Antonio Gramsci 1922
One year
Unsigned, L'Ordine Nuovo, 15 January 1922.
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 whole history of Italy since 1900 (i.e. since the
assassination of Umberto I and the failure of the idiotic
doctrinaire attempts to create a constitutional State with a rigid
corpus of written laws), and perhaps even the whole of our
country's modern history since the achievement of national unity,
would be an enigma if one neglected to take as the central focus
of one's historical vision the ceaseless endeavours of certain
governmental strata to incorporate into the ruling class the most
eminent personalities from the working-class
organizations. Italian democracy, as created after 1870, lacked a
solid class structure because of the failure of either of the two
propertied classes - the capitalists and the landowners - to
become predominant. In other countries, the struggle between these
two classes represented the terrain on which the modern liberal,
parliamentary State was organized. In Italy, this struggle was
almost entirely missing, or to be more accurate it took place in
an equivocal manner as a bureaucratic and plutocratic subjugation
of the central and southern regions of the country, inhabited by
the rural classes, to the northern regions, where industrial and
finance capital had developed.
The need to maintain a democratic régime, which was at
once rule by bourgeois minorities and domination by a small part
of the nation of the greater part of its territory, ceaselessly
drove the representatives of northern industrialism and plutocracy
to seek to broaden their own cadres as a ruling class, by
integrating the working-class masses and eliminating the class
struggle in their own area. Up to 1900, the northern capitalists
in alliance with the big southern landowners sought to extinguish
simultaneously the class struggle of the industrial proletariat
and the violent eruptions of the poor peasant classes in the
south. But it became clear that this alliance in the long run
would have reversed the situation, giving State power to the big
landowners and causing the North to lose the privileged position
it had won with national unity.
The attempt by Umberto and Sonnino to give the State a rigid
constitutional structure, removing from parliament the de
facto prerogatives which it had succeeded in winning, was the
decisive watershed in these struggles. With the assassination of
Umberto, capitalism definitively got the upper hand. It sought to
replace the alliance on a national scale of the propertied classes
by a system of alliance with the urban proletariat, on the basis
of which it could develop a true parliamentary democracy as in
other capitalist countries. Giolitti is the typical representative
of this tendency, and the whole history of the socialist movement
from 1900 till today has simply been a result of the successive
combinations thought up by Giolittism to secure the support of the
working classes. In no country have the emergence and articulation
of trade-union and cooperative organizations been encouraged as
they have in Italy. Through the consolidation of these established
interests, a whole stratification of petty-bourgeois officials was
to emerge from within the working class, ready to lend a
favourable ear to the seductive words of bourgeois statesmen. This
twenty-year plan of the most intelligent part of the Italian
bourgeoisie has today reached full maturity. In his extreme old
age, Giolitti sees himself at last on the point of reaping the
fruits of his long and patient labours. And this conclusion is
being reached precisely in the days which mark the anniversary of
the Livorno Congress.
One year ago, it was clear to the communists what the real line
of development of Italian political life was. Despite the extreme
difficulty of the moment, and despite the fact that their action
might seem reckless and premature to 4 great part of the working
class, the communists did not hesitate to adopt a clear position,
separating off their own responsibility - and thus in the last
analysis that of the entire Italian proletariat - from the
political actions which were inevitably going to be carried out by
the petty-bourgeois stratum which, for twenty years of history,
had been forming and organizing powerfully within the working
class.
The so-called unitary maximalists, with that ignorance of the
social history of their country which has always distinguished
them, believed instead that holding the class-collaborationist
tendencies imprisoned in a verbally revolutionary party formation
was sufficient to prevent the historical act from being
accomplished. The maximalists maintained that the predetermined
and daily preached collaboration was simply a question of
will. They always refused, with the obstinacy of blinkered mules,
to recognize that the whole of Italian history, because of its
particular premisses and because of the way in which the unitary
State was founded, necessarily had to lead to collaboration.
But Giolitti knew the history of the Italian socialist movement
better than the maximalists. He knew (because to a great extent he
was its creator) that the system of cooperatives and all the other
organizations of resistance, insurance and production of the
Italian working class were not born out of some original and
revolutionary creative impulse, but depended on a whole series of
compromises in which the strength of the government represented
the dominant element. What the government had created, the
government could destroy. What the government had created without
officially compromising the authority of the State, could be
destroyed by the government by the same method.
Thus fascism became the instrument for blackmailing the
Socialist Party; for producing a split between the petty-bourgeois
elements, encrusted like barnacles upon the established interests
of the working class, and the rest of the Socialist Party - which
limited itself to feeding on ideological formulae, since it had
shown itself incapable of leading the revolutionary upsurge of the
proletariat to a conclusion. Once again, economics prevailed over
ideology. Today, the representatives of established interests -
i.e. of the cooperatives, the employment agencies, the shared
land-tenancies, the municipalities and the providential societies
- although they are in a minority in the party, have the upper
hand over the orators, the journalists, the teachers and the
lawyers, who pursue unattainable and vacuous ideological
projects.
In one year, intensifying to the point of absurdity the policy
of compromise which is traditional for the Italian ruling classes,
the bourgeoisie has succeeded in obtaining what it had patiently
been preparing for twenty years. The great Socialist Party, which
in 1919 seemed to have become the unifier of all the tendencies to
revolt that were smouldering even among the lowest strata of the
Italian population, has completely disintegrated. Two political
forces have thereby resulted, neither of which is capable of
dominating the situation: on the one hand, the reformist tendency,
which will swiftly be incorporated within the bourgeoisie; and on
the other, the Communist Party.
But these objective results of the Livorno Congress are not
such as to discourage the communists. Indeed, the latter are
strong precisely because they do not refuse to look the situation
in the face and assess the real relationship of forces. For the
proletariat to become an independent class, it was necessary for
the edifice of false economic might that had been built up in
twenty years of compromise to disintegrate. A collapse of such a
kind could not fail to have very serious consequences that would
weaken the proletariat itself. The communists had the courage to
face up to the situation and bring it on. However, if this courage
had been lacking, the collapse would have occurred just the same;
but then not even the present strength preserved by the
proletariat would have been saved from the catastrophe.
It is a necessary precondition for revolution that the complete
dissolution of parliamentary democracy should occur in Italy
too. The proletariat will become a dominant class and put itself
at the head of all the revolutionary forces of the country only
when experimentally, as a fresh proof of historical reality, the
collaborationist tendencies show that they are incapable of
resolving the economic and political crisis. At Livorno, the
maximalists did not want to be convinced of this truth, which
flows from the whole of Marxist doctrine. They believed that by
the ideological coercion of an empty party discipline, they could
prevent the historical process from being realized integrally in
all its moments, and that a link in the chain could be leaped
over. They were punished for their pride and belief in
miracles. As a result of their lack of all political capability or
understanding of the real history of the Italian people, they only
achieved the wretched success of artificially postponing an
experiment which, by now, would already have been liquidated by
its own results. Thus to the pain and suffering imposed on the
working class by capitalist oppression, they added new pains and
new sufferings which could have been avoided.