Once again, aft er World War I the Ordinovisti shook these bien pensants in their primary assumptions: “those who speak of fallacious illusions necessarily imply that the working class always has to bend its neck in front of the capitalists, [they] imply . . . that the working class has to persuade itself of being incapable of having its own conception to counterpose to that of the bourgeois, of having ideas, sentiments, aspirations, and interests that are contradictory to the ideas, sentiments, aspirations, and interests of the bourgeois class” (Gramsci 1920f, 2). On the contrary, workers were the revolutionaries whereby “being revolutionary means working eff ectively toward transforming the whole productive order” (Togliatti 1919a, 72).

Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, loc. 514