1926: A Crucial Year in the History of the International Communist Movement

Exactly a century has passed since that fateful 1926, which marked the worldwide defeat of the revolutionary communist movement and left the proletariat a victim, delivered entirely into the hands of its betrayers. The defeat was so total and so powerful that after a hundred years the international proletariat still gives no appreciable sign of recovery or of a resumption of the class struggle on a large scale, but only sporadic flare-ups.

Besides a political guide present across the class and the various countries, there are no true class unions to organize and lead intransigent action in defense and in attack. Class unions will have to rise again, and without doubt they will; but today they do not exist. Let us always remember the two alternatives put forward by the Communist Left.

If the defense of the proletariat’s material and economic interests can be guaranteed by truly class-based unions, it is nevertheless necessary that within them the influence of the communist party be strong, so that the proletariat can make the necessary leap in quality from the defense of bread and work to the struggle for the conquest of power.

The guidance of a strong party, rooted in vast layers of workers, through whose action the union becomes a “transmission belt” between the party and the proletarian masses, is therefore an indispensable factor.

And not even such a party exists today.

For the resumption of the class struggle it would have been preferable had the defeat been caused by direct clash with the reactionary armies of the bourgeois States. Instead this defeat, all the more bitter, which struck so hard and for so long, was the effect of the degeneration, from within, of the highest organization of revolutionary communism: the Moscow International, Lenin’s own.

1926 moreover represents a crucial aspect of the victorious battle of the Communist Left alone against every kind of degeneration and contamination of revolutionary Marxist doctrine. We can say with pride that it was a true victory: the battle fought in 1926 against the degeneration of the party and the International, and the documents and programmatic theses of that time, constitute a unitary body of doctrine, program, tactic and tradition, on the basis of which the communist party of the international revolution will necessarily have to come back to life.

At the present moment the task of our small organization is to keep intact the continuity of that red thread which will link the past experience of the Communist Left to what must be the future and powerful international communist party. No easy task, if we consider how many present-day political groupings, though contaminated by petty-bourgeois ideologies, disguise themselves as heirs of the Left.

But let us return to 1926, a crucial year in the history of the international communist movement, when the degeneration of the revolutionary communist movement had by now infected the highest leading organs.

As for Italy, the question a militant might naively ask is: “How was it possible that the Party born at Livorno, founded on such cornerstones, degenerated so?” The answer is that it was not a national problem but an international one. The parties of the Third International were born spurious, for historical reasons, from splits more or less to the left of the old social-democratic parties, from unions of non-homogeneous groups, and not even the Communist Party of Italy could wholly escape this congenital defect. The degenerative process depended in large part on the weaknesses that had historically marked the formation of the new international organization, which, when the revolutionary ebb arrived, weighed on its capacity to react to the unfavorable situation.

The tactical errors of the International had led to a long series of defeats, beginning with that of the revolution in Germany, paid for with the impossibility of winning a second great country to the revolution after the first, a country of decisive importance for the development of world victory.

Naturally the degenerative phases of the Third International could not fail to be reflected within the Communist Party of Italy as well.

As we wrote over half a century ago: “the history of the Third International is, unfortunately, also the history of its gradual departure from its main road; it is therefore also the history of how a party is killed. […] 1926 is the year of ‘socialism in one country’ with all its necessary trappings (bolshevization, the crushing of the Russian Left Opposition under the steamroller of discipline-for-discipline’s-sake). […] It is the true year of the death of the Comintern: the rest will be no more than a macabre dance around its coffin.”

The degeneration matured on different levels which, intertwining and developing together, led first to the corruption and then to the destruction of the true unity of the international communist movement, replacing it, in 1926/27, with a purely formal and militaristic unity, fit only to endorse and mask the freedom of the leading center to trample to the last shred the program, tradition and doctrine.

“We had insistently demanded that the formation of the communist parties (better still, of the International as a single world communist party) be based on a theoretical and programmatic platform defined once and for all, to be taken or left. […] By virtue of this theoretical and programmatic barrier there were to be irrevocably excluded not only the doctrines of the ruling class […] but also the schools enjoying a certain following in the working class: from social-democratic, pacifist and gradualist reformism, to syndicalism, which devalues the political action of the working class and the necessity of the party as the supreme revolutionary organ; from anarchism, which repudiates on principle the historical necessity of the State and of the proletarian dictatorship as means for transforming the social order and abolishing the division into classes, down to the spurious and equivocal ‘centrism,’ synthesis and condensate of analogous deviations sheltered behind a pseudo-revolutionary phraseology.”

The barrier was never erected and, little by little, there regained ground within the International French-style syndicalism, German-style workerism, and a whole internal practice typical of parliamentarism. In this atmosphere there could not fail to appear that mixture of Sorelianism and Crocean idealism typical of the “Ordine Nuovo.”

When the Third Congress of the PCd’I was held at Lyons, the 14th Congress of the Russian communist party had just ended in Moscow, where nearly the whole old guard had risen up, by now in vain, against the prevailing and suffocating internal climate. Another month would pass, and then came that 6th Enlarged Executive where the Italian Left fought its last battle. A last battle which, in spite of all the official interpretations, did not end in defeat but on the contrary represented the victory of revolutionary communism, incarnated by this one and only current. Unfortunately, a similar balance on the historical scale could not be drawn even by the Russian Opposition, for the very fact that the degeneration had followed a course begun long before 1926, in which the Opposition had had its share of co-responsibility. Not so the Italian Left, which alone, for many years, had warned against what would be the inevitable consequences of the tactical eclecticism of the Comintern, and which therefore had the possibility and capacity to draw the overall balance of the preceding six years.

The Party will have to resume a thorough study of the degeneration of the International starting from the internal crisis that broke out in the Russian party. For now, without wishing to enter into the heart of the problem, which would lead us away from the purpose we have set ourselves, we nevertheless wish to sketch the situation lived by the comrades inside the Russian communist party, where the Stalinist counterrevolution was by then registering its definitive victory over what remained of the revolutionary and internationalist tradition.

Through falsification of documents, invention of plots and other similar expedients, the new chiefs of the Russian party managed to get the better of the true commanders of the revolutionary 1917. The roads of deportation opened, before Trotsky, to many other comrades, while the Russian party and the International, by now Stalinized, imposed as the condition for remaining in the International the acceptance of the new opportunist theory of “Socialism in one country.”

It is well known that during the 14th Congress many delegates preferred to keep silent so as not to run the risk of being deported to Murmansk or Turkestan. “These ‘transfers,'” declared Krupskaya, “create in the party the impossibility of speaking sincerely and openly. If we create conditions such that a party member can be ‘transferred’ elsewhere for having openly expressed his opinion, all the good intentions about internal democracy will remain on paper.”

Besides this we also wish to cite an excerpt from another intervention by Krupskaya, at the 14th Russian congress, in which she protests against the abuse of appealing to the authority of so-called “Leninism” and of majorities: “I think it is out of place to cry that this or that is true Leninism. I have recently reread the first chapters of ‘State and Revolution.’ […] He wrote: ‘There have been cases in history in which the teachings of great revolutionaries were distorted after their death. Harmless icons were made of them, and, while honoring their name, the revolutionary edge of their teaching was blunted.’ I think this bitter quotation obliges us not to hide this or that conception of ours behind the label of Leninism, and makes it necessary to examine all questions in their essence. […] For us Marxists, truth is what corresponds to reality. Vladimir Ilyich was in the habit of saying: ‘Marx’s teaching is invincible because it is true.’ […] The work of our congress must be to seek and find the right line. […] Bukharin said with great emphasis that whatever the congress decides will be right. Every Bolshevik considers the decisions of the congress unappealable, but […] one must not console oneself by thinking that the majority is always right. In the history of our party there have been congresses in which the majority was wrong.”

The congress ended with the adoption of the reports of Stalin and Molotov by 559 votes to 65.

In February-March 1926, inside an International not yet counterrevolutionary but by now in full decay, the Italian Left fights alone in Moscow and remains “defeated.” In November-December, at the 7th enlarged session of the Comintern Executive, triumphant Stalinism liquidates the Bolshevik Opposition.

1926 was “the year of the supreme test, since upon the outcome of the titanic struggle of the Chinese workers and peasants and of the British proletarians there depended, in the last instance, the destiny of Soviet Russia and of the International. The Russian Opposition will feel in the course of that year the terrible urgency of the knots come to the comb of history and, overcoming old quarrels, Trotsky and Zinoviev (to name only two) will desperately form a bloc against the pressing forces of counterrevolution. […] The Chinese revolution will emerge beaten, together with the Russian Opposition, and, the grandiose British strike defeated, the entire international communist movement will emerge destroyed.” The International brought to completion that degeneration long foreseen and denounced by the Left.

But of this we shall treat at length in the continuation of this work; this part will instead be devoted to how the 3rd Congress of the Communist Party of Italy was arrived at, and to the theses presented by the Communist Left, our current.

First of all we wish to premise that those theses, although presented to the congress of a “national” communist party, in reality concerned the whole problem of the tactics of the international communist movement, of which the “Italian question” was nothing but a secondary reflection, soluble only within the general one.

Those theses represented a true watershed in the history of international communism: they were a point of arrival, seen against the background of the six lived years of the Third International. For us, however, they have represented much more: the point of departure of our independent existence, as a current first and as a party afterwards, and of the perspectives of the revolutionary movement to come.

If we were to represent the evolution of the international communist movement from the standpoint of pure material events, we would have to admit, in agreement with official historiography, the defeat without appeal of the Left, crushed under the weight of enormously unfavorable relations of force. We, on the contrary, proudly claim for the Left a victory at the international and historical level, as well as the theoretical one, because it was the only current able to maintain the uninterrupted and uncorrupted continuity of the doctrine, tactic and tradition of revolutionary communism. Only thanks to the Left has the red thread joining Marx, Lenin, Livorno 1921 suffered no break. And when the revival of the world revolutionary movement finally comes, this movement, if it is at last to bring its victory to completion, can only base itself on the clear-cut positions of the Left.

Not even the Russian Opposition, fallen heroically in defense of proletarian internationalism, can, because of its participation in that tactical eclecticism on which the degeneration rested, represent a basis for the restart of the party of the future triumphant revolution.

What at the 5th Congress of the International had represented an abrupt “turn to the left” had not in the least excited our current. We have never regarded “turns,” with their oscillating course from right to left and vice versa, as positive.

In what, in fact, the “turn to the left” consisted can be well understood from the fact that the 5th international congress, in place of the one elected by the Congress of Rome, had appointed a Centre composed of representatives of the old Ordinovist group.

After the disasters of the German 1923, the International, instead of drawing a sober balance of its tactics, had found it much easier to make fall the heads of the leaders accused of right-wing deviationism.

From that moment on, the danger of deviation into opportunism became ever more evident and, as we have written on other occasions, proofs of this now rampant orientation were not lacking:

• The rapprochement with social-democracy, with the project of dissolving the Red Trade Union International in view of a fusion with the Amsterdam international.

• The theorization of the “left government” as an intermediate stage favorable to revolutionary development.

• The return to equivocal formulas of united front extended even to bourgeois left parties. • The attempt at noyautage (entryism) within left factions of the social-democratic parties.

• The tendency to attenuate every differentiation between the communist parties and the peasant or national-democratic parties, both in the colonial and semi-colonial areas and in the heart of fully capitalist Europe.

• The system of resolving the internal problems of the parties by reshuffling their respective leaderships, a system typical of bourgeois democracy.

• The refusal to bring the discussion of the Russian question into the International.

• The system of humiliation and corruption by which confessions and abjurations were demanded of the “reprobates.”

The 5th Congress of the Comintern had established that the Communist Party of Italy should convene its next congress within the following six months, and already gave a glimpse of what the “freedom” granted to the Left to take part in the pre-congress discussion and to set out its positions in party assemblies would be: “In the discussion on the press organs, the opinions expressed by the Left must always be accompanied by adequate replies from the leadership. The party must strengthen and centralize its organizational structure by adopting various measures.”

And the “various measures” could be none other than those adopted by the communist party of Russia, certainly within the limits allowed by the Italian situation, but with the same unscrupulousness, dishonesty and, as far as possible, use of force. After 1924 the Ordinovist group, installed at the head of the party, began a most violent campaign against the Left. In preparation for its 3rd Congress, the voting procedures imposed were so fraudulent that the Left, which a year earlier at the Como conference had obtained the adherence of nearly all the delegates, was confined to a derisory minority.

In the Party born at Livorno in 1921, now on the way to complete Stalinization, a veritable internal repression against exponents of the Left had begun as early as 1925: expulsions, suspensions, denigratory press campaigns, and openly provocative actions became ordinary practice.

The 3rd Congress of the Italian party was to bring about the defeat of the Left; such were the directives from Moscow, and therefore every means would be good for the purpose. Besides, how could the party “learn to maneuver skillfully among all obstacles” if it did not rid itself of the Left?

To uproot from the base of the party the influence exercised by the Left was, for the International and the centrist leadership, a priority task. They could not have afforded a consultation of the party conducted on an honest confrontation of the respective programmatic positions; too recent was the rebuff suffered at the illegal Conference of Como. Neither the alliance with the heterogeneous elements of the right, nor the entry, with full honors, of the “terzini” repudiated by the PSI, nor the new levy of members of 1924, none of these expedients had modified the internal balance all that much.

With the attempt to reabsorb the PSI into the ranks of the Comintern having failed, the conquest of the “terzini” faction was regarded as proof of the correct tactic of the International: “The fusion with the third-internationalist faction must be carried out immediately and in the most clamorous form. It must then be exploited to the maximum in order to provoke a movement of unification towards the communist party, to show the proletariat that it will be the PCd’I that realizes proletarian unity, and to weaken the influence of the socialist party among the masses of the workers.” (who says so?)

The “terzini,” welcomed with every honor into the PCd’I in 1924, after being expelled from the socialist party, had entered as an organized faction, and as such they behaved. What was the result of this great conquest is confessed to us by an exponent of the new party himself, who we can be sure never had great sympathy for the Left: Gramsci, compelled to admit that the “terzini” co-opted into the party were nothing but a group of opportunists.

“The general situation was aggravated last year by the entry into our ranks of the third-internationalist faction […] which for two and a half years had lived in autonomous form inside the maximalist party, creating internal bonds among its adherents which were bound to persist even after the fusion. […] It was wholly absorbed by the internal struggle […] which was predominantly personal and sectarian in character and only episodically dealt with fundamental questions, whether political or organizational.”

Indeed, in a report to the International, in November 1924, Togliatti wrote: “The position of the various tendencies in the party is as follows: the right has no influence, it is limited to the individual action of a few comrades. […] the two groups in which the party gathers are the centre and the Left. It is not possible to say at this moment what the balance of forces is. In the recent federal congresses the party has in general approved the resolutions of the 5th Congress and the policy followed in Italy. But this approval cannot be considered a definitive shift, because the great mass has not yet become aware of the real divergences between those directives and the attitude taken by the Bordiga group at the 5th Congress. For this reason the solidarity still possible of a fraction of the party with comrade Bordiga has only a relative importance, because it represents only to a small extent an effective adhesion to his thought and his political attitude, but is rather the effect of the personal influence that Bordiga exercises on the party, an influence which is fatally destined to diminish […].”

If we purge these contradictory and embarrassed statements of their “official optimism” we can note:

1. That the centrists have to admit the persistence of a strong influence of the Left on the party, and since they cannot confess to themselves and to the Moscow leaders that they have failed to “conquer the masses” of the party, they are forced to remain vague, asserting that they “cannot say at this moment what the balance of forces is.”

2. That even in the federal congresses they had taken good care not to clarify the real points of contrast between the Left and the official policy of the Comintern.

3. That their battle against the Left would take on the character of personal attack and denigration.

But Togliatti himself, on the following 15 February, was forced to confess that in the traditional strongholds of the party the Left kept the majority: in particular at Turin (home of the Ordine Nuovo), Alessandria, Novara, Biella, Milan, Pavia, Como, Bergamo, Trento, Modena, Rome, Naples, Ancona, Teramo, Macerata, Aquila, Foggia, Taranto, Cosenza, Cremona.

It would have been very difficult to wrest from the base of the party the predominant influence of the Left through a correct and honest confrontation of program and tactics. It was a terrain on which centrism knew well it would be defeated, but the solution adopted was that of the “political struggle” to be conducted inside the party.

As for the method of “political struggle inside the party,” the not-so-young comrades will not be able to forget its reappearance as a theorized doctrine over half a century ago and, recently, its renewed practice.

The warhorse of centrism in its slanderous struggle against the Left was the question of “discipline.”

“Discipline” is the hypocritical resource to which, every time, a degenerate Party Centre appeals to muzzle all those who recall it to its duties.

A much-trumpeted example of indiscipline, committed by the comrades of the Left, was supposed to be, for the centrists, the refusal to sit on the C.C. and the C.E. of the party. Even had this been true, it would have been an act of authentic and full discipline toward the party leadership, as the Left had made quite clear, holding it necessary that the central organs of the party have as homogeneous a composition as possible and not a hodgepodge of currents which, creating internal contrasts and antagonisms, would in fact compromise their functioning. Moreover these were also the directives of the International: “The leadership of the party shall be made up of comrades determined to apply the tactic of the International and to undertake the struggle, on the ideological as on the organizational plane, against the anti-Marxist revisionism of the extreme right as against that of the extreme left, in order to direct the mass of the party’s members onto the road of the Communist International.”

We wrote: “even had this been true,” and in fact it was not true “that the 5th Congress invited comrades of the Left to take part in the Centre of the party. With its conclusions against us […] the 5th Congress de facto ratified our removal decided at the Enlarged Executive of June 1923, against which, for that matter, we never raised any objection in point of procedure, even though it remains the only case of its kind in the history of the International. Moreover the 5th Congress unanimously voted the conclusions of the Italian Commission, which […] resolved to constitute the party Centre without us.”

It is plain, then, how the invitation to take part in the central organs of the party was entirely instrumental, since the International itself ordered the newly appointed Leadership to fight the Left on every plane.

In the course of the pre-congress “debate” the Left was prevented from carrying out any activity whatsoever. It began with the suppression of the review Prometeo.

Sections in which the Left is dominant are dissolved, comrades of the Left are removed from leading posts, their articles and documents censored or not published; if published, they are flanked by ample editorial prefaces, sometimes longer than the articles themselves, in which, falsifying their content, an attempt was made to discredit them by presenting them as factionalists, taking special pleasure in attributing to the Left opinions and attitudes openly contrary to reality. Within the party a regime of suspicion and intimidation is established, of barracks-style and bureaucratic discipline. A climate of veritable ideological terrorism.

But shortly afterwards the Centre would be able to obtain its “proof” of the factional and disruptive work carried out by the Left: the formation of a “Committee of Understanding.”

On 1 June a group of comrades of the Left sent to the C.E. of the party a letter informing it of the constitution of a “Committee of Understanding.” The letter, after reaffirming the necessity of a debate as wide as possible and free of any form of prejudice, ended by putting forward the following requests:

“a) That the discussion be given a span of time commensurate with the state of unpreparedness of the party’s masses and the importance of the questions;

“b) That the provincial congresses be held only after an exhaustive discussion has taken place in the party press;

“c) That at the provincial congresses the recognized representatives of the various tendencies be given the right to speak in contradiction;

“d) That the delegates to the Party Congress be appointed by the respective federal congresses; should, however, such appointment be made by other systems, the provincial trustees of the various currents be given the right to choose the elements called to sit on any committees;

“e) That, finally, the right be recognized to appoint and regulate the speakers who will illustrate at the congress the thought of this or that current.

“It is evident that the work of congress preparation is such as to require activity and discipline from all.

“The undersigned comrades therefore bring to the attention of the Executive Committee the constitution of a ‘Committee of Understanding’ among elements of the Left.”

In an internal communication of the CdI, of 6 June, the comrades of the Left were notified that “the Executive has already taken disciplinary measures against all the comrades who signed the letter sent to the central organ of the party, a letter in which some comrades of the Left asked how, in their view, the pre-congress campaign should be conducted in order to arrive at a true clarification in the party.”

Indeed, the following day the party daily informed comrades and adversaries (fascists and police included) that “the C.E., unanimously, has judged that the comrades of the Committee of Understanding, comrades Damen, Repossi, Lanfranchi, Venegoni, Manfredi, Fortichiari, have made themselves guilty of an attack on the party which could be sanctioned by their expulsion, and has decided to refer them to the judgment of the next session of the Central Committee, suspending them in the meantime from all work or office.” On 4 June, by circular to the interregional secretaries, instructions were given to “strike down without further ado those who criminally […] weaken our ranks. The members of the C.E. have the absolute necessity to crush radically every attempt and every activity aimed at crumbling the solidity of the party, diminishing its strength, transforming it into a masked social-democratic party.”

The circular speaks of the “criminal responsibility of the constitutors of the faction,” of the “work undertaken by a group of enemies of the party,” of the necessity “to carry out a work of purification of our ranks.”

But, bless them, the centrists hoped that “the few comrades responsible for the scandal […] will be induced to recognize the criminal content of their fault and to repent […] under the banners of Leninism.”

The order to dissolve the CdI by the representative of the International in Italy bears the date of 3 July, but is published in l’Unità only on the 19th, together with the document of acceptance by the Left, which the Centre had had for about a week. This delay in publication allowed the Centre to continue in the paper its slanderous campaign of accusation against the repeated factionalism of the Left.

Thus appeared, on the 19th, the third page of the party daily.

Across the full page, over six columns, towered the headline in giant type: “The members of the Committee of Understanding against the International,” and below, over three columns: “Political degeneration and moral wretchedness.”

Over the document of the Committee of Understanding, again over three columns, was placed the following headline: “A document unworthy of communists.” This was the climate breathed in the “party founded by Gramsci and Togliatti” (as it was once said. And in this case the attribution of paternity was correct!).

Of the Left’s document we shall report only one significant passage: “Communists will judge our conduct. We care not to win their superficial adhesion or sympathy and to pile up votes for the congress, but to bring the debate and the consciousness of the party a little further beyond the superficial and petty attitudes on which people speculate when they want to rid themselves with little effort of the nuisance of being discussed and criticized. If it is wished to go on organizing demagogic deceit and industrializing confusion and bewilderment, let it be done, but let no one think to build anything stable: the harm to the party will remain, but the position of the groups and groupuscules, artificers of so politicking a method, will not be saved, a vulgar scenery destined to fall soon enough, revealing the dangers of opportunism and of the degeneration of the party.” Let the comrades reflect how timely these words are.

In its work of denigration centrism has always played on the fact that the mass of comrades refuses to believe that wholly false and groundless things are asserted from the centre of the party, and this genuine instinct plays into the hands, every time, of factionalism from above.

Moreover the C.E. of the Comintern, with a view to the 3rd Congress of the PCd’I, had already in April 1925 unleashed its attack against the Italian Left. At the 5th Enlarged Executive a “resolution on the Italian question” asserted “that the main obstacle to the bolshevization of the party is constituted by the Bordigist ideology and that therefore the greatest effort must be directed to eliminating this obstacle.”

In this resolution it will not be possible to find any indication of the tasks and tactics the party should carry out; it consisted entirely of an attack on the “ideology” of the Italian Left, declared a “by-product of the second international” and in contrast with “Leninism” on three fundamental points: abstentionism, the role of the party, tactics.

“The urgent task of the party,” the resolution said, “is to arrive, within its own ranks, at a complete ideological clarification and to combat all deviations, above all those of comrade Bordiga, which at the present moment are the most dangerous for the movement. The national congress will have to decide whether it approves the policy conducted by the Central Committee of the party since the 5th World Congress, in agreement with the International. At the same time it will have to express its choice between Bordigan tactics and Leninism. Only if it has understood the necessity of placing itself without reservations on the Leninist platform will the Communist Party of Italy be truly strong and truly able to fulfil its historic role as guide of the masses in the proletarian revolution.”

As for Leninist tactics the document specified: “Leninism represents a supple tactic, which continually adapts to the changing economic and political situation in the world, in order to mobilize all anti-capitalist forces and to seize the favorable moment for the intervention of the party, while the latter, consequently, is ready to modify rapidly its slogans and its attitude, in order to remain in contact with the masses and drag them along with it.”

In the intentions of the centrists the 3rd Congress “was to close a whole epoch in the life of the party,” and so it was.

Even the decision to hold the congress abroad was a move owed less to questions of security than to a political maneuver.

Paolo Spriano in his “History of the PCI” wrote: “The Executive decided some time ago to hold the congress abroad; Vienna is chosen first, but the person preparing the organization there […] falls gravely ill. Lyons is then decided upon.” Lyons was therefore a last-minute makeshift.

On this point it is well to highlight something always passed over in silence by official historiography, namely that, as Bruno Fortichiari recalled, “the Milan federation, whose organization was still efficient and some of whose leaders were members of Office 1 of the party, offered the centre to secure a suitable venue in Milan for a clandestine meeting, guaranteed and defended. The centre refused the offer without checking its seriousness. It had decided on Lyons also, or rather precisely, because it was easier to ‘filter’ the delegates who would have to go there clandestinely. To refuse a convocation in a metropolis of great movement in every quarter, with constant exchange of thousands of people in transit even from abroad, with besides dozens of premises suited to controllable meetings and hundreds of trained and trusty comrades […] was proof of sovereign ineptitude or of a caution suited to an evident end.”

The delegates had to reach France by crossing the frontier illegally by eleven different routes. The congressists had left Italian territory illegally, but just as illegally they entered French territory. The congress was held moving among various secret premises since the French police, alerted, were on the congressists’ trail. Thus illegal was the expatriation, clandestine the congress, illegal the return of the congressists to Italy. As can be seen, the percentage of risk was quite high (and some fell into the net of the French police), but it allowed the Centre to have total control and choice of the participants in the congress.

Giuseppe Berti himself, notoriously rabid toward the Left, of which he was a turncoat, was nevertheless forced to state: “Objectively […] it must be said that if the Como conference was prepared little, indeed not at all, and gave, therefore, the well-known results, the Lyons congress […] was, perhaps, prepared a little too much, in the sense that preliminarily the December conference […] saw to it that at Lyons the extreme left […] was represented in a manner not adequate to the forces it still counted in the party.”

That democracy represents an element of deceit through which the ruling class exercises its dictatorship is entirely natural for communists. That the democratic method may also be used by the party of the working class, in a phase of its development, is likewise natural and scandalizes no one. But that this method be used inside the party, by those who hold its leadership, to crush internal currents is truly shameful; yet, once “political struggle” is admitted, this too becomes a weapon which factionalism from above uses to keep a power it has acquired.

The official results of the congress awarded 90.8% of the votes to the centrist theses and 9.2% to the Left.

The maneuvers of the Centre grotesquely falsified the majority of the Left, always dominant in the party, also by exploiting the impossibility for many sections of getting their votes through. Now, the centrists’ idea was highly original: it was established that all membership cards for which no vote was recorded would be counted in favor of the theses of the centre. But this democratic mechanism reached such refinement that even Amadeo’s vote turned out to have been cast in favor of the theses of the Centre.

On the scope of the battle sustained by the Left at the 3rd Congress of the party we shall return in depth in a forthcoming article.