FOR WHOM THE PROLETARIANS VOTED

Il Comunista, May 26, 1921

The votes cast by the socialist party far outnumbered those of the communist party, representative of the Third International. We have already said that we do not weep over this (of course we weep even less because the bourgeois parties have overtaken us) but this does not detract from the fact that the causes of this fact must be examined and discussed in order to draw useful conclusions for the class tactics of the proletariat.

Our party itself in its election manifestos and appeals had attributed to the indications of the election results the value of an index, had said that on the 15th of May the workers who are for communism, through the dictatorship of the proletariat and the sovietist republic, would be counted on the ground of the programme of the Moscow International. But in talking about this consultation, we did not give it a majority sense, as the social democrats give it. Just as the communists organised in the party ranks will never be more than a minority of the workers, so the communist voters cannot be a majority as long as the bourgeois regime is in place. This observation is so beyond suspicion that it, with the theoretical and historical arguments well known to the readers of our press, forms the basis of our criticism of the method, of the social-democratic illusion. As long as the elections are within the framework of bourgeois democracy, the ranks of proletarians who give the political manifestation of voting for the communist party, i.e. against the bourgeois democratic system itself, can only be a vanguard ranks.

Precisely because we give to this consultation not the value of a positive action in which we summarise all the contribution that the masses must bring to the political struggle, but the value of an indirect indication of the magnitude of the forces ready to act tomorrow on another terrain; we will never try in our electoral tactics to increase the number of voters at the expense of their quality, i.e. their consciousness of having embraced the communist programme, in its preponderant extra-electoral part.  For the same reasons that the membership of the communist party, where attention is paid to the quality of the adherents much more than in the social-democratic and labour parties, will always be lower than in these other parties; the number of communist voters will hardly exceed the number of social-democratic voters. On the contrary, it must be assumed that the number of sympathisers not organised in the party is proportionately much smaller for the communists than for the social democrats: hence a double reason for the decrease.

So while the number of communist voters, as well as the number of party members, when increasing undoubtedly indicates an increase in the revolutionary strength of the party, provided that the increase is not achieved through opportunistic softenings and concessions, when the question is posed as a comparison between communist and social-democratic votes, more comprehensive considerations must be made, bearing in mind that the number of communists registered in the party, and the wider field of communist voters, at the moment of non-parliamentary, but directly revolutionary actions, will see a large part of the immature masses coming round to them, who in the electoral contest allow themselves to be regimented by the social democrats.

With these general considerations in mind, let us see what degree of revolutionary development of the Italian masses can be deduced from the fact that, in the political struggle in general, a preponderant part of them allow themselves to be led by the socialist party.

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1 – There is a tendency to make this figure appear discouraging for communism by comparing it with the elections of 1919 and evaluating the enormous harvest of votes reaped then by the socialist party, not yet split, and adherent to the Third International. We do not need to repeat the reasons that show how only in appearance was that struggle based on a maximalist programme; how the party had become communist only in the label, comprising a considerable current openly opposed to communism, and a majority that understood communism insufficiently to show with evidence that it was destined to close that brief demagogic parenthesis to reveal itself, as it has done today, as intimately social-democratic.

The struggle gave a large number of reformist and pseudo-maximalist deputies; magna pars of it was the reformist Confederation of Labour, the party worked in it with all the traditional social-democratic method and resources, without demanding that the propaganda be based on a precise and constant programme; above all it gravitated the struggle on the question of war by exploiting, even among elements who were not only non-maximalist, but even non-proletarian, its past opposition to it. The socialist party then skilfully succeeded in [taking] the votes of the proletarians who tended to be revolutionaries – but whose tendency deserved to be cultivated seriously rather than bastardised in that orgy of demagogy – with those of all the undecided elements of intermediate classes, tending by logic to social-democratic politics. Subsequent events, the same ones that condemned the party’s action by proving it to be non-revolutionary, have given an idea of the significance of the 1919 elections, have proven how they, and in them the socialist triumph, were a way of salvation for the Italian bourgeoisie; far from being welcomed, not only as a revolutionary assault, but not even as an indication of revolutionary forces in the process of being safely prepared for greater and more decisive struggles.

2 – In the elections of 1919 and in all its action the socialist party paralysed the formation of a communist consciousness in the masses by suggesting the democratic concept of ‘majoritarianism’ – putting in the shade all the demands of preparation as individual and collective values of theoretical and practical nourishment in the face of the need to ‘be many’; many in the party, in the ‘proletarian fortalices’, in the elections, with the formula of unity at any cost that was not unity to achieve with truly concerted efforts a common goal. The elections themselves with their result and the subsequent bitter disappointments of the proletariat should have disgraced this ‘majoritarian’ concept; but these processes among the masses take place slowly: and so the social-democratic movement is everywhere the most effective counter-revolutionary expedient. The 156 deputies, and then municipalities and provinces galore, bringing instead of revolutionary acceleration the cooling and recoil. What a lesson from history! But if the party, if the boiling maximalists in Bologna understood it only in their minority, it was absurd to expect that, before other intrinsic upheavals and repercussions on the real situation of the masses, vast strata of the proletariat could understand it.

The fascist phenomenon, properly understood, is but a clear confirmation of the illusionism contained in that ‘majoritarian’, or, pardon the word, ‘numeritarian’ concept. Suffice it to say that it has raged most where the numeritarian laurels have been most (count the deputies, provincial councillors, socialist municipalities in the Ferrara area!) and has retreated where, as in the south, it believed it was effortlessly the master. But instead, the Italian socialist party’s call to eradicate fascism by ballots, by numbers, was still successful after the split in Livorno. Logically, if the party had done nothing to seriously uproot the traditionally legalitarian mirage from its followers, and if its extremist declamations had not even dented the breeding of the parliamentarist microbe that is its essential function, it was able, without losing all its followers, to make this admirable conversion in its outward attitudes (although in substance nothing has changed) by moving from a false and forced anti-democratic preaching to the exaltation of legal methods of action.

Undoubtedly, the Italian proletariat still believed that the number of ballots and deputies was a protection and a class weapon against the bullying of the adversary. Communist propaganda had neither the time nor the opportunity to disgrace this ignominious and cretinous concept: too much has been allowed for the opportunism of ballot maximalism to poison consciences and ruin situations, before openly shouting at those the epithet they deserve: traitors! And so it is explained how many proletarians having to choose between the effectiveness of their vote given to the communists and that of the vote given to the social democrats have reasoned as follows: on the one hand you ask for the vote but deny it any intrinsic value; on the other hand you attribute to it, in large numbers, a decisive value; and you are on the way to accumulating many more: let us vote for the second, for the socialists.

Certainly these proletarians are not communists, and it is not bad that they did not vote for us. If as soon as we had in the obvious and palpable predictions (in some places it has happened) reached a certain ‘numeritarian’ strength, the avalanche would have rained down on our lists, where the instinctively revolutionary conviction of the voters would concur with the ‘numeritarian’ mania to count us as many, to beat, on the harmless ground of minutes and counts, ‘the bourgeoisie’. Let us hope that this misfortune will never befall us. All these proletarian voters have thus wanted to experiment with a method that sufficient evidence has already debunked. It may be regrettable that a test was still needed, but it is so. What anti-democratic conviction loses in readiness, it gains in depth and power. The writer has never believed that the thousand clowns who rant at the Bologna congress and many other gatherings the amusing formulas of an anarchic and decomposed revolutionarism had the conviction of the revolution in fifteen days in their pockets instead of the deputy badge.

3 – It is hardly necessary to recall the reasons why the Communist Party could not deploy all its forces against this mirage. First of all, this critical propaganda work is not done during the election campaign. During the election campaign, votes are stolen, and nothing else good or useful is done, if there is no prior solid preparation of the party in the field of propaganda and disciplining its forces. It is an enormous achievement to have made it through the elections, taking the votes that reasonably could and should have been taken, without having bastardised the whole apparatus of the work in progress and the clarity of our theoretical and tactical orientations, without making ourselves prisoners of illogical situations.

We barely remember that we had a party in the course of being constituted, made up of abstentionists as convinced as they were disciplined and of electivists… who were beginning to regret having disciplined the former. The framing of the masses by the party is a formidable work, which is done in many fields, from trade union action to street clashes, which in elections is noted, but not developed. Above all, we are sure, because of the esteem in which we hold the party, that it does not see its future task in the easy prospect of a rise in electoral statistics; but it hopes to be left to carry out its work of preparation, so harsh and difficult, before a new election comes along to repeat the risk of diverting all its energies into it. If it were to happen, we would still do our duty, we would still leave the morbid ‘numeritarian’ itch unstimulated…

4 – The detailed communications that the Executive will make will show how the outcome of the struggle has corresponded to the forecasts, taking into account various circumstances that have influenced it. The Communist deputies are roughly the same number as before. One cannot take as the basis for the number of elected members – in comparison with the socialist party – the number of party members as it was at the Livorno congress. We had the votes of one-third of the party; while our deputies were, according to an old rule, which always gives fewer deputies to left-wing tendencies, one-seventh (18 against 132) of those of the united party; a proportion that the elections have preserved almost exactly. And it is logical that the socialist party has a larger group of sympathisers, for the reasons mentioned. Moreover, as many Unitarians openly acknowledge (see the Canalini interview in Ordine Nuovo) the communist secession gained the socialist party many votes on the right. If one takes into account the abstention of a great many revolutionary workers, one can see that the ratio of proletarian votes, and of proletarian followers above all, between us and the social democrats cannot be deduced from electoral figures for this consideration either.

It should be added that our policy has been not to seek the votes of the syndicalist and anarchist working masses, many of whom, with shrewd manoeuvres, were attracted precisely by the social democrats. For them, the vote of a bourgeois who awaits the salvation of Italy from Turati is as good as that of an anarchist worker whose abstentionism falls before the petty-bourgeois mirage of the protest-candidacy. We asked for and got the vote of those who are on the precise line of the communist programme.

5 – The skilful resources of the social democrats had no small influence. Their hypocritical conduct has already been denounced by us: all our party newspapers publish repugnant details of it. Instead of fighting fairly in debates of ideas and methods, the socialist gentlemen have pretended that they do not want the fratricidal struggle in order to show themselves in a good light before the masses and to conceal more and more the terms of their defection from the revolutionary directives; but in the shadows they have spread the most shamelessly false and defamatory rumours, they have spread false news of the withdrawal of the communist lists at the last hour: they have influenced the unsuspecting masses by telling them that by voting for the communists ‘the vote was lost’ etc. etc. On our side, we responded with much saner methods, albeit less suited to immediate popularity success, with direct and open attacks, even violent ones, but holding our head up.

This is how the enormous difference in votes between socialists and communists should be judged. It is only because we are concerned with following the development of the political consciousness of the proletariat towards communism that we examine all this, not out of foolish recriminations or regret for not having had greater electoral success.

On the contrary, our objective remains to measure ourselves against the social democrats on other ground, and we are quite certain that the situations which are being prepared will completely detach the revolutionary masses from them, despite all their lying resources and all the speculations on the past with which they try to obscure the clear approach to the problems of today. The large number of votes received by the Italian socialist party is for us, according to Marxist criticism, a new indication that it is a dangerously anti-revolutionary apparatus. If the communists believe that our numerical defeat was something to be consoled about, and if they are pleased with the large number of socialist votes to console themselves, then we offer them our heartfelt condolences – after observing that it is not enough to be pleased or sorry about the facts, that they must be understood in order to use them for further action.

But we have reason to believe that they are very few.