Self-criticism functioned as a disciplinary ritual inside communist parties, not only fascist ones.

Evidence

The term “self criticism” was of course already current in the communist movement, and especially in the Soviet Union, by the late twenties. Tasca was expelled from the PCI for refusing to criticise himself for his positions in 1927 28; the Italian delegates to the Tenth Plenum in July 1929 had to criticise their party’s 1927 28 policies, and also the “softness” shown towards Tasca by the party leadership; the “three” began their opposition during the same year by calling for “serious self-criticism” (notably by Togliatti and Grieco) for the 1927-28 line. However, it seems difficult to interpret this note of Gramsci’s as a reference to the communist usage of the term, and at all events it is clear that what follows refers to fascism in Italy. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2335

Categorization

• DEFINE: Names the specific institutional history of ‘self-criticism’ as a term of art — useful for distinguishing left-internal from state-internal practices of enforced confession.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader critical-theory scaffolding on how movements police their own members, a mechanism that recurs in later readings on ideology and complicity.