In many countries around the world, farmers frequently support sovranist leaders and governments whose policies actually damage their business. These loyalties fluster political opponents, who often are not able to explain the how and why of these dynamics. Reading Gramsci may provide some guidance.
As I am in Europe for research and vacation, I follow the local news, including those about food. Despite the amazing variety of culinary traditions and products, the outlook for the future is not too cheerful. The consequences of climate change are there for all to see, from heat waves and droughts in northern Europe to extreme weather events, like the golf ball-sized hail that has basically destroyed all crops in the area around the city of Pescara, on the eastern coast of central Italy. Although providing emergency aid to the affected communities, most governments seem incapable to take serious initiatives to limit climate change, mitigate its effects, and increase the resiliency of agriculture. And those are not the only issues troubling the European food system. Concerns about the provenance of products, the presence of pesticides and insecticides on crops, the diffusion of GMOs, and the effectiveness of food safety tools, all loom large in the shopping decisions of consumers.
Moreover, food production is enmeshed in heated political debates touching on cultural identities and the fears of outsiders. While it is a known fact that the cultivation and harvesting of fruits and vegetables depend on the presence of immigrant workers, often undocumented, exploited, and victimized by organized crime, it is politically toxic to suggest any reform of immigration policies, even limited to the agricultural sector. After the 2015 wave of arrivals that put to the test Europe’s capacity of dealing with unprecedented flows of arrivals, experienced as overwhelming and damaging to national economies, the presence of newcomers has been used as a political weapon to spread fears about foreigners – often depicted in terms of an invasion that threatens the European way of life and its cultural values. While it is undeniable that efficient solutions to these issues need to be negotiated and implemented with the participation of local and national governments, the panic these phenomena cause has been leveraged by populist and often xenophobic sovranist movements to achieve national visibility and to win elections.
These political dynamics are far from being only contemporary. On vacation, I also like to relax and enjoy books that I usually don’t have the time or the opportunity to read when I am busy with work or research. This is the case for very long books, or books in Italian that I may not find in the US. This summer I am reading M. Il figlio del secolo by Antonio Scurati, a semi-fictional novel that chronicles Mussolini’s ascent to power between 1919 and 1924 (not translated into English yet). It is a gripping but sobering reading, especially as it shows as political authoritarianism metastasizes subtly, almost innocuously, at least at first. It becomes part of everyday life, giving meaning to the lack of meaning that may affect part of the population, shaping their reality while feeding on their energy, mostly in the forms of alarm and confusion. Violence then emerges as a political method, generating well-calculated effects. The men who embraced fascism represented what Hannah Arendt aptly described as the “banality of evil.” When discussing Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat in charge with the transportation of millions of Jews to concentration camps, she described him as ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’. What a frightening portrayal!
Fascism managed to take control of the Italian political system slowly and systematically, taking their time before imposing its dictatorship, by assuaging the distress of the petit-bourgeois and the capitalists that felt threatened by the growth and success of socialist unions. Landowners were particularly scared of the resistance their laborers were able to organize, which at times expressed itself through destructive acts of brutality. Over time, agricultural workers had managed to impose better contracts and salaries to the landowners, who found in Fascism a force to beat the workers down into obedience. Terror reigned in the countryside until it was “pacified” by Fascist squadrons. In the following years, rural workers joined the Fascist labor organizations in droves. Yet, neither land redistribution nor noticeable increases in wages took place.
I found Scurati’s book unsettling because, although the events it narrates took place one hundred years ago, it eerily seems to reflect aspects of the contemporary diffusion of the forms of sovranism that plague many countries around the world. Sovranist leaders, often presenting themselves as strong self-made men outside of the elites, are uncannily able to obtain the support of large segments of citizens, including those whose economic interests and goals would appear to clash with sovranist agendas. In the field of agriculture and food production, it is not unusual to see farmers backing leaders whose policies are actually damaging to their endeavors. While these measures do not affect large agribusinesses excessively, they hit small farmers more acutely.
However, embracing the sovranist ideals of self-reliance and national pride, these farmers may find themselves soldiering through trade wars, inadequate food safety policies, lopsided taxation and financial schemes, lack of environmental protection, and overall mismanagement of water and other natural resources. Subsidies and emergency aid, although rarely sufficient and frequently distorting in the long run, are welcome as signs of care from the leaders. These loyalties fluster political opponents of sovranism, who – often contained within their own echo chambers – are not able to explain the how and why of these dynamics, which we can recognize, with local characteristics and variations, in places as diverse as the USA, India, Brazil, and the Philippines.
How can this happen? Some suggestions may be found in Antonio Gramsci’s writing, into which I stumbled while trying to give some order to my bookshelves. Gramsci was a leader of the Italian Communist Party who, imprisoned by the Fascist regime for most of his adult life, used his time in jail to reflect on the political and social situation of his country, the clutch that the Fascist party had on the people, and the role of culture in those dynamics. Despite his Marxist background, he felt he could not dismiss culture (including politics) as a “superstructure,” a mere consequence of the economic structure with no influence on social and political life. What were the ideological resources of Fascism? How could this totalitarian regime get so many citizens to adhere to its tenets and practices? The answer Gramsci gave was that the Fascist party had gained dominance – which he called “hegemony – in that it had transcended the interests of the specific sectors that it represented and created a political and social culture that met the interests of most subordinate groups, thus ensuring its dominant position in Italy.
Taking advantage of the incapacity of Italian intellectuals, especially the ones in the Left, to create a lively and productive relationship with the other classes, due to their status as a separate caste, Fascism had been able to talk to the imagination and the dreams of the masses, beyond actual material and immaterial needs, shaping a “national-popular” culture which influenced their mentalities and behaviors. In Gramsci’s reflections, popular culture is a field were political, social, and ideological battles are fought among different groups of interest to establish their hegemony over society at large. He specifically discusses serial novels, mostly foreign and from the nineteenth century, and opera as examples of popular entertainment: two genres that nowadays sit comfortably in the “high brow” categories. The arena has shifted to social media, YouTube, and other visual forms of communication.
Gramsci’s reflection is still relevant today: how do sovranist leaders succeed in capturing the loyalty of whole populations? How do they maintain the backing of parts of society that tend to suffer from their policies? What kind of emotions, values, and attitudes are they able to activate in order to create an ideology that satisfies their supporters? When it comes to food systems, why do farmers and other actors, frequently damaged by agricultural and trade policies put in place by sovranist leaders, keep on following them? It is clearly not a matter of material gains. Against this background, it becomes strategic to understand the aspirations and the lifeworld of these workers, businessmen, and entrepreneurs, while avoiding any sense of superiority. Gramsci pointed out the need for organic intellectuals emerging from the same socio-cultural groups, rather than from the intelligentsia, in order to explain and engage with these positions. Reading Gramsci, after all, may provide some guidance.