Antonio Gramsci 1924
Leader
Unsigned, L'Ordine Nuovo, March 1924; republished with the title Lenin, revolutionary leader, signed Antonio Gramsci, L'Unità, 6 November 1924.
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.
Every State is a dictatorship. Every State cannot avoid having
a government, made up of a small number of men, who in their turn
organize themselves around one who is endowed with greater ability
and greater perspicacity. So long as a State is necessary, so long
as it is historically necessary to govern men, whichever the
ruling class may be, the problem will arise of having leaders, of
having a "leader". The fact that socialists, even ones who call
themselves Marxists and revolutionaries, say they want the
dictatorship of the proletariat but not the dictatorship of
leaders; say they do not want command to be individualized and
personalized; in other words, say they want dictatorship, but not
in the form in which it is historically possible - merely reveals
a whole political stance, a whole "revolutionary" theoretical
formation.
In the question of proletarian dictatorship, the key problem is
not the physical personification of the function of command. The
key problem consists in the nature of the relations which the
leaders or leader have with the party of the working class, in the
relations which exist between this party and the working
class. Are these purely hierarchical, of a military type, or are
they of a historical and organic nature? Are the leader and the
party elements of the working class, are they a part of the
working class, do they represent its deepest and most vital
interests and aspirations, or are they an excrescence or simply a
violent superimposition? How was this party formed, how did it
develop, through what process did the selection of the men who
lead it take place? Why did it become the party of the working
class? Did this occur by chance?
The problem becomes that of the whole historical development of
the working class, which is gradually formed in struggle against
the bourgeoisie, winning a few victories and suffering many
defeats: the historical development, moreover, not just of the
working class of a single country, but of the entire working class
of the world - with its superficial differentiations, which are
nevertheless so important at any single moment in time, and with
its basic unity and homogeneity. The problem also becomes that of
the vitality of Marxism; of whether it is or is not the most
certain and profound interpretation of nature and of history; of
whether it can complement the politician's inspired intuition by
an infallible method, an instrument of the greatest precision for
exploring the future, foreseeing mass events, leading them and
hence controlling them.
The international proletariat has had, and still has, the
living example of a revolutionary party exercising workingclass
dictatorship. It has had, and unfortunately no longer has, the
most typical and expressive living example of what a revolutionary
leader is - comrade Lenin."[118]
Comrade Lenin was the initiator of a new process of development
of history. But he was this, because he was also the exponent and
the last, most individualized moment of a whole process of
development of past history, not just of Russia but of the whole
world. Did he become the leader of the Bolshevik Party by chance?
Did the Bolshevik Party become the leading party of the Russian
proletariat, and hence of the Russian nation, by chance? The
selection process lasted thirty years; it was extremely arduous;
it often assumed what appeared to be the strangest and most absurd
forms. It took place, in the international field, in contact with
the most advanced capitalist civilizations of central and western
Europe, in the struggle of the parties and factions Which made up
the Second International before the War. It continued within the
minority of international socialism which remained at least
partially immune from the social-patriotic contagion. It was
renewed in Russia in the struggle to win the majority of the
proletariat; in the struggle to understand and interpret the needs
and aspirations of a numberless peasant class, scattered over an
immense territory. It still continues, every day, because every
day it is necessary to understand, to foresee, to take
measures.
This selection process was a struggle of factions and small
groups; it was also an individual struggle; it meant splits and
fusions, arrest, exile, prison, assassination attempts; it meant
resistance to discouragement, and to pride; it meant suffering
hunger while having millions in gold available; it meant
preserving the spirit of a simple worker on the throne of the
Tsars; it meant not despairing even when all seemed lost, but
starting again, patiently and tenaciously; it meant keeping a cool
head and a smile when others lost their heads. The Russian
Communist Party, with its leader Lenin, bound itself up so tightly
with the entire development of its Russian proletariat, with the
whole development therefore of the entire Russian nation, that it
is not possible even to imagine one without the other: the
proletariat as a ruling class without the Communist Party being
the governing party; hence without the Central Committee of the
party being the inspirer of government policy; and hence without
Lenin being the leader of the State.
The very attitude of the great majority of Russian bourgeois,
who used to say "our ideal too would be a republic headed by Lenin
without the Communist Party", had great historical
significance. It was the proof that the proletariat no longer
merely exercised physical domination, but dominated spiritually as
well. At bottom, in a confused way, the Russian bourgeoisie too
understood that Lenin could not have become and could not have
remained leader of the State without the domination of the
proletariat, without the Communist Party being the government
party. Its class consciousness prevented it as yet from
acknowledging, beyond its physical, immediate defeat, also its
ideological and historical defeat. But already the doubt was
there, expressed in that typical sentiment.
Another question arises. Is it possible, today, in the period
of the world revolution, for there to exist "leaders" outside the
working class; for there to exist non-Marxist leaders, who are not
linked closely to the class which embodies the progressive
development of all mankind? In Italy we have the fascist
régime, we have Benito Mussolini as fascism's leader, we
have an official ideology in which the "leader" is deified,
declared to be infallible, prophesied as the organizer and
inspirer of a reborn Holy Roman Empire. We see printed in the
newspapers, every day, scores and hundreds of telegrams of homage
from the vast local tribes to the "leader". We see the
photographs: the hardened mask of a face which we have already
seen at socialist meetings. We know that face: we know that
rolling of the eyes in their sockets, eyes which in the past
sought with their ferocious movements to bring shudders to the
bourgeoisie, and today seek to do the same to the proletariat. We
know that fist always clenched in a threat. We know the whole
mechanism, the whole paraphernalia, and we understand that it may
impress and tug at the heartstrings of bourgeois
school-children. It is really impressive, even when seen close to,
and has an awesome effect. But "leader"?
We saw the Red Week of June 1914.[119] More than three million
workers were on the streets, called out by Benito Mussolini, who
for about a year since the Roccagorga massacre had been preparing
them for the great day, with all the oratorical and journalistic
means at the disposal of the then "leader" of the Socialist Party,
of Benito Mussolini - from Scalarini's lampoon to his great trial
at the Milan Assizes.[120] Three million workers were on the
streets: but the "leader", Benito Mussolini, was missing. He was
missing as a "leader", not as an individual; for people say that
as an individual he was courageous, and defied the cordons and the
muskets of the carabinieri in Milan. He was missing as a
"leader", because he was not one. Because, by his own admission,
within the leadership of the Socialist Party he could not even
manage to get the better of the wretched intrigues of Arturo Vella
or Angelica Balabanoff.
He was then, as today, the quintessential model of the Italian
petty bourgeois: a rabid, ferocious mixture of all the detritus
left on the national soil by the centuries of domination by
foreigners and priests. He could not be the leader of the
proletariat; he became the dictator of the bourgeoisie, which
loves ferocious faces when it becomes Bourbon again, and which
hoped to see the same terror in the working class which it itself
had felt before those rolling eyes and that clenched fist raised
in menace.
The dictatorship of the proletariat is expansive, not
repressive. A continuous movement takes place from the base
upwards, a continuous replacement through all the capillaries of
society, a continuous circulation of men. The leader whom we mourn
today found a decomposing society, a human dust, without order or
discipline. For in the course of five years of war, production -
the source of all social life - had dried up. Everything was
re-ordered and reconstructed, from the factory to the government,
with the instruments and under the leadership and control of the
proletariat, i.e. of a class new to government and to history.
Benito Mussolini has seized governmental power and is holding
onto it by means of the most violent and arbitrary repression. He
has not had to organize a class, but merely the personnel of an
administration. He has dismantled a few of the State's mechanisms
more to see how it is done and to learn the trade than from any
primary necessity. His ideas are all contained in the physical
mask, the eyes rolling in their sockets, the clenched fist ever
raised in menace.
Rome has seen these dusty scenarios before. It saw Romulus, it
saw Augustus Caesar, and at its twilight it saw Romulus
Augustulus.[121]
(notes from Antonio Gramsci "Selections from political writings (1921-1926)")
118 Lenin had died on 21 January 1924.
119 On 7 June 1914, an
anti-militarist demonstration at Ancona, organized by Malatesta
and Nenni (then a republican), was fired on by the police,
resulting in three deaths. The PSI called a general strike, and
there were insurrectionary outbreaks throughout the
country. Ancona was held by the insurgents for ten days, and it
took 10,000 troops to subdue it.
120 Mussolini became editor
of Avanti! in December 1912, and gained immediate wide
publicity with his fiery editorials on the occasion of a police
massacre of agricultural labourers at Roccagorga in January
1913. (In the Prison
Notebooks, Gramsci was to cite Roccagorga as the real
origin of the train of events culminating in the Red Week, see
QC II, pp. 10 10- 11). As a result of the Avanti!
campaign, Mussolini and a number of other journalists and
contributors to the paper were put on trial in Milan between 26
March and 1 April 1914; some of the braccianti who had
escaped the massacre testified as defence witnesses. One of
Mussolini's co-defenders was Giuseppe Scalarini, who was to
continue as one of the principal contributors to
Avanti! until its suppression in the mid-twenties.
121 Romulus Augustulus, last
of the Western Emperors of Rome, was overthrown in A.D. 476 by
the Heruli under Odoacer.