LENIN’S LETTER

LENIN’S LETTER

Il Soviet, January 11, 1920)

The tremendous influence exerted by the wise word of the great communist compels us to comment on this latest letter published in the Avanti! a few days ago, addressed to the German communists, in which he advises them to participate in the bourgeois parliament. Already on another occasion Lenin in a short letter to Comrade Serrati had expressed his approval of the Italian Socialist Party’s intention to participate in the parliamentary elections, thus contrasting with our decidedly abstentionist point of view. Lenin, who knows how great, and deservedly so, is his prestige, hastens in both letters, very wisely, to premise that he has very scanty information, and this is to caution those who might wish to make excessive assessment of his judgment, which he certainly admits is possibly inaccurate due to lack of precise data. 

Of Italian socialism he, who was in Zimmerwald, knows the party’s decisive aversion to the war, which together with its adherence to the Third International has made the party itself outside our country acquire a credit greater than its merits by making it pass for a party with a strong revolutionary character; which is just not absolutely accurate. 

The repercussion of the war phenomenon was, within the party, more than a product of theoretical evaluation, mainly sentimental in nature and therefore often absurd and contradictory.

There are not a few of our comrades and of the best who, staunch opponents of war, declare themselves equally relentless opponents of all violence for whatever reason exercised. Were opposed to the war many of the most tenacious reformists who accept the concept of the defense of the homeland. Many out of calculation, out of prudence, a few out of deep intimate conviction. Therefore, the opposing attitude never went beyond a verbal exercise. During the crisis of Caporetto, no attempt was made to try to take advantage of the difficult moment of the bourgeoisie, which encountered no obstacle to overcome the perilous pass. On the contrary, the party scrambled at that hour and after to exonerate itself of the responsibility that the bourgeoisie wanted to place on it for having participated in provoking that phenomenon, without claiming that little which could be due for the contrary propaganda constantly made, which couldn’t fail to bear some fruit.

In those days Turati, speaker of the parliamentary group, echoed the words of the prime minister inciting resistance, exclaiming: The fatherland is on the Grappa, and in the newspaper he wrote of the danger of the second enemy (the foreigner) without the party raising protest, indeed with the almost general consent of the it. 

How few in that hour held firm within their soul and did not invoke the liberating democratic victory of the Entente arms that would fulfill the Wilsonian gospel! The cleverest kept silent and waited for the propitious hour of the electoral struggle to put themselves forward to the masses with a stainless certificate of opposition to the war, where the most imprudent spoke out and today pay the price.

And that is as far as war aversion is concerned, the credit for which belongs to only a very few. Let us not speak of joining the Third International. The sincerity of this membership and the consciousness of it is in the way the vote was taken, that is, by acclamation.

Those who are distant and have little accurate information, including therefore comrade Lenin, believe that the Italian party is homogeneously and authentically revolutionary, that is, that it has already purged itself of all the old Social Democratic dead weight. 

Who knows what considerations Lenin would make if he knew, for example, that the Italian Communists, to whom he believes he is addressing himself, are not such but simply socialists (by now the importance that the diversity of the denomination has assumed is no longer questioned by anyone), or if, for example, he knew that there are social democrats in the party who are far to the right of the renegade traitor Kautsky and who are far more explicitly and tenaciously declared enemies of Bolshevism than he is; and all of this at the behest of the director of Comunismo and the maximalists, in opposition to the proposals of our fraction, on the sole ground that the unity of the party should not be broken in the imminence of the battle with … ballots for winning more seats in the national parliament.

Lenin says that there can be no peace, that one cannot work together with Kautsky, Adler, etc.; here with us it is not a question of working together; unfortunately, it is a question of living together in the same party, with the same discipline and, irony!, even with the same program… the electoral one. 

So too, it is not a question of uniting illegal and legal work; unfortunately, we do only the latter, which is the only one that many parts of the party consider useful and necessary to have to do because it is the only truly revolutionary one. 

About the participation in the bourgeois parliament recommended to the German Communists, it is not worth recalling the varied behaviour held by the Bolsheviks in relation to the Duma, as these are not behaviours that can be evaluated by analogy.

For us, the fundamental reason for non-participation lies above all in the evaluation of the historical period one is passing through, believing, as we have at other times amply developed, that in the revolutionary period the one and only task of the Communist Party is to devote its every activity to the preparation of revolutionary action tending to violently overthrow the bourgeois state and to prepare for the realization of communism. 

A question of such cardinal importance involves the whole substantial function of the party, as appeared sharply in Germany in the hour of the collapse of the old empire, during which those like Scheidemann, Kautsky, etc., who wanted parliamentary action appeared and were consequently opportunists. 

In countries where democracy has no tradition, as in Russia, this appearance is manifested in those critical hours; in our countries, where democracy has lived for a long time, there is no need to wait for these crises in order to judge the conduct of certain fractions, which have constantly done opportunistic, collaborationist and anti-revolutionary work, such as the parliamentary function demands and imposes. 

It amazes us that Lenin lumps together, as if they were the same thing, the renunciation of participation in bourgeois parliaments and that of reactionary trade unions, factory councils, etc., which some German Communists advocate. FIN QUI

For us these are two things that cannot go together: parliament is a bourgeois organ, nor can it have any other function except in the interests of the bourgeoisie; it must therefore disappear with the fall of bourgeois rule. The workers’ union, on the contrary, is a purely class organ, which although, due to recklessness of the leaders, carries out reactionary activities can, indeed must, be recalled to its true function.

Intervention in parliament for communists is of no interest since it is to be destroyed; not so the trade union, workers’ council, etc., which do revolutionary work under bourgeois rule, insofar as they are imbued with communist spirit and act on communist directives under the impetus and control of communists; for equally they will be useful and positively factual organs under communist rule not only because of the form of their constitution.

If the German Communists want to boycott these workers’ bodies, it is also possible that they are compelled to do so for reasons of defense and preservation, in order to evade the persecution of the socialrogue Noske who has unleashed his spies in these bodies.

But if, on the other hand, they were doing this out of a tendency to the anarchist-individualist conception of the revolution, then we need not remind that we are resolutely opposed to such an attitude since we are in perfect agreement with Lenin on the necessity of having a strong, centralized political party which is the brain, soul and sure guide of the proletariat in the struggle for its redemption.

To this end we continue our tenacious action for the division of communists from social democrats, a division which for us is an indispensable factor for the victory of communism.