Gramsci 1917
Source: La Rivoluzione contro il Capitale;
First published: Avanti!, 24 December 1917;
Translated: for marxists.org by Sam Nartus, 2025.
The Bolshevik revolution has definitively grafted itself onto the general revolution of the Russian people. The Maximalists who, until two months ago, were the necessary ferment for events to not come to a rest, for the race toward the future not to stop to give place to a definitive form of order - which would have been a bourgeois order, - seized the power, have stabilised their dictatorship, and are elaborating the socialist frameworks within which the revolution will finally have to take place in order to continue to develop in harmony, without too many shocks, from the great conquests which have already been achieved.
The Bolshevik revolution has materialised from ideologies more than facts (thus, in the end, it matters little for us to know more than we do know). It is the revolution against Karl Marx's Capital. Marx's Capital was, in Russia, the book of the bourgeoisie more than the proletariat. It was the critical demonstration of the fatal necessity of forming a Russian bourgeoisie, to begin a capitalistic era, to establish a Western civilisation, before the proletariat could even think of their retaliation, their demands, their revolution. The facts have surpassed ideologies. The facts have burst the critical schemes within which Russia's history would have had to unfold according to the historical materialism canons. The Bolsheviks renounce Karl Marx, and assert through their action statement and from their achievements, that the canons of historical materialism are not as inflexible as one might have thought, and as it was indeed thought to be.
Nevertheless there is a fatality still in these events, and if the Bolsheviks renounce certain affirmations from Capital, they do not renounce the vivifying immanent thought. Simply put, they are not "Marxists": they have not built from the master's work an outer doctrine of dogmatic and indisputable affirmations. They live the Marxist thought, that which never dies, which is the continuation of the idealist Italian and German thought, and which in Marx has been contaminated by positivist and naturalist deposits. And this thought takes as a major factor of history not raw economic facts, but Man, Man's society, of Men who get together, who develop with each other, who develop through these contacts (civilisation) a collective social will, and understand the economic facts and judge them as they please, until this becomes the economy's engine, the shaper of objective reality, that lives, moves, and acquires a seething telluric character, which can be channelled where will pleases.
Marx has predicted the predictable. He could not predict the European war, or better yet he could not predict that this war would have had the length and the effects it has had. He could not have predicted that this war, in three years of indescribable suffering, would have elicited the popular, collective will that it has elicited in Russia. A will of this magnitude normally requires a long process of permeation in order to shape itself, and a long series of class experiences. Men are slow, need to organise themselves, outwardly at first, in corporations, in leagues, then intimately, in thought, in will [...] of an incessant continuity and multiplicity of external stimuli. This is why, normally, the canon of the Marxist historical critique captures reality, restricts it, and renders it evident and distinct. Normally, it is through ever intensifying class struggle that the two classes of the capitalistic world create history. The proletariat feels its current misery, is continually in a state of unease and pushes the bourgeoisie to better their own conditions. The struggle forces the bourgeoisie to improve production techniques, to render production more useful for it to be possible to satisfy their more urgent needs. It is a heavy race towards betterment, which accelerates the rhythm of production, which consistently increases the sum of goods available to the community. And in this race many fall, making the desire of those that remain ever more urgent, and the masses are always on edge, and from the chaos the people becomes yet more orderly in their thought, becomes yet more conscious of their own power, of their own ability to assume the social responsibility, to become the arbitrators of their own fates.
This is the normal course, when the facts repeat with a certain rhythm. When the story develops through ever more complex and rich moments in meaning and value, but still similar. But in Russia the war has served to rouse wills. They, through the suffering accumulated in three years, have found themselves in agreement very rapidly. The famine was imminent, hunger, death from hunger, could seize all, crush tens of millions of men with one blow. The wills have synchronised, at first mechanically, actively, spiritually after the first [February] revolution.
The preaching of socialism has put the Russian people in contact with the experiences of other proletarians. The preaching of socialism has dramatically and instantaneously enlivened the history of the proletariat, its struggles against capitalism, the long series of efforts it must make in order to theoretically emancipate itself from the constraints of servitude that made it abject, to become a new consciousness, a real testimony of a world to come. The preaching of socialism has created the social will of the Russian people. Why should they wait for the history of England to repeat in Russia, for a bourgeoisie to be formed in Russia, for class struggle to be elicited in order for class consciousness to arise and the catastrophe of the capitalist world to finally occur? The Russian people have gone through these experiences in their thought, even if only the thought of a minority. They have overcome these experiences. They need it to assert themselves now, just as they will use the experiences of capitalism in the West to quickly put themselves at the height of production of the Western world. North America is more advanced than England on the capitalist front, because Anglo-Saxons in North America started at a point that England has only achieved following a long evolution. The Russian proletariat, socialistically educated, will begin its history from the big stage of production which has arrived in England today, because having to begin, it will begin from a point that has already been completed elsewhere, and from this point it will get the impulse to reach that economic maturity which according to Marx is the necessary condition of the collective. The revolutionaries themselves will create the necessary conditions for the complete and full realisation of their ideal. They will create them in less time than capitalism has done. The critiques that socialists have made towards the bourgeois system, evidencing the imperfections, the distribution of wealth, will aid the revolutionaries in doing better, to avoid these unequal distributions, to not fall into these deficits. But the same conditions of misery and suffering would be passed down from a bourgeois regime. Capitalism could not immediately do in Russia more than collectivism could. I would do much less today, because it would have suffered at the hands of an unhappy, frenetic proletariat, by now incapable of handling the pain and disappointment wrought by economic distress. Also from an absolute human point of view, immediate socialism is justified in Russia. The suffering that will be left behind after peace could only be put up with insofar as the proletarians will feel as though they stand in their own will, in their tenacity in the process of suppressing it in as little time as possible.
If it is under the impression that the Maximalists have been, in this moment, the spontaneous expression, biologically necessary, for Russian civilisation not to fall into the most horrible collapse, because Russian civilisation, absorbed in the gigantic, autonomous work of proper regeneration, is able to sense less stimuli from the hungry wolf and Russia shall not become a mass-grave of wild animals devouring each other.