Despite mass membership, Italy’s socialist party failed to organize revolution

Evidence

In the November 1919 general elections, the P.S.I. received almost two million votes, and returned 156 deputies to parliament, out of a total of 508 seats. Party membership rose from 20,000 at the end of the war to 87,000 in 1919, 180,000 in 1920; membership of the C.G.L. rose in the same period from 250,000 to two million. But despite its revolutionary language, the P.S.I. neither organised itself for insurrection, nor sought allies for the industrial proletariat (four million strong at this time) among the peasants or agricultural labourers (each of whom represented a further four millions, approximately). Although the peasants were occupying feudal estates in the South throughout the revolutionary years, the party made no attempt to co-ordinate their struggles. It allowed the catholic Popular Party to organise the mass of small peasants in North and Central Italy. And it neither carried out any serious work in the army, nor organised the proletariat militarily. Finally, it alienated the urban petite bourgeoisie and the demobilised officers and failed to channel their resentments (caused by their critical economic and social position) against the ruling class. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 88

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete case of Gramsci’s later hegemonic theory: the PSI failed precisely because it never built alliances beyond the industrial proletariat — the missing war of position. Links to the leadership/hegemony passages and forward to why Islamophobia arguments must account for cross-class alliance-building.
• SEED: The arithmetic of failed revolution as a template: a mass party that outgrew left allies but never reached out — the four-million-factory-worker vs. twelve-million-peasant imbalance is a striking concrete figure for any essay on revolutionary organization’s alliance problem.