Antonio Gramsci 1921
England and Russia
Unsigned, L'Ordine Nuovo, 18 March 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 trade agreement between England and Soviet Russia,
considering the moment in which it has been concluded, represents
an undoubted political victory for the Moscow workers'
government. The Kronstadt revolt, staged by international
reaction to wreck the negotiations, failed to induce Lloyd
George's government to change direction. The Soviet State has been
recognized by England as the sole legitimate authority, alone
capable of giving permanent guarantees for the fulfilment of
international contracts. But this political victory of our Russian
comrades must not encourage over-rosy illusions or engender
indolence. It is not international communism which stands to gain
by this agreement, but capitalism and imperialism.
The fact that England recognizes politically the stability of
the workers' government, and comes to accept the idea of trading
with it, is an event in the realm of common sense; but it does not
change by one hair's breadth the existing economic relations
between communism and capitalism. England, an eminently industrial
nation, maintains its superiority over Russia, an eminently
agricultural nation. The peasant class in Russia will indeed be
enabled to restore its economy, ruined by six years of war and
destruction. But it will not be the Russian proletariat which
offers the peasants the possibility of restoring production; it
will be capitalism - and a foreign capitalism at that. The very
foundations of the workers' State are damaged and corroded by this
fact, and the Russian comrades do not hide it either from
themselves or from others. They hoped in the world revolution;
they hoped that the aid necessary to their existence would be
fraternally offered them by the international Commune, rather than
usuriously by a capitalist state; and they have not yet lost that
hope. For the Russian comrades, until the world revolution, the
question is one of surviving, gaining a breathing-space, and
preserving the elementary conditions for communism -
i.e. political power in the hands of the workers. It cannot be one
of deep or permanent achievements.
The agreement with England does not have and cannot have any
other significance. Having won power, the working class has
succeeded in showing that it is the only social force capable of
saving the Russian nation from foreign bondage, and the Russian
economy from total ruin. But the strength of the Russian
proletariat has been diminished economically by the
agreement. Only in the world revolution, and in the solidarity of
the workers' International become arbiter of the productive
forces, can the Russian and other proletariats hope for a
resolution of the conflicts and crises which are rending society
today, and for their salvation from utter ruin.