"The Revolution against Capital"

From the readings the first I select is "The Revolution against Capital", from which is Gramsci's first commitment to supporting Lenin and the Bolsheviks. This is a relatively early piece in Gramsci's career and is more of a statement than a contribution to theory, but it provides a look into Gramsci's mind and political beliefs. This was written in December of 1917 in Avanti!.

This is the revolution against Karl Marx's Capital. In Russia, Marx's Capital was more the book of the bourgeoisie than of the proletariat. It stood as the critical demonstration of how events should follow a predetermined course: how in Russia a bourgeoisie had to develop, and a capitalist era had to open, with the setting-up of a Western-type civilization, before the proletariat could even think in terms of its own revolt, its own class demands, its own revolution.

On another level, this is a rejection of gradualist arguments within the international socialist movement. That is a given society must move through a period of bourgeoisie rule and allow capitalism to develop, before the conditions necessary for socialism and class awareness can arise.

And yet there is a fatality even in these events, and if the Bolsheviks reject some of the statements in Capital, they do not reject its invigorating, immanent thought. These people are not 'Marxists', that is all; they have not used the works of the Master to compile a rigid doctrine of dogmatic utterances never to be questioned.

And on this point, he shows his position of Marxist thought having to evolve and move beyond certain dogmatic interpretation of Marxism and bring it inline so as to provide a practical, applicable solution with conditions in mind.

Afterwards Gramsci goes into a description of what would happen in "normal conditions"- the development of capitalism, and the clash between the bourgeoisie and the Proletariat, which will create the conditions and awareness in workers to have a socialist revolution.

He then points out that Russia is not something that can be considered a "normal condition", and that the Russian revolutionaries (the Bolsheviks in Gramsci's mind) should be able to assert their commitment to socialism. As he puts it,

Why should they wait for the history of England to be repeated in Russia, for the bourgeoisie to arise, for the class struggle to begin, so that class consciousness may be formed and the final catastrophe of the capitalist world eventually hit them? The Russian people -or at least a minority of the Russian people -has already passed through these experiences in thought. It has gone beyond them. It will make use of them now to assert itself just as it will make use of Western capitalist experience to bring itself rapidly to the same level of production as the Western world. In capitalist terms, North America is more advanced than England, because the Anglo-Saxons in North America took off at once from the level England had reached only after long evolution. Now the Russian proletariat, socialistically educated, will begin its history at the highest level England has reached today.

Since it has to start from scratch, it will start from what has been perfected elsewhere, and hence will be driven to achieve that level of economic maturity which, Marx considered to be a necessary condition for collectivism. The revolutionaries themselves will create the conditions needed for the complete and full achievement of their goal. And they will create them faster than capitalism could have done. The criticisms that socialists have made of the bourgeois system, to emphasize its imperfections and its squandering of wealth, can now be applied by the revolutionaries to do better, to avoid the squandering and not fall prey to the imperfections. Itwill at first be a collectivism of poverty and suffering. But a bourgeois regime would have inherited the same conditions of poverty and suffering.

In other words, why should the Bolsheviks and the Russians be constrained by dogmatic thought from the standard interpretation of Marxism at the time? Why can't they use the acquired experience from their comrades elsewhere and move society under a socialist framework, to industrialization, progression, and eventually collectivization? To learn from their mistakes and adjust, to create a more just society rather than resign to the fate that they would have to allow for the creation of a bourgeoisie state to replace the imperial one?

Such a statement was also directed at the current state of the PSI at the time. The reformist wing of the party, led by Turati and others, while in the minority still held authority in the party due to their alliances in segments of trade-union leadership, and were opposed to revolution unless they could engineer certain conditions within capitalist society.

This is the beginning of when Gramsci committed to Leninism, also being fascinated by Lenin's idea of a worker-farmer alliance that Gramsci saw as also applicable to Italy's own divisions (Industrial North, Agrarian South) to start a revolution and ultimately cast down the issues that divided Italy, a condition that Gramsci felt was created due to the nature of the Risorgimento not truly "unifying" Italy.

To this end like many others who would support Lenin and his revolution, Gramsci would earnestly and eagerly follow the early stages of the Russian revolution, the Civil War, and the formation of the Soviet Union hoping it would provide a model and hope for the people in their own countries.