Rivoluzione passiva e laboratorio politico: appunti sull'analisi del fascismo nei Quaderni del carcere

The article intends to highlight the close relationship between the hypothesis that fascism is the “passive revolution” of the 20th century and the fact that it can be considered as a kind of political laboratory. Gramsci states the hypothesis that fascism is the “passive revolution” of the 20th century as a result of a critique to Benedetto Croce’s approach to Italian history, which culminates in the definition of Croce’s “religion of liberty” as an effort to stabilise fascism, that is, as a way to reinstate bourgeois hegemony over popular masses. On the other side, as a “totalitarian” State and as a “totalitarian” political practice, fascism cannot be considered as a mere reaction to the process of self-organisation of the popular masses, which is carried on in the first decades of the 20th century and above all after the World War. Since fascism’s main goal is to absorb and channel the masses’ impulse more than to reject it, it is rather a “political laboratory”, where for the first time in the history of the Italian national state, the “people” can do their “apprenticeship” to politics. The conclusion Gramsci draws from this analysis of fascism and of Croce’s discourse on “liberty”, is that in contemporary Italy it is possible to articulate a political strategy that, recalling to the other Jacobin values of “equality” and “fraternity”, gives rise to a movement for popular democracy under the slogan of the “constituent assembly”