Antonio Gramsci 1917
The Revolution Against 'Capital'
Signed Antonio Gramsci, Milan edition of Avanti!, 24 December 1917.
Republished by Il Grido del Popolo, 5 January 1918, with the following note: “The Turin censorship has once completely blanked out this article in Il Grido. We reproduce it here as it appeared in Avanti! after passing through the sieve of the Milan and Rome censorship.”
The Bolshevik Revolution is now definitively part of the
general revolution of the Russian people. The maximalists up
until two months ago were the active agents needed to ensure
that events should not stagnate, that the drive to the future
should not come to a halt and allow a final settlement – a
bourgeois settlement - to be reached. Now these maximalists have
seized power and established their dictatorship, and are
creating the socialist framework within which the revolution
will have to settle down if it is to continue to develop
harmoniously, without head-on confrontations, on the basis of
the immense gains which have already been made.
The Bolshevik Revolution consists more of ideologies than of
events. (And hence, at bottom, we do not really need to know more
than we do.) This is the revolution against Karl Marx's
Capital. In Russia, Marx's Capital was more the
book of the bourgeoisie than of the proletariat. It stood as the
critical demonstration of how events should follow a predetermined
course: how in Russia a bourgeoisie had to develop, and a
capitalist era had to open, with the setting-up of a Western-type
civilization, before the proletariat could even think in terms of
its own revolt, its own class demands, its own revolution. But
events have overcome ideologies. Events have exploded the critical
schema determining how the history of Russia would unfold
according to the canons of historical materialism. The Bolsheviks
reject Karl Marx, and their explicit actions and conquests bear
witness that the canons of historical materialism are not so rigid
as might have been and has been thought.
And yet there is a fatality even in these events, and if the
Bolsheviks reject some of the statements in Capital, they
do not reject its invigorating, immanent thought. These people are
not "Marxists", that is all; they have not used the works of the
Master to compile a rigid doctrine of dogmatic utterances never to
be questioned. They live Marxist thought - that thought which is
eternal, which represents the continuation of German and Italian
idealism, and which in the case of Marx was contaminated by
positivist and naturalist encrustations. This thought sees as the
dominant factor in history, not raw economic facts, but man, men
in societies, men in relation to one another, reaching agreements
with one another, developing through these contacts (civilization)
a collective, social will; men coming to understand economic
facts, judging them and adapting them to their will until this
becomes the driving force of the economy and moulds objective
reality, which lives and moves and comes to resemble a current of
volcanic lava that can be channelled wherever and in whatever way
men's will determines.
Marx foresaw the foreseeable. But he could not foresee the
European war, or rather he could not foresee that the war would
last as long as it has or have the effects it has had. He could
not foresee that in the space of three years of unspeakable
suffering and miseries, this war would have aroused in Russia the
collective popular will that it has aroused. In normal
times a lengthy process of gradual diffusion through society
is needed for such a collective will to form; a wide range of
class experience is needed. Men are lazy, they need to be
organized, first externally into corporations and leagues, then
internally, within their thought and their will [...] need a
ceaseless continuity and multiplicity of external stimuli. This is
why, under normal conditions, the canons of Marxist
historical criticism grasp reality, capture and clarify
it. Under normal conditions the two classes of the
capitalist world create history through an ever more intensified
class struggle. The proletariat is sharply aware of its poverty
and its ever-present discomfort and puts pressure on the
bourgeoisie to improve its living standards. It enters into
struggle, and forces the bourgeoisie to improve the techniques of
production and make it more adapted to meeting the urgent needs of
the proletariat. The result is a headlong drive for improvement,
an acceleration of the rhythm of production, and a continually
increasing output of goods useful to society. And in this drive
many fall by the wayside, so making the needs of those who are
left more urgent; the masses are forever in a state of turmoil,
and out of this chaos they develop some order in their thoughts,
and become ever more conscious of their own potential, of their
own capacity to shoulder social responsibility and become the
arbiters of their own destiny.
This is what happens under normal conditions. When events are
repeated with a certain regularity. When history develops through
stages which, though ever more complex and richer in significance
and value, are nevertheless similar. But in Russia the war
galvanized the people's will. As a result of the sufferings
accumulated over three years, their will became as one almost
overnight. Famine was imminent, and hunger, death from hunger
could claim anyone, could crush tens of millions of men at one
stroke. Mechanically at first, then actively and consciously after
the first revolution, the people's will became as one.
Socialist propaganda put the Russian people in contact with the
experience of other proletariats. Socialist propaganda could bring
the history of the proletariat dramatically to life in a moment:
its struggles against capitalism, the lengthy series of efforts
required to emancipate it completely from the chains of servility
that made it so abject and to allow it to forge a new
consciousness and become a testimony today to a world yet to
come. It was socialist propaganda that forged the will of the
Russian people. Why should they wait for the history of England to
be repeated in Russia, for the bourgeoisie to arise, for the class
struggle to begin, so that class consciousness may be formed and
the final catastrophe of the capitalist world eventually hit them?
The Russian people - or at least a minority of the Russian people
- has already passed through these experiences in thought. It has
gone beyond them. It will make use of them now to assert itself
just as it will make use of Western capitalist experience to bring
itself rapidly to the same level of production as the Western
world. In capitalist terms, North America is more advanced than
England, because the Anglo-Saxons in North America took off at
once from the level England had reached only after long
evolution. Now the Russian proletariat, socialistically educated,
will begin its history at the highest level England has reached
today. Since it has to start from scratch, it will start from what
has been perfected elsewhere, and hence will be driven to achieve
that level of economic maturity which Marx considered to be a
necessary condition for collectivism. The revolutionaries
themselves will create the conditions needed for the total
achievement of their goal. And they will create them faster than
capitalism could have done. The criticisms that socialists have
made of the bourgeois system, to emphasize its imperfections and
its squandering of wealth, can now be applied by the
revolutionaries to do better, to avoid the squandering and not
fall prey to the imperfections. It will at first be a collectivism
of poverty and suffering. But a bourgeois regime would have
inherited the same conditions of poverty and suffering. Capitalism
could do no more immediately than collectivism in
Russia. In fact today it would do a lot less, since it would be
faced immediately by a discontented and turbulent
proletariat, a proletariat no longer able to support on behalf of
others the suffering and privation that economic dislocation would
bring in its wake. So even in absolute, human terms, socialism
now can be justified in Russia. The hardships that await
them after the peace will be bearable only if the proletarians
feel they have things under their own control and know that by
their efforts they can reduce these hardships in the shortest
possible time.
One has the impression that the maximalists at this moment are
the spontaneous expression of a biological necessity -
that they had to take power if the Russian people were
not to fall prey to a horrible calamity; if the Russian people,
throwing themselves into the colossal labours needed for their own
regeneration, were to feel less sharply the fangs of the starving
wolf; if Russia were not to become a vast shambles of savage
beasts tearing each other to pieces.