Antonio Gramsci 1922
A crisis within the crisis
Unsigned, L'Ordine Nuovo, 24 February 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.
No solution was found yesterday either. The crisis is certainly
becoming daily more complex. Is any solution possible, given the
existing Chamber? To pose the problem in this way means in a sense
to shift it. Whatever government emerges from the present crisis,
it can only be a transitional one. For a new element has entered
the interplay of parliamentary combinations, and until this has
been successfully inserted into its natural place, it cannot fail
to unbalance things. This element is the socialist group -
although the newspaper editorialists do not seem to be paying it
much attention in their comments on the evolution of the
crisis. The motion put to the vote yesterday in Rome, protesting
about the fact that this wretched country is still unable to give
itself a government, shows that the parliamentary situation cannot
be clarified if the socialist parliamentary group does not take
the decision to abandon its habitual methods. The muddying of the
parliamentary waters is due to the fact that the parties threshing
about in them have not yet succeeded in finding their own
equilibrium. Among these parties, the most uncomfortable, we
repeat, is the Socialist Party.
Now that it has openly entered the orbit of legality and ceased
to call itself a revolutionary party even by simple definition, it
cannot fail to reach the ultimate consequences of its new
attitude, which began with its abstention in Parliament. The
Socialist Party, in other words, must collaborate not just in the
corridors of Montecitorio, but in power. This decision can only
come to fruition through a series of crises. First of all, the
Socialist Party must free itself from the last fetters of apparent
intransigence, and must find its ally on the terrain of
parliamentary combinations. But the socialist collaboration which
was yesterday desired by all, today has greater obstacles to
overcome, because of the shift of interests it would bring
about. Not that Socialist collaboration is not still desired
today; but the results which landowners and industrialists were
hoping for from it have now been partially achieved. The treachery
of the socialist union leaders, one might say, was a kind of
indirect collaboration.
Thus today, the landowners and industrialists no longer even
need the assistance of the socialreformists. So their
participation in power is less straightforward today. But it is
inevitable. The socialists must rise to power. They will do so
even with the proletariat's worst enemy, but to power they will
rise, because today this is their only wish. Now, until this
process of Italian political life has been completed, the
situation will remain obscure and complicated for all who seek a
solution to it within the limits of Parliament. No government can
achieve a stable existence without socialist collaboration. This
is why the social-democratic government which is beginning to take
shape on the horizon of Italian political life too, far from being
the "best government" as the socialists are dishonestly saying,
will be the worst that the proletariat could hope for.