Antonio Gramsci 1924
Democracy and fascism
Unsigned, L'Ordine Nuovo, 1 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.
In what sense should one say that fascism and democracy are two
aspects of a single reality, two different forms of a single
activity: the activity which the bourgeois class carries out to
halt the proletarian class on its path? The assertion of this
truth is contained in the theses of the Communist International,
but only in Italy does the history of the last few years gives an
unambiguous proof of it. In Italy, in the last few years, there
has been a perfect division of labour between fascism and
democracy.
It became clear after the War that it was impossible for the
Italian bourgeoisie to go on ruling with a democratic system. Yet
before the War, Italian democracy had already been a fairly
singular system. It was a system which knew neither economic
freedom nor substantial political freedoms; which strove through
corruption and violence to prevent any free development of new
forces, whether they committed themselves in advance to the
existing framework of the State or not; and which restricted the
ruling class to a minority incapable of maintaining its position
without the active assistance of the policeman and the
carabiniere. In the Italian democratic system, before the
War, each year several dozen workers fell in the streets; and
peasants were sent to pick grapes in some places with muzzles on,
for fear they might taste the fruit. Democracy, for the peasants
and workers, consisted only in the fact that at the base they had
the possibility of creating a network of organizations and
developing these, strand by strand, to the point where they
included the majority of decisive elements of the working
class. Even this very simple fact implied a death-sentence for the
democratic system. The post-war crisis made it explicit.
The existence and development of a class organization of the
workers create a state of affairs which cannot be remedied, either
through the State violence which every democratic order permits
itself, or with a systematic use of the method of political
corruption of leaders. This could be seen in Italy after the first
elections held under universal suffrage and with proportional
representation. 117 After these, the democratic bourgeoisie felt
impotent to solve the problem of how to prevent power slipping
from its grasp. Despite the wishes of the leaders, and
notwithstanding the absence of conscious guidance, the workers'
movement could not fail to advance and achieve decisive
developments.
The handclasps for Filippo Turati, the winks at D'Aragona, and
the favours done on the sly for the mandarins of the cooperative
movement, were no longer sufficient to contain a movement which
was impelled by the pressure of millions of men integrated, in
however illogical and elementary a manner, in an organization:
millions of men moved by the stimulus of elementary needs which
had increased and been left unsatisfied. At this juncture, those
democrats who wanted to remain consistent posed themselves the
problem of how to "make the masses loyal to the State". An
insoluble problem, so long as there did not exist a State for
which the masses would be flesh and blood; a State which had
emerged from the masses through an organic process of creation,
and which was bound to them. In reality, at this juncture
democracy understood that it must draw aside, leaving the field to
a different force. Fascism's hour had come.
What service has fascism performed for the bourgeois class and
for "democracy"? It set out to destroy even that minimum to which
the democratic system was reduced in Italy - i.e. the concrete
possibility to create an organizational link at the base between
the workers, and to extend this link gradually until it embraced
the great masses in movement. It set out too to annihilate the
results already achieved in this field. Fascism has accomplished
both these aims, by means of an activity perfectly designed for
the purpose. Fascism has never manoeuvred, as the reactionary
State might have done in 1919 and 1920, when faced with a massive
movement in the streets. Rather, it waited to move until
working-class organization had entered a period of passivity and
then fell upon it, striking it as such, not for what it "did" but
for what it "was" - in other words, as the source of links capable
of giving the masses a form and physiognomy. The strength and
capacity for struggle of the workers for the most part derive from
the existence of these links, even if they are not in themselves
apparent. What is involved is the possibility of meeting; of
discussing; of giving these meetings and discussions some
regularity; of choosing leaders through them; of laying the basis
for an elementary organic formation, a league, a cooperative or a
party section. What is involved is the possibility of giving these
organic formations a continuous functionality; of making them into
the basic framework for an organized movement. Fascism has
systematically worked to destroy these possibilities.
Its most effective activity has, therefore, been that carried
on in the localities; at the base of the organizational edifice of
the working class; in the provinces, rural centres, workshops and
factories. The sacking of subversive workers; the exiling or
assassination of workers' and peasants' "leaders"; the ban on
meetings; the prohibition on staying outdoors after working hours;
the obstacle thus placed in the way of any "social" activity on
the part of the workers; and then the destruction of the Chambers
of Labour and all other centres of organic unity of the working
class and peasantry, and the terror disseminated among the masses
- all this had more value than a political struggle through which
the working class was stripped of the "rights" which the
Constitution guarantees on paper. After three years of this kind
of action, the working class has lost all form and all organicity;
it has been reduced to a disconnected, fragmented, scattered
mass. With no substantial transformation of the Constitution, the
political conditions of the country have been changed most
profoundly, because the strength of the workers and peasants has
been rendered quite ineffective.
When the working class is reduced to such conditions, the
political situation is "democratic". In such conditions, in fact,
so-called liberal bourgeois groups can, without fear of fatal
repercussions on the internal cohesion of State and society:
1. separate their responsibilities from those of the fascism which
they armed, encouraged and incited to struggle against the
workers; 2, restore "the rule of law". i.e. a state of affairs in
which the possibility for a workers' organization to exist is not
denied. They can do the first of these two things because the
workers, dispersed and disorganized, are not in any position to
insert their strength into the bourgeois contradiction deeply
enough to transform it into a general crisis of society, prelude
to revolution. The second thing is possible for them because
fascism has created the conditions for it, by destroying the
results of thirty years' organizational work. The freedom to
organize is only conceded to the workers by the bourgeois when
they are certain that the workers have been reduced to a point
where they can no longer make use of it, except to resume
elementary organizing work - work which they hope will not have
political consequences other than in the very long term.
In short, "democracy" organized fascism when it felt it could
no longer resist the pressure of the working class in conditions
even of only formal freedom. Fascism, by shattering the working
class, has restored to "democracy" the possibility of existing. In
the intentions of the bourgeoisie, the division of labour should
operate perfectly: the alternation of fascism and democracy should
serve to exclude for ever any possibility of working-class
resurgence. But not only the bourgeois see things in this way. The
same point of view is shared by the reformists, by the
maximalists, by all those who say that present conditions for the
workers of Italy are analogous to those of thirty years ago, those
of 1890 and before, when the working-class movement was taking its
first steps among us. By all those who believe that the resurgence
should take place with the same slogans and in the same forms as
at that time. By all those, therefore, who view the conflict
between "democratic" bourgeoisie and fascism in the same way that
they then viewed the conflicts between radical and conservative
bourgeois. By all those who speak of "constitutional freedoms" or
of "freedom of work" in the same way that one could speak of these
at the outset of the workers' movement.
To adopt this point of view means to weld the working class
inexorably within the vicious circle in which the bourgeoisie
wishes to confine it. To hear the reformists, the workers and
peasants of Italy today have nothing more to hope for than that
the bourgeoisie should itself give them back the freedom to
reconstruct their organization and make it live; the freedom to
re-establish trade unions, peasant leagues, party sections,
Chambers of Labour, and then federations, cooperatives, labour
exchanges, worker-control offices, committees designed to limit
the boss's freedom inside the factory, and so on and so forth -
until the pressure of the masses reawoken by the organizations,
and that of the organizations themselves, to transcend the
boundaries of bourgeois society becomes so strong that "democracy"
can neither resist it nor tolerate it, and will once again arm an
army of blackshirts to destroy the menace.
How is the vicious circle to be broken? Solving this problem
means solving, in practice, the problem of revolution. There is
only one way: to succeed in reorganizing the great mass of workers
during the very development of the bourgeois political crisis, and
not by concession of the bourgeois, but through the initiative of
a revolutionary minority and around the latter. The Communist
Party, from the day in which the fascist régime went into
crisis, has not set itself any other task than this. Is it a task
of an "organizational" nature in the narrow sense of the word, or
is it a "political" task? What we have said above serves to show
that only insofar as the Communist Party succeeds in solving it
will it succeed in modifying the terms of the real
situation. "Reorganizing"the working class, in this case, means in
practice creating" a new force and causing it to intervene on the
political scene: a force which today is not being taken into
account, as if it no longer existed. Organization and politics are
thus converted one into the other.
The work of the Communist Party is facilitated by two
fundamental conditions. I - By the fact that the shattering of the
working class by fascism has left the Communist Party itself
surviving, as the organized fraction of the class; as the
organization of a revolutionary minority and of the cadres of a
great mass party. The whole value of the line followed by the
communists in the first years of the party consists in this, as
does the value of the activity of purely technical organization
carried on for a year after the coup d'état. 2. By
the fact that the alternation from fascism to democracy and from
democracy to fascism is not a process abstracted from other
economic and political facts, but takes place simultaneously with
the extension and intensification of the general crisis of the
capitalist economy, and of the relations of force built upon
it. There thus exists a powerful objective stimulus towards the
return of the masses to the field, for the class struggle. Neither
of these conditions exists for the other so-called workers'
parties. They in fact all agree, not just in denying the value of
conscious party organization, but in accepting the bourgeois
thesis of the progressive stabilization of the capitalist economy
after the wartime crisis.
But the political function of the Communist Party is revealed
and develops with greater clarity and more effectively because of
the fact that it alone is capable of calling for the creation of
an organization which, transcending at one and the same time the
limits of narrowly party organization and of trade-union
organization, realizes the unity of the working class on a vaster
terrain: that of preparation for a political struggle in which the
class returns to the field arrayed for battle autonomously, both
against the fascist bourgeois and against the democratic and
liberal bourgeois. This organization is provided by the "workers'
and peasants' committees" for the struggle against fascism.
To find in the history of the Italian movement an analogy with
the workers' and peasants' committees", it is necessary to go back
to the factory councils of 1919 and 1920 and to the movement which
emerged from them. In the factory council, the problem of the
class's unity, and that of its revolutionary activity to overthrow
the bourgeois order, were considered and resolved
simultaneously. The factory council realized the organizational
unity of all workers, and at the same time carried the class
struggle to an intensity such as to make the supreme clash
inevitable. Not only the fable of collaboration and the utopia of
social peace, but also the foolish legend of an organization
developing with bourgeois permission inside capitalist society
until it transcends the latter's limits and empties it gradually
of its content, found a total negation in the factory
council. Working-class unity was achieved on the terrain of
revolution, breaking the economic and political organization of
capitalist society from below.
To what extent can the revolutionary function once fulfilled by
the factory councils be carried out today by the workers' and
peasants' committees? L'Ordine Nuovo, which in the first
period of its existence devoted itself in particular to developing
theses relating to the councils movement and to encouraging the
spontaneous creation and the development of these organisms, is
now basing its propaganda and agitational work on this other
problem, to which the Communist Party is devoting itself
today. The continuity between the two, whatever the points of
similarity and difference between councils and committees may be,
lies in the effort to induce the resurgent movement of the broad
masses to express itself in an organic form, and to find in it the
germs of the new order of things which we want to create. The
odious alternation and the base division of labour between fascism
and democracy will come to an end only insofar as this effort
produces a result.