File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1996/96-12-08.085, message 61


Date: Thu, 5 Dec 1996 23:12:39 -0500 (EST)
From: Louis R Godena <louisgodena-AT-ids.net>
Subject: Re: M-I: RE: The Gramscian theory of the proletariat


  
Adam begins his pharisaical attack with a bit of hyperbole:
      
>This whole post is essentially a poisonous attack on everything
>Gramsci actually stood for. While conversant with the facts, 
>it distorts them, ignoring the scale and revolutionary potential
>of the crucial years 1919 and 1920. This means Louis G is
>completely unable to understand the link between Gramsci
>theory and Gramsci practice.

The "Red Years" of 1919-20 aroused high hopes amongst the intellectuals of
both the Left and Right in about equal measure.    The economic crisis and
political upheaval occasioned by the end of the First World War,  together
with the heady expectations stirred by the Russian revolution,  created an
environment in which it was widely felt (especially by the Left) that
revolution was just around the corner.    The Right, of course,  rubbed its
hands over the imminent collapse of Giolitti's bourgeois regime.   In the
meantime,  Gramsci's Factory Councils were enjoying a success sufficient to
frighten the employers into a lock-out,  which quickly grew into a general
strike.    The struggle for control of industry was now joined (although the
governemnt remained officially neutral for a time),  and involved over
200,000 workers.   Its denouement witnessed the occupation of factories
throughout Northern Italy as the workers began to experiment in
self-management based around the Councils.    In them,  Gramsci saw the
obliteration of the divisions of the bourgeois State between capital and
labor, giving the workers the responsibility and self-discipline to work
with each other for the benefit of the whole society,  rather than just for
themselves (G. Williams,  *Proletarian Order: Antonio Gramsci,  Factory
Councils,  and the origins of Communism in Italy,  1911-1921* [London, 1975:
Pluto Press].   See especially M. Clark's *Antonio Gramsci and the
Revolution that Failed [New Haven,  1977: Yale University Press]).     

In the end,  the strike became,  at the behest of the government,  the
employers,  and,  significantly,  a majority of the workers themselves,  a
mere quarrel over the "official" recognition of union "control" in some
factories,   which were,  following a few cosmetic concessions by the
capitalists,  quickly vacated by the striking workers and returned to full
production within a few days.    Once again,  like Germany in 1919,  and as
would be the case in England in 1926 and in France nearly a half century
later,  revolution had loomed momentarily on the horizon--- and the workers
had hastened to turn their backs on it.  

Gramsci's theory necessarily underwent profound revisions following this
seminal defeat,  which was complemented two years later by Mussolini's
triumph--an event largely supported by sectors of the industrial proletariat
and which precipitated Gramsci's well known thesis of the "two fascisms" (W
Adamson,  *Hegemony and Revolution: A study of Antonio Gramsci's political
and cultural theory* [Berkeley,  1980: University of California Press]).
In fact,  the entire theoretical framework underpinning the "hegemony"
paradigm underwent extensive revision,  laying the groundwork for a new
offensive to win over workers--and they were many,  if not an outright
majority--who currently supported Mussolini.    

Adam then goes on to argue,  lamely, that:

>... everyone, including those who opposed
>the [Russian] revolution, at the time, thought it was a workers revolution.
>John Reid's taxi driver understood this "mine all - all mine" , he
>said, looking at Petrograd. Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolshevik party
>understood this. But so did Martov ( "Please, sir, understand - 
>what we have here is a victorious workers revolution" ) 
> Kerensky, and Lloyd George.

But while the revolution may have been made in the *name* of the workers,
it was nonetheless made and saved not by a class,  but by a *party*
proclaiming itself to be the representative and vanguard of a class.
Despite the heady enthusiasm of John Reed's driver,  the reality of Russia's
revolutionary tradition,  consonant with a weak and politically immature
proletariat,  determined finally the outcome of October. 

>Why does Louis G not quote from the best book ever written
>about the Russian Revolution : The History of the Russian
>Revolution, by Leon Trotsky ? 

For Trotsky,  the Russian revolution,  except as part of a world-wide
revolution,  seemed meaningless and irrelevant -- as Marx had once said of a
revolution that did not reach England,  "a storm in a teacup".    In March
1917,  conjuring up for a moment the vision of a Russian revolution which
did not spread to Germany,  he decided that "we need not rack our brains
over so implausible a hypothesis".    He continued to believe  -- it was
certainly not an absurd or paradoxical conviction -- that Germany missed a
proletarian revolution in the winter of 1918-19 only because it lacked an
organized Communist party and resolute leaders.    Oddly enough,  Trotsky's
illusion centered almost wholly on Germany: he was one of those who opposed
the attempt to carry revolution to Warsaw at the point of Soviet bayonets in
the summer of 1920.    But October 1925 found him once more -- and for the
last time -- a fervent believer in the imminence of the German revolution.
Trotsky's adversaries found it easy to fasten on him -- in substance,
unjustly -- the label of revolutionary adventurism in Europe under the guise
of "permenant revolution";  and Stalin brilliantly cut the ground from under
his feet with the doctrine of  "socialism in one country".  

The preponderence of evidence points to Trotsky as the organizer of the
Russian revolution.   It is equally clear,  however,  that he was sadly out
of his element when it came to the prospects for European revolution in the
decade following 1917.
      
Adam looks askance at my claim that Mussolini enjoyed widespread working
class support: 

>Is there any evidence of this at all ? If this is true, why did 
>Mussolini
>have to smash the basic organisations of  the working class, the 
>trade unions ? Why did he have to beat up and imprison thousands
>of trade unionists, if they supported him ?

Mussolini's repression of the unions was initially aimed primarily at the
Factory Councils and party-generated organizations in Italy's north and
center.    On the other hand,  Mussolini enjoyed substantial support among
industrial workers (especially in Rome and in parts of the northeast) and
those engaged in the transport industries of the south and center (J
Barrows, *Labor and the Rise of Fascism in Italy* [New York, 1979: Holt[).
Labor's illusions about Fascism mirrored those of many liberals,  who saw
Mussolini as a force for securing the bourgeois State.   It is to be
remembered that it is in this regard that Gramsci formulated his thesis of
"two Fascisms",  that of the movement itself and that of the big capitalists
and landowners who sought to exploit it for their own ends.    Much of labor
belonged to the former category in alliance with the petit bourgeois which
formed initially Fascism's "mass base."  

On my thesis concerning the rural basis of the anti-fascist resistance,
cf., Sidney Tarrow's *Peasant Communism in Southern Italy* (New Haven,
1967: Yale University Press).               

I have declined to reproduce Adam's remarks on the united front,  as it is
outside the scope of this discussion,  and in any event,  seems to have been
drawn chiefly from the vanity press of the disreputable Tony Cliff.    The
same is sadly true of his analysis of the PSI and the 1920 strike.   Adam
really needs to broaden his knowledge well beyond this sectarian crap.        

One more serious question:

>... How could Gramsci have developed the
>close relationship with the working class militants of the Turin 
>councils,
>if he had not understood "the alienating and reifying aspects of modern
>factory life" ? Surely this is convincing evidence that he understood
>this better than either the reformist trade union leaders or the ultra
>lefts, since neither of these two trends were able to establish any
>sort of relationship with these people, other than one of distrust ?

This is sheer nonsense.     The factory workers in both Milan and Turin
voted overwhelmingly with their reformist trade union leaders (whom,
according to Adam,  were unable to "establish any sort of relationship" with
the workers) to restrict the demands of the 1920 general strike to union
recognition.   It was the various Left factions,  including Gramsci's
*L'Ordine Nuovo* group,  that failed to muster sufficient support at this
critical moment.    In fact,  one could plausibly argue that the Italian
general strikes of 1920,  like its counterpart in Britain six years later,
marked a turning-point in the development of the working-class movement,
marking the end of the last great period of working class militancy as well
as a momentous shift in the outlook and orientation of the trade union
movement.  

It needs to be borne in mind that Gramsci's theory of the proletariat was
derived from both Marxist sources (especially Lenin's ideas on "dual power"
and Rosa Luxemburg's conciliar communism) and the influences of the "ethical
State" tradition of the Italian neo-Hegelians,  especially Gentile,  and by
the Italian syndicalists,  both of which ultimately fed into Fascist
corporatist doctrines.     Gramsci was a critical admirer of the
"scientific" management techniques and assembly line production methods
pioneered by Taylor and Henry Ford,  publishing a series of articles
especially supportive of "Taylorism" in *L'Ordine Nuovo*.    Like many other
Marxists of the period,  he saw them as maximizing and simplifying
industrial production and disciplining the workforce in ways which made the
system largely self-regulating,  thereby paving the way for workers' control
of industry.  

Gramsci tended to ignore the problems of reification and alienation by
associating the growth of freedom with greater productive efficiency.
Within a society of any degree of complexity,  however,  and allowing for a
fair degree of individual diversity,  the hypothesis that all human
activities will prove naturally and rationally assimilable to a single moral
framework becomes correspondingly less and less plausible.    Without this
optimistic assumpton,   though,  Gramsci's theory risks requiring the
totalitarian social engineering of which organic conceptions of the State
are traditionally accused.   

Louis Godena

    



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