Antonio Gramsci 1921
The "arditi del popolo"
Unsigned, L'Ordine Nuovo, 15 July 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.
Hon. Mingrino's declarations to the press about his joining the
Arditi del Popolo serve magnificently to highlight the
Communist Party's statement on the same subject. Mingrino's
declarations correspond to the obsolete, worn-out psychology of
the Socialist Party, which on other occasions we have baptized as
neo-Malthusianism. If this conception were accepted, the Arditi
del Popolo movement would inevitably lead to a repetition of the
events of September 1920, when the metal-working proletariat was
led on to the terrain of illegality, placed in a situation where
it could not resist without arming itself and violating the most
sacred privileges of capitalism, and then, suddenly, everything
came to an end because the occupation of the factories only set
itself ... trade-union objectives.
Hon. Mingrino is joining the Arditi del Popolo. He is
giving that institution his name, his rank as a socialist deputy,
his personal prestige as someone liked by the revolutionary
proletariat for his conduct during the fascist attack on comrade
Misiano. But what is the mission of the Arditi del
Popolo, according to Hon. Mingrino? It should be limited to
achieving a counter-weight to fascist violence; it should be one
of pure resistance; in short, it should have purely
... trade-union objectives.
Does Hon. Mingrino then believe that fascism is a superficial
manifestation of post-war psychosis? Has he not yet been persuaded
that fascism is organically linked to the present crisis of the
capitalist order and will only disappear with the suppression of
that order? Has he not yet been convinced that the patriotic,
nationalistic, reconstructionist ideology of Mussolini and Co. is
of purely marginal significance? That instead fascism must be seen
in its objective reality, outside all predetermined schemas or
abstract political models, as a spontaneous pullulation of
reactionary energies which coalesce, dissolve and come together
again, following the official leaders only when their directives
correspond to the inner nature of the movement? For this is what
it is, notwithstanding Mussolini's speeches, Pasella's official
statements and the hurrahs of all this world's idealists.
To launch, or join, a movement of popular resistance, while
setting in advance a limit to its expansion, is the most serious
error of tactics that can be committed at this moment. It is
essential not to sow illusions among the popular masses, who are
suffering cruelly and are led by their sufferings to delude
themselves, to believe that they can alleviate their pain simply
by shifting their position. It is essential not to make them
believe that a little effort will be enough to save them from the
dangers which loom over the entire working people today. It is
essential to make them understand, it is essential to compel them
to understand, that today the proletariat is confronted not just
by a private association, but by the whole State apparatus, with
its police, its courts, its newspapers which manipulate public
opinion as the government and the capitalists please. It is
essential to make them understand what they were not made to
understand in September 1920: when the working people leaves the
terrain of legality but does not find the necessary spirit of
sacrifice and political capacity to carry its actions through to
the end, it is punished by mass shootings, by hunger, by cold, by
inactivity which kills slowly, day by day.
Are the communists opposed to the Arditi del
Popolo. movement? On the contrary: they want the arming of
the proletariat, the creation of an armed proletarian force which
is capable of defeating the bourgeoisie and taking charge of the
organization and development of the new productive forces
generated by capitalism.
The communists are also of the opinion that when one wishes to
launch a struggle, one should not wait for victory to be
guaranteed by a notary's certificate. On many occasions in
history, peoples have found themselves at a crossroads: either to
languish day by day in starvation and exhaustion, strewing their
paths with a few deaths each day - which, however, in the course
of weeks, months and years become a host; or else to take a
chance. This could mean to die fighting in an allout effort; but
it could also mean to win, to halt the process of dissolution at a
single blow and initiate the enterprise of reorganization and
development which will at least ensure a little more tranquillity
and well-being for future generations. Those peoples who had faith
in themselves and their own destinies, and who faced up to the
struggle with audacity, were the ones who saved themselves.
But if the communists are of this opinion - as regards the
objective elements of the situation; as regards the relation of
forces with the enemy; as regards the ways in which the decadence
and chaos created by the imperialist war can be overcome; as
regards all those elements which cannot be inventoried, and
concerning which it is not always possible to make an accurate
calculation of probabilities - they nevertheless at least want the
political objectives to be clear and concrete. They do not want
what happened in September 1920 to be repeated today, at least so
far as what can be foreseen is concerned what can be assessed, and
predetermined by political activity organized in a party.
The workers have the means to express their opinions. The
socialist workers, who are revolutionaries and have drawn certain
lessons from the experience of these last months, have the means
to exert pressure on the Socialist Party, forcing it to abandon
equivocation and ambiguity, and obliging it to take up a clear and
precise position on this problem in which the actual physical
safety of the worker and the peasant is at stake. Hon. Mingrino is
a socialist deputy. If he is a sincere man, as we believe, let him
take the initiative in bringing the masses which still follow his
party out of their torpor and indecision. But let him not put
limits on their expansion, if he does not wish to bear the
responsibility of having brought the Italian people a new defeat
and a new fascism, compounded by all the vengeance which reaction
implacably wreaks upon the waverers and hesitaters, after it has
massacred the assault troops in the vanguard.