Antonio Gramsci 1921
The Italian Parliament
Unsigned, L'Ordine Nuovo, 24 March 1921
ext 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.
It now seems certain that Hon. Giolitti intends to renew the
Chamber of Deputies, and the poor representatives of the people's
will are in great distress and great anguish. The deputies who
represent the socialist will of the Italian people are the most
disturbed and anguished. How will they succeed in convincing the
electoral masses yet again that Parliament must be taken
seriously, and that social progress and the emancipation of the
oppressed can only be expressed through parliamentary action?
Today, the Italian people has experimentally gained its own
political education. Today, even the most agile mountebanks of
parliamentary cretinism, such as Hon. Treves, if asked by a
worker: What power and real influence does Parliament exercise
over the State? what importance and what political function does
the Italian Parliament have at the present moment? - would not
know what to reply, since demagogic charlatanry can too easily be
refuted by the data of direct experience.
But what is happening today is not a novelty. In Italy, even
before the War, Parliament never exercised a constitutional
function and power. In Italy, there has never existed a
parliamentary régime, only a despotic régime,
somewhat tempered before the War by periodic consultation of
popular opinion. From the point of view of constitutional law, the
Italian political régime is characterized by the absence of
an independent judiciary power, with its personnel recruited
strictly, to which the armed forces of the country are
subordinated. In Italy, judiciary power does not exist, but merely
a judiciary order; the armed forces depend directly on the
government, which can use them at will against the people and
against Parliament itself. Since no judiciary power exists,
Parliament legislates for the archives. No guarantee exists that
its laws will be applied and respected. The people has no means of
control over the government, or of defence against the arbitrary
acts of the government, other than armed insurrection.
The present situation of impunity for massacres and a
magistrature in headlong flight is not a novelty. Even before the
War, there existed no legal guarantee in Italy of the liberty and
personal safety of the citizens. Even before the War, it was
possible to hold citizens in custody for an unlimited period by a
simple administrative decision. Even before the War, massacres of
those in custody occurred. Even before the War, every agent of the
police force, every armed functionary of the government, felt that
he was invested not merely with the executive role of executioner,
but also with the roles of legislator and judge: he could restore
the death penalty, pronounce the verdict and carry out the
sentence on the spot. Even before the War, the situation had got
so bad in Italy that to prevent massacres, which had become an
everyday occurrence, the Italian people in June 1914 rose against
the government in an armed insurrection, seeing the impotence of
parliamentary action.
The cast of the Italian political régime can also be
easily explained from the historical point of
view. Parliamentarism, characterized by the separation of powers
and the subordination of the police forces to the judiciary power,
is a product of the struggle between the capitalist class and the
landowning class, with the industrialists prevailing over the
landowners. In Italy, this class struggle has not been decisive:
Italian history is nothing but a compromise between the State and
the landowners. The landowners have continued to hold the power of
life and death over the poor peasants, and the magistrature is to
a great extent recruited from the petty bourgeoisie of peasant
origin, especially in southern Italy. In such conditions, it was
impossible for a strong and independent judiciary power to arise
and impose itself through parliamentary struggle, hence
parliamentarism could not emerge. Thus Parliament in Italy has
always been a mere consultative body, without any real influence
on the governmental machine, without power of initiative or
control. Even elections have never had any significance or value,
other than that of allowing a despotic and paternalist government
to sample opinion, and reassuring it that its arbitrary acts and
its abuses would not provoke irreparable ruptures in the
established order.
The new elections too, if Hon. Giolitti decides to call them,
can have no other significance. Hon. Giolitti wants a Parliament
that will appear as the popular expression of a reactionary will
turned against the industrial workers and poor peasants. His
desire will be abundantly satisfied. The petty bourgeoisie, which
in November 1919 was convinced of the inevitability of a socialist
government, has today aligned itself openly against the
proletariat and against socialism. It is the petty bourgeoisie,
especially in the country areas, which provides the forces for
fascism. It is the petty bourgeoisie which has armed itself and
organized itself militarily, before the proletariat and against
the proletariat. The new Parliament will mark a violent recovery
of the landowning classes over the industrial classes: the
definitive subjugation of the cities - in the throes of economic
crisis and incapable of supplying the national market with the
products it desperately needs - to the countryside, which has a
near monopoly of food-supplies and hence, in the present period,
an unquestioned superiority. Military dictatorship and a new war
of plunder will be the necessary consequences of this new
equilibrium of the social classes, if the proletariat is not able
to organize itself politically and win its battle.
It is certain that the Socialist Party, as it is composed
today, will be smashed by the new popular consultation. To save
itself politically, it would have to accept a programme of
collaboration with the bourgeois government and repression against
the working class. The right wing of the party, stimulated by the
need for self-preservation, will end up by accepting this point of
view, dragging the majority behind it. The Socialist Party will be
smashed, because it is not capable of understanding Italian
reality and the complicated play of the class struggle. It is
unable to say a single concrete word to the industrial workers,
the majority of whom have in fact abandoned it and gone over to
the Communist Party. It is unable to orient the poor peasants who
are hit hardest and most directly by fascism.
The present situation can be understood and politically
exploited only by the anti-parliamentary and anti-democratic
forces. By the bourgeois government, which knows what elections
amount to, since it manipulates them and seeks to make use of them
only in order to bring about a state of demoralization in the
revolutionary proletariat, by putting it into a minority. And by
the communists, who can make use of them as an agitational
instrument to educate the working-class masses in a precise
understanding of what proletarian dictatorship means, and to
organize the sole popular institution capable of controlling and
reducing to impotence the industrial and agrarian bourgeoisie: the
people itself in arms, united in its system of Councils, which has
incorporated in its revolutionary Councils the three powers of the
State in order to use them as an axe to cut down its enemies.