L'eccidio di Roccagorga e la «settimana rossa»: Gramsci, il «sovversivismo» e il fascismo

The massacre of Roccagorga and the “red week”: Gramsci, “sovversivismo” and fascism The massacre of Roccagorga (January 1913) and the “red week” (June 1914) are two episodes to which Gramsci refers several times in the Prison Notebooks and in various articles published between 1916 and 1926. I shall argue that those are very precise references to the harsh debate which took place in Italy in the wake of these two episodes, involving the director of the PSI newspaper’s and leader of the party’s left wing, Benito Mussolini, the main representatives of the party, and several Italian politicians, writers and intellectuals. Mussolini made a close connection between Roccagorga and the “red week”, against and beyond the official line of the Socialist party, arguing that this had been the first great attempt at an autonomous unification of the popular masses from the South and the North of Italy. This argument is at the centre of Gramsci’s interest in the following years, when he outlines his interpretation of fascism as a political movement which, at the same time, expresses and disfigures the most profound aspirations and demands of the popular masses. In Mussolini’s deviation within the socialist movement, these aspirations and demands found a development which was also an interruption, since they were channeled towards the form of “national socialism” which would eventually merge into nationalism and imperialism. In this sense, it can be said that the connection between Roccagorga and the “red week” is key to understanding the roots of Gramsci’s qualification of fascism as a “passive revolution”