Spontaneous insurrection outpaced organized socialist leadership in Turin 1917
Evidence
In August 1917, on the occasion of yet another failure of bread supplies, the Turin proletariat rose in a spontaneous insurrection. Barricades went up in the working-class quarters, and the centre of the city was besieged. In so far as there was any organisation on the insurgent side, it was provided by the anarchists. The intransigent socialist leaders were as impotent as the reformist deputies or trade union officials. This impotence of the socialist leaders was to be demonstrated repeatedly during the next three years. The insurrection lasted for four days, and machine-guns and tanks had to be brought into the fray before the last barricades fell. Some fifty workers were killed in the fighting, and almost one thousand were subsequently either imprisoned or sent to the front by order of the courts. The August events showed with dramatic clarity both the immense revolutionary spirit of the Turin prole- — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 77
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: The gap between spontaneous mass revolt and party organizations’ impotence seeds Gramsci’s later theory of revolutionary organization — relevant to how the reader understands the relationship between subaltern spontaneity and political leadership.