The 1917 October Revolution taught Italian socialists two distinct lessons

Evidence

In 1918, after the war had ended, the idea that the revolution was on the agenda was common to both sides in the class struggle, in Italy as in most of continental Europe. But beyond the first, tremendous revelation of October, that the socialist revolution could be made , even in a country where the objective conditions were apparently “not ripe”, the impact was a dual one, the lessons drawn of two kinds. Firstly, the supreme lesson for party militants everywhere was the role played by a highly organised, disciplined revolutionary party. In Italy, the quickest to appreciate this lesson was Amadeo Bordiga, and it is this more than anything else that explains his absolute dominance of the P.C.I. at its formation. But October had a second meaning, which for the proletarian masses was primary, and this was as the installation of Soviet power. The idea of these new institutions of proletarian power, which could both play a role in the revolutionary process and provide the institutional basis for the proletarian State, swept round the world. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 81

Categorization

• XREF: This dual-lesson framing of revolution—party leadership vs. new institutional forms of mass power—resonates with later Gramscian theory of hegemony and civil society vs. the state, which the Islamophobia readings will build on.