Chapter Two Workers’ Democracy and Factory-Councils: 1919–20

2.1. L’Ordine Nuovo In April 1919, together with Angelo Tasca, and Umberto Terracini, Gramsci published in Turin L’Ordine Nuovo, a ‘weekly commentary on socialist culture’. At first, the goal of the review did not stray much from Gramsci’s old concerns: hav- ing an organ that would serve as a centre for the creation and propagation of socialist culture, for the ideological preparation that, as we have seen, he considered an essential element in the struggle to create the conditions for socialist transforma- tion. However, given the new historical framework opened up by the October Revolution, the ‘cultural’ project became more comprehensive and more con- crete. The Soviet Revolution had in practice revealed to Gramsci something that he had been claiming in theory: the revolutionary will, the initiative of a collected organised subject, is able to bring socialist proposals to triumph even where objective condi- tions (as seen from a strictly economistic perspec- tive) seem to be not-yet ‘mature’ for transformation. With the Soviet Revolution and, more broadly, with the end of the First World-War, the issue of social- ism became a priority all over Europe. Everything seemed to indicate that the era of world-revolution had begun. The Italian , which had benefited from a neutral position during the conflict (an attitude that, even though determined for the 14 • Chapter Two most part by maximalist passivity, had avoided the adoption of the social- patriotic views that had led to the collapse of the main parties of the Second International), emerged from the War in a strong position. The Party had taken part in the conferences of the ‘internationalist Left’ in Switzerland, which had been supported by Lenin, and presented its candidacy for a place in the Third International, which was being founded at the time. Serrati, then-leader of the maximalist group, which represented the majority of the Party, even went to the meetings of the new International. For the young socialists who had founded L’Ordine Nuovo, there was a pressing need to ‘act politically’. In issue seven, dated 27 July 1919, the ini- tial culturalist position was altered. Gramsci and Togliatti, with Terracini’s support, promoted against Tasca what Gramsci would later call ‘an editorial coup d’état’: in the piece ‘Workers’ Democracy’,1 it is stated clearly that actual political action should be substituted for the battle of ideas. To act politically becomes, within the framework of an apparently imminent world-revolution, synonymous with ‘doing as in Russia’, that is, to elaborate both the theory and the practice of the soviet (or council) evolving in Italy. For the L’Ordine Nuovo group, solidarity with the Communist International did not mean a merely formal and rhetorical solidarity, as it did for the PSI: ‘doing as in Russia’, preparing the conditions for socialist revolution in their own country, was the concrete way of showing a practical and essential agreement with the Communist International and with the teachings of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, several translations of which L’Ordine Nuovo began to publish in Italy.2 But let us see how Gramsci himself, in an article from August 1920, explains the weekly’s intentions after the ‘turn’ in the seventh edition. The review posed itself the following question:

Is there any working-class institution in Italy that can be compared to the Soviet, that shares some of its characteristics? . . . Something that would allow us to say: the Soviet is a universal form, not a Russian, and only a Russian, institution; wherever there exist proletarians struggling to win for themselves industrial autonomy, the Soviet is the form in which the working class manifests this determination to emancipate itself; the Soviet is the form of self-government of the working masses. Is there any germ, a vague hope or hint of such Soviet-style self-government in Italy, in Turin? . . . Yes, a germ of a workers’ government, of a Soviet, does exist in Italy, in Turin –

1. Gramsci 1987, pp. 87–91; 1999a, pp. 65–8. 2. As early as February 1919, before the foundation of L’Ordine Nuovo, Gramsci already proved that he had learned an essential Leninist lesson: ‘The concrete problem can only be resolved within the state; therefore, no one is “concrete” without a general conception of the essence and the limits of the state’ (Gramsci 1984, p. 520).