It is the fatality, it is what cannot be counted on, it is what upsets the programs, which overturns the best-constructed plans; it is the brute matter that chokes the intelligence. What happens, the evil that strikes everyone, happens because the mass of men abdicates their will, allows laws to be promulgated that only revolt can abrogate, lets men rise to power that only a mutiny can overthrow. Between absenteeism and indifference a few hands, not supervised by any control, weave the web of collective life, and the mass ignores, because they don't care; and then it seems to be fatality that overwhelms everything and everyone, it seems that history is nothing more than an enormous natural phenomenon, an eruption, an earthquake of which everyone remains victims, those who wanted and those who did not want, who knew and who he did not know who had been active and who indifferent.

Some whimper piteously, others swear obscenely, but none or a few ask themselves: if I had done my duty too, if I had tried to assert my will, would what happened would have happened? I hate the indifferent also for this: because I am annoyed by their cry of eternal innocents.

I ask each of them to account for how he has carried out the task that life has set him and places on him every day, what he has done and especially what he has not done. And I feel I can be inexorable, that I don't have to waste my pity, that I don't have to share my tears with them.

I participate, I live, I feel the activity of the future city that my part is building already pulsing in the consciences of my part. And in it the social chain does not weigh on a few, in it everything that happens is not due to chance, to fatality, but is the intelligent work of the citizens.
There is no one in it who stands at the window and watches while the few sacrifice themselves, faint.

ALIVE, I PARTICIPATE. THEREFORE I HATE THOSE WHO DO NOT PARTICIPATE, I HATE THE INDIFFERENT

ANTONIO GRAMSCI
Italian philosopher and politician
1891 - 1937