(Not signed, 5th June, 1920)
Antonio Gramsci The proletarian revolution is the arbitrary act of an organisation that asserts itself to be revolutionary, or of a system of organisalions that assert themselves to be revolutionary. The proletarian revolution is a very long historical process that manifests itself in the rising and developing of specific productive forces (which we summarise by the expression:
proletariat") ina specific historical context (which we summarise by the expression "private property, capitalist
production, factory system, organisation of society in a democratic-parliamentary state"), Ina specific phase of this process, the new productive forces are not able to develop any more and to organise themselves in an aulonomous fashion within the official order of things in which the human community is evolving; in this specific phase the revolutionary act occurs, consisting of an energetic attempt to break up these orders of things violently, to destroy the whole apparatus of economic and political power, in which the revolutionary productive forces were oppressively contained. The revolutionary act also consists of an energetic atrempt (o break the machinery of the bourgeois state, and to construct a type of state in which the order of things is such that the freed productive forces find the adequate form for their further development, for their further expansion, in which the organisation is such that they find the fortress of strength and the arms that are necessary and sufficient for them to suppress their adversaries,
The actual process of the proletarian revolution cannot be identified with the development and the action of the revolutionary organisations of a voluntary and contractual type such as the political party and the trade unions: organisations which were born within the field of bourgeois democracy, * First published in English by the Institute for Workers‘ Control
xhich were born within the field of political liberty, as affirmation and as development of political liberty, These organisations, insofar as they embody a doctrine which interprets the revolutionary process and envisages (within certain limits of historical probability) their development, insofar as they are recognised by the broad masses as their reflection and their embryonic apparatus of government, actually are, and more and more become, the direct and responsible agents of successive acts of liberation which the whole working class will try to achieve in the course of the revolutionary process. But all the same they do nat embody this process, they do not go beyond the bourgenis state, they do not embrace and cannot embrace the whole multiplicity of growth points of the revolutionary forees which capitalism lets loose as it goes on its implacable way as a machine of exploitation and oppression.
In the period of the economic and political predominance of the bourgeois class the actual unfolding of the revolutionary process takes place sub-terraneously, in the obscurity of the factory and in the obscurity of the consciousness of countless multitudes that capitalism subjects to its laws: it is not controllable and documentable; it will be so in the future when the elements that constitute it (the feelings, the desires, the habits, the germs of initiative and of habit) shall have been developed and purified with the development of society, with the development of the situation that the working class comes to occupy in the field of production. The revolutionary organisations (the political party and the trade union} are born in the field of political liberty, in the field of bourgeois democracy, as an affirmation and development of liberty and of democracy in general, in a field in which the relationships of citizen to citizen subsist: the revolutionary process comes about in the field of production, in the factory, where the relations are those of oppressor to oppressed, of exploiter to exploited, where liberty for the worker does not exist, where democracy does not exist; the revolutionary process comes about where the worker is nothing and wants to become everything, where the power of the proprietor is unlimited, is the power of life and death over the worker, over the worker's wife and over the worker's children.
When do we say that the historical process of the workers’ revolution that is immanent in the human community in the capitalist regime, that has its own laws within itself and evolves necessarily through the flowing together of a multiplicity of actions that are uncontrollable since created by a situation that has not been willed by the worker and is not foreseeable by the worker, when do we say that the historical process of the workers' revolution has blossomed out into the
light of day, has become controllable and documentable? We say this when the whole working class has become revolutionary, not so much in the sense that it refuses in a general way to collaborate with the government institutions of the bourgeois class, not so much in the sense that it represents an opposition within the field of democracy, but in the sense that the whole working class, as it is to be found ina factory, starts an action that must necessarily result in the founding of a workers’ state, that must necessarily lead to the shaping of a human society in a form that is altogether unlike anything that has previously existed, in a universal form that embraces the whole workers' International, and hence the whole of humanity. And we say that the present period is revolutionary precisely because we can see that the working class, in all countries, is tending to create, is tending with all the energy at its disposition - though with many mislakes, vacillations, encumbrances such as one would expect of an oppressed class which has no historical experience, which must do everything for the first time - to extrude from within itself institutions of a new type in the working class field, institutions on a representative basis, constructed within the industrial order of things; we say that the present period is revolutionary since the working class is trying with all its energies, with all its will power, to find its own state, So that is why we say that the birth of the workers' factory Councils represents an historical event of profound significance, represents the beginning of a new era in the history of the human race: for il, the revolutionary process, has blossomed out into the light of day, it is entering into the phase in which it can be controlled and documented, In the liberal phase of the historical process of the bourgeois class and of society dominated by the bourgeois class, the elementary cell of the state was the proprietor who in the factory subjected to his profil the working class. In the liberal phase the proprietor was also the entrepreneur, he was also the industrialist: industrial power, the source of industrial power, was in the factory, and the worker did not succeed in freeing his consciousness from the conviction that the proprietor was necessary and his person was identified with the person of the industrialist, with the person of the manager responsible for production and hence also for his salary, for his bread, for his clothing, for his house.
In the imperialist phase of the historical process of the bourgeois class, industrial power in every factory has become separated from the faclury and is concentrated in a (rust, ina monopoly, in a bank, in a state bureaucracy. Industrial power does not have directly to answer for what il does and so
is more autocratic, more ruthless, more arbitrary: but the worker, freed from working under the "boss", freed from the servile spirit of a hierarchy, and also urged on by the new general conditions in which society finds itself as a consequence of the new historical phase, the worker realises priceless conquests of autonomy and initiative.
In the factory the working class becomes a specific "instrument of production” in a specific organic structure; every worker enters “by the dictate of chance” to play a part in this structured body: at the dictate of chance so far as his own will is concerned, but not at the dictate of chance as regards the
work is destined, since he represents a speci-
van Une process Mf waboer and groduction, ‘ sr that that he is taken on. if is andy for that tnat he is able to earn his bread: he is a cog in the machine oi the division of labour, in the working class constituted ina quite definite way into an instrument of production, If the worker acquires a clear consciousness of the "determined necessity” of his situation and makes of it a base for a representative apparatus of a state type (that is not voluntary, contractual, through the ballot box, but absolute, organic, part of a reality that it is necessary to recognise if one wants to be sure of having bread, clothing, housing, industrial production): if the worker, if the working class does this, it does something of profound significance, it initiates a new history, it initiates the era of the workers' States that should flow together into the formation of communist society, of a world organised on the basis of an after the fashion of a large engineering works, of the communist International in which every people, every part of humanity acquires its characteristic physiognomy as it predominantly performs such and such a kind of production and net insofar as it is organised in the form of a state and has such and such frontiers,
Insofar as it builds this representative apparatus, in reality the working class completes the expropriation of the first machine, of the most important instrument of production; the working class itself, which has refound itself, which has acquired consciousness of its arganic unity and which as one united whole counterposes itself to capitalism. The working class sa asserts that industrial power, that the source of industrial power ought to return to the factory, it presents the factory ina new light, from the workers' point of view, as a form in which the working class constitutes itself into a specific organic body, as the cell of a new state, the workers’ state, as the basis of a new representative system, a system of Councils. The workers’ state, since it is born according to a configuration of production, already creates the conditions
for its own development, for its own disappearance as a state, for its organic incorporation in a world system, the communist International.
As today, in the Council of a large engineering works, every work team (by trade) is amalgamated, from the proletarian point of view, with the other teams in the department, every aspect of industrial production merges with, from the proletarian point of view, the other aspects, and brings out the contours of the productive process, so in the world, English coal mixes with Russian petrol, Siberian grain with Sicilian sulphur, rice from Vercelli with wood from Stiria ... ina single organism, submitted to an international administration which governs the richness of the world in the name of all humanity. In this senge the workers' factory Council is the first cell of an historical process which should end in the Communist International, not so much as a political organisation of the revolutionary proletariat, but as a reorganisation of world economy and as reorganisation of the whole human community, on a national and world scale. Every revolutionary action that occurs, has value, is historically real, insofar as it forms part of this process, insofar as it is conceived and is an act that frees this process from the bourgeois superstructure that restricts and obstructs it.
The relations that should link the political party and the factory Council, the trade union and the factory council, are already implicit in the line of argument that has been presented; the party and the trade union should not put themselves forward as teachers or as ready-fashioned superstructures for this new institution, in which the historical process of the revolution takes a controllable historical form, they ought by contrast to put themselves forward as conscious agents of its liberation from the restraining forces that one may briefly describe as the bourgeois state, they ought to set themselves the task of organising the general external conditions (political) in which the process of the revolution can achieve iis maximum speed, in which the freed productive forces find their greatest
expansion.