PROLETARIAN ORDER: Antonio Gramsci, Factory Councils, and the Origins of Communism in Italy 1911-1921, by Prof. Gwyn Williams. My first comment is to note that the late, not-so-kind Professor—and it seems there is no aspect of human affairs so absurd or so preposterous that some professor somewhere has not built a lucrative tenure teaching upon its foundation—far from adhering to his own strictures that Communism in Italy was in no way Italian but was part and parcel of the global Communist Party as administered by the Comintern, posed the title of his book as “the Origins of Italian Communism” rather than “the Origins of the Communist Party of Italy”, thus exposing the first of many contradictions and obfuscations by Professor Williams.
This book is a tendentious, unimaginative in the extreme, dully doctrinaire work by a class-war Marxist-Leninist of the most dreary variety, as pious and stolid in his armored faith in the Soviet Union as any knight of the round table. In his hands, every trace of individuality is “counter-revolutionary”, every attempt to defend life and property is “capitalist aggression”, and the slightest hint of government by representative democracy is “bourgeois reaction…laced with corruption and scandal”, just as every industrial plant is by definition “colonized” by capitalists.
Communist violence, on the other hand, is routinely excused and recast in glowing and self-righteous terms, drenched in faux militance, such as “the battle for wheat” and “battle for the lira”, with murder and intimidation all-too-easily translated into slogans such as “political action”, “will to power”, and “will to victory”. Every thuggish riot is a social “movement”, every petty theft a “revolutionary act”.
In his world, diversity of opinion is “counter-revolutionary”—except when his hero Antonio Gramsci is stridently seeking to make his voice heard among skeptical and disapproving socialist leaders. Voting is an “obstacle to revolutionary progress”, except in the context of striking workers who are attempting to vote at worker council meetings in favor of Communists like Bordiga. Hierarchy and discipline are aspects of monopoly capitalism and imperialism, except where “socialist hierarchy” and “Communist discipline” are “central” to Communist success. Every land seizure by persons whom the author would term “rednecks” were such to happen in the United States, is “class conflict erupting in popular action” and “communal revolt”, even in the context of Mafia-ridden rural Italy. The same act if done by a Communist is a “revolutionary act”, but “fascist terror” if done by anyone in opposition, or a “fascist attack” on socialists’ “preaching of calm, non-violence”.
He accuses the Italian President Giolitti of “bad faith” when he expanded suffrage in 1912, but remains silent when Lenin eliminated suffrage entirely in 1917, and he supports Gramsci and Bordiga when they advocate the end of suffrage in Italy. He blames the “bourgeois” politician Ansaldo for funding Italian banks and newspapers to take a stand against worker riots, but says nary a word about the Soviet Union funding Italian Communists and public unions and anyone else in the government willing to take a bribe to submit to Moscow’s instructions.
Williams’ main theme is that World War I destroyed the PSI, the Italian Socialist Party, so that there was no effective release valve from “mounting popular exasperation” which finally found an outlet in the “occupation of the factories” of northern Italy by Italian industrial workers in 1920. A secondary theme is the emergence of the modern Communist Party of Italy from the failure of this occupation, jettisoning what remained of the PSI, the new Communist Party led first by Bordiga and then Gramsci who gradually abandons his “reformism” and embraces the abstentionism of Bordiga.
Exchange “redneck” for “working class” and one sees immediately the first problem with all this. “Dictatorship of the rednecks” just doesn’t have the same ring. In the end, Williams’ hair-splitting doctrinal disputes among Bordiga and Gramsci and Serrati amount to no more than the pedantic filioque dispute between the Latin and Orthodox churches in the tenth century, and results in similarly ridiculous statements like “the conquest of self-consciousness” and “determinism is a condition of voluntarism”. This is the kind of nonsense that follows application of the dialectic to politics.
Williams’ classically bad thinking is matched by classically bad writing. For example: “it was in 1917 that contradictions became acute”, referring to the alleged internal contradictions of capitalism which could only find an outlet through violence (note the persistent Marxist dialectical mode of thought: only out of the violent clash of opposites can peaceful synthesis emerge). A real writer might phrase it: “The social equilibrium of the sons of Romulus gyroed into chaos in the wake of the Teutonic juggernaut at Caporetto”. But one cannot expect innovative writing any more than innovative thinking from a dully doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist like Gwyn Williams.
Many issues he fails to make clear: For instance, to what extent was Italian Communism controlled by the Comintern, meaning 
indirectly by Lenin’s new Communist Party-Soviet Union headquartered in Moscow? On the one hand, Williams describes how slavishly the leading figures of the Italian Left regarded Lenin and his Bolsheviks in Russia, celebrating the arrival of an emissary or any communication from Lenin like a missive from the Pope, the only land anywhere where socialism had “conquered”. On the other hand, Bordiga sent a public letter to Lenin remonstrating his failure to back “abstentionism” (boycotting of elections) by Italian Communists. Still, the ultimate outcome of this “failure of Communist discipline” was Bordiga’s own purging from the Communist Party of Italy—this regarding the founding father of Communism in Italy, “Italy’s Lenin”—which suggests that the observation by others, implied by Williams himself, that there was only one Communist Party, administered top-down through the Comintern, which was itself administered top-down by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and that precious little independence existed in the Communist Party of Italy, was correct. A just outcome, at any rate, given Bordiga’s constant advocacy of party unity through purges of dissidents, and contempt for voting procedures. Perhaps it is more accurate to state that Bordiga could never have held any position of leadership in the new Communist Party of Italy without Moscow’s approval, and when he imagined that he enjoyed some degree of independence, Moscow set him straight.
A second issue he similarly skirts: although he acknowledges that Mussolini was the most popular socialist in Italy prior to World War I, and was the editor of the leading socialist publication Avanti, and further that Mussolini largely stole the thunder from the post-war PSI by drawing most Italian youth to his banner of action for action’s sake under the new symbol of the ancient Roman fasces, Williams fails to account for why Mussolini’s popularity should have soared in the wake of the Occupation of the Factories in 1920. How does Williams explain the huge wave of support enjoyed by Mussolini in early 1921, culminating in national elections that showed very few Italians voting for Communists, or even for socialist candidates? Could it be that the “masses” were relieved to see law and order restored instead of an endless series of street riots and an economy collapsed by unremitting nation-wide strikes? Or that, having seen the famines in Russia and the wreckage of the short-lived Communist regimes in Hungary and Bavaria, even socialist leaders in Italy were relieved not to see a “workers’ paradise” come in Italy? How does Williams discount the logic that manipulation, deception, and violence in internal party relations should not result in anything but the same in its external relations?
Third, since Gramsci consciously modeled his proposed Communist Party of Italy on the early Christian movement, how does Williams square this with the allegedly de-mystified and secular “scientific” basis of modern Socialism, which every class-war Marxist always invokes in an effort to cloak his own profound mystification in an aura of science? Surely even a doctrinaire in-the-box Marxist (non)thinker such as Williams sees the yawning chasm in logic between a claimed humanist and secularist and the fervently religious and apocalyptic global Communist movement which brought with it “in truth, a powerful feeling of conversion” in Williams’ own words? No such admission in this book. This reviewer advises that if the gentle reader desires objectivity and balance, he shall encounter more inside the covers of a Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Awake! Magazine than in this work by Professor Williams. –Sin City Milla
