COMMUNISTS AND UNITARIANS Faced With Trade Unionism… And Sincerity

A few days before the Livorno Congress, Avanti! published an article by Arturo Vella defending the unitary thesis. Vella sought to highlight the senseless accusation levelled at Italian communists by various parties, without a single serious argument of principle or fact: the accusation of being tainted by syndicalist and anarchist tendencies.

In his article, Vella attempted to take, in the name and for the benefit of the current for unity, the position of appropriate criticism and reaction to the syndicalist errors made in recent years by the left wing of the Socialist Party, which was inspired by sound Marxist principles.

Without being able to say anything that demonstrated any detachment on the part of us communists from those critical anti-syndicalist positions, Vella recalled the terms of the attitude taken by the intransigent revolutionaries of the party and the youth movement in the face of the debate a few years ago between syndicalists and reformists. He recalled how we had then allowed the trade unionist minority to leave the party, considering its methods of struggle against those reformist deviations, which we nevertheless found implacable adversaries, to be wrong, and he recalled our positions at the time on the trade union issue, inspired by the same Marxist criteria on which the Communist International’s current trade union tactics are based. Underlying these references to the history of the Socialist Party was, as always, the insinuation and even the hope that the Communist minority leaving the party would meet the same fate as the trade unionists of the past.

Without reiterating the fundamental reasons that demonstrate how the logical continuity of the attitude of the intransigent Marxists is reflected in the programmatic line followed by our party today, and therefore that those who have deviated and traded away all their doctrinal and tactical preparation are precisely the Vellas, without even pausing to note that trade union attitude no longer distinguishes the intransigent and revolutionary types like Vella from the reformists of the extreme right – as the whole struggle taking place in the Confederation clearly demonstrates – it will be interesting to consider what attitude has been taken towards the trade union movement, on the one hand by our party, and on the other by the unitary maximalists and, incidentally, by Vella himself.

In the aftermath of the split, we formed the cadres of our party without including anyone other than those who had been members of the left wing of the old party. No syndicalist group was admitted to the communist sections. In dealing with the syndicalist and anarchist proletarians, we applied the rule followed by the Communist International, which is that we can and must win them over individually to the communist militia by combating their prejudices against the function of the class party and the necessity of proletarian political power in the revolution. If, within the Communist International, there is a party immune from any syndicalist heterodoxy, that party is ours, especially when one considers the position taken by the most extreme current among those that contributed to its formation: the abstentionist faction, which in its anti-syndicalism and anti-anarchism was certainly not too lukewarm, perhaps even too extreme.

Faced with the trade union, we certainly adopted the attitude of working with all our might to persuade it to join the Confederation of Labor. Some of its militants, who were convinced of the fundamental communist theses, took steps to join our sections. We certainly did nothing to drive them away from the party, but we set them clear and fair conditions. To some of them, such as Meledandri from Bari, whom we will discuss now when we move on to Vella’s consistency in his daily politics and his commendable doctrinal orientations, we told them directly that they had to unconditionally accept the programmatic principles and organizational discipline of the Communist Party, commit to supporting its proposals within the Trade Union, and accept any decision the party might take in the event of a rejection by the majority of that organization on the issue of trade union unification.

The elections came, and the proposal to include trade unionists and anarchists on the party lists – provided, of course, that they were political victims – was not even given the honor of being discussed. Not even the trade unionists who had joined after Livorno could have been included on the lists, as they did not meet the requirements of the Statute regarding length of membership.

We say this for reasons that we will see shortly, even though logic would suggest that the trade unionists, by joining our ranks, would have reluctantly overcome their prejudice against elections and candidacies. Mr. Meledandri, for example, while agreeing with what we were saying, expressed the most serious reservations about electoral tactics and, above all, declared that he would never feel comfortable working alongside the unitary confederalists of Bari, the politicians known as Pastore, Di Vagno, Vella, and their comrades, in the same organization.

Subsequent events have shown that all the theoretical and tactical prejudices that the anti-unionist unitarians and the anti-reformist syndicalists had against each other at the time were of little consequence in the face of that prejudice, fundamental for us communists, which has alienated many of both groups from us: that of inflexible and severe discipline of thought and action. It was above all in the face of the electoral fever that all this came to light.

We do not intend to draw general conclusions from a single episode or a few episodes, but what happened in Bari, and similarly in other places, is so characteristic that it is worth talking about.

In the run-up to the elections – while the party excluded Meledandri and a few other former trade unionists from standing as candidates – the leaders of the Bari Trade Union Chamber, which until then had maintained very cordial relations with the communists in the common struggle against the unionists of the Confederation Chamber, proposed, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, the inclusion of Captain Giulietti on the communist list, citing as their most persuasive argument the offer that, under this condition, the Federation of Sea Workers would contribute three hundred thousand lire for the electoral campaign.

The fate of this proposal is logical and well known: it is simply inconceivable that anyone could have been so foolish or brazen as to present it to the Communist Party.

Faced with the indignant rejection of our party, some trade unionists from the Trade Union Chamber voted for a deliberate abstention, as a consequence of the complete break between the Communist Party and themselves. However, this deliberate abstention did not last long. A few days later, while the Communists, totally isolated and attacked on all fronts, engaged in a difficult but noble struggle, following the express orders of the Executive, the most moving agreement was established between the two Chambers of Labor, between the Social Democrats and the extremist trade unionists, and the names of the speakers Vella and Meledandri appeared side by side on the same election posters!

The shipwreck of theoretical and tactical prejudices could not have been more ignoble, determined as it was by the gentle electoral winds.

Vella found nothing strange in the fact that the Socialist Party’s list included the trade unionist Di Vittorio, who was not a member of the Party, nor did he find anything strange in the fact that the trade unionists with whom he accused us of sympathizing without any reasonable grounds spoke at the party’s rallies. His theoretical Marxist prejudices faded when it came to ensuring his re-election as a deputy from the threatening game of preferences played by his dear comrades on the list.

The trade unionists simultaneously abandoned their aversion to approaching the reformist leaders and, worse still, the Confederation Chamber, and their aversion to participating in electoral action, which made it so difficult for them to accept the communist tactic in which electoralism becomes a means of revolutionary propaganda above all base personal aspirations. Joining trade union bodies led by reformists is nothing more than a tactical resource to better defeat them. Meanwhile, in Bari, the shared electoral enthusiasm of trade unionists and social democrats has taken on the most vulgar and degenerate forms, and contact between trade union leaders on both sides has resulted in an open political and electoral alliance.

This episode, although not isolated in its various phases, since the proposal of three hundred thousand lire was also aired with equal success in the districts of Genoa and Cagliari, and since there were also trade unionists elsewhere who were excluded from our lists and included in the socialist ones, certainly does not justify accusing the entire Italian trade union movement of political unworthiness and inconsistency, as there are many members who are tenaciously loyal to their own directives and fiercely opposed to the Social Democrats.

However, it shows how idiotic and ridiculous the insinuation was that we would have broken away from the Socialist Party to form a party that would have softened the precise limits of inflexible Marxist discipline, both in terms of the cornerstones of the doctrine and in the militancy of the organization. Those who portrayed our movement as destined to welcome irregulars, rebels, political adventurers, those who are revolutionaries in their excessive words and actions and perhaps in their feelings, but who do not understand it as a school and a militia of rigorous continuity, homogeneity, critical and tactical balance, were inspired only by base malice.

It is interesting to catch one of those who, like Vella, took advantage of previous noble battles that were essentially ours to flaunt the prediction that we would be overturned off the road, perhaps winning a medal by sacrificing everything that can honestly be called intransigence and serious devotion to a program and a party, and show it in the flagrant consummation of all those faults that he arbitrarily attributed to the future work of our party. And may these episodes be a warning to everyone, without distinction, that the Communist Party has truly, intimately, and solidly inherited them, strengthening them in a highly effective selection process that has made it possible to discard all the stigmas of deviation, here criteria of intransigence that are truly, also and above all because they are commonly betrayed by those seeking personal success, an indelible result drawn from the long experience of the proletariat in Italy.

The Communist Party has as its motto to sacrifice to this superior dignity and steadfastness of its rule of organization—which doctrine and history show to be closely linked to the effectiveness of preparation for struggle and proletarian dictatorship—we will not even mention the personal fortunes of its militants, who must give everything to it and ask nothing of it; but even the possible affirmations of apparent and fallacious popularity, as the battle positions are no clearer and more transparent than crystal.