The Campaigner

fantasies into reality, it appeals to a mechanistic force to council. The workers thus found themselves
effect the transformation. It appeals to a more drastic faced with a vacuum and continued to perform the
magic. Underlying all of Gramsci's theoretical writings is suicidally limited anarchosyndicalist dance. What was
this profound belief in magic, in the notion that words, lacking was a sense of exponential expansion of the
once ordered on a page, may become "flesh" in the struggle in a form the soviet capable of
dynamics of the class struggle. In essence, what is the concretizing and carrying that potential to ever vaster
factory council? Simply, the projection on a sociological layers of the class.
plane of the secret self, the scared impotent self hiding Gramsci sabotaged the one great moment for his own
its fear under the mask of cazzista bravado and creativity by saying no to the workers' itch for something
militance! more. Masochistically, he censored his own incipient
Withdrawing into its own precisely articulated limits, creativity in order to preserve the suffering self. By
it nurtures the fantasy that it can magically make the sabotaging the objective situation which could have freed
revolution. It never can, because, like the secret self, it him, he doomed hundreds of thousands of workers to
cannot tolerate a relation with reality on pain of death -- misery and despair.
the destruction of the fantasy itself. Gramsci in 1920, indeed in all his life, was incapable
Gramsci's writings on revolutionary organizing, of love.
already cited, are full of this sense of magic; the
"inevitable" flow of history is supposed to make the How many times have I asked myself if it was possible
to bind oneself to the masses when one had never loved
factory council the "primary cell" of the revolution, etc.,
anyone, not even one's own relatives, if it was possible
etc. Nowhere in his writings is there any indication of to lovethecollectivityifonehadnot deeply loved single
how this is to come about, nor would it be possible for human creatures. Wouldn't that have had reflexes on
Gramsci to pose the question in terms of dynamic my life as a militant, wouldn't it have made my
revolutionary quality sterile, reduced it to a pure inprocesses
because the essence of magic is precisely tellectual fact, a mathematical calculation?...(118)
this mechanist notion of reality as governed by unseen
forces propitiated into action by incantation. Gramsci could not love in the necessary sense of
When Gramsci got annoyed at workers who asked him encouraging the development of man's capacities to
what to do he was actually saying this: the councils are develop further. In the mass-strike ferment, he was
there, so they should act as my theory dictates. The incapable of forcing working-class leaders to develop
councils, on paper, were expected to translate the new, conscious, revolutionary formations. The shriveled
symmetrical, mechanistic plan into reality, despite the connection to his wife Gramsci hints at in his letter does
stubborn sociological and psychological nature of that indeed exist; it is the very basis of his social relations and
reality. When the magic didn't work, Gramsci was politics. What Gramsci sees, though, is only the formal
annoyed, and he fled the scene. Later he covered up for indication of a link, almost a romantic reflection on his
the misfire by pretending it had never happened that personal torment as somehow related to the decimation
way, by calling the occupation a success. Still later, in of the working class under fascism.
1924, he went so far as to say that the chances for What Gramscimisses is the content of the relationship
revolution were better under fascism than before! between interpersonal love and love in a socialist, social
I am persuaded that the current situation is more sense.
favorable to the success of the revolution than in 1919- Hysterically protecting the integrity of the council, the
1920. Then, after the revolution, with a party like the
PSI, with a working class that in general...preferred isolated, terrified, alienated self -- his own mind,
songs and fanfares to sacritices, we would have had intellectuality -- Gramsci in effect denied the existence
counterrevolutionary attempts which would have of the other, the rest of the working class, and denied the
whisked us away totally... (117) possibility for this class to develop itself as a class.
In the occupation of the factories, the social forces in That he has no conception of program is perfectly
play moved lawfully in the mass-strike process beyond coherent with his refusal to see production as a
the pre-established limits of the trade-union struggle, developing, expanding process. Thus he could not
The workers, though as ignorant as Gramsci of the supersede the other cripples of his generation and
principles of classwide revolutionary organizing, achieve an understanding of the content of revolutionary
chaotically pressured trade-union and party formations organizing as centered around a program for expanded
from the inside, blindly, anarchistically reaching out. social reproduction. Gramsci could only retreat into his
Gramsci, terrified by this chaos of potential expan- internal hell of fantasy and pain, striving to ward off the
sion, clung to the old familiar formation, the factory giant spider.
101