Class Intransigence and Italian History

This article appeared unsigned in II Grido del Popolo in May 18, 1918. It is known though that it was written by Gramsci.

In order to understand it, one must know the time Gramsci was writing it in. The PSI was going through considerable upheaval as divisions between the revolutionaries and reformists were becoming more pointed. Gramsci opens up with a basic overview of the "democracy" in Italy, something that many of us looking at wouldn't see too different from our own systems.

What does the state represent from the socialist point of view? The state is the economic-political organization of the bourgeois class. The state is the bourgeois class in its modern, concrete expression. The bourgeois class is not a unified entity outside the state. As a result of the working of free competition, new groups of capitalist producers are constantly forming to fulfil the regime's economic capacity. Each one of these groups yearns to remove itself from the bloody struggle of competition through recourse to monopoly. The state's function is to find a juridical settlement to internal class disputes, to clashes between opposed interests; thereby it unifies different groupings and gives the class a solid and united external appearance. Competition between groupings is concentrated at the point of government, of state power. The government is the prize for the strongest bourgeois party or grouping; the latter's strength wins for it the right to regulate state power, to turn it in any particular direction and to manipulate it at any time in accordance with its economic and political programme.

The bourgeois parties and the Socialist Party have utterly different attitudes to the state.

The bourgeois parties are either the representatives of categories of producers, or they are simply a swarm of 'coachman-flies' who make not the slightest impact on the framework of the state, but drone their speeches and suck the honey of favouritism.

The Socialist Party is not a sectional, but a class organization: its morphology is quite different from that of any other party. It can only view the state, the network of bourgeois class power, as its antagonistic likeness. It cannot enter into direct or indirect competition for the conquest of the state without committing suicide, without losing its nature, without becoming a mere political faction that is estranged from the historical activity of the proletariat, without turning into a swarm of 'coachman-flies' on the hunt for a bowl of blancmange in which to get stuck and perish ingloriously. The Socialist Party does not conquer the state, it replaces it; it replaces the regime, abolishes party government and replaces free competition by the organization of production and exchange.

Gramsci also points out that Italy's problem was compounded by its ruling class and interests not being united in the borders that other countries had solved, as a consequence of how Italy was formed.

In discussions and polemics, words are too frequently superimposed on historical reality. When speaking of Italy we use words like capitalists, proletarians, states, parties as if they represented social entities which had reached the peak of their historical development, or a level of maturity comparable to that achieved in the economically advanced countries. But in Italy capitalism is in its infancy, and the law is in no way adapted to the real situation. The law is a modern excrescence on an ancient edifice.

...

the Italian state has retained the substance and framework of a despotic state (the same can be said of France). There exists a bureaucratic, centralist regime, founded on the tyrannical Napoleonic system, with the express aim of crushing and containing any spontaneous drive or movement. Foreign affairs are conducted in the highest secrecy -not only are discussions not public, but even the terms of treaties are kept from those whom they nevertheless affect...

<Parliament is, in reality, subordinated to the executive power, it has no effective capacity of control. The parliamentary deputies are no more than the messenger boys of local groups of peasants or the third estate who go up to the capital to request particular privileges, as in a full-blooded feudal regime, not to establish the rule of law. >

Hence the class state, in which the effectiveness of the principle of free competition culminates, with great parties representing the vast interests of the different sectors of production, does not exist. What has existed has been the dictatorship of one man [Giolitti], the representative of the narrow political interests of Piedmont, who in order to keep the country united, has imposed on Italy a centralized and despotic system of colonial domination. The system is collapsing; new bourgeois forces have arisen and are growing stronger -ever more insistently they are demanding recognition of their interests. Interventionism is a contingent phenomenon, and so is pacifism -the war will not last forever. But what is in imminent danger is the despotic Giolittian state, the entire mass of parasitic interests encrusted upon this old state, and the old enfeebled bourgeoisie which sees its super-privileges threatened by the agitation of bourgeois youth wanting its place in the government, wanting to be part of the free play of political competition. Provided no new event cuts off its evolution, this new bourgeois generation will undoubtedly rejuvenate the state and throw out all the traditional dross. For a democratic state is not the product of a kind heart or a liberal education; it is a necessity of life for large-scale production, for busy exchange, for the concentration of the population in modern, capitalist cities.

The end of the article discusses the role of the worker and the socialist party outside the mainstream bourgeoisie parties. As Gramsci points out early on in the article, government is an arena for the factions of the bourgeoisie to vie for control of state power for their own advancement. He proclaims that the socialist party is a workers' party and must stay inline with this by practicing intransigence- refusing to work with the bourgeois parties- if they wish to remain a true party based on class struggle, not class collaboration.

Intransigence is not inertia, since it forces others to move and act.3 It is not based on stupidities, as La Stampa so cleverly insinuates. It is a principled policy, the policy of a proletariat that is conscious of its revolutionary mission as accelerator of the capitalist evolution of society, as a reagent clarifying the chaos of bourgeois production and politics and forcing modern states to carry through their natural mission as dismantlers of the feudal institutions that still, after the collapse of the former societies, survive and hinder historical development.

...

The supreme law of capitalist society is free competition between all social forces. Merchants compete for markets, bourgeois groupings compete for the government, the two classes compete for the state. Merchants seek to create monopolies behind protective legislation. Each bourgeois grouping would like to monopolize the government, and to be able to make exclusive use of the spell-bound energies of the class that is outside governmental competition. Intransigents are free-traders. They do not want barons whether sugar and steel barons or barons in government. The law of freedom must be allowed unrestricted operation; it is intrinsic to bourgeois activity, the chemical reagent that is continually dissolving its cadres and forcing them to improve and perfect themselves. The powerful Anglo-Saxon bourgeois cadres acquired their modern productive capacity through the implacable play of free competition. The English state has evolved and been purged of its noxious
elements through the free clash of bourgeois social forces that finally constituted themselves into the great historic parties, the Liberals and Conservatives. Indirectly from this clash the proletariat has gained cheap bread, and a substantial series of rights guaranteed by law and custom: the right to assemble, the right to strike, an individual security which in Italy remains a chimerical myth.

Gramsci goes on to describe that the Italian government is going through crisis and how the government had begun to reach out to socialist deputies to try and support their agenda.

But no, they would rather make the proletariat do their moving for them, or better still, they would like to make the socialist deputies vote.

So intransigence is inertia, is it? Movement, however, is never just a physical act; it is intellectual as well. Indeed, it is always intellectual before becoming physical -except for puppets on a string. Take away from the proletariat its class consciousness, and what have you? Puppets dancing on a string!

This is somewhat of an attack on reformist elements of the Italian Socialist Party- led by figures like Filipio Turrati, who were open to working with bourgeoisie parties to advance some legislation. Gramsci, as did other Marxists, were critical of the tendency for these reformist politicians to cast away their principles of class struggle and enter into collaboration with bourgeois parties, and in turn they themselves become instruments of the bourgeoisie. These tensions increased in the following years, culminating in 1921 when the Revolutionary Communist faction of the party left en masse to form the PCd'I.