Understanding Fascism: Gramsci’s Insightful Analysis

Antonio Gramsci wrote some of the most penetrating analysis of fascism while sitting inside one of Mussolini’s prison cells. Arrested in 1926 and silenced by the very regime he was studying, he filled his famous Prison Notebooks with reflections that still shape how political scientists understand authoritarian power. For Gramsci, fascism was not a temporary madness or a simple military takeover. It was a strange new political form, born from crisis, capable of winning real mass support while quietly preserving the power of old elites. Understanding his framework gives us a sharp tool for reading not just the 1920s, but reactionary politics in any era.

Who was Gramsci and why his analysis matters 🔗

Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist theorist and a one-time leader of the Italian Communist Party. His most influential work was produced after his arrest, when the Fascist regime imprisoned him in 1926 and he turned years of confinement into an extraordinary body of writing. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that it was precisely during this imprisonment that Gramsci produced his richest texts, including his theory of hegemony, which describes how a ruling class secures power through intellectual and moral leadership rather than force alone.

This idea of hegemony is the foundation for everything that follows. Gramsci’s central insight was that ruling classes in advanced societies do not stay in power only through police and armies. They stay in power because large parts of society consent to their rule, accepting their worldview as common sense. Fascism, in his reading, was a particular and dangerous way of reorganising that consent during a period when the old order was breaking down.

Fascism as a ‘passive revolution’ 🔗

Gramsci’s most famous characterisation of fascism is that it was a passive revolution. The phrase sounds like a contradiction, and that tension is exactly the point. A genuine revolution involves mass participation from below that transforms society. A passive revolution looks like dramatic change on the surface, but the deeper structures of power and property remain intact. It is change managed from above so that the essentials stay the same.

In his notebooks, Gramsci directly asked whether fascism might be the form of passive revolution specific to the twentieth century, just as liberalism had been the characteristic form in the nineteenth. He linked fascism to a reformist transformation of the economy and to the role it played in stabilising relations between the traditional ruling class and the urban and rural middle layers. The regime restored a kind of equilibrium during a crisis, but it did so by absorbing and neutralising popular demands rather than fulfilling them.

Revolution-restoration: changing to preserve 🔗

Gramsci borrowed the idea of a revolution-restoration to describe this process. A new political order is built, the state is modernised, and power is reorganised, yet the social arrangements that benefit elites are protected. Sociologist Dylan Riley’s study of the notebooks emphasises that where a ruling class comes to power through such an elite-driven, non-revolutionary process, genuine hegemony and democracy remain weak. Fascism, then, was a way of carrying out modernisation while blocking any real democratic settlement.

The petty bourgeoisie and the question of mass support 🔗

One of the things that separates Gramsci’s analysis from a simple dismissal of fascism is his insistence that it had a real social base. Fascism was not just a conspiracy of generals or industrialists. It was a movement that mobilised genuine enthusiasm, drawing heavily on the petty bourgeoisie: small shopkeepers, lower-level professionals, artisans, and segments of the rural middle class who felt squeezed between big capital above and an organised working class below.

These middle layers were anxious, often resentful, and frightened by economic instability and the threat of socialist revolution. Fascism gave them a sense of purpose, national pride, and an enemy to blame. By treating this support as something to be explained rather than ignored, Gramsci pushed analysts to take seriously the way reactionary movements build mass consent. Recognising that fascism organised real social forces, rather than simply seizing the state, is what made his account a novel contribution.

Gramsci versus Trotsky: more than Bonapartism 🔗

The depth of Gramsci’s view becomes clearer when set against Leon Trotsky’s. Trotsky analysed fascism through the lens of Bonapartism, the model drawn from the regimes of Napoleon and his nephew, in which an apparently independent state machine balances above warring classes and rests primarily on the military and police.

Trotsky did distinguish fascism from ordinary Bonapartism, recognising that fascism mobilised the petty bourgeoisie into a mass movement. But his key argument was about what happens afterward. He held that once in power, the fascist leadership must muzzle the very masses who followed it, losing its active social base as it comes to serve big capital. In this analysis, fascism in its phase of decline regenerates into Bonapartism, resting once again on the bureaucratic and repressive apparatus of the state.

Gramsci’s framing was different in emphasis. Rather than seeing fascism as essentially a variant that collapses back into a familiar strongman state, he treated it as a distinctive organisation of consent and coercion, a new way of managing an entire social crisis through hegemony and force combined. Where Trotsky’s horizon focused on the class character of the dictatorship and its inevitable narrowing, Gramsci’s focused on how the regime reshaped civil society itself.

Caesarism: the strongman in a crisis 🔗

To explain how a single leader rises during such a breakdown, Gramsci developed the concept of Caesarism. Caesarism describes a situation where the contending social forces are so evenly balanced, and the crisis so deep, that a charismatic individual steps forward as an apparent arbiter, concentrating extraordinary power to restore order. The name evokes Julius Caesar, but the figures Gramsci had in mind were modern, with Mussolini as the obvious example.

Gramsci was careful not to treat Caesarism as a single fixed thing. As the scholar Francesca Antonini explains in her study of the concept, Gramsci distinguished different gradations of Caesarism, including qualitative and quantitative forms. Some Caesarist solutions are progressive, opening a path forward; others, like fascism, are reactionary, freezing a crisis in favour of the old order. This nuance kept his analysis from collapsing into a simple theory of the great man.

War of position and war of movement 🔗

Gramsci’s strategic vocabulary is where his analysis becomes most useful for the broader study of politics. He borrowed two metaphors from military thinking to describe how political struggle is waged.

The Bolshevik war of movement 🔗

A war of movement, sometimes called a war of manoeuvre, is a rapid, frontal assault aimed at directly seizing the state. The model was the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in 1917. Gramsci argued this worked in Russia because, in his words, the state was everything and civil society was undeveloped. A single decisive blow against the state could topple the whole structure.

Why the West needed a war of position 🔗

In Western Europe, Gramsci argued, the situation was different. Behind the state lay a dense, resilient civil society of churches, schools, newspapers, associations, and cultural institutions that anchored ruling-class power. A frontal assault would shatter against these defences. The appropriate strategy was therefore a war of position: a slow, infiltrative struggle to win cultural and ideological influence across society before any decisive confrontation. The review of Antonini’s work notes that Gramsci connected these military metaphors directly to his concept of passive revolution, since both involve gradual, drawn-out processes rather than sudden ruptures. Fascism itself could be understood as a reactionary war of position, slowly capturing civil society to entrench its dominance.

Inherent contradictions and the predicted demise 🔗

Despite fascism’s apparent strength, Gramsci argued that it carried the seeds of its own collapse. A passive revolution can absorb popular demands and stabilise a crisis, but it cannot build a durable, genuine hegemony, because it rests on suppressing rather than satisfying the social forces it mobilised. The middle layers that powered the movement gain little materially, and the regime increasingly relies on coercion to hold together what consent cannot.

This is where Gramsci’s reading and Trotsky’s partly converge: a regime that exhausts its mass base is forced to lean ever more heavily on the state apparatus, which makes it brittle. Gramsci died in 1937, before the outcome was clear. Yet within a decade the fascist regimes of Italy and Germany had been destroyed by war and internal collapse, a sequence that gave his diagnosis of fascism’s internal contradictions considerable historical weight. The posthumous influence of the Prison Notebooks rests in no small part on how well this analysis travelled beyond its original moment.

What do you think? If fascism succeeds partly by winning the consent of anxious middle classes during a crisis, what does that suggest about how democracies should respond to economic insecurity today? And do you find Gramsci’s idea of a slow war of position more convincing than Trotsky’s emphasis on the fragile class base of dictatorship?

References

1. https://cup.columbia.edu/book/prison-notebooks/9780231060820/
2. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gramsci/
3. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-international-studies/article/abs/passive-revolution-a-universal-concept-with-geographical-seats/9C8B8E8B232D70A078AA6663CDE87DC2
4. https://sociology.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/faculty/Riley/hegemonydemocracy.pdf
5. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1934/340715.htm
6. https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/19062_caesarism-and-bonapartism-in-gramsci-hegemony-and-the-crisis-of-modernity-by-francesca-antonini-reviewed-by-sevgi-dogan/