Antonio Gramsci: Selections from Political Writings 1921-1926

546 Pages·1978·11.62 MB·English

by  Antonio Gramsci

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