The Programme of Ordine Nuovo

When in April, 1919 we decided—in groups of threes, fours and fives—to begin publication of this review, Ordine Nuovo (and the reports must still exist—yes, the reports! because they were drawn up and fair copies were made for history's sake!) not one of us (perhaps just one!) thought in terms of changing the world, of renewing the hearts and minds of masses of human beings, or dreamed of a new era in history. Not one of us (perhaps there was one who dreamed of 6,000 subscribers within a few months) nursed rosy illusions about the success of the enterprise.

Who were we? What did we represent? Of what new idea were we the heralds? Alas, in those meetings of ours the only unifying sentiment arose out of a vague passion for a vague proletariat culture. We wanted to act, act, act. Plunged into the turbulence of those first months following the Armistice when the collapse of Italian society seemed imminent, we felt anguished and disoriented. Alas! The only new idea put forward in those meetings of ours was stifled. One of us who was a technician said: "It is essential to study factory organisation as an instrument of production. We must devote all our attention to capitalist systems of production and organisation and we must work to concentrate the attention of the working class and the Party on this objective." Another, who was concerned with the organisation of men, the history of men, the psychology of the working class, said: "It is necessary to study what is happening among the working masses. Does there exist in Italy a working-class institution at all comparable to, or of the nature of, the Soviets? Anything which gives us the authority to state: 'The Soviet is a universal form, not a Russian, and exclusively Russian, institution. Wherever proletarians are struggling for industrial autonomy, the Soviet is the form through which the working class manifests its desire to emancipate itself.' Is there in Italy, or in Turin, the germ, the feeblest wish for, or even any fear of government by Soviets?" This other, who had been impressed by the question fired point blank at him by a Polish comrade "Why is it that no congress of Factory Committees has ever been held in Italy?" used to answer his own questions in those meetings. "Yes, there is in Italy, in Turin, the germ of a workers' government, the germ of a Soviet. It is the Factory Committees. Let us study this workers' institution, investigate it. Let us also study the capitalist factory, but not as an organisation for material production which would require specialised knowledge we do not possess. Let us study the capitalist factory as a necessary framework for the working class, as a political organism, as the 'national territory' of workers' self government." That idea was new. It was precisely Comrade Tasca who rejected it.

What did Comrade Tasca want? He was opposed to starting any propaganda directly among the workers. He wanted an agreement with the secretaries of the federations and the trade unions; he wanted a meeting of these secretaries to be called, and a plan for an official campaign to be set up. In this way the Ordine Nuovo group would have been reduced to the level of an irresponsible clique of upstarts and lone wolves. . .

What was Ordine Nuovo in its first issues? It was an anthology, nothing more; a review which could have come out of Naples, Caltanisetta or Brindisi. It was a journal of abstract culture and abstract information, with a propensity for publishing blood-curdling little stories and well-intentioned woodcuts. This is what Ordine Nuovo was—disorganised, the product of mediocre intellectualism clumsily seeking an intellectual platform and a path to action. This was Ordine Nuovo launched after the April, 1919 meetings, meetings duly recorded, meetings in which Comrade Tasca dismissed (because it didn't conform to the good traditions of the peaceful well-behaved family of Italian socialism) the proposal that we devote our energies to the discovery of a tradition of Soviets within the Italian working class, to seeking out the thread of real Italian revolutionary spirit—real because it coincides with a universal spirit in the workers' international, because it is the product of a real historical situation, because it is the result of the working class's own development.

We—Togliatti and I—plotted an editorial coup d'état. The problem of the Factory Committees was explained clearly in Number 7 of the review. A few nights before writing the article I had discussed the line of the piece with Comrade Terracini and he expressed his full agreement with it both in theory and practice. The article, with Terracini's approval and Togliatti's collaboration, was published and what we had anticipated came to pass. We—Togliatti, Terracini and I—were invited to hold discussions in educational circles, at meetings of factory workers, and we were invited by the Factory Committees to discussions in closed meetings of activists and dues-collectors. We went on. The problem of the development of the Factory Committees became the central problem, it became the idea of Ordine Nuovo; it was put forward as the fundamental problem of the workers' revolution and of proletarian "freedom". Ordine Nuovo for us and for those who followed us, became the "paper of the Factory Councils".

The workers loved Ordine Nuovo (this we can state with inner satisfaction), and why did they love Ordine Nuovo? Because in the articles of the journal they found something of themselves, their own better selves; because they felt that the articles in it were permeated with their own spirit of self searching: "How can we free ourselves? How can we realise ourselves?" Because the articles in Ordine Nuovo were not of cold intellectual construction but flowed out of our own discussions with the best workers and set forth the feelings, wishes, real passions of the Turin working class of which we had partaken and which we had stimulated. And also because the articles in Ordine Nuovo were almost a "putting into action" of real events, seen as forces in a process of inner liberation and as the working class's own expression of itself. That is why the workers loved Ordine Nuovo, and that is how the idea of Ordine Nuovo developed.

... Since Comrade Tasca did not participate in this experience and was in fact hostile to its happening at all, the significance of the Factory Councils, in terms of their historical and organic development, escaped him. ... For Tasca, the problem of the Factory Councils was simply a mathematical one—how to organise immediately the whole class of Italian workers and peasants. In one of his sharp polemics, Tasca writes treating the Communist Party, the Trade Unions and the Factory Councils on one level; in another, he shows that he has not understood the meaning of the “voluntary” character which Ordine Nuovo ascribes to party organisations and trade unions, differentiating these from the factory councils which are assumed to be a form of “historical” association only comparable to that of the present day bourgeois state. In Ordine Nuovo's view, a view developed around a concept—the concept of liberty (and concretely developed, on the level of the actual making of history, around the hypothesis of autonomous revolutionary action by the working class), the factory council is an institution of a "public" character while the Party and the trade unions are associations of a "private" nature.

In the Factory Councils the worker, because of his very nature, plays the role of producer as a result of his position and function in society, in the same way as the citizen plays a role in the democratic parliamentary state. In the Party and trade unions, the worker plays his role "voluntarily", signing a written pledge—a contract which he can tear up at any moment. The Party and the trade unions, because of this "voluntary" character, because of their "contractual" nature, are not to be confused with the councils which are representative institutions and do not develop mathematically but morphologically, and in their higher forms tend to give a proletarian meaning to the apparatus, created by the capitalist for the purpose of extracting profit, of production and exchange. The development of higher forms of organisation of the councils was therefore not raised by Ordine Nuovo in the political terminology of society divided into social classes, but with the reference to industrial organisation.

In Ordine Nuovo's view, the system of councils cannot be expressed by the term "association" or words of similar meaning, but can only be represented by reproducing for a whole industrial centre the complex industrial relationships which bind one team of workers to another, one department to another, in one factory. The Turin example was a model for us and thus in one article it was taken as the historic forge of the Italian Communist revolution. In a factory, workers are producers because they work together to produce the manufactured object, and are deployed in a manner precisely determined by industrial techniques which are (in a certain sense) independent of the system by which the value of the things produced is appropriated. All the workers in an automobile factory, whether sheetmetal workers, vehicle builders, electricians, woodworkers, etc., take on the character of producers because they are all equally necessary and indispensable to the automobile factory, and inasmuch as they are bound together industrially they constitute a necessary and absolutely indivisible historic organism. Turin, as a city, developed historically in this way. Because of the transfer of the capital to Florence and then Rome, and because the Italian state was first formed as an outgrowth of Piedmont, Turin lost its petit-bourgeois class, sections of which provided the personnel for the new Italian state apparatus. But the transfer of the capital and the impoverishment of this typical element of all modern cities did not bring about a decline; the city, in fact, began to develop again and the new development went hand in hand with the development of the engineering industry, with the Fiat factories. Turin gave the new state its class of petit-bourgeois intellectuals; and the development of the capitalist economy, ruining the small-scale industries and artisans of the Italian nation, at the same time caused the growth in Turin of a compact proletarian mass which gives the city its present character, perhaps unique in all Europe. The city developed around the central pattern which it still retains, organised naturally around the industry which "governs" the whole urban growth of the city and regulates its outlets. Turin is an automobile city in the same way that Vercelli is organised around rice, the Caucasus around petrol, South Wales around coal, etc. As in a factory, where workers assume a pattern governed by the production of a given object which unites and organises metal-workers and woodworkers, constructional workers, electricians, etc., so in a city, the proletariat adopts patterns determined by the prevalent industry which dominates the whole urban life. So, on a national scale, a people adopts the pattern laid down by its exports, by the real contribution the nation makes to the economic life of the world.

Comrade Tasca, a very inattentive reader of Ordine Nuovo, stated none of these theoretical explanations, which in any case were no more than a translation, in terms of Italian historical reality, of the idea developed by Comrade Lenin in several writings published by Ordine Nuovo, and of the ideas of the American theorist of the revolutionary syndicalist association, the I.W.W., the Marxist Daniel de Leon. In point of fact, Comrade Tasca at one point interpreted the symbols of mass production expressed by words like rice, wood, sulphur, etc., in a merely "commercial" book-keeping sense. Again, he asks what relationship there could be between the councils. In a third point, he ascribes the origin of the ideas set forth in Ordine Nuovo to the Proud-honian concept of the workshop destroying the government, although in that same issue of Ordine Nuovo of June 5th which carried the piece on the Factory Councils and the comments by the Trades Union Congress, there was also printed an extract from Marx on the Paris Commune in which Marx clearly recognises the industrial character of the communist society of producers. In this work by Marx, Lenin and de Leon found the basic inspiration for their ideas, and it was on these extracts that the Ordine Nuovo articles were prepared and written. Again, and precisely because it was around this issue that the polemic started, Comrade Tasca proved his reading to be superficial and without understanding of the ideological and historical substance which it contained.

The comments made at the Trades Union Congress on Comrade Tasca's attempt to influence the vote on an executive motion, were dictated by the desire to keep Ordine Nuovo's programme intact. The factory councils have their own rules; they cannot and must not accept trade union rules because it is precisely their aim to remodel these fundamentally. Similarly, the Factory Councils' movement wants workers' representatives to come directly from the masses and to be bound to the masses by an imperative mandate. Comrade Tasca's speech at a workers' congress, without a mandate from anyone, on a problem of concern to the whole mass of workers and the solution of which should unite the masses, was so much opposed to the ideas of Ordine Nuovo that a sharp reply was perfectly justified and completely deserved.

Ordine Nuovo

August 1920