the context was now radically different,
Gramsci’s analysis of fascism remained part of his wider effort to derive
revolutionary strategic lessons from the triumph of fascism to that point.
In December 1933, with his health, always poor, deteriorating rapidly,
Gramsci was transferred to the first of two clinics, then died in April 1937. At
that point, of course, the fascist dynamic was still playing out, so we must

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remember that Gramsci did not see the whole trajectory, culminating in a
particular mode of failure. Although aspects of that trajectory would defy them,
the categories he devised in prison proved in the end to illuminate the peculiar
combination of accomplishment, limitation, and failure that characterized the
fascist regime.
Gramsci could not have been expected to sort it all out as it happened. The
course of fascism was anything but certain – and was much contested by the
fascists themselves. Yet drawing out Gramsci on the nature of the revolutionary
situation helps us see scope for an alternative, anti-Marxist revolution in
principle. At the same time, however, we note his reluctance to take seriously
fascist claims to constitute such an alternative. As a result, he consistently
underestimated fascism prior to 1926.
Even before the Bolshevik takeover in Russia, Gramsci was conveying his
sense of what, in light of the war, was revolutionary about the situation in
Europe (Gramsci 1982: 452–55). By then he was a committed Marxist, but a
Marxist of a particular sort, thanks partly to his reading of the idealist-historicist
thinkers Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, with their accent on human
freedom and the scope for human action from within an open-ended history.
In February 1917, Gramsci referred to Croce as ‘the greatest European thinker
of the present time’, and Crocean accents are prominent in his writing during
the pivotal 1917–19 period (Gramsci 1982: 21 [Feb. 1917]).1
Gentile’s impact was also clear by 1917, as he was becoming prominent not
only as a philosopher but also as a civic educator. Gramsci’s way of embracing
the ‘spiritual’ meaning of the First World War, as socializing the masses and
thereby forming a new collective subject, paralleled Gentile’s (Maggi 2008: 27–
8, 34, 211). In an article of February 1918, Gramsci found Gentile’s
philosophical system, unifying the true and the actual in a never-to-be
completed dialectical progression, to be the ultimate development of the
idealist tradition that, in Germany, had not proceeded beyond Hegel (Gramsci
1982: 650–51 [Feb. 1918]).
Before the advent of fascism, Gramsci characterized the revolutionary
situation in terms surprisingly congruent with those of many, including
Gentile, who were on their way to fascism. The two sides made analogous
arguments about the revolutionary impact of the war and about why it was
now necessary and possible for Italy to transcend the liberal order. Like
Gramsci, proto-fascists placed great store on idealism, spiritual transformation
and collective will as they played down doctrine or ideology. Gramsci (1955: 6,
8 [June 1919]) even paralleled Gentile in finding the goal to be a deeper
identification with something like a proto-totalitarian ethical state. And critical
though he was of fascist violence, he subsequently recognized that to have put
things back together on a new basis in response to Italy’s revolutionary crisis
would have required compulsion, extra-legal force (Gramsci 1971a: 228–29).
Gramsci acknowledged the limits of the mainstream revolutionary tradition
by 1917, even implying that the Croce–Gentile filter was necessary, first to

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make the appropriate idealist sense of Marxism and, second, to justify the
Leninist revolution in light of what had come to seem Marxist orthodoxy.
Even Marx could not have foreseen the actual revolutionary situation, so
revolutionaries found themselves in uncharted territory. Gramsci was initially
concerned with the requirements for carrying through the revolution in
Russia, but his insistence that ‘the revolutionaries themselves create the
conditions necessary for the full and complete realization of their ideal’ suggested
a wider idealist revolutionary opportunity (Gramsci 1982: 516 [Dec. 1917]).2
Although it was bound up with the acceleration of capitalist development
produced by the war, the revolutionary situation in Italy, as Gramsci saw it, was
not the cataclysmic crisis of capitalism foreseen in classical Marxism. And
though the earlier bourgeois hegemony was dissolving, Gramsci was explicit
that the solution did not entail immediately instituting ‘socialism’ (Gramsci
1955: 10–13 [June 1919], 277–78 [Oct. 1919]). But neither was the revolution
to be preliminary, in the sense of the bourgeois revolution, nor was it simply to
create a deeper parliamentary democracy. Although he was certainly concerned
with the exploitative side of capitalism, Gramsci looked beyond economic
relationships to posit a wider spiritual crisis and dissolution of societal bonds,
symptomatic of what he later plausibly portrayed as the dissolution of the
hegemony of the established ruling class. From within the liberal dispensation,
moreover, the Italian bourgeoisie had not been sufficiently productive; any
revolution would have to unshackle productivist energies in Italy (Gramsci
1982: 571 [Jan. 1918], 1984: 159, 176 [July 1918]).
What was needed was not so much a revolution against capitalism as a
revolution against liberalism – but also against what we might loosely call
‘positivism’, entailing all the cultural assumptions that kept human beings from
grasping their collective potential to shape their world, even, up to a point,
their economic world (Gramsci 1982: 513–15 [Dec. 1917]). It would not
necessarily be the ultimate revolution, but, even in Marxist terms, it might be
understood as the appropriate revolution for now, to carry beyond liberalism
and positivism toward deeper communitarian values and a new understanding
of the relationship between politics and economics.
In light of what would that revolution might entail, who was best equipped
to spearhead it? Gramsci became bitterly critical of what seemed the tactical
failings of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), then even of his rivals within Italian
communism after the schism of January 1921.3 But whatever those failings, on
what basis could the Marxists claim privileged insight even in principle under
these particular revolutionary circumstances? Insofar as the war had been, as for
Gramsci, a school of energies and cohesion, his way of linking the
revolutionary opportunity to the proletariat, as opposed to those actually
embracing the war experience most explicitly, might seem arbitrary (Gramsci
1980: 291–92 [May 1916], 1982: 452–54 [Nov. 1917], 1955: 24–27 [Aug.
1919]). He also noted the need for leadership by a minority with a particular
mode of consciousness and will within a hierarchical structure in the

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determination of historical change (Gramsci 1984: 205–6 [July 1918]). It might

seem that the unforeseen war experience had yielded the scope for a new
minority to step forward and claim the leadership.
So the obvious question is whether, in light of the revolutionary situation as
Gramsci himself conceived it, fascism might have constituted an alternative
revolutionary force, contesting the post-liberal terrain with the Marxists. As
fascism began emerging as a mass movement, Gramsci (1972: 12 [Jan. 1921])
generally took it for granted that it could only end up seeking to defend the
interests of the large landowners and industrialists. Yet he acknowledged that
fascism encompassed discontents and aspirations that were potentially
revolutionary in implication, even as he also noted various axes of division
within fascism. He was certainly correct that the ideals of fascism were
somewhat inchoate; but prior to his imprisonment, he failed to connect certain
dots, and he underestimated the staying power and scope for development of
the radical, post-liberal strands within fascism. Yet he was discerning what
proved some crippling limitations of the fascist revolutionary effort at the same
time.
In responding to fascism, Gramsci frequently proved wrong in his
assessments of the implications of particular episodes, partly because he was
misled by short-term oscillations reflecting tactical maneuvering. Mussolini’s
‘betrayal’ of D’Annunzio’s regime at Fiume certainly manifested disparities in
the immediate priorities of the disaffected and, above all, strategic
uncertainties in the unprecedented, highly volatile situation. But it did not
indicate as deep a fissure as Gramsci (1972: 76–79 [Feb. 1921]) assumed.
Much of the legacy of Fiume, including the memory of its neo-syndicalist
constitution, the Carta del Carnaro, would be encompassed within fascism,
even if to play a largely mythological role. In the same way, Gramsci’s
analysis of the split over the pacification pact of August 1921 misconstrued
the stakes of the dispute, as understood by at least some of the squadristi
opposed to the pact. In continuing their assault on the socialist unions, they
were seeking to force the workers into fascist unions, which, as they saw it,
would eventually become components of a new state as fascism made its
alternative revolution. At the same time, they wanted to keep fascism from
getting bogged down in the parliamentary compromise that Mussolini’s
strategy seemed to portend.
The schism Gramsci anticipated in light of the 1921 dispute did not occur,
not least because, under the compromise reached that fall, fascist trade-union
and corporativist development continued (Gramsci 1972: 297–99 [Aug. 1921]).
In pronouncing the beginning of the end of such development in January 1924,
Gramsci again missed the staying power of this particular radical strand
(Gramsci 1971b: 520–22 [Jan. 1924]). Some say that the end was reached with
the sbloccamento of 1928, but even that notion has been overplayed. Although
the relative autonomy that the fascist union confederation had maintained
under the veteran syndicalist Edmondo Rossoni was lost, fascist trade-union

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development continued from within the emerging corporativist framework. In

his prison writings, Gramsci himself would recognize that fascist corporativism
was playing an ongoing progressive role up to a point, despite what he had said
in 1924.
Gramsci’s treatment of the rivalry in 1925–26 between minister of the
interior Luigi Federzoni, a staunch monarchist and former Nationalist, and
Fascist Party secretary Roberto Farinacci, a leader of the radical, sometimes
unruly squadrista element within fascism, is still another example of his tendency
toward a certain myopia (Gramsci 1971b: 116–18). For Gramsci the cleft was
the latest evidence of the fundamental contradiction in fascism between
capitalist and petty bourgeois interests. Whereas those like Federzoni,
representing big capitalism, wanted to liquidate the party altogether, Farinacci
represented the petty bourgeois element, which saw the party as its institutional
base. The party was to pressure the state to keep the petty bourgeoisie from
being crushed by capitalism. But in the last analysis, as Gramsci saw it, the
Farinacci tendency was merely a diffuse state of mind lacking organization and
clear direction; the government would find it easy to dissolve its constitutive
nuclei (Gramsci 1971b: 116–18, 122).
The Federzoni–Farinacci rivalry was indeed symptomatic of ongoing party-
state tensions, but even as Farinacci and the party lost this particular battle, the
outcome did not indicate the marginalization of the Fascist Party, with its
radical pretensions, as Gramsci expected. Even as Farinacci’s particular brand of
radicalism was muffled, the party went on to win renewed significance,
especially under two of his successors as party secretary, Augusto Turati and
Achille Starace.
Gramsci relied especially on the ‘petty bourgeoisie’ category to deny any
scope for the fascists to develop their own radical departure from liberal
democracy (Gramsci 1972: 9–12 [2 Jan. 1921]).4 And he traced ‘petty
bourgeois’ discontents and aspirations to the economic level, even though, in
principle, there was scope for a departure based on relatively autonomous
political and cultural concerns. In January 1926, as the fascist dictatorship was
being fully consolidated, Gramsci concluded that the petty bourgeois
component in fascism was itself being damaged by fascist policies, which were
concentrating wealth in the hands of the industrial and agrarian oligarchy
(Gramsci and Togliatti 1971: 497). But the resulting discontents, he assumed,
could help fuel revolution only insofar as they were encompassed by the
Marxists and the working class.
Gramsci was quick to blame his Marxist rivals for the failure of the left to
reach out to wider discontented elements that, in many cases, found their way
into fascism. But it is not clear he himself understood fascism well enough
during this period to have done better, had he been in a position to establish
strategy. In repairing so quickly to the petty bourgeoisie category and in
reducing discontents to the economic level, he was settling for a delimited
understanding of the radical discontents and aspirations at issue. Thus he did

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not convincingly think through what would have been required to embrace
them.
Writing thirty years ago, Walter Adamson charged that because Gramsci
never questioned his conception of the political as essentially market rational
behavior, his socio-psychological analysis of fascism was somewhat shallow, and
thus he failed to grasp the nature of fascism’s rational and irrational appeal.
Because of his delimited sense of the needs at issue, Adamson (1980: 622, 624)
concluded, Gramsci could not have specified a convincing alternative to
fascism in light of the Matteotti crisis of 1924, even had he tried. Adamson
mentions that in prison Gramsci read one book by Freud, implying that had he
read more along those lines he would better have understood what fascism was
all about. But there are other possibilities.
Let us first recall the classic analysis by the PSI leader Pietro Nenni (1962),
who argued that the left failed especially in its attitude toward the Italian war
effort. The socialist-led workers, he suggested, could have taken a populist-
democratic tack by reaching out to discontented war veterans who believed in
the war’s positive values, but instead the left disparaged the war and the claims
of its national-popular significance. At one point Gramsci (1972: 297–98 [Aug.
1921]) acknowledged that fascist antisocialism stemmed not only from naked
class struggle but also, at least in part, from the disputes between the socialists
and interventionist associations during the war. But he offered no sustained
analysis of the implications of that axis of division for the terms of the Italian
revolutionary situation.
Comparison with the Argentinean-born Marxist Ernesto Laclau, who
analyzed the Italian situation in 1977, is still more illuminating. As Laclau saw
it, Italy experienced a genuinely revolutionary crisis as earlier modes of
dominance dissolved in the wake of World War I, but the crisis could not be
understood in conventional Marxist terms. The situation offered the scope for a
populist revolution against the establishment, a revolution that, under Italian
conditions, had to reconnect with the Mazzini–Garibaldi radical tradition. Had
the working class, as itself part of ‘the people’, presented itself as the historical
realizer of the uncompleted tasks of the Risorgimento, it could have oriented
the aspirations of wider discontented sectors in a socialist direction (Laclau,
1977: 109, 117, 126–29, 132).
However, as a result of its immaturity, Laclau (1972: 115) went on, the
proletariat had proven too sectarian to take an interest in wider concerns and
aspirations. It thus let the chance slip. And it was ‘because the working class,
both in its reformist and its revolutionary sectors, had abandoned the arena of
popular-democratic struggle’ that fascism became possible (Laclau 1972: 124).
Rather than merely reactionary, fascism was ‘one of the possible ways of
articulating the popular-democratic interpellations into political discourse’
(Laclau 1972: 111).
But though an alternative revolution was possible in principle, Laclau found
fascism inadequate to spearhead it, despite the abdication of the working class.

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We need not follow his reasoning further here; what the comparison shows is
the scope for deeper Marxist thinking than we find in Gramsci about the
complexity of the Italian revolutionary situation in light of the Italian war
experience, the particular antiliberal sentiments at work, the legacy of an
antiliberal but non-Marxist radical tradition, and the sectarian tendencies of the
Marxist left.5 Though he, too, used the petty bourgeoisie category, Laclau, in
noting the scope for an alternative, populist revolution, gave the discontents
and aspirations of those who flowed into fascism more autonomous force than
Gramsci did. Even in 1926, in the ‘Lyon Theses’ co-authored with Palmiro
Togliatti, Gramsci traced the fascist outcome entirely to the failure of the left;
fascism itself had not constituted a serious revolutionary force (Gramsci and
Togliatti 1971: 495).
By the time of Gramsci’s imprisonment, in December 1926, the fascist
regime was solidly entrenched in one sense, and the immediate scope for action
was extremely limited. Under these radically different circumstances, Gramsci
was bound to rethink what had happened, and what was happening, especially
in order better to specify what would be required to win the longer-term
struggle. He did so especially during 1930–33 in his Prison Notebooks, first
published posthumously in 1948–51. In light of the difficult prison
circumstances, the analysis of fascism in the Notebooks was bound to be
unsystematic, abstract, and elliptical; key points are often made with no explicit
mention of fascism at all.
Having earlier missed fascism’s potential for ongoing development, Gramsci
now recognized that a deeper treatment was necessary to account for the
measure of success fascism had achieved. As he saw it, in Italy, and more widely
in Europe, the war had produced a genuinely revolutionary crisis, entailing a
loss of legitimacy, consensus, or what he had come to call hegemony. When
some particular hegemony dissipates, yielding a crisis, an organic solution
ensues only insofar as a new grouping combines previously scattered forces and
creates the political basis for a new hegemony. If the postwar crisis had resulted
from the emergence of a strong antagonistic collective political will, that
antagonist would simply have won out, establishing such a new hegemony.
In the case at hand, however, the old hegemony had dissolved because of
‘purely mechanical causes’, as Gramsci called them. The formerly passive
masses had become politically active, but in a chaotic and disorganized way,
without leadership or clear direction. During the war, middle class sectors had
newly assumed positions of responsibility and command but then, once the war
was over, had found themselves not only deprived of such positions but left
unemployed altogether. The challenge had been to reconstruct a hegemonic
framework for these formerly passive and apolitical elements, to organize this
situation of disorder. And this, Gramsci acknowledged, would have required
the use of extra-legal force (Gramsci 1971a: 228–29). In Italy, such an organic
solution had perhaps been possible in 1919, but the proletariat, with its
muddled leadership, had failed to organize itself properly as a new collective

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will capable of bringing together the disparate discontented elements (Adamson

1980: 628).
By the later 1920s, the revolutionary moment was clearly over, and outside
the Soviet Union the outcome was fascism, most obviously for Italy; but
Gramsci (1975: x2 1229) was convinced of fascism’s wider ideological import.
As something novel and unforeseen, it seemed to require new categories, and
he adopted ‘Caesarism’, ‘war of position (or attrition)’ and ‘passive revolution’
to make sense of fascism and its historical role.
Even as he implicitly conceded that he had previously underestimated
fascism, Gramsci did not find it an organic solution, a viable alternative
revolution in the wake of proletarian failure. It was rather a mode of Caesarism,
a term he used to encompass an array of ad hoc, provisional outcomes that had
emerged throughout history in response to a threat of systemic crisis. Forms of
Caesarism arise as a sort of third, unforeseen alternative when a hegemonic
crisis yields ‘a situation in which the forces in struggle balance in a catastrophic
way.’ (Gramsci 1975: x2 1195). The new, progressive force does not manage to
supplant the established force, but neither is it decisively defeated. Coming
from the outside, as it were, the Caesarist force manages to dominate the
situation, producing a kind of equilibrium but without providing a new
hegemony. So the equilibrium is inherently provisional and unstable.
Still, any mode of Caesarism seeks to strengthen itself by trying, at least, to
build up its hegemony, making mere domination less evident and less
necessary. In fact, because of the volatility of the situation, the Caesarist regime
will use extraordinary means, beyond normal modes of consensus-building, in
seeking to establish its rule (Adamson 1980: 628–29).
Fascism, then, was not only a form of Caesarism; it was also involved in a
war of attrition with the progressive side that had failed to provide the only
possible organic solution during the hegemonic crisis. The alternation of war of
movement and war of position was nothing new; it had characterized the
Italian Risorgimento, as Mazzini’s effort at popular initiative, a mode of war of
movement, gave way to Cavour and war of position, linked to ‘passive
revolution’ (Gramsci 1975: x2 1088, x3 1766–69). As a mode of passive
revolution, the resulting liberal regime was progressive up to a point in making
adjustments to encompass the possibilities for positive change that the situation
allowed, even as it also served to head off systemic change.
In one sense, fascism was merely the contemporary form of the war of
position, corresponding to liberalism in the nineteenth century (Gramsci 1975:
x2 1088–89, 1227–29). Rather than merely conservative, it had to be a mode
of ‘passive revolution’ as it sought to cement its rule. But as also a form of
Caesarism – and a very particular form, in light of the contemporary play of
forces – fascism was also a very particular form of war of attrition. Gramsci was
persuaded that with fascism even the possibility that the antagonistic forces
might be united, albeit necessarily through a difficult and even bloody process,
had fallen away. The contrast between the opposing forces had become

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historically incurable; under the circumstances, in fact, the advent of the

Caesarist outcome only exacerbated the antagonism. Still, Caesarism always
entails a certain margin for development, varying depending on the country
and its weight on the international level. It seeks to preserve the weakness of
the progressive force but, under current Italian conditions, it was relying more
on the police than the military to do so (Gramsci 1975: x2 1198).
More generally, fascism’s extraordinary effort was yielding an attempt at
something like totalitarianism. Without mentioning fascism specifically,
Gramsci noted that war of position demands enormous sacrifices, an
unprecedented concentration of hegemony, and thus a more interventionist
form of government that openly takes the offensive against the opposition to
make internal dissolution permanently impossible. Government seeks control
on every level. Moreover, Gramsci understood the confrontation in
apocalyptic terms. The nature of the present struggle indicated that the
culminating phase of the political-historical period was at hand, because once
victory was won, it could only be definitive. War of movement was possible
only insofar as the aim was not decisive conquest in the face of the mobilization
of all the resources of hegemony and of the state. But precisely such total
mobilization was at work in fascist Italy, so the scope for a war of movement
had fallen away as a reciprocal war of attrition ensued. That war was reciprocal
because the opposing force had to fight back against the Caesarist regime in the
same terms. Concentrated and difficult, such war of attrition demands
exceptional qualities of patience and inventive spirit (Gramsci 1975: x2 801–2).
Although Gramsci did not use the term, ‘totalitarianism’ was clearly what he
had in mind in suggesting that the contemporary Caesarist war of attrition
entails total mobilization. And the reciprocity of the siege meant that the fascist
totalitarian effort at modern hegemony could only be countered by another
totalitarian effort. Totalitarian politics was the strategic corollary of this
definitive struggle of opposing hegemonic directions (Maggi 2008: 137).
Moreover, Gramsci did use ‘totalitarianism’ in noting that people were being
led to find in a single party, which destroys or encompasses all the others,
satisfactions they formerly had found in a variety of sometimes conflicting
entities (Gramsci 1975: x2 800–01).
So, though it was so far only a Caesarist expedient, fascism, from its
governmental foothold, could conceivably win definitively the present war of
attrition. In any case, Gramsci noted that a regime can last a long time and not
constitute an epoch. Certain regimes prove to have unsuspected staying power,
especially insofar as they are strengthened by the weaknesses of others (Gramsci
1975: x3 1744). So the struggle against fascism would require a mighty effort,
first of theoretical clarification, and the struggle might well prove protracted.
The fascist state could not be assaulted directly, but in light of the fragility of
any Caesarism, the fascist effort to establish a new hegemony could be
combated on other levels. Thus it was crucial to understand, and to counter,
the ideas that, Gramsci now recognized, were central to that fascist effort. And

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thus he took seriously aspects of fascism that have often been neglected or
dismissed in efforts to understand fascism after the fact.
For Gramsci, it was now clearer that fascism, precisely as a form of passive
revolution, was even progressive up to a point. He assumed, for example, that
there could be no going back to traditional parliamentarism, not least because
fascism entailed a species of what he called ‘black parliamentarism’, allowing the
pursuit of individual economic advantage no longer masked by an institutional
shell (Gramsci 1975: x3 1742–43). He seemed to find fascist corporativism
symptomatic in this regard, though elsewhere he found corporativism
progressive in a more direct way.
As Gramsci saw it, corporativism was a kind of halfway house, typical of
passive revolution. It was as far as Italy could go in departing from liberalism
toward more advanced economic, political and cultural forms without some
destructive cataclysm. Through corporativism, fascism aimed to intensify the
socialization and cooperation of production but only in a mild way, limited to
regulating profit. From within the framework of present Italian social relations,
this was the only way to develop the productive forces of industry under the
control of the traditional ruling classes, who, Gramsci conceded, were caught
up in an especially difficult competition with the richer, more advanced
countries. Whatever its degree of practical realization, corporativism had an
important ideological role in creating hope and anticipation, especially among
the petty bourgeois urban and rural masses (Gramsci 1975: x2 1228–29).
Gramsci also noted the ideological significance of the philosopher Giovanni
Gentile and a number of his fascist followers, especially the corporativists Ugo
Spirito and Arnaldo Volpicelli. Even as he insisted that the actual fascist state
did not conform to the Gentilian conception, Gramsci (1975: x2 753, 1089)
stressed that the Gentilian effort reflected legitimate concerns and demands. So
critique of the Gentilian position seemed central to the present challenge.
Gramsci charged that Gentile, in specifying a totalitarian ethical state as
fascism’s direction, was positing merely superficial unities between real and
ideal, theory and practice, and thereby obliterating the distinction between
dictatorship and hegemony, force and consensus, juridical coercion and moral
adhesion. Gramsci (1975: x2 691, 1355–56) also criticized Gentile for assigning
ethical significance to the corporativist-economic side of fascism, thereby
conflating dimensions that still needed to be distinguished at this point in the
historical progression at work. In taking as resolved the still-open problems of
politics, class struggle, and the state–ethical relationship, Gentile was merely
fleeing from ongoing conflicts and accepting present power (Maggi 2008: 229–
30).
Gramsci found such Gentilian conflations especially evident in Spirito and
Volpicelli. As long as there is a class state, he charged, the ordered society they
proclaim cannot exist (Gramsci 1975: x2 693, 1355–56). At the same time,
Gramsci (1975: x2 691–93) could not resist an element of reductionism as he
traced their reactionary ideal to the illusions of ‘the middle classes and minor

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intellectuals’, eager to avoid acute struggles and cataclysms. But even as, in
another passage, Gramsci (1975: x2 752–56, esp. 753) ridiculed Spirito and
Volpicelli as ‘clowns’, he discerned genuine concerns and aspirations, especially
in Spirito’s critique of the liberal understanding of economic relationships.
So Gramsci was acknowledging that even those aspects confined to the
realm of unrealized theory were central to the particular hegemonic effort
characteristic of fascism as a Caesarist war of attrition at this decisive moment.
And they were central to the modicum of appeal that fascism achieved.
After underestimating fascism even into 1926, Gramsci in his prison writings
was conceding that fascism, as a mode of ‘passive revolution’, was indeed a sort
of alternative revolution up to a point. As the Italian crisis had played out,
especially with the failure of the Marxist left, fascism was all the situation would
allow to enable Italy to move beyond liberalism and to develop its productive
forces from within the more deeply competitive international framework. But
insofar as fascism was revolutionary, it was revolutionary in a very particular,
and symptomatically limited, way.
So it is not at all clear that Gramsci was offering a way of understanding
fascism as ‘revolutionary in own right’, in the sense that those like Payne,
Griffin and Emilio Gentile have in mind. Those who portray fascism as
revolutionary do not all have the same criteria, but among the most prominent
there is a family resemblance entailing something like the sacralization of
politics, a longing for palingenesis, and, most basically, the satisfaction of
emotional needs that may have inflated in light of modern anxieties, especially
as refracted in postwar Italy.
No one would suggest that just any possible revolution, even one
responding to real emotional needs, would count as the appropriate modern
revolution. Even as genuine, those needs may be taken as less worthy than
others, as ‘weak’, symptomatic of problems requiring a deeper solution to be
overcome in a way congruent with human potential. For Gramsci, nothing on
the level of sacralization of politics or emotional satisfaction could have
constituted an organic solution, no matter how well the fascists did at it.
Although it was important to understand the immediate emotional needs at
issue – and Gramsci could surely have done better, just as Adamson suggests –
from his perspective the revolutionary challenge was not to satisfy those needs
directly, but to create a situation from within which they were transcended.
But for those like Gentile and Griffin, in light of their sense of the challenge
and the possibilities, the effort did not have to yield anything like Gramsci’s
organic solution to count as revolutionary. They are not measuring fascism
against Gramsci’s standard, which by now seems to have proven illusory. Still,
as we have emphasized, the basis for a revolutionary departure from the liberal
mainstream was being contested by would-be revolutionaries at the time and is
still debated among scholars today. Those like Gentile and Griffin can plausibly
take fascism to have been more deeply revolutionary than Gramsci did, but,
again, they do so with no implication of desirability, let alone ultimate success.

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As an actor in the situation, Gramsci was necessarily concerned with

desirability and the scope for success. Whereas he did not fully contemplate the
scope for an alternative revolution, he was most concerned to explain why
fascism, though it had proven the outcome to that point, and though it might
well last a long time, could only be superficial, that even the fascist effort at
totalitarianism could yield only a superficial solution. And on that level he
proved importantly right, up to a point.
As we noted, in Gramsci’s interpretation Caesarism results when no one
group has mastered the situation sufficiently to synthesize the aims of previously
disparate groupings. In accenting the inability of fascism to forge a hegemonic
will, Gramsci was implying that fascism was limited not merely because of the
power of the agrarian-business oligarchy and the weaknesses of the petty
bourgeoisie. Rather, the lack of a hegemonic will was symptomatic of the
inability of anyone to provide an organic solution under the circumstances Italy
had faced.
Yet Gramsci did not account for the limits as forcefully as he might have,
precisely because, paradoxical though it initially seems, he was so reluctant
seriously to countenance the scope for an alternative revolution in principle.
That reluctance continued even in prison, when he no longer faced immediate
tactical questions and when the constituent elements of fascism were at least
somewhat clearer.
Although he took Giovanni Gentile and his disciples seriously up to a
point, he evaded the sense in which the Gentilian ideal of a totalitarian
ethical state enabled fascism to claim, at least, to challenge Marxism on its
own post-liberal terms, to claim to offer a more appropriately modern
understanding of the scope for a deeper mode of human self-realization. It is
true, as Gramsci charged, that the Gentilian totalitarian fusion excludes, or
claims to transcend, such distinctions as juridical coercion versus moral
adhesion. But Gramsci sidestepped Gentile’s accent on the need for
internalization, for genuine ethical elevation, as opposed merely to
submission. Even as he posited the totalitarian ethical state as the fascist
direction, Gentile insisted explicitly that the creativity of individual moral
response remains, and remains essential. Through the totalitarian state it
would be possible to nurture and focus the individual ethical capacity in a
way transcending liberalism–positivism.6
Gramsci also missed the endlessness of the process whereby, for Gentile, the
individual ethical capacity rises to the ideal state. The ethical capacity is
marshaled on an ongoing basis, not achieved once and for all. In fact, Gentile’s
insistence that the totalitarian ethical state is forever under construction, never
completed, recalls Gramsci’s way of characterizing, in July 1918, the Russian
revolutionary effort to create socialism, which he portrayed as a continual
becoming, a development of ever-richer collective values (G. Gentile 1929:
46–48).7 In Gentile’s conception the dialectic is not suppressed, as Gramsci
charged, but plays out in the relationship between, on the one hand, individual

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ethical capacity, as fused with the totalitarian state, and, on the other, endlessly
novel historical challenges.
Although he recognized the import of Spirito’s concerns, Gramsci merely
invoked the petty bourgeoisie category to explain why those concerns could
not feed significant change. In protesting that as long as there is a class state,
there can be no ordered society, Gramsci (1975: x2 693, 1355–56) was simply
begging the question. The question is obviously how central to modernity the
class struggle is, and even insofar as it is at least a central facet, what scope there
might be for better handling class differences through a post-liberal but non-
Marxist political-cultural dispensation.
As Michele Maggi (2008: 237) has noted, a tension between idealism and
materialism runs through the Prison Notebooks, producing a certain instability in
Gramsci’s thinking. In principle, even for Gramsci, the question of the scope
for revolutionary change not based on class struggle, yet still aiming to handle
class differences in a radically post-liberal way, might have been an empirical
matter, to be determined by the struggle of historical forces. But the
materialism trumped as Gramsci took class as privileged a priori, precluding the
scope for transcending class differences through spiritual transformation and
new institutional arrangements.
In criticizing Gentile for assigning ethical significance to corporativist-
economic development, Gramsci was evading the question of the scope, in
principle, for politicizing and even spiritualizing production, which might be
taken as essential to the appropriate contemporary revolution. At the very least,
in light of his own reading of Italy’s postwar circumstances, why could fascist
corporativist institutions not have constituted the organs of productivist
education and discipline he found necessary?
Yet, even as he continued to sidestep aspects of the fascist challenge,
Gramsci pinpointed key limitations and sources of weakness. Although he
underestimated the staying power of the syndicalist–corporativist current, the
business opposition he noted in January 1924 would indeed limit its scope for
development. He was also correct in observing that, whereas Spirito’s Gentilian
way of identifying the individual with the state would require considerable re-
education of individuals, ‘it does not seem to happen in fact, because this
identification is merely verbal and rhetorical’ (Gramsci 1975: x3 1770–71).
Implicitly criticizing fascism, Gramsci stressed that ‘a collective consciousness,
and thus a living organism, can be formed only after the multiplicity is unified
through the disagreement among individuals’. Although he failed to address the
sense in which, at least for some, corporativism was to provide the forum for
this sort of give and take, his implication that fascism, in restricting individual
participation, was producing a merely passive consensus, not the active
consensus that was possible in principle, was on target (Gramsci 1975: x3 1771).
Still, Gramsci’s failure to take fascism more seriously as a potential alternative
revolution kept him from deepening his key overall point that fascism, as the
contemporary mode of Caesarism and passive revolution, was subject to certain

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symptomatic limitations. Above all, his way of glossing over revolutionary

possibilities kept him from a deeper analysis of fascism’s internal fissures, which
were more complex, symptomatic and significant for the regime’s trajectory
than he let himself grasp.
To be sure, Gramsci fastened upon certain fissures at various points,
attributing them to rifts in the bourgeoisie, and especially to a divergence
between the agrarian-industrial oligarchy and the more radical petty bourgeois
elements. As we noted, he took this tack in treating the divergence between
minister of the interior Federzoni and party secretary Farinacci during 1925–
26. That split was only the tip of an iceberg, however, and in taking the tack he
did, Gramsci was analyzing only the tip. Federzoni and Farinacci represented
particular positions within their respective currents, each of which was itself
fissured.
Gramsci lumped justice minister Alfredo Rocco with Federzoni, and
plausibly up to a point, because both were former Nationalists concerned to
strengthen the state even at the expense of the party. But Rocco was more
totalitarian and innovative than Federzoni, whose accents were more
authoritarian and monarchist. Thus Rocco was central to corporativist
development as Federzoni was not. But then how does Rocco interface with
the corporativist advocate and sometime minister of corporations Giuseppe
Bottai? Their visions for corporativism prove diametrically opposed. How does
Rocco interface with the Gentilian corporativists Spirito and Volpicelli, whose
concerns and aspirations Gramsci addressed? And what about the difference
between Gentile and Rocco even over how to conceive the nation, a
difference that Gramsci noted during the war as he lauded Gentile’s open-
ended, ‘spiritual’ conception, which differed crucially from the more
naturalistic conception of Nationalists like Rocco? Gentile would again
highlight the difference even from within the fascist regime, but Gramsci did
not use this as an example of fissuring (Gramsci 1982: 80–81 [Mar. 1917]).8 We
could go on about different visions of the party’s role even among the major
party secretaries Farinacci, Turati and Starace, and about differences in the party
and corporativist directions even among fascist radicals.
In short, Fascism was a messy mixture, and even its revolutionary and
would-be totalitarian components could not be fused effectively. Although he
noted fissures here and there, Gramsci did not make the bigger point about
disparate radicalisms because he kept attributing fascist radicalism to vague,
inchoate discontents. Yet the fissuring, even in light of the scope for an
alternative revolution in principle, was symptomatic of precisely the incapacity
of fascism to form a hegemonic alternative that Gramsci had diagnosed. The
central role of Mussolini was less the expression of a unifying collective will
than a symptom of its absence, and its absence was crucial for the ultimate
weakness of fascism as revolution. Yet it was merely symptomatic of the deeper
problem: the heterogeneity of the disaffected yet aspirational elements that
found their way into fascism in light of the problematic side of liberal

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democracy, the performance of the Italian liberal elite, and the limits of the
mainstream Marxist effort to specify a systematic alternative. It was not clear if,
or how, they could all have been brought together.
Because the fascist revolutionary thrust was at once deeper than he
understood and flawed in ways he did fully grasp, Gramsci did not recognize
how volatile the mix was. In continuing to miss aspects of the revolutionary
dynamic of fascism, he proved symptomatically wrong on how it would all turn
out. The regime was not in a sort of unstable equilibrium but self-destructed.
What undermined it was not the development of a counter-hegemonic force
but its own internal contradictions and the resulting dynamic. And because the
workers did not spearhead the overcoming of fascism, what followed was not
the proletarian regime that Gramsci had seen as the only possible alternative.
The terms in which Gramsci had conceived the situation were clearly too
apocalyptic; it proved not to have reduced to but two alternatives – fascism and
communism. He had concluded that there could be no going back to
traditional parliamentarism in the wake of fascism, yet what followed the fall of
fascism was a return to parliamentary democracy, although on the basis of a
somewhat different social compact. The framework allowed ongoing
communist attempts to establish a counter-hegemony, but by the 1980s
Gramsci’s frame of reference seemed definitively to have been left behind. Yet,
what the situation might have allowed in response to the crisis that developed
in Italy from the First World War remains open for debate.

Notes
1 Gramsci most obviously takes Crocean categories for granted in Il nostro Marx (1984:
205–06, 209 [July 1918]).
2 See also pp. 513–15.
3 See, for example, Gramsci (1982: 117–18 [ May 1920]). See also Gramsci and
Togliatti (1971: 495).
4 See also pp. 150–51 [Apr. 1921].
5 In that sense, Griffin (2008: 56, 61–62) is correct that Gramsci’s greater a priori
reliance on class categories makes him less supple than Laclau.
6 The key statement of Giovanni Gentile’s fascism is his Origini e dottrina del fascismo
(1929; see especially pp. 35–36, 52–53).
7 See also Pellizzi (1924: 157–65; cf. Gramsci 1984: 211 [July 1918]).
8 Referring to a Gentile article of March 1917, republished in Giovanni Gentile (1989:
35–38).

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