Antonio Gramsci was a key activist and seminal Marxist thinker in
Italy during the 1920s and 1930s, whose ideas, although often
misunderstood, remain relevant for activists and revolutionaries
today.
Gramsci moved from rural Sardinia to industrialized Turin in 1911.
He saw that while both the workers and the peasants were being
exploited, their world-views were very different, and this led to
distrust between these two classes. Gramsci was convinced that if
workers and peasants could fight together, capitalism could be
overthrown in Italy. He wondered how these groups could be made to
view their interests as one.
Gramsci joined the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), which strove for
socialist reform through electoral means. There were food shortages
and riots in 1919. Soviets (workers councils) were set up in many
cities. The PSI focused on winning seats in Parliament and did not
participate in the soviets. Gramsci saw the need to begin operating
independently.
Gramsci’s practice as organizer and revolutionary
He went to Turin’s factories to organize workers’ councils that
would stay on-site after-hours to study Marxism. Gramsci hoped the
councils would help create a fertile environment for a new
revolutionary party to grow. The councils started organizing marches
and strikes around political issues, and successfully demanded pay
raises. The industrial capitalists attacked the councils by locking
the workers out of the factories. When unions started negotiating to
re-open them, the factory owners demanded an end to the councils. In
response, Gramsci and his comrades proposed a general strike
throughout Turin. They hoped that a successful strike would help
spread the movement throughout Italy.
Most of the workers of Turin participated in the strike. The
bosses formed “Commissions of Civil Defense” in which they, their
families and friends volunteered to perform civil services, such as
distributing food and mail to the population of Turin, thereby
blunting the effect of the strike. They made themselves appear to the
population of Turin as benefactors of society. The masses were led to
believe their interests were tied to the welfare of the city’s rich,
rather than to that of the striking workers.
By the summer of 1920, the Italian workers’ movement was on the
defensive. The factory owners demanded increased insurance premiums
and a ban on overtime. Throughout the country, workers took to
“obstructionism”—intentionally working slowly, or engaging in
what is known in the United States as a “slowdown.” The owners
threatened mass lockouts. In response, more than 400,000 people
occupied their workplaces throughout Italy in September 1920.
Workers’ councils oversaw production and different factories
communicated with each other to provide for the needs of the people
on a national scale.
Gramsci celebrated the occupation movement but warned against
viewing it as a revolution. So long as the state was still in the
service of the capitalist class, the workers would eventually see
their organizations overthrown.
The parliamentary members of the PSI agreed to exert their
influence to quell the movement in exchange for union control of the
factories. Gramsci took from this that even when a revolutionary
situation presented itself, actual revolution was impossible without
a well-developed revolutionary party. He helped found the Communist
Party of Italy in 1921. Gramsci viewed union control of the factories
still under capitalist ownership as counter-revolutionary, because
the Italian workers might come to view themselves as invested in the
state of the capitalists who exploited them, thus losing their
revolutionary potential.
Union control, however, never came about, as the capitalists paid
off rightist parliamentarians and fascist thugs to oppose it. As the
fascist movement—headed by Benito Mussolini, formerly a leading
member of the PSI—became more powerful, the Soviet Union advised
the Italian left to form a united front to oppose fascism.
Gramsci sought to form an alliance between communists, socialists
and anarchists, but ideological divisions made this impossible. The
fascists took over and outlawed both the PSI and the CPI. In 1926,
Gramsci was arrested and sentenced to 20 years in prison. After
suffering years of harsh imprisonment in solitary confinement, he was
conditionally released from prison in 1934 due to his declining
health. Gramsci died three years later, in 1937.
Gramsci’s ideas
Gramsci wrote over 3,000 pages on politics during his years of
imprisonment. He believed that the capitalist class had been able to
derail revolution in Italy because the peasants had not been made to
see their struggle as one with that of the urban proletariat. If they
had, the entire nation might have joined in striking against
capitalism. Gramsci noted how seizing a revolutionary opportunity
from a capitalist crisis depended on developing a sense of unity
between different classes and sectors of classes.
Those oppressed by capitalism are comprised of different groups
with unique life experiences. Although these groups have come to
think of themselves as separate from each other, Gramsci believed
they must come to understand themselves as one exploited totality.
This sense of unity between different groups, which Gramsci called
a “historic bloc,” had been successfully articulated by the
Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks’ emphasis
on the struggle of all exploited classes against national oppression
made unity in the Russian Empire possible. Gramsci referred to the
successful formation of a historic bloc as “hegemony.”
In Italy, however, the capitalist class had formed a historic bloc
with the peasants and sectors of more-privileged workers. They
peasants and these workers were convinced that their interests lay
with the capitalist class rather than the factory workers. Gramsci
deduced that for a revolution to be successful in an advanced
capitalist society, a historic bloc would have to be formed between
the various sectors of exploited and oppressed.
In recent months, we have witnessed initial steps in the direction
of what Gramsci would have called the formation of a hegemonic
operation. The mantra of the Occupy Wall Street movement—“We are
the 99 percent!”—articulates a unity between all but the most
privileged in U.S. society—the tiny elite of banks and
corporations—the 1 percent.
Rather than expressing the needs of the majority as dependent on
the capitalists—the “job-creators” as the right wing calls
them—the Occupy Wall Street movement expresses a shared interest
between diverse sectors, from the petit-bourgeoisie, to relatively
highly paid “white-collar” workers, to union workers and the most
oppressed members of our society.
Of course, whether or not the Occupy movement evolves into a
“historic bloc” that can ultimately overthrow the capitalist
system will depend on whether it can move beyond expressing the
rightful grievances of the majority against the capitalist class to
adopting a program, and organizational perspective, to unleash the
power of the multinational working-class.
Mis-appropriating Gramsci
Unfortunately, Gramsci’s name has become associated in some
circles with reformist ideas. In their book “Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy,” published in 1985, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe
hijacked Gramsci’s theories to claim that class struggle was no
longer viable, and in the process anointed themselves
“post-Marxists.”
Workers have, according to Laclau and Mouffe, formed a historic
bloc with the capitalists through the labor movement, thus becoming
invested in the capitalist state. According to the post-Marxist
narrative, workers under advanced capitalism are not simply workers
but have also become consumers and administrators.
What is needed is not revolution, Laclau and Mouffe claim, but the
expansion of participatory democracy to oppressed minorities, who
will learn to form their own historic blocs with the “democratic”
capitalist state.
What these arguments ignore is that neither “participatory
democracy” nor the class-conciliatory line of the labor movement
can alter the function of the capitalist state as an instrument of
repression against the working class. Advanced capitalist countries
operate under the dictatorship of the capitalist class, though
imperialist super-profits have made possible what could be termed a
“historic bloc” between the capitalists and organized labor. But
as evident from the severe weakening of most unions over the past few
decades, this bloc has not served the longer-term interests of the
working class and is doomed to collapse.
Gramsci, as a Marxist, would not view the participation of workers
in capitalist institutions as truly democratic. No matter what
possessions a high-paid worker may amass, everything can be taken
away from that worker in a time of crisis. The capitalist class can
take away every “right,” including access to shelter and food,
from these “liberated workers.”
Further, the ruling class benefits from ideologies such as racism,
sexism and homophobia, which prop up their power by dividing workers
and delivering extra profits. The idea that oppressed sectors can
simply gain access to a share of capitalist super-profits and
overcome these conditions is a myth. That will require overturning
the capitalist system, and putting the economy and society as a whole
on a different footing.
Despite the misappropriation of Gramsci’s thought, revolutionaries
should remember Gramsci as someone who dedicated his life to the
struggle of the working class, and for his important contributions to
Marxist analysis.
