Antonio Gramsci 1921
Real Dialectics
Unsigned, L'Ordine Nuovo, 3 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.
Events are the real dialectics of history. They transcend all
arguments, all personal judgements, all vague and irresponsible
wishes. Events, with the inexorable logic of their development,
give the worker and peasant masses, who are conscious of their
destiny, these lessons. The class struggle at a certain moment
reaches a stage in which the proletariat no longer finds in
bourgeois legality, i.e. in the bourgeois State apparatus (armed
forces, courts, administration), the elementary guarantee and
defence of its elementary right to life, to freedom, to personal
safety, to daily bread. It is then forced to create its own
legality, to create its own apparatus of resistance and
defence. At certain moments in the life of the people, this is an
absolute historical necessity, transcending every desire, every
wish, every whim, every personal impulse. Events present
themselves as a universal fatality, with the overwhelming momentum
of natural phenomena. Men, as individuals and en masse,
find themselves placed brutally before the following dilemma:
chances of death one hundred, chances of life ten, a choice must
be made. And men always choose the chances of life, even if these
are slight, even if they only offer a wretched and exhausted
life. They fight for these slight chances, and their vitality is
such and their passion so great that they break every obstacle and
sweep away even the most awesome apparatus of power.
This is the situation which the real dialectics of history
creates for men at certain moments - the decisive moments in the
painful and bloody development of mankind. No human will can
create situations of this kind; no little man, even if he puffs
out his cheeks and distils from his brain the words which most
touch hearts and stir the blood, can create situations of this
kind. They are the blazing brazier in which flow together all the
passions and all the hatreds which only the sight of violent death
can arouse in the masses. Only this can be considered as a
revolutionary situation in this historical period, which has as
its immediate past experience the deeds of the Spartacists,
Hungary, Ireland, Bavaria. In this situation, there is no middle
term to choose; and if one fights, it is necessary to win.
Today, we do not find ourselves in such a situation. Today, we
can still choose with a certain freedom. The freedom of choice
imposes certain duties upon us, absolute duties which concern the
life of the people and are inherent in the future of the masses
who suffer and hope. Today, there exists only one form of
revolutionary solidarity: to win. It therefore demands of us that
we should not neglect any single element that might put us in a
condition to win. Today, there exists a party that truly expresses
the interests of the proletariat; that expresses the interests not
only of the Italian proletariat, but of the workers' International
as a whole. Today, the workers must have and can have faith. The
Italian workers, maintaining an iron discipline, without a single
exception, in response to the slogans of the Communist Party, will
finally show that they have emerged from the state of
revolutionary infantilism in which their movement has hitherto
floundered. They will show that they are worthy and capable of
victory.