Antonio Gramsci 1921
Caporetto and Vittorio Veneto
Unsigned, L'Ordine Nuovo, 28 January 1921
Text from Antonio Gramsci "Selections from political writings (1921-1926)", translated and edited by Quintin Hoare (Lawrence and Wishart, London 1978), transcribed to the www with the kind permission of Quintin Hoare.
The period we are passing through can be defined the Caporetto
of Italian maximalism. The Communist Party, which is born and has
to organize itself in the travails and among the perils of this
exceptionally difficult moment, must express the working class's
precise, cold determination to have its battle on the Piave and
its Vittorio Veneto. So our slogan can be this alone:
organization, maximum effort of organization, maximum speed in
ordering and organizing the fabric of the new party. Certainly,
the existence of a strong political organism of the working class
would have been necessary today. Certainly, it would have been
necessary to be able already to speak of action, and no longer of
preparation. But the birth of the Communist Party is precisely
linked to the conviction which has taken root in the proletariat's
most intelligent vanguard, that we would have arrived at the
present situation inevitably, given the incapacity of the
Socialist Party to carry out its historical task. And that it was
therefore indispensable to change course, and to begin the
positive and definitive work of preparation. The present situation
thus causes no surprise or demoralization among the Communists. It
does not cast them down, or make them regret the tactics they
followed at the Livorno Congress.
Maximalism, which is today in full flight, indeed decomposing,
applied in the civil war the same tactics which General Cadorna
applied in the national war. It wasted the proletarian forces in a
multiplicity of disorganized and chaotic actions; wore the masses
out; deluded them about the ease and speed with which victory
would come. Italian maximalism and General Cadorna had precursors:
the Chinese Boxers, who thought they could dislodge the English
and Germans from their forts by advancing against the machine-guns
in a turbulent mob, preceded by paper banners on which horrible,
frightening monsters were painted.
The central idea of maximalism was not that of the Communist
International: i.e. that all the activity and effort of the
proletariat should be turned and directed towards the conquest of
political power and the foundation of the workers' State; that all
the specific problems of the working class can be effectively
solved through the solution of the first and most important
problem - that of winning political power and having armed force
in its own hands. The central idea of maximalism was given it by
the reformists: to govern without having direct responsibility for
government; to be the éminence grise of the
bourgeois government; to compel the bourgeois government - through
terror (the monsters of the Chinese Boxers) and through the
strength of the unions and the parliamentary group - to implement
that limited degree of socialism which can be implemented in
Italy, given the country's economic condition and the danger of a
blockade. This vulgar Machiavellianism has been the effective
programme of Italian Maximalism, and has produced the present
situation, the Caporetto of the working class. The hasty
organization of a few thousand fascists was enough to knock down
the castle that had been built with the revolutionary phraseology
of the Bologna Congress. And thus something recurred in
twentieth-century Italy, after the cruel experiences of the War
and the Russian, Hungarian, Bavarian and German revolutions, which
had seemed only conceivable in the ... eighteenth century, when 45
Hungarian knights succeeded in dominating all of Flanders for six
months, simply because the population did not succeed in arming
itself and counterposing a defensive and offensive organization to
that organization of 45 men.
It is in such conditions of chaos and collapse that the
Communist Party is born. Its militants must show that they are
truly capable of dominating events; that they are truly capable of
filling every hour and every minute with the activity which that
hour and that minute require; that they are truly capable of
welding together the links in the historical chain which must end
with the victory of the proletariat. We are in the midst of the
Caporetto of verbal, verbose revolutionism. The first link to be
forged is the Communist Party. If our will is strongly dedicated
to this patient work of organization, then we shall succeed also
in forging and welding together the other links. And the working
class will have its battle on the Piave; it will have its Vittorio
Veneto.