Loyal party discipline must flow from conviction, not mechanical coercion

Evidence

At the same time, however, Gramsci expressed the Italian party’s fears about the course which the Russian inner-party struggle was taking, and stressed that “unity and discipline cannot be mechanical and coercive; they must be loyal and the result of conviction, and not those of an enemy unit imprisoned or besieged—thinking all the time of how to escape or make an unexpected counter-attack.” In the second letter, Gramsci replied with very considerable acerbity to the reasons put forward by Togliatti in Moscow for not transmitting the P.C.I.’s first letter to the Russian Central Committee to whom it was addressed, dismissing these reasons as “vitiated by bureaucratism”, etc. He wrote with very great eloquence of the importance of “the Leninist line” which “consists in struggling for the unity of the party, and not merely for external unity but for the rather more profound kind which involves there not being inside the party two political lines which diverge on every question”. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 219

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes authentic (conviction-based) political unity from merely formal or coercive unity — a core Gramscian distinction.
• XREF: connects to: Symbolic dissent prosecutions widened the gap between party and society without enforcing loyalty. — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past: The…, 233; Being “regular” meant dependable, unquestioning party loyalty in Tammany parlance — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 511