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title = "The Southern Question"
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> It is well known what kind of ideology has been disseminated in myriad ways among the masses in the North, by the propagandists of the bourgeoisie: the South is the ball and chain which prevents the social development of Italy from progressing more rapidly; the Southerners are biologically inferior beings, semibarbarians or total barbarians, by natural destiny; if the South is backward, the fault does not lie with the capitalist system or with any other historical cause, but with Nature, which has made the Southerners lazy, incapable, criminal and barbaric - only tempering this harsh fate with the purely individual explosion of a few great geniuses, like isolated palm-trees in an arid and barren desert. - ![](author:gramsci.md)

from [Selections from Political Writings 1921-1926](https://library.memoryoftheworld.org/#/book/4788da2d-d490-46e1-8ffd-81d5b7d8d334)