Antonio Gramsci 1925
Introduction to the first course of the party school
Signed "Agitation and Propaganda Department of the Communist Party".
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.
Which specific need of the working class and its party, the
Communist Party, has stimulated the initiative of a correspondence
school, now finally beginning to be realized with the publication
of the present batch of study notes.
For almost five years, the Italian revolutionary workers'
movement has been plunged into a situation of illegality or
semi-legality. Freedom of the press, the rights of assembly,
association and propaganda - all these have been virtually
suppressed. The formation of leading cadres of the proletariat
can, therefore, no longer take place in the ways and by the
methods which were traditional in Italy up to 1921. The most
active working-class elements are persecuted; all their movements
and all their reading is controlled; the workers' libraries have
been burnt or otherwise dispersed; the great mass organizations no
longer exist, and great mass actions can no longer be carried
out. Militants either do not take part at all, or only do so in
the most limited way, in discussions and the clash of ideas. An
isolated existence, or the occasional gathering of tiny restricted
groups; the possibility of becoming habituated to apolitical life
which in other times would have seemed exceptional: these engender
feelings, states of mind and points of view which are often
incorrect, and sometimes even unhealthy.
The new members whom the party gains in such a situation,
clearly sincere men of vigorous revolutionary faith, cannot be
educated in our methods by the broad activity, wide-ranging
discussions and mutual checking which characterize a period of
democracy and mass legality. Thus a very serious danger
threatens. The mass of the party growing accustomed in the illegal
conditions to think only of the expedients necessary to escape the
enemy's surprise attacks; growing accustomed to only seeing
actions by little groups as possible and immediately organizable;
seeing how the dominators have apparently won, and kept, power
through the action of armed and militarily organized minorities -
draws slowly away from the marxist conception of the proletariat's
revolutionary activity. And while it seems to become radicalized,
in that extremist statements and bloodthirsty phrases are often
heard on its lips, in reality it becomes incapable of defeating
the enemy.
The history of the working class, especially in the epoch
through which we are passing, shows that this danger is not an
imaginary one. The recovery of revolutionary parties, after a
period of illegality, is often characterized by an irresistible
impulse to action for action's sake; by the absence of any
consideration of the real relation of social forces, the state of
mind of the broad mass of workers and peasants, the degree to
which they are armed, etc. It has thus too often occurred that the
revolutionary party has let itself be massacred by a Reaction not
yet destroyed, whose resources had not been correctly assessed,
while the great masses - who after every reactionary period become
extremely prudent, and are easily seized by panic whenever a
return to the situation which they have only just left threatens -
have remained indifferent and passive.
It is difficult, in general, to prevent such errors from being
made. It is, therefore, incumbent on the party to be on its guard,
and to carry out specific activity designed to improve the
situation and its own organization, and to raise the intellectual
level of the members in its ranks during the period of white
terror. For these are destined to become the central nucleus, most
able to sustain every trial and sacrifice, of the party which will
lead the revolution and administer the proletarian State.
The problem thus appears bigger and more complex. The recovery
of the revolutionary movement, and especially its victory, pour a
great mass of new elements into the party. They cannot be
rejected, especially if they are of proletarian origin, since
precisely their recruitment is one of the most symptomatic signs
of the revolution which is being accomplished. But the problem is
posed of how to prevent the central nucleus of the party from
being submerged and fragmented by the mighty new wave. We all
recall what happened in Italy after the War, in the Socialist
Party. The central nucleus, made up of comrades who had remained
faithful to the cause during the cataclysm, was reduced to only
about 16,000. Yet at the Livorno Congress 220,000 members were
represented: in other words, the party contained 200,000 members
who had joined since the War, without political preparation,
lacking any or almost any notion of marxist doctrine, an easy prey
to the rhetorical, petty-bourgeois blusterers who in the years
1919-20 constituted the phenomenon of maximalism. It is not
without significance that the present leader of the Socialist
party and editor of Avanti! should be precisely Pietro Nenni, who
entered the Socialist Party after Livorno but who nevertheless
sums up and synthesizes in himself all the ideological weaknesses
and distinctive characteristics of post-war maximalism.
It would really be a crime if the same thing were to occur in
the Communist Party with respect to the fascist period, as
occurred in the Socialist Party with respect to the war
period. But this would be inevitable, if our party were not to
have an orientation in this field too: if it did not take care in
good time to reinforce its present cadres and members
ideologically and politically, in order to make them capable of
absorbing and incorporating still greater masses, without the
organization being too shaken and without the party's profile
being thereby altered.
We have posed the problem in its most important practical
terms. But it has a basis which goes beyond any immediate
contingency. We know that the proletariat's struggle against
capitalism is waged on three fronts: the economic, the political
and the ideological. The economic struggle has three phases:
resistance to capitalism, i.e. the elementary trade-union phase;
the offensive against capitalism for workers' control of
production; and the struggle to eliminate capitalism through
socialization. The political struggle too has three principal
phases: the struggle to check the bourgeoisie's power in the
parliamentary State, in other words to maintain or create a
democratic situation, of equilibrium between the classes, which
allows the proletariat to organize; the struggle to win power and
create the workers' State, in other words a complex political
activity through which the proletariat mobilizes around it all the
anti-capitalist social forces (first and foremost the peasant
class) and leads them to victory; and the phase of dictatorship of
the proletariat, organized as a ruling class to eliminate all the
technical and social obstacles which prevent the realization of
communism. The economic struggle cannot be separated from the
political struggle, nor can either of them be separated from the
ideological struggle.
In its first, trade-union phase, the economic struggle is
spontaneous; in other words, it is born inevitably of the very
situation in which the proletariat finds itself under the
bourgeois order. But in itself, it is not revolutionary; in other
words, it does not necessarily lead to the overthrow of
capitalism, as the syndicalists have maintained - and as with less
success they continue to maintain. So true is this, that the
reformists and even the fascists allow elementary trade-union
struggle; indeed, they assert that the proletariat as a class
should not engage in any kind of struggle other than trade-union
struggle. The reformists only differ from the fascists in that
they say that, if not the proletariat as a class, at least
proletarians as individuals and citizens should also struggle for
"general democracy", i.e. for bourgeois democracy: in other words,
should struggle only to preserve or create the political
conditions for a pure struggle of trade-union resistance.
For the trade-union struggle to become a revolutionary factor,
it is necessary for the proletariat to accompany it with political
struggle: in other words, for the proletariat to be conscious of
being the protagonist of a general struggle which touches all the
most vital questions of social organization; i.e. for it to be
conscious that it is struggling for socialism. The element of
"spontaneity" is not sufficient for revolutionary struggle; it
never leads the working class beyond the limits of the existing
bourgeois democracy. The element of consciousness is needed, the
"ideological" element: in other words, an understanding of the
conditions of the struggle, the social relations in which the
worker lives, the fundamental tendencies at work in the system of
those relations, and the process of development which society
undergoes as a result of the existence within it of insoluble
antagonisms, etc.
The three fronts of proletarian struggle are reduced to a
single one for the party of the working class, which is this
precisely because it resumes and represents all the demands of the
general struggle. One certainly cannot ask every worker from the
masses to be completely aware of the whole complex function which
his class is destined to perform in the process of development of
humanity. But this must be asked of members of the party. One
cannot aim, before the conquest of the State, to change completely
the consciousness of the entire working class. To do so would be
utopian, because class consciousness as such is only changed when
the way of living of the class itself has been changed; in other
words, when the proletariat has become a ruling class and has at
its disposal the apparatus of production and exchange and the
power of the State. But the party can and must, as a whole,
represent this higher consciousness. Otherwise, it will not be at
the head but at the tail of the masses; it will not lead them but
be dragged along by them. Hence, the party must assimilate
marxism, and assimilate it in its present form, as Leninism.
Theoretical activity, in other words struggle on the
ideological front, has always been neglected in the Italian
workers' movement. In Italy, Marxism (apart from Antonio Labriola)
has been studied more by bourgeois intellectuals, in order to
denature it and turn it to the purposes of bourgeois policy, than
by revolutionaries. We have thus seen coexisting peacefully in the
Italian Socialist Party the most disparate tendencies. We have
seen the most contradictory ideas being official opinions of the
party. The party leaders never imagined that in order to struggle
against bourgeois ideology, i.e. in order to free the masses from
the influence of capitalism, it was first necessary to disseminate
Marxist doctrine in the party itself and defend it against all
false substitutes. This tradition has not been, or at least has
not yet been, broken with by our party; has not been broken with
in a systematic manner and through a significant, prolonged
activity.
People say, however, that Marxism has enjoyed good fortune in
Italy, and in a certain sense this is true. But it is also true
that this good fortune has not helped the proletariat; has not
helped to create new means of struggle; has not been a
revolutionary phenomenon. Marxism, or more precisely a few
statements taken from Marx's writings, have helped the Italian
bourgeoisie to show that it was an inevitable necessity of its
development to do without democracy; that it was necessary to
trample on the laws; that it was necessary to mock freedom and
justice. In other words, what the philosophers of the Italian
bourgeoisie called Marxism was the description which Marx gave of
the methods the bourgeoisie (without any need for Marxist
justifications) uses in its struggle against the workers.
The reformists, to correct this fraudulent interpretation,
themselves became democrats, and made themselves into the
incense-bearers for all the desecrated saints of capitalism. The
theorists of the Italian bourgeoisie have had the astuteness to
create the concept of the "proletarian nation"; in other words, to
claim that Italy as a whole was "proletarian", and that Marx's
conception should be applied not to the struggle of the Italian
proletariat against Italian capitalism., but to Italy's struggle
against other capitalist states. The "Marxists" of the Socialist
Party let these aberrations go without a struggle; indeed, they
were accepted by one person - Enrico Ferri - who passed for a
great theoretician of socialism. This was the good fortune of
Marxism in Italy: that it served as parsley in all the
indigestible sauces that most of the reckless adventurers of the
pen have sought to put on sale. Marxists of this ilk have included
Enrico Ferri, Guglielmo Ferrero, Achille Loria, Paolo Orano,
Benito Mussolini .... I I I In order to combat the confusion which
has been being created in this way, it is necessary for the party
to intensify and systematize its activity in the ideological
field; to make it a duty for the militant to know Marxist-Leninist
doctrine, at least in the most general terms.
Our party is not a democratic party, at least in the vulgar
sense commonly given to this word. It is a party centralized both
nationally and internationally. In the international field, our
party is simply a section of a larger party, a world party. What
repercussions can this type of organization - which is an iron
necessity for the revolution - have, and has it already had? Italy
itself gives us an answer to this question. As a reaction against
the usual custom in the Socialist Party - in which much was
discussed and little resolved; where unity was shattered into an
infinity of disconnected fragments by the continuous clash of
factions, tendencies and often personal cliques - in our party we
had ended up by no longer discussing anything. Centralization,
unity of approach and conception, had turned into intellectual
stagnation. The necessity of ceaseless struggle against fascism,
which precisely at the moment of our party's foundation had passed
over to its first active, offensive phase, contributed to this
state of affairs. But it was also encouraged by the wrong
conception of the party set out in the "Theses on Tactics"
presented to the Rome Congress. 112 Centralization and unity were
understood in too mechanical a fashion: the Central Committee,
indeed the Executive Committee, was the entire party, instead of
representing and leading it.
If this conception were to be applied permanently, the party
would lost its distinctive political features and become, at best,
an army (and a bourgeois type of army). In other words, it would
lose its power of attraction and become separated from the
masses. In order for the party to live and be in contact with the
masses, it is necessary for every member of the party to be an
active political element, a leader. Precisely because the party is
strongly centralized, a vast amount of propaganda and agitation
among its ranks is required. It is necessary for the party in an
organized fashion to educate its members and raise their
ideological level. Centralization means, in particular, that in
any situation whatsoever - even when the most rigorous Emergency
Laws are in operation, and even if the leading committees are
unable to function for a given period or are put in a situation
where they cannot maintain contact with the local organizations -
all members of the party, and everyone in its ambit, have been
rendered capable of orienting themselves and knowing how to derive
from reality the elements with which to establish a line, so that
the working class will not be cast down but will feel that it is
being led and can still fight. Mass ideological preparation is
thus a necessity of revolutionary struggle, and one of the
indispensable conditions for victory.
This first course of lessons in the party school proposes,
within the limits which the situation permits, to carry out a part
of this general activity. It will contain three series of lessons:
one on the theory of historical materialism; one on the
fundamental elements of general politics; one on the Communist
Party and its principles of organization. In the first part, which
will follow - or simply give a translation of - comrade Bukharin's
book on the theory of historical materialism., comrades will find
a complete treatment of the subject.
The second part., on general politics, will provide the most
elementary notions of the following series of subjects: political
economy; the development of capitalism up to the epoch of finance
capital; the War and the crisis of capitalism; the development of
economic forms; communist society and the transitional
régime; communist doctrine of the State; the Ist and IInd
Internationals; the IIIrd International; the history of the
Russian Bolshevik Party; the history of the Italian Communist
Party; soviet power and the structure of the republic of Soviets;
the economic policies of Soviet power in the epoch of war
communism; the origins and basis of the New Economic Policy;
agrarian and peasant policy; trade and cooperation; financial
policy; the trade unions, their functions and tasks; the national
question.
The third part will systematically set out doctrine concerning
the party and the principles of revolutionary organization, such
as are developed through the Communist International's activity of
leadership, and such as were fixed in a more complete fashion at
the Organizational Conference held in Moscow in March of this
year. 114
This will be the school's basic course. It cannot be complete,
and hence could not satisfy all comrades' needs. To obtain a
greater completeness and organicity, it has been decided to
publish each month, in the same format as the study-notes,
separate dossiers on single subjects. One dossier will be devoted
to the trade-union question, and will deal with the most
elementary and practical problems of union life (how to organize a
union; how to draw up rules; how to launch a wage struggle; how to
frame a work-contract; etc.), thus representing a real organizer's
manual. Another dossier will be designed to assemble every idea
about the economic, social and political structure of Italy. In
other dossiers., other specific subjects of working-class politics
will be dealt with, in accordance with the doctrine of
Marxism-Leninism. Furthermore, in every batch of study-notes, in
addition to the three lessons, there will be published informative
- and formative - notes designed to give direct backing to the
lessons themselves; model discussions; didactic advice for study
carried out without the help or direct guidance of a teacher,
etc.
The study-notes must be seen by the pupils as material to be
actually studied, not just read as one reads a newspaper or a
pamphlet. The pupils must study as if they had to pass an
examination at the end of the course. In other words, they must
force themselves to remember and assimilate the subjects dealt
with, so as to be capable of delivering reports or holding small
meetings. The party will keep the list of pupils, and whenever it
needs to will turn to them before anyone else.
So pupils must not be worried if at first many of them have
difficulty in understanding certain ideas. The study-notes have
been compiled bearing in mind the average formation of the party
membership at large. It may happen that for some they will
represent things already known, while for others they will be
something new and somewhat difficult to digest. Indeed, it is
inevitable that this will happen. In these circumstances, the
pupils must help each other as far as possible. The establishment
of groups and joint recital of the lessons received, may sometimes
eliminate this problem. In any case, all pupils are entreated to
write to the school administration, explaining their situation,
asking for additional elucidation, and recommending other methods
or forms of exposition.