By LINCOLN SECCO*
Gramsci had to deal with fascism in prison in its moment of stabilization and daily rooting
Third phase. Os notebooks (1928-1935)
Between 1948 and 1951, the six volumes of the thematic edition of the Prison Notebooks. The organization fell to Felice Platone under the supervision of Palmiro Togliatti. Only in 1975 would the notebooks be edited according to the organization left by Gramsci himself, in the care of Valentino Gerratana.[I]
After the critical edition, advances in philological criticism revealed different facets of Antonio Gramsci's thought. Concepts that were once decisive in the formulations of its readers or in political parties have become questionable, such as the historical block, the dyad base and superstructure,[ii] arditismo, subordinates, civil society and even hegemony. Which doesn't mean they were invalidated.
Consensus and coercion were used in a dichotomous and non-procedural way and, therefore, there was a wide debate about Gramsci's alleged conceptual imprecision in the delimitation between state and civil society. The controversies that involved the authors of the 1970s had in two intellectuals a strong moment of the debate about hegemony, historical block etc: Christine-Bucci Glucksmann[iii] and Maria Macciochi.[iv]
Also Hughes Portelli[v] and Perry Anderson entered the debate and he wrote a critique of Antonio Gramsci based on the Gerratana edition.[vi] As it turned out later, Perry Anderson was comparing identical terms without realizing that the notions underlying them were different according to the evolution that Antonio Gramsci experienced in his production;[vii] the conception of hegemony signaled a conflict and not a given fact. The common substratum of those authors was the resumption of the discussion on fascism, especially Glucksmann and Anderson.
In the 1970s, urban armed struggle and clandestine state-backed right-wing terrorism revived the theme of fascism.[viii] When Enzo Santarelli edited a collection of texts by Antonio Gramsci on fascism in 1974, he wrote that neo-fascism fed on post-fascist society itself.[ix] The post-World War II cycle of capitalist expansion had run its course, neoliberalism was influencing governments and questioning the role of the state; politics and culture were redefined; financialization affected international relations between center and periphery; and, finally, the economy experienced a productive revolution. This was the context in which Antonio Gramsci's ideas on the state and civil society, subaltern classes, Fordism and fascism were discussed.
At the time of Antonio Gramsci, new productive demands and cultural changes were also imposed, which he addressed under the rubric “Americanism and Fordism”. For him, the cruelty of fascism was born from the new relations of production and the need for an international war of position against the working class.
Fascism marked the passage to a new form of productive organization. Liberism, wrote Antonio Gramsci, “is a regulation of a state nature, introduced and maintained by legislative and coercive means: it is a fact of will conscious of its own ends, and not a spontaneous, automatic expression of the economic fact. Therefore, liberism is a political program destined to change, when it succeeds, the leading personnel of a State and the economic program of the State itself, that is, to change the distribution of national income.[X].
There is therefore no counterposition of the State against the market. To believe that would be to reproduce liberal ideology itself. Therefore, fascism is not statist or liberal, it simply responds to the most appropriate form of state intervention in the capitalist economy at a given historical moment. Liberalism and fascism are modes of passive revolution.
Antonio Gramsci initially resorted to passive revolution to interpret the bourgeois rise devoid of Jacobin radicalism. A kind of revolution – restoration, in the expression that Antonio Gramsci borrows from the historian Edgard Quinet, in which the modernization of the productive forces is carried out, avoiding the French Revolution (in the case of nineteenth-century liberalism) and the Russian Revolution (in the case of of twentieth-century fascism).
He dealt mainly with the Risorgimento Italian, but left clear indications that fascism could also be treated in that interpretation key, evidently reformulated. The Passive Revolution excludes the autonomous participation of the popular layers through their own organizations, which are destroyed and their leaders are decapitated or co-opted (transformism). Jacobin radicalism is replaced by legislative initiative, corporate organization and profound changes in economic organization to “accentuate the flat element of production (…) without thereby touching the individual or group appropriation of profit”. At the Risorgimento the way out of the political deadlock was conservative liberalism. In the 1920s it was fascism, the only force capable of “integrating Italy to the rhythm of imperialist accumulation patterns”.[xi]
In the case of Italian fascism, corporatism is an attempt at a middle path between Soviet planning and the market economy. The state would beholding” which bridges the gap between national income and consumption, placing public savings at the disposal of large industry, circumventing the various fixed capital turnover times, providing credit or investing directly in the medium and long term, “performing those functions that United States were carried out spontaneously by the bourgeoisie itself”.[xii]
The syndicalist wing of fascism (in general formed by former revolutionary unionists), led by Rossoni, aimed at a single organization of workers and businessmen (integral syndicalism) that would subordinate large industries into a unit with medium sectors, agricultural and industrial workers and small businessmen.[xiii] However, corporatism was the alternative model to integral unionism.
Although it predicted a kind of co-management of the economy, in practice the corporatist policy incorporated Cofindustria into the state and kept entrepreneurs in private despotism in their companies. That meant giving them control of a state body[xiv] and corporations became monopolistic bodies.[xv] “The State created by Rocco exalted the aspect of coercion, totalitarianism aimed and exalted the aspect of consensus”.
Although it was never fully realized, Mussolini's totalitarian hypothesis sought the "annulment of the liberal separation between state and civil society, the total integration of the second in the first"[xvi], exactly the opposite of the Gramscian proposition. Antonio Gramsci did not use the term totalitarian only in a negative sense. The word was used by the Italian anti-fascist opposition and by the regime itself. In Gramsci, it can mean both the fascist attempt to abolish other organizations and satisfy social demands within a “single homogenizing center” (the state absorbs civil society), and the communist solution in which civil society absorbs the state.[xvii].
Antonio Gramsci realized that corporatism froze classes at an elementary (socio-professional) level and incorporated the need for economic planning into a controllable institutional space. Thus was realized the goal of a regulated economy, without violating private property and profit.
It should be noted that “Gramscian reflection is cautious and not conclusive, favoring explanatory hypotheses rather than generalizing schemes”.[xviii] There is nothing definitive about fascism. Certainly, empirical observation led Gramsci to consider a salient role for the state, but he also resorted to the concept of passive revolution to address a modernization without revolution based on the spontaneous forces of civil society: Americanism. In this case, the liberal state was preserved. Liberalism was understood not according to the ideology of free trade, but as the type of state intervention that provides the environment for the free enterprise of capital that reaches the monopoly stage by itself. But many of these statements are accompanied by interrogations, variants and verbs in the conditional tense.
the fascist party
Antonio Gramsci understood parties as the private fabric of the State. They depend on the degree of homogeneity and awareness of the various social groups. The party is a school of state life, which mimics the political body it wishes to conquer.
The movement for the formation of states suppresses previous autonomies and unfolds, once established as a power “above” society, in parties and in civil society, recognizing itself as a reality in the world. As if each one of them were a small potential state, it being up to the modern prince to allow the reunion of the unity of the state's ideality and the objectivity of civil society. The modern prince is not a party in the abstract, but historical, concrete. When we talk about party or state this is very abstract, although it seems simple. For this very reason, for dialectics, the simple is an abstraction and not the complex.
Only after a course of historical analysis do the parties in Italy become complex, the result of many determinations, therefore concrete. For Antonio Gramsci, in Italy the newspapers constituted the true parties. It shifts the focus away from formal parties, which have been torn apart by war, the failure of liberalism and fascism. There is no way not to draw an analogy with the use of mass media and social networks by fascists in the XNUMXst century.
Antonio Gramsci turned to the party in a broad and non-formal sense. At one point he claimed that the church itself was forced to become a party. The fascist party was primitive. It resulted from the corporate economic tradition of the Italian ruling classes. There is a quote from the fascist Balbo that establishes a parallel between fascism and communism as movements capable of acting outside the law in the context of the crisis of the liberal parliamentary regime: “Mussolini acted. If it had not done so, the fascist movement would have perpetuated civil guerrilla warfare for decades and it is not excluded that other forces, which operated, like ours, outside the law of the State, but with anarchic and destructive purposes, would end up benefiting from neutrality and impotence".[xx]
As a fascist, he assigned to his adversary what he himself had accomplished: the task of destruction. And he concealed the means, because fascism only acted illegally with the complicity of the state apparatus, while this was impossible for its opponents. Once in power, fascism tended to use illegality and did not bother to institute a new law. Gramsci asserted that Mussolini used the state to dominate the party and the party, in difficult times, to dominate the state.[xx]
He suggested that the primitive phase of the mass party expressed itself in the charismatic leader. The “doctrine presents itself to adherents as something nebulous and incoherent, which needs an infallible pope to be interpreted and adapted to circumstances”[xxx]. This party was not born and formed on “a unitary conception of the world because it does not express a historically essential and progressive class, but on the basis of incoherent and disorganized ideologies (arruffate), which are nourished by feelings and emotions”. The fascist party expressed classes that, although in dissolution, still had a certain social importance and clung to the past to protect themselves from the future.
It was a police variant of domination, without theoretical and doctrinal activity. The fascist party could exercise a police function to protect order, but it was not a modern prince capable of establishing a new stable balance of power. Fascism confirms the cultural and economic subalternity of a country, although it uses the idea of nation to dissolve social classes in its discourse. This is possible when they are paralyzed.
Lorianism
Antonio Gramsci had to deal in prison with fascism in its moment of stabilization and daily rooting. One of the volumes of the classic biography of Mussolini, written by historian Renzo De Felice, was entitled The years of consensus. 1929-1936.[xxiii] A deliberate provocative choice that attributed consensus to a regime founded on coercion and illegality. An uncomfortable provocation for post-fascist Italian democracy itself, which never completely “de-fascistized”.
Fascism challenged its opponents because it did not set a coherent ideology against them, whether defined negatively, as false consciousness, or positively, as a legitimate conception of life and the world. As we have seen before, fascism is just action, according to Mussolini. And always opportunistic. Hitler himself insisted that one must address the masses not with arguments, evidence and knowledge, but with feelings and professions of faith. For Mussolini, who had a greater prior political background than Hitler, doctrines were nothing more than tactical expedients.
Antonio Gramsci was not alone when he scrutinized in 1935 the irrational nature of fascist discourse. Wilhelm Reich wrote Mass psychology of fascism in 1933, turning to the affective and irrational content of adherence to fascism[xxiii]. O Behemoth by Franz Neumann is from 1944. In it the author demonstrated that every Nazi statement lacked consistency. It was an absolute opportunism where every statement proceeded from the immediate situation and was abandoned when the situation changed.[xxv]
It was a discourse in which the words maintained an arbitrary relationship with the supposed realities to which they referred. Therefore, there was no coherence in the meanings or in the sequence of what was stated, only in the manipulation technique. The objective of manipulation is only the perpetuation of manipulation itself. Form doesn't matter, style is rude. As a preaching, fascism is the “divinization of the fait accompli” and therefore it doesn't matter that it was republican first, monarchist later and republican again.[xxiv]
This apparent “philosophy” that comes from below, from everyday life, is part of the bizarre form that has always accompanied intellectual strata that felt marginalized.[xxv] There is always an intellectual type that cultivates eccentric theories, reactionary and opportunistic positions, disguised as progressive and scientific that distort empirical evidence to reach extravagant results.
To understand the composite message of fascism, it is more important to study these marginal figures in literature and science, but who were publicly welcomed in their times, than the names that entered the literary canon. Achile Loria, today an unknown author, was an example for Antonio Gramsci. Common sense is not the result of low education. In the sphere of everyday life, we are all “ordinary” human beings, where we act immediately, without reflection. Jurists, senior officials, university professors, political and scientific leaders offered their support to fascism because they did not link their studies and their profession to society as a whole.
The eccentric discourse is one of the fascist sources that unveils a new way of operating in the public debate and that takes up the theme of the betrayal of the intellectuals, but not to Julien Benda, why not propose a return to pure and disinterested science[xxviii]. In fact, nothing is proposed.[xxviii]. The fascist does not hide what he thinks. His lie is in the whole and not necessarily in the parts. There is in it a vile interest, no doubt, but also a broken faith, a disjointed whole that is proclaimed when leftist intellectuals abandon the universal and become technicians of knowledge, counting the number of articles in their curricula. He does not plan the meeting of the people with philosophy. It gives “theoretical” status to common sense, to the “average man's philosophy”, incoherent and disjointed. Unlike Gramsci, there is no idea of finding a “sound core” in common sense through a reciprocal action between theory and popular conception. It is the opposite: it is not a question of raising the belief of the common man, but of giving it the status of a philosophy. fake.
The technique consists of oxymoron, generalization of teratological cases, use of contradictory ideas and narrative incoherence. one of the last Prison Notebooks, written in 1935, is dedicated precisely to “Lorianism”. It is impossible not to think about the Brazilian astrologer Olavo de Carvalho[xxix]. Like him, Achile Loria came up with weird ideas; he proposed, for example, that hunger be fought by smearing the wings of airplanes with mistletoe, which would allow the poor to eat the birds that would be stuck to the airplanes. Loria was a “medallion” intellectual (to use Machado de Assis's expression). “Lorianism” referred to positivism and opportunism[xxx], even presenting himself as progressive. “Brescianism”, on the contrary, typifies a group of literati dilettantes, reactionaries and ideologically confused, like the Jesuit priest Bresciani.
Even celebrated artists and intellectuals can have traits of Lorianism, such as “moral and civil cowardice” and conformism. The two rubrics chosen by Antonio Gramsci can serve as inspiration to answer the question: how to deal with what is bizarre, monstrous, irrational, but endowed with the power of influence?
Antonio Gramsci indicates that it is “a research on the history of culture, not artistic criticism”, and the most salient feature that he questions in the examined authors is that they “introduce an external moral content” to their works and do not respect internal rules methodological, after all they are eclectic, they focus on the recipient of the message, they do propaganda, never science or art.
O lorianism it is a category of analysis of molecular, imperceptible, unconscious and spontaneous transformations that crystallize in residues that politics does not collect. These rejects of bourgeois civilization in the past had no meaning, but now (1935) they took on a form. This is defined as special (it did not exist before), voluntary (collectively assumed), systematic (mass) and terrorist. When listing these characteristics of the phenomenon lorian Gramsci does not spare the “responsibility of those who, being able, did not prevent”.
The question presented to Antonio Gramsci is that all the movements he studied could have some positive trait: Croce's philosophy, liberalism, reformism, religions, etc. Caesarism can be regressive or progressive, but the lorianism nothing positive.[xxxii] It is with this category that he refers to Nazism as “lorianism monstrous". How to combat a blind fanaticism that lacks a conception of the world and of the State? In the last addition he wrote to his notebooks, Gramsci compared Nazism to manifestations of brutality and ignominy that filled cultural life with suffocating gases.[xxxi]
The “deteriorated and bizarre aspects” constitute a group mentality and correspond, therefore, to traits of the national culture. The main thing is the absence of organicity, that is, research and systematic study.
However, an attitude lorian in the social hideouts of so-called misunderstood geniuses it is not the problem that matters. Loria's own career indicates that there were flaws in the cultural system and, out of opportunism or self-interest, established intellectuals supported him. When citing immense mediocre volumes that could be accepted by publishers, Antonio Gramsci says: “the responsibility of the system is evident here”. Einaudi, for example, used his editorial and intellectual power to make a “Bibliografia di Achille Loria”. Furthermore, the lack of permanent criticism of those oddities allowed Loria to survive in the intellectual world. Continuity and persistence allowed him to be evaluated by the number of titles, “in these times of quantitative civilization”, added Gramsci.
The oddities do not derive only from individual pretensions, but from the absence of a cultural and institutional filter. Even well trained people in some make mistakes and that's normal. Even blunders can be recognized and corrected. Antonio Gramsci cites the case of an author of patriotic books who confused the “house of the Parthians” – a ruin of the Parthians, an Asian people – with a Roman gynecological clinic. The issue there is that the misconceptions were not filtered through the university system or its equivalent. O lorianism it is an inverted filter that rejects everything that is systematic and decants everything that is “impure”.
Loria developed, for example, the theory “on the degree of morality according to altitude in relation to sea level, with the practical proposal of regenerating delinquents by taking them to the upper atmospheric layers in immense airplanes, thus correcting a previous proposal to build the prisons on high mountains”. These follies also corresponded to a “cultural” substratum and to traditions that continually returned.
The problem is not "talking about anything", although that may be an index of Lorianism. Intellectuals are continually summoned to give their opinion in the public sphere on various topics. Antonio Gramsci himself addressed many different subjects in the Prison Notebooks. But he did so with a unitary intention and even those texts that were for their own enlightenment were subordinated to a method. Lorians are always in their "lair of misunderstood geniuses" and their intellectual ambition is mixed with the hope of "selling their nonsense". But they ignore the notions of coherence and method and the reasonableness of common sense.
the antifascism
Antonio Gramsci issued opinions of an immediate practical nature, according to some political prisoners[xxxii] and it is known that his relations with the Communists were not always friendly.[xxxv]. But their disagreements were of a much deeper nature. He did not believe that modern thought was just an expression of bourgeois decadence and aspects of the dominant culture could be developed. It is in this resumption that the gap in Lorianism resides, which throws itself on new movements to pervert them.
Lorianism, as the degeneration of the positivist philosophy of technique, allowed and justified the central element of fascism: terrorism. The fight against this demands that the denial of each element of the old civilization be carried out according to the perspective of overcoming the split between philosophy and common sense, which enhances practice and does not reduce theory to just one more technique. For Antonio Gramsci, the left itself could be accused of accepting this dehumanization. Socialist leaders had Lorian attitudes, like Turatti.[xxxiv]
In terms of our time, it is not possible to propose social transformations that are not also universalized as a social conscience. Politics, even those of the "left", which do not serve to bring together leaders and those led, philosophy and common sense, theory and practice, is the one that is reduced to the technical management of social conflicts. It manages to attract adherents today and lose them tomorrow to fascism because its elaborations do not become a political culture, that is, a shared network of production and circulation of practices, organizations, theories, values, ideals, feelings, etc.
“How to react?” asks Antonio Gramsci. In the long run by a new school; in the short term, creating "instinctive" dislike for Lorianism with the sense of the ridiculous, since common sense can be "awakened by a good pinprick", as he wrote. His best-known anti-Lorian words sum up the attitude towards fascism: “Moreover, every collapse brings with it intellectual and moral disorder. It is necessary to raise men who are sober, patient, who do not despair in the face of the worst horrors and who do not get excited in the face of any foolishness. Pessimism of intelligence, optimism of will.”
* Lincoln Secco He is a professor in the Department of History at USP. Author, among other books, of History of the PT (Studio).
To access the first part of the article click on https://dpp.cce.myftpupload.com/antonio-gramsci-e-o-fascismo/
Notes
[I]The Brazilian edition directed by Carlos Nelson Coutinho and Luiz Sergio Henriques, although extensive, did not follow the criteria of the Gerratana edition and did not fully publish the texts written in prison.
[ii] Balsa, Javier. “An Assessment of the Philological Readings of Gramsci's Work and Its Possible Contributions to Political Strategies”. Praxis and Popular Hegemony Magazine, year 4, n. 5, p. 82-104, Aug/Dec, 2019.
[iii] Bucci-Glucksmann, Christine. Gramsci and the StateLa Javie, 2ª ed. Rio: peace and land, 1980.
[iv] Macciochi, MA In favor of Gramsci. Rio de Janeiro: Peace and Land, 1980.
[v]Portelli, Hughes. Gramsci and the historic block. Rio: peace and land, 1977.
[vi] Anderson, P. “The Antinomies of Gramsci”, in Marxist Criticism. S. Paulo: Joruês, 1986. Anderson's critique of Gramsci begins with his most important historiographical work. His hypothesis of absolutism as a centralized feudal regime contradicted the classic Marxian and Marxist reading of the Modern State as an arbitrator that allowed the coexistence of landed nobility and an ascending bourgeoisie within the scope of “national” monarchies. By attacking the entire reading of the State made by Machiavelli and Marx himself, assumed by Gramsci, he also considers all Gramsci's questioning about the Renaissance and the Risorgimento to be wrong. Anderson, Perry. Lineages of the Absolutist State. Trans. Suely Bastos. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 2 ed, 1989, p. 169.
[vii] Francioni, G. L'Officina gramsciana. Napoli: Bibliopolis, 1984, p. 198.
[viii]The cinema of Pasolini, Ettore Scola, Costa Gavras, Elio Petri, Liliana Cavani and others documents this.
[ix]Santarelli, Enzo. “Prologue” in Gramsci, Antonio. About Fascism. Mexico: Era, 1979, p.30.
[X]Gramsci, Notebooks, cit., p.1589.
[xi]Ruviaro, Deborah. and Siqueira, Mirele H. “The Gramscian debate on fascism: a Brazilian-style fascism?”, O Social em Questão, ano XXIV, n. 51, Sep Dec 2021.
[xii]Bianchi, Alvaro. “Passive revolution: the past tense of the future”, using this link. Accessed on August 10, 2020.
[xiii]Carocci, Giampiero. Storia d'Italia dall'Unità ad Oggi. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1975, p. 255.
[xiv]Carocci, G. op. cit., p. 256.
[xv]Salvatorelli, Luigi. Summary of the Story of Italy. Turin: Einaudi, 1974, p. 500.
[xvi]Carocci, G. op. cit., p. 267.
[xvii]Ruviaro, Deborah. and Siqueira, Mirele H. “The Gramscian debate on fascism: a Brazilian-style fascism?”, O Social em Questão, ano XXIV, n. 51, Sep Dec 2021.
[xviii]Cf. Bianqui, Alvaro. Passive revolution: the past tense of the future, using this link.
[xx]Gramsci, Antonio. Quaderni del Jail. Turin: Riunitti, 1975, p. 808.
[xx]ID ibid., p. 233.
[xxx]ID ibid., p. 233.
[xxiii] Felice, Renzo de. Mussolini il Duce. Gli anni del consensus. 1929-1936. Turin: Einaudi, 1974 (https://amzn.to/3sfESN7).
[xxiii]Reich, Wilhelm. Mass Psychology of Fascism. Lisbon: Escorpião, 1974, pp. 35, 79, 93 and 95.
[xxv]Neuman, F. Behemoth. Mexico: FCE, 2005, p. 57.
[xxiv]Fabbri, Luce. Fascism: Definition and History. São Paulo: Microutopias, 2019, p.19.
[xxv]In the contexts of political reaction, they are removed from the imaginary “self-exile” and achieve an incidence inversely proportional to the depth of their writings, which can gather in a single work an alleged erudition shakespearean with the indictment of an underclass of sexually irresponsible and economically insecure people produced by leftist academic discourse. In Brazil Paulo Francis and after him others less gifted fulfilled this role. In Great Britain for example: Dalrymple, Theodore. Our culture… or what's left of it. Trans. M. Righi. São Paulo: É Realizações, 2015.
[xxviii]Benda, Julien. The Betrayal of Intellectuals. Trans. Paul Neves. São Paulo: Peixoto Neto, 2007. See also: Boto, Carla. “Betrayal of the Intellectuals”. USP Magazine, Sao Paulo, 2009.
[xxviii]For Benda, the intellectual could even be a partisan as long as he defended the universal, truth and justice. Bobbio recalled that this would be easier for someone on the left because the intellectual on the right cannot admit that behind honor and country he defends personal interests and his coterie. Bobbio, Norberto. Intellectuals and Power: Doubts and Options of Men of Culture in Contemporary Society. São Paulo, Unesp, 1997.
[xxix]See: Secco, L. “Gramscismo: Una Ideología de la Nueva Derecha Brasileña”, Revista Política Latinoamericana, nº7, Buenos Aires, julio-diciembre 2018.
[xxx]Buttigieg, Joseph. "Gramsci's method". Translation: Luiz Sérgio Henrique in: https://www.acessa.com/gramsci/?page=visualizar&id=290. Accessed on 28/07/2019.
[xxxii]Badaloni, Nicola. “Gramsci: The Philosophy of Praxis as Prediction”, in Hobsbawm, Eric (Org). history of marxism. Volume X. Translated by Carlos Nelson Coutinho and Luiz Sérgio Henriques. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1987, p.117.
[xxxi]ID ibid., p.119.
[xxxii]Giuseppe Ceresa reported on it: Ceresa, G. “Gramsci in Prison”, Problems, nº10, May 1948. Sandro Pertini alluded to a meeting with Gramsci. Pertini, Sandro. I know condanne, due to evasioni, Milano, Mondadori, 1982, p.181. Athos Lisa wrote a report to the Communist Party. Lisa, Athos, “Political Discussion with Gramsci, in prison”, in: Gramsci, A. Political writings (1917-1933), 4th ed, Mexico, iglo XXI, 1990.
[xxxv]From mid-1931 to December 1933, Operation status was silent about Gramsci. The unit went through 1932 without a single word about him. See Spriano, P. Gramsci in jail and the party, Rome: Riunitti, 1977, pp. 61-62.
[xxxiv]The example cited by Gramsci is ambiguous. In 1919, Filippo Turati simultaneously addressed the issue of women's right to vote and the problem of prostitutes, called “earners of love” and “providers of a public service and, therefore, more honest than the political class”. Mussi, Daniela. “Antonio Gramsci and the Feminine Question”, Social Time, USP sociology journal, v. 31, no. 2. São Paulo, USP, 2019.