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
 

¡Caciques al GULAG!

Workers of the World, Unite!

¡Reciprocidad! ¡Repatriación! ¡Revolución!

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