Analysis of Situations, Relations of Forces

The study of how "situations" need to be analysed, i.e. of how the different levels of the relations of forces need to be established, can lend itself to an elementary exposition of the science and art of politics, in the sense of the totality of practical canons for research and of particular observations useful for awakening interest in effective reality and encouraging more rigorous and vigorous political intuitions. At the same time an exposition should be made of what must be understood by strategy and tactics, by strategic "plan", by propaganda and agitation, by the science of organisation and administration in politics. The empirical observations which are usually expounded here and there in works on political science (as for example in G. Mosca's book, The Elements of Political Science) ought, in so far as they are not abstract matters or with no solid foundation, to find a place in the different levels of the relations of forces, beginning with the relations of international forces and going on to the objective social relations, i.e. to the level of development of the productive forces, to the relations of political and party forces (hegemonic systems inside the State) and to the immediate (or potentially military) political relations.

Do international relations precede or follow (logically) the fundamental social relations? Undoubtedly they follow. Every organic innovation in the structure modifies organically the absolute and relative relations in the international field, through its technico-military expressions. Even the geographical position of a national State does not precede but follows (logically) the structural innovations, though reacting on them to a certain extent (to the extent precisely to which superstructures react on the structure, politics on economics, etc.). On the other hand international relations react passively and actively on the political relations (of hegemony of parties). The more the immediate economic life of a nation is subordinated to international relations, the more a certain party will represent this situation and exploit it in order to prevent any advantage for the opposing parties (remember Nitti's famous speech about the technically impossible Italian revolution!). From this series of facts the conclusion can be reached that often the so-called "foreigners' party" is not the same as it is popularly called, but is in fact the most nationalistic party, which, in reality, rather than representing the vital forces of its own country, represents its subordination and economic slavery to the hegemonic nations or groups of nations.

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It is the problem of the relations between structure and superstructures which needs to be posed exactly and resolved in order to reach a correct analysis of the forces working in the history of a certain period and determine their relationship. One must keep within the bounds of two principles:

1. that no society sets itself tasks for whose solution the necessary and sufficient conditions do not already exist or are not at least in process of emergence and development;
2. that no society dissolves and can be replaced unless it has first developed all the forms of life implicit in its relations.¹

From reflection on these two canons one can successfully develop a whole series of other principles of historical methodology. However, in studying a structure, it is necessary to distinguish organic movements (relatively permanent) from movements which could be called “incidental” (which appear as occasional, immediate, almost accidental). Incidental phenomena are certainly dependent as well on the organic movements, but their significance has no great historical importance: they give rise to a petty, day-to-day political criticism which concerns the small ruling groups and personalities directly responsible for power. Organic phenomena give rise to historico-social criticism which concerns the large groupings, those beyond the immediately responsible people and beyond the leading personnel. In studying an historical period this distinction appears of the greatest importance. A crisis appears which sometimes lasts for decades. This exceptional duration means that incurable contradictions have appeared (have come to maturity) in the structure, and that the political forces working positively for the preservation and defence of the same structure are exerting themselves nevertheless to heal them within certain limits and to overcome them. These incessant and persistent efforts (since no social form is ever willing to confess that is has been superseded), form the basis for the "occasional" ("occasionale"), on which was organised the antagonistic forces which aim to show (a demonstration which in the last analysis only succeeds and is "true" if it becomes a new reality, if the antagonistic forces triumph, whereas in the short term there develops a whole series of ideological, religious, philosophical, political, legal, etc., polemics whose concreteness is to be valued by the extent to which they succeed in conquering and in displacing the existing array of social forces) that the necessary and sufficient conditions already exist which make possible and imperative the historical solution of certain tasks (imperative, because every shortcoming in historical duty increases the necessary disorder and prepares more serious catastrophes).

The error often committed in historico-political analyses consists in having been unable to find the correct relationship between what is organic and what is occasional: thus one succeeds either in expounding as directly operative causes which instead operate indirectly, or in asserting that direct causes are the only effective causes; in one case there is an excess of "economism" or pedantic doctrinaireism, in the other an excess of "ideologism"; in the one case an overestimation of mechanical causes, in the other an exaltation of the voluntarist and individual element. The distinction between organic "movements" and events and "incidental" or occasional movements and events must be applied to all type of situations, not only to those where one sees a reactionary development or an acute crisis, but to those where one sees a progressive or prosperous development and to those where one sees a stagnation of the productive forces. The dialectical nexus between the two kinds of movement, and, therefore, of research, is difficult to establish; and, if the error is serious in historiography, it is still more serious in the art of politics, where we are dealing not with reconstructing past history but with building present and future history:² one's own inferior and immediate desires and passions are the cause of error, in so far as they are substituted for objective and impartial analysis, and this happens not as a conscious "means" to stimulate action but as self-deceit. Here also, the snake bites the charlatan, or rather the demagogue is the first victim of his demagogy.

These methodological criteria acquire their full significance only if applied to the examination of concrete historical events. This could be usefully done for the events unfolded in France from 1789 to 1870. I think that, for greater clarity in the exposition, it is really necessary to take in the whole of this period. Indeed, only in 1870-1, with the Communard attempt, were all the germs born in 1789 historically worked out, in other words, not only did the new class struggling for power conquer the representatives of the old society who did not wish to admit that they had been decisively overcome, but it also conquered the newest groups which held that the new structure which had arisen out of the development begun in 1789 was already outdated, and thus showed that it was alive in comparison with both the old and the very new. Further, with 1870-1 all the principles of political strategy and tactics born in practice in 1789 and developed ideologically around 1848 lost their efficacy (those which are summed up in the formula of the "permanent revolution");³ it would be interesting to study how far this formula passed into Mazzini's strategy—for example, the Milan insurrection of 1853—and whether this took place consciously or otherwise). An element showing the correctness of this point of view is the fact that historians are in no way in agreement (and it is impossible that they should be) in fixing the limits for that group of events which constitutes the French Revolution. For some (e.g. Salvemini), the Revolution was completed at Valmy: France had created a new State and had been able to organise the politico-military force to assert and defend its territorial sovereignty. For others the Revolution continued until Thermidor, and, moreover, they speak of more revolutions (August roth is, according to them, a revolution in itself, etc.).⁴ The method of interpreting Thermidor and the work of Napoleon provides the sharpest contradictions: is it revolution or counter-revolution? For others the history of the Revolution continues down to 1830, 1848, 1870 and even until the Great War of 1914. In all these views there is some truth. Really the internal contradictions of French social structure which develop after 1789 are relatively composed only in the Third Republic and France has sixty years of balanced political life after eighty of ever longer waves of revolution: 1789, '94, '99, 1804, '15, '30, '48, '70. It is precisely the study of these "waves" of varying frequency which allows us to reconstruct the relations between structure and superstructure, on the one hand, and, on the other, between the development of organic movement and incidental movement in the structure. It can at the same time be said that the dialectical interaction between the two methodological principles put forward at the beginning of this note can be found in the politico-historical formula of permanent revolution.

An aspect of the same problem is the so-called question of the relations of forces. One often reads in historical narratives expressions like: “favourable relations of forces, unfavourable to this or that tendency”. Thus, abstractly, this formulation explains nothing or almost nothing, since all it does is to repeat the fact which ought to be explained, presenting it once as a fact and once as an abstract law, as an explanation. The theoretical error consists therefore in giving a canon of research and interpretation as an “historical cause”.

At the same time it is necessary to distinguish different stages and levels in the “relation of forces”, which fundamentally are the following:

1. A relation of social forces closely tied to the structure, objective, independent of men's will, which can be measured with the precision of the exact or physical sciences. On the basis of the level of development of the material forces of production we have social classes, each one of which represents a function and has a given position in production itself. This relation is what it is, stubborn reality: no one can change the number of factories and their workers, the number of cities with a given urban population, etc. This fundamental scheme enables us to study whether there exist in the society the necessary and sufficient conditions for its transformation, enables us, that is, to check the level of reality and attainability of the different ideologies which have come into existence on the same basis, on the basis of the contradictions which it has generated in the course of its development.

2. A later stage is the relation of political forces; that is to say, an estimation of the degree of homogeneity, of self-consciousness and organisation reached by the various social groups. This stage can be in its turn analysed and differentiated into various levels, corresponding to the different degrees of collective self-consciousness, as they have manifested themselves up to now in history. The first and most elementary is the economico-corporative stage: one trader feels that he must be solid with another trader, one manufacturer with another; in other words a homogeneous unity is felt, and the duty to organise it, by the professional group, but not yet by the wider social group. A second stage is that in which consciousness of the solidarity of interests among all the members of the social group is reached, but still in the purely economic field. Already at this stage the question of the State is posed, but only on the basis of reaching a politico-legal equality with the ruling group, since the right is proclaimed to share in legislation and administration and even to modify it, reform it, but inside the fundamental existing framework. A third stage is that in which consciousness is reached that one's own corporative interests, in their present and future development, transcend the corporative circle of the purely economic group, and can and must become the interests of other subordinate groups. This is the more strictly political phase, which marks the clear transition from the structure to the sphere of complex superstructures, it is the phase in which ideologies which were germinated earlier become "party", come into opposition and enter the struggle until the point is reached where one of them or at least one combination of them, tends to predominate, to impose itself, to propagate itself throughout the whole social sphere, causing, in addition to singleness of economic and political purpose, an intellectual and moral unity as well, placing all questions around which the struggle rages not on a corporative, but a "universal" plane and creating in this way the hegemony of a fundamental social group over a number of subordinate groups. The State is conceived, certainly, as an organism belonging to a group, destined to create the conditions favourable to the greatest expansion of that group; but this development and expansion are conceived and presented as the motive force of a universal expansion, of a development of all the "national" energies; that is to say, the ruling group is co-ordinated concretely with the general interests of the subordinate groups and State life is conceived as a continual formation and overcoming of unstable equilibriums (unstable within the ambit of the law), between the interests of the fundamental group and those of the subordinate groups, equilibriums in which the interests of the ruling group predominate but only up to a certain point, i.e. not as far as their mean economico-corporative interest would like.

   In historical reality these stages are reciprocally mixed, horizontally and vertically so to speak—according to economic and social activities (horizontally) and according to territory (vertically), combining and splitting up differently: each one of these combinations may be represented by its own organised economic and political expression. It is also necessary to take account of the fact that international relations are interlaced with these internal relations of a nation-State, creating new, original and historically concrete combinations. An ideology, coming into existence in a more developed country, is diffused in less developed countries cutting across the local play of combinations.

   This relationship between international and national forces is again complicated by the existence inside each State of several territorial sections with a different structure and a different relation of forces at all levels (thus La Vandée was allied with reactionary international forces and represented them inside the bosom of French territorial unity; similarly Lyons in the French Revolution represented a particular knot of relations, etc.).

3. The third stage is that of the relations of military forces, time and again immediately decisive. (Historical development oscillates continuously between the first and the third stage, with the mediation of the second.) But this also is not something indistinct and immediately identifiable in a schematic form; two levels can be distinguished: the military level in the strict or technico-military sense, and the level which can be called politico-military. In the development of history these two levels are presented in a great variety of combinations. A typical example which can serve as demonstration-limit, is that of the relationship of military oppression of a State over a nation which is seeking to achieve its State independence. The relationship is not purely military, but politico-military; and, in fact, such a type of oppression would be inexplicable without a state of social disintegration among the oppressed people and the passivity of the majority; because of this, independence cannot be achieved with purely military forces, but with military and politico-military forces. If the oppressed nation, in fact, in order to begin the struggle for independence, had to wait for the hegemonic State to allow it to organise its own army in the strict and technical sense of the word, it would have to wait quite a while (it might happen that the aim of having its own army could be granted by the hegemonic nation, but this means that already a great part of the struggle has been fought and won on the politico-military plane). The oppressed nation will therefore oppose the hegemonic military force initially with a force which is only "politico-military", that is, with a form of political action which has the virtue of causing repercussions of a military character in the sense (1) that it is effective in breaking up from the inside the war efficiency of the hegemonic nation; (2) that it obliges the hegemonic military force to dissolve and disperse itself over a large territory, nullifying the greater part of its war efficiency. In the Italian Risorgimento the disastrous absence of politico-military leadership can be noted, especially in the Party of Action (through congenital incapacity), but also in the Piedmontese moderate party, both before and after 1848, certainly not through incapacity, but through "economico-political Malthusianism", or in other words because it was unwilling even to mention the possibility of agrarian reform and because it did not want the calling of a constituent national assembly, but only aimed at extending the Piedmontese monarchy, without limitations or conditions of popular origin, to the whole of Italy, solely with the sanction of regional plebiscites.

Another question connected with the preceding ones is that of seeing whether fundamental historical crises are directly caused by economic crises. The answer is contained implicitly in the preceding paragraphs, where we dealt with questions which are only another way of looking at the present one; nevertheless it is always necessary, for didactic reasons, given the particular public, to examine every way of presenting the same question as if it were an independent and new problem. It can be excluded that, by themselves, economic crises directly produce fundamental events; they can only create a more favourable ground for the propagation of certain ways of thinking, of posing and solving questions which involve the whole future development of State life. For the rest, all assertions regarding periods of crisis or prosperity can give rise to onesided judgments. Mathiez, in his review of the history of the French Revolution, opposing the popular traditional history, which "found" a priori a crisis coinciding with the great breach in the social equilibrium, asserts that around 1789 the economic situation was, on the contrary, good in the short run, and that therefore one cannot say that the catastrophe of the absolute State was due to a crisis of impoverishment. It needs to be observed that the State was in the grip of a deadly financial crisis and the question arose of which of the three privileged social orders ought to bear the sacrifices and burdens in order to put the State and Royal finances in order. Further: if the bourgeoisie was in a flourishing economic position, the popular classes of the cities and countryside were certainly not in a good situation, especially those who were racked by endemic poverty. In any case, the breach in the equilibrium of forces did not come about through the immediate mechanical cause of the impoverishment of the social group which had an interest in breaking the equilibrium and in fact did break it; it came about within the framework of conflicts above the immediate economic world, connected with the "prestige" of classes (future economic interests), with an exasperation of the feeling of independence, autonomy and power. The particular question of economic malaise or health as a cause of new historical realities is a partial aspect of the question of the relations of forces in their various levels. Changes can be produced either because a situation of well-being is threatened by the selfish egotism of an opposed group, or because malaise has become intolerable and one cannot see in the old society any force which is capable of mitigating it and re-establishing normality by legal means. One can therefore say that all these elements are the concrete manifestations of the incidental fluctuations of the totality of social relations of force, on the basis of which occurs the transition of the latter, to political relations of force, culminating in the decisive military relationship.

If this process of development from one stage to the other is lacking, and it is essentially a process which has for its actors men and the will and capacity of men, the situation remains static. Contradictory conclusions can arise: the old society resists and is helped by a "breathing space", physically exterminating the opposing élite and terrorising the masses of reserves; or the reciprocal destruction of the conflicting forces takes place with the establishment of the peace of the graveyard, but under the watch of a foreign guard.

But the most important observation to be made about every concrete analysis of relations of forces is this: that such analyses cannot and must not be ends in themselves (unless one is writing a chapter of past history), and they only acquire significance if they serve to justify practical activity, an initiative of will. They show what are the points of least resistance where the force of will can be applied must fruitfully; they suggest immediate tactical operations; they indicate how a campaign of political agitation can best be presented, what language will be best understood by the multitudes, etc. The decisive element in every situation is the force, permanently organised and pre-ordered over a long period, which can be advanced when one judges that the situation is favourable (and it is favourable only to the extent to which such a force exists and is full of fighting ardour); therefore the essential task is that of paying systematic and patient attention to forming and developing this force, rendering it ever more homogeneous, compact, conscious of itself. One sees this in military history and in the care with which at all times armies have been predisposed to begin a war at any moment. The great States have been great precisely because they were at all times prepared to enter effectively into favourable international situations, and these situations were favourable because there was the concrete possibility of effectively entering them.

Notes

1. "No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions for their existence have matured in the womb of the old society. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation." Marx, Preface to The Critique of Political Economy.↩
2. Failure to consider the immediate stage of the "relation of forces" is linked with hangovers of the popular liberal conception, of which syndicalism is a manifestation, believing that it is more advanced while in reality it took a step backwards. In fact the popular liberal conception giving importance to the relation of political forces organised in the various forms of party (newspaper-readers, parliamentary and local elections, mass organisations of parties and trade unions in the narrow sense) was more advanced than syndicalism, which gave primordial importance to the fundamental economico-social relations and only to these. The popular liberal conception implicitly took account of these relations also (as appears from many signs), but insisted more on the relations of political forces which were the expression of the former and in reality contained them. These hangovers of the popular liberal conception can be traced back to a whole series of writings which purport to be connected with Marxism and have given rise to infantile forms of optimism and folly. ↩
3. The term "permanent revolution" is used here by Gramsci to indicate the interpretation given by Trotsky (i.e. of a political revolution achieved by a minority without the support of the great masses) to this formula of Karl Marx. It is for this reason that Gramsci puts it in inverted commas.—Trans.↩
4. cf. The French Revolution, by A. Mathiez.↩