Antonio Gramsci 1921
The General Confederation of Labour
Unsigned, L'Ordine Nuovo, 25 February 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 communists will not have the majority at the
Confederation's forthcoming congress at Livorno: indeed it is
almost certain that in spite of all their efforts of propaganda
and organization, the communists will not have a majority at
future congresses either. The situation presents itself in the
following terms: to win a majority at a congress, the communists
would have to be able to carry out a radical revision of the
rules; but to change the rules, it is necessary already to have
the majority. If the communists were to let themselves become
bogged down in this vicious circle, they would play into the hands
of the trade-union bureaucracy. It is therefore necessary for the
opposition to have a precise approach and method capable of
breaking the present state of affairs.
The General Confederation of Labour (in other countries there
exists an identical situation to the Italian one) is a mechanism
of government which cannot even be compared to the bourgeois
parliamentary State. Its models can only be found in the ancient
Assyrian and Babylonian State organizations or in the martial
associations which still emerge and develop today in Mongolia and
China. The explanation for this is a historical one. The masses
entered the trade-union movement for fear of being crushed by an
adversary whom they know to be very powerful [phrase missing] and whose blows and initiatives they are not able to
foresee. Disturbed by their condition of absolute inferiority,
lacking any constitutional education, the masses abdicated
completely all sovereignty and all power. The organization became
identified for them with the organizer as an individual, just as
for an army in the field the individual commander becomes the
protector of the safety of all, the guarantor of success and
victory.
It should have been the task of the Socialist Party to give the
proletarian masses the political preparation and constitutional
education which they lacked. It should have been the task of the
Socialist Party gradually to renew the organizational forms and
transfer as much power as possible into the hands of the
masses. The Party did nothing in this direction. The organization
was left entirely at the mercy of a small group of officials, who
carefully built up the machine which today gives them absolute
power. Seven years without a congress have allowed even more: a
whole swarm of officials has been echeloned in the most important
positions, and a fortress has been constructed that cannot be
taken or penetrated even by the most tenacious and willing. The
Socialist Congress at Livorno can only be explained by this state
of affairs which exists in the trade-union field. The Socialist
Party has entirely fallen into the hands of the trade-union
bureaucracy, whose human and organizational resources secured a
majority for the unitary tendency. The Socialist Party has been
reduced to the role of a janissary for the mandarins and
condottieri who are at the head of the union federations
and Confederation.
The Communists must recognize this state of affairs and act in
consequence. The communists must consider the Confederation in the
same light as the parliamentary State, i.e. as an organism whose
conquest cannot take place by constitutional means. Moreover, in
considering the question of the Confederation, the following
postulates must also be borne in mind: that we want to achieve
proletarian unity, and that we want to pose the problem of control
of production in a revolutionary way. The field of activity of the
Communist Party is the whole mass of workers and peasants. The
Confederation is the scene of the greatest degree of propaganda
and activity only because numerically it embraces most of the
organized workers and peasants in Italy, i.e. of those who are
most conscious and experienced.
We believe the struggle for the creation and development of
factory and enterprise Councils to be the specific struggle of the
Communist Party. It must enable the party to graft itself directly
on to a centralized organization of the working-class masses, an
organization which must be above all the other existing ones and
which must be recognized by the masses as the only one competent
and authorized to issue slogans for general action. Through the
struggle for the Councils, it will be possible to win the majority
of the Confederation in a stable and permanent fashion;
thereafter, if not in the prerevolutionary period then certainly
in the post-revolutionary period, it will be possible also to win
the leading positions. This process has already been seen in
Russia; in the revolutionary days of November 1917, the
proclamations and manifestoes of the Bolshevik Party did not carry
the signature of the All-Russian Federation of Trade Unions, but
that of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Factory
Councils.
It is certainly important to have a strong communist minority,
organized and centralized, within the Confederation. All our
efforts of propaganda and activity must be directed to this
end. But both historically and tactically it is more important
that no effort should be spared to ensure that, immediately after
the Congress at Livorno, it is possible to convene a congress of
the Councils and Internal Commissions of all Italian factories and
firms, and that a Centre is nominated by this congress that will
embrace the entire proletarian mass within its organizational
framework.