Category: Translation

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Gramsci: Maximalism and extremism

A new translation of Maximalism and Extremism, from l’Unità, 2 July 1925

Comrade Bordiga is offended because it has been written that in his ideas there is much maximalism. It is not true, and cannot be true—writes Bordiga—. In fact the most distinctive trait of the extreme left is an aversion for the maximalist party, which disgusts us, makes us vomit, etc., etc.

The question however is something else. Maximalism is a fatal and mechanical conception of the doctrine of Marx.

There is a maximalist party which from this maximalist conception draws an argument for its opportunism, to justify its collaborationism masked with revolutionary phrases. Bandiera rossa trionferà [The Red Flag will triumph] because it is fatal and inevitable that the proletariat must win; Marx said so, who is our sweet and doting master! It is useless to move ourselves; why move and struggle if the victory is fatal and inevitable? Thus speaks a maximalist of the maximalist party. But there is also the maximalist who is not part of the maximalist party, and can instead be in the Communist Party. He is intransigent, and not opportunist. But he too believes it useless to move and struggle day by day; he awaits only the great day. The masses—he says—cannot not come to us, because the objective situation forces them towards the revolution. Thus let us wait for them, without so much talk about tactical manouevres and such expedients.

This, for us, is maximalism, just like that of the maximalist party. Comrade Lenin has taught us that to defeat our class enemy, who is powerful, who has many means and reserves at his disposal, we have to exploit every chink in his armour and we must use every ally possible, even be they uncertain, wavering and temporary. He has taught us that in the war of armies, one cannot reach the strategic aim, which is the destruction of the enemy and the occupation of his territory, with having first reached a series of tactical objectives tending to break up the enemy before confronting him in the field. The whole prerevolutionary period is presented as a mainly tactical activity, with the aim of acquiring new allies for the proletariat, of breaking up the organizational offensive and defensive apparatus of the enemy, of exposing and exhausting his reserves.

Not taking account of this teaching of Lenin, or taking account of it only theoretically, but without putting it into practice, without making it become daily practice, means being maximalist, that is pronouncing great revolutionary phrases, but being incapable of moving one step closer to the revolution.

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Gramsci: Unions and councils

Gramsci: Unions and councils

A new translation of Antonio Gramsci’s article, Unions and Councils, from 1919.

 

The leaders of the organization do not notice this deep and widespread crisis. The more it clearly appears that the working class is not organized in forms corresponding to its real historical structure, the more it happens that the working class is not lined up in a configuration which incessantly adapts itself to laws which govern the intimate process of real historical development of the class itself; the more these leaders persist in their blindness and force themselves to “juridically” settle dissent and conflicts. Eminently bureaucratic spirits, they believe that an objective condition, rooted in the psychology which is developed in the living experiences of the factory, can be overcome with a discourse which moves feelings, and with an order of the day unanimously voted in an assembly made ugly by hubbub and oratorical meanderings. Today they force themselves to “rise to the height of the times” and, as if to demonstrate that they are also capable of “hard thinking,” refashion the old and worn-out union ideologies, tediously insisting on relations of identity between the soviet and the union, tediously insisting on affirming that the present system of union organization constitutes the system of forces in which the dictatorship of the proletariat must be made flesh.

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Gramsci: The development of the revolution

A new translation of Gramsci’s journalism, from L’Ordine Nuovo, 1919.

The fundamental theses of the Communist International can be summarized as follows:

1) the world war of 1914 – 1918 represents the tremendous demonstration of that moment in the process of development of modern history which Marx synthesized in the expression: the catastrophe of the capitalist world;

2) only the working class can save human society from the abyss of barbarity and economic collapse towards which it is pushed by the emboldened and maddened forces of the owning class, and it can do so organizing itself in a dominant class to impose its own dictatorship in the politico-industrial field;

3) the proletarian revolution is imposed and not proposed. The conditions created by the war (extreme impoverishment of the economic resources required to satisfy elementary needs of collective and individual life, concentration of the means of production and international trade in the hands of a small group of owners, colonial subjection of all the world’s countries to Anglo-Saxon capitalism, concentration, at national level, of the political forces of the owning class) can create these outcomes: either the conquest of social power by the working class, with its own methods and tools, to arrest the process of dissolution of the civil world and lay the basis of a new order in which it is possible to recommence useful activity and a vital energetic and rapid impulse towards higher forms of production and social life; or the death from hunger or exhaustion of a large part of the workers; or permanent slaughter for social decimation until the reestablishment of a balanced relationship between capitalistically managed production and the consuming masses.

Read the rest on the Marxists Internet Archive.