Antonio Gramsci 1921
War is War
Unsigned, L'Ordine Nuovo, 31 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.
Understanding and knowing how to assess accurately one's enemy
means that one already possesses a necessary condition for
victory. Understanding and knowing how to assess one's own forces
and their position in the field of struggle means that one
possesses another extremely important condition for victory.
In Turin too, the fascists clearly want to carry through the
general plan of action which has secured easy triumphs in other
cities. Contingents have been called in from outside - units from
Bologna, picked troops, well-trained. Demonstrative parades have
been stepped up, with the fascist forces organized and drawn up
into columns in military fashion. Their supporters are continually
assembled without warning, under orders to come to the meetings
armed. This serves to create an expectation of mysterious events,
and thus to create a war psychology. Alarmist rumours are spread
in great profusion ("the first to be killed will be a socialist
student, we will burn L'Ordine Nuovo, we will burn the
Chamber of Labour, we will burn the Cooperative Alliance
bookshop"). This expedient has two aims: to disintegrate the
proletarian forces through panic and the unnerving uncertainty of
the wait, and to familiarize the fascists with the objective to be
achieved. Will the fascists have the easy triumph in Turin which
they have had in other cities?
Let us first observe that to have asked for help from outside
is a proof of the organic weakness of Turin fascism. In Turin the
fascists base themselves upon - and can base themselves upon -
only one category of the petty-bourgeois class: the category of
shopkeepers, certainly not famous for its sublime martial
qualities. The Turin working class is certainly morally superior
to the fascists and knows that it is morally superior. The
counter-revolutionaries of the General Confederation of Labour (in
order to dishearten the masses and strip them of all capacity for
attack or defence) are saying that the workers, since they did not
fight in the war, cannot combat and defeat fascism on the terrain
of armed violence. As far as Turin is concerned, this defeatist
and counterrevolutionary assertion is objectively untrue. The
Turin workers have had the following "war" experiences: general
strike of May 1915, armed insurrection lasting five days in August
1917, manoeuvres involving broad masses on 2-3 December 1919,
general strike with episodic use of Irish tactics and development
of a unitary strategic plan in April 1920, occupation of the
factories last September with the accumulation of a wealth of
experience in the military sphere. Another incontestable fact:
after August 1917, the workers most suspect of revolutionarism had
their exemption lifted and were sent to the front in the most
exposed positions. The Turin proletariat gave more soldiers to the
trenches than any other, and from this point of view too has
accumulated military experience which has already borne fruit,
precisely during the occupation of the factories. The accusation
of "peace-mongering" is ridiculous and absurd if addressed to the
Turin workers, who have shown, especially in August 1917, that
they are not afraid of bullets or blood. The same cannot be said
of the Turin fascists: despairingly called upon for help by
D'Annunzio, they were characteristically stingy with their heroism
- despite their claim to have organized themselves to save Italy
from the dishonour of the "thicklipped executioner." They limited
themselves to letting off a bomb under the windows of La
Stampa. The fascists (especially those from Turin, who only
fought the war in newspapers and offices) are aware of this
inferiority of theirs, just as the workers are perfectly aware of
their superiority.
These conditions of a psychological and moral nature are
supplemented by others of a practical, organizational kind. What
has been most painfully surprising, in the cities that have fallen
prey to the fascists, has been the absence of any spirit of
initiative among the mass of workers. In these cities, all
revolutionary energy was concentrated in the offices of the
Chamber of Labour. Once the Chamber of Labour was hit, the working
class was decapitated and became incapable of any action. But in
Turin, the very great centralization of the movement does not
deprive the working class of its energy and capacity for
action. Even during the War, the Internal Commissions had become
the centre around which the revolutionary forces
crystallized. They kept the class struggle going and preserved an
unbroken spirit of autonomy and initiative even in the darkest
periods of capitalist and state oppression, when the trade union
organizations joined committees of industrial mobilization and
abdicated all freedom and independence. This meant that it was
possible for the workers in August 1917, although the Chamber of
Labour had been occupied by the police and the centres were all
widely scattered, to maintain for five days a bitter struggle with
arms in hand and more than once threaten conquest of the city's
central points. It also made possible the admirable manoeuvres of
2-3 December 1919, when the working-class forces left the
factories in order and under discipline, and like an immense
converging rake swept the city from the outskirts to the
centre. Again, during the occupation of the factories, it made
possible the autonomous, yet unitary and naturally centralized
development of a whole range of revolutionary actions and
initiatives of incalculable and unpredictable scope.
The movement of factory councils and communist groups has
perfected this articulation of the working class movement in Turin,
which can no longer be decapitated and paralysed by any
reactionary gale. One may say this: while in the other industrial
cities the working class has not yet gone beyond the stage of mass
frontal attacks - the tactics of General Cadorna which led to
Caporetto - in Turin this stage has been definitively left
behind. In the campaign for the factory councils, the communists
always reminded the Turin workers of what had happened in
Barcelona.' They always spoke to the workers in the rough, sincere
language which must be that of the revolutionary proletariat. They
never hid the fact that perhaps Italy would pass through a period
of reaction and that, as in Barcelona, the possibility was not
excluded that the Chamber of Labour and trade unions would be
dissolved or placed in conditions where they could not
function. So it was necessary to multiply the revolutionary
centres and organizations. So it was necessary to stimulate among
the masses the spirit of initiative and autonomy; necessary to
replace the bureaucratic and bestial centralization which
characterized the trade unions by a democratic centralization, an
agile and flexible articulation, that would allow the proletarian
body to continue to live whatever blows might be inflicted either
on it as a whole or on its individual members. This realistic
propaganda was begun as early as 1919. At that time, the present
repentant Magdalenes of maximalism called the Turin council
movement "reformist", because it proposed to "qualify" and
"instruct" the workers, while the maximalists merely preached
great frontal actions and inserted the noun "violence" after every
third word in their speeches. Today, one can see how necessary
that propaganda was and how only through that work of preparation
could the future of the proletariat truly be defended.
This objective presentation of the conditions in which the
struggle will take place is in no way aimed at diminishing the
gravity of the danger. The Turin working class certainly finds
itself in a good war position; but no good position can, in
itself, save an army from defeat. The good position must be
exploited in all its possibilities. Woe to the working class if it
even for a single instant permits the fascists to put their plan
into execution in Turin, as they have done in other cities. The
least weakness, the least hesitancy could be fatal. The first
fascist attempt must be followed by a swift, decisive, pitiless
response from the workers, and this response must be such that the
memory of it will be handed down to the great-grandchildren of the
capitalist gentlemen. When fighting a war one must act
accordingly, and in war blows are not given by agreement. However,
the Turin working class has already stated, in a resolution from
its political party, that it considers the fascists to be merely
the instruments of an action whose instigators and main principals
are to be found in very different circles. La Stampa too
wrote (on 27 January, just five days ago): "The present powerful
organization [of the fascists] is encouraged by businessmen,
industrialists, farmers." In war and revolution, to take pity
on ten means to be pitiless with a thousand. The Hungarian working
class wanted to be gentle with its oppressors: today it is paying,
and the women of the working class are paying and the children of
the working class are paying, for its gentleness: pity for a few
thousand has brought misery, grief, despair to millions of
Hungarian proletarians.
Blows are not given by agreement. All the more implacable must
the workers be, in that there is no comparison between the damage
which the working class suffers and the damage which the
capitalists suffer. The Chamber of Labour is the product of the
efforts of many working class generations. It cost hundreds and
hundreds of thousands of workers sacrifice and privation, it is
the sole property of a hundred thousand proletarian families. If
it is destroyed, those efforts, those sacrifices, those
privations, that property are annihilated. They want to destroy it
in order to destroy organization, in order to take away from the
worker the security of his bread, his roof, his clothes, to take
away this security from the worker's wife and his child. Mortal
danger to whoever touches the Chamber of Labour, mortal danger to
whoever encourages and promotes the work of destruction!
A hundred for one. All the houses of the industrialists and
businessmen cannot save the casa del popolo, [house of the
people], because the people loses everything if it loses its
house.
Mortal danger to whoever touches the worker's bread, or the
bread of the worker's son. War is war: whoever seeks adventure
must feel the iron jaws of the beast which he has let loose. All
that the worker has created at the cost of his sacrifices, all
that generations of workers have slowly and painfully wrought with
blood and with sorrow, must be respected as something sacred. The
tempest and the hurricane break when sacrilege is committed, and
carry away the guilty like straws. Mortal danger to whoever
touches the property of the worker, of the man condemned to have
no property. War is war. Woe betide whoever unleashes it. A
militant of the working class who has to pass into the next world,
must have a first-class accompaniment on his journey. If fire dyes
red the patch of sky over one street, the city must be provided
with many braziers to warm the women and children of the workers
who have gone to war. Woe betide whoever unleashes war. If Italy
is not used to seriousness and responsibility, if Italy is not
used to taking anyone seriously, if bourgeois Italy happens to
have acquired the sweet and facile conviction that the Italian
revolutionaries are not to be taken seriously either, let the die
be cast: we are convinced that more than one fox will leave his
tail and his cunning in the snare.