The L'Ordine Nuovo days- "Workers' Democracy"

As I had posted earlier, L'Ordine Nuovo was founded between Gramsci, Togliatti, Terracini, and Tasca as a cultural journal. In time it began to explore political concepts and during the agitation of workers in Italy after the war, they began to endorse the position of "councils" as a form of organization and governance by the proletariat.

Gramsci and others felt that the experiences of the Soviets in Russia proved the relevancy of councils in the revolution and the groundwork for a socialist society. The paper had its most influence in Turin and had encouraged the formation of councils there.

The paper helped to bring Gramsci into greater awareness in the socialist scene, particularly in Marxist circles as the divisions between revolutionaries, "centrists", and reformists were becoming more pronounced. Gramsci's most common criticism here by others was most articulated by Bordiga who felt that Gramsci's support of councils betrayed both syndicalist and economist ideas in Gramsci's thought.

The reputation of L'Ordine Nuovo got a great boost when Lenin mentioned that its positions were the closest to his.

Three of the readers I've posted has selections from the L'Ordine Nuovo publications. In the Novacs reader, it's under the chapter of "Factory Councils and Socialist Democracy", in the Cambrdige reader it is under "The New Order", and in the Hoare 1910-1920 it is under "L'ORDINE NUOVO AND THE FACTORY COUNCILS".

L'Ordine Nuovo eventually got wrecked by a dispute by Tasca and Gramsci over the role of trade unions, and eventually the Factory Council position got discredited as the Bienno Rosso fizzled out. Bordiga's party positions came to be more adopted by the Communists then and Gramsci found himself alone in his defense of the councils, and eventually abandoned it. Gramsci acknowledged the role of the party in directing and organizing the workers by 1925.

I will begin to take selections highlighting the arguments from each piece. The overall argument Gramsci made is that the councils represented an "expression" of the proletariat and were the germs of a future socialist order. It represents an early part of the development in his thought. While he backed away from councils in time, the concept of a self-regulating association of workers councils showed itself in his discussions on the Civil Society. In some interpretations of the Prison Notebooks, it was said that the "Civil Society" that the Marxists secured in their wars of position and wars of maneuver would be the element left over after the state "withered away". In a sense, the idea of these worker-based constructs without the influence of a state authority would be the face of a communist world.

My first selection is from "Workers' Democracy". This can be found in the Novac reader on page 39 of the PDF, and on 65 of the Hoare 1910-1920 collection. Some highlights:

From the getgo, Gramsci's idea of the foundations of a socialist state already existing within the workers organizations comes to the foreground. He states:

The socialist State already exists potentially in the institutions of social life characteristic of the exploited working class. To link these institutions, coordinating and ordering them into a highly centralized hierarchy of competences and powers, while respecting the necessary autonomy and articulation of each, is to create a genuine workers' democracy here and now- a workers' democracy in effective and active opposition to the bourgeois State, and prepared to replace it here and now in all its essential functions of administering and controlling the national heritage.

In here he was referring to the institutions of the party and trade unions, as well as the general notions of class-struggle, that made the organization possible for forming an opposition against the bourgeois state. This argument does bear some similarities again to the concepts of the war of position in forming a counter-hegemonic block to the bourgeois order that Gramsci formulated in the prison notebooks.

Gramsci posits the issue of "absorbing and disciplining" the entirety of the working class into the socialist order. The positions on the party that would get him in scuffles already comes known here:

It will take the Socialist Party and the trade unions years, even decades of effort to absorb the whole of the working class. These two institutions will not be identified immediately with the proletarian State.

He goes on to describe the position of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, stating that "they [working class] have continued to exist independently of the State. with the pany functioning as a driving force, and the unions as instruments for supervision and the achievement of limited reforms."

Instead he raises that solutions may lay in the social lives of the working class themselves. He states that: "But the social life of the working class is rich in the very institutions and activities which need to be developed, fully organized and coordinated into a broad and flexible system that is capable of absorbing and disciplining the entire working class."

He sums up these positions as so:

The workshop with its internal commissions, the socialist clubs, the peasant communities - these are the centres of proletarian life we should be working in directly.

The internal commissions are organs of workers' democracy which must be freed from the limitations imposed on them by the entrepreneurs, and infused with new life and energy. Today the internal commissions limit the power of the capitalist in the factory and perform functions of arbitration and discipline. Tomorrow, developed and enriched, they must be the organs of proletarian power, replacing the capitalist in all his useful functions of management and administration.

He proposes a simple slogan: "All power in the workshop to the workshop committees" along with ''All State power to the Workers' and Peasants' councils". Gramsci goes on to describe how these councils should be formed.

The communists organized in the Pany and the ward clubs would thus be presented with a vast field for concrete, revolutionary propaganda. The clubs, in agreement with the urban pany sections, should carry out a survey of the working-class forces in their area, and become the seat of the ward council of workshop delegates, the ganglion co-ordinating and centralizing all the proletarian energies in the ward.

The electoral system could vary according to the size of the workshops: the aim, however, should be to dect one delegate for every fifteen workers, divided into categories (as is done in English factories) and ending up, through a series of elections, with a committee of factory delegates representing every aspect of work (manual workers. clerical workers. technicians). The ward committee should also seek to incorporate delegates from other categories of workers living in the ward: waiters, cab-drivers. tramway men, railwaymen, road-sweepers, private employees, clerks and others.

The ward committee should be an expression of the whole of the working class living in the ward, an expression that is legitimate and authoritative, that can enforce a spontaneously delegated discipline that is backed with powers, and can order the immediate and complete cessation of all work throughout the ward.

The ward committees would grow into urban commissariats, controlled and disciplined by the Socialist Party and the craft federations.

These ideas were not unique to Gramsci however. He had drawn on this from previous attempts at industrial democracy in Europe, and the writings of Lenin and Luxemburg. However it did represent something that had not got a lot of coverage in Italy at the time, something that excited the workers' after decades of the previous tactics of trying to "develop" Italy out of the domination of aristocratic dominances, here he proposed a total break from this electoral tradition. It also, for various reasons, seemed to indicate a syndicalist streak in Gramsci's thought at the time.

Like Lenin's idea of attempting to involve workers in all aspects of governance and the economy as a means to "educate" and raise awareness, Gramsci too felt that these councils would serve to advance the same goal. As he sums up:

It would be a magnificent school of political and administrative experience and would involve the masses down to the last man, accustoming them to tenacity and perseverance, and to thinking of themselves as an army in the field which needs a strict cohesion if it is not to be destroyed and reduced to slavery

Gramsci goes on however to say that this piece is to serve as a platform for discussion and further improvement. To make workers aware of the potentials- and challenges- in the revolution. Drawing upon the experiences of the Russian Revolution and Lenin's slogan of "All Power to the Soviets", Gramsci warns that the "state can not be improvised", and the Italian communists should be aware that "the work of reconstruction itself will demand so much time and effort that every day and every act should be dedicated to it."

Gramsci wrote this along with Togliatti in 1919 for L'Ordine Nuovo, though it was unsigned. It was the first major foray into the idea of "workers' councils" and wanted to be a rallying cry for a revolution, for workers to take up arms on their own. This piece appeared in the same month as the earlier publication- which you can read in the Cambridge collection on 138- which began to expound the failures of the bourgeois state in the "rule of law", and the ills that began to affect the state. Essentially this "Workers' Democracy" served as a foil- another world is possible.