THE RISE AND FALL OF MAXIMALISM 73
state and the Nation3. But his admirable speech was
received with general indifference, and, because the
mountain would not come to him, Turati did not go to the
mountain. The fate of Italian socialism was indeed tragic,
for it suffered as much from the insight of some of its leaders
as from the obtuseness of the rest.
Another socialist leader, Glaudio Treves, for many years
Turati's colleague on his review, the Critica Sociale, in a
speech in the Chamber on March 30, at the time of the first
Nitti crisis, described the situation thus : c This is the crux
of the present tragic situation : you can no longer maintain
your existing social order and we are not yet strong enough
to impose the one we want.5 But actually the old social
order was digging itself in, while the new one was befogged.
Seeking a way out a group of young intellectuals in Turin,
headed by Antonio Gramsci, had gone far both in theory
and practice to base an organization on the factory councils
which had achieved a fair degree of maturity and power in
that town. But their efforts were wrecked by the obtuseness
of the Socialist Party and by their own inexperience and
isolation. The maximalist party leaders, unmoved, con-
tinued to sleep on their paper schemes for Soviets. The
National Council at Florence had directed the party
executive in January 1920 to draw up within two months
definite plans for Workers' Councils. At the National
Council at Milan in April—long after the time limit had
expired—the c need for Soviets * was once more affirmed,
and the party leaders once more called upon to * create these
proletarian organizations'. To lighten their task, they were
supplied with a set of regulations for drawing up Soviets,
wherein, in a few dozen clauses, every provision for their
efficient functioning was laid down. Only the Soviets them-
selves were missing. . . , Was it in order to seize power
and destroy the counter-revolution at birth that the party
leaders had to impose these Soviets from above, in bureau-
cratic style ? On the contrary, it was chiefly to * obstruct
and paralyse the experiment of social democracy \ to
prevent e the establishment of the bourgeois parliament %
and to destroy those illusions of democracy—' the most
dangerous kind'. With these objects in view they must