Antonio Gramsci 1921
The elections and freedom
Unsigned, L'Ordine Nuovo, 21 April 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 real, concrete terms of bourgeois equality are
progressively being laid bare in all their naked reality, and they
cannot fail to be understood even by the most benighted and
backward layers of the proletariat.
The industrial and landowning bourgeoisie possesses thousands
and thousands of newspapers and printing-presses: all the
paper-mills are at its disposal. The proletarians can only print
very few newspapers with their own resources. The acts of
destruction which have occurred, and the threats which rain down
on printing works which accept orders from the working-class
parties, make the inferiority of the propertyless class even more
grotesque. Not one of the thousands upon thousands of bourgeois
papers has yet been destroyed by the proletarians. Out of the
small number of working-class papers, however, the destruction has
already taken place of Il Lavoratore from Trieste, of
Il Proletario, from Pula, of La Difesa from
Florence, of La Giustizia from Reggio Emilia, and of
Avanti! in both its Milanese and its Roman editions.
The industrial and landowning bourgeoisie possesses tens of
thousands of meeting-halls, theatres and cinemas, where it can
assemble its supporters peacefully and carry out all the
propaganda it deems useful. But the premises of the working class,
the Chambers of Labour and the Socialist and Communist sections,
have been burned down in their tens and their hundreds. Even the
streets are denied to the popular masses: the natural place where
the proletariat can assemble without cost has become a field for
surprise-attacks and ambushes. To keep its domination of the
streets, the working class would have to remain mobilized day and
night, neither going to the factory to work nor going home to
rest. A hundred armed individuals - guaranteed impunity for any
violent act they may commit and the unconditional assistance of
the forces of public order in case of need; with no obligation to
carry out productive work; and able to move about from one spot to
another in the execution of an overall plan is sufficient to hold
the proletariat in check and deprive it of its freedom to come and
go, its freedom to meet and to discuss.
What value could a Parliament elected in such conditions have?
How could it be seen as representing the "free" will of the
nation? What could it reveal about the real political position of
the social classes? If simply posing these questions were enough
to produce a widespread conviction, a universal state of awareness
and an impulse towards the foundation of a new order of things,
the political struggle would already long since have concluded in
the victory of the working people over the bourgeois class. The
insurrection of the oppressed and exploited classes against their
dominators, with their false and hypocritical liberty and
equality, would long since have taken place.
The truth is that words and propaganda are not enough to cause
the broad masses to rise up, or to determine the necessary and
sufficient conditions for the foundation of a new order of
things. The historical process is accomplished through a real
dialectic: not through education or verbal polemics, but through
the violent counter-position of incontestable states of affairs,
which are manifest to the great popular masses with the utmost
clarity. It is certain that the forced resignations of the
socialist municipal councillors did more than two years of
demagogic propaganda from the Socialist Party to render the notion
of proletarian dictatorship comprehensible. It is certain that
fascism, in a few months, has contributed more to illustrating the
theses of the Communist International empirically in the
proletarian consciousness than two years of Avanti! and
the entire output of its publishing house have done. It is certain
that these elections will definitively extirpate Parliament and
all the other bourgeois institutions from the popular
consciousness; and that they will make the emergence of a new
representative system, in which the will of the people and the new
ideals of liberty and equality are asserted and ensured
protection, historically necessary and irresistible.
That is why the Communist Party is not abstaining from the
elections. Because it wants the experiment to be carried out with
full effectiveness and educative force. Because the Communist
Party is the party not just of the proletarian vanguard, but of
the great popular masses - even those who are most backward and
benighted. It wants to reach and defeat the democratic socialist
illusion even in its deepest lair. Will the elections, staged as
they are in the environment of freedom and equality which is
specific to bourgeois democracy, give the working class even just
one deputy? This single one will then represent the whole
oppressed class. His voice will be heard by the whole class. A
slogan proclaimed by this single deputy, under the mandate of the
proletarian party, will be accepted and put into practice by the
whole class.
Such a situation will inexorably provoke the explosion of new
representative institutions, which will counterpose themselves to
Parliament and replace it: no popular layer will regret it or
fight for it. This real process has already taken place in
Russia. It is quite understandable why the Soviet government, even
a few months after the November Revolution, should have convened
the Constituent Assembly. If the Constituent Assembly had not been
convened, many popular layers would have remained supporters of
parliamentarism in Russia. Yet its dissolution provoked no
discontent or rebellion. It had become obvious, even to the most
backward peasant masses, that the Constituent Assembly, elected as
it was on the basis of lists for parties which no longer occupied
those specific positions, did not represent the people - did not
represent the interests of the majority of the nation. The
Bolsheviks wanted the experience to be gone through. They wanted
the popular consciousness to be formed materialistically. They
wanted no regret or vague illusion to persist among the broad
masses.
Let us make the revolutionary hypothesis that a popular
insurrection sweeps away the next Parliament and replaces it with
a Congress of workers' and peasants' deputies. Certainly not even
Filippo Turati will still dare to maintain then that bourgeois
democracy is the "city" and the Soviets the "horde". . . .