Antonio Gramsci: Letters From Prison, Volume 1

Antonio Gramsci (1891--1937) was one of the most original political thinkers in Western Marxism and an exceptional intellectual. Arrested and imprisoned by the Italian Fascist regime in 1926, Gramsci died before fully regaining his freedom, yet he wrote extensive letters while incarcerated, rich with insight into the physical and psychological tortures of prison. In meticulous detail, Gramsci records how political prisoners, himself included, contend with the fear of illness and death and the rules and regulations that threaten to efface their individuality. Forming an incomparable link between Gramsci's intellectual passion and his emotional vulnerability, Letters from Prison shows a man reconstructing his life while being separated from it, struggling to recapture the primary relationships that once defined his identity.

Frank Rosengarten divides more than four hundred Gramsci letters into two companion volumes, complete with a chronology of the thinker's crucial life experiences, an introduction that sheds light on the main experiences and themes in the letters, biographical notes on his correspondents, and a bibliography of works cited in his letters.

The most complete and authoritative edition of Antonio Gramsci's prison letters available in any language. Raymond Rosenthal's translation... is reliable and gives a good sense of the colloquial style of the original. Frank Rosengarten's extensive notes, together with his introduction, represent a significant piece of Gramsci scholarship.
(Journal of the History of Philosophy )

These volumes are laced with political insight. They are also shrewd, humorous, brave, and resourceful.
(Terry Eagleton The Guardian )

Painstakingly edited by Frank Rosengarten and movingly translated by Raymond Rosenthal... the letters are illuminated by critical commentary that highlights the contrast between the material conditions of Gramsci's confinement and the extraordinary spaciousness of his intellectual concerns.
(Socialism and Democracy )

A credit to publisher, translator, and editor.
(Radical Philosophy )

Invaluable.... The Letters serve to confirm Gramsci's remarkable intellectual stature.... Equally apparent is the depth of his commitment to his beliefs.
(The Journal of the Historical Association )

One of the most poignant human stories of our century.
(Joseph A. Buttigieg, editor and translator of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, Volumes 1, 2, and 3 )

Antonio Gramsci: Prison Notebooks (vol. 1, 2,3)

Columbia University Press's multivolume Prison Notebooks is the only complete critical edition of Antonio Gramsci's seminal writings in English. Based on the authoritative Italian edition of Gramsci's work, Quaderni del Carcere, this comprehensive translation presents the intellectual as he ought to be read and understood, with critical notes that clarify Gramsci's history, culture, and sources; an index of names; and a contextualization of the thinker's ideas against his earlier writings and letters.


This set includes notebooks 1 through 8 with all attendant notes and materials and is an indispensible resource for scholars in the humanities and social sciences.

Until Joseph Buttigieg's meticulous translation and critical attention to Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, this invaluable text, a testimony to the most emancipatory thinking of our time, was available to the leadership in English in only an artificially contrived form. Now Buttigieg's monumental and magesterial work is available in paperback. Scholars, teachers, students, activists, general readers -- rejoice!

(Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak )

Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left by Slavoj Zizek, Ernesto Laclau, and Judith Butler

The Hegelian legacy, Left strategy, and post-structuralism versus Lacanian psychoanalysis.

What is the contemporary legacy of Gramsci's notion of Hegemony? How can universality be reformulated now that its spurious versions have been so thoroughly criticized? In this ground-breaking project, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek engage in a dialogue on central questions of contemporary philosophy and politics. Their essays, organized as separate contributions that respond to one another, range over the Hegelian legacy in contemporary critical theory, the theoretical dilemmas of multiculturalism, the universalism-versus-particularism debate, the strategies of the Left in a globalized economy, and the relative merits of post-structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis for a critical social theory. While the rigor and intelligence with which these writers approach their work is formidable, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality benefits additionally from their clear sense of energy and enjoyment in a revealing and often unpredictable exchange.

Letter to Palmiro Togliatti by Antonio Gramsci (1926)

Letter to Palmiro Togliatti

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Source: Gramsci a Roma, Togliatti a Mosca, edited by Chiara Daniele. Giulio Einaudi Editore, Turin, 1999;
Translated: by Mitchell Abidor;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2007.

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October 26, 1926
Dearest Ercoli:

I received your letter of the 18th. I’m responding on a personal basis, though satisfied that I express the opinion of the other comrades.

Your letter seems to me too abstract and schematic in its reasoning. Our point of departure – which seems to me to be accurate – is that in our countries there exist not only parties – understood as technical organizations – but also the great working masses, politically stratified in a contradictory way, but on a whole inclining towards unity. Among the most energizing elements of the unitary process is the existence of the USSR, combined with the real activity of the CPUSSR and the wide-spread conviction that the USSR is on the road to socialism. Insofar as our parties represent the entire complex of activities of the USSR they have a determining influence on all political strata, representing the unitary tendency progressing on a historical terrain fundamentally favorable, despite the contrary superstructures.

But there’s no need to believe that this element, which makes of the CPUSSR the most potent mass organizer that has ever appeared in history, has already acquired a stable and decisive form: on the contrary. It is still unstable. We shouldn’t forget that the Russian Revolution has already been in existence for nine years, and that its current activity is an amalgamation of partial political and governmental acts that only a highly developed theoretical and political consciousness can grasp as a whole and in its overall movement towards socialism. Not only for the great laboring masses, but for a notable part of the members of the western parties – who are differentiated from the masses only by the radical initial step towards a developed political consciousness which is entry into the Party – the overall movement of the Russ. Rev. is concretely represented by the fact that the Russian party advances in a unitary fashion; that the representative men that the masses know and have gotten used to knowing work and move forward together. The question of unity, not only of the R.P., but of the Leninist nucleus, is therefore a question of the greatest importance on an international level. And from the point of view of the masses this is the also the most important question in this historical period of an intensified, inconsistent process towards unity.

It is possible and probable that unity can’t be preserved, at least in the form it was in the past. It is also true that nonetheless the world will not collapse, and that it is necessary to prepare the comrades and the masses for the new situation. This doesn’t take away from that which is our absolute obligation, which is to energetically draw to the attention of the political consciousness of the Russian comrades the dangers and weaknesses that their attitudes are about to cause. We’d be poor and irresponsible revolutionaries if we passively allowed the fulfilling of a fait accompli by justifying their necessity a priori.

That the fulfilling of such an obligation on our part would – in a subordinate way – also be useful to the Opposition should only worry us up to a certain point. In fact, it is our objective to contribute to the creating and maintaining of a unitary plan in which the diverse tendencies and personalities could gather and meld together ideologically as well. But I don’t think that in our letter – which obviously must be read in its entirety and not in bits and pieces – there is the least danger of weakening the position of the majority of the CC. In any case, taking into account the possibility of such an appearance, in an attached letter I’ve authorized you to modify the form. You can quite well separate the two parts and place our affirmation of the “responsibility” of the Opposition at the beginning our affirmation. This mode of reasoning of yours has made a very distressing impression on me.
And I’d like to say to you there is not in us the least shadow of alarmism, but only a well-thought out and cold reflection. We are sure that in no way will the world collapse. But it seems to me that it would be foolish to move forward only if the world were about to collapse. Nevertheless, no phrases spoken can turn us from the idea that we are following the correct line – the Leninist line – in the way we consider the Russian question. The Leninist line consists in fighting for the unity of the P., but not only for external unity, but for a unity a bit more intimate, one that consists in there not being in the P. two political lines completely divergent on all questions . When dealing with things having to do with the ideological and political direction of the Intern., with that which concerns the hegemony of the prolet., that is the social content of the state, not only in our countries, but also in Russia, the unity of the P. is the existential condition.

You confuse the international aspects of the Russian Question – which are a reflection of the historical fact of the ties of the laboring masses with the first socialist state – and the problems of international organization in the area of unions and politics. The two orders of fact are strictly coordinated, but nevertheless distinct. The difficulties that are encountered, and which were constituted on the most restricted organizational level, depend on the fluctuations occurring on the larger plain of the idea spread among the masses of the reduction of the prestige of the R.P. in some popular areas. As a method we have only sought to speak of the more general aspects. We wanted to avoid falling into the scholasticism which too often surfaces in some documents of other parties, and that remove all seriousness from their interventions.

It thus isn’t true – as you say – that we are too optimistic about the real Bolshevization of the western P. The process of Bolshevization is so slow and difficult that every obstacle, however small, stops it or slows it down. The Russian discussion and the ideology of the Oppositions play a greater role in this slowing down and halting insofar as the Oppositions represent in Russia all the old prejudices of class corporatism and syndicalism that weigh on the traditions of the western proletariat and slow down their ideological and political development. Our remarks were totally against the Oppositions. It’s true that the crises of the P. and also of the R.P. are linked to the objective situation, but what does that mean? Perhaps that we should thus end the struggle and stop our efforts to favorably modify the subjective elements. But Bolshevism also consists precisely in keeping one’s head and in being ideologically and politically firm in difficult situations as well. Your remark is thus idle and void of any value, like that contained in point 5, since we spoke of the great masses and obviously not of the proletarian vanguard. Subordinately, therefore, the difficulty also exists for this, which is not an idle question but is tied to the masses; and it exists all the more insofar as reformism – with its tendency towards class corporatism: that is to say to the non-comprehension of the leading role of the vanguard, a role we must preserve even at the price of sacrifices – is much better rooted in the west than it was in Russia. You forgot the technical conditions in which the work of many parties developed, which don’t permit the diffusion of the most elevated theoretical questions other than in small circles of workers. All of your reasoning is corrupted by “bureaucratism:” today, nine years after October 1917 it is no longer the fact of the seizing of power by the Bolsheviks which can revolutionize the western masses – because this has already been taken into account and has produced its effects; today ideologically and politically the conviction is active (if it exists) that once power is seized the proletariat can construct socialism. The authority of the P. is linked to this conviction, which can’t be inculcated in the great masses with scholastic pedagogical methods, but only through revolutionary pedagogy, that is by the political fact that the R.P. is its entirety is persuaded and fights unitarily.
I’m sincerely sorry that our letter wasn’t understood by you in the first place, and that you, on the outline of my personal letter didn’t seek to better understand. Our letter was in its entirety a requisition against the Oppositions; one not done in demagogic terms, and precisely for this reason more effective and serious. I ask you to include with the proceedings, aside from the Italian text of the letter and my personal letter, this one as well.

Cordial greetings.

Antonio

On the Operations of the Central Committee of the Party by Gramsci (1925)

On the Operations of the Central Committee of the Party

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Source: L’Unità, December 20 ,1925;
Translated: by Mitchell Abidor;
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1. The political line adopted by the Central Committee and after that by the Fifth Congress , one in complete alignment with the Italian political situation, has allowed our party to develop its forces and has raised it to a degree of real political influence that it has never had. It has allowed the party to make great progress along the road of effective political preparation. We are today connected to the working class in a way far superior to any other in the life of our Party. What is more, favored by the objective situation, we have resolutely commenced and set out on the path to a solution to the problem of political ties with the peasant class in a way that has never before been done.

We can affirm that the line followed by the Party during the first period of its existence, and especially when the disagreements with the International were acute, could never have brought us to the point we are now at. If the party had adopted the tactics that Bordiga proposed it could never have profited from the situation after the Matteoti crime; would, in fact, never have succeeded in exercising in every moment of its activity an influence over wide strata of the masses, would not have been as able to wrest the laboring masses from the influence of the middle of the road counter-revolutionary parties and to thus gradually extend its influence to the current degree.

We affirm that only the tactics that the Central Committee has followed, in conformity with the deliberations of the world congresses of the last two years, has allowed it to pose in real terms the problem of creating in Italy the party of the working class as a mass party and not as a sect completely cut off from the masses and fossilized in the repetition of empty revolutionary phraseology. What is more, we affirm that a return to the “Bordigan” tactics would have us rapidly lose all that we have obtained, and would thus have the gravest consequences not only for the party, but also for the working class.

Placed among the “Bordigan” sectarian organization and the counter-revolutionary formations in a state of ruin (Maximalists, Unitarists, Aventiani and their like) the working class would fall into passivity, inertia, disintegration, from which we have instead rescued them.

2) As regards the policies of the party in the period between the Fourth and Fifth World Congresses, if it is true that in this period there was, insofar as it was a matter of the same general directives, uncertainty and oscillation, it is even more true that the responsibility for this fact falls on he who, in order to carry on a struggle against the International, didn’t hesitate to open a serious crisis in the party, above all favoring the formation of a “Right” that had no other a raison d’etre than its “fidelity” to the directives of the International against which the party was deployed. To follow Bordiga today would mean reproducing a situation like that of the past. But fortunately there are no signs that the party wants to follow him.

3) As regards organization, we don’t hesitate to affirm that an organization such as ours was in the first period of its existence represented an enormous progress compared to the Social Democrat’s and Maximalist’s routine of the time. If this met the situation of that time it would not be at all appropriate in resolving the problems which are now posed for the party, in the first place the problem of maintaining in working condition its contact with the widest strata of the working class, as well as the problem of its functioning as a party of the working class itself. The problem of organizing the Communist Party as a party of the working class and mass party was only posed at the current Central Committee. As a consequence of its general political direction the Central Committee led by Bordiga didn’t see this problem. We can’t say that this has today been resolved, but the process has certainly been begun and enormous progress has been made towards its resolution.

4) As for practical organizational work, we don’t believe that everything done by the current Central Committee was good. We believe that there were defects and failings and that these still exist. However, if we take into account the conditions in which the work of the party has developed after the Fifth World Congress, we can do no less than say that these defects vanish when placed before the enormous work of reorganization carried out in order to arrive at the present situation, since we started from a situation in which the entire old framework had collapsed and had to be reconstructed with new criteria and employing new “material.”

Comrade Bordiga knows of these things, just has he knows that, taking into account the various objective conditions (today, in order to have a letter go from the center to the periphery requires a “labor” ten times greater than that needed in Bordiga’s time) the current party apparatus is smaller than it once was, which means that the number of functionaries is relatively smaller. But even if there were more of them we affirm that they would be chosen based on the most rigorous of criteria, and that their work would be controlled based on the most rigorous criteria. We are certain that the so despised party “functionaries” are today a disciplined and conscious group of “professional revolutionaries” who are entirely devoted to the cause of the party and the class.

5) It remains to be seen if it is true that the Central Committee has “poisoned the living arrangements” of the party with sectarianism. Well, if Bordiga is referring, as he doubtless is, to the energetic and implacable actions of the Central Committee to smash the fractionalist attempt which took the name of “Entente Committee,” we can only say that if another endeavor of this kind were attempted we are ready today, tomorrow and always to smash it with the same implacable energy.

But we are convinced when all of the comrades will have taken note of how far the actions of the “Entente Committee” would have taken us on the road to breaking up the party, they will find that they should have been even more harsh in their stigmatizing of their actions. Whoever is in the Communist Party and wants to work in a disciplined fashion, under the directives that the International has laid out and who works for their application will never find that the living arrangements are “poisoned.” But he who wants to repeat the mad endeavor of breaking up the unity of the party, to oppose it to the International, to dissolve the assembly; for these people there is no doubt that the air of our party, after the Third Congress, will not be breathable.

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Sterile and Negative Criticism by Antonio Gramsci (1925)

Sterile and Negative Criticism

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Source: L’Unità September 30, 1925;
Translated: by Mitchell Abidor;
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In [Bordiga’s] long article one thing is truly noteworthy: the elegant skepticism with which he avoids taking a clear position on points which he nevertheless affirms to dissent from; there is the continual oscillation between thesis and antithesis, without for all that indicating an “original” thesis of his own.
Comrade Bordiga limits himself to upholding a cautious position on all the questions raised by the Left. He doesn’t say: the International poses and resolves such and such a question in this way, but the Left will instead pose and resolve it this other way. He instead says: the way the International poses and resolves problems doesn’t convince me; I fear it falls into opportunism, there are insufficient guarantees against this, etc. His position, then, is one of permanent suspicion and doubt. In this way the position of the “Left” is purely negative; they express reservations without specifying them in a concrete form, and above all without indicating in concrete form their point of view, their solutions. They end by spreading doubt and distrust, without constructing anything.

The article begins with a characteristic metaphysical hypothesis. Comrade Bordiga asks; is it possible to 100% exclude the possibility that the Communist International will fall into opportunism? But we can also ask if we the possibility can be excluded that even Comrade Bordiga won’t become opportunist, that the Pope will become an atheist, that the industrialist Ford will become a communist, etc. In the realm of metaphysical possibility you can fancy whatever you want, but a Marxist should pose the question thusly: does possibility exist that the Communist International is no longer the vanguard of the proletariat but is instead on the road to becoming the expression of the workers’ aristocracy, corrupted by the bourgeoisie? It is thus that the question is posed Marxistically, and it is then easy for every comrade to resolve it.

The article is a tissue of theoretical and practical errors that the comrades will surely point out. We will limit ourselves to pointing out the most characteristic points. Comrade Bordiga says a propos of cells that the type of party organization cannot in itself ensure its political character and guarantee it against opportunist degeneration. But we affirm that organization in the form of cells ensures the proletarian character of the Communist Party better than any other and, better than any other, guarantees the party against opportunism.

And after having repeated the curious affirmation that the system of cells is appropriate for Russia, though more so before than after the conquest of power, and that this doesn’t apply to countries with a bourgeois democratic regime, Comrade Bordiga concludes: “We aren’t against the cells, at least as groups of members in factories, with given functions” So is the left for or against the cells? And what are these “given functions” that Comrade Bordiga avoids specifying? The Left and Comrade Bordiga don’t declare themselves explicitly against Bolshevizaition, but are only suspicious of it because it is based on organization in cells which would be overseen by a web of functionaries chosen based on the criterion of blind obsequiousness to Leninism.

That the local leadership of the party should be made up of ideologically chosen elements is beyond any doubt, because without this the Communist Party would not be what it is. As for blind obsequiousness, this is a type of polemical method that is vulgar to no small extent and upon which it is pointless to linger.

It is also curious what Comrade Bordiga writes concerning Leninism. He writes that if Leninism is nothing but Marxism, then it’s pointless to use such a term; but immediately after this he adds that the Left will use both terms indifferently. Not only does he contradict himself here, but there is also a contradiction in the assertion concerning the use of the two terms indifferently and the contemporary recognition that Lenin is the “completer, in large part, of Marxism; and his interpretation of imperialism, the formulations on the agrarian and national questions are fundamental contributions in the development of Marxism.”

Concerning his disagreement with Lenin, Comrade Bordiga remains skillfully on the general, while not being specific. The phrases, “We have discussed and criticized Lenin and we are not entirely convinced by his counter-deductions,” and, “Lenin’s rebukes have not converted me” can have an effect on the petit-bourgeois, but Communists and revolutionary workers will only shrug their shoulders.

Comrade Bordiga, without anywhere specifying the extent of his disagreement with Lenin goes on affirming that he doesn’t retain Lenin’s tactical system because it doesn’t contain guarantees against opportunist applications. But Comrade Bordiga would be more sincere if he were to declare that he rejects any tactical maneuvers insofar as every tactical maneuver presents the danger of opportunist deviations.

The guarantee against deviations doesn’t consist in tactics themselves, but in us, in our Communist consciousness, in the entire party’s vigilance and self-criticism, in firmness of principles, in the effort to never lose sight of the revolutionary goal. We don’t pretend to have exhausted in the current note the objections to Comrade Bordiga’s article. It is truly a mine of errors and inconsistencies of every type.

We want only to note those concerning anti-parliamentarism and the tactics of the party towards the Aventine worker masses. The tactic adopted by the party- says Conrade Bordiga – was not anticipated at any congress. But aside from the fact that no congress anticipated either the Matteoti crime or the reaction of the masses, with their contemporaneous tilt towards Aventine illusions, what is the tactic that, according to Comrade Bordiga, should have been adopted? He restrains himself from explaining it in any form, and limits himself to saying “little is done when a lot could be done.”


The entire article is a document of true intellectual decadence. Comrade Bordiga not only fails to draw the logical consequences of his negations, he above all fails to counter-propose new directives to the criticized directives in a clear and complete form. To limit oneself, as he does, to negative criticism, to spread doubt, skepticism and distrust, without indicating anything positively constructive constitutes not only a lack of character, but also reveals little respect for or attachment to the party and the International.

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Maximalism and Extremism by Antonio Gramsci (1925)

Maximalism and Extremism

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Source: L’Unità, July 2, 1925;
Translated: by Mitchell Abidor;
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Comrade Bordiga is offended because it was written that there is much of maximalism in his concepts. This isn’t true and can’t be true – Bordiga writes. In fact, the most distinctive trait of the extreme left is aversion for the Maximalist Party, which it finds revolting, which it detests, etc, etc.
But this is not the question. Maximalism is a fatalistic and mechanical conception of Marx’s doctrine. It is the Maximalist Party which draws arguments for its opportunism, which justifies its disguised collaborationism, with revolutionary phrases drawn from this falsified concept. The red flag will triumph because it is fated and ineluctable that the proletariat will win. Marx said it, and he is our kind and gentle teacher. It is pointless for us to act: what is the good of acting and fighting if victory is fated and ineluctable? This is the way the maximalists of the Maximalist Party speak.

But there is also the maximalist who isn’t in the Maximalist Party and is instead in the Communist Party. He is intransigent and not opportunist. But he also believes that it would be pointless to act and struggle day after day; he is only waiting for the great day. The masses – he says – cannot but come to us, because the objective situation is driving them to the revolution. And so let’s wait, without all these stories about tactical maneuvers and like expedients. This for us, is maximalism, exactly like that that of the Maximalist Party.

Comrade Lenin has taught us that in order to defeat our class enemy, who is strong, who has many means and reserves at his disposal, we must exploit every crack in his front and must use every possible ally, even if he is uncertain, vacillating or provisional. He has taught us that in a war of armies you can’t attain the strategic goal, which is the destruction of the enemy and the occupation of his territory, without having first attained a series of tactical objectives – which aim at breaking up the enemy – and then confronting him in the field.

The entire pre-revolutionary period presents itself as one of primarily tactical activity, directed at acquiring new allies for the proletariat, breaking up the enemy’s offensive and defensive organizational apparatus, and detecting and exhausting his reserves. Not taking account of this teaching of Lenin’s, or only taking account of it theoretically without putting it in practice, without making it become daily activity, means being a maximalist, that is, speaking grand revolutionary words while being incapable of taking a step along the road of revolution.

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Speech to the Italian parliament by Gramsci (1925)

Speech to the Italian parliament

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Delivered: 16 May 1925;
Source: Gramsci Antonio, Contro la legge sulle associazioni segrete, 1997, Manifestolibri;
Translated: by Michael Carley for marxists.org 2006;
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SPEAKER: The honourable Gramsci may speak.

GRAMSCI: The proposed law against secret societies has been presented to the House as a proposed law against freemasonry; this is the first real act of fascism to assert what the Fascist Party calls its revolution. We, as a communist party, want to seek out not only the reason for the presentation of this bill against organizations in general, but also the meaning of why the Fascist Party has presented this law as directed primarily against freemasonry.

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.

In November 1920 we predicted that fascism would take power – a thing then inconceivable to the Fascists themselves – if the working class did not take up arms in time to block its blood-stained advance.

Fascism, then, today declares itself to have practically "conquered the State.” What does this expression, now become a cliché, mean? And what meaning, in this sense, has the struggle against freemasonry?

Since we think this phase of the "Fascist conquest” to be one of the most important undergone by the Italian state, and as we represent the interests of the majority of the Italian people, the workers and peasants, we believe that an analysis of the question, even if rushed, is necessary.

What is freemasonry? You have spoken at length on the spiritual significance, the ideological currents which it represents, etc; but all of these are forms of expression which you use only to convince yourselves.

Freemasonry, given the manner in which Italy was united, given the initial weakness of the Italian capitalist bourgeousie, freemasonry was the the only real and effective party which the bourgeouis class had for a long time. It must not be forgotten that little less than twenty years after the entry of the Piedmontese into Rome, parliament was dissolved and the electoral body of about three million was reduced to 800 thousand.

This was an open confession by the bourgeouis of being a very weak minority of the population, if after twenty years of unity it was forced to adopt the most extreme dictatorial measures to maintain power, to crush its class enemies, which were the enemies of the unitary state.

Who were these enemies? They were mainly the Vatican, the Jesuits, and the Honourable Martire must be reminded how, as well as the Jesuits who wear the habit, there exist lay Jesuits, who have no special symbol which indicates their religious order.

In the early years after the foundation of the kingdom the Jesuits stated in a series of articles published in Civiltà cattolica the political programme of the Vatican and of the classes which were represented by the Vatican, that is the old semifedual classes, Bourbon by tendency in the South, or Austrian by tendency in Lombardy-Veneto, numerous social forces which the capitalist bourgeouisie has never managed to contain, even though in the period of the Risorgimento it represented progress, and a revolutionary beginning. The Jesuits of Civiltà cattolica, and thus the Vatican, made the first point of their political programme the sabotage of the unitary state, through parliamentary abstention, the obstruction of the liberal state in all of its activities which could corrupt and destroy the old order; the second point, the creation of a rural reserve army to place against the advance of the proletariat, as since '71 the Jesuits foresaw that on the field of liberal democracy the proletarian movement would be born, which would develop into a revolutionary movement.

The Honourable Martire has today declared that the spiritual unity of the Italian nation, at the expense of freemasonry, has finally been achieved.

Since freemasonry in Italy has represented the ideology and the real organisation of the capitalist bourgeouis class, whoever is against freemasonry is against liberalism, is against the political tradition of the Italian bourgeouisie. The rural classes which were represented in the past by the Vatican, are today mainly represented by fascism; it is logical that fascism has replaced the Vatican and the Jesuits in the historical task, by which the most backward classes of the population bring under their control the class which has been progressive in the development of civilization; this is the significance of the achievement of the spiritual unity of the Italian nation, which would have been a phenomenon of advancement fifty years ago; and today it is instead the largest phenomenon of regression ...
The industrial bourgeouisie has not been capable of slowing down the workers' movement, it has not been capable of controlling the workers' movement, or the revolutionary rural movement. Thus the first instinctive and spontaneous watchword of fascism, after the occupation of the factories was this: "The rural will control the urban bourgeousie, who do not know how to be strong against the workers.”

If I have not deluded myself, then, Honourable Mussolini, was that not your thesis, and between rural fascism and urban fascism you said you preferred urban fascism ...

[INTERRUPTIONS]:

MUSSOLINI: I must interrupt you to remind you of an article of mine in praise of rural fascism in 1921-22.

GRAMSCI: But that is not a purely Italian phenomenon, however much in Italy, with its weaker capitalism, it had the greatest development; it is a European and world phenomenon, of great importance in understanding the general postwar crisis in the domain of practical activity and in the domain of ideas and culture.

The election of Hindenburg in Germany, the victory of the conservatives in England, with the liquidation of the respective liberal democratic parties, are the equivalent of the Italian fascist movement; the old social forces, though not completely absorbed by it, have taken control of the organisation of the states, bringing into their reactionary activity all of the depth of ferocity and ruthless decision which has always been theirs; but in substance we have a phenomenon of historical regression which is not and will not be without implications for the development of the proletarian revolution. Examined on this ground, will the present law against the associations will be enforced or is it instead destined to be futile? Will it correspond to reality, will it be a means to stabilize the capitalist regime or will it only be a new instrument given to the police to arrest Tom, Dick and Harry? ... The problem then is this: has the situation of capitalism in Italy been strengthened or weakened since the war, by fascism? What were the weaknesses of the Italian capitalist bourgeoisie before the war, weaknesses which brought about the creation of this masonic political system which existed in Italy, which had its greatest development in Giolittismo? The greatest weaknesses in Italian national life were in the first place the lack of raw materials, that is the impossibility of the bourgeoisie creating in Italy industry which would have deep roots in the country and which could develop progressively, absorbing the surplus workforce. Secondly, the lack of colonies tied to the mother country, thus the impossibility for the bourgeouisie of creating a labour aristocracy which could be permanently allied to the bourgeouisie itself. Thirdly, the Southern question, that is the question of the peasants, closely tied to the problem of emigration, which is the proof of the inability of the Italian bourgeouisie to maintain ...[Interruptions].

MUSSOLINI: Germans have also emigrated by the million.

GRAMSCI: The significance of mass emigration of workers is this: the capitalist system, which is the dominant system, is not capable of giving food, housing and clothing to the population, to a not insignificant part of this population which is forced to emigrate ...

ROSSONI: So the nation must expand in the interests of the proletariat.

GRAMSCI: We have our own conception of imperialism and colonialism, according to which these are above all an export of finance capital. Until now Italian "imperialism” has consisted only of this: the Italian emigrant worker works for the profit of the capitalists of other countries, that is until now Italy has only been a means of expansion for non-Italian finance capital. You rinse your mouths with declarations of a claimed demographic superiority of Italy over other countries; you always say, for example, that Italy is demographically superior to France. This is a question which only statistics can finally resolve, and I sometimes deal with statistics; now a statistic published after the war, and never denied, and which can not be denied, states that pre-war Italy from the demographic point of view, was already in the same situation as France after the war; this is determined by the fact that emigration removes from the national territory such a mass of the male, economically active, population, that the demographic relations become catastrophic. In the national territory there remain the old, women, children, invalids, that is the inactive part of the population, which weighs on the population to a greater degree than in any other country, even France.

And this is the fundamental weakness of the Italian capitalist system, for which Italian capitalism is destined to disappear even more rapidly as the world capitalist system no longer manages to absorb Italian emigration, to exploit Italian labour, which our capitalism is incapable of organizing.
The bourgeouis parties, freemasonry, how have they tried to resolve these problems?

In Italian history we know about the last two political plans of the bourgeouisie to resolve the question of the governance of the Italian people. We have had the Giolitti programme, the collaboration of Italian socialism with Giolittismo, that is the attempt to establish an alliance of the industrial bourgeouisie with a certain northern labour aristocracy to oppress, to subject to this bourgeouis-proletarian grouping the mass of the Italian peasantry, especially in the Mezzogiorno. The programme did not succeed. In southern Italy a bourgeouis-proletarian coalition was established through parliamentary collaboration and the politics of public works; in southern Italy the leading class is corrupted and dominates the masses with goons...[Interruptions of Deputy Greco] You fascists have been the major authors of the failure of this political programme, as you have impoverished eqully the labour aristocracy and the poor peasantry of all of Italy.

We have had a programme which we might call that of Corriere della sera, a newspaper which represents no mean force in national politics: 800,000 readers are also a party.

VOICES: Fewer ...

MUSSOLINI: Half! And the readers of newspapers don't count. They have never made a revolution. The readers of newspapers are regularly wrong!

GRAMSCI: The Corriere della sera does not want to make a revolution.

FARINACCI: Nor does l'Unità

GRAMSCI: The Corriere della sera has systematically supported all of the politicians of the Mezzogiorno, from Salandra to Orlando, to Nitti, to Amendola; in the face of the Giolitti solution, oppressive not only of classes, but even of whole territories, such as the Mezzogiorno and the islands, and thus just as dangerous as the current fascism for the same material unity of the Italian state, the Corriere della sera has always supported an alliance between the industrialists of the North and a certain vague mainly Southern rural democracy on the ground of free trade. One solution and the other tended essentially to give the Italian state a larger base than it had originally, and tended to develop the "conquests” of the Risorgimento.

What do fascists propose against these solutions? They propose a law supposedly against freemasonry; they claim to want to so conquer the State. In reality fascism struggles against the only effectively organized force which the bourgeouisie have in Italy, to supplant it in occupying the posts which the state gives its civil servants. The fascist "revolution” is only the replacement of one administrative personnel by another.

MUSSOLINI: Of one class by another, as happened in Russia, as normally happens in all revolutions, as we will methodically do! [Applause].

GRAMSCI: It is only revolution that which is based on a new class. Fascism is not based on any class that was not already in power ...

MUSSOLINI: But if a large part of the capitalists are against, but if I list for you the major capitalists who vote against us, who are in the opposition: the Mottas, the Contis ...

FARINACCI: And they subsidize subversive newspapers! [Comments].

MUSSOLINI: The directors are not Fascist, and you know it!

GRAMSCI: The reality then is that the law against freemasonry is not principally against freemasonry; in the end fascism will easily come to a compromise with freemasonry.

MUSSOLINI: The fascists have burnt the masonic lodges before making the law! So there is no need for an accomodation.

GRAMSCI: Fascism uses against freemasonry, in a more intense form, the same tactic as it used against all the non-fascist bourgeouis parties: first it created a fascist cell in those parties; then it tried to extract from other parties the forces most useful to it, not managing to take them over as it intended ...

FARINACCI: And you call us fools?

GRAMSCI: You would not be fools only if you knew how to solve the problems of the Italian situation ...

MUSSOLINI: We will solve them. We have already solved many of them.

GRAMSCI: Fascism has not managed to completely absorb all the parties into its organization. With freemasonry it has employed the political tactic of noyautage, then the terrorist system of burning lodges, and finally it employs legislative action, through which certain persons of the company boards and the high bureaucracy will end up giving in to the masters so as not to lose their jobs, but the fascist government will have to come to a compromise with freemasonry. What do you do when your enemy is strong? First, you break his legs, then you make a compromise from a condition of obvious superiority.

MUSSOLINI: First you break his ribs, then you imprison him, as you have done in Russia! You have taken your prisoners and you hold them, and you need to! [Noises]

GRAMSCI: Taking prisoners means exactly making compromises: thus we say that in reality the law is especially made against workers' organizations. We ask why for many months without the Communist Party being declared illegal, the carabinieri have arrested our comrades every time they find them in a meeting of at least three ...

MUSSOLINI: We are doing what you do in Russia.

GRAMSCI: In Russia there are laws which are obeyed: you have your own laws ...

MUSSOLINI: You have big round-ups? You do well to! [Laughter].

GRAMSCI: In reality the police apparatus of the state already considers the Communist Party a secret organization.

MUSSOLINI: That is not true!

GRAMSCI: In so far as anyone, accused of no specific offence, found in a meeting of three persons, is jailed, just because they are communist.

MUSSOLINI: But they are soon released. How many are in jail? We pick them up just to find out who they are!

GRAMSCI: It is a form of systematic persecution which precedes and will justify the application of the new law. Fascism is adopting the same systems as the government of Giolotti. You are doing as the Giolotti goons did in the Mezzogiorno when they arrested opposition voters ...to find out who they were.

A VOICE: There was only one case of it. You do not know the South.

GRAMSCI: I am from the South!

MUSSOLINI: With respect to electoral violence I remind you of an article by Bordiga which fully justifies it!

GRECO PAOLO: You, Honourable Gramsci, have not read this article.

GRAMSCI: Not fascist violence, ours. We are sure of representing the majority of the population, of representing the most essential interests of the majority of the Italian people; proletarian violence is thus progressive and cannot be systematic. Your violence is systematic and systematically arbitrary because you represent a minority destined to disappear. We must say to the working population what your government is, how your government conducts itself, to organize against you, to make it ready to defeat you. It is most probable that we too will find ourselves forced to use the same systems as you, but as a transition, occasionally. [Noises, interruptions]. Certainly: use the same systems as you, with the difference that you represent the minority of the population, while we represent the majority. [Interruptions, noises].

FARINACCI: But then, why do you not make the revolution? You are destined for the same end as Bombacci! They will throw you out of the party!

GRAMSCI: The Italian bourgeouisie when they made the unification were a minority of the population, but since they represented the interests of the majority even if it did not follow them, were able to maintain themselves in power. You have won by arms, but you have no programme, you represent nothing new or progressive. You have only taught the revolutionary vanguard that only arms, in the final analysis, determine the success of programmes and non-programmes ... [Interruptions, comments].

SPEAKER: Do not interrupt!

GRAMSCI: This law will not manage to slow down the movement which you yourselves are preparing in the country. Since freemasonry will enter the fascist party en masse and will form a tendency within it, it is clear that with this law you hope to impede the development of large worker and peasant organizations. That is the real value, the real meaning of the law.

Some fascists still hazily remember the teachings of their old masters, from when they were revolutionary and socialist, and believe that a class cannot permanently remain so and develop itself up to the conquest of power without it having a party and an organization of the best and most conscious part of itself. There is something true in this sinister reactionary perversion of Marxist teachings. It is certainly very difficult for a class to reach the solution of its problems and to reach those ends which are built into its existence and into the general strength of society, without a vanguard constituting itself and carrying this class to the attainment of these ends.

But it is not said that this statement is always true, such dogmatism is foreign to reactionary purposes! This is a law which serves for Italy, which must be applied in Italy, where the bourgeouisie has not managed in any way and will never manage to resolve in the first place the question of the Italian peasantry, to resolve the question of Southern Italy. Not for nothing is this law presented at the same time as some projects concerning the reclamation of the Mezzogiorno.

A VOICE: Talk about freemasonry.

GRAMSCI: You want me to talk about freemasonry. But in the title of the law there is not even a hint of freemasonry, it speaks only of organizations in general. In Italy capitalism has been able to develop insofar as the state has pressed on the peasant populations, especially in the South. Today you feel the urgency of this problem, so you promise a billion for Sardinia, you promise public works and hundreds of millions for the whole Mezzogiorno; but to do serious concrete work you should start by restoring to Sardinia the 100-150 million in taxes that you extort from the Sardinian population every year! You should restore to the Mezzogiorno the hundreds of millions in taxes which every year you extort from the Southern population.

MUSSOLINI: You don't impose taxes in Russia! ...

A VOICE: They steal in Russia, they don't pay taxes!

GRAMSCI: That is not the question, honourable colleague, who should at least know the parliamentary reports on these questions which exist in the library. It does not deal with the normal bourgeouis mechanism of taxation: it deals with the fact that every year the state extorts from the Southern regions sums in taxes which it does not restore in any way, neither through services of any kind ...

MUSSOLINI: It is not true.

GRAMSCI: ...sums which the state extorts from the Southern peasant populations to give a base to the capitalism of northern Italy. [Interruptions, comments]. On this field of the contradictions of the Italian capitalist system there will necessarily form, notwithstanding the difficulty of building large organizations, the union of workers and peasants against the common enemy.

You fascists, you fascist government, notwithstanding your demagogic speeches, have not overcome this contradiction which was already fundamental; you have instead made it more strongly felt by the popular classes and the masses. You have worked in this situation, for the neccessities of this situation. You have added new dust to that already accumulated by the development of the capitalist society and you believe you have suppressed with a law the most lethal effects of your own activity. [Interruptions]. This is the most important question in the discussion of this law!

You can "conquer the state,” you can change the laws, you can seek to stop organizations existing in the form in which they have existed up to now; you cannot prevail against the objective conditions under which you are constrained to move. You will do no more than force the proletariat to find a direction different from that up to now most commonly followed in the field of mass organization. We want to say this to the proletariat and to the Italian peasant masses from this platform: that the Italian revolutionary forces will not allow themselves to be broken, that your sinister dream will not succeed. [Interruptions]. It is very difficult to apply to a population of 40 million inhabitants the systems of government of Cankof. In Bulgaria there are a few million inhabitants and in any case, despite the aid from outside, the government cannot manage to defeat the coalition of the Communist Party and the peasant revolutionary forces, and in Italy there are 40 million inhabitants.

MUSSOLINI: The Communist Party has fewer members than has the Italian Fascist Party!

GRAMSCI: But it represents the working the class.

MUSSOLINI: It does not represent it!

FARINACCI: It betrays it, it does not represent it.

GRAMSCI: Yours is a consent obtained with the stick.

FARINACCI: You are talking about Miglioli.

GRAMSCI: Exactly. The Miglioli phenomenon has great importance in exactly the sense of what I said earlier: that even the Catholic peasant masses are turning to the revolutionary struggle. Nor would the fascist newspapers have protested against Miglioli if the Miglioli phenomenon had not had great importance in showing the new orientation of the revolutionary forms as a function of your pressures on the working classes.

In conclusion: freemasonry tips the scales in favour of the reactionary anti-proletarian measures! It is not freemasonry which matters! Freemasonry will become a wing of fascism. The law is intended for the workers and peasants, who will understand so very well from the use that will be made of it. To these masses we want to say that you will not succeed in suffocating the organisational forms of their class life, because against you stands the whole development of Italian society.

[Interruptions].

SPEAKER: But do not interrupt! Let him speak. You, however, Honourable Gramsci, have not spoken of the law!

ROSSONI: The law is not against organizations!

GRAMSCI: Honourable Rossoni, it is itself a section of the law against the organizations. The workers and peasants must know that you will not succeed in stopping the revolutionary movement strengthening and radicalizing itself. [Interruptions, noises]. Because I am only stating today the situation of our country ... [Interruptions].

SPEAKER: Honourable Gramsci, you have repeated this idea three or four times. Please! We are not jurors, who need to be told the same thing many times!

GRAMSCI: It must be repeated, however, you must hear it until you are sick of it. The revolutionary movement will defeat fascism. [Comments].

Neither Fascism nor Liberalism: Sovietism! by Antonio Gramsci (1924)

Neither Fascism nor Liberalism: Sovietism!

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Source: L’Unità, October 7, 1924;
Translated: by Mitchell Abidor;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2008.

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In the political crisis of the liquidation of fascism the opposition bloc increasingly appears to be a factor of a secondary order. Its heterogeneous social composition, its hesitations, and its aversion for a struggle of the popular masses against the Fascist regime reduce its actions to a journalistic campaign and parliamentary intrigues, which impotently run up against the armed militia of the Fascist party.
In the opposition movement to fascism the most important part has passed to the Liberal Party because the bloc has no other program to oppose to fascism than the old Liberal program of parliamentary bourgeois democracy, the return to the constitution, to legality, to democracy. In the discussion concerning the succession to fascism, according to the congress of the Liberal Party the Italian people is placed by the opposition before a choice: either fascism or liberalism; either a Mussolini government of bloody dictatorship or a Slandri, Gioliotti, Amendola, Turati, don Sturzo, or Vella government tending towards the reestablishment of the good old liberal Italian democracy, under whose mask the bourgeoisie will continue to exercise its exploitative rule.

The worker, the peasant, who for years has hated the fascism that oppresses him believes it necessary, in order to bring it down, to ally himself with the liberal bourgeoisie, to support those who in the past, when they were in power, supported and armed fascism against the workers and peasants, and who just a few months ago formed a sole bloc with fascism and shared in the responsibility for its crimes. And this is how the question of the liquidation of fascism is posed? No! The liquidation of fascism must be the liquidation of the bourgeoisie that created it.

When the Communist Party, in the days after the assassination of Matteoti, issued the slogan: “Down with the government of assassins! Dissolution of the Fascist militia!” it didn’t think that the government of assassins should be replaced by a government of those who in all their policies had opened the way to and armed the assassins; it never thought that Giolitti, Nitti, and Amendola, who were in power when the Fascist militia was formed, would be capable of disarming this militia which they had favored and armed against the working class.

In putting forth its slogan our party didn’t intend to replace failing fascism with the old liberalism, whose opprobrious failure and definitive liquidation the March on Rome had signaled. The Communist Party, from the beginning of the crisis of fascism, affirmed that the working class and the peasants must be the gravediggers and the successors of those in power.

The action of the mass of industrial proletarians and peasants is necessary for the defeat of fascism, for the class struggle with all of its consequences. Without a doubt the proletariat should and must use, in its struggle against fascism, the contradictions and the struggles that have developed within the bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeoisie. But without direct action fascism can never be brought down. Posing the problem in this way would mean, at the same time, clearly posing the question of the succession to fascism. With the defeat of fascism by the action of the worker and peasant masses liberalism will have no part in the succession: this right belongs to the government of the workers and peasants which alone will be capable of and will have the sincere determination to disarm the Fascist militia, arming the working class and the peasants.

At the current time it is a question of something other than the return of the constitution, to democracy and liberalism. These latter are mellifluous words that the bourgeoisie uses to mislead the workers of the city and the countryside in order to prevent the crisis from taking on its true character, that is the vengeance of the workers and peasants against the fascism that has suppressed them and against the liberalism that has misled them, and which just a few months ago collaborated or sought to collaborate (D’Aragona, Baldesi, etc) with Mussolini.

The Italian crisis can only be resolved through the action of the laboring masses. There is no possibility for the liquidation of fascism on the plain of parliamentary intrigues, only a compromise that leaves the bourgeoisie at the lead along with armed fascism at its service. Liberalism, even if inoculated with the glands of the reformist monkey, is powerless. It belongs to the past. And all the Don Struzos of Italy, united with the Turatis and the Vellas, will not succeed in returning to it the youth necessary for the liquidation of fascism.

A government of the classes of workers and peasants, which will not preoccupy itself either with the constitution or the sacred principles of liberalism, but which is determined to definitively defeat fascism, to disarm it and to defend the interests of the workers of the cities and the fields against all exploiters, this alone is the sole youthful force capable of liquidating a past of oppression, of exploitation and crime and of giving a future of true liberty to all who labor.

Today the Communist Party is the only one that repeats this truth to the proletariat. Its influence increases, its organization is developing, but the majority of the workers and peasants, dragged along by the Confederation of Labor and the Maximalist Party, in their turn advancing in the wake of the constitutional opposition, has not yet re-acquired its class consciousness, hasn’t understood that the working and peasant class is the principal factor in the crisis because it has the irresistible numbers and the great force of youth. If it doesn’t want to delude itself it must act on the plain of the class struggle as an independent force, which will soon be determinant, and not on the plain of class collaboration in order to do nothing but change the mask of the Italian bourgeoisie.

The essential task of our party consists is having penetrate among the workers and peasants this fundamental idea: only the class struggle of the mass of workers and peasants will defeat fascism. Only a government of workers and peasants can disarm the fascist militia. When these essential truths will have penetrated the spirit of the working and peasant masses by means of our tireless propaganda the workers of the factories and the fields, of whatever party, will understand the need to construct Worker and Peasant Committees for the defense of their class interests and for the struggle against fascism.

They will understand that these are the necessary instruments of the revolutionary struggle and of their will to replace the government of assassins with a government of workers and peasants. At the moment of the closing of the of the Liberal Congress, which seeks yet again to win over the working people, from one end to the other of Italy the workers and peasants answer their sonorous and empty chatter with: Neither Fascism nor Liberalism: Sovietism!

The parties and the Masses by Antonio Gramsci (1921)

The parties and the Masses

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First published: L’Ordine Nuovo, 25 September 1921, unsigned article;
Source: Biblioteca Multimediale Marxista;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2008;
Translated: for Marxists.org by Mark Camilleri.
Proofread: by Andy Carloff 2010.

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The heavily debated constitutional crisis by the Socialist Party interests the Communist Party as it is a deeper reflection of the constitutional crisis which is discussed by the Italian people. From this point of view the crisis of the Socialist Party can not be considered as isolated: it is part of a wider and more comprehensive picture, which it is also connected with the Popular Party and fascism.
The masses don’t exist politically, if they are not framed in political parties: the mutations of opinion which are verified through the masses under the pressure of the determined economic forces are interpreted by parties which first divide by tendency, and than divide in a multiplicity of new organic parties: through this process of disarticulation, neoassociation and fusion between homogenates, is revealed a more profound and intimate process of the decomposition of democratic society for the definite diversion of classes in a struggle for the conservation or the conquest of the power of the State and its power on the functions of production.

During the period of the armistice and the factory occupations, the Socialist Party represented the majority of the working people, constituted from the three fundamental classes: the proletariat, the petty bourgeois and the poor peasants. From these three classes only the proletariat was essentially and thus permanently revolutionary: the other two classes were only “occasional” revolutionaries. They were “socialists of war” and accepted the idea of the revolution in general, due to the anti-government sentiments which accumulated during the war. Since the Socialist Party had a majority of petty bourgeois and peasants elements, it could do the revolution only in the first periods of the armistice, when the sentiments of anti-government revolt were yet vivacious and active. Furthermore, since the Socialist Party was predominantly made up of petty bourgeois and peasant elements (whose mentality is not very different from that of the urban petty bourgeois) it could not fail to waver and hesitate, without any clear or precise programme, without address, and especially without an internationalist consciousness. The factory occupations, essentially proletariat, had already found the socialist unprepared as it was in a crisis of conscience due to the first blows of fascism. The end of the factory occupations vanished completely the Socialist Party, the revolutionary sentiments and infantile beliefs fell completely; the pains of war were partly implemented (a revolution can’t be made with only memories from the past); the bourgeois government yet looked strong in the period of Giolitti^[1] and in the fascist activity; the reformist leaders affirmed that thinking of a revolution was madness; Serrati^[2] stated that thinking about the the communist revolution in Italy was madness. During that period, only a minority of the party formed by the most advanced of the industrial proletariat, did not mute its communist and internationalist point of view, was not demoralized by the every day events, did not let itself be deceived from the appearances of robustness and energy from the bourgeois State. In this way, the Communist Party was formed; the first autonomous and independent organization of the industrial proletariat, of the only class essentially and permanently revolutionary. The Communist Party hasn’t become immediately the party of the masses. This proves one single thing: the conditions of great demoralization and great discouragement in which the masses were sealed as a result of the political failure of the occupation of the factories. Trust in most officials was lost: that is those who had been exalted are now looked upon with derision: the most intimate and delicate sentiments of the conscience of the proletariat became brutally smeared by these officials. Subaltern officialism became sceptic and corrupted in its repentance of its maximalist past^[3]. Immediately after the masses diverted from the Socialist Party, became segmented, liquefied and dispersed. The petty bourgeois who sympathized with socialism, now sympathizes with fascism; the peasants, now without support in the Socialist Party, now beheld sympathies for the Popular Party. But this does not pass without any consequence: this confusion of the old effects of the Socialist Party on one side and the fascists on the other, and the populars on another.

The Popular Party came near the Socialist Party in the parliamentary elections during the parliamentary elections. The open popular lists in all circumscriptions collected hundreds and thousands of names of socialist candidates. During the municipal elections, in some rural communes, from the political elections until now, many a times the socialists presented lists of minority and consulted their adherents to reverse their votes on the popular list. At Bergamo, this phenomenon, had a clamorous manifestation. The popular extremists broke off from the white organisation, and fused with the socialists and founded a Labour League and a weekly journal written by populars and socialists together. Objectively the process of rapprochement by the socialist and populars represents a progress. The peasant class unites and acquires the conscience and the notion of its diffused solidarity, breaking the religious covering in the popular field, breaking the covering of the anticlerical culture of the petty bourgeois in the socialist field. Because of these tendencies by the rural effects, the Socialist Party broke further away from the industrial proletariat and thus broke its strong unifying link which the socialist camp seemed to have created between city and country. Since this link was not a reality there emerged no negative effect from this situation. A real advantage seems to be evident; the Popular Party undertook a strong oscillation to the left and became more secular; thus it will end up breaking off from the right and will decisively enter in the camp of class struggle with a formidable weakening to the bourgeois government.

The same phenomenon is profiled in the fascist camp. The urban petty bourgeois, reinforced by all the deserters of the Socialist Party, had tried after the armistice in making something out of the organisational capacity and the military action acquired during the war. The Italian war was directed in absence of a major and efficient state; from the subaltern officialism, that is from the petty bourgeois. The suffering delusions during the war had created strong sentiments of anti-government rebellion in this class, that which has lost, after the armistice its military unity in its formation. It dispersed in the various mass parties, carrying with them fermentations of rebellion but also uncertainties, oscillations and demagogy. As the strength of the Socialist Party fell after the factory occupations, this class reorganized rapidly and reconstructed its military formations and organized nationally under the pressure of the same major state which had exploited it during the war. Rapid maturation with the rapid constitution crisis. The small urban bourgeois, a toy in the hands of the major State and to the most retrograde forces of the government, allied itself with the agrarians and broke off at the expense of the agrarians and the organisations of the peasants. The pact of Rome with fascists and socialists signalling the point of arrest of this blind and disastrous politics for the urban petty bourgeois, that which comprised its selling of its “primogeniture” for a plate of lentils. If fascism continued in its punitive expeditions through Treviso, Sarzana, Roccastrada the population would be inserted en masse in the hypothesis of popular defeat. The petty bourgeois would definitely not win power but the major State and the big land owners. Fascism came again near socialism while the petty bourgeois tried break its links with the great property owners and tried to have a political programme which ended up strangely looking like that of Turati and D’Aragona.

And this is the situation of the Italian masses, a great confusion created by superficial unity created by war and personified in the Socialist Party which is in great confusion and finds points of dialectical polarisation in the Communist Party, an independent organisation of the industrial proletariat, in the Popular Party an organisation of peasants and in fascism, an organisation of the petty bourgeoisie. The Socialist Party which during the factory occupations represented the demagogy of these three classes of workers and today the most exposed is most meritorious victim of the process of disarticulation (for a new definitive asset) which the Italian masses are undertaking as a consequence of the decomposition of democracy.

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Translator’s Notes

1. Giovanni Giolitti: Prime Minister of Italy between 1892-1921

2. Serrati was a central leader of the Socialist Party of Italy

3. Maximalists were a group of socialist reformers who propagated revolution but limited themselves only to parliamentary elections and other legal actions.

Men of Flesh and Blood by Antonio Gramsci (1921)

Men of Flesh and Blood

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Source: L’Ordine Nuovo, May 8, 1921;
Translated: by Mitchell Abidor;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2008.

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The workers of Fiat have returned to their jobs. Betrayal? Denial of revolutionary ideals? The workers of Fiat are men of flesh and blood. They resisted for a month. They knew how to fight and resist, not only for themselves, not only for the rest of the working masses of Turin, but for the entire Italian working class.

They resisted for a month. They were physically worn out because, for many weeks and months, their salaries were reduced and were no longer sufficient to sustain their families, and yet they resisted for a month. They were completely isolated from the nation, immersed in a general atmosphere of weariness, indifference, hostility, and yet they resisted for a month.

They knew not to expect any outside assistance. They knew that the Italian working class was now rendered helpless, condemned to defeat, and yet they resisted for a month. There is no shame in the defeat of the Fiat workers. We can’t ask of a mass of men who, assailed by the most pressing needs of existence, who are responsible for the existence of a population of 40,000 people, we can’t ask of them more than was given by these comrades who returned to work, sadly, regretfully, conscious of the impossibility of further resistance or action.

Especially we Communists, who live side by side with the workers, who know their needs, who have a realistic idea of the situation, should understand the reasons for this conclusion to the Turinese struggle.

For too many months the masses fought, for too many years they exhausted themselves in small scale actions, squandering their means and their energy. And this was the reproach that at the end of May 1919 we of “Ordine Nuovo” consistently put forth to the heads of the workers and socialist movements: don’t abuse the resistance and the virtue of sacrifice of the proletariat. We were dealing with ordinary men, real men subject to the same weaknesses as all the ordinary men that we pass on the street; who drink in the taverns, talk in groups in the plazas, who are hungry and cold, who are moved when they hear their children cry and their wives loudly lament.

Our revolutionary optimism has always been sustained by this crudely pessimistic vision of human reality, which must inexorably be taken into account. A year ago we already foresaw what the Italian situation would result in if the responsible leaders were to continue in their tactic of revolutionary squalls and opportunist practice. And we desperately fought to recall these responsible individuals to a more realistic, more practical vision, one more congruous and in accordance with the development of events.

Today we are paying for the ineptitude and the blindness of the others. Even today the Turinese proletariat must support the blows of the adversary, strengthened by the non-resistance of the others. There is no shame in the surrender of the workers of Fiat. That which had to happen implacably did happen. The Italian working class has been flattened beneath the steamroller of capitalist reaction. For how long? Nothing is lost if belief and consciousness remain intact, if bodies surrenders, but not souls.
The workers of Fiat fought for years strenuously, have bathed the streets in their blood, have suffered from hunger and cold. Thanks to their glorious past they remain in the vanguard of the Italian proletariat, they remain militants faithful and devoted to the revolution. They have done what is given men of flesh and blood to do. We should take off our hats before their humiliation, because even in this there is something grand that inspires the sincere and the honest.

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Split or Disorder? by Antonio Gramsci (1920)

Split or Disorder?

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Source: L’Ordine Nuovo, December 11-18, 1920;
Translated: by Mitchell Abidor;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2008.

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The Unitary Social-Communists don’t want a split in the party because they don’t want to ruin the Italian proletarian revolution. We recognize that the Unitary Social Communists represent and embody all the most “glorious” traditions of the great and glorious Italian Socialist Party (which will turn into the Unitary Social-Communist Party): glorious ignorance, glorious and broadminded absence of any scruple in polemic and of any sense of responsibility in national politics; glorious low demagogy, glorious vanity, greatly glorious charlatanry. This is the corpus of glorious and so Italian traditions that are embodied and represented by the Unitary Social Communists.

The Congress of the Communist International has posed the problem to the Italian Socialist Party of organizing itself on the basis of the acceptance of the deliberations approved by its assembly. It is a matter of breaking with the reformists, of breaking, that is, with a small part of its own body, with a part that has no vital function in the organism, that is distant from the proletarian masses, that can say it represents the masses only when they have been demoralized by the errors, the uncertainty, the absenteeism of the revolutionary leaders.

The Unitary Social-Communists haven’t wanted to accept the deliberations of the II Congress so as not to split the reformists from the party, and they affirm that they don’t want to split the reformists from the party so as not to split the masses. They have sunk the masses, both in the party and in the factories, into the darkest chaos; they have put in doubt the correctness of the International Congress, they have repudiated the party’s adherence to the congress (Serrati has returned to Italy from Moscow the same way that Orlando one day returned from Versailles, to protest, to split up the responsibility, to save the Italians’ honor and glory); they have discredited (or sought to discredit) the highest authority of the working class International, have spread, in an ambience as propitious for it as ours, a putrid tide of rumor and insinuations; of cowardice, of skepticism.

And what have they obtained? They have split the party in three, four, five tendencies; they have, in the big cities, split the working masses, which were united against reformism and the reformists; they have spread far afield the seed of disorder and decomposition in the ranks of the party.

What then is Unitarism? What occult evil is hidden by this word, which causes greater and more widespread discord and splits, while affirming that it wants to avoid a limited and precise split? That which is had to occur. If Unitarism provoked the current disorder the truth is to be found in the fact that disorder already existed; Unitarism has no other fault than to have violently opened the dams to a cloacal mass. The truth is that the Socialist Party wasn’t an “urbe,” it was an “orda.” It wasn’t an organism it was an agglomeration of individuals who had the amount of class-consciousness necessary for organizing itself in a professional union, but didn’t have the capacity and the political preparation necessary to organize itself into a revolutionary party such as is demanded in the current historical period.

Italian vanity always led us to see that we had a unique Socialist Party, that couldn’t and wouldn’t suffer the same crises as the other Socialist Parties. What has happened is that in Italy the crisis was artificially delayed and that it broke out at precisely the moment when it would have been better to avoid it, and it broke out in a way all the more violent and devastatingly by the will and the stubbornness of those who always denied it and who today deny it still (we are Unitarists! Unitarist damn it!)

It would be ridiculous to whimper over what has occurred and what is irremediable. Communists must reason coldly and collectedly: if everything is in a state of disorder we have to remake the party. Starting today it is necessary to consider and to love the Communist fraction as a true and actual party, as the solid framework of the Italian Communist Party, which is acquiring proselytes, solidly organizes them, educates, forms active cells of the new organization that is developing and will develop until it becomes the entire working class, until it becomes the soul and the will of all the working people.

The crisis we are today undergoing is perhaps the greatest revolutionary crisis of the Italian people. To understand this truth the comrades should put forth this hypothesis: what would have happened if the Socialist Party had suffered this crisis in the middle of the revolution, having all the responsibility for a state? What would have happened if the government of a revolutionary state had found itself having in hand men who fought for their tendencies and who in the passion of this struggle placed in doubt the most sacred patrimony of a worker: faith in the International and in the capacities and loyalty of the men who occupied its highest offices? What would have happened is what happened in Hungary: the abandonment by the masses, the relaxing of revolutionary energy, the rapid victory of the counter-revolution.

The Unitarists charlatan mania has today only caused disorder in a party. Tomorrow they would have caused the fall of the revolution. For this reason they have damaged the working class and reinforced reaction. The evil is not decisive; men of good will yet have a boundless field to harvest and render fruitful.

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One Year of History by Antonio Gramsci (1918)

One Year of History

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Source: Il Grido del Popolo, March 16, 1918;
Translated: by Mitchell Abidor;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2008.

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One year has passed since the day when the Russian people forced Tsar Nicholas to abdicate and take the road of exile. The commemoration of the anniversary is hardly merry. Sorrow, ruin, the appearance of collapse, the bourgeois counter-offensive with German bayonets and guns.
Is the Russian Revolution finished? Has the proletariat in Russia failed in the greatest experiment in history? The look of things doesn’t give comfort: the German generals have arrived in Odessa, the Japanese are said to be ready to intervene, fifty million citizens are have been torn from the revolution, and with them the most fertile lands, the ways to the seas, the roads of civilization and economic life. The Revolution was born in pain and despair, and continues in pain and suffering, gripped in a ring of enemy power, immersed in an economic world refractory to its ideal, to its goals.

In March 1917 the telegraphs announced that a world had collapsed in Russia, a world already ephemeral, the inanimate shadow of a power that was surging up, which was growing stronger, which dragged itself along with bloody violence, with the repression of spirits, with the torture of flesh torn to pieces. This power gave life to a huge state machine. 170 million human creatures were forced to forget their humanity, their spirituality in order to serve. To serve what? The idea of the Russian Empire, of the Great Russian State which had to reach the warm and open seas in order to secure an outlet for its economic activity from every size of competitor, from the surprise of war. The Russian Empire was a monstrous necessity of the modern world. In order to live, to develop, to ensure a life of activity ten races, 170 million men had to submit to a ferocious state discipline; had to renounce their humanity and be pure instruments of power.

In March 1917 the monstrous machine collapsed, rotted, decomposed by its congenital impotence. Men rose up, looked each other in the eye. Human values took the upper hand. Exteriority no longer had any value: too much wrong had been done, too much pain had been caused, too much blood had been spilled. History, true history had begun. Everyone wants to be the master of his own destiny, wants society to be molded in obedience to the spirit, and not vice versa. The organization of life in common in society should be the expression of humanity, should respect autonomy and liberty. The new history of humanity had begun; a new experiment in the history of the human spirit had begun. These coincided with the expressions that the socialist ideal had given to man’s elementary needs. The socialists as a political class reached power without too much effort; the words of their faith coincided with the confused and vague aspirations of the Russian people.

They had to make the new organization a reality, had to pass new laws, stabilize the new regulations. The past continued to exist, but it was falling apart. It gave the appearance of collapse, disorder, confusion. It seemed as if they were returning to barbarian society, that is, to non-society. The past continued to live beyond the land of liberty and sought vengeance.

The new order was slow in being realized. Slow? O skeptical wicked men, it wasn’t slow, for one doesn’t remake society by fiat, because the evil of the past is not an edifice of papier-mâché that is brought down in an instant. Life is a painful effort, a tenacious struggle against habits, against bestiality and the coarse instincts that continuously make themselves known. A new human society isn’t created in six months when three years of war have exhausted a country, have deprived it of the mechanical means needed for civil life. Millions and millions of men aren’t organized in freedom just like that, when everything is against it and all that is left is the indomitable spirit. The history of the Russian Revolution hasn’t been closed and will not close with the anniversary of its beginning.
In the same way that a canto exists in the imagination of the poet before it does on the printed page, the arrival of a new social organization exists in consciousnesses and wills. They are changed men; this is what is important. They want exteriority, the words on the page. They cry out at every failure, at every apparent reverse.

Historians ask of the Russians what has never been asked of past revolutions: the immediate creation of a new order. They devise plans that have never existed, hopes that have never been dreamed of. And these plans, these hopes confront a current reality to end in failure, in collapse. With a reality which is said to issue from a year of new history, but which issues from centuries of the most bestial repression in human history. The impossible is asked of them, which has never asked of the men of the past.

How many times did the French Revolution see Paris occupied by the enemy? And the occupation came after Napoleon had dictatorially organized the revolutionary forces and led the French armies from victory to victory. And France was a small thing compared to the exterminated Russia.
No, mechanical force has never prevailed in history; it is men, it is consciousness and the spirit that molds external appearances and always triumphs in the end. A year of history has closed, but history continues. (The next six lines were censored.)

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