The Movement and the Goal (1932)

Original RS translation of sections 6, 7, and 23 of the ninth of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks.

Is it possible for a movement to sustain itself without having a notion of its end goal? Bernstein’s principle, that “The movement is everything, the final goal is nothing,” though it claims to be an “orthodox” interpretation of dialectics, belies a purely mechanistic conception of movement, where human forces are regarded as passive and unconscious, as elements not unlike material things.

This is interesting because Bernstein found his weapons in idealistic revisionism, and this should have led him to appraise the intervention of men in the historical unfolding as decisive. ^[1] If one looks more closely, however, one sees that in Bernstein, though human intervention is in fact valued, implicitly, it’s in a one-sided way, considered only as “thesis” but not as “antithesis.” The moment of resistance and perseverance — the thesis — is praised, but the initiative and progressive drive — the antithesis — is rejected. For Bernstein there may be “goals” for resistance and perseverance, but not for progress and initiative.

The consequence of this conception is passivity. Antithesis, which presupposes the awakening of still dormant and sleeping forces, needs goals, both immediate and mediated, for the sake of movement. Without having a prospect of fulfilling concrete ends, movement cannot be sustained.

The concept of the “lesser evil,” most relativizing, can be conceived as this kind of apologia. There is always a lesser evil than the previous lesser evil, a greater danger in comparison to the previous greater danger. Each greater evil becomes lesser in comparison with an even greater one, and so on indefinitely.

This turns out to be nothing more than the form taken by the process of adaptation to a regressive movement, such that while reaction proceeds efficiently, the antithetical force is determined to capitulate progressively, in small stages, and not all at once. If it were otherwise, the condensed psychological effect might give rise to an active competing force, or to a reinforcement of it if such a force already existed.

Insofar as the regressive unfolding in the most advanced countries foreshadows what will happen in countries where the movement is in its infancy, comparison is in order.

It remains to be seen how much is correct about the trend against individualism, and how much is erroneous and dangerous. The attitude to the two aspects of individualism, negative and positive, will necessarily be contradictory. The question therefore should be posed historically, and not abstractly or schematically. The question takes a different form in countries that have had reform, or that have been crippled by counter-reform. We can speak of a man-collective in which conformism is imposed, or one in which it is voluntary (but should it also be called conformism in that case?).

Critical consciousness cannot arise without a break from Catholic or authoritarian conformism, and thus without a flourishing of individuality. Should the relationship between man and reality be direct, or through a priestly caste? (Like the relationship between man and god in Catholicism? Itself in turn a metaphor for the relationship between man and reality.) Struggle against individualism is really against a particular individualism, with a particular social content — specifically against economic individualism at a time when it has become anachronistic and anti-historical (remembering, of course, that it was historically necessary, and a phase of the overall progressive unfolding).

That in the struggle to destroy an authoritarian conformity which has become retrogressive and cumbersome, through a stage of development of individuality and critical personality, one arrives at the “man-collective,” is a dialectical conception that is difficult for schematic and abstract mentalities to understand. Just as it is difficult for them to understand the argument that through the destruction of one State machine we come to create another stronger and more complex one, etc.