Antonio Gramsci 1917
Notes on the Russian Revolution
Initialled A. G., Il Grido del Popolo, 29 April 1917. This article was Gramsci’s first comment on the events of the “February Revolution” that overthrew the Tsarist autocracy.
Why is the Russian revolution a proletarian revolution?
Reading the papers, reading the confusing despatches that the
censorship has passed for publication, one is hard put to it to
know why. We know the revolution was carried out by proletarians
(workers and soldiers) and we know of the existence of a
committee of worker delegates overseeing the functioning of the
administrative organs which have had to be maintained to see to
everyday affairs. But is it enough that a revolution be carried
out by proletarians for it to be a proletarian revolution? War
too is made by proletarians, but it is not, for this reason
alone, a proletarian event. For it to be so, other, spiritual,
factors must be present. There must be more to the revolution
than the question of power: there must be the question of
morality, of a way of life. The bourgeois newspapers have
emphasized the aspect of power. They have told us how the power
of the autocracy came to be replaced by another power, which is
not yet clearly defined but which they hope is a bourgeois
power. And at once they have set up the parallel: Russian
Revolution, French Revolution and found the events to be
similar. But the events resemble each other only on the surface,
just as one act of violence resembles another act of violence,
and one destruction resembles another.
We, however, are convinced that the Russian revolution is more
than simply a proletarian event, it is a proletarian act, which
must naturally lead to a socialist regime. The small amount of
really concrete, substantial news does not allow exhaustive proof
of this. However, certain facts are available to support such a
conclusion.
The Russian revolution has been innocent of Jacobinism. The
revolution had to smash the autocracy - but it did not have to
crush the majority of the people by the use of
violence. Jacobinism is a purely bourgeois phenomenon: it
characterizes the French bourgeois revolution. The bourgeoisie,
after carrying out the revolution, had no universal programme. It
carried it out to further its own, particularist class interests,
and did so with the closed and mean mentality common to all people
who pursue particularist ends. The violence of the bourgeois
revolutions has a twofold character: it destroys the old order,
and imposes the new. The bourgeoisie imposes its power and its
ideas not only on the previously dominant caste, but also on the
people it will in future dominate. It is one authoritarian regime
replacing another authoritarian regime.
The Russian revolution has destroyed authoritarianism and
replaced it by universal suffrage, extending the vote to women
too. It has replaced authoritarianism by liberty, the Constitution
by the free voice of universal consciousness. Why are the Russian
revolutionaries not Jacobins - in other words, why have not they
too replaced the dictatorship of one man by the dictatorship of an
audacious minority ready to do anything that will ensure its
programme’s victory? It is because they are pursuing aims which
are common to the vast majority of the population. They are
certain that when the whole of the Russian proletariat is asked to
make its choice, the reply cannot be in doubt. It is in everyone’s
mind, and will be transformed into an irrevocable decision just as
soon as it can be expressed in an atmosphere of absolute spiritual
freedom, without the voting being perverted by police
interventions and by the threat of the gallows or exile. Even
culturally the industrial proletariat is ready for the transition;
and the agricultural proletariat too, which is familiar with the
traditional forms of communal communism, is prepared for the
change to a new form of society. Socialist revolutionaries cannot
be Jacobins: in Russia at the moment all they have to do is ensure
that the bourgeois organs (the duma, the
zemstvas) do not indulge in Jacobinism, in order to
secure an ambiguous response from universal suffrage and turn
violence to their own ends.
* * * * *
The bourgeois newspapers have attached no importance to another
intriguing event. The Russian revolutionaries have not only freed
political prisoners, but common criminals as well. When the common
criminals in one prison were told they were free, they replied
that they felt they did not have the right to accept liberty
because they had to expiate their crimes. In Odessa they gathered
in the prison courtyard and of their own volition swore to become
honest men and resolved to live by their own labours. From the
point of view of the socialist revolution, this news has more
importance even than that of the dismissal of the Tsar and the
grand-dukes. The Tsar would have been deposed by bourgeois
revolutionaries as well. But in bourgeois eyes, these condemned
men would still have been the enemies of their order, the stealthy
appropriators of their wealth and their tranquillity. In our eyes
their liberation has this significance: what the revolution has
created in Russia is a new way of life. It has not only replaced
one power by another, it has replaced one way of life by
another. It has created a new moral order, and in addition to the
physical liberty of the individual, has established liberty of the
mind. The revolutionaries were not afraid to send back into
circulation men whom bourgeois justice had stamped with the
infamous brand “previous offender”, men whom bourgeois justice had
catalogued into various types of criminal delinquent. Only in an
atmosphere of social turbulence could such an event occur, when
the way of life and the prevailing mentality is changed. Liberty
makes men free and widens their moral horizons; it turns the worst
criminal under an authoritarian regime into a martyr for the cause
of duty, a hero in the cause of honesty. It says in a report that
in one prison these criminals rejected liberty and
elected themselves wardens. Why had they never done such a thing
before? Because their prison was ringed by massive walls and their
windows were barred? The men who went to free them must have
looked very different from the tribunal judges and the prison
warders, and these common criminals must have heard words
very different from the ones they were used to, for their
consciousness to be transformed in this way, for them to become
suddenly so free as to be able to prefer segregation to
liberty and to voluntarily impose an expiation on themselves. They
must have felt the world had changed, that they too, the dregs of
society, now counted for something; that they too, the segregated,
had the freedom to choose.
This is the most majestic phenomenon that human history has
ever produced. As a result of the Russian revolution the man who
was a common criminal has turned into the sort of man
whom Immanuel Kant, the theoretician of absolute ethical conduct,
had called for - the sort of man who says: the immensity of the
heavens above me, the imperative of my conscience within me. What
these brief news items reveal to us is a liberation of spirit, the
establishment of a new moral awareness. It is the advent of a new
order, one that coincides with everything our masters taught
us. And once again it is from the East that light comes to
illuminate the aged Western world, which is stupefied by the
events and can oppose them with nothing but the banalities and
stupidities of its hack-writers.