Liberty and Discipline Gramsci and the Factory Council Movement

Abstract

The occupation of the factories by the Turin metalworkers in September 1920 represented the culmination of postwar working class unrest. The occupations, the final episode of the now fabled biennio rosso (two red years) of 1919–20, had a decisive impact on Gobetti, bringing him into proximity with a genuinely spontaneous working class politics and focusing his aspiration for renewal on a concrete historical subject. The occupations were defended theoretically by Ordine Nuovo and, in particular, by its twenty-nine-year-old communist coeditor, Antonio Gramsci, who, in its pages, outlined a theory of workplace democracy that envisaged the factories as the basis of a new workers’ state. Gobetti’s acquaintance with Gramsci and Ordine Nuovo’s project opened up a whole new horizon of possibilities, expanding his understanding of radical politics and encouraging him to transform his liberalism into what he understood as a revolutionary doctrine.KeywordsTrade UnionCommunist PartyFactory OccupationSocialist PartyRussian RevolutionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.