Gramsci on the Communist Party

With the creation of the Communist Party, the working class broke away from previous traditions and confirmed its own political maturity. The working class no longer wants to work together with other classes for the development and change of the bureaucratic parliamentary state; it wants to work to successfully ensure the development of its own class. It puts forth its candidacy as a ruling class and shows that it would only be able to carry out this historical role in an institutional framework different from the current, within a new state system and not in the pre-existing context of a bureaucratic parliamentary state. 

With the creation of the Communist Party, the working class is able to present itself as the initiator of the political fight, as the driving force; no longer is it a mass movement which is guided by the superior system of another social class. The working class wants to govern the country and shows that it is the only class able to do so, through its own means and its own national and international institutions, to resolve current problems caused by the general historical situation. Who are the working class’ true forces? How many proletarians in Italy have become aware of their class’ historic mission? What kind of following does the Communist Party have in Italian society? In all the confusion, in the current chaos, do we already have the great figures required for a new historical arrangement? When different social forces, classes and sections of Italian society are continually separating then joining together, breaking down but then recomposing themselves, has a basic core already been created? Is there a strong and solid core which is faithful to the ideas and the agenda of the Communist International and the world revolution, around which the working class’ can form their new, but definitive, political and governmental organisation? These are the questions that will be answered through the elections.

Gramsci
 

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Gramsci on emigration

MUSSOLINI: Germans have also emigrated by the million. 

GRAMSCI: The significance of mass emigration of workers is this: the capitalist system, which is the dominant system, is not capable of giving food, housing and clothing to the population, to a not insignificant part of this population which is forced to emigrate ... 

ROSSONI: So the nation must expand in the interests of the proletariat. 

GRAMSCI: We have our own conception of imperialism and colonialism, according to which these are above all an export of finance capital. Until now Italian "imperialism” has consisted only on this: the Italian emigrant worker works for the profit of the capitalists of other countries, that is, until now Italy has only been a means of expansion for non-Italian finance capital. You rinse your mouths with declarations of a claimed demographic superiority of Italy over other countries; you always say, for example, that Italy is demographically superior to France. This is a question which only statistics can finally resolve, and I sometimes deal with statistics; now a statistic published after the war, and never denied, and which can not be denied, states that pre-war Italy from the demographic point of view, was already in the same situation as France after the war; this is determined by the fact that emigration removes from the national territory such a mass of the male, economically active, population, that the demographic relations become catastrophic. In the national territory there remain the old, women, children, invalids, that is the inactive part of the population, which weighs on the population to a greater degree than in any other country, even France. 

And this is the fundamental weakness of the Italian capitalist system, for which Italian capitalism is destined to disappear even more rapidly as the world capitalist system no longer manages to absorb Italian emigration, to exploit Italian labour, which our capitalism is incapable of organizing. 

The bourgeois parties, freemasonry, how have they tried to resolve these problems? 

In Italian history we know about the last two political plans of the bourgeoisie to resolve the question of the governance of the Italian people. We have had the Giolitti programme, the collaboration of Italian socialism with Giolittismo, that is the attempt to establish an alliance of the industrial bourgeoisie with a certain northern labour aristocracy to oppress, to subject to this bourgeois-proletarian grouping the mass of the Italian peasantry, especially in the Mezzogiorno. The programme did not succeed. In southern Italy a bourgeois-proletarian coalition was established through parliamentary collaboration and the politics of public works; in southern Italy the leading class is corrupted and dominates the masses with goons...[Interruptions of Deputy Greco] You fascists have been the major authors of the failure of this political programme, as you have impoverished equally the labour aristocracy and the poor peasantry of all of Italy.

Gramsci
 

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Gramsci sulla Rivoluzione Proletaria

Le difficoltà e le obiezioni che la rivoluzione proletaria deve superare si sono rilevate immensamente superiori a quelle di ogni altra rivoluzione del passato. Queste tendevano solo a correggere la forma della proprietà privata e nazionale dei mezzi di produzione e di scambio; toccavano una parte limitata degli aggregati umani. La rivoluzione proletaria è la massima rivoluzione: poiché vuole abolire la proprietà privata e nazionale, e abolire le classi, essa coinvolge tutti gli uomini, non solo una parte di essi. Obbliga tutti gli uomini a muoversi, a intervenire nella lotta, a parteggiare esplicitamente. Trasforma la società fondamentalmente: da organismo pluricellulare; pone a base della società nuclei già organici di società stessa. Costringe tutta la società a identificarsi con lo Stato, vuole che tutti gli uomini siano consapevolezza spirituale e storica.

Gramsci
 

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Gramsci on Revolutionaries and elections

Just so: the revolution finds the great Italian popular masses still unformed, still pulverized in an animal swarm of individuals without discipline and without culture, obedient only to the stimuli of the stomach and of barbaric passions. Just so the conscious revolutionaries have accepted the electoral struggle: to create a primordial form and unity in this multitude, to join it by a link of action to the Socialist Party, to give a sense and a glimmer of political conscience to its instincts and its passions. But also thus the revolutionary vanguard does not want these multitudes to be deceived, to make them believe that it possible to overcome the current crisis with parliamentary action, with reformist action. It is necessary to harden the separation of the classes, it is necessary that the bourgeoisie demonstrate its absolute incapacity to satisfy the needs of the multitudes, it is necessary that they be persuaded through experience that there exists a clear and raw dilemma: either death by hunger, the slavery of a foreign heel on the neck which forces the worker and the peasant to crumple on the machine or on the sod of earth, or a heroic effort, a superhuman effort of the Italian workers and peasants to create a proletarian order, to suppress the owning class and eliminate every cause of waste, low productivity, indiscipline, disorder. 

Only for these revolutionary reasons has the conscious vanguard of the Italian proletariat descended into the electoral lists, has planted itself solidly in the parliamentary market. Not for a democratic illusion, not for a reformist tenderness: to create the conditions for the triumph of the proletariat, to ensure the right outcome of the revolutionary effort which is directed towards installing the proletarian dictatorship incarnate in the system of councils, inside and outside Parliament.

Gramsci
 

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Gramsci - La conquista dello stato

La creazione dello Stato proletario non è, insomma, un atto taumaturgico: è anch'essa un farsi, è un processo di sviluppo. Presuppone un lavoro preparatorio di sistemazione e di propaganda. Bisogna dare maggiori poteri alle istituzioni proletarie di fabbrica già esistenti, farne sorgere di simili nei villaggi, ottenere che gli uomini che le compongono siano dei comunisti consapevoli della missione rivoluzionaria che l'istituzione deve assolvere. Altrimenti tutto il nostro entusiasmo, tutta la fede delle masse lavoratrici non riuscirà ad impedire che la rivoluzione si componga miseramente in un nuovo Parlamento di imbroglioni, di fatui e di irresponsabili, e che nuovi e più spaventosi sacrifizi siano resi necessari per l'avvento dello Stato dei proletari.

Gramsci
 

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Antonio Gramsci - Maieutica

Partecipando all'attività generale della società umana nello Stato, i socialisti dimenticarono che la loro posizione doveva mantenersi essenzialmente di critica, di antitesi. Si lasciarono assorbire dalla realtà, non la dominarono. I comunisti marxisti devono caratterizzarsi per una psicologia che possiamo chiamare "maieutica" (metodo di interrogare l'interlocutore per aiutarlo a mettere in luce il suo pensiero).

Antonio Gramsci

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