Chapter 4: The Great Proletarian Struggles and Their Repercussions on the Party

Impotence and Inefficiency of the PSI

On November 4, 1918 there was the armistice with Austria and the war was over. The working class in the West galvanized itself into action following the Russian proletariat. Italy, fresh from the conflict, is in the throes of deep economic crisis. The workers take action straightaway, but the PSI prevaricates once again and shows itself incapable of taking the lead when proletarian struggles take place.

On November 13, supporters of the war organized a campaign against certain local administrations with socialist leanings (Milan, Bologna). The working class replies with a demonstration and a manifesto signed by the mayor of Milan, the CGL (Confederazione generale del lavoro), and the leadership and parliamentary group of the PSI. The manifesto makes a list of general demands without calling for class struggle. Another manifesto calling for immediate reforms is issued by the CGL on November 30. This is echoed by yet another drawn up on November 7 but not published until December 7 and issuing from the leadership of the PSI, still associated with the CGL, the parliamentary group, and the league of cooperatives. Thus the PSI would blindly adhere to the positions of reformist economic organizations. Avanti! would publish a report, truncated by the government censor, on the meeting of the Directorate (December 7-11). One notes that despite all, there is still resolute opposition towards annexation by Italy of the Slav territories still belonging to the ex-empire of Austria, but the order of the day is limited to adopting a programme of immediate political actions initiated already by trade-union organizations.

In short, once the war was over, the PSI, though officially led by “revolutionaries,” didn’t take up clear positions and assert itself as guide of the proletarian class movement. Instead, it gave fresh evidence of its organizational weakness and, de facto, the betrayal by some of the leaders.

On March 22, 1919 the PSI adheres to the Third International which had been founded at the beginning of the month (we recall that there was no delegate representing the Italian proletarian movement). It was a time when the Italian proletariat would launch a formidable offensive lasting a good two years: the famous Biennio Rosso (Two Red Years) of 1919-1920. This offensive would quickly be characterized by a prodigious increase in union membership, rising from 200,000 in 1918 to 1,000,000 in 1919, reaching 2,000,000 in 1920. Of particular note was the large-scale participation of agricultural laborers in these struggles. The vigor and force of the attack is also to be explained by the fact that the Italian proletariat was uncorrupted by the politics of the Union Sacrée and had been firmly opposed to the war, much more so than its party. The Italian proletariat’s magnificent postwar revolt was characterized by the variety and sheer number of struggles which took place throughout Italy. And though the class struggles in Naples were but one episode amongst many, they differed by clearly formulating the existing relations between the workers union movement and the political socialist movement in post-war Italy.

The extreme opportunism of the socialist section in Naples before the war had caused, by way of reaction, the differentiation of a Neapolitan extreme-left which fought to bring the PSI back onto class positions, both before and after the war.

Il Socialista, the organ of the Neapolitan Socialist Federation, was substituted on December 22, 1918, by Il Soviet which would soon develop the theses of electoral abstentionism. The proletarian struggles in Naples, which commenced in May 1919, would last for almost two months and be characterized by a large-scale trade-union movement supported and led by the extreme left of Il Soviet. It was certainly no accident that the Il Soviet office was in the Camera del Lavoro, alongside the metalworkers’ federation. But many other union and craft organizations grouped around it as well. These fifty days of bitter struggle regain a glorious chapter and confirmation of everything the left was asserting on the necessity of the split from the party and the foundation of the Communist Party. From January 18 to May 2, 1919, a first great trial of strength took place between the metalworkers and industrialists. In May there was the big strike in which at least 40,000 metalworkers took part. Buozzi, secretary of the metalworkers’ union (FIOM), would have his attempts at conciliation rejected. Only on June 12 would he manage to sign an agreement.

But the PSI was just as incapable as the unions of making the most of the opportunity offered by this proletarian battle, or rather it didn’t wish to. In fact, the proletarian offensive revealed and accentuated the contradictions existing within these organizations. Remaining faithful to its Pact of Alliance with the CGL (which assured the unions independence from the party), the PSI swallowed whole the communiqués of the CGL and quietly published them, without comment, in Avanti!. Thus on June 17, 1919 a CGL communiqué was published which denounced the work of groups of “secessionists”. This was clearly a reference to the extreme left of the party, which, though very active inside the unions, hadn’t proposed to split them.

Faced with the growth of the fascist movement (in April 1919 there would be the first clashes between fascists and workers) an adherent of the so-called “intransigent” fraction proposed some vie nuove, new paths, namely: a parliamentary alliance with Nitti’s and Giolitti’s parties and even with the Catholics, that is with all those who had, in due course, made declarations against the war. The PSI reacted in a spirited manner to such a proposal, yet without making any concrete proposals. The extreme left, in contrast, would never cease to insist that the defeat of the proletarian movement in Italy wasn’t directly dependent on the strengthening of fascism. The main reason being instead the work of sabotage carried out by opportunism. The extreme left actively fought to reorientate the PSI and propound the theses of electoral abstentionism. In June, Il Soviet published an article entitled “Elections or Revolution”. Numerous sections and youth federations would adhere to the positions expressed in Il Soviet. The necessity of organizing a fraction on a national scale immediately made itself felt, and in July 1919 the extreme left of the PSI met at Bologna with a view to organizing the abstentionists into a national fraction. Its programme was published in Il Soviet on July 13. The programme contained a historical part and a political part. This programme would then be completed at the meeting of the Communist Abstentionist Fraction held in Florence in May 1920, with a part on tactics and a critique of the opposing schools. This text showed that the question of abstentionism didn’t represent the central characteristic of the Marxist programme of the Left. The group that had put forward this programme proposed to diffuse it within the Socialist Party in order that some sections and individual members might adhere to it, the intention being to create a communist fraction within the party.

The fraction got ready to present its programme to the party’s national congress as a replacement for the Genoa programme of 1892. On June 15, Il Soviet welcomed, with reservations, the appearance of the Turinese paper L’Ordine Nuovo. The two papers in fact stand for very different political and practical positions.

In the spring of 1919 the deepening of the economic crisis, with a vertiginous inflation of the prices of basic necessities compels the proletariat to re-enter the struggle. In the major cities violent agitations break out which take the name of lotta contro il caro viveri, struggle against the high cost of living. There are also committees of an inter-classist nature which are set up to defend consumers. Revolutionaries would denounce this absurd form of action, which would see the Confindustria (Italian equivalent to the British CBI) joining in the struggle against the high cost of living… because the bosses have an interest in seeing that the workers can eat at low cost! They would denounce the Labour Federation that echoed the appeals of the industrialists and which, substituting itself for the party, led the struggles of the masses.

In June the movement was radicalized by the strike movements. On June 16 the Dalmine metalworkers strike and occupy the factory, and Mussolini makes his famous speech. The scheming political hack declares himself in favor of the workers’ demands, approves the strike, and speaks in defense of a trade-union movement linked to the Fascist Party. Only an “expert” on the workers’ movement could help the bourgeoisie to organize their dictatorship – in order to conjure away the menace of the red dictatorship! In July the violence of the agitations against food prices reaches extreme levels with a great international strike planned for July 20 to halt the military operations against Russia and Hungary.

In 1970, a representative of our party had this to say on the subject of these proletarian struggles:

«The war having ended with the victory of Vittorio Veneto, glorified despite being neither large-scale nor producing notable successes, there was an intensification throughout the country of hardship and economic crisis […] The inevitable state of widespread discontent didn’t provoke the masses into a recovery of that collective historical consciousness that unfortunately the party had largely lost; the response, of course, was the reappearance of a veritable tidal wave of demands and agitations for immediate improvements, including of wages. The earth shook under the feet of the bourgeoisie, but it was still not enough to summon up the potential in the proletariat needed to take up arms to establish its dictatorship.

«Today we can give a more exact formulation than ‘the situation was ripe for the socialist revolution in Italy in 1919’; it is better put this way: the First World War over, the proletarian parties could have placed themselves at the head of a victorious offensive movement, which didn’t happen only because those parties betrayed their own ideological heritage and the appropriate vision of how historical struggles would bring the capitalist era to a close. It was therefore the right moment and the fateful juncture for the reconstruction of the proletarian and socialist movement, for restoring its true doctrinal foundations both programmatic and tactical. It was to this task that Lenin and the Communist International promptly turned their attention, as did the left wing of the Italian movement which showed – and can still show to today – that its work was entirely in harmony with the glorious historical line of the worldwide anti-capitalist revolution, which commenced with the 1848 Manifesto of Marx and Engels.»

The complexity of the setting in which the proletarian battles were fought and the perils resulting from the dubious directives of the various committees struggling against the cost of living meant another meeting of the party leadership was needed and it met on July 10. Out of the discussions no clear directives emerged and it was decided to summon a meeting of the National Council of the PSI at Bologna. The Left’s delegates took an active part in discussions on every topic. They affirmed that the international strike of solidarity with Russia and Hungary ought to be to the bitter end, and not just forty-eight hours long. The strike in Europe had only a very modest success, above all because of sabotage by the French Socialist Party and by the defection of the CGT: even in Italy there was the extremely serious defection of the railway union. On July 13 the Left put up a lively opposition (in the movement against the cost of living) to the reformist and counter-revolutionary Right and to the disorganized and pseudo-revolutionary positions of the Maximalists (centrists) that appealed to the demagogic formula of the “expropriating strike”.

Il Soviet on July 20 would declare: «The concept of expropriation simultaneous with insurrection and put into effect in a capricious way by individuals and groups, which is implicit in the phrase ‘expropriating strike’, is an anarchist concept devoid of revolutionary content.»

The Left had to, therefore, fight on two fronts, on the one hand opposing the clearly counter-revolutionary stance of the right-wing, which was rooted in the parliamentary socialist group and the CGL leadership, and on the other, opposing the lack of clarity of the PSI leadership and its majority which declared itself, in words, in solidarity with the Bolshevik revolution and for an attack against the bourgeois regime in Italy, but with chaotic methods and with a chaotic programme. The internal debates in the PSI were therefore focused essentially on the electoral question: “Revolutionary preparation or electoral preparation” was the headline in “Avanti!” on August 21, 1919. To this article, written by one of our comrades, the electoral Maximalists turned a deaf ear.

The Bologna Congress of the PSI, October 5‑8, 1919

In 1919 there existed at least four currents within the PSI:

1. The Right, headed by Turati, Treves, and Modigliani who placed themselves on purely legal terrain.
2. The Intransigent Communist Fraction, “communist electoralists”, or “Maximalists”, who had the leadership and Avanti! in their hands. This current was represented by Lazzari, Serrati, etc.; revolutionaries in words, but reformists in practice; they had led a non-active opposition against the war and above all against any opposition of a revolutionary character.
3. The Turinese Ordinovisti, with Gramsci, Tasca, Terracini, and Togliaitti, allied to maximalism. They were gradualists and educationalists. With their watchword of the conquest of the municipalities and the factories they avoid the central problem of the taking of power and the party. According to the Ordinovists, the party is a technical organ whose function is to coordinate the different socialist organizations.
4. Finally, the fourth tendency is the Communist Left which consisted of the embryonic nucleus of the future Communist Party of Italy. We have already traced the origins of this current in an earlier chapter. From immediately after the meeting in Rome on July 6, the current set itself the aim of making a defense of the revolutionary Marxist programme, diffusing it by means of “Il Soviet” and by articles sent to “Avanti!”.

Eighty-three sections adhered to “Il Soviet”, with these more concentrated in northern and central Italy than in the southern part of the country. The Left took the name Frazione Comunista Astensionista (Communist Abstentionist Fraction) to distinguish itself from the electoral “Maximalist” communists. At the regional congress in Naples on September 14, 1919, the abstentionists are victorious. For the communist abstentionists, the necessity of a split has far greater importance than the tactic of abstentionism.

At the Sixteenth Congress of the PSI (1,418 sections representing 66,708 members are present) three motions are presented: one by the “Communist Electoralist Fraction”, one by the “Communist Abstentionist Fraction”, and there is the “Unitarian Maximalist Motion”.

The electoralists would recognize that the party’s programme (still as set down at Genoa in 1892) had been by-passed by events on the international scene, above all by the Russian Revolution, and that the proletariat, to win power and consolidate its revolutionary victories, must have recourse to the use of violence: but it reiterates the necessity of utilizing elections as a useful form of propaganda for Marxist principles; they decide, after all, for the adherence of the PSI to the Third International.

The motion of the abstentionists is marked by the assertion of the inappropriateness of having as members of the party those who proclaim the possibility of proletarian emancipation within the ambit of a bourgeois democratic regime, and who repudiate the method of armed struggle against the bourgeoisie to achieve the proletarian dictatorship. The abstentionists would call on the PSI to take the name of Communist Party and become an integral part of the Third International, accepting its programme and pledging itself to observe its discipline. The party should refrain from electoral competition and intervene in the hustings only in order to make propaganda on the reasons for taking such a stance. The entire forces of the party should be pledged to spreading, inside the working class, the historical consciousness of the necessary and complete realization of the communist programme, building up the proletarian organizations, and adopting practical means of action and struggle in order to bring about the realization of the cardinal programmatic points.

The unitarian motion rejected any break with the reformists promulgating for all members the right of citizenship in the party and their complete liberty of thought.» The modification to the old Genoa programme was solely platonic because no other programme was put forward.

«The first motion won the majority with 48,000 votes, the abstentionists received 3,400, and the unitarians 15,000.

«In the frequently recalled testimony of 1970, our comrade who participated in these events would write:

«At the Sixteenth Congress […] the Communist Abstentionist Fraction […] didn’t differ from the other currents only in its proposal not to participate in the imminent political general elections and in parliament, but also because they alone had supported the theses of the constitutive congress of the Third International held in March 1919, in which was distilled the great historical experience of the October 1917 revolution in Russia. These theses placed to the fore the conquest of power not through bourgeois democratic forms but through the advent of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and its Marxist class party. The prospect of a big electoral campaign – and the real possibility of success for the one party which had truly opposed the bloody and ruinous war of 1915 – was rejected because it would diffuse the tension in the Italian masses which had arisen from the immense and bloody sacrifice on the battlefields, and out of the grave economic crisis which characterized the post-war period. Such an outcome would openly contradict any possibility and hope of channeling that tension, that uneasiness, that widespread discontent, into the one direction history had shown could lead, not only in Italy but throughout Europe, to the socialist and revolutionary solution.

«These fundamental positions, on which the entire abstentionist fraction had stood firm […] obviously could not be presented and sustained before the other three currents at the congress. The latter instead were satisfied with anticipating a broad electoral success which maybe would allow the party, by use of the parliamentary maneuver, to usher in measures which might in part alleviate the anxiety of the masses and correspond to their hopes and expectations. Such an outcome would mean definitively destroying the favorable aspects of the situation as it existed at the time, and barring the way to the one path which, once taken, would mean the entire movement of the exploited classes bringing its pressure to bear; it would mean clipping the wings of the revival of true revolutionary consciousness of the working class and its party.

«The reformist Right would in fact openly condemn the vital communist theses. The so-called Maximalist current, whilst it didn’t reject these theses outright, didn’t see how these principles, which formed a precise historical programme, must be binding not only on the party as a whole, but also on each of its parts, and on each of its individual militants and members, who in the event of obstinate opposition would have to be excluded from the ranks of the party. Only by such means could one arrive at the reconstruction of a new international movement which wasn’t hopelessly ensnared by the danger of a repeat of the horrendous catastrophe of August 1914, at which could be cured of the infection of social-democratic and minimalist opportunism. From the time of the congress of Bologna, therefore, the Abstentionist Fraction put forward the demand that the unity of the Socialist Party be broken. The fact that implicit in this unity was a considerable membership and anticipated future electors, would deceive the proponents of the electoral tactic into making a grave error: that there could be a march towards proletarian socialism whilst repudiating the employment of violence and armed force, and the great historic measure of the dictatorship, the key to which consists in depriving of any electoral or democratic right (and even of organization and propaganda) all strata of the population not consisting of authentic workers […]

«The central thesis of our fraction wasn’t anti-electoralism but was rather splitting the party, to leave on the one hand genuine revolutionary communists, and on the other, those who supported the “revisionism” of the principles of Marx regarding the inevitable catastrophic explosion of the conflict and the struggle between the opposing social classes, already put forward by the German Bernstein before the war. Putting our theses to the test at the conference, we proposed to the leaders of the Maximalist electoralist fraction, counted amongst whom were Serrati, Lazzari, and Gramsci, a specific proposal aiming to substitute one single text which would stipulate anti-revisionist far more plainly than the one they had prepared: in it we agreed there would be no talk of boycotting the elections if they would accept our theses on the split in the party. Our proposal was totally rejected by the Maximalists. Regarding this proposal, it is worth recalling that Lenin, in writing his text against extremism as an infantile disorder of communism, stated he had received and read some numbers of Il Soviet and appreciated that our movement was the only one in, in Italy, to have understood the necessity of separating communists from social democrats, through splitting the Socialist Party.»