Further evidence of Gramsci’s specific problematization of the political party as a collective organism can be found in the classification of the party’s internal components, based on what Gramsci calls the ‘theorem of fixed proportions’:63
for a party to exist, three fundamental elements (three groups of elements) have to converge: 1) A mass element, composed of ordinary, average men, whose participation takes the form of discipline and loyalty, rather than any creative spirit or organizational ability. […]
2) The principal cohesive element, which centralizes nationally and renders effective and powerful a complex of forces which left to themselves would count for little or nothing. […] 3) An intermediate element, which articulates the first element with the second and maintains contact between them, not only physically but also morally and intellectually.64
The proportions in which such elements are to be found is given by historical conditions and the political contingency. However, the second element, which identifies the leaders capable of coordinating and centralizing the ‘collective wills’65 that would otherwise be dissipated, is the one that always plays the key role in the modern political party. If, given favourable ‘objective material conditions’, such an element exists, then in Gramsci’s view ‘the other two are bound to exist’.66
However, this ‘key’ element is also the main barrier to the bureaucra-tization of the party. In fact, how can the political line be maintained if the technical position is imposed for organizational reasons? In this regard, Gramsci makes the distinction, with regard to the organization of a political party, between organic centralism and democratic centralism.
The contraposition of these two approaches was originally formulated in the course of the long-standing debate with Amadeo Bordiga – the first ever secretary of the Italian Communist Party and a leading figure among the party’s left-wing faction – who in the 1920s argued the need
for an ‘organic relationship’ between the masses and the party, and for an ‘organic centralism’ in the governance of the party. Bordiga employed these expressions to basically regiment the party and to indicate an immediate (and presumed) correspondence between leadership and class, and thus the significant autonomy of the former. Gramsci began to write the initial notes of his Prison Notebooks by countering this organic centralism with democratic centralism, criticizing organic centralism with its underlying principle of ‘“co-optation” around a “possessor of the truth”’,67 implying ‘a caste and priestly type of leadership’68. However, in a note in Notebook 9 his view changes:
The most accurate name [for organic centralism] would be bureaucratic centralism. ‘Organicity’ can only be found in democratic centralism, which is so to speak a ‘centralism’ in movement – i.e. a continual adaptation of the organisation to the real movement, a matching of thrusts from below with orders from above, a continuous insertion of elements thrown up from the depths of the rank and file into the solid framework of the leadership apparatus which ensures continuity and the regular accumulation of experience. Democratic centralism is
‘organic’ because on the one hand it takes account of movement, which is the organic mode in which historical reality reveals itself, and does not solidify mechanically into bureaucracy; and because at the same time it takes account of that which is relatively stable and permanent, or which at least moves in an easily predictable direction.69
Thus, organicity cannot be a characteristic of a static, authoritarian vision of political organization, but of political organization operating in a dynamic, democratic manner. From here on, Gramsci always uses the term ‘organic centralism’ as a synonym of ‘democratic centralism’, whereas he replaces the preceding (negative) notion of organic centralism with that of ‘bureaucratic centralism’.70
Thus, organic centralism refers to a form of unitary, yet plural and conflicting, organization, requiring the constant adjustment of organization and class, through the enhancement of the multiplicity of individuals’ claims:
A collective consciousness, which is to say a living organism, is formed only after the unification of the multiplicity through friction on the part of the individuals; nor can one say that ‘silence’ is not a
multiplicity. An orchestra tuning-up, every instrument playing by itself, sounds a most hideous cacophony, yet these warm-ups are the necessary condition for the orchestra to come to life as a single
‘instrument’.71
The possibility of influencing the establishment of the collective organism, in a conflicting, organized manner through those forms of mediation present in every organization, becomes a prerequisite of the collective will: ‘the vital question is not one of passive and indirect but active and direct consent, and hence that of the participation of single individuals, even though this gives an impression of disintegration and tumult’.72 Gramsci’s words re-echo those of Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy, namely, that ‘where the matter is not corrupt, tumults and other scandals do not hurt’.73 In fact movement, conflict and disagreement are not necessarily perceived as signs of decadence, but as potential factors of strength and liberty, if the organism within which they operate is
‘healthy’; that is, going back to Gramsci, if there is the right relationship between individuals and the collective organism. In this regard, Gramsci coined an expression that characterizes that healthy relationship in which the individual is not nullified by the collective organism, but where the two interact without being opposed to one another, thus ensuring that they are both reciprocally enhanced through their interaction:
With the extension of mass parties and their organic coalescence with the intimate (economic-productive) life of the masses themselves, the process whereby popular feeling is standardized ceases to be mechanical and casual […] and becomes conscious and critical.
Knowledge and a judgment of the importance of this feeling on the part of the leaders is no longer the product of hunches […]. Rather it is acquired by the collective organism through ‘active and conscious co-participation’, through ‘compassionality’, through experience of immediate particulars, through a system which one could call
‘living philology’.74
It is this system of living philology that needs to underlie the formation of a collective organism capable of meeting the need to organize the potentially no longer passive ‘great masses of the population’.75 The tumultuous process by which this organism is created and enhanced is thus the element that characterizes the method of living philology,
within the Gramscian assumption of organicity as a metaphor to be used to redefine the semantic field of the revolution. Organicity as a symbol of the centralism of a party, on the one hand, and living philology as an approach to the internal relations of that party, on the other hand, thus paint an initial overall picture of the party according to Gramsci.
Given such premises – and given the assumption that the historical actors are now collective organisms rather than individuals – Gramsci can imagine the party as the modern Prince, in reference once again to Machiavelli’s work.