Antonio Gramsci on discipline

Bourgeois discipline is the only force which keeps the bourgeois aggregation firmly together. Discipline must be met with discipline. But whereas bourgeois discipline is mechanical and authoritarian, socialist discipline is autonomous and spontaneous. If you accept socialist discipline it means you are a socialist or you want to be so more fully, joining the youth movement if you are young. And whoever is a socialist or wants to become one does not obey: he commands himself, he imposes a rule of life on his impulses, on his disorderly aspirations. It would be strange if, while one too often obeys without a murmur a discipline that one does not understand and does not feel, we were not able to act according to a course of conduct that we ourselves have helped prescribe and keep rigidly consistent. For this is what autonomous disciplines are like: the very life, the very thought of the person who observes them. The discipline imposed on citizens by the bourgeois state makes them into subjects, people who delude themselves that they exert an influence on the course of events. The discipline of the Socialist Party makes the subject into a citizen: a citizen who is now rebellious, precisely because he has become conscious of his personality and feels it is shackled and cannot freely express itself in the world.

- Antonio Gramsci on discipline