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Antonio Gramsci: Selections from Political Writings 1921-1926 PDF

546 Pages·1978·11.62 MB·English
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Antonio Gram sci Selections from Political Writings 1921-1926 ANTONIO GRAMSCI SELECTIONS FROM POLITICAL WRITINGS (1921-1926) with additional texts by other Italan Communist leaders translated and edited by QUINTIN HOARE LAWRENCE AND WISHART LONDON Lawrence and Wishart Ltd 39 Museum Street London WC1 First published 1978 English translation Copyright© Quintin Hoare, 1978 This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers’ prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser Printed in Great Britain at The Camelot Press Ltd, Southampton CONTENTS page INTRODUCTION by Quintin Hoare ix OUTLINE CHRONOLOGY, 1921-1926 xxv I SOCIALISM AND FASCISM 1 Caporetto and Vittorio Veneto 3 2 War is War 5 3 Workers’ Control 10 4 The General Confederation of Labour 12 5 Real Dialectics 15 6 Officialdom 17 7 Unions and Councils 20 8 Italy and Spain 23 9 Socialists and Communists 25 10 England and Russia 27 11 The Italian Parliament 29 12 The Communists and the Elections 32 13 The Elections and Freedom 35 14 Elemental Forces 38 15 The Old Order in Turin 41 16 Socialists and Fascists 44 17 Reactionary Subversiveness 46 18 Referendum 48 19 Leaders and Masses 52 20 Bonomi 54 21 The “Arditi del Popolo” 56 22 The Development of Fascism 59 23 Against Terror 61 24 The Two Fascisms 63 25 The Agf-arian Struggle in Italy 66 26 Those Mainly Responsible 68 27 Parties and Masses 71 28 Masses and Leaders 75 vi GRAMSCI; POLITICAL WRITINGS 1921-1926 29 One Year 79 30 The “Alleanza del Lavoro” 83 31 A Crisis within the Crisis 85 32 Lessons 87 II THE ROME CONGRESS 33 Theses on Tactics of the PCI (“Rome Theses”) - Bordiga and Terracini 93 34 Congress Interventions 118 35 Report on the National Congress to the Turin Communist Section 123 III TOWARDS A NEW LEADING GROUP 36 Origins of the Mussolini Cabinet 129 37 Togliatti to Gramsci (1 May 1923) 132 38 Gramsci to Togliatti (18 May 1923) 138 39 Report by the minority of the Italian delegation to the Enlarged Executive meeting of June 1923 143 40 What the relations should be between the PCI and the Comintern 154 41 Faction Meeting: Fragment of the minutes (12 July 1923) 157 42 Three fragments by Gramsci 159 43 Gramsci to the Executive Committee of the PCI 161 44 Our Trade-union Strategy 164 45 What is to be Done? 169 46 Gramsci to Scoccimarro(5 January 1924) 173 47 Gramsci to Terracini (12 January 1924) 177 48 Gramsci to Togliatti (27 January 1924) 182 49 Gramsci to Leonetti (28 January 1924) 188 50 Gramsci to Togliatti, Terracini and others (9 February 1924) 191 IV THE NEW ORIENTATION 51 Editorial: March 1924 207 52 “Leader” 209 53 Against Pessimism 213 54 Gramsci to Togliatti, Scoccimarro, Leonetti, etc. (21 March 1924) 218 CONTENTS vii 55 The Programme of L’Ordine Nuovo 224 56 Problems of Today and Tomorrow 229 5 7 Gramsci to Zino Zini (2 April 1924) 237 58 Gramsci to Togliatti, Scoccimarro, etc. (5 April 1924) 240 59 The Como Conference: Resolutions 243 60 Gramsci’s Intervention at the Como Conference 250 61 The Italian Crisis 255 62 Democracy and Fascism 267 63 The Fall of Fascism 273 64 Report to the Central Committee: 6 February 1925 276 65 Introduction to the First Course of the Party School 285 66 The Internal Situation in our Party and the Tasks of the Forthcoming Congress 293 67 Elements of the Situation 306 V THE LYONS CONGRESS 68 Minutes of the Political Commission nominated by the Central Committee to finalize the Lyons Congress documents 313 69 The Italian Situation and the Tasks of the PCI (“Lyons Theses”) - Gramsci and Togliatti 340 VI REARGUARD ACTION 70 The Party’s First Five Years 379 71 A Study of the Italian Situation 400 72 The Peasants and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat 412 73 Once Again on the Organic Capacities of the Working Class 417 74 We and the Republican Concentration 422 75 On the Situation in the Bolshevik Party I Gramsci to Togliatti 426 II To the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party 426 III Togliatti to Gramsci 432 IV Gramsci to Togliatti 437 76 Some' Aspects of the Southern Question 441 NOTES 463 INDEX 508 INTRODUCTION This volume’s predecessor, Political Writings (1910-1920) (spw i), contained a selection from Gramsd’s political journalism during the First World War and in thetwostormy years of revolutionary upsurge in Italy which followed the War. It closed on the eve of the January 1921 founding congress of the Italian Communist Party (pci) at Livorno, with Gramsci at the age of twenty-nine already a well-known figure on the revolutionary left in his country, through the key animating role which his weekly journal L’Ordine Nuovo had played in the factory-coundl movement in Turin - Italy’s “Petrograd”. The present volume (spw ii) spans the six brief years of the pci’s legal existence, before the Italian fasast dictatorship became total. The first piece translated here was written on the morrow of the Livorno Coiigress, the last a few days before Gramsci’s own arrest and entry into the darkness of Mussolini’s prisons, from which he was to be released eleven years later only in time to die - aged forty-six. If the period covered by spw i was the crudal political watershed of this century - encompassirtg the Great War, the October Revolution, the débâcle of the II nd International and the creation of the Illrd - the years that followed were hardly less momentous. They saw the restabilization of the bourgeois order where it had been most threatened in the wake of the War, and a crushing succession of defeats for the forces of revolution. They saw a growing bureaucratic involution ofthe young Soviet régime, in the conditions so harshly imposed by foreign intervention, dvil war and imperialist blockade; Stalin’s increasing domination of the Bolshevik Party; and in turn the increasing domination of the latter over the Communist International as a whole. Finally, they saw the rise to State power of fasasm, first and most notably in Italy - an ominous prelude to the black tide of the thirties and to the Second World War. It was in late 1920 and early 1921 that sections of the Italian ruling class - first landowners in central and northern Italy, followed closely by powerful industrial and finandal forces - began to turn to the hitherto insignificant fasdsts as an appropriate instrument with which to prosecute their class interests. Perhaps the foremost consideration X GRAMSCI: POLITICAL WRITINGS 1921-192« which led them to do so was an awareness of the extreme weakness of the traditional State institutions and party-system created in the half-century since national unification. In Italy, by this time the revolutionary upsurge had already passed its peak, and the defeats inflicted upon the working class in April and September 1920 had been decisive ones; but this was not perceived to be the case by the Italian bourgeoisie and landowning classes as a whole. Even those who did grasp the significance of the victory that had been achieved in 1920 wished to ensure that the opportunity would now be seized to eliminate once and for all any possibility for their opponents to regroup for a new trial of strength. So the fascist squadristi were financed and equipped for the task of destroying the material resources and the political morale accumulated in four decades of working-class struggle. They burned and looted, bludgeoned and killed; and the mass socialist and trade-union organizations put up no adequate defence. Fascism acquired mass proportions; it also took on a dynamic of its own, with a considerable degree of autonomy from those sections of the traditional political class and of the State apparatus who had encouraged and thought to use it. In October 1922, the March on Rome brought Mussolini to full governmental power. In the ensuing four years, the fascists perfected a novel type of bourgeois class rule, characterized by the following main elements: total destruction of all independent working-class institu­ tions; permanent mobilization of a mass political base, initially at least of a predominantly petty-bourgeois nature: suppression of all independent forms of political organization, including of the ruling class itself, outside the fascist institutions; defence, rationalization and development of Italian capitalism, in harmony with the essential interests of big capital; a militarist and expansionist ideology, facili­ tating imperialist adventures. The pci too was founded after the revolutionary moment had passed. Although, on paper.it emerged from the Socialist Paity (psi) in January 1921 with 60,000 members - one third of the total - its real strength in 1921 was about 40,000. Moreover, its popular support, as reflected in electoral results, was far weaker in relation to that commanded by the psi than the balance of forces at the latter’s Livorno Congress had suggested. The Communist Party was, of course, from the beginning a prime target for fascist repression, and its membership figures reflect this: some 25jOOO in late 1922; perhaps no more than 5,000 active members in early 1923; a slow build-up to around 8,500 in November

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Though he died as Benito Mussolini's prisoner, leaving only newspaper articles and fragmentary notes, Antonio Gramsci is now seen as the most significant Marxist thinker since Lenin. This volume is the first English translation of his writings on culture, organically and coherently edited from his j
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