– The attitude of the P.S.I. Left

The Communist Left did not lend itself in the least to the traditional prejudices of Latin anarcho-syndicalism, while it was perfectly vaccinated against the “infantile disorders” that afflicted Anglo-Saxon communism in 1920. Such maturity was not the privilege of a few leaders, but descended from the very characteristics of pre-1914 Italian socialism, which had long since broken with anarcho-syndicalism (Genoa Congress, 1892) and, thereafter, had never left it the monopoly of the struggle against the reformists (expulsion of the social-imperialists on the occasion of the war in Libya in 1912). These and other circumstances made the 1913 election campaign a vigorous manifestation of revolutionary propaganda. As the article “Against Abstentionism” shows, the representatives of the Left then not only defended participation in the elections, but denounced in the anarchist prescription of abstention a form of apoliticism and neutralism whose only conclusion could be the worst bloc of class collaboration.

The three articles of 1919 echo the elections of the immediate postwar period that in all countries had such a baleful influence on the struggle and organization of the revolutionary proletariat and, in Italy in particular, delayed the process of class party selection. Since then, the anti-parliamentarism of the Communist Left has been based on a dual analysis: that of the situation, on the one hand, and that of the strategy of the class party in the phase of imperialist wars and proletarian revolutions, on the other. On the first point, Lenin’s assessment, formulated in the “Letter to the Workers of Europe and America” (Jan. 21, 1919), and that of the Left, are strictly identical: to call the proletariat to the polls in 1919 is to stab the Soviet republics of Bavaria, Hungary and Russia in the back; it is to admit that the struggle must necessarily remain “confined within the limits of the bourgeois order.” The second point is forcefully developed in the article “Revolutionary Preparation or Electoral Preparation,” and further clarified in the article “The Contradictions of Electoral Maximalism,” and will be at the heart of the disagreements over tactics at the Second Moscow Congress. For the Left, in fact, “the incompatibility of the two forms of activity is not a momentary incompatibility,” but characterizes a whole imperialist and fascist phase into which the old-democratic countries have irrevocably entered. Therefore, the rejection of parliamentary tactics must be adopted even regardless of the ebb and flow of revolutionary situations, as a fact imposed on the class party by the objective conditions of its final struggle.

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