Antonio Gramsci 1921
Italy and Spain
Unsigned, L'Ordine Nuovo, 11 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.
What is fascism, observed on an international scale? It is the
attempt to resolve the problems of production and exchange with
machine-guns and pistol-shots. The productive forces were ruined
and dissipated in the imperialist war: twenty million men in the
flower of their youth and energies were killed; another twenty
million were left invalids. The thousands upon thousands of bonds
that united the various world markets were violently broken. The
relations between city and countryside, between metropole and
colonies, were overturned. The streams of emigration, which
periodically re-established the balance between the excess
population and the potential of the means of production in
individual countries, were profoundly disturbed and no longer
function normally. A unity and simultaneity of national crises was
created, which precisely makes the general crisis acute and
incurable. But there exists a stratum of the population in all
countries - the petty and middle bourgeoisie - which thinks it can
solve these gigantic problems with machine-guns and pistol-shots;
and this stratum feeds fascism, provides fascism with its
troops.
In Spain, the organization of the petty and middle bourgeoisie
into armed groups occurred before it did in Italy; it had already
begun in 1918 and 1919. The world war cast Spain into a terrible
crisis before other countries: the Spanish capitalists had in fact
already looted the country and sold all that was saleable in the
first years of the conflagration. The Entente paid better than the
poor Spanish consumers were able to do, so the owners sold all the
wealth and goods which should have provided for the national
population to the Entente. By 1916, Spain was already one of the
richest European countries financially, but one of the poorest in
goods and productive energies. The revolutionary movement surged
forward; the unions organized almost the entirety of the
industrial masses; strikes, lockouts, states of emergency, the
dissolution of Chambers of Labour and peasant associations,
massacres. street shootings, became the everyday stuff of
Political life. Anti-Bolshevik fasces (somaten) were
formed. Initially, as in Italy, they were made up of military
personnel, taken from the officers' clubs (juntas), but
they swiftly enlarged their base until in Barcelona, for example,
they had recruited 40,000 armed men. They followed the same
tactics as the fascists in Italy: attacks on trade-union leaders,
violent opposition to strikes, terrorism against the masses,
opposition to all forms of organization, help for the regular
police in repressive activity and arrests, help for blacklegs in
agitation involving strikes or lockouts. For the past three years
Spain has floundered in this crisis: public freedom is suspended
every fortnight, personal freedom has become a myth, the workers'
unions to a great extent function clandestinely, the mass of
workers is hungry and angry, the great mass of the people has been
reduced to indescribable conditions of savagery and
barbarism. Moreover, the crisis is intensifying, and the stage of
individual assassination attempts has now been reached.
Spain is an exemplary country. It represents a phase through
which all the countries of Western Europe will pass, if economic
conditions continue as they are today, with the same tendencies as
at present. In Italy, we are passing through the phase which Spain
passed through in 1919: the phase of the arming of the middle
classes and the introduction into the class struggle of military
methods of assault and surprise attack. In Italy too, the middle
class thinks it can resolve economic problems by military
violence. It thinks it can cure unemployment by pistol-shots; it
thinks it can assuage hunger and dry the tears of the women of the
people with bursts of machine-gun fire. Historical experience
counts for nothing with petty bourgeois who do not know
history. Similar phenomena are repeated and will continue to be
repeated in other countries, apart from Italy. Has not the same
process affected the Socialist Party in Italy, as had already
occurred several years earlier in Austria, Hungary and Germany?
Illusion is the most tenacious weed in the collective
consciousness; history teaches, but it has no pupils.