The great anti-fascist novelist, Ignazio Silone, writes:[*] “The cafone [which may be approximately translated as ‘small farmer’ or ‘sharecropper’] is by no means primitive; in one sense he is overcivilized. The experience of generations makes him believe that the State is merely a better organized Camorra [i.e., racket].… Marx often speaks of the peasants as having torpid minds, but what did he know about them? I imagine that he watched them in the market-place at Trier and observed that they were sullen and tongue-tied. He would not stop to think that they had assumed this role
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