Gramsci: The events of 2–3 December (1919)

A new translation of Gramsci’s The events of 2–3 December (1919), L’ordine nuovo, 6-13 December 1919.

Petit bourgeois

The events of 2–3 December are a final episode of the class struggle. The struggle was not between proletarians and capitalists (this struggle develops organically, as a struggle for wages and hours and as a tenacious and patient labour for the creation of an apparatus of government of production and of the masses of men who might replace the present apparatus of the bourgeois state); it was between proletarians and small and middling bourgeois. The struggle was, in the final analysis, for the defence of the liberal democratic state, for the liberation of the liberal democratic state from the confinement in which it is held prisoner by a part of the bourgeois class, the worst, the vilest, the most useless, the most parasitic: the small and medium bourgeoisie, the “intellectual” bourgeois (“intellectual” because in possession, through a simple and cursory career in middle school, of low and middle certificates of general study), the bourgeoisie of father-son public functionaries, shopkeepers, small industrial and agricultural proprietors, businessmen in the city, usurers in the country. This struggle developed in the only form in which it could develop: disorderly, tumultuous, with a raid in the streets and the squares with the aim of freeing the streets and the squares of an invasion of putrid and voracious locusts. But this struggle, be it indirectly, was connected to another struggle, to the higher class struggle between proletarians and capitalists: the small and medium bourgeois is in fact the barrier of corrupt, dissolute, putrefying humanity with which capitalism defends its economic and political power, servile, abject humanity, humanity of goons and lackeys, today become the “boss servant” which wants to take from production a larger slice not only of the salary earned by the working class, but of the same slice taken by the capitalists; to expel it from the social field, as a swarm of locusts is expelled from a half destroyed field, with fire and iron, means freeing the national apparatus of production and exchange of a leaden bridle which suffocates it and stops it functioning, means purifying the social environment and finding oneself against the specific adversary: the class of capitalist owners of the means of production and exchange.
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Gramsci: The problem of power

A new translation of The Problem of Power, L’ordine nuovo, 29 November 1919

The historical position currently reached by the Italian class of the exploited is summarized in these general terms:

Public order. An assembly of about three and a half million workers,peasants and employees, corresponding to about fifteen million of the Italian population, represented in Parliament by one hundred and fifty five socialist deputies. In the political order the Italian class of producers who do not possess the instruments of labour and the means of production and of exchange of the national economic apparatus, has managed to bring about a concentration of forces which places an end to the function of Parliament as the base of state power, as a
constitutional form of political government; the Italian class of the exploited has thus managed to inflict a tremendous blow on the political apparatus of capitalist supremacy, which is founded on the circulation of conservative and democratic parties, on the
alternation, in government of various political firms which paint in unvarying colours the capitalist brigandry, the rule of the bank vaults.

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Getting it wrong

Today’s Sunday Independent reports on a Boeing 757 flying from London to Boston which had to land at Dublin, due to “technical issues with the Boeing 757-200 plane’s nose-wheel steering”. You might ask why an aircraft with duff nose-wheel steering might not simply continue to Boston to be fixed there.

Somebody with a clue gives us some more information:

When the left hyd sys is u/s consequences are:
– 1 autopilot (out of 3) inop;
– No autoland;
– No Autobrakes;
– Some spoilers on each wings inop;
– Rudder ratio inop;
– Left thrust reverser inop;
– Electric slats and flaps extention required (takes longer time and less flaps must be used for landing, Flaps 20 iso Flaps 30);
– Alternate gear extension required (then it is not possible to raise the gear knowing it makes a lot of drag);
– Alternate brakes inop (reserve and narmal brakes are still working);
– Yaw dampres inop;
– Nose wheel steering inop (towing required after landing).

Of all the things that weren’t working, the Sunday Independent noticed the minor one.