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SELECTIONS FROM

POLITICAL WRITINGS1910-20

Antonio Gramsci



ELECBOOK CLASSICS

Selections fromPolitical Writings

1910-1920

Antonio Gramsci

ISBN 1 84327 121 4

©The Electric Book Company 2001

The Electric Book Company Ltd

20 Cambridge Drive, London SE12 8AJ, UK

www.elecbook.com



SELECTIONS FROM

POLITICAL

WRITINGS

(1910-1920)

ANTONIO GRAMSCI

Selected, Edited and Introduced by Quintin Hoare

Translated by John Mathews

ElecBook

London 1999

Transcribed from the edition published by

Lawrence & Wishart, London 1977

Read the entire book at Electric Book www.elecbook.com

http://www.elecbook.com/




Selections from Political Writings 1910-1920

Classics in Politics: Antonio Gramsci ElecBook

4

Contents

Click on number to go to page

INTRODUCTION......................................................................... 10

A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION .................................................. 22

I. THE YOUNG SOCIALIST ........................................................... 23

1. OPPRESSED AND OPPRESSORS.............................................. 24

2. ACTIVE AND OPERATIVE NEUTRALITY..................................... 28

3. SOCIALISM AND CULTURE ..................................................... 34

4. JULY 14th............................................................................. 39

5. A VETERINARY SURGEON ON FILM......................................... 41

6. INDIFFERENCE...................................................................... 44

7. REMEMBERING THE HISTORY OF THE COTTON-

WORKERS’ STRUGGLE ............................................................... 47

8. MEN OR MACHINES? ............................................................. 55

9. NOTES ON THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION................................... 59

10. THE RUSSIAN MAXIMALISTS ................................................ 64

11. THE REVOLUTION AGAINST “CAPITAL”.................................. 68

12. CLASS INTRANSIGENCE AND ITALIAN HISTORY..................... 73

Class, State, Parties................................................................. 75

Does Italy have a class State? ................................................... 76

The Unspoken Promise ............................................................ 79

Realism and Empiricism........................................................... 81


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5

The Function of the Proletariat .................................................. 83

13. THE RUSSIAN UTOPIA ......................................................... 86

14. OUR OBLIGATION TO BE STRONG......................................... 97

15. THE WAR IN THE COLONIES............................................... 101

16. THE REVOLUTIONARY TIDE................................................ 104

II. L’ORDINE NUOVO AND THE FACTORY COUNCILS................... 106

17. WORKERS’ DEMOCRACY .................................................... 107

18. THE RETURN TO FREEDOM................................................ 113

19. THE CONQUEST OF THE STATE .......................................... 118

20. TOWARDS THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL..................... 126

21. WORKERS AND PEASANTS................................................. 131

22. ELECTORALISM ................................................................. 138

23. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE REVOLUTION .......................... 140

24. TO THE WORKSHOP DELEGATES OF THE FIAT

CENTRO AND BREVETTI PLANTS .............................................. 146

25. UNIONS AND COUNCILS .................................................... 151

26. TRADE UNIONS AND THE DICTATORSHIP ........................... 158

27. SYNDICALISM AND THE COUNCILS..................................... 166

Appendix................................................................................. 172

28. THE PROGRAMME OF THE WORKSHOP DELEGATES ............ 172

Preamble................................................................................. 172

Declaration of Principles......................................................... 175

General Regulations .................................................................. 178








6

Appointment of Delegates and their Powers .............................. 178

Delegates and Unions ............................................................ 180

The Duties of the Factory Delegates ......................................... 181Towards Workers’ Schools ...................................................... 183

The Executive Commissariat of a Factory ..................................... 184

Appointment, Functions, Powers ............................................. 184

Publications, Notices, Reports, Meetings .................................. 186

III. THE COMING CONFRONTATION........................................... 187

29. REVOLUTIONARIES AND THE ELECTIONS............................ 188

30. THE PROBLEM OF POWER ................................................. 192

Political Order....................................................................... 192

Economic Order .................................................................... 192

31. THE EVENTS OF 2-3 DECEMBER [1919].............................. 199

Petty Bourgeoisie................................................................... 199

A Hypothesis... ..................................................................... 202

Class Struggle, Peasant War ................................................... 204

32. THE PARTY AND THE REVOLUTION .................................... 208

33. WORKERS AND PEASANTS................................................. 215

34. THE HISTORICAL ROLE OF THE CITIES ................................ 21935. FIRST: RENEW THE PARTY................................................. 224

36. ACTION PROGRAMME OF THE TURIN SOCIALIST

SECTION................................................................................. 230

37. THE INSTRUMENTS OF LABOUR......................................... 236

38. GOVERNING PARTY AND GOVERNING CLASS ...................... 243

39. PROLETARIAN UNITY......................................................... 251










8

THE FACTORY COUNCILS ......................................................... 335

50. THE TASCA REPORT AND THE CONGRESS OF THE

TURIN CHAMBER OF LABOUR.................................................. 356

51. THE FACTORY COUNCIL..................................................... 362

52. UNIONS AND COUNCILS .................................................... 369

53. POLEMICS OVER THE L’ORDINE NUOVO

PROGRAMME—TASCA ............................................................. 375

Editorial Note........................................................................ 39254. ON THE L’ORDINE NUOVO PROGRAMME............................. 406

VI. TOWARDS THE COMMUNIST PARTY .................................... 417

55. THE COLONIAL POPULATIONS............................................ 418

56. TWO REVOLUTIONS........................................................... 423

57. THE TURIN FACTORY COUNCILS MOVEMENT ...................... 430

The April Strike ..................................................................... 430

Anarchists and Syndicalists..................................................... 431

Industrial Production.............................................................. 432

Turin, the Capital of Italy ........................................................ 433

Two Armed Insurrections........................................................ 434

Barricades, Trenches, Barbed-Wire Entanglements..................... 435

The Co-operative Alliance ....................................................... 436

The Post-War Period.............................................................. 437

Enthusiastic support for the Councils........................................ 439

The Councils and Internal Commissions during Strikes................ 440

The Struggle against the Councils ............................................ 441

National Socialist Council in Milan........................................... 442








9

58. EDITORIAL: 21 AUGUST 1920 ............................................ 445

59. WHAT DO WE MEAN BY DEMAGOGY? ................................. 448

60. THE OCCUPATION ............................................................. 452

61. THE COMMUNIST PARTY ................................................... 457

62. RED SUNDAY .................................................................... 470

63. FIVE MONTHS LATER......................................................... 475

64. POLITICAL CAPACITY ......................................................... 479

65. EDITORIAL: 9 OCTOBER 1920 ............................................ 484

66. REACTION......................................................................... 486

67. PREDICTIONS.................................................................... 491

68. WHAT IS REACTION?.......................................................... 496

69. SPLIT OR RUIN? ................................................................ 499

70. EDITORIAL: 24 DECEMBER 1920........................................ 503

71. THE WORKERS’ STATE....................................................... 506

72. THE MONKEY-PEOPLE ....................................................... 511

73. THE LIVORNO CONGRESS .................................................. 515






INTRODUCTION

he earliest piece in this selection (the first of two volumes) from

Antonio Gramsci’s political writings prior to his imprisonment

dates from 1910. The author wrote it at the age of twenty, in his

final year at school in Sardinia, before he became a Socialist. The last

piece was written just before the January 1921 Livorno Congress of the

Italian Socialist Party (PSI), which was also the founding Congress of theCommunist Party of Italy (PCd’I): Gramsci was then almost thirty and a

major figure on the revolutionary left in his country. The decade which

these texts span was perhaps the key watershed of our century. During

those few years, the First World War left 10 million dead and twice as

many wounded. The Second International was swamped by the upsurge

of nationalist passions and pressures in 1914, and collapsed. In Russia,

the February Revolution of 1917 overthrew the Tsarist regime. It was

followed within a few months by the Bolshevik Revolution, which

destroyed the fragile bourgeois order installed in February; took Russia

out of the War; deprived capitalism at one stroke of the largest country

on the globe; sent ripples of enthusiasm and fear throughout the world;

successfully confronted foreign intervention and a terrible civil war

(though at a price in internal repression which was destined to have

heavy consequences); and embarked upon socialist construction. The

Third International was founded in 1919, as a revolutionary wave swept

through much of continental Europe.

In Italy itself, by the end of 1920 when this volume closes, that wave

was already receding. But no one on the left believed—or allowed

themselves to believe—that the tide itself had turned and was now on

T






Political Writings 1910-1920: Introduction


11

the ebb. The decade had seen a vertiginous expansion of the country’s

productive forces, above all during the war years (production of iron and

steel multiplied five times during the course of the war, and firms likeFIAT—whose work force rose from 4,000 to 20,000 in that period

increased their capital tenfold). At the same time, the war was followed

by a severe economic crisis (the lira lost 80 per cent of its value

between 1914 and 1920; the budgetary deficit rose from 214 millions

in 1914-15 to 23 ,345 millions in 1918-19, with the main tax burden

falling on the petty bourgeoisie; wheat production fell from 52 million

quintals in 1911-13 to 38 million in 1920, and 40 per cent of the

balance of payments deficit was accounted for by food imports;

production dropped after the war by 40 per cent in the engineering

industries, 20 per cent in chemicals, 15 per cent in mining, etc.; coal

prices were over 16 times higher in 1920 than they had been in 1913;

and so on) to which successive governments seemed to have no

solution. The political crisis of the old order was manifest: incapable of

creating any coherent political party with a stable structure, mass base

or clear programme, the shifting cliques of ‘notables’ in parliament, with

their personal followings, clientele and hired vote-gathering enforcers,

appeared impotent either to control the worsening economic situation or

to confront the inexorable growth of the socialist forces.

At the same time, the PSI had become the largest single party at theNovember 1919 elections, with 156 seats out of a total of 508.

Membership of the Socialist trade-union federation (CGL) rose from

250,000 to two million between the end of the war and 1920.

Moreover, in words at least, the Socialist Party stood for Revolution and

Soviets, and the workers in the main industrial centres had shown in

repeated actions that they were a formidably militant force. For the

insurrectionary uprising in Turin in August 1917, the great general strike








12

which created a situation of dual power throughout Piedmont for eleven

days in April 1920 and the occupation of factories in all the main

industrial centres of Northern Italy in August—September of the sameyear were fresh in the memories of all. These massive proletarian actions

had failed, yet was that not essentially for want of firm, revolutionary

leadership on a national scale: in short, a party? And if the PSI, despite

its formal adherence to the Third International, was not prepared to

become, or capable of becoming, that party, by applying the Comintern’s

twenty-one conditions, expelling the reformists and putting its own

inflammatory rhetoric into practice, then a new Communist Party would

take its place and lead the Italian proletariat to victory.

However, in reality, the revolutionary moment had passed. The

occupation of the factories was itself essentially defensive in character.

The refusal of the PSI to extend the April strike nationally marked a

decisive turning-point. And the party’s failure in the post-war period

either to tap the revolutionary potential of the agricultural proletariat and

peasantry or to channel the resentments of the urban petty bourgeoisie

in a socialist direction had irreversible consequences for the balance of

class forces. That autumn of 1920 saw the transformation of fascism

from a marginal to a mass phenomenon. Fascist squads began to carry

out raids on behalf of the landowners of North and Central Italy, against

both the Socialist and Catholic peasant associations and againstsocialist-controlled municipalities such as that of Bologna or socialist

papers such as the Trieste daily Il Lavoratore. Twenty years of reaction

were just beginning. Gramsci had written presciently in April 1920 (see

No. 43 below): “The present phase of the class struggle in Italy is the

phase that precedes: either the conquest of political power on the part of

the revolutionary proletariat and the transition to new modes of

production and distribution that will set the stage for a recovery in








13

productivity—or a tremendous reaction on the part of the propertied

classes and governing caste. No violence will be spared in subjecting the

industrial and agricultural proletariat to servile labour: there will be a bidto smash once and for all the working class’s organs of political struggle

(the Socialist Party) and to incorporate its organs of economic resistance

(the trade unions and co-operatives) into the machinery of the bourgeois

State.” By the end of 1920, Gramsci’s second alternative was coming to

pass—though he and the first generation of Italian communists were to

spend the next six years in a grim fight to the death premised on the

assertion that the former was still on the agenda.

This momentous decade, then, was the period of Gramsci’s basic

political formation. When he arrived in Turin in 1911, on a scholarship

for poor children from Sardinia, his political ideas (reflected in the liceo

essay “Oppressed and Oppressors” printed here) were probably fairly

typical of the “southernist” melange of liberal and socialist themes which

was so prevalent throughout the South and the Islands in the years

preceding the War. Although Gramsci was quickly to shed any leanings

in the direction of Sardinian nationalism when he came into contact with

the proletarian reality of Italy’s most advanced industrial city, he was

never to lose his concern with the “Southern problem”. The violent social

upheaval that had swept Sardinia in 1906—affecting peasant masses,

urban workers and miners alike and brutally repressed by mainlandtroops—had been his first experience of class struggle; it had been the

crucial stimulus impelling him towards revolutionary politics.

It was in Turin, however, that Gramsci became a socialist, joining the

party towards the end of 1913. Soon after arriving in the city, he had

struck up a friendship with Angelo Tasca, a fellow student, the son of a

railway-worker, born in the same year as himself and active in the

Socialist Party since 1909. Tasca was probably the decisive influence in








14

introducing Gramsci to organized political activity. In fact, racked by ill

health and desperately poor, Gramsci’s main concerns until late in 1915

were cultural and academic. It was only in November 1915 that heabandoned his studies and joined the staff of the socialist paper Il Grido

del Popolo. Prior to that date, he had (so far as is known) published just

four articles: a 24-line piece on a local election campaign for a Sardinian

paper in 1910; two cultural essays in a student paper in 1913 (one of

them called for a serious critical analysis of Italian futurism, relating it to

the cubism of Picasso); and most notably “Active and Operative

Neutrality” (see No. 2 below), in October 1914. This article, Gramsci’s

first real foray into political journalism, was a disastrous error of

judgment, which may well have held him back from further writing for a

whole period: it was certainly a mistake that was to be brought up

against him for years to come.

When war broke out between the Entente and the Central Powers,

the Italian Socialist Party adopted a policy firmly opposed to any

intervention by Italy in the war. Soon afterwards Mussolini, the editor of

Avanti! (the official PSI newspaper) and acknowledged leader of the

party’s left wing, began to shift away from the official line of neutrality.

In response to an attack on Mussolini by Tasca, Gramsci wrote “Active

and Operative Neutrality” in the former’s defence. It was, however, not

long before the real direction in which Mussolini was moving becameclear; he was expelled from the party and Gramsci retreated into a

silence of more than a year. What had in fact impelled Gramsci to make

this blunder was not any capitulation to nationalist themes of the kind

which motivated Mussolini, but rather a somewhat idealist voluntarism

which was to remain an element of his politics for some years to come.

There is an evident link between his rejection of the PSI’s “passivity” in

this early text and his saluting of the October revolution as the








15

“Revolution against ‘Capital”’ (No. 11 below). Moreover, it must be

recognized that although Gramsci utterly misjudged Mussolini and

advocated a wrong line for the PSI in 1914, he was not wrong in hisestimate of the party’s official policy, which was a far cry from the

revolutionary internationalism of Lenin and was indeed thoroughly

passive—with disastrous results in the post-war period.

At all events, it was not until November 1915 that Gramsci began to

write regularly for the socialist press in Turin. In the ensuing five years,

his printed articles totalled well over a thousand, if one counts only

those which have already been positively identified. Although a scholarly

edition of these articles is now announced, they have been published to

date in a largely ad hoc fashion, partly grouped by subject matter, partly

by journalistic form and partly by chronology. For the purposes of the

present selection, Gramsci’s 1916-20 theatre criticism (published as an

appendix to the volume of Prison Notebooks entitled Letteratura e vita

nazionale, Turin 1954) has been left on one side, as indeed have all his

cultural writings. The volume Sotto Ia mole (Turin 1960), which

contains almost four hundred short articles which appeared under that

rubric between 1916 and 1920 in the Turin edition of Avanti!,

commenting on every aspect of local intellectual, cultural, political and

social life, has also been left unrepresented, with the exception of three

pieces (Nos. 4, 5, 6 below). Nor has anything been included from arecent volume of previously unidentified articles Per Ia verità (Rome

1974), although many are of undoubted interest. Just three articles have

been included (Nos. 60, 63, 67 below) from an earlier collection of

freshly identified articles Scritti 1915-21 (Milan 1968), though again

many of the pieces in that collection are of considerable value. The great

majority of the texts translated here, therefore, have been taken from the

collections entitled Scritti giovanili 1914-18 (Turin 1958) and L’Ordine








16

Nuovo 1919-20 (Turin 1955). Moreover, whereas only eleven articles

have been taken from the former volume, forty-nine have been included

from the latter. The selection has been completed by five texts written byAmadeo Bordiga and two by Angelo Tasca.

Clearly, the criteria which have governed this selection require some

explanation. What has been said should make it clear that no attempt

has been made to offer a representative choice of Gramsci’s writings

prior to 1920. The first limitation is made explicit in the title of this

volume. Despite the impressive variety of Gramsci’s concerns, and the

great intrinsic interest of what he wrote on a whole range of cultural,

intellectual and social topics, the selection is focused on what was

undoubtedly central for Gramsci himself: politics. Secondly, purely

biographical considerations have not been determinant. For instance, it

is undoubtedly interesting to note that Gramsci had no clear idea in

September 1917 of who the Bolsheviks really were or what they

represented (of course, this was not just a personal failing of his own,

but reflected a general situation of ignorance or actual misinformation on

the Italian left); nevertheless, such a consideration does not really seem

to warrant inclusion of the article “Kerensky-Chernov” in which his

confusion is expressed. Similarly, the selection does not have as a

primary aim to demonstrate the range of Gramsci’s political interests,

notably in the international sphere, impressive as these were. Finally,the selection has not been motivated by strictly historiographic

concerns, although Gramsci’s writings do constitute an invaluable source

for the historian of the period.

No, the guiding conviction which has governed the selection of

Gramsci’s political writings presented here is that, in confronting the

great issues thrown up by the period through which he was living,

Gramsci produced a profoundly original body of thought—in close








17

relation with a concrete revolutionary practice—which remains centrally

relevant to Marxists today, in its lacunae as in its strength. The selection

seeks to present this body of thought in as powerful and concentrated aform as possible—without seeking to obscure any of its weaknesses or

ambiguities. The articles translated show Gramsci discussing the impact

of the World War upon the bourgeois order, internationally and in Italy;

the significance of the Russian revolution; the potential of the

revolutionary forces organized in the Communist International; the crisis

of the Italian ruling class; the specific characteristics of the Italian petty

bourgeoisie; the limitations and deficiencies of the mass organizations of

the working class; the conditions for proletarian victory. Above all, these

texts are the record of an attempt to hammer out, in intimate inter-

relation with a mass proletarian practice in Turin, a theory of the specific

organizational forms capable of harnessing the full revolutionary

potential of the class and representing the embryos of a future soviet

State in Italy.

Thus only a few articles have been translated from the period before

the foundation of the weekly L‘Ordine Nuovo in May 1919. In fact, until

1917, Gramsci was only in the most generic sense a Marxist. It was on

the one hand the Russian revolutions, and on the other the August

insurrection of that year in Turin (in whose wake he was elected to an

important post in the local party organization—since almost all theestablished leaders had been arrested—and appointed editor of Il Grido

del Popolo) which first seriously posed the problem of power for the

young journalist. And it was only with the publication of “Workers’

Democracy” (No. 17 below) that his thought began to coalesce into a

coherent and original political theory, which constitutes the main focus

of this volume. Of course, it would be quite wrong to idealize that theory.

As Gramsci was himself to acknowledge subsequently, in a letter to








18

Alfonso Leonetti (written from Vienna in January 1924): “In 1919-20

we made extremely serious mistakes, which ultimately we are paying for

today. For fear of being called upstarts and careerists, we did not form afaction and organize this throughout Italy. We were not ready to give the

Turin factory councils an autonomous directive centre, which could have

exercised an immense influence throughout the country, for fear of a

split in the unions and of being expelled prematurely from the Socialist

Party.” Moreover, even this expresses inadequately the mistakes made.

For what lay behind the failure to conduct a fight within the party, as

Bordiga had from the end of 1918 (or even in a sense from 1912!), was

a theoretical failure to grasp the essential role of the revolutionary party

in centralizing the struggle against the existing order and organizing the

insurrectionary seizure of power.

Consequently, some of the points made by Bordiga and by Tasca in

the polemics against L‘Ordine Nuovo included here are entirely correct,

from their seemingly opposed but at times not dissimilar standpoints.

These texts have been translated here, not simply to place in context the

ideas developed by L‘Ordine Nuovo, but also because of the importance

the views expressed were to have throughout the early years of the

Italian Communist Party. Yet for all that they were each in some ways

formally right against Gramsci, their conventionality by contrast with his

analyses is here manifest. Whereas what Gramsci wrote on the factorycouncils, for all its one-sidedness, is relevant to contemporary Marxist

discussion on the forms of revolutionary mobilization, the character of

dual power organs and the nature of the post-revolutionary State,

Tasca’s failure to grasp the fundamental nature and role of trade unions

under capitalism and Bordiga’s effective identification of the dictatorship

of the proletariat with dictatorship of the communist party fatally flawed

their respective positions in this debate.









Classics in Politics: Antonio Gramsci

20

of course, texts written in the conviction that revolution is possible, is

immediately on the agenda, inevitably take on a tragic aspect when the

historical moment has passed; when the reader knows with hindsightthat not revolution but black reaction was in store. When the author was

himself destined to die a victim of that reaction, this tragic aspect is

redoubled. Yet it would be quite wrong to read these texts simply as the

record of a tragic illusion. For quite apart from the question—which can,

of course, never finally be settled—of what was possible in Italy in

1919—20, the problems with which Gramsci sought to grapple are

those which must arise in any pre-revolutionary situation. What kind of

party is needed to organize the revolution? What role do the trade unions

—quintessential expression of the class’s corporative interest—play?

What are the soviet bodies that can incorporate the whole working

class? What allies can the proletariat win? What are the cultural and

moral prerequisites for a successful revolution? What are the material

prerequisites? To what extent, and in what conditions, can workers

control production prior to the overthrow of capitalism? What is the

potential significance of such control?

In any case, Gramsci was more free of illusions than most. His stark

presentation of the alternative perspectives that faced the Italian working

class in early 1920 has already been quoted. Neither during the April

1920 general strike nor during the August/September 1920 occupationof the factories did he succumb to facile optimism. In “Superstition and

Reality”, one of the many important texts which space did not allow to

be included in this volume, written immediately after the April strike, he

wrote: “The Turin working class was defeated and could not but be

defeated. The Turin working class was dragged into the struggle; it had

no freedom of choice, it could not postpone the day of the conflict

because the initiative in the class war still belongs to the capitalists and




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selections from political writings 1910-1920 by antonio gramsci preview