Antonio Gramsci 1921
Unions and Councils
Unsigned, L'Ordine Nuovo, 5 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 end of the CGL's Livorno congress opens a new period in the
history of the Italian working class. A new system of forces has
now been established: two conceptions are ranged against each
other, embodied in two distinct parties, and each can only develop
and consolidate itself at the other's expense. The new period will
be one of bitter struggles and polemics, and one does not need to
be a prophet to forsee that the biggest struggles and bitterest
polemics will rage over the factory councils, and control of
production.
The Communist Party of Italy has a body of political doctrine
on these questions, and an immense store of historical
experience. The very discussion which is taking place today in the
Russian Communist Party, on the functions of trade unions in the
period of the proletarian dictatorship, shows how the problem of
union organization does not cease to be actual or important simply
because the working class has become the ruling class; simply
because, in its struggle against the national and international
bourgeoisie, it has far stronger battle organs at its disposal,
such as the Red Army and the Extraordinary Commission to Combat
Counter-revolution. The trade-union question continues to
remain a central question for the workers' state. The greater or
lesser solidity of the general organization of revolutionary
forces - and hence, in the last analysis, the solidarity of the
revolution itself - may depend upon the solutions which the
Communist Party gives to it.
The theses of the Second Congress of the IIIrd International
represent the body of doctrines specific to our party. These
theses state that in this historical period a new problem faces
the proletariat, the problem of control; and they state that the
natural and specific organs of the struggle for control are the
factory councils. The councils represent the only possible form of
organization of the industrial proletarian vanguard. They stand in
the same relation to the unions as does big industry to the
capitalist economy in general. Hence, the councils are those most
interested in control and in the nationalization of industry. They
organize the mass of workers employed in the big plants, in the
capitalist formations which represent the transitional phase
between private property and communism, and it is they who most
keenly feel the urgency of the historical thrust towards radical
economic transformations. From the Marxist point of view, the
factory councils are the new economic organization which presses
at the flanks of the old organization, and which tends to break
the latter's structures as it comes into being and develops.
The question of the councils interests the party at present not
just as a new type of industrial organization, but also as a means
of organizing the broad mass of workers directly creating a
mechanism that can produce a new working-class leading stratum and
train a new administrative personnel. Because they function as a
selective mechanism in this way, the factory councils are
especially disliked by the old union bureaucracy. Wherever the
councils have emerged - in Italy, in Russia, in England, in the
United States - the same phenomenon has occurred: in the councils,
the working class always selects a predominantly revolutionary
leading personnel, and supports the positions and the
representatives of the Communist Party; by contrast, in the old
union bodies, the positions and the representatives of reformism
prevail. In October 1917 in Russia, the General Confederation of
Labour was in the hands of the Mensheviks, the Central Executive
Committee of the factory councils was in the hands of the
Bolsheviks; the council organization provided the basis for the
action of the Russian masses who followed Bolshevik slogans.
The factory councils must fuse with the unions, but the moment
for this fusion cannot be fixed a priori. According to
the theses of the Moscow congress, fusion must take place
naturally, spontaneously, and the unions must base themselves
firmly upon the councils, becoming the means for their
centralization. A new type of trade organization will thus be
created, specific to the period of the dictatorship and capable of
fulfilling the tasks imposed by the needs of the workers'
state. In Russia, the fusion of the unions with the factory
councils took place about six months after the October
Revolution. Today, after three years of the workers' state, there
is a new discussion on whether the time has come to pay great
attention once more to the councils, in order to prevent new forms
of syndicalism and to combat the new bureaucratic sedimentations
that have been forming for three years.
The Livorno congress makes it necessary for the Italian
communists today to examine this question and study it deeply, so
that communist sections and groups can carry out a really
coordinated and centralized overall activity. For the broad mass
of Italians, the problem is an almost entirely new one. It is
vitally urgent today to find a solution to it quickly; however,
this must be done without sacrificing revolutionary precision or
wisdom.