Discipline and Organisation: Performativity and Revolutionary Semantics in Gramsci’s and Togliatti’s Texts (1916-1928)

Is it possible to appreciate ‘the utopia’ of a political revolutionary text? And, if so, to what extent? How much of such a performative revolutionary potential has the actual power to orient social identities and practices? In the vein of the historiographical approach of the New Cultural History, this essay responds to the need to reevaluate the research on the political lexicon. Mostly neglected by the historiography of the Italian Communist Party, this methodology considers language not just as a mere superstructure component, but as a fundamental factor founding the structure itself. This essay carries out a historical–linguistic and semantic analysis of some keywords (such as ‘revolution’, ‘discipline’, and ‘organization’) and aims at exploring the political modalities and the instrumental use of language in a sample of early texts by Antonio Gramsci (1916–1918) and Palmiro Togliatti (1925–1928). The goal is to identify the several ways in which these authors addressed their militants so that they would identify themselves with a particular ‘must–be’ ideal (the ‘good revolutionary’, the ‘good communist’) and in order to mobilise them, first by giving them a system of values and meanings and then by giving them a transcendent motivation for the achievement of the ‘future communist civilisation’.