The Comintern rejected offensive theory in favor of winning mass support

Evidence

Lenin had sharply condemned Bordiga’s abstentionism in 1920. In the summer of 1921, the International had been highly critical of the P.C.I.’s attitude to the arditi delpopolo (see note 25 on p. 230 below). At the Third World Congress in June, the Italian party had aligned itself with the new leadership of the German party in support of the “theory of the offensive” (formulated notably by Bela Kun); that theory was the object of harsh criticism from Trotsky in his keynote report to the Congress, and when Terracini, the P.C.I. spokesman, defended it he found himself at the receiving end of one of Lenin’s most devastating polemical broadsides. Terracini had invoked the positions of the previous World Congress in support of the P.C.I.’s views, but the year which separated the two Congresses had seen the proclamation of N.E.P., a swift growth of Italian fascism, and the failure of the “March Action” in Germany; Zinoviev, at the end of March and under pressure from Lenin, had written an article speaking of the slow-down of the revolutionary tempo. Despite the arguments of the important German and Italian parties for the theory of the offensive, the Congress was marked by a new determination to win the majority of the working class and launched the slogan “to the masses”—in an adumbration of the united front. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 120

Categorization

• XREF: The shift from offensive theory to ‘to the masses’ anticipates the hegemony emphasis on winning consent — a direct precursor to the central Prison Notebooks concept.