Crise na estrutura e disputa pela superestrutura: Marx, Gramsci e o laboratório para o fascismo na Itália.

Abstract

This dissertation investigates Italian fascism as a passive revolution in moments of hegemonic crisis, from a philosophical perspective whose methods are historical-dialectical materialism and the philosophy of praxis, dialectically connecting Karl Marx’s critique of political economy with Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. The central hypothesis is that fascism in Italy was not a historical contingency, that is, something that erupted into history without decisive and precise causes; nor does it support the claim that fascism was a moral aberration or a necessary evil in response to the advance of communism in Europe initiated by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. On the contrary, Italian fascism was the direct result of the contradictions inherent in the social relations of capitalism undergoing structural crisis. The hypothesis holds that economic crises arising from the productive structure of capitalism, when they reach an appropriate degree of maturity, become crises of hegemony, affecting the superstructure and opening spaces for possible solutions based on force, with the strengthening of political society at the expense of civil society as their central feature. Italy, with its well-defined “precise causes,” was, for the first time in the history of developed Western capitalism, the laboratory in which these articulations became fully visible at the superstructural level, manifesting themselves in fascist policies during the first decades of the twentieth century. Thus, the dissertation demonstrates that crises of hegemony, whose ultimate expression is fascism, are not isolated phenomena arising from contemplative causes, but rather superstructural expressions of a much broader structural crisis that nevertheless originates in the foundations of production and, once transferred to the layers of the superstructure, disrupts the mechanisms of consensual domination within civil society. The investigation therefore proceeds from the “abstract” to the concrete. The “abstract” is the crisis in the structure and its analysis; the concrete is the way in which this crisis concretely transforms the lives of real individuals. Accordingly, this means starting from the dialectical unity between structure and superstructure, articulating them from the particular to the universal—that is, taking Italy as the point of departure at the level of the particular and moving toward the universal conditions of crisis within international capitalism itself. To this end, the theoretical framework is fundamentally composed of Marx and Gramsci, in dialogue with the principal thinkers on the subject, such as Lenin, Hilferding, Sweezy, and Harvey. The dissertation is organized into six chapters. The first three are devoted to the theoretical foundations of Marx’s analysis of economic crises; the following three focus on the historical analysis of the “precise causes” and on the way in which they are articulated with structural crises. In this second part, Gramsci serves as the principal philosopher. The dissertation therefore demonstrates that fascism in Italy was the form through which the bourgeois ruling class sought to reorganize its hegemony in crisis. For this reason, this study offers important concepts for understanding class struggle in advanced capitalism in the post–World War I period (1914–1918), a period that shaped the struggle between the two antagonistic classes at an even more developed stage of capitalism.