Antonio Gramsci: The Communist Party
1920 Jan 21
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Antonio Gramsci: The Communist Party @ Satoshi Nakamoto
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Antonio Gramsci
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I
Since Sorel, it has become a cliché to refer to the primitive
Christian communities in assessing the modern proletarian movement. It
must be said at once that Sorel is in no way responsible for the
small-mindedness and intellectual crudity of his Italian admirers, just
as Karl Marx is not responsible for the ridiculous ideological
pretensions of "Marxists." Within the field of historical research,
Sorel is an "inventor": he cannot be imitated; he does not supply his
aspiring disciples with a method that can be applied mechanically, by
anyone, on any occasion, and produce intelligent findings as a result.
For Sorel, as for Marxist doctrine, Christianity represents a revolution
at the height of its development — a revolution, that is, that has gone
as far as it can, as far as creating a new and original system of moral,
legal, philosophical and artistic relations. To assume these
developments as an ideological blueprint for every revolution
is a crude and unintelligent travesty of Sorel's historical intuitions.
All it can give rise to is a series of historical researches on the
"germs" of proletarian culture that we must be able to detect,
if it is true (as it is for Sorel) that the proletarian revolution is
immanent in modern industrial society and if it is true that from this
revolution, as well, there will result a new set of rules for living and
a wholly new system of relations, characteristic of the revolutionary
class. What significance can be attached, then, to the assertion that,
in contrast with the early Christans, the workers are not chaste, or
sober, or very original in their lifestyle? Leaving to one side the kind
of amateurish generalization that turns all "Turinese metal-workers"
into a mob of brutes, who eat their roast chicken every day and get
drunk in brothels at night, who neglect their families and look to the
cinemas and an aping of bourgeois manners to satisfy their ideals of
beauty and morality — leaving to one side this kind of amateurish and
puerile generalization, the statement can still in no way become the
premise for a historical judgement. It is equivalent, in historical
terms, to saying that, since modern Christians eat well, use
prostitutes, get drunk, give false testimony, commit adultery, etc.,
etc., it must be a myth that ascetics, saints and martyrs ever existed.
Every historical phenomenon, in other words, must be studied for its own
peculiar characteristics, in the context of contemporary realities, as a
development of the freedom that manifests itself in ends, institutions
and forms that absolutely cannot be confused or compared (except
metaphorically) with the ends, institutions and forms of historical
phenomena in the past.
Every revolution that, like the Christian and the communist, comes
about and can only come about through a stirring of the vast popular
masses at their deepest level, cannot do other than break down and
destroy the entire existing system of social organization. Who can
imagine and foresee what the immediate consequences will be when the
endless hordes who are currently deprived of will or power finally make
their entry into the arena of historical creation and destruction?
Because they have never before experienced this "will" and this "power,"
they will expect to see their newly gained will and power manifested in
every public and private act. They will find the whole existing world
mysteriously alien and will want to destroy it from the roots. But
precisely because of the sheer immensity of the revolution, its
character of unpredictability and boundless freedom, who would dare to
hazard so much as a single definitive hypothesis on what sentiments,
what passions, what initiatives, what virtues will be forged in this
glowing furnace? Everything that exists at present, everything we see
around us today that lies outside the scope of our own will and force of
character — what changes will it all undergo? Will not every single day
lived at this level of intensity be a revolution in itself? Will not
every change that takes place in individual consciousness — occurring,
as it will, simultaneously across the whole mass of the people — have
creative repercussions which are quite unimaginable?
Nothing can be predicted, in the realm of morality and sentiment,
starting from what can be observed at present. Only one sentiment —
which has now become a constant, a distinguishing feature of the working
class — can be registered already: the sentiment of solidarity. But the
intensity and strength of this sentiment can be counted on to sustain
the will of resistance and self-sacrifice only for that period of time
that even the people's meagre capacity for historical prediction can
estimate, more or less accurately. They cannot be counted on, and thus
relied on to sustain the historical will during the period of
revolutionary creation and building of the new society, when it will be
impossible to set a limit on how long resistance and sacrifice be called
for. Because, by then, the enemy to be fought and defeated will no
longer be outside the proletariat — a defined and manageable external
physical presence. It will be within the proletariat itself; in its
ignorance, its sluggishness, its ponderous slowness in grasping new
insights. The dialectic of the class struggle will have become
internalized and in every conscience the newly created man will have to
be on his guard every moment against the bourgeois lying in ambush.
Because of this the workers' trade union, the body that realizes
proletarian solidarity in practice and disciplines it, cannot serve as
the model and the basis for predictions concerning the future of
civilization. The trade union is lacking in elements necessary to
encourage the development of freedom. It is destined to undergo radical
changes as a consequence of general developments. It is determined, not
determining.
The proletarian movement, in its present phase, is striving to bring
about a revolution in the way in which material things and physical
forces are organized. Its distinguishing features cannot be the
sentiments and passions that are distributed throughout the masses, that
sustain the will of the masses. The distinguishing features of the
proletarian revolution can only be looked for in the party of the
working class, the Communist Party, which owes its existence and
development to its disciplined organization of the will to form a State,
the will to give a new, proletarian order to the existing arrangement of
physical forces and to lay the foundations of popular liberty.
At the present moment, the Communist Party is the only institution
that may be seriously compared with the religious communities of
primitive Christianity. To the exent that the Party already exists on an
international scale, one can hazard a comparison, and establish a scale
of criteria for judging between the militants for the City of God and
the militants for the City of Man. The communist is certainly not
inferior to the Christian in the days of the catacombs. On the contrary!
The ineffable end which Christianity promised to its champions is in its
evocative mysteriousness, ample justification for heroism, saintliness,
a thirst for martyrdom. There is no need for the great human resources
of character and will to come into play in order to awaken a spirit of
sacrifice in someone who believes in a heavenly reward and eternal
bliss. The communist worker who, week after week, month after month,
year after year, without asking for anything in return, follows up his
eight hours work at the factory with eight hours work for the Party or
the union or the co-operative — from the point of view of human history,
this communist worker is greater than the slave or artisan who risked
everything to make it to his secret prayer meeting. Similarly, Rosa
Luxemburg and Karl Leibknecht are greater than the greatest of Christian
saints. Precisely because what they are fighting for is something
concrete, human, defined, the warriors of the working class are greater
than the warriors of God. The moral forces that sustain their will are
the more infinite the more finite the end their will is directed
towards.
How vast an expansion will come about in the sentiments of the worker
who spends eight hours a day bending over his machine, repeating the
ritual gestures of his job, as monotonous as the clicking of a circle of
rosary beads, when he becomes a "master" and the measure of all social
values? Is it not a miracle that the worker can still manage to think at
all when he is reduced to working away without understanding the how and
why of what he is doing? This miracle of the worker who, day after day,
gains in spiritual autonomy and the freedom to create within the realm
of ideas, struggling against his weariness and boredom, against the
monotony of a job that tends to mechanize and hence to stifle his inner
life — this miracle is being organized in the Communist Party, in the
will to struggle and the revolutionary creativity that are expressed in
the Communist Party.
The worker in the factory merely executes given tasks. He does not
follow through the overall process of work and production. He is not a
point that moves to create a line: he is a pin stuck in a particular
place and the line is made up of the sequence of pins that have been set
up by an alien will for its ends. The worker tends to carry over this
way of being into all areas of his life: he readily adapts, in
everything, to being a simple material executor, a "mass" guided by a
will that is alien to his own. He is intellectually lazy, he cannot see
and does not wish to see beyond his immediate horizon, and so he lacks
any reliable criterion for choosing his leaders and he lets himself be
easily swayed by promises. He wants to believe he can get what he wants
without any great effort on his part and without having to think too
much. The Communist Party is the instrument and the historical form of
the process of inner liberation through which the worker is transformed
from executor to initiator,
from mass to leader and guide, from pure
brawn to a brain and a will. The founding of the Communist Party gives a
glimpse of that seed of liberty that germinate and grow to its full
extent when the workers' State has prepared the necessary ground. The
slave or artisan of the classical world came to know himself and
realized his own liberation when he joined a Christian community, where
he felt himself to be equal, a brother, because all were sons of the
same father. It is just the same for the worker, when he joins the
Communist Party, where he collaborates in "discovering" and "inventing"
new ways of life, where he collaborates "consciously" in the world's
activity; where he thinks, looks ahead, has a responsibility; where he
organizes, rather than simply being organized; where he feels himself to
be part of a vanguard that runs ahead pulling the whole popular mass
along with it.
Even in purely organizational terms, the Communist Party has shown
itself to be the particular form of the proletarian revolution. No
previous revolution involved political parties: they were born after the
bourgeois revolution and they have entered their decline on the terrain
of parliamentary democracy. Here, as elsewhere, there is confirmation of
the idea that capitalism throws up forces that it then cannot succeed in
keeping under control. The democratic parties served to show up able
politicians and secure their success at the polls. Today the men in
government are imposed by the banks, the great newspapers, the
industrial confederations; the parties are crumbling into a multitude of
personal cliques. The Communist Party, arising out of the ashes of the
socialist parties, is repudiating its democratic and parliamentary roots
and revealing its essential characteristics which are completely new
within history. The Russian Revolution is a revolution brought about by
men who were organized by the Communist Party — men who forged
themselves a new personality within the Party, developed new sentiments
and realized a moral life which is destined to become the universal
consciousness and the ultimate end of all men.
II
Political parties are the reflection and the nomenclature of the
social classes. They emerge, develop, decline and renew themselves as
the various strata of the warring social classes undergo changes of
genuine historical significance, as they acquire a new and clearer
awareness of themselves and their own interests. What has become
characteristic of the present historical period, as a consequence of the
imperialist war, which profoundly altered the structure of the national
and international apparatus of production and exchange, is the rapidity
of the process by which the traditional parliamentary parties, which
emerged on the terrain of liberal democracy, are now falling apart and
new political organizations are rising up alongside them. This general
process obeys an implacable inner logic of its own, which is shown up in
the disintegration of the old classes and groupings and in the rapid
shifts in the position of whole strata of the population throughout the
entire territory of the State and often throughout the entire territory
under capitalist domination.
Even those social classes which historically have been the slowest
and most sluggish in differentiating themselves, like the peasant class,
have not escaped the chemical action of the reagents dissolving the body
of society. On the contrary, it seems as though the slower and more
sluggish these classes have been in the past, the more eager they are
now to race on to the ultimate consequences in the dialectic of the
class struggle — civil war and the violation of economic relations. In
Italy, we have seen a powerful party of the rural class, the Partito
Popolare, emerging as if from nowhere, in the space of two years. When
it was set up, this party claimed to represent the economic interests
and political aspirations of all the different social strata of rural
Italy, from the baron with his latifondi, to
the medium-sized landowner, from the small landholder to the tenant
farmer, from the sharecropper to the penniless peasant. We have seen the
Partito Popolare win almost a hundred seats in parliament with bloc
lists completely dominated by the representatives of the barons, the
great forest owners and the owners of large and medium-sized estates — a
tiny minority of the rural population. We have seen internal struggles
between tendencies in the Partito Popolare breaking out almost
immediately and quickly becoming endemic — a reflection of the process
of differentiation that was taking place in the original electoral body.
The great masses of small landowners and peasants were no longer content
to be the passive infantry-mass enabling the medium-sized and larger
landowners to secure their interests. Under their energetic pressure,
the Partito Popolare split into a right, a left and a centre, and we
have seen the extreme left of the popolari, under pressure from
the poorest peasants, adapting a revolutionary stance and entering into
competition with the socialist party, which has also become the
representative of the vast peasant masses. We are already witnessing the
break-up of the Partito Popolare, whose parliamentary wing and Central
Committee no longer represent the interests and the newly acquired
self-consciousness of their mass electorate or the forces organized in
the white unions. These are now represented by the
extremists who, not wanting to lose control of them and unable to delude
them with legal action in Parliament, are forced to resort to violent
struggle and to invoking new political institutions of government.
The same process of rapid organization and even more rapid
dissolution has also been apparent in the other political current that
claimed to represent the interests of the peasants: the war veterans'
association. It is a reflection of the tremendous internal crisis that
is racking the whole of rural Italy, and that reveals itself in the
massive strikes in the centre and the north, in the take-over and
distribution of the great latifondi of Apulia and in the
appearance of hundreds and thousands of armed peasants in the towns of
Sicily.
This profound stirring of the peasant classes is shaking the
framework of the democratic parliamentary state to its very foundations.
Capitalism, as a political force, is being reduced to corporate
associations of factory owners. It no longer possesses a political party
whose ideology also extends to the petit bourgeois strata in the cities
and the countryside and so ensures the survival of a broadly based legal
state. In fact, capitalism has been reduced to relying for its political
representation on the major newspapers (a print-run of 400,000, a
thousand electors) and the Senate, which is immune, as an institution,
from the actions and reactions of the great popular masses, but which
also lacks authority and prestige in the country. Because of this, the
political power of capitalism is tending to become even more closely
allied with the upper ranks of the military — with the Royal Guard and
the swarm of adventurers who have emerged since the Armistice, aspiring,
every one of them, to become the Kornilov or the Bonaparte of Italy. The
political power of capitalism can today only find expression in a
military coup d'état and an attempt to impose a rigid national
dictatorship to drive the brutalized Italian masses into the economy by
sacking neighbouring countries sword in hand.
With the bourgeoisie worn down and exhausted as a ruling class, with
capitalism exhausted as a mode of production and exchange, with the
peasant class failing to provide a unified political force capable of
forging a State, the working class is being ineluctably summoned by
history to take upon itself the responsibilities of a ruling class. Only
the proletariat is capable of creating a strong state that can make
itself respected, because the proletariat has, in communism, a programme
of economic reconstruction that finds its necessary premises and
conditions in the phase of development reached by capitalism in the
1914-18 Imperialist War. Only the proletariat, through its creation of a
new organ of public authority, the system of Soviets, can give dynamic
expression to the fluid and incandescent mass of workers and restore
order amid the general upheaval of the productive forces. It is natural
and historically justified that it should be precisely in a period such
as this that the problem of forming a Communist Party should arise — a
party representing a proletarian vanguard which has a precise
consciousness of its historical mission, which will establish the new
social order and be both initiator and protagonist of the new and
unprecedented historical period.
Even the traditional political party of the Italian working class,
the Socialist Party, has not escaped the process of decomposition of all
forms of association, this process which is characteristic of the period
we are living through. This has been the colossal historical error of
the men who have been in charge of the controlling organs of our
association from the outbreak of the World War to the present day —
believing that they could preserve the old structure of the party when
it was crumbling from within. In fact, the Italian Socialist Party, if
you look at its traditions, at the historical origins of the currents it
is made up from, at its pact, tacit or explicit with the General
Confederation of Labour (a pact which has the effect, in all its
congresses, Councils and deliberative assemblies, of giving an
unwarranted power and influence to trade-union bureaucrats), at the
unlimited autonomy conceded to its parliamentary group (which gives
deputies, too, a power and influence at congresses, Councils and
high-ranking discussions which is similar to that of the union
bureaucrats and equally unjustified) — if you look at all these things,
the Italian Socialist Party is not different at all from the British
Labour Party; it is revolutionary only where the general statements
contained in its programme are concerned. It is a conglomeration of
parties: when it moves, it cannot help but move sluggishly and slowly.
It runs the permanent risk of becoming an easy prey for adventurers,
careerists and ambitious men without integrity or political capability.
With its heterogeneous character, with the endless snags in its
machinery, worn and sabotaged as it is by serve-padrone, it can never be in a position to
take upon itself the burden of and responsibility for the revolutionary
initiatives and actions demanded of it by the ceaseless pressure of
events. Here we have the explanation for the historical paradox that, in
Italy, it is the masses who propel and "educate" the party of the
working class and not the Party which guides and educates the
masses.
The Socialist Party claims to be the champion of Marxist doctrines.
One would therefore expect the Party to possess in these doctrines, a
compass to steer it through the confusion of events. One would expect it
to have that capacity for historical foresight that characterizes the
intelligent followers of Marxist dialect. One would expect it to possess
a general plan of action, based on this historical foresight and to be
in a position to issue clear and precise orders to the working class,
engaged in its struggle. But instead, the Socialist Party, the champion
of Marxism in Italy — just like the Partito Popolare, the party which
represents the most backward classes in the Italian population — is
exposed to all the pressures of the masses and it shifts and alters its
position following the shifts and alterations of the masses. This
Socialist Party, which proclaims itself to be the guide and educator of
the masses, is in fact nothing more than a wretched clerk, recording the
way in which the masses are operating of their own accord. This poor
Socialist Party, which proclaims itself to be at the head of the working
class, is nothing more than the baggage-train of the proletarian
army.
If this strange behaviour on the part of the Socialist Party, this
bizarre state that the party of the working class finds itself in, has
not yet led to a catastrophe, it is because there exist in the ranks of
the working class — in the urban Party sections, in the unions, in the
factories, in the villages — energetic groups of communists who are
conscious of their historical role, energetic and shrewd in their
actions, well equipped to guide and educate the proletarian masses
around them. It is because there exists, at the heart of the Socialist
Party, a potential Communist Party, which only needs an explicit
organization — a centralization, a discipline of its own in order to be
able to develop rapidly, to take over and renew the membership of the
party of the working class and to give a new direction to the
Confederation of Labour and the co-operative movement.
The immediate problem in this period — after the metal-workers'
struggle and before the congress in which the party is going to have to
adopt a serious and precisely defined attitude to the Communist
International — is precisely that of how to organize and centralize
these communist forces which already exist and are in operation. The
Socialist Party is crumbling at a rate of knots, falling further into
decay by the moment. In a very short space of time, the tendencies in
the Party have rearranged themselves completely. Faced with the
responsibilities of historical action and the obligations the party
accepted by joining the Communist International, individuals and groups
within it have become confused and shifted their ground. Centrist and
opportunist equivocation has captured a section of the Party's
leadership, spreading confusion and doubt in the sections. Amid this
general falling-off of conscience, will and faith, this tempest of
baseness, cowardice and defeatism, the duty of communists is to form
tight-knit groups, to rally and stand at the ready for the orders which
will come. Acting on the basis of the theses approved by the Second
Congress of the Third International, and on the basis of steadfast
discipline to the supreme authority of the worldwide workers' movement,
sincere and dedicated communists must carry out the preparatory work,
which is needed to set up, at the earliest possible opportunity, the
communist fraction of the Italian Socialist Party, which must then, at
the Florence Congress, for the good name of the Italian proletariat,
become, in name and in fact, the Communist Party of Italy, a section of
the Third Communist International. The communist fraction must have an
organic and powerfully centralized leadership apparatus. It must have
its own disciplined branches wherever the proletariat works, assembles
and struggles and a whole range of services and organs for supervision,
activity and propaganda, which will enable it to function and develop
right from the first as a real party.
After saving the working class from disaster in the metal-workers'
strike through their energy and spirit of initiative, the communists
must now follow through their attitudes and action to their logical
conclusion. They must save (by reconstructing it) the primordial fabric
of the party of the working class. They must give the Italian
proletariat a Communist Party which is capable of organizing the
workers' State and the conditions needed to bring about a communist
society.
Notes
Antonio Gramsci: The Communist Party
1920 Jan 21 See all postsAntonio Gramsci
satoshinakamotonetwork@proton.me
https://satoshinakamoto.network
I
Since Sorel, it has become a cliché to refer to the primitive Christian communities in assessing the modern proletarian movement. It must be said at once that Sorel is in no way responsible for the small-mindedness and intellectual crudity of his Italian admirers, just as Karl Marx is not responsible for the ridiculous ideological pretensions of "Marxists." Within the field of historical research, Sorel is an "inventor": he cannot be imitated; he does not supply his aspiring disciples with a method that can be applied mechanically, by anyone, on any occasion, and produce intelligent findings as a result. For Sorel, as for Marxist doctrine, Christianity represents a revolution at the height of its development — a revolution, that is, that has gone as far as it can, as far as creating a new and original system of moral, legal, philosophical and artistic relations. To assume these developments as an ideological blueprint for every revolution is a crude and unintelligent travesty of Sorel's historical intuitions. All it can give rise to is a series of historical researches on the "germs" of proletarian culture that we must be able to detect, if it is true (as it is for Sorel) that the proletarian revolution is immanent in modern industrial society and if it is true that from this revolution, as well, there will result a new set of rules for living and a wholly new system of relations, characteristic of the revolutionary class. What significance can be attached, then, to the assertion that, in contrast with the early Christans, the workers are not chaste, or sober, or very original in their lifestyle? Leaving to one side the kind of amateurish generalization that turns all "Turinese metal-workers" into a mob of brutes, who eat their roast chicken every day and get drunk in brothels at night, who neglect their families and look to the cinemas and an aping of bourgeois manners to satisfy their ideals of beauty and morality — leaving to one side this kind of amateurish and puerile generalization, the statement can still in no way become the premise for a historical judgement. It is equivalent, in historical terms, to saying that, since modern Christians eat well, use prostitutes, get drunk, give false testimony, commit adultery, etc., etc., it must be a myth that ascetics, saints and martyrs ever existed. Every historical phenomenon, in other words, must be studied for its own peculiar characteristics, in the context of contemporary realities, as a development of the freedom that manifests itself in ends, institutions and forms that absolutely cannot be confused or compared (except metaphorically) with the ends, institutions and forms of historical phenomena in the past.
Every revolution that, like the Christian and the communist, comes about and can only come about through a stirring of the vast popular masses at their deepest level, cannot do other than break down and destroy the entire existing system of social organization. Who can imagine and foresee what the immediate consequences will be when the endless hordes who are currently deprived of will or power finally make their entry into the arena of historical creation and destruction? Because they have never before experienced this "will" and this "power," they will expect to see their newly gained will and power manifested in every public and private act. They will find the whole existing world mysteriously alien and will want to destroy it from the roots. But precisely because of the sheer immensity of the revolution, its character of unpredictability and boundless freedom, who would dare to hazard so much as a single definitive hypothesis on what sentiments, what passions, what initiatives, what virtues will be forged in this glowing furnace? Everything that exists at present, everything we see around us today that lies outside the scope of our own will and force of character — what changes will it all undergo? Will not every single day lived at this level of intensity be a revolution in itself? Will not every change that takes place in individual consciousness — occurring, as it will, simultaneously across the whole mass of the people — have creative repercussions which are quite unimaginable?
Nothing can be predicted, in the realm of morality and sentiment, starting from what can be observed at present. Only one sentiment — which has now become a constant, a distinguishing feature of the working class — can be registered already: the sentiment of solidarity. But the intensity and strength of this sentiment can be counted on to sustain the will of resistance and self-sacrifice only for that period of time that even the people's meagre capacity for historical prediction can estimate, more or less accurately. They cannot be counted on, and thus relied on to sustain the historical will during the period of revolutionary creation and building of the new society, when it will be impossible to set a limit on how long resistance and sacrifice be called for. Because, by then, the enemy to be fought and defeated will no longer be outside the proletariat — a defined and manageable external physical presence. It will be within the proletariat itself; in its ignorance, its sluggishness, its ponderous slowness in grasping new insights. The dialectic of the class struggle will have become internalized and in every conscience the newly created man will have to be on his guard every moment against the bourgeois lying in ambush. Because of this the workers' trade union, the body that realizes proletarian solidarity in practice and disciplines it, cannot serve as the model and the basis for predictions concerning the future of civilization. The trade union is lacking in elements necessary to encourage the development of freedom. It is destined to undergo radical changes as a consequence of general developments. It is determined, not determining.
The proletarian movement, in its present phase, is striving to bring about a revolution in the way in which material things and physical forces are organized. Its distinguishing features cannot be the sentiments and passions that are distributed throughout the masses, that sustain the will of the masses. The distinguishing features of the proletarian revolution can only be looked for in the party of the working class, the Communist Party, which owes its existence and development to its disciplined organization of the will to form a State, the will to give a new, proletarian order to the existing arrangement of physical forces and to lay the foundations of popular liberty.
At the present moment, the Communist Party is the only institution that may be seriously compared with the religious communities of primitive Christianity. To the exent that the Party already exists on an international scale, one can hazard a comparison, and establish a scale of criteria for judging between the militants for the City of God and the militants for the City of Man. The communist is certainly not inferior to the Christian in the days of the catacombs. On the contrary! The ineffable end which Christianity promised to its champions is in its evocative mysteriousness, ample justification for heroism, saintliness, a thirst for martyrdom. There is no need for the great human resources of character and will to come into play in order to awaken a spirit of sacrifice in someone who believes in a heavenly reward and eternal bliss. The communist worker who, week after week, month after month, year after year, without asking for anything in return, follows up his eight hours work at the factory with eight hours work for the Party or the union or the co-operative — from the point of view of human history, this communist worker is greater than the slave or artisan who risked everything to make it to his secret prayer meeting. Similarly, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Leibknecht are greater than the greatest of Christian saints. Precisely because what they are fighting for is something concrete, human, defined, the warriors of the working class are greater than the warriors of God. The moral forces that sustain their will are the more infinite the more finite the end their will is directed towards.
How vast an expansion will come about in the sentiments of the worker who spends eight hours a day bending over his machine, repeating the ritual gestures of his job, as monotonous as the clicking of a circle of rosary beads, when he becomes a "master" and the measure of all social values? Is it not a miracle that the worker can still manage to think at all when he is reduced to working away without understanding the how and why of what he is doing? This miracle of the worker who, day after day, gains in spiritual autonomy and the freedom to create within the realm of ideas, struggling against his weariness and boredom, against the monotony of a job that tends to mechanize and hence to stifle his inner life — this miracle is being organized in the Communist Party, in the will to struggle and the revolutionary creativity that are expressed in the Communist Party.
The worker in the factory merely executes given tasks. He does not follow through the overall process of work and production. He is not a point that moves to create a line: he is a pin stuck in a particular place and the line is made up of the sequence of pins that have been set up by an alien will for its ends. The worker tends to carry over this way of being into all areas of his life: he readily adapts, in everything, to being a simple material executor, a "mass" guided by a will that is alien to his own. He is intellectually lazy, he cannot see and does not wish to see beyond his immediate horizon, and so he lacks any reliable criterion for choosing his leaders and he lets himself be easily swayed by promises. He wants to believe he can get what he wants without any great effort on his part and without having to think too much. The Communist Party is the instrument and the historical form of the process of inner liberation through which the worker is transformed from executor to initiator, from mass to leader and guide, from pure brawn to a brain and a will. The founding of the Communist Party gives a glimpse of that seed of liberty that germinate and grow to its full extent when the workers' State has prepared the necessary ground. The slave or artisan of the classical world came to know himself and realized his own liberation when he joined a Christian community, where he felt himself to be equal, a brother, because all were sons of the same father. It is just the same for the worker, when he joins the Communist Party, where he collaborates in "discovering" and "inventing" new ways of life, where he collaborates "consciously" in the world's activity; where he thinks, looks ahead, has a responsibility; where he organizes, rather than simply being organized; where he feels himself to be part of a vanguard that runs ahead pulling the whole popular mass along with it.
Even in purely organizational terms, the Communist Party has shown itself to be the particular form of the proletarian revolution. No previous revolution involved political parties: they were born after the bourgeois revolution and they have entered their decline on the terrain of parliamentary democracy. Here, as elsewhere, there is confirmation of the idea that capitalism throws up forces that it then cannot succeed in keeping under control. The democratic parties served to show up able politicians and secure their success at the polls. Today the men in government are imposed by the banks, the great newspapers, the industrial confederations; the parties are crumbling into a multitude of personal cliques. The Communist Party, arising out of the ashes of the socialist parties, is repudiating its democratic and parliamentary roots and revealing its essential characteristics which are completely new within history. The Russian Revolution is a revolution brought about by men who were organized by the Communist Party — men who forged themselves a new personality within the Party, developed new sentiments and realized a moral life which is destined to become the universal consciousness and the ultimate end of all men.
II
Political parties are the reflection and the nomenclature of the social classes. They emerge, develop, decline and renew themselves as the various strata of the warring social classes undergo changes of genuine historical significance, as they acquire a new and clearer awareness of themselves and their own interests. What has become characteristic of the present historical period, as a consequence of the imperialist war, which profoundly altered the structure of the national and international apparatus of production and exchange, is the rapidity of the process by which the traditional parliamentary parties, which emerged on the terrain of liberal democracy, are now falling apart and new political organizations are rising up alongside them. This general process obeys an implacable inner logic of its own, which is shown up in the disintegration of the old classes and groupings and in the rapid shifts in the position of whole strata of the population throughout the entire territory of the State and often throughout the entire territory under capitalist domination.
Even those social classes which historically have been the slowest and most sluggish in differentiating themselves, like the peasant class, have not escaped the chemical action of the reagents dissolving the body of society. On the contrary, it seems as though the slower and more sluggish these classes have been in the past, the more eager they are now to race on to the ultimate consequences in the dialectic of the class struggle — civil war and the violation of economic relations. In Italy, we have seen a powerful party of the rural class, the Partito Popolare, emerging as if from nowhere, in the space of two years. When it was set up, this party claimed to represent the economic interests and political aspirations of all the different social strata of rural Italy, from the baron with his latifondi,1 to the medium-sized landowner, from the small landholder to the tenant farmer, from the sharecropper to the penniless peasant. We have seen the Partito Popolare win almost a hundred seats in parliament with bloc lists completely dominated by the representatives of the barons, the great forest owners and the owners of large and medium-sized estates — a tiny minority of the rural population. We have seen internal struggles between tendencies in the Partito Popolare breaking out almost immediately and quickly becoming endemic — a reflection of the process of differentiation that was taking place in the original electoral body. The great masses of small landowners and peasants were no longer content to be the passive infantry-mass enabling the medium-sized and larger landowners to secure their interests. Under their energetic pressure, the Partito Popolare split into a right, a left and a centre, and we have seen the extreme left of the popolari, under pressure from the poorest peasants, adapting a revolutionary stance and entering into competition with the socialist party, which has also become the representative of the vast peasant masses. We are already witnessing the break-up of the Partito Popolare, whose parliamentary wing and Central Committee no longer represent the interests and the newly acquired self-consciousness of their mass electorate or the forces organized in the white unions.2 These are now represented by the extremists who, not wanting to lose control of them and unable to delude them with legal action in Parliament, are forced to resort to violent struggle and to invoking new political institutions of government.
The same process of rapid organization and even more rapid dissolution has also been apparent in the other political current that claimed to represent the interests of the peasants: the war veterans' association. It is a reflection of the tremendous internal crisis that is racking the whole of rural Italy, and that reveals itself in the massive strikes in the centre and the north, in the take-over and distribution of the great latifondi of Apulia and in the appearance of hundreds and thousands of armed peasants in the towns of Sicily.
This profound stirring of the peasant classes is shaking the framework of the democratic parliamentary state to its very foundations. Capitalism, as a political force, is being reduced to corporate associations of factory owners. It no longer possesses a political party whose ideology also extends to the petit bourgeois strata in the cities and the countryside and so ensures the survival of a broadly based legal state. In fact, capitalism has been reduced to relying for its political representation on the major newspapers (a print-run of 400,000, a thousand electors) and the Senate, which is immune, as an institution, from the actions and reactions of the great popular masses, but which also lacks authority and prestige in the country. Because of this, the political power of capitalism is tending to become even more closely allied with the upper ranks of the military — with the Royal Guard and the swarm of adventurers who have emerged since the Armistice, aspiring, every one of them, to become the Kornilov or the Bonaparte of Italy. The political power of capitalism can today only find expression in a military coup d'état and an attempt to impose a rigid national dictatorship to drive the brutalized Italian masses into the economy by sacking neighbouring countries sword in hand.
With the bourgeoisie worn down and exhausted as a ruling class, with capitalism exhausted as a mode of production and exchange, with the peasant class failing to provide a unified political force capable of forging a State, the working class is being ineluctably summoned by history to take upon itself the responsibilities of a ruling class. Only the proletariat is capable of creating a strong state that can make itself respected, because the proletariat has, in communism, a programme of economic reconstruction that finds its necessary premises and conditions in the phase of development reached by capitalism in the 1914-18 Imperialist War. Only the proletariat, through its creation of a new organ of public authority, the system of Soviets, can give dynamic expression to the fluid and incandescent mass of workers and restore order amid the general upheaval of the productive forces. It is natural and historically justified that it should be precisely in a period such as this that the problem of forming a Communist Party should arise — a party representing a proletarian vanguard which has a precise consciousness of its historical mission, which will establish the new social order and be both initiator and protagonist of the new and unprecedented historical period.
Even the traditional political party of the Italian working class, the Socialist Party, has not escaped the process of decomposition of all forms of association, this process which is characteristic of the period we are living through. This has been the colossal historical error of the men who have been in charge of the controlling organs of our association from the outbreak of the World War to the present day — believing that they could preserve the old structure of the party when it was crumbling from within. In fact, the Italian Socialist Party, if you look at its traditions, at the historical origins of the currents it is made up from, at its pact, tacit or explicit with the General Confederation of Labour (a pact which has the effect, in all its congresses, Councils and deliberative assemblies, of giving an unwarranted power and influence to trade-union bureaucrats), at the unlimited autonomy conceded to its parliamentary group (which gives deputies, too, a power and influence at congresses, Councils and high-ranking discussions which is similar to that of the union bureaucrats and equally unjustified) — if you look at all these things, the Italian Socialist Party is not different at all from the British Labour Party; it is revolutionary only where the general statements contained in its programme are concerned. It is a conglomeration of parties: when it moves, it cannot help but move sluggishly and slowly. It runs the permanent risk of becoming an easy prey for adventurers, careerists and ambitious men without integrity or political capability. With its heterogeneous character, with the endless snags in its machinery, worn and sabotaged as it is by serve-padrone,3 it can never be in a position to take upon itself the burden of and responsibility for the revolutionary initiatives and actions demanded of it by the ceaseless pressure of events. Here we have the explanation for the historical paradox that, in Italy, it is the masses who propel and "educate" the party of the working class and not the Party which guides and educates the masses.
The Socialist Party claims to be the champion of Marxist doctrines. One would therefore expect the Party to possess in these doctrines, a compass to steer it through the confusion of events. One would expect it to have that capacity for historical foresight that characterizes the intelligent followers of Marxist dialect. One would expect it to possess a general plan of action, based on this historical foresight and to be in a position to issue clear and precise orders to the working class, engaged in its struggle. But instead, the Socialist Party, the champion of Marxism in Italy — just like the Partito Popolare, the party which represents the most backward classes in the Italian population — is exposed to all the pressures of the masses and it shifts and alters its position following the shifts and alterations of the masses. This Socialist Party, which proclaims itself to be the guide and educator of the masses, is in fact nothing more than a wretched clerk, recording the way in which the masses are operating of their own accord. This poor Socialist Party, which proclaims itself to be at the head of the working class, is nothing more than the baggage-train of the proletarian army.
If this strange behaviour on the part of the Socialist Party, this bizarre state that the party of the working class finds itself in, has not yet led to a catastrophe, it is because there exist in the ranks of the working class — in the urban Party sections, in the unions, in the factories, in the villages — energetic groups of communists who are conscious of their historical role, energetic and shrewd in their actions, well equipped to guide and educate the proletarian masses around them. It is because there exists, at the heart of the Socialist Party, a potential Communist Party, which only needs an explicit organization — a centralization, a discipline of its own in order to be able to develop rapidly, to take over and renew the membership of the party of the working class and to give a new direction to the Confederation of Labour and the co-operative movement.
The immediate problem in this period — after the metal-workers' struggle and before the congress in which the party is going to have to adopt a serious and precisely defined attitude to the Communist International — is precisely that of how to organize and centralize these communist forces which already exist and are in operation. The Socialist Party is crumbling at a rate of knots, falling further into decay by the moment. In a very short space of time, the tendencies in the Party have rearranged themselves completely. Faced with the responsibilities of historical action and the obligations the party accepted by joining the Communist International, individuals and groups within it have become confused and shifted their ground. Centrist and opportunist equivocation has captured a section of the Party's leadership, spreading confusion and doubt in the sections. Amid this general falling-off of conscience, will and faith, this tempest of baseness, cowardice and defeatism, the duty of communists is to form tight-knit groups, to rally and stand at the ready for the orders which will come. Acting on the basis of the theses approved by the Second Congress of the Third International, and on the basis of steadfast discipline to the supreme authority of the worldwide workers' movement, sincere and dedicated communists must carry out the preparatory work, which is needed to set up, at the earliest possible opportunity, the communist fraction of the Italian Socialist Party, which must then, at the Florence Congress, for the good name of the Italian proletariat, become, in name and in fact, the Communist Party of Italy, a section of the Third Communist International. The communist fraction must have an organic and powerfully centralized leadership apparatus. It must have its own disciplined branches wherever the proletariat works, assembles and struggles and a whole range of services and organs for supervision, activity and propaganda, which will enable it to function and develop right from the first as a real party.
After saving the working class from disaster in the metal-workers' strike through their energy and spirit of initiative, the communists must now follow through their attitudes and action to their logical conclusion. They must save (by reconstructing it) the primordial fabric of the party of the working class. They must give the Italian proletariat a Communist Party which is capable of organizing the workers' State and the conditions needed to bring about a communist society.
Notes
Large, often under-cultivated landed estates, characteristic of southern Italy.↩︎
The Catholic trade unions, as opposed to the socialist ("red") unions.↩︎
Maid who is really the mistress of house.↩︎