Th e factory council, as "an absolutely original institution" of the proletariat, was a strategic vehicle for toppling the pillars of capital accumulation. It was also a venue in which workers could concretely experience politicaleconomic unity: "born from labor, [the council] adheres to the process of industrial production . . . within it economics and politics merge, in it the exercise of sovereignty is all one with the act of production . . . in it the proletarian democracy is realized" (Gramsci 1919b, 117). Indeed, within the councils, the organization of the production process was deeply political. Th us, in their proceedings, councils put into practice the core of an alternative society, one in which "the mendacious bourgeois democracy" [menzognera democrazia borghese] and its expression in "parliamentarism" was suppressed in favor of an antiauthoritarian "selfgovernment of the people" embodied in the "proletarian state"-an institution that would no longer be alienated from the people but rather be part and parcel of their daily activities.

Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, loc. 534