Italian Rebels – Raymond Angelo Belliotti

Gramsci perceived, correctly, that the ideological dispute was merely verbal camouflage for a deeper quarrel bearing profound practical implications. The primary stumbling block was, yet again, disagreement over the proper relationship between the revolutionary party and power in the workplace. Serrati and especially Bodiga were dedicated to preserving the primacy of party authority. In fairness, Gramsci’s own writings on this topic oscillate. Although an avid promoter of factory councils as akin to soviets, Gramsci’s ambivalence about the relationship of party to soviet persisted. He seemed to crave two contradictory realities: all state power in the hands of workers’ and peasants’ councils as well as the revolutionary party as supreme authority.38 The conflict is evident: The masses of workers were seemingly ill prepared to constitute the vanguard of radical social transformation, but their participation was crucial if the movement was to attain its professed ends, one of which was the extension of democracy; an elite party embodied the discipline and will to serve as the vanguard, but its leadership amounted to revolution from above, threatened to establish class division between intellectuals and labor, and jeopardized the desired ends of the movement.

The best Gramsci could do to soften the conundrum was to endorse the immediate purging of reformists from the party, insist on party support for the faculty councils that would generate political soviets, and assign the party primary ideological tasks, while the political soviets would serve as the dictatorship of the proletariat—in effect, articulating and exercising the will of the masses.39 Readers might well conclude that Gramsci’s formulation is rhetorical dressing lacking a substantive solution to the enigma.

The party remains the vanguard, basically informing the political soviets on how and what to think; the soviets, under cover of expressing the will of the masses, in fact exercise the resolve of the party elite; and, in the end, the revolution is guided from above. Class division, perhaps of a new stripe, seems the outcome. In September 1920, a second uprising of workers, spreading from Milan throughout Italy, engineered often by factory councils and auguring extended democracy from below, spurred Gramsci to adjust his position further and herald the alliance of laborers and peasants as the vanguard of genuine revolution: “Today, the workers’ occupation has shattered despotic power in the factories.

. . . Each factory is an illegal state, a proletarian republic which lives from day to day, waiting upon the turn of events.”40 This was a national movement, including agricultural workers in southern Italy and Sicily who occupied uncultivated regions of large farming enterprises. The moment for marrying revolutionary theory to practice had arrived, or so it appeared.

General Editor: Dr. Anthony Julian Tamburri, Dean of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Italian Studies is devoted to the publication of scholarly works on Italian literature, film, history, biography, art, and culture, as well as on intercultural connections, such as Italian-American Studies.

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Salsini (eds.), Resistance, Heroism, Loss: World War II in Italian Film and Literature (2018) Catherine Ramsey-Portolano, Performing Bodies: Female Illness in Italian Literature and Cinema (1860–1920) (2018) Italian Rebels Mazzini, Gramsci, and Giuliano Raymond Angelo Belliotti FAIRLEIGH DICKINSON UNIVERSITY PRESS Vancouver • Madison • Teaneck • Wroxton Published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Copublished by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE, United Kingdom Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

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