Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-Honor Italian Communist Leader Antonio Gramsci - Workers’ democracy (1919)

Markin comment:

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices. This year we pay special honor to American Communist party founder and later Trotskyist leader, James P. Cannon, Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, and German Left Communist Karl Korsch.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
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Antonio Gramsci 1919-Workers’ democracy

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Source: L'Ordine Nuovo, 21 June 1919;
Translated: by Michael Carley.

A nagging problem afflicts every socialists who feels alive the sense of historic responsibility which hangs over the working class and the party which represents the critical and functioning consciousness of the mission of this class.

How to control the immense social forces which the war has unleashed? How to discipline them and give them a political form which contains in itself the virtue of developing normally, of integrating itself continuously, until it becomes the framework of the socialist state in which the dictator of the proletariat will be embodied. How to weld the present to the future, satisfying the urgent necessities of the present and working usefully to create and “anticipate” the future?

This article aims to be a stimulus to thought and work; it aims to be an invitation to the best and most conscious workers to reflect and, each in the sphere of his own competence and his own action, to collaborate on the solution of the problem, focussing the attention of comrades and associations. Only from a united and common work of clarification, persuasion and reciprocal education will the concrete action of construction be born.

The socialist state potentially already exists in the institutions of social life characteristic of the exploited working class. Connecting these institutions to each other, coordinating them and subordinating them in a hierarchy of competences and powers, strongly focussing them, while respecting the necessary autonomy and flexibility, means creating from now a true and proper workers’ democracy, in effective and active counterposition to the bourgeois state, already prepared to replace the bourgeois state in all of its essential functions of management and control of national property.

The labour movement is today directed by the Socialist Party and by Confederation of Labour; but the exercise of the social power of the Socialist Party and of the Confederation takes place, for the major mass of workers, indirectly, by force of prestige and of enthusiasm, by authoritarian pressure, thus by inertia. The sphere of prestige of the party expands daily, reaches working classes hitherto untouched, implants the consensus and desire to work vigorously for the coming of communism in groups and individuals up to now absent from the political struggle. It is necessary to give a political form and a permanent discipline to these disordered and chaotic energies, to absorb, assemble and empower them, to make of the proletarian and semiproletarian class an organized society which educates itself, which makes its own experience, which acquires a responsible consciousness of the duties which fall to the classes come to state power.

The Socialist Party and the trade unions cannot absorb the whole working class, except through the work of years and decades. They do not identify immediately with the proletarian state; in the communist republics in fact, they continue to operate independently of the state, as institutes of propulsion (the party) or of control and partial realization (the unions). The party must continue to be the organ of communist education, the focus of the faith, the repository of doctrine, the supreme power which harmonizes and brings to a point the organized and disciplined forces of the working and peasant class. Precisely to rigidly develop this its office, the party cannot throw open the doors to an invasion of new members, not used to the exercise of responsibility and discipline.

But the social life of the working class is rich with institutions, it articulates itself in multiple activities. Precisely these institutions and these activities need to be developed, organized together, connected in a vast and flexibly articulated system which absorbs and disciplines the whole working class.

The workshop with its internal commissions, the socialist circles, the peasant communities, are the centres of proletarian life in which it is necessary to work directly.

The internal commissions are organs of workers’ democracy which should be freed from the limits imposed by owners, and in which new life and energy should be inspired. Today the commissions limit the power of the capitalist in the factory and perform functions of arbitration and discipline. Developed and enriched, they should tomorrow be organs of proletarian power which will replace the capitalist in all his useful functions of direction and administration.

Already workers should proceed to the election of vast assemblies of delegates, chosen from the best and most conscious comrades, on the watchword: “All power in the workshop to the workshop committee,” matched to the other: “All state power to the worker and peasant councils.”

A vast field of concrete revolutionary propaganda would open for communists organized in the party and in the district circles. The circles, in agreement with the urban sections, should make a census of the labour forces of the area, and become the seat of the district council of the workshop delegates, the ganglion which ties and concentrates the proletarian energies of the district. The electoral systems can be varied according to the size of the workshops: however, the aim should be to elect one delegate for every 15 workers divided by category (as is done in English workshops), arriving, by gradual elections, at a committee of factory delegates which includes representatives of the whole labour complex (blue collar, white collar, technical). The district committee should also aim to include delegates from the other categories of workers living in the district: catering, haulage, trams, railways, refuse, white collar, self-employed, shopwork, etc.

The district committee should be an emanation of the whole working class living in the district, legitimate and authoritative, able to impose discipline, invested with power, spontaneously delegated, and order the immediate and complete cessation of all work in the whole district.

The district committees will be enlarged in urban commissions, controlled and disciplined by the Socialist Party and by the trade federations.

Such a system of workers’ democracy (integrated with equivalent peasant organizations) would give a form and a discipline to the masses, would be a magnificent school of political and administrative experience, would assemble the masses up to the last man, habituating them to tenacity and perseverance, habituating them to consider themselves an army in the field which needs a firm cohesion if it does not want to be destroyed and reduced to slavery. Every factory would form one or more regiments of this army, with its corporals, with its communication services, with its officers, with its general staff, delegated powers for free election, not imposed authoritarianly Through the rallies, held inside the workshop, with the unceasing work of propaganda and persuasion developed by the most conscious elements, a radical transformation of the workers’ psychology would take place, would render the masses better prepared for and capable of the exercise of power, would diffuse a consciousness of the duties and rights of the comrade and of the worker, concrete and efficient because spontaneously generated by the living historical experience.

We have already said: these rapid notes are put forward only to stimulate thought and action. Every aspect of the problem deserves a vast and deep treatment, clarifications, subsidiary and coordinated integration. But the concrete and complete solution of the problems of socialist life can be given only by communist practice: discussion in common, which sympathetically modifies consciousnesses uniting them and filling them with working enthusiasm. To tell the truth, to arrive together at the truth, is to achieve a communist and revolutionary act. The formula “dictatorship of the proletariat” must cease to be only a formula, an occasion for outbursts of revolutionary phraseology. Whoever wants the ends, should want the means. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the inauguration of a new state, typically proletarian, in which combine the institutional experiences of the oppressed class, in which the social life of the worker and peasant class becomes a widespread and strongly organized system. This state is not improvised: the Russian Bolshevik communists have worked for eight months to propagate and make concrete the watchword: all power to the soviets, and the soviets have been known to Russian workers since 1905. The communists must treasure the Russian experience and save time and effort: the work of reconstruction will require for itself much time and much effort, to which every day and every act must be destined.

*Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-Honor Early Italian Communist Party Leader Antonio Gramsci

Markin comment:

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.

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Frank Rosengarten

An Introduction to Gramsci's Life and Thought

Transcribed to www.marxists.org with the kind permission of Frank Rosengarten.


Antonio Gramsci was born on January 22, 1891 in Ales in the province of Cagliari in Sardinia. He was the fourth of seven children born to Francesco Gramsci and Giuseppina Marcias. His relationship with his father was never very close, but he had a strong affection and love for his mother, whose resilience, gift for story-telling and pungent humor made a lasting impression on him. Of his six siblings, Antonio enjoyed a mutual interest in literature with his younger sister Teresina, and seems to have always felt a spiritual kinship with his two brothers, Gennaro, the oldest of the Gramsci children, and Carlo, the youngest. Gennaro's early embrace of socialism contributed significantly to Antonio's political development.

In 1897, Antonio's father was suspended and subsequently arrested and imprisoned for five years for alleged administrative abuses. Shortly thereafter, Giuseppina and her children moved to Ghilarza, where Antonio attended elementary school. Sometime during these years of trial and near poverty, he fell from the arms of a servant, to which his family attributed his hunched back and stunted growth: he was an inch or two short of five feet in height.

At the age of eleven, after completing elementary school, Antonio worked for two years in the tax office in Ghilarza, in order to help his financially strapped family. Because of the five-year absence of Francesco, these were years of bitter struggle. Nevertheless, he continued to study privately and eventually returned to school, where he was judged to be of superior intelligence, as indicated by excellent grades in all subjects.

Antonio continued his education, first in Santu Lussurgiu, about ten miles from Ghilarza, then, after graduating from secondary school, at the Dettori Lyceum in Cagliari, where he shared a room with his brother Gennaro, and where he came into contact for the first time with organized sectors of the working class and with radical and socialist politics. But these were also years of privation, during which Antonio was partially dependent on his father for financial support, which came only rarely. In his letters to his family, he accused his father repeatedly of unpardonable procrastination and neglect. His health deteriorated, and some of the nervous symptoms that were to plague him at a later time were already in evidence.

1911 was an important year in young Gramsci's life. After graduating from the Cagliari lyceum, he applied for and won a scholarship to the University of Turin, an award reserved for needy students from the provinces of the former Kingdom of Sardinia. Among the other young people to compete for this scholarship was Palmiro Togliatti, future general secretary of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and, with Gramsci and several others, among the most capable leaders of that embattled Party. Antonio enrolled in the Faculty of Letters. At the University he met Angelo Tasca and several of the other men with whom he was to share struggles first in the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and then, after the split that took place in January 1921, in the PCI.

At the University, despite years of terrible suffering due to inadequate diet, unheated flats, and constant nervous exhaustion, Antonio took a variety of courses, mainly in the humanities but also in the social sciences and in linguistics, to which he was sufficiently attracted to contemplate academic specialization in that subject. Several of his professors, notably Matteo Bartoli, a linguist, and Umberto Cosmo, a Dante scholar, became personal friends.

In 1915, despite great promise as an academic scholar, Gramsci became an active member of the PSI, and began a journalistic career that made him among the most feared critical voices in Italy at that time. His column in the Turin edition of Avanti!, and his theatre reviews were widely read and influential. He regularly spoke at workers' study-circles on various topics, such as the novels of Romain Rolland, for whom he felt a certain affinity, the Paris Commune, the French and Italian revolutions and the writings of Karl Marx. It was at this time, as the war dragged on and as Italian intervention became a bloody reality, Gramsci assumed a somewhat ambivalent stance, although his basic position was that the Italian socialists should use intervention as an occasion to turn Italian national sentiment in a revolutionary rather than a chauvinist direction. It was also at this time, in 1917 and 1918, that he began to see the need for integration of political and economic action with cultural work, which took form as a proletarian cultural association in Turin.

The outbreak of the Bolshevik revolution in October 1917 further stirred his revolutionary ardor, and for the remainder of the war and in the years thereafter Gramsci identified himself closely, although not entirely uncritically, with the methods and aims of the Russian revolutionary leadership and with the cause of socialist transformation throughout the advanced capitalist world.

In the spring of 1919, Gramsci, together with Angelo Tasca, Umberto Terracini and Togliatti, founded L'Ordine Nuovo: Rassegna Settimanale di Cultura Socialista (The New Order: A Weekly Review of Socialist Culture), which became an influential periodical (on a weekly and later on a bi-monthly publishing schedule) for the following five years among the radical and revolutionary Left in Italy. The review gave much attention to political and literary currents in Europe, the USSR, and the United States.

For the next few years, Gramsci devoted most of his time to the development of the factory council movement, and to militant journalism, which led in January 1921 to his siding with the Communist minority within the PSI at the Party's Livorno Congress. He became a member of the PCI's central committee, but did not play a leading role until several years later. He was among the most prescient representatives of the Italian Left at the inception of the fascist movement, and on several occasions predicted that unless unified action were taken against the rise of Mussolini's movement, Italian democracy and Italian socialism would both suffer a disastrous defeat.

The years 1921 to 1926, years "of iron and fire" as he called them, were eventful and productive. They were marked in particular by the year and a half he lived in Moscow as an Italian delegate to the Communist International (May 1922- November 1923), his election to the Chamber of Deputies in April 1924, and his assumption of the position of general secretary of the PCI. His personal life was also filled with significant experiences, the chief one being his meeting with and subsequent marriage to Julka Schucht (1896-1980), a violinist and member of the Russian Communist Party whom he met during his stay in Russia. Antonio and Julka had two sons, Delio (1924-1981), and Giuliano, born in 1926, who lives today in Moscow with his wife.

On the evening of November 8, 1926, Gramsci was arrested in Rome and, in accordance with a series of "Exceptional Laws" enacted by the fascist-dominated Italian legislature, committed to solitary confinement at the Regina Coeli prison. This began a ten-year odyssey, marked by almost constant physical and psychic pain as a result of a prison experience that culminated, on April 27, 1937, in his death from a cerebral hemorrhage. No doubt the stroke that killed him was but the final outcome of years and years of illnesses that were never properly treated in prison.

Yet as everyone familiar with the trajectory of Gramsci's life knows, these prison years were also rich with intellectual achievement, as recorded in the Notebooks he kept in his various cells that eventually saw the light after World War II, and as recorded also in the extraordinary letters he wrote from prison to friends and especially to family members, the most important of whom was not his wife Julka but rather a sister-in-law, Tania Schucht. She was the person most intimately and unceasingly involved in his prison life, since she had resided in Rome for many years and was in a position to provide him not only with a regular exchange of thoughts and feelings in letter form but with articles of clothing and with numerous foods and medicines he sorely needed to survive the grinding daily routine of prison life.

After being sentenced on June 4, 1928, with other Italian Communist leaders, to 20 years, 4 months and 5 days in prison, Gramsci was consigned to a prison in Turi, in the province of Bari, which turned out to be his longest place of detention (June 1928 -- November 1933). Thereafter he was under police guard at a clinic in Formia, from which he was transferred in August 1935, always under guard, to the Quisisana Hospital in Rome. It was there that he spent the last two years of his life. Among the people, in addition to Tania, who helped him either by writing to him or by visiting him when possible, were his mother Giuseppina, who died in 1933, his brother Carlo, his sisters Teresina and Grazietta, and his good friend, the economist Piero Sraffa, who throughout Gramsci's prison ordeal provided a crucial and indispenable service to Gramsci. Sraffa used his personal funds and numerous professional contacts that were necessary in order to obtain the books and periodicals Gramsci needed in prison. Gramsci had a prodigious memory, but it is safe to say that without Sraffa's assistance, and without the intermediary role often played by Tania, the Prison Notebooks as we have them would not have come to fruition.

Gramsci's intellectual work in prison did not emerge in the light of day until several years after World War II, when the PC began publishing scattered sections of the Notebooks and some of the approximately 500 letters he wrote from prison. By the 1950s, and then with increasing frequency and intensity, his prison writings attracted interest and critical commentary in a host of countries, not only in the West but in the so-called third world as well. Some of his terminology became household words on the left, the most important of which, and the most complex, is the term "hegemony" as he used it in his writings and applied to the twin task of understanding the reasons underlying both the successes and the failures of socialism on a global scale, and of elaborating a feasible program for the realization of a socialist vision within the really existing conditions that prevailed in the world. Among these conditions were the rise and triumph of fascism and the disarray on the left that had ensued as a result of that triumph. Also extremely pertinent, both theoretically and practically, were such terms and phrases as "organic intellectual," "national'popular," and "historical bloc" which, even if not coined by Gramsci, acquired such radically new and original implications in his writing as to constitute effectively new formulations in the realm of political philosophy.

*"Bella Ciao"- But "Bandiera Rossa" (Red Flag) As Well- We Are Indeed Partisans Of The Struggle

Here is a link to a new Renegade Eye post. We need our revolutionary songs as part of the struggle, no question. "Bandiera Rossa" (Red Flag) would be my choice rather than the more amorphous "Bella Ciao". I have posted our classic anthem "The Internationale" in the past for May Day and the anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Bandiera rossa [Red Flag]
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Avanti o popolo, alla riscossa
Bandiera rossa, bandiera rossa
Avanti o popolo, alla riscossa
Bandiera rossa trionferà.

Bandiera rossa la trionferà
Bandiera rossa la trionferà
Bandiera rossa la trionferà
Evviva il socialismo e la libertà!

Degli sfruttati l'immensa schiera
La pura innalzi, rossa bandiera
O proletari, alla riscossa
Bandiera rossa trionferà.

Bandiera rossa la trionferà
Bandiera rossa la trionferà
Bandiera rossa la trionferà
Il frutto del lavoro a chi lavora andrà.

Dai campi al mare, alla miniera
All'officina, chi soffre e spera
Sia pronto è l'ora della riscossa
Bandiera rossa trionferà.

Bandiera rossa la trionferà
Bandiera rossa la trionferà
Bandiera rossa la trionferà
Soltanto il socialismo è vera libertà.

Non più nemici, non più frontiere
Sono i confini rosse bandiere
O socialisti, alla riscossa
Bandiera rossa trionferà.

Bandiera rossa la trionferà
Bandiera rossa la trionferà
Bandiera rossa la trionferà
Nel solo socialismo è pace e libertà.

Falange audace cosciente e fiera
Dispiega al sole rossa bandiera
Lavoratori alla riscossa
Bandiera rossa trionferà.

Bandiera rossa la trionferà
Bandiera rossa la trionferà
Bandiera rossa la trionferà
Evviva il comunismo e la libertà!
Forward people, to the rescue
Red flag, red flag
Forward people, to the rescue
Red flag will triumph.

Red flag will be triumphant
Red flag will be triumphant
Red flag will be triumphant
Long live socialism and freedom!

The exploited's immense formation
Raises the pure, red flag
Oh proletarians, to the rescue
Red flag will triumph.

Red flag will be triumphant
Red flag will be triumphant
Red flag will be triumphant
The fruits of labor will be for he who works!

From the country to the sea, to the mine
To the workshop, those who suffer and hope
Be ready, it's the hour of vengeance
Red flag will triumph.

Red flag will be triumphant
Red flag will be triumphant
Red flag will be triumphant
Only socialism is true freedom.

No more enemies, no more frontiers
The borders are red flags
Oh socialists, to the rescue
Red flag will triumph.

Red flag will be triumphant
Red flag will be triumphant
Red flag will be triumphant
Only in socialism is there peace and freedom.

Bold, conscious and proud ranks
Unfurl the red flag in the sun
Workers to the rescue
Red flag will triumph.

Red flag will be triumphant
Red flag will be triumphant
Red flag will be triumphant
Long live communism and freedom!