The Location of Hegemony
Mapping a Workers’ City: Turin, 1919–1922
You may have noticed I’ve been largely inactive on Substack for the last month. That’s because I’m currently in Italy conducting archival research for my dissertation, which has been occupying the lion’s share of my time. Over the last few days, I’ve been at the Fondazione Istituto Piemontese Antonio Gramsci in Turin, reading through the papers of rank-and-file workers and militants who stood at the helm of Italian socialism in the years preceding the rise of Fascism.
This kind of material—personal letters, workplace memoranda, union documents— lets you see a movement from the inside: as something built day by day by ordinary people. And the socialist movement of this period itself is worth revisiting, since it posed in unusually concrete terms a question that still confronts the Left: how can everyday people organize themselves into a force capable of transforming society?
This post is not intended as a précis of my dissertation research, but a few brief words about the broader project will help to contextualize what I’m doing here in Turin.
My dissertation recovers the early work of Antonio Gramsci—the young journalist and organizer, not yet the canonical “theorist”—as part of a more general effort to think through the relationship between hegemony, political practice, and organizational form.1 I argue that the construction of hegemony does not occur strictly—or even primarily—at the level of discourse, but hinges on how social relations are organized across concrete spaces and in everyday practices. This argument has both theoretical and practical implications: building hegemony is not, or not only, about changing the way people think, but about structuring social space to foster the aptitudes, inclinations, and relationships that make a subordinated class capable of autonomy and self-government.2
On its face, that’s a fairly abstract claim. But my method of demonstration is historical. The dissertation turns toward the socialist movement in which Gramsci came of age as an organizer in the late nineteen-teens, with a particular focus on the Turinese workers’ councils: institutions of proletarian self-government that Gramsci and his allies championed in the years that became known as the “Biennio Rosso”—the “Two Red Years” of 1919 and 1920.
The crucible of the Turinese councils, I argue—from their rise in 1919 to their collapse in 1921 and the rise of Fascism in 1922—dramatizes the process through which a nascent hegemonic project can be built, consolidated, and rapidly unravelled.3
Political Education “From Below”
The archival research I’ve been doing in Turin connects to a chapter I’m writing on the pedagogical dimensions of the workers’ councils. In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci argued that “every relation of hegemony is necessarily a pedagogical relation”—a quote that routinely gets cited by scholars studying Gramsci’s theory of hegemony.4 Yet, while it seems straightforward, this evocative claim remains elusive so long as the expression “pedagogical relation” remains undefined. What exactly was a “pedagogical relation,” for Gramsci?
My working hypothesis is that the Turin workers’ councils of 1919-1921 were experimental sites in which a distinctively Gramscian understanding of pedagogy was elaborated. If this is so, then the workers’ councils would shed light on Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony as such.
This, however, is just a hypothesis. And that’s where the archival research comes in.
Building hegemony is not—or not only—about changing the way people think, but about cultivating the aptitudes, inclinations, and relationships that make a class capable of leadership, autonomy, and self-government.
In fact, most scholars would agree that Gramsci and his interlocutors in the Turin socialist movement understood the workers’ councils as educative spaces. After all, Gramsci himself made this point repeatedly throughout 1919 and 1920. In one of his most well-known articles of the period, Gramsci heralded the fledgling workers’ councils as “magnificent schools of political and administrative experience.” And yet, despite broad consensus that the workers’ councils performed a pedagogic function, I’ve uncovered vanishingly few sources that detail how they did so.
In consulting the archives, then, my aim is to clarify what exactly political education looked like in the context of the workers’ councils. What concrete practices facilitated workers’ education? What was the shape of the “pedagogic relation” embodied in the councils? And how was that relation structured to incline toward a politics of social emancipation, or what militants in the Turinese workers’ movement called “popular autonomy”?
In keeping with the thrust of the dissertation, there is a broader argument about hegemony at stake here: rather than treating hegemony as a purely ideological or discursive phenomenon, my aim in the chapter is to underscore how hegemony is forged via institutions that cultivate political capacities—judgment, leadership, and organizational skills—among members of a (potentially) ascendent class.
So far, I haven’t turned up any decisive documents in the archives. But this isn’t all that surprising, given that most of what I’m doing at the moment is photographing materials: everything from union registration booklets and organizational files to letters and handwritten memoirs reflecting on the council movement, which a number of participants wrote in the 1950s. Actually sifting through this material will take quite a bit of time.
From the skimming I’ve done so far, however, one thing has already come into focus: Gramsci himself was neither an outside observer nor a detached “theorist” of the workers’ movement—still less did he consider himself a “teacher” with workers as “students.” As Giovanni Parodi—a metalworker at FIAT during the Biennio Rosso who later became a partigiano and, after the fall of fascism, the Secretary General of the Industrial Metallurgists Federation (FIOM)—recalled in a typewritten memoir dated 1956:
Gramsci spent many hours among us workers, asked us questions, listened to our concerns, sought to understand our aspirations and what we thought about particular events. One of his characteristics consisted in his great modesty—not only in private and personal life, but above all in the intellectual sphere. With whomever he spoke, he never displayed any ostentation of someone who knows many things. His habit was to listen calmly and with patience, without interrupting, and with great attentiveness. He used to say: “I have much to learn from the workers.” Whenever I happened to find something in [Gramsci’s newspaper] L’Ordine Nuovo that corresponded to the thought and aspirations of the workers, Gramsci would reply: “It was you who provided me with the raw material.” He never refused to speak with or listen to workers, whoever they were and whatever the subject they raised. Gramsci was the true figure of an intellectual who, having lived the life of the working class—their struggles, their economic misery, their social position—had, in the fullest sense of the word, become proletarianized.5
Similar accounts of Gramsci’s unpretentious and solidaristic demeanor are legion in the volume Gramsci Vivo (Feltrinelli, 2010), which collects testimonies from Turinese workers who struggled alongside him in the nineteen-teens. Yet, however poignant these reflections may be, they do little to clarify the concrete pedagogical dynamics of the Turinese workers’ councils—which is ultimately what I’m after.
Fascism’s violence consisted not only in the physical dismemberment of the workers’ movement, but also in the attempt to disarm it of its memory and history.
While more digging in the archives certainly could certainly turn up material to this end, it’s also possible I’ll find nothing. Many of the documents associated with the workers’ movement of the Biennio Rosso were destroyed by fascists during the Turin Massacre of December 1922—when the Chamber of Labor and the local section of the Socialist Party were sacked and burned. On its own that’s a powerful reminder: fascism’s violence consisted not only in the physical dismemberment of the workers’ movement, but also in the attempt to disarm it of its memory and history.
Infrastructures of association
Alongside archival work, I’ve been spending a lot of time walking through the streets of Turin, trying to reconstruct the organizational ecology—and the physical landscape—of the socialist movement during this period. That landscape matters, because one of the central moves of my dissertation is to foreground the spatial and embodied dimensions of political life.
What’s coming into focus, as I meander the streets of Turin, is just how tightly knit the associational fabric of the workers’ movement here was. That movement gravitated around a series of core institutions: the local Chamber of Labor, the Turin Cooperative Alliance (ACT), major unions such as the Industrial Metallurgists Federation (FIOM), and, of course, the local section of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI). Between these formal organs ran an expansive connective tissue, including the socialist press—the PSI daily Avanti! and the weekly journal L’Ordine Nuovo, founded by Gramsci in 1919—and a network of worker-run circoli (circles), often organized around reading, discussion, and political education.
While secondary source material had already familiarized me with each of these nodes prior to my arrival in Turin, it wasn’t until I started digging up addresses in the archives and setting out on foot to track them down that I registered how deeply interwoven these institutions were. Indeed, many of them were not just functionally linked but physically proximate, often sharing the same buildings or occupying neighboring addresses on the same city block.
As I begin to piece together the landscape, two addresses surface as particularly significant.
One was Corso Siccardi 12. This building housed not only the Chamber of Labor and the Alleanza Cooperativa Torinese (ACT), but also the local PSI section; it appears, moreover, to have been the site where L’Ordine Nuovo—and, presumably, Avanti!—was printed. The concentration of socialist activity at this address made it a major target of fascist violence, and in December 1922, it was almost entirely destroyed by a fascist attack.
In the years after the First World War, Turin was home to a working-class milieu in which a significant portion of the factory proletariat had actively organized itself along socialist and communist lines.
Just over a kilometer away, Corso Siccardi 12 found its complement at Via dell’Arcivescovado 3, on the corner of Via XX Settembre. This was the joint office of both Avanti! and L’Ordine Nuovo—and, as a number of memoirs in Gramsci Vivo make clear, the building was much more than a simple workspace. Rather, it was a crucial gathering place for workers and militants, who filtered constantly in and out of the Ordine Nuovo offices. And with the rise of fascist violence in 1921, the building became something of a fortified bunker for socialists in the city. Vincenzo Bianco, a foundry worker, recalled:
The door on Via XX Settembre was small, and moreover we had blocked it with a wooden crate filled with stones. Those who needed to enter were forced to pass through one at a time; two people side by side could not get through. To guard against possible attacks from the rooftops—difficult though they would have been—we had built a small tower on which a machine gun was installed. We had rifles and pistols, and we were all volunteers—workers who had been fired from the factories, and some, like me, with warrants out for our arrest and therefore wanted by the police. But all of us were determined to defend our newspaper [L’Ordine Nuovo]. The weapons were kept hidden in a place very close by, within easy reach. In the evenings, guard shifts were also carried out by outside volunteers who came from the factories.6
From the newspaper offices at Via dell’Arcivescovado 3, it was only a brief walk to Gramsci’s own residence in Via San Massimo, adjacent to what is now the Piazza Carlina.
Beyond these better-known sites, my archival work has turned up a number of institutions that add density to the map of working-class social life in this period.
At Via Micca 2, for instance, the Alleanza Cooperativa Torinese (ACT) operated a pharmacy from as early as 1907; and at Corso Stupinigi 9—today, roughly the same address on Corso Turati—the ACT-adjacent Torino Tipografia Coperativa printed documents for FIOM and other working-class institutions. Finally, I came across evidence of two organizations I had not previously encountered—the Associazione Generale degli Operai (AGdO), and the Federazione Circoli Educativi Socialisti (FCES)—which both operated out of Corso Siccardi 12, the same address as the Camera del Lavoro and the ACT.
Add to these the twenty-eight worker-run socialist “circles” listed on a 1920 membership card for the FCES, and what emerges is not simply a dense institutional landscape, but a deeply politicized one. In the years after the First World War, Turin was home to a working-class milieu in which a significant portion of the factory proletariat had actively organized itself along socialist and communist lines.
I’ll be in Turin for another week, which means there’s still time for a few more visits to the archives, and for a few more long walks tracing the outlines of the half-vanished world I’ve been trying to reconstruct.
Tomorrow is May Day—a holiday of socialist stamp that Turin will undoubtedly celebrate with a distinctive breed of pomp and circumstance—and a reminder that the Turinese Left is not simply a relic of the past. Some of the same buildings that once housed socialist presses or cooperative institutions now carry a different set of inscriptions: “Free Gaza” graffiti, or the ubiquitous “Meloni Merda.” These tags are like archaeological layers on the surfaces of a much older political landscape. What’s striking, the longer I stay here, is how much of the Biennio Rosso’s infrastructure has disappeared, and yet how legible its imprint remains once you know where to look.
The history of the Left rarely carries ready-made lesson for the present. But examining that history can sharpen our understanding of contemporary problems. If hegemony is something that must be organized into the texture of everyday life, then the question is not only what people think, but what kinds of spaces, practices, and institutions make those thoughts collectively actionable and politically durable. That, at least, is the question I’ll be carrying with me as I head back to Chicago.
For another discussion of hegemony, check out this post from a few months back. I still need to write the follow-up.
This approach pushes back against a tendency—especially associated with Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe—to treat hegemony as a primarily discursive process. Without denying the importance of discourse, I argue that returning to the young Gramsci’s work surfaces the way building hegemony depends on dense networks of face-to-face interaction, embedded in the routines of everyday life and supported by a very real physical infrastructure.
This means that, in contrast to the bulk of contemporary scholarship on workers’ councils, I consider these institutions as neither a replicable template for emancipatory organization nor a simple avatar for failure. In the context of my project, the workers’ councils become a prism for unpacking the exigencies, tensions, and limits of hegemonic politics.
See Gramsci, Quaderni 10II, §44. Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 350.
Fondazione Instituto Piemontese Antonio Gramsci. Fipag / Parodi / b. 1 / fasc. 4.
See Gramsci Vivo, p. 33.
Very interesting. Avanti! has interested me since learning about Albert Hirschman smuggling it in his anti-fascist youth; I’d love to have a richer sense of the place and milieu. I also have parallel pedagogical questions from the Situated Learning/Legitimate Peripheral Participation/Suchman research program and I’ll look forward to reading more about Gramsci’s thinking and formation on the topic.
Yes, hegemony goes far beyond discourse. Hegemony inculcates often merely by being. Conditions condition. And create divergent and counter responses. From content form. Good luck digging through the material content, even as a lot of it maybe be more the form of underlying content. Things often teach simply by being, as any public service does. That’s a big reason why private forces, private hegemony, oppose the creation of public services and organizations, public hegemony, because just by being and functioning humanely they are inherently great teachers.