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International Labor and Working-Class, Inc.

Gramsci and Factory Councils


Author(s): Louise A. Tilly
Source: International Labor and Working-Class History, No. 14/15 (Spring, 1979), pp. 33-41
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of International Labor and Working-
Class, Inc.
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International Labor and Working Class History
Number 14/15, Spring 1979 pp. 33-41

Gramsci and Factory Councils


Louise A. Tilly
University of Michigan

" 'Illusion is the most tenacious weed in the collective consciousness',


Antonio Gramsci wrote in March 1921, 'History teaches but it has no pupils.'"
With this aphorism Gwyn Williams introduces his discussion of the formation
of the Communist Party of Italy (Proletarian Order. Antonio Gramsci, Factory
Councils and the Origins of Communism in Italy, 1911-1921). * It can be
applied to this and other recent studies of Italian factory councils only in
modified form. History has its pupils; they come eager to learn; but they bring
the baggage of the present to their enterprise. Carl Boggs, Gramsci s
Marxism, Martin Clark, Antonio Gramsci and the Revolution that Failed,
Paolo Spriano, The Occupation of the Factories: Italy, 1920, ^ and Williams,
Proletarian Order put forward divergent interpretations of Gramsci and of the
Italian occupation of the factories in 1920. Their differences, however, are not
a consequence of refusing to learn from history. Rather they arise from the
different contemporary issues that have sent these historians to study the
past.
This essay examines the four books, their sources, their points of view
and their contributions to our knowledge of the postwar crisis and of
Gramsci's thought and action. It dodges a major issue: who is correct? All are
correct on some points. All are polemical on others. All are uneven in their
treatment of their topics. To write a sustained alternative to the four would
require another book. I limit myself to pointing out open issues and questions
for further research.
Boggs' Gramsci's Marxism is a low-keyed exploration of Gramsci's po
litical philosophy. Williams' Proletarian Order is a combative interpretation of
the relationship between theories and actions of Gramsci and Amadeo
Bordiga. (Bordiga was the chief theorist and militant to Gramsci's left.)
Spriano's monographic study of the factory occupations was translated by
Williams as a companion to his interpretive work, because Williams believes
its textual appendices bolster his interpretation. Clark's Antonio Gramsci and
the Revolution that Failed is the broadest and best documented of the studies.
His unpublished doctoral dissertation, of which the book is a revision, was one
of Williams' chief sources. The appearance of this material in English repres
ents an approximate doubling of English language materials on Gramsci.
Such material has appeared only slowly, despite growing interest in the man

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34 ILWCH, 14/15, Spring 1979

as theorist and as activist. I refer the reader to Williams' discussion (in the
bibliographic essay of Proletarian Order) of the major works in English and
Italian and of the curious history of the publication of Gramsci's own writing
in Italian, as it fits into the postwar history of communism in Italy. The books
under review contribute to the Gramsci scholarship in diverse and unique
ways.
Boggs is interested in political philosophy more than in practice. He
sees Gramsci's thought as organic, a developing body, in which there is much
continuity. The roots of the Prison Notebooks (written between 1929 and 1936
before Gramsci's death in 1937), were present in the Ordine Nuovo writings of
1919 to 1920. The context, the experience of the man in his action, influenced
the development of his thought less, Boggs argues, than its inner logic. Boggs
is commenting on texts, and his style is exegesis. He writes: "I have found a
definite thematic continuity that far outweighs the change in priorities and
emphasis that marks different historical 'stages' in his political life" (9).
Boggs emphasizes Gramsci's anti-materialist, anti-positivist rejection of the
economist Marxism of the Second International. One of Gramsci's major
insights, he argues, was a recognition of the increased importance, in ad
vanced capitalism, of ideological encounters with the ruling class (53). This
recognition led him to preach the need for a "more organic,
'counter-hegemonic' strategy" (54). Gramsci's earliest writings were con
cerned with ideology and consciousness. He developed a critique of that
contemporary Marxist thought which insisted on economic base as a deter
mining factor. This critique led Gramsci to a more activist concept of strategy,
Boggs argues, than that of the postwar Italian Socialist Party. The party,
writes Boggs, was "enslaved by the paralysis of its short-range economic
goal-orientation on the one hand and its fatalistic waiting for the appearance
of 'ripe' objective conditions on the other." (59).
Thus much of Gramsci's energy went into a discussion of the role of the
ideological and cultural hegemony of the ruling class, a search for strategies
for overcoming it, and particularly an examination of the role of intellectuals.
Central to Gramsci's thinking on these subjects was his notion of "organic
intellectuals." Although Boggs fails to explore many of the links between this
concept and other thoughts of Gramsci's, he does specify clearly that
a group of 'organic' intellectuals . . .would be both 'leading' and
'representative' in the crucial respect of being part of the everyday
social existence of the working class. [In Gramsci's view] New
ideas would not be introduced or 'propagandized' as extraneous
inputs into mass politics but would be integrated into the very
fabric of proletarian culture ... by revolutionaries who them
selves worked and lived within the same environment. (77-78)

Gramsci similarly envisaged the factory councils as the nucleus of a new


state appearing within the daily life of capitalism and providing a means to
replace the bourgeois concept of the citizen with the revolutionary concept of
comrade (93). Boggs agrees that Gramsci never, even in his most syndicalist

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Gramsci and Factory Councils 35

moments, repudiated the idea of the party, although "he insisted that the
party should be nothing more than the expression of proletarian consensus at
any given historical period" (95). He sees Gramsci's increased emphasis on
party over the years as only a partial change: "Gramsci's Leninism . . . never
assumed the narrow, one-sided and extremely voluntarist conception of the
revolutionary process normally associated with the vanguard party" (104).
Boggs argues: "the theoretical-strategic tradition that came out of the Council
struggles . . . has perpetuated within Marxism the most vital and hopeful
alternative to the one-dimensional bureaucratic politics of the Third Interna
tional and other 'vanguard' tendencies" (98). Gramsci's departure from Lenin
derives also from his emphasis on ideological hegemony and the national task
of Marxism (114). Boggs' perspective is evident when he notes the attractive
ness of Gramsci to New Left intellectuals because of "striking parallels be
tween Gramscian theory and new left practice" (119).
Boggs has shown us a unilinear development of Gramsci's thought by
dint of lopping off or playing down parts of that thought that do not fit
comfortably into his interpretation. He argues that the development of
Gramsci's Marxism "was more a change in emphasis in response to new
political conditions than a total rupture" (96). Yet Boggs makes this argument
primarily by leaving out the context, by separating thought and action, by
underestimating the force of events. Boggs misunderstands the political real
ity of Italy in the postwar period: he claims that "vast sectors" of the proletar
iat "were moving rapidly in the direction of reaction" in 1920, and that the
working class "came increasingly under the spell of bourgeois-fascist ideolog
ical hegemony" (56). It was not, however, the lack of a mass psychology in
socialism or the powerful ideology of the Fascist movement which led to the
demobilization of Italy's left. It was the anti-union, anti-left violence of the
Fascists and the state's toleration ofthat violence which demobilized the left.
Can one separate political context and development of theory the way Boggs
wishes us to? By what standards are Gramsci's experience, his increased
interest in party, his participation in the party and later in the Comintern, less
authentic than the aspects of his political theory that Boggs prefers?
Gwyn Williams has a very different point of view, and a very different
mission from Boggs. His work examines many more facets?wrinkles and
warts!?of Gramsci. Although Williams gives us more context, he follows
Gramsci for only ten years, 1911 to 1921. He ends his study before the Fascist
take-over, before Gramsci became a party leader, and of course, before the
writing of the Prison Notebooks. His sources are published works, especially
those of Paolo Spriano, the doctoral dissertation of Martin Clark, "Factory
Councils and the Italian Labour Movement," and Gramsci's writing in the
Ordine Nuovo of the years 1919 to 1920. He notes in his preface that he has
"given almost as much weight to Amadeo Bordiga and his movement; they
seem to me equally important [as Gramsci] and require further
examination .... I think it very important to remain imprisoned within a strict

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36 ILWCH, 14/15, Spring 1979

chronology, at least at this stage, particularly with Gramsci's writings, but


also with Bordiga's" (7).
Williams' writing style is vigorous but often oblique. He frequently uses
elaborate periodic sentences, like the following: "His single, driving, dialec
tial revolution thrusts through the chaos of capitalist collapse like an elemen
tal force of nature, but one controlled and directed by the communist will
realizing the unity of theory and practice in the developing crisis of the mode
of production" (230). Williams' rolling, apocalyptic style, his historian-as-god
approach is often hard to take.
The story is rich and complex. Williams studies Bordiga and Gramsci at
a crucial point in the political history of the Italian left, 1919 to 1920. He
insists that the period under scrutiny be widened beyond the factory occupa
tions to the entire Red Biennium; in fact, he emphasizes the importance of the
time before the summer of 1920. The idea of the factory councils, elaborated
in mid-1919, was "the point of entry for the new civilization. In the microcosm
of the factory council were reproduced the lineaments of the macrocosm: the
state of the councils, the soviet state, the new proletarian order" (103). Of
course, supporters of the unions and members of the Socialist Party
disagreed. Williams examines Gramsci's positions in the debate with other
points of view and focuses on the continuing "dialectical" relationship with
Bordiga. Gramsci had supported Bordiga in 1917, favoring an "intransigent
revolutionary faction. He fully shared Bordiga's detestation of parliamentary
democracy" (146). On the other hand, Gramsci opposed Bordiga's policy of
abstention from voting in parliamentary elections. Electoral struggles, Gram
sci wrote in November, 1919, could both help "to shape this multitude into
some unity and primitive form," and prove to workers through practical ex
perience the necessity to undertake "a superhuman effort by the workers and
peasants to create a proletarian order, to suppress the proprietor class and
with it, every source of waste, barrenness, indiscipline and disorder."
Williams' comments on this pioneering essay are uncompromisingly
hostile.
This is a distinctly unpleasant document, harsh with the repulsive
arrogance which tends to inform Gramsci's more savagely unbri
dled writing. . . . He, with his Sorelian contempt for democracy,
was certainly treading a tightrope here, as taut as that between the
barbaric belly-slaves of the cowardly and the inert who are to be
transformed by the whip and the wonder workers of the proletarian
vanguard into heroes of productive creation (152).
Williams then traces the evolution of Gramsci's thinking about politics
through his writings of 1919 and 1920. The key lines of the book, repeated in
somewhat different form in several places, are:
. . .it is important to stress now that Gramsci arrived at a similar
intensity [to that of Bordiga], a similar stress on the imperative of
living communist in total, though in no sense insulated, differenti
ation from the bourgeois world. The centrality of Bordiga's scheme

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Gramsci and Factory Councils 37

was therefore the party, built strictly on Bolshevik principles, the


concentration of individual conversions to living communist in the
service of a class. Gramsci, as we are seeing, was much slower to
arrive at this point (which Bordiga had reached, in fact, by 1912).
But arrive at it he did. Later history and even later historiography
has masked the essential fact that there was, on the central issue
of the historical definition of communism in Italy, a, fundamental
consonance between Bordiga and Gramsci (177).
Williams ends his close reading of events and texts in 1921. He reviews
later events quickly in an epilogue: although he received the mission to organ
ize the Italian Communist Party and did so, Bordiga later resisted the
Comintern's shift from a left opposition position to a united front policy and
was ultimately "identified" with Trotsky. Gramsci built and defended a center
ground in the Communist Party against Bordiga and Angelo Tasca, leader of a
right-wing faction. In 1928, the Comintern changed its policy; Tasca and
Bordiga were expelled from the party. By then Gramsci was in jail, and
although he opposed the new policy he could play no role in party politics. The
writing of the Prison Notebooks still lay ahead. Williams' interpretation, like
that of Boggs, achieves its coherence by means of wrenching several years of
Gramsci's life and thought out of a longer chronology. Thus Gramsci is shown
to agree on many points with the Trotskyist Bordiga vis-a-vis the party and
other issues.
Williams' history also depicts the April, 1920 strike of FIOM in
Piedmont, rather than the factory occupations of September, as the key event
of the Biennio Rosso. "It was probably the most remarkable moment in Italian
working-class history, perhaps the major event in the post-war history of the
European working class" (206). Why? Williams believes thus because of the
alliance in the strike movement of communists and syndicalists as
"revolutionaries and comrades." The defeat in the strike opened up a split
between the Turin left and the Ordinovisti on the one hand, and the Socialist
Party and the socialist union (CGL) on the other. The other part of Williams'
message is the essential incompetence and the eventual sell-out of these
latter groups.
Paolo Spriano's the Occupation of the Factories: Italy 1920 (first publi
shed in 1964) was translated by Gwyn Williams to accompany his own study.
Williams wanted to illustrate his final point by means of Spriano's
documentation. An introduction by Williams provides a broader context for
Spriano's study. Williams is quite frank in his disagreement with Spriano's
interpretation: "there appears to be a certain incoherence in the organization
of the material. . . [making it] essential that readers study the references and
the appendix as closely as they do the text; they may reach different
conclusions" (15). "There is a certain opacity in Spriano's book on Bordiga
and his fraction" (19).
Williams wishes the book to be read for the fine-scale evidence it pres
ents (much of it from the Archivio Centrale del Stato, Minister of the Interior

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38 ILWCH, 14/15, Spring 1979

correspondence), but he wishes the reader to face the big questions. "Lenin's
question: during the occupation did one single communist put in an
appearance? Which takes us back in the end to the terrible growing agony of
the central problem?the exact quality of the popular 'militancy' of
1919-20. . . [and to the queston] is the real 'revolutionary opportunity' to be
located rather in the war years, or at least before that demobilization which
meant that 'groups of armed men' were once more the monopoly of govern
ment and the right?" (18)
Spriano follows the factory occupation of September, 1920 day by day, in
some instances hour by hour. He emphasizes the role of the intransigence of
the employers in provoking the strike and making it spread. There is relati
vely little about Gramsci here, more on the socialist and union leadership.
Spriano believes that no revolutionary situation was present in September (as
Williams argues in the above citation) but that bourgeois fury was unleashed
by the factory occupation, fury which was then turned against the socialists.
The documents that Williams suggests be carefully scrutinized show
how early in the occupation socialist leaders like Filippo Turati and Claudio
Tr?ves, Bruno Buozzi and Gabriele D'Aragona were talking to the govern
ment about cooperation. The Spriano text also shows how central Bordigist
militants were in the occupation movement. Spriano does not give them credit
for their role. Williams is building a post hoc case for an earlier attempt at
revolution, more closely following the war and its aftermath, along the lines
Bordiga was the first to spell out. In such an attempt, Gramsci would have
been a comrade in arms and a shaper of theory. Williams is also obliquely
pointing to the rewriting of history by Palmiro Togliatti and his associates
after the Second World War. This rewriting played down the vacillation and
hesitancy of the later communists in 1920 and obscured the fact that Bordiga
was an early communist, whose prescription might have worked.
Martin Clark also does some second guessing, but he is less heavy
handed about it than Williams. His work is both less portentous in prose style
and more thoroughly documented. Rather than stressing the left internation
alist links between Gramsci and Bordiga, Clark stresses the need to re
examine communist historiography of the post-Second World War period,
which played down the participatory, anti-bureaucratic heritage of factory
council practice. Thus Clark puts Antonio Gramsci and the Revolution that
Failed in a context of the question of workers' control. He calls his book "an
essay in the 'sociology of ideology'" and notes that "Gramsci was a good
enough thinker to transcend his own time and place, and many of his themes
are ours today?the nature of cultural revolutions, the importance of educa
tion and the media, the need for workers' self-management. Above all, there
is his fascination with the role of intellectuals in bringing about social and
political change" (3). Clark goes over many of the same facts as Williams.
Some new points and different interpretations from Williams and from Boggs
can be noted.

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Gramsci and Factory Councils 39

Contrary to Boggs (46-47), who believes that Gramsci foresaw Taylorism


as a "hegemonic, ideological force in advanced capitalism," Clark argues that
accusations that Ordine nuovo was a "productivist" movement which advo
cated Taylorism, the "scientific organization of labor," are justified. "Factory
councils would 'educate' and 'discipline' the masses and enable workers to
develop their own 'authentic' consciousness through the hard lessons of polit
ical and industrial experience. They would advocate and incarnate hard work,
skills, discipline" (70). Williams' position on the question of Taylorism is that
a "productivist criterion" was characteristic of Gramsci, Marx, Engels and
the Fascists. "That this attitude was self-defeating and ultimately
'petty-bourgeois' would no doubt be a commonplace of criticism in the left.
That the attitude was characteristic of working men and women, who not only
called themselves, but acted like communists and revolutionaries, even under
fascist terror, should also become a commonplace of such criticism" (133).
Clark is in agreement with Williams and against Boggs on the relation
ship between party and councils:
It was vital ... in Factory Council theory that there should exist a
political party to 'concentrate and centralize proletarian activity
. . . bring about unity and simultaneous effort'; indeed this was for
Gramsci the only justification for a working-class political party
.... The two essential characteristics of such a Party were that it
would be the Party of the 'proletarian vanguard,' . . . organized
... on the same basis as the eventual workers' state, i.e., that of
'organic units of production' . . . and it was this, rather than in
creased centralization or tighter discipline, that would enable it to
play its part as the 'Supreme Command of the working class'. (64)
In the August, 1920 party branch election, Togliatti and others of
Gramsci's colleagues in the Ordine Nuovo joined in the "Electionist
Communist" group. Although that group was committed to an eventual purge
of the Socialist Party and to the formation of a Communist Party, it was willing
in the short run to contest elections. Gramsci did not support them. Nor did he
support the Bordigist faction which called for an immediate purge of
reformists, rapid formation of a Communist Party and meetings with workers
of other persuasions to build unity. Gramsci set up a "Communist Education
Group" and declared that both "electionists" and "abstentionists" were fight
ing over a foolish issue. A higher level of discourse, he thought, could be built
through further political education (142-143). Thus the April, 1920 failure of
the strike did not lead either Gramsci or his closest colleagues to work for a
Communist Party. Gramsci still sought a "new type of mass organization
based on industrial units" (144). Neither Ordine Nuovo's factory councils nor
Gramsci's Communist Education Group was responsible for the factory
occupations. The occupations began as a union tactic in a struggle over
wages, but the employers' determination to stand firm in September, 1920
provoked a political crisis. Clark makes it clear why Williams is correct, if
rhetorical, when he repeats: "[in the September crisis] there was no Commu
nist party . . . Communist party there was none" (253-254).

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40 ILWCH, 14/15, Spring 1979

Gramsci insisted that the occupation was not "an experiment in Commu
nist Society," nor was it a revolution. He did not opposed the occupations,
because they would reveal the weakness of the regime and show workers that
they must transcend trade union agitation (162-163). In the end, the occupa
tions were mastered by Premier Giovanni Giolitti, as the Socialist Party and
CGL disagreed on who should take the lead. The Ordine Nuovo group also
split. Clark says:
Yet did Gramsci really believe that a 'revolutionary' outcome was
possible? It seems unlikely. I have discussed his initial pessimism;
and Togliatti, after all, had refused to take the initiative when
challenged to do so in Milan. It is not surprising that both Trade
Union leaders and Maximalist Socialists later accused the Ordine
Nuovo group of hypocrisy, or that more recently it has been argued
that the Ordinovisti were very good at theorizing about revolution,
but quite inept at leading one" (173).
Williams reports Gramsci's views more gently, using Romain Roll and's
words: "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will" (203).
Clark concludes his history of 1920 with two new points. He argues that
it was the occupation of the factories, the specter of trade union control of
industry, and the fear that government would not protect their interests that
drove industrialists to support Fascism. His evidence is thin (as he readily
admits). The timing of Fascist activity (in 1920-21, Fascist squadristi attacked
primarily organized agricultural workers) does not, in fact, support this
interpretation. Finally, Clark believes that some of the central ideas in
Gramsci's prison writings, such as the southern question and cultural
hegemony, resonated so meaningfully with the Second World War experience
of resistance to the Nazis that those ideas, rather than the factory council
ideas, became emphasized in the writing of communist history after 1945
(222, 225). Thus he allows a more benign motivation for immediate postwar
publication of certain of Gramsci's writings and neglect of others than does
Williams.
The Gramscian moment came in the few years just after World War I,
when the example of the Bolshevik Revolution was at hand, when the oppor
tunity for revolution seemed to be forming in Italy, and when (as our comfort
able hindsight permits us to see) the conditions for a Fascist victory were
likewise maturing. The Gramscian moment and Gramsci's writings about it
continue to fascinate contemporary political analysts. And rightly so. The
moment and the writings provide a remarkable conjunction of historical trend,
critical events, strategic choices and theoretical problems, all bearing implica
tions for the feasibility of revolutionary change in today's Italy, as well as
elsewhere in the western world. That Boggs, Clark, Spriano and Williams
should disagree is unsurprising, and probably useful. For, given the richness
and importance of the Gramscian moment and of Gramsci's writings, it is far
too early in the inquiry to fall into superficial agreement or, worse still,
lockstep orthodoxy.

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Gramsci and Factory Councils 41

NOTES

1. Urizen Books (New York, 1975), 291.


2. Urizen Books (New York, 1976).
3. Yale University Press (New Haven and London, 1977).
4. Translated and introduced by Gwyn Williams, Urizen Books (New York, 1975).

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