Gramsci on Madness and Fascism: Hegemony and Sanist Slurs

By

Robert Chapman

Mad and neurodivergent people on the left often find ourselves in purportedly inclusive spaces where ableist and sanist language nonetheless circulates casually, most often as a way of dismissing political opponents. Words like mad, insane, or moronic are deployed as if they were neutral descriptors rather than loaded judgments with real consequences. When Trump (or whoever occupies a similar position of power) orders the kidnapping of a foreign leader or justifies the killing of his own citizens, the reflexive response is often to reach for these slurs.

While this is not the focus of the argument here, it matters to note that the primary function of such language, whatever the intentions of those who use it, is to reinforce the dehumanisation of mad and disabled people, and to reassert the quiet supremacy of those deemed sane and able. The mechanism is familiar to more widely recognised cases: just as racist or sexist slurs shore up their respective hierarchies, sanist language reproduces an apparatus that sorts bodies and minds into the legitimate and the disposable. For anyone with even a minimal commitment to social justice or collective liberation, this alone should give pause.

But beyond its ethical problems, this framing is also analytically and ideologically impoverished. To describe a political decision as mad or insane is to suggest that it is fundamentally irrational—opaque, inexplicable, governed by impulse rather than structure. The effect is to foreclose understanding. Political violence and authoritarian manoeuvres are reduced to personal pathology, and the economic, ideological, and institutional logics that enable them fade into the background. The political is psychologised; history is replaced with diagnosis.

This problem is not new. In fact, it was identified as early as 1925, only a few years after Mussolini named fascism in Italy, and well before Hitler had become a widely recognised figure. At the time, fascism was above all a violent anti-communist project. Mussolini drew significant support from conservatives and liberals who believed he could neutralise the threat of socialist revolution by crushing organised communists in Italy. Industrialists, monarchists, and aristocrats backed him not because they mistook him for a lunatic, but because they believed he could be used, controlled, even, while real power would remain in their hands.

In this context, fascism was frequently dismissed as an aberration, a temporary excess, something unserious. In the 1920s, outside socialist, Marxist, and communist circles, and sometimes within those circles, its dangers were often minimised. It was precisely this dismissal that Antonio Gramsci warned against in 1925: the temptation to treat authoritarian politics as madness rather than as a rational—if brutal—response to crisis within capitalism itself. In his own words:

“We are among the few who have taken fascism seriously, even when fascism seemed nothing more than a blood-stained farce, when fascism was discussed in the common terms of “war psychosis,” when all parties sought to soothe the working population presenting fascism as a superficial phenomenon, of very short duration.”

Vitally, Gramsci’s intervention was aimed precisely at this refusal to take fascism seriously as part of the logic of capitalist crisis and decay. To treat fascism as madness was, for him, a dangerous comfort. It allowed liberals and conservatives to imagine it as an irrational deviation from the normal functioning of society, rather than as something that emerged as part of a predicable process from crisis conditions within capitalism.

What Gramsci grasped early on was that fascism did not operate despite the interests of capital and the state, but often in alignment with them. Its theatrical excesses, its cult of personality, its seemingly erratic decisions could easily be mistaken for chaos. As he saw, beneath this surface disorder was a coherent project: the crushing of organised labour, the destruction of left-wing institutions, and the reassertion of national unity under authoritarian control. Fascism, in other words, was not a breakdown of reason but a particular form of reason that reorganised violence, consent, and coercion in order to restore a threatened social order.

Here, then, the language of insanity performs an ideological function. It reassures us that what we are witnessing is accidental, the result of a uniquely deranged individual, rather than symptomatic of deeper structural crises. Seen this way, the casual use of sanist language does double harm. It reinforces existing hierarchies of ability and legitimacy, while also weakening our capacity for analysis. What looks like a moral condemnation turns out to be a theoretical retreat into a form of ideological inertia. And this, of course, is the opposite of what we need, especially in times of crisis.

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This article originally appeared on Robert Chapman’s Substack, Neurodiversity and Capitalism.