2021 Presentation of “The Italian Left: On the Line of Lenin and the First Two Congresses of the Third International”

The text we publish here in English is an adaptation of a study that first appeared in 1990 in “La Gauche Communiste”, issues 18-19, 20-21 and 22-23, then translated into Italian in “Il Partito Comunista” in issues 187-195 of 1990, and finally in English in “Communist Left,” from issue 4 of 1991 to issue 25-26.

On February 23, 1919 in Il Soviet, the press organ of the Communist Abstentionist Fraction (the split within the Italian Socialist Party had not yet occurred) was published a short note, but with an extremely significant title: “Bolshevism, a plant of every climate”.

The article highlighted how Bolshevism was not a Russian phenomenon, but an international one, because Bolshevism and revolutionary Marxism were the same thing.

“In order to combat patriotic prejudices and the sophism of the “defense of the nation”, we did not wait for Lenin and the Bolsheviks, our comrades in faith and tendency for many years, to succeed in triumphing in Russia; and even without their glorious and luminous example, the day historical events led us to victory, we would have done as they did. Precisely because we and they worked and work for the same program, for the class struggle that denies national solidarity, for revolutionary socialism, for the conquest of power and for the proletarian dictatorship, for those who have no fatherland. For this doctrine and method were not improvised in 1917 […] but since 1847 had been proclaimed by the Socialist International; and we who, as the left wing of the Russian Social-Democrats, were and are against all later revisions of Marxism, were inspired by that program […]

“Bolshevism lives in Italy, and not as an imported article, because socialism lives and struggles wherever there are exploited people fighting for their own emancipation.

“In Russia it has made its first grandiose affirmation, and we, finding our entire program in the formidable developments of the Russian Revolution, have written at the top of these columns the magic Slavic word: Soviet, which has become the symbol of the International Revolution.”

And what was written in the article was confirmed by the facts.

In the whirlwind of the First World War, which involved practically all the parties of the Second International and the great trade union confederations, if in Italy the Socialist Party was saved from plunging into open betrayal, it was not as much due to its own merit as to the work of the national bourgeoisie which, not having yet decided to which of the two warring coalitions it would sell the flesh of its proletarians, had initially declared itself neutral. In fact, except for a small number of nationalists, when the war seemed inevitable the Italian people, of every social class, sided with the neutrality.

In the meantime, bourgeois diplomacy opened negotiations with both warring coalitions, trying to obtain as advantageous a position as possible. Not satisfied with the offers of the Austro-Germans, with whom it was linked by a pact of alliance, it ended up entering the war on the side of the Entente, signing the “Treaty of London” on April 26, 1915. These events were preceded by an intense interventionist campaign in which the utmost important role was played by the man who until a few days before had been recognized as the leader of the intransigent revolutionary current: Benito Mussolini.

After having opportunistically vacillated on the matter, held back by the left wing of the party, Mussolini openly went to the side of the class enemy and founded his own newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia. Naturally, he presented his adhesion to the war as “revolutionary”, as a means of opening the road of emancipation to the masses of workers. It’s not pleasant to admit it, but both Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti, future leaders of the degenerating Communist Party of Italy, adhered to this thesis.

However, only an insignificant minority of party members followed Mussolini, the vast majority refrained from joining the war. It was said that the Italian Socialist Party had “saved its soul” for not having joined the war. But the “non-adherence”, when it is not accompanied by a vigorous opposition, is nothing but a hypocritical mask that leaves to the capitalist State and the bourgeoisie every freedom to trap the proletariat militarily and send it to the slaughter on the battlefields. Lazzari’s equivocal formula, adopted by the “revolutionary” party leadership, of “neither adhering to nor sabotaging the war”, in fact represented nothing more than the capitulation of the party to the needs of national imperialism.

This conciliatory line was opposed by the intransigent wing of the party, which would later organize itself into the Abstentionist Fraction.

The Communist Abstentionist Fraction will write its first letter to the Communist International on November 10, 1919: “During the whole period of the war there was within the Party a strong radical movement which opposed the mild policy of the parliamentary group, of the General Confederation of Labor – perfectly reformist – and of the Party Directorate itself, although it was intransigent revolutionary according to the decisions of the pre-war congresses. The Directorate was always divided into two currents in front of the problem of the war; the right-wing headed by Lazzari, author of the formula “neither adhere nor sabotage the war”; the left-wing was headed by Serrati, director of Avanti!. In all the meetings held during the war, however, the two currents presented themselves in solidarity with each other, and while they had reservations about the behavior of the parliamentary group, the “left-wing” didn’t oppose it. Left-wing elements outside the Executive fought against this misunderstanding, aiming at splitting the reformists of the group from the Party and taking a more revolutionary attitude.”

At the third congress of the Communist Party of Italy (PCd’I), held in Lyon in 1926, when by then the leadership of the party was in the hands of Gramsci and Togliatti, we had to recall how “during the World War, if the entire party, or almost the entire party [referring to Gramsci and Togliatti, ed] opposed a policy of ‘sacred union’, within it was even better detectable the activity of a clear extreme left, which in the meetings of Bologna (May 1915), Rome (February 1917), Florence (November 1917) and at the Rome Congress in 1918, supported Leninist directives such as the denial of national defense and revolutionary defeatism, the use of the defeat for the setting up of the problem of power, the incessant struggle and the request for expulsion from the party against the opportunist leaders, trade unions and parliamentarians.

“Immediately after the war the directive of the extreme left was brought to life in the newspaper Il Soviet which was the first to set out and defend the directives of the Russian revolution denying its anti-Marxist [Allusion to Gramsci’s Article “The Revolution Against Capital” of January 1918, ed], opportunist, syndicalist and anarchist interpretations, and correctly posing the essential problems of the proletarian dictatorship and the task of the party, supporting from moment one a split away from the socialist party.”

In March 1919 the first congress of the Third International was held in Russia. No representative of our fraction was then able to participate in that historic meeting, but we were present in 1920 at the Second, real founding congress, where we played an important role by making a significant contribution from both theoretical and tactical point of view.

But already after the First Congress of Moscow, the Communist Abstentionist Fraction had tried to get in touch with the Third International by sending two successive letters, together with a collection of issues of Il Soviet; the first one, which we have mentioned, is dated November 10, 1919, and the second is from January 10, 1920. Unfortunately neither of them reached their destination because they were intercepted by the police.

However, we are interested in their contents. The fraction presented itself with these words: “Our fraction was formed after the Bologna Congress of the Italian Socialist Party (October 6-10, 1919) but had begun its propaganda through the Neapolitan newspaper Il Soviet, and then held a conference in Rome on July 6, 1919 in which the program was approved and then presented at the Congress […] After the war, apparently the whole Party took a “maximalist” direction by joining the Third International. The Party’s attitude, however, was not satisfactory from the Communist point of view [here the letter refers to the reading of the attached papers, ed.]

“[…] Immediately we, with other comrades from all over Italy, moved towards electoral abstentionism, which we supported at the Bologna Congress. We wish it to be clear that at the Congress we were divided from the rest of the Party not only on the electoral question, but also on that of the split in the Party […] “The “maximalist-electionist” fraction, which won at the Congress, had also accepted the thesis of the incompatibility of remaining in the Party of the reformists, but renounced it for purely electoral considerations despite the anti-communist speeches of Turati and Treves.”

Examining the parliamentary question, the letter continued: “Parliamentary democracy in Western countries takes such forms that it constitutes the most formidable weapon for the deviation of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat […]. The left wing of our party has been engaged since 1910-1911 in a polemic and struggle against bourgeois democracy, and this experience leads to the conclusion that in the present revolutionary period in the world, all contact with the democratic system must be severed […] We attach importance to the question of electoral action and we think that it is not in accordance with communist principles to leave the decision on this matter to the individual parties of the 3rd International. The International Communist Party should examine and solve this problem.”

With regard to the Party it was specified: “Today we aim to work towards the establishment of a truly communist party, and our fraction within the PSI is working on this […] It should be noted that we are not in relations of collaboration with movements outside the party: anarchists and syndicalists, because they follow non-communist principles and are against the proletarian dictatorship, indeed they accuse us of being more authoritarian and centralizing than the other maximalists of the party. See the controversy about it in Il Soviet.”

Avanti! carried a letter from Lenin addressed to the German Communists on December 30 or 31, 1919 (depending on its local editions). In his letter Lenin reiterated the necessity of the struggle against all deviations from revolutionary Marxism, regardless of how they’re disguised. “The Scheidemanns, the Kautskys, the Frederick Adlers – whatever the difference between those gentlemen from the point of view of personal honesty – have shown themselves to be petty-bourgeois, traitors to the proletariat, allies of the bourgeoisie. They all subscribed to the 1912 Basel manifesto in the imminence of the imperialist war, they all spoke of “proletarian revolution” and they all present themselves to us today as petty-bourgeois democrats, as standard-bearers of the bourgeois republic, as democratic illusionists, as helpers of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie […] Through direct and frank criticism we shall soon come to wipe out all traitors to socialism in every country, by means of the Marxist-educated working masses, for there are some in every country.”

In the same letter Lenin reiterated the concept of the necessity of parliamentary participation, as well as of not leaving the yellow unions, however reactionary they were, but he admitted that “differences of opinion among communists […] are differences between representatives of the same movement which is growing in an incredible way […] On such a basis differences of opinion are not a danger. They are the crisis of growth and not the weakness of old age.” It also reiterated the absolute necessity of “uniting illegal and legal work, of giving a systematic and strong control of the legal activity by means of the illegal Party and its organizations.”

The second letter which the Abstentionist Fraction addressed to the Third International took its cue precisely from Lenin’s appeal.

“The purpose of this letter is to submit to you some remarks to Comrade Lenin’s letter to the German Communists, which the December 31, 1919 issue of Avanti! reported from the 20th December issue of Rote Fahne, in order to make it very clear to you what our political attitude is […] The Italian [Socialist] Party is not a Communist party and not even a revolutionary one; the same “maximalist electoralist” majority is, rather, on the ground of the German independents. At the congress [of Bologna, ed.] we were divided from it not only by the electoral tactics but also by the proposal to exclude the reformists led by Turati from the party.”

Regarding Lenin’s criticism of the German “leftists”, the Fraction clarified: “Programmatically, our point of view has nothing to do with anarchism and syndicalism. We are advocates of the strong and centralized Marxist political party of which Lenin speaks, indeed we assert this conception more tenaciously than anyone in the maximalist camp. We do not advocate the boycott of the trade unions but their conquest by the Communists, and our directives are those which we read in a report by Comrade Zinoviev to the Russian Communist Party Congress published in the January 1st issue of Avanti!.”

We reproduce in full the part of the letter devoted to the position of the Fraction on electoralism and parliamentarism:

“We are for the participation in elections of any representation of the working class in which only workers take part. On the other hand, we are openly opposed to the participation of communists in elections to parliaments, municipal or provincial councils or bourgeois constituencies, because we believe that revolutionary work cannot be done in such bodies, and we believe that electoral action and preparation hinder the formation of communist consciousness in the working masses and the preparation for proletarian dictatorship in antithesis to bourgeois democracy.

“Participating in such bodies and avoiding social-democratic and collaborationist deviations, is a solution that does not really exist in the present historical period […]

“Parliamentary intransigence was feasible, always, however, amidst continual shocks and difficulties, in the non-revolutionary period, when the conquest of power by the working class was not envisaged as possible; and the difficulties of parliamentary action are all the greater the more the regime and the composition of parliament itself have a traditional democratic character. It is by these criteria that we would judge comparisons with the participation of the Bolsheviks in the Duma elections after 1905.

“The tactic followed by the Russian comrades of participating in the elections to the Constituent Assembly and then forcibly dissolving this same assembly, even if it did not constitute an unfavorable condition for success, would be dangerous in countries where parliamentary representation, instead of being a recent formation, is an institution that’s been firmly established for a long time and rooted in the consciousness and habits of the proletariat itself […].

“We contrast electoral activity with the violent conquest of political power by the proletariat for the formation of the Soviet Republic [Republic of Workers’ Councils, translator’s note], and therefore our abstentionism does not descend from a denial of the necessity of a centralized revolutionary government.”

Reference is then made to the Italian Socialist Party: “The general elections of November 16, also carried out by the PSI on the platform of maximalism, have once again proven that electoral action excludes and makes one forget all other activities and especially all illegal activities. In Italy the problem is not of uniting legal action with illegal action, as Lenin advised the German comrades, but to start diminish “legal” activity in order to begin “illegal” ones, which are entirely lacking.”

The letter concluded with the affirmation that “if up to now we have remained in the PSI, disciplined to its tactics, in a short time […] our fraction will separate from the party that wants to keep in its bosom many anti-communists, to constitute the Italian Communist Party, whose first act will be to send you its adhesion to the Communist International.” (January 11, 1920)

The Communist Abstentionist Fraction participated in the Second Congress of the International where it had a role of the utmost importance. In the November 5, 1920 issue of Il Soviet we read: “The deliberations of the Moscow Congress fully agree with what our fraction has always maintained about the need to create a truly communist party, about the functions and the constitution of this party and its relations with the Third International. They also perfectly agree with what we have maintained on the question of workers’ councils, implicitly doing summary justice to the PSI’s deliberate decision, which we fought against, to build them from now on.”

It is true that there was no agreement on the question of parliamentarism, but this was, at the time, a purely tactical divergence and the Fraction, while reaffirming its position, did not hesitate to set aside abstentionism. In fact, the parliamentary action envisaged by the Third International had nothing to do with social-democratic and collaborationist parliamentarism.

“The thesis voted in Moscow reiterates as a premise the fundamental concept that parliamentarism is a bourgeois system of government, that it cannot constitute the form of the proletarian State, that it cannot be conquered from within but must be destroyed along with the other congenial and local organs to be replaced by the central and local workers’ councils, etc. This evaluation of parliamentarism corresponds precisely to what our fraction has constantly maintained in this respect, which has tenaciously insisted that it be accepted by the majority of the Party as well […]. Moscow’s thesis rightly points out that the fundamental method of struggle against the political power of the bourgeoisie is that of mass action which is transformed into armed struggle, as we have always maintained, and relegates parliamentary action to being subordinate to the aims of extra-parliamentary action, considering the parliamentary tribune as one of the points of support, that is, a legal position which the party, which directs mass action or armed struggle, must establish behind the back of the proletariat in struggle. This is fundamentally different and against what the PSI did, before and after Bologna, whose main focus is and always has been parliamentary action, which dominates and guides the entire political struggle.” (Il Soviet, November 5, 1920)

This demonstrates how, even on this issue, if the tactical evaluation differed, that of the principles coincided perfectly. Therefore, the theses on parliamentarism adopted at the Second International Congress did not represent a defeat for our Fraction, on the contrary, they confirmed what we had affirmed, because they established to what extent the parliamentary function could be used for the purposes of revolutionary action and reaffirmed that the struggle for the conquest of power is played out by parliamentary action.

Having clarified this aspect, it is worth highlighting the role played by the Italian Fraction in a much more important issue: the determination of the so-called “21 conditions” of admission.

A remarkable debate took place on this crucial question.

While almost all of the speakers argued about the peculiarities of their own countries, which would have them accepting “everything”, but with reservations, our delegate, on the contrary, spoke in the sense of demanding the utmost severity in the universal conditions of admission: adhesion would have to be total and unreserved, in the fields of both theory and action. The Abstentionist Fraction recognized, perhaps uniquely among the participants, the capital importance of the Second International Congress. Its spokesman affirmed: “It must defend and ensure the fundamental principles of the Third International. When, I think in April 1917, Comrade Lenin returned to Russia and outlined the main lines of the new program of the Communist Party, he also spoke of the reconstitution of the International. He said that this work had to be based on two essential foundations: on the one hand, it was necessary to eliminate the social-patriots, and on the other hand, it was necessary to eliminate the social-democrats, those socialists of the Second International who admitted the possibility of the emancipation of the proletariat without a class struggle that reached the level of armed action, without the necessity of realizing the dictatorship of the proletariat after the victory in the insurrectionist period.”

Our representative noted that the old distinction between “reformists” and “revolutionaries” was now outdated, because now everyone professed to be a “revolutionary”. After the war, it was easy to affirm that “in the future” there would be no more relapses into the error of national defense. The same thing was true of the adherence of the centrists to soviet power, to the dictatorship of the proletariat, etc., in the hope that the revolution would not happen, and without doing anything to bring it about. It would therefore have been a serious mistake to welcome them into the new International.

Our comrade reiterated the necessity of the utmost rigor in the application of the 21 Conditions by proposing what later became the 21st point: “Those Party members who fundamentally reject the Conditions and Theses laid down by the Communist International are to be expelled from the Party. The same will apply particularly to delegates to the Special Party Congress.”

However, despite the fact that the conditions of admission were more precise and thorough, our comrades were not under any illusions: “the matter at hand was that in principle the “reconstructionists” will be able to join the International under certain guarantees. It is our opinion that in certain countries, and especially in France, there is a danger of the entry of too right-wing elements.” (Il Soviet, October 3, 1920)