Antonio Gramsci and the Role of Violence during the Red Biennium

Gramsci is frequently identified as a theorist of “cultural hegemony,” consent or the “battle of ideas.” His thought seems of little help in analyzing the relationship between politics and violence. Contrary to this view, this article focuses on his pre-carceral writings commenting on two major events held in Turin during the Red Biennium (biennio rosso): the strike “of the clock hands” and the factory occupations movement. In these publications, Gramsci is constantly preoccupied with the violence of the bourgeois state and proletarian counter-violence. The repression of the regular army, carabinieri, Royal Guard, and private militias directly compromised the realization of the strategy he promoted in L’Ordine Nuovo, which aimed to transform the internal commissions into factory councils in Italy. The disorganization of the “military defense” of factories occupied by workers, and the unpreparedness of a possible armed insurrection, also prompted valuable reflections from him about revolutionary counter-violence.