Antonio Gramsci 1926
The peasants and the dictatorship of the proletariat
(Notes for Il Mondo)
Unsigned, L'Unità, 17 September 1926.
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.
So we have a new article in Il Mondo, entitled - in
accordance with the technique beloved of the old Barzinism and the
new Calzinism - "Looking for Communism" Naturally, it is in
workers' and peasants' Russia that Il Mondo looks for
communism. If we wanted to imitate the dialectical technique
beloved of Il Mondo, we might write a whole series of
articles entitled 'Looking for democracy', and demonstrate that
democracy has never existed. And indeed, if democracy meant, as it
cannot but mean, rule of the popular masses, expressed through a
Parliament elected by universal suffrage, then in which country
has the government ever existed which meets such criteria? In
England itself, homeland and cradle of the parliamentary
régime and of democracy, Parliament is flanked in
government by the House of Lords and the Monarchy. The powers of
democracy are in reality null. It does not exist. Before the War,
in other words when the social-democrats and all the "friends of
the people" could not yet accuse Bolshevism of having "provoked"
the bourgeoisie and induced it (poor thing!) to abandon legality
and resort to dictatorial means, Lord Carson was already able to
arm and raise an army against the parliamentary bill on Irish
freedom.
And does democracy perhaps exist in France? Alongside
Parliament there exists in France the Senate, which is elected not
by universal' suffrage, but by two levels of electors who in their
turn are only partially an expression of universal suffrage; and
there also exists the institution of the President of the
Republic. The different terms of power fixed for the three basic
institutions of the French Republic are intended to serve,
according to official statements, to temper the possible excesses
of the Parliament elected by universal suffrage. In reality, they
are the mechanism through which the ruling class prepares to
organize civil war in the best conditions for agitation and
propaganda.
In Germany, there does not exist any institution of an
aristocratic or oligarchic nature alongside Parliament. Yet we
have recently been able to see the formidable braking power
exerted on the so-called national will by the fact that the
President of the Republic has an electoral base that is temporally
different from the one which forms the national assembly. The
votes obtained in the referendum for expropriating the former
princes without indemnity were more numerous than those won by
Marshal Hindenburg for his nomination as President of the Republic
Nevertheless, Hindenburg did not resign. Having issued the
blackmailing threat of a grave political crisis during the
referendum campaign, after the referendum he continued to exert
pressure to render the will of the popular masses null and
void.
Certainly, we do not propose to convince the writers of Il
Mondo. We know them, as we know their various bosses, from
the Perrone brothers to Max Bondi, Count Matarazzo, Commander
Pecoraino and the Banca Commerciale - in whose service they write
the most contradictory articles, but always designed to deceive
the toiling masses. It is only for the masses' sake that we are
writing to inquire: "Is it fair to ask of the new working-class
régime that emerged in Russia in 1917, during the World
War, after the greatest social and economic disaster that history
has known, a one hundred per cent application of the maximum
programme of the party which is in power in Russia, if one oneself
represents and supports a régime which - in some centuries
of existence - has not succeeded in realizing any of its
programmatic promises, but has failed shamefully, capitulating
before the most reactionary currents only to merge with them
forthwith?"
Our paper must publish a whole series of documents which reply
exhaustively to the questions raised by the writers -of Il
Mondo, questions which are essential for the international
workers' movement, even if Il Mondo raises them in the
most contorted and unintelligent way one could imagine. One
confession which is implicit in a whole series of articles and in
Il Mondo's prose must be taken up at once: for what
exactly does Il Mondo mean by seeking to demonstrate that
in Russia there does not exist the least element of social life,
and by systematically keeping silent about the working-class
character of the Russian State institutions, including
cooperatives, banks and factory managements? Il Mondo
means only to maintain the illusion among the broad mass of the
people, that it is at least possible to obtain what exists today
in Russia without a revolution, and without the total conquest of
Stat power by the working class and peasants.
All Il Mondo's arguments - from the one about the
historical judgment to be made on Italian fascism, to this
genuinely wretched critique on principle of the Russian economic
and social structure - aim at this single goal. For us communists,
the fascist régime is the expression of the most advanced
stage of development of capitalist society. It precisely serves to
demonstrate how all the conquests and all the institutions which
the toiling classes succeed in realizing in the relatively
peaceful period of development of the capitalist order are
destined for annihilation, if at a given moment the working class
does not seize State power with revolutionary means. So one can
understand how the writers of Il Mondo have an interest
in maintaining that fascism is a pre-democratic régime;
that fascism is related to an incipient and still backward phase
of capitalism.
So one can understand how the writers of Il Mondo - by
presenting the readership of their paper (a readership
unfortunately made up in large measure of workers and peasants)
with a model of Russian society in which the bourgeois and
petty-bourgeois elements are permeating the structure of the
workers' State, over which they are destined inevitably to triumph
through a restoration of the old régime - are seeking to
represent, in an updated form, the old utopian schema of democracy
and reformism. According to this, the socialist elements - such as
trade unions, cooperatives, socialist local councils, etc., etc. -
which exist under the capitalist order could permeate the
structure of the latter to the point where they would modify it
completely, so leading to the bloodless victory of socialism. But,
precisely, fascism has implacably destroyed such schemas, by
destroying all the socialist (insofar as linked to the working
class) elements which had been being formed in the period of
development of the capitalist class.
There exist today in Russia socialist elements which are
preponderant, and elements of petty-bourgeois economy which
theoretically can develop, just as theoretically the socialist
elements which existed in Italy before fascism could develop. But
in Italy the proletariat has not conquered State power. The old
capitalist organization, at a certain moment, put an end to the
concessions it had made to the cooperatives, the unions, the
socialist local councils: i.e. to the working class. In Russia,
the working class in power - the working class which regulates and
manages the essential parts of the national economy, the
control-levers of the whole economic structure of Russian society
- has made and does make concessions: not to the old society of
the capitalists and big landowners, which was overthrown arms in
hand and has been stripped of all property and all political
rights, but to the peasant masses from whom theoretically the new
capitalism could emerge.
There is, however, a little question which the gentlemen of R
Mondo seem to want to ignore, which is the following. Capitalism,
as it emerges and develops, creates proletarians in numbers which
far exceed that of the capitalists themselves. So the question -
which the writers of Il Mondo think can be ignored of
establishing which class holds State power in its hands becomes a
key question. In Russia today, the working class which has the
State in its hands has an interest, if it wants to create an
internal market capable of absorbing industrial production, in
promoting and encouraging the development of agriculture. Since
agriculture in Russia is still backward and can only be organized
on an individual basis, the economic development of the Russian
agricultural classes necessarily leads to a certain enrichment of
an upper layer in the countryside. Every worker understands that
if one carries out a policy to ensure that one hundred peasants
will move from a yearly income of one thousand lire to
one of two thousand lire. so that they will become able
to buy more objects from socialized industry than they were able
to with their original thousand lire, it is impossible to
prevent certain of those one hundred peasants from moving not just
from one to two thousand lire, but as a result of
specific highly favourable circumstances reaching five or six
thousand. While, at the other extreme, five or six peasants not
only do not succeed in moving from an income of one to an income
of two thousand lire, but as a result of extremely
unfavourable circumstances (death of stock, hurricanes, etc.) will
see their income of a thousand lire reduced to zero.
What is essential for the policies of the working class in
Russia is that the central mass of peasants, through legislative
provision, should achieve the results which the workers' State
proposes: i.e. should become the basis for the formation of
national savings which will serve to sustain the general apparatus
of production in the hands of the working class, allowing this
apparatus not just to maintain itself, but to develop. There does,
however, exist this 4 or 5 per cent which develops beyond the
limits foreseen by the legislation of the workers' State. And in a
country like Russia, where the peasant masses represent a
population of 100 million inhabitants, this 4 or 5 per cent
becomes a social force - which can appear quite massive - of 4 or
5 million inhabitants. But if the working class, which in Russia
today numbers at least 20 million inhabitants, retains its links
to the great mass of peasants, which numbers scores of millions,
the figure represented by the enemies of socialism is reduced to
its just proportions in the overall picture, and the relatively
peaceful victory of the socialist forces over the capitalist
forces is ensured. We say relatively peaceful, because in fact in
Russia the prisons are in the hands of the workers, the courts are
in the hands of the workers, the police is in the hands of the
workers, the army is in the hands of the workers. In other words,
in Russia there exists a dictatorship of the proletariat, a
socialist element which we are so foolish as to judge just a tiny
bit more important than it is judged to be by the friends of the
Perrone brothers, of Max Bondi, of Count Matarazzo and of
Commander Pecoraino!