Chapter 3: The Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and its Abstentionist Fraction: 1919‑20

The Origins of the Italian Socialist Party and the Extreme Left Current: 1864‑1914

From 1860 to 1880, the workers’ movement in Italy was dominated by “libertarians”, and it is not until 1881 that the first avowedly Marxist tendency emerges at Rimini, in the Socialist Party of Romagna. The Socialist Party of Italy (PSI) is founded in 1892 in Genoa, would arise from the union of the Socialist Party of Romagna with the Workers’ Party of Milan (an “apolitical” and abstentionist party which counted Turati amongst its members).

This founding signaled the definitive separation from the anarchists, who were opposed to any participation in elections. The party’s programme (which would remain unchanged up until 1919) although containing some very vague statements, was nevertheless mainly characterized by the tenets of class struggle, i.e., socialization of the means of production, organization of the proletariat into a political party, independence from all other parties.

Little by little, inside the PSI, a movement would develop in response to reformism. Since the Marxist wing was so weak, it fell to the syndicalists to express this reaction to begin with, but in 1907, these would leave the party. In 1910, at the Milan Conference, the “Intransigents”, opposed to the reformists, manifested themselves in the shape of Mussolini and Lazzari. During the Libyan War period (1911-12) the reformists were divided into groups for and against the war; in 1912, the parliamentary group would however vote against the annexation of Libya. At the congress held in Reggio Emilia, the intransigents managed to gain the upper hand over the reformists and the extreme right. The latter grouping, represented by Bissolati, Bonomi, Cabrini, and Podrecca, supported the Libyan War and were prepared to participate in bourgeois cabinets: this wing was expelled from the party. Mussolini would speak out at this conference against the autonomy of the parliamentary group.

The intransigent fraction, which represented the PSI’s left, had La Soffitta as their journal (the attic to which certain bourgeois politicians thought Marxism had been banished!). Mussolini, already editor of the Youth Federation paper, L’Avanguardia, became editor of “Avanti!”, the party paper. The Youth Federation, founded in 1907, had an extreme left leadership, and would carry out a determined fight against reformism. Complete victory for the intransigent revolutionary current came at the Ancona Congress in April 1914, a congress characterized by the declaration that membership of the party was incompatible with participation in Freemasonry.

The extreme left current of the PSI was born in Southern Italy, specifically in Naples. One of the first sections of the International had been set up in Naples, by Bakunin in 1870. This section, oriented towards a Sorelian syndicalist policy, founded “La Propaganda” and fought against the Liberal administration. In 1900, Naples became the Italian center for reformism’s development – thanks in large measure to some scandalous electoral alliances. In 1907 the syndicalists abandoned the section, which at the time consisted mainly of reformists and freemasons.

In 1912 it is the revolutionary socialists who abandon the section, though still retaining their membership in the PSI, in order to start the “Karl Marx” Socialist Revolutionary Circle and to publish the review La Voce The Circle would eventually restore the local section after the Ancona Conference, where the revolutionary Marxist group of Naples had presented its conclusions on its long battle against the disgraceful electoralism which had reached unparalleled heights in Naples. On March 14, 1914, II Socialista of Naples was founded as the organ of the Campanian PSI.

The 1914‑18: Struggle of the Left Against the Inertia and Deviations of the PSI Leadership

Of all the socialist parties, only the Bolshevik party, the Serbian Socialist Party, and the PSI (along with all other Italian Parties up to 1915) were opposed to the war. But whilst the entire PSI, or at least a good part of it, rejected the policy of the Union Sacrée, its Left, quite distinct from it, defended Leninist positions at the party congresses and reunions that followed (Bologna, May 1915 – Rome, February 1917 – Rome, 1918) namely: rejection of national defense; defeatism, the use of military defeat to pose the problem of the seizure of power; incessant struggle against the union leaders and opportunist MPs and the demand for their expulsion from the party. Hence the Left vigorously and consistently opposed the inertia and opportunism of the PSI leadership in a series of theoretical and practical battles, about which we’ll have more to say later.

The declaration of war on August 2, 1914, which neither the Italian government nor its bourgeois opposition were party to, had been preceded in Italy by an important episode in the class war. This was the explosive “Red Week” of June 9-12, 1914, which occurred in response to the murder of three workers during an anti-militarist demonstration in Ancona. Strikes and demonstrations quickly spread to all the cities in Italy. But the CGL, led by reformists, didn’t hesitate to betray the struggle and ordered an end to the general strike.

Between August 1914 and May 1915, all official Italian political life focused on the question of neutrality, and Italy’s intervention in the war. The Italian bourgeoisie would soon show that its real aim was war against its Austrian ally. Their nationalist and patriotic stance would soon be echoed on the unstable fringes of the PSI.

On October 18, 1914, Mussolini revealed his treachery in Avanti!, the paper he edited, in an article entitled From Absolute Neutrality to Active and Operative Neutrality, a prelude to the theory of the revolutionary and defensive war. The extreme left of the Naples section responded to Mussolini and this war theory immediately through its own review “Il Socialista”. There was also an intervention by the Youth Federation, in which Mussolini had hitherto enjoyed great influence. Mussolini was expelled from the party, and the leadership entrusted to Lazzari, Bacci, and Serrati. Three currents then were delineated inside the PSI: the Turatian reformists; the intransigents, who while supporting opposition to the war in parliament were opposed to expelling the reformists, in effect supporting them; and finally, the left, who demanded that a policy of active sabotage of the war be adopted.

On May 24, 1915, Italy went to war against Austria. At the PSI Bologna Congress on the war (May 19, 1915), the participants were: nine members for the party leadership, twenty for the parliamentary groups, eight for the CGL, and peripheral delegations of the party (Reggio Emilia, Rome, Turin, Bologna, Catania, Florence, Genoa, Milan, Pisa, Venice, Naples, Parma, Modena, and Ravenna). In the course of this conference all the various conflicts between the various PSI tendencies with regard to the war came to the surface. The vague formula “neither participate nor sabotage” put forward by Lazzari corresponded to a centrist policy. The extreme left took a radical position by referring to defeatism and sabotage of every war, according to Lenin’s formula. The Italian left wasn’t aware of Lenin’s position at the time, but from the identical programmatic and theoretical premises it arrived at the very same tactical conclusions. The initiative of the general strike was left to the local organizations, as requested by the delegates from Turin, where the proletariat was in a state of extreme volatility, and where repression was fierce. The resolution passed was “lackluster” and spared the PSI from “taking on its responsibilities.”

The PSI took part in the resumption of international relations; it attended the conferences at Zimmerwald in September 1915, and Kienthal in April 1916. At Zimmerwald, Modigliani and Lazzari signed the general manifesto, but not the manifesto of the extreme left proposed by Lenin.

During the war it was impossible to organize the national congress of the PSI; however, in Rome, a non-clandestine convention was held on February 25-26, 1917. The few documents that we have from this meeting are still sufficient to show there was a fierce struggle between two opposing positions. Three points came up for discussion. The first of these concerned the relationship of the party leadership and the parliamentary group. The parliamentary group – like the union leadership – in fact carried out its own policy independently of the party, without the leadership intervening. However, since the Socialist Party was being attacked on all sides for its position on the war, sentimentality would prevail, and a vote of confidence in the leadership was moved by Trozzi, a representative of the Left, and passed. The second point concerned the proposed reuniting of the socialist parties of the countries in the Entente (which now included Italy). It would have been correct simply to say, as the extreme left did, that the Second International and the French Socialist Party were well and truly dead, and therefore there was no need to participate in the Paris conference. The motion of unity, however, would be carried on secondary points. On the all-important third point, there were clear differences: the Left obtained 14,000 votes against the 17,000 of the Center and Right. This third point involved establishing the tactics the party should adopt when the war had ended, just then in the offing. The pacifist wing of the party supported democratic-bourgeois formulae: peace without annexations, and without war reparations; the right of nations to self-determination; the creation of the League of Nations. The thesis of the left was clear, and blew sky-high all the creaky ultra-bourgeois notions:

“The war came about because in a capitalist regime, it could not be otherwise (Zimmerwald reaffirmed that) and it is not a question of basking in a new historic phase of peace, but of posing the question of how to prevent another war. What means does the proletariat have at its disposal? One and one alone: to overthrow capitalism: therefore, if our present programme (1917) hasn’t been up to the task of stopping the war with defeatism, the post-war programme must involve the proletariat taking power and the social revolution!” (Storia della Sinistra, Volume 1, page 106)

In February 1917, The Russian Revolution breaks out. Then there is the intervention of the United States, giving the Entente powers that added democratic veneer which the socialist Right seeks to use against the Left. Faced with the inconsistent and vacuous stance of the central organs of the PSI with regard to the war and the Russian Revolution, the extreme left mobilizes. The motion passed by the Naples section (a motion subsequently circulated throughout the entire party) would criticize the party’s passive attitude, in war and in peace. Opposition to the leadership’s policy becomes increasingly lively, particularly in Turin and amongst the young.

On August 23, 1917 in Florence, a committee of the Left fraction was formed which included the federations of Milan, Turin, Florence, and Naples. The committee issued a circular with a view to the party’s Fifteenth Congress (which was then postponed to autumn 1918). This circular expressed an orientation completely opposed to the leadership: socialist activity would have to be developed exclusively on the terrain of class struggle.

In August 1917, the workers of Turin launched a new class action, to which the national bourgeoisie react with violent repression and the arrests of proletarian leaders. In September – October 1917, the Italian defeat at Caporetto provoked a flare-up of interventionism in the PSI. The parliamentary group, supported by the CGL, proposed a Union Sacrèe in defense of the fatherland, and their aim is obstructed only by strenuous opposition from the rest of the party.

The leadership of the PSI, with Lazzari, in effect adapted itself to the extreme left, which was joined by the intransigent fraction to make common cause against the interventionists. At the request of the extreme left, the leadership convoked the members of the intransigent fraction, which represented the majority of the PSI, at the reunion of Florence on November 18, 1917, holding it illegally. The clandestine meeting, brought about under the stimulus of the Left, was hence directed openly against the reformist and jingoist attitudes of the parliamentary group, of the union leaders, and certain mayors (like those of Milan and Bologna), and set itself the task of putting a stop to such bad habits. Following this meeting, the circulars of the PSI center aimed at hindering the patriotic initiative of the parliamentarians and the union leaders, and the most resolute of the militants were able to organize themselves even more effectively.

The intervention of the representative of the extreme left at the clandestine meeting in Florence involved a clear condemnation of the French and German Socialist Parties, of their Union Sacrée policy, and it denounced those who justified participation in the war as the defense of the parliamentary-democratic bourgeois countries against the allegedly “feudal” Central Powers. It developed Marx and Engels’ distinctive critique of the prospect for a democratic Europe, supposedly resulting from a military victory of the Entente. The stance of the Neapolitan extreme left coincided with that taken by Lenin: defeatism and negation of the defense of the fatherland, the view that the proletarian revolution could triumph where the armies of the bourgeois State had been defeated, as had been confirmed in Russia in 1917. At the fraction reunion, the extreme left therefore proposed to use the military defeats incurred by monarchist and bourgeois Italy as the means of getting the proletarian revolution under way. But such a proposal didn’t fit in with the policy of the party leadership, which subscribed to Lazzari’s passive formula: “neither participation nor sabotage”. For the left current, the PSI position on war was inadequate because it stopped short of what Lenin termed “the transformation of the war between States into civil war between proletarians and bourgeois”.

In point of fact the PSI leadership had already compromised itself in May 1915, both when it had refused to proclaim the general strike against mobilization, and, not for the last time, when it had tolerated the parliamentary group’s acceptance of Turati’s watchword, “defense of the fatherland”.

From 1917, the Italian State, after it had rejected any form of support by the PSI, unleashed a terrible repression against the proletarian movement and against all those opposed to the war. In January 1918, Lazzari and Bombacci were arrested and accused of conspiracy and defeatism, and Serrati was arrested in May 1918. In 1918, the Turin comrades were put on trial and incurred very heavy sentences. In February 1918, Turati would make a patriotic speech in the House of Deputies, and in May the parliamentary group and the union leaders decided to participate in the study commissions for the passage from war to peace. They were disavowed by the party, but still Turati refused to give up his place on the government commission.

The Fifteenth Congress of the PSI (Rome, 1918) was authorized by the State powers, whereas that held in September 1917 had been prohibited; this was because there are times when democratic illusions are far more effective than rifle shots in restraining revolutionary anger. At this congress, many delegates were absent, whether because of mobilization, which still kept a considerable number of militants under arms, or because of arrests. There were 365 sections of the party represented. The struggle against the war had invigorated the party and many of those present condemned the maneuvers of the parliamentary and union Right, the patriotism of Turati, and the ambiguities of Graziadei. Whereas the representatives of the Right avoided making the slightest reference to the Bolshevik revolution, Repossi (long associated with the extreme left), declared himself in favor of Lenin and the dictatorship of the proletariat and concluded his speech by calling for the struggle of “class against class”. The lawyer Salvatori, who had also attended the congresses of Bologna (1915) and Florence (1917), defended the positions of the extreme left; he drafted a motion disowning the parliamentary group, and deploring the weakness of the leadership. Modigliani then intervened in a violent manner declaring that the MPs would denounce such a motion if it were approved. Hence it was given a blander formulation: nevertheless, it required the parliamentary group to conform strictly to the party’s directives. Salvatori’s modified motion would collect 14,015 votes, the centrists’ 2,507, and Modigliani’s 2,505. However, it only took a few months for the parliamentary group to recommence its autonomous activity, with the party leadership standing by and letting it happen.

The congress, in fact, avoided the central question by getting absorbed in trivial personal disputes and accusations. Already in the previous year the center current had asked that “theoretical” debates be avoided so as not to compromise the unity of the party! The Left affirmed, on the contrary, that, “the sincere, honest and upright way of resolving the question (of divergences) is rather to decide whether one or the other tendency lines up with the party’s programme and corresponds to the goals that it has set […] We are firmly on theoretical terrain here. We have to be convinced that it is time to face the matter and resolve it, so as to be able to proceed then with certainty in the field of action.” (Avanti!, October 13, 1917) Practical questions, in particular tactical and organizational ones, could only be resolved by equating them with doctrine, and examining them in the light of Marxist theory. As for personal polemics, it was appropriate to the bourgeoisie and reformism, and must be especially spurned.

The consequence of not being able to reach agreement on basic questions was that the new party leadership which emerged from the congress was neither able to straighten things out in an organizational sense, nor overcome the legacy of hesitations and wavering of the past.

In this struggle of the extreme left against the inertia and deviations of the PSI during the war, it is critical to highlight the importance of the Socialist Youth Federation. On the eve of the war, the socialist youth movement made significant contributions to the revolutionary wing of the party. In October 1914, in the wake of Mussolini’s treachery, a minor crisis was unavoidable. The National Youth Committee was then convoked as a matter of urgency on October 25, 1914 at Bologna, that is a few days after the famous article would signal Mussolini’s volte-face. A resolute motion was passed, which put an end to any interventionist hesitation in its paper L’Avanguardia. A few days later, the paper’s editor, Lido Calani felt obliged to go over, lock, stock, and barrel, to the traitor’ side, without even a tiny minority of the youth to follow him. After Bologna, the line of the paper was rectified completely, and it carried out radical activity against the war. At the congress of Reggio Emilia (May 10-11, 1915), on the eve of Italy’s entry into the war, the principle of revolutionary defeatism and a general strike in the event of war was approved. The Youth Federation developed the same directives as those backed by the extreme left at the Rome Congress in 1917. It made an open criticism of the “pacifist and gradualist” attitude of the leadership. On October 23, 1917, the federation held a national congress in Florence and supported the circular issued by the revolutionary and extreme fraction. A representative of the left (the extreme left of Naples) took over the leadership. The federation gave voice to passionate support for the October Revolution, and began to raise the question of the new International, thereby preparing itself for the decisive struggle between the left wing and the reformist tendency.