Antonio Gramsci - I hate the indifferent

I hate the indifferent.
By Antonio Gramsci*.

I hate the indifferent. I believe that living means taking sides. Those who really live cannot help being a citizen and a partisan. Indifference and apathy are parasitism, perversion, not life. That is why I hate the indifferent.

The indifference is the deadweight of history. The indifference operates with great power on history. The indifference operates passively, but it operates. It is fate, that which cannot be counted on. It twists programs and ruins the best-conceived plans. It is the raw material that ruins intelligence. That what happens, the evil that weighs upon all, happens because the human mass abdicates to their will; allows laws to be promulgated that only the revolt could nullify, and leaves men that only a mutiny will be able to overthrow to achieve the power.

The mass ignores because it is careless and then it seems like it is the product of fate that runs over everything and everyone: the one who consents as well as the one who dissents; the one who knew as well as the one who didn’t know; the active as well as the indifferent. Some whimper piously, others curse obscenely, but nobody, or very few ask themselves: If I had tried to impose my will, would this have happened?

I also hate the indifferent because of that: because their whimpering of eternally innocent ones annoys me. I make each one liable: how they have tackled with the task that life has given and gives them every day, what have they done, and especially, what they have not done. And I feel I have the right to be inexorable and not squander my compassion, of not sharing my tears with them. I am a partisan, I am alive, I feel the pulse of the activity of the future city that those on my side are building is alive in their conscience. And in it, the social chain does not rest on a few; nothing of what happens in it is a matter of luck, nor the product of fate, but the intelligent work of the citizens. Nobody in it is looking from the window of the sacrifice and the drain of a few. Alive, I am a partisan.

That is why I hate the ones that don’t take sides, I hate the indifferent.

Indifference is actually the mainspring of history. But in a negative sense. What comes to pass, either the evil that afflicts everyone, or the possible good brought about by an act of general valour, is due not so much to the initiative of the active few, as to the indifference, the absenteeism of the many. What comes to pass does so not so much because a few people want it to happen, as because the mass of citizens abdicate their responsibility and let things be. They allow the knots to form that in time only a sword will be able to cut through; they let men rise to power whom in time only a mutiny will overthrow. The fatality that seems to dominate history is precisely the illusory appearance of this indifference, of this absenteeism. Events are hatched off-stage in the shadows; unchecked hands weave the fabric of collective life – and the masses know nothing. The destinies of an epoch are manipulated in the interests of narrow horizons, of the immediate ends of small groups of activists – and the mass of citizens know nothing.

But eventually the events that are hatched come out into the open; the fabric woven in the shadows is completed, and then it seems that fatality overwhelms everything and everybody. It seems that history is nothing but an immense natural phenomenon, an eruption, an earthquake, and that we are all its victims, both those who wanted it to happen as well as those who did not, those who knew it would happen and those who did not, those who were active and those who were indifferent. And then it is the indifferent ones who get angry, who wish to dissociate themselves from the consequences, who want it made known that they did not want it so and hence bear no responsibility. And while some whine piteously, and others howl obscenely, few people, if any, ask themselves this question: had I done my duty as a man, had I sought to make my voice heard, to impose my will, would what came to pass have ever happened? But few people, if any, see their indifference as a fault – their scepticism, their failure to give moral and material support to those political and economic groups that were struggling either to avoid a particular evil or to promote a particular good. Instead such people prefer to speak of the failure of ideas, of the definitive collapse of programmes, and other like niceties. They continue in their inindifference and their scepticism.

August 1916.

https://communismgr.blogspot.com/2017/01/antonio-gramsci-i-hate-indifferent_23.html

Which side are you on, boys?

Man, if that doesn't get your blood roaring then you ain't got none. This little guy would go one to spend his whole life in prison, and I can guarantee his attitude did not change. Makes me feel like a wimp, a fucking cry-baby...

Neither Fascism nor Liberalism: Sovietism!

Source: L’Unità, October 7, 1924;
Translated: by Mitchell Abidor;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2008.

In the political crisis of the liquidation of fascism the opposition bloc increasingly appears to be a factor of a secondary order. Its heterogeneous social composition, its hesitations, and its aversion for a struggle of the popular masses against the Fascist regime reduce its actions to a journalistic campaign and parliamentary intrigues, which impotently run up against the armed militia of the Fascist party.

In the opposition movement to fascism the most important part has passed to the Liberal Party because the bloc has no other program to oppose to fascism than the old Liberal program of parliamentary bourgeois democracy, the return to the constitution, to legality, to democracy. In the discussion concerning the succession to fascism, according to the congress of the Liberal Party the Italian people is placed by the opposition before a choice: either fascism or liberalism; either a Mussolini government of bloody dictatorship or a Slandri, Gioliotti, Amendola, Turati, don Sturzo, or Vella government tending towards the reestablishment of the good old liberal Italian democracy, under whose mask the bourgeoisie will continue to exercise its exploitative rule.

The worker, the peasant, who for years has hated the fascism that oppresses him believes it necessary, in order to bring it down, to ally himself with the liberal bourgeoisie, to support those who in the past, when they were in power, supported and armed fascism against the workers and peasants, and who just a few months ago formed a sole bloc with fascism and shared in the responsibility for its crimes. And this is how the question of the liquidation of fascism is posed? No! The liquidation of fascism must be the liquidation of the bourgeoisie that created it.

When the Communist Party, in the days after the assassination of Matteoti, issued the slogan: “Down with the government of assassins! Dissolution of the Fascist militia!” it didn’t think that the government of assassins should be replaced by a government of those who in all their policies had opened the way to and armed the assassins; it never thought that Giolitti, Nitti, and Amendola, who were in power when the Fascist militia was formed, would be capable of disarming this militia which they had favored and armed against the working class.

In putting forth its slogan our party didn’t intend to replace failing fascism with the old liberalism, whose opprobrious failure and definitive liquidation the March on Rome had signaled. The Communist Party, from the beginning of the crisis of fascism, affirmed that the working class and the peasants must be the gravediggers and the successors of those in power.

The action of the mass of industrial proletarians and peasants is necessary for the defeat of fascism, for the class struggle with all of its consequences. Without a doubt the proletariat should and must use, in its struggle against fascism, the contradictions and the struggles that have developed within the bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeoisie. But without direct action fascism can never be brought down. Posing the problem in this way would mean, at the same time, clearly posing the question of the succession to fascism. With the defeat of fascism by the action of the worker and peasant masses liberalism will have no part in the succession: this right belongs to the government of the workers and peasants which alone will be capable of and will have the sincere determination to disarm the Fascist militia, arming the working class and the peasants.

At the current time it is a question of something other than the return of the constitution, to democracy and liberalism. These latter are mellifluous words that the bourgeoisie uses to mislead the workers of the city and the countryside in order to prevent the crisis from taking on its true character, that is the vengeance of the workers and peasants against the fascism that has suppressed them and against the liberalism that has misled them, and which just a few months ago collaborated or sought to collaborate (D’Aragona, Baldesi, etc) with Mussolini.

The Italian crisis can only be resolved through the action of the laboring masses. There is no possibility for the liquidation of fascism on the plain of parliamentary intrigues, only a compromise that leaves the bourgeoisie at the lead along with armed fascism at its service. Liberalism, even if inoculated with the glands of the reformist monkey, is powerless. It belongs to the past. And all the Don Struzos of Italy, united with the Turatis and the Vellas, will not succeed in returning to it the youth necessary for the liquidation of fascism.

A government of the classes of workers and peasants, which will not preoccupy itself either with the constitution or the sacred principles of liberalism, but which is determined to definitively defeat fascism, to disarm it and to defend the interests of the workers of the cities and the fields against all exploiters, this alone is the sole youthful force capable of liquidating a past of oppression, of exploitation and crime and of giving a future of true liberty to all who labor.

Today the Communist Party is the only one that repeats this truth to the proletariat. Its influence increases, its organization is developing, but the majority of the workers and peasants, dragged along by the Confederation of Labor and the Maximalist Party, in their turn advancing in the wake of the constitutional opposition, has not yet re-acquired its class consciousness, hasn’t understood that the working and peasant class is the principal factor in the crisis because it has the irresistible numbers and the great force of youth. If it doesn’t want to delude itself it must act on the plain of the class struggle as an independent force, which will soon be determinant, and not on the plain of class collaboration in order to do nothing but change the mask of the Italian bourgeoisie.

The essential task of our party consists is having penetrate among the workers and peasants this fundamental idea: only the class struggle of the mass of workers and peasants will defeat fascism. Only a government of workers and peasants can disarm the fascist militia. When these essential truths will have penetrated the spirit of the working and peasant masses by means of our tireless propaganda the workers of the factories and the fields, of whatever party, will understand the need to construct Worker and Peasant Committees for the defense of their class interests and for the struggle against fascism.

They will understand that these are the necessary instruments of the revolutionary struggle and of their will to replace the government of assassins with a government of workers and peasants. At the moment of the closing of the of the Liberal Congress, which seeks yet again to win over the working people, from one end to the other of Italy the workers and peasants answer their sonorous and empty chatter with: Neither Fascism nor Liberalism: Sovietism!

https://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/1924/10/fascism-liberalism.htm