The Italian Left: On the Line of Lenin and the First Two Congresses of the Third International Pt 10

Proletarian Struggles Betrayed by the PSI and the CGL

A decline in workers’ struggles and an offensive by the dominant classes characterized the international situation. The Italian proletariat had already launched an attack in the summer of 1919 and in April 1920 and had struggled against the forces of order. This time, in the second half of 1920, it was a defensive action in the face of the intransigent refusal on the part of the industrialists in the iron and steel and engineering industries to accept the new collective labour contract, which had been obtained by the Rome concordat of August and September 1919.

The proletariat took action immediately, but their movement remained restricted within the factory walls. The slogan “workers’ control” raised by the socialist and trade-union leaders and leading to endless discussions about what form such control should take, served only to delude the working masses and weaken the movement. The delusion lay, in fact, in the notion that power had been conquered simply by taking possession of the factories, rather than by taking possession of the central organizations of bourgeois domination. Even if they were bypassed due to the sheer scale of the movement, the leaders of the Italian Federation of Metalworkers (FIOM) and the General Confederation of Labor (CGL) still managed to keep it under their control until the very end, showing yet again that the trade union Right was dominating the Maximalist Center, which served as its accomplice in paralyzing the labour movement.

The Italian government tried to intervene as little as possible in the hope that the proletarian fire would extinguish itself naturally through lack of oxygen. Furthermore, and it was by no means fortuitous, the failure of this attack by the workers coincided with the birth of the fascist offensive against an enemy grown vulnerable through the very fact of its withdrawal into the workplace and weakened by its dependence on reformism. Giolitti’s velvet glove and the fascist iron fist would divide the task of sapping the proletariat of its last reserves of energy, and do so very effectively.

Let’s look at the facts. On the August 30, 1920, the Milan section of the FIOM ordered the occupation of 300 regional metallurgical factories. The occupation of the factories would be nearly universal in the Milan-Turin-Genoa industrial triangle, and also spread to many other parts of Italy. Between September 1 to 4, around 400,000 workers took possession, “in an extraordinarily peaceful way” of metallurgical works, and in a few cases, chemical and textile factories, etc. The problem arose of extending the strike to all the other categories of workers. The CGL, which until that point had remained a passive spectator, worked skillfully to take control of the movement. On September 4, a meeting took place between the majority of the CGL’s steering committee, a representative of the socialist leadership, delegates from the main camere del lavoro (chambers of labour) in North and Central Italy, and the FIOM. Negotiations took place between two government representatives and D’Aragona (CGL), Buozzi (FIOM), the parliamentary socialists Turati and Treves, and representatives of the moderate wing of the industrialists, including Agnelli. The latter would end up by accepting the principle of workers’ control over the industries by the trade-union organizations in the form of “collaboration and co-responsibility for the different elements of production”, just as Turati and D’Aragona had many times proposed! The bill was never discussed in parliament, and Giolitti, the head of the government, left it to molder in his desk drawer.

On September 9 there was a meeting between the CGL and some of the socialist leaders. The CGL refused to allow the PSI to take over the leadership of the movement, which was what the Maximalists wanted. The PSI Directorate bowed to the pressure from the reformists and postponed the discussion… On September 10, at a meeting of the National Council of the CGL, the party leadership, in the person of Gennari, accepted the vote which had gone in D’Aragona’s favor, that is: that the PSI would officially leave the leadership of the movement to the CGL. Thus the PSI discharged its historical responsibility!

The concordat which had been signed in Rome on September 19 was accepted by the extraordinary congress of the FIOM on September 21-22, despite the fact it only recognized some of the workers’ demands. This was an open betrayal by the trade unions and the reformists, and the abstentionist section in Turin would call for an immediate split from the PSI. This proposal was rejected by the fraction’s central committee.

Be that as it may, the setback suffered to the occupation of the factories didn’t represent, as was said on many sides, a “missed revolution”. The working class was quick to defend itself, but wasn’t materially prepared to mount an offensive; the unfavorable social situation and a dominant class which had recovered from the perils of the post-war period, whose State apparatus was managed by the astute and calculating Giolitti, and supported by the fascist offensive, wouldn’t allow it. The wave of popular discontent receded in the same measure as the illusion of democracy was revived inside the working class by the electoral and parliamentary successes. Furthermore, since the PSI was dominated by a reformist perspective, the class lacked revolutionary political guidance.

Only the CAF, whose participation in the movement wasn’t based on the possibility of an immediate revolution, was conscious of this state of affairs. During the debate on fascism at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, the fraction’s representative would declare, “I do not believe, as comrade Zinoviev has been saying over the last few days, that the PSI could have fought a revolution in Italy; but at least it should have got itself into a condition where it could provide a solid organization for the revolutionary forces of the working class”. And in 1970, in an interview, he declared:

“[…] the proletarian movement, which involved the well-known occupation of the factories, reached its peak in the autumn of 1920, that is, after the return to Italy of the delegates who had attended the Second Congress of the Communist International in Moscow. The Ordine Nuovo group’s assessment of the possible revolutionary opportunities offered by that movement was altogether different, in fact directly opposed, to Il Soviet’s. At the time, Il Soviet wrote an article which was critical of the Turinese entitled, “To Take the Factory, or Take Power?” Taking matters of principle as our starting point, we rejected Gramsci’s assertion that the communist revolution could open with the conquest of the workshops and their economic-technical management by the workforce. In our view, the political forces of the workers needed to take the lead by launching assaults on the police stations and State prefectures in order to spark the large-scale movement, by the proclamation of a victorious and total general strike, which was required in order to achieve and install the political dictatorship of the proletariat. This vision of a possible outcome was clearly sensed by the shrewd and capable head of the Italian forces of the bourgeoisie, Giovanni Giolitti. Indeed, when the industrialists called for armed intervention by the public forces to expel the workers occupying the factories, and to restore the factories to their legitimate owners, it was he who made sure the request fell on deaf ears. Giolitti’s view at the time was that leaving the plants in the hands of the workers meant leaving them with a weapon which was totally ineffective since it didn’t threaten to overturn the power and privilege of the capitalist minorities; and as for the workers’ management of the instruments of production, it certainly wouldn’t open the door to a non-private regime of social production. Our tactical line therefore required that the class party of the proletariat should prioritize extending its influence and control not over the factory councils and electoral slates of the internal commissions, which is what “Ordinovism” wanted, but rather over the traditional trade-union organizations of the working class. That, then, is what clearly separated me from Gramsci during that phase. I never accepted that the general occupation of the factories was taking us, or might have taken us, closer to the social revolution which we wanted.”

The Ordinovist militants from Turin only drew partial lessons from this conflict. Gramsci, after having adulated the occupation of the factories, realized the impasse into which the workers had been placed by the Maximalist-reformist leadership and recognized, therefore, the necessity of the revolutionary party. The Turinese group, furthermore, hadn’t played any leading role in the movement, and a profound crisis had broken out in June due to a dispute arising between Gramsci and Tasca. This crisis drew the majority of the Ordinovist group into the struggle for the founding of the class party (Terracini, Togliatti, Tasca, Leonetti), whilst Gramsci preferred to abstain from disputes and “observe and evaluate”. At the elections of the new Executive Commission of the Turinese socialist section (July 24) two motions would be presented: the winning motion (receiving 141 votes) was put forward by the “communist electionists” and called for, “a purge, to be conducted not in a sectarian spirit, but with the maximum energy”. The other one, submitted by the “Communist Abstentionists” gained fifty-four votes, and re-proposed the theses which had just been passed at the fraction’s congress. It put forward as its primary objective the constitution of the Communist Party, and the elimination of the “reformists and counter-revolutionaries” from the Socialist Party. Gramsci, along with six other comrades, limited himself to presenting a declaration for the constitution of a group distinct from the other two tendencies (which, it is well to note, both demanded the constitution of the Communist Party with the purging of the reformist tendencies). This group led by Gramsci, called itself “communist education” and received seventeen votes for its statement.

The real lesson of the occupation of the factories was it confirmed that the working class, even if weakened by years of poorly led struggles, still possessed an extraordinary capacity for resistance against the bosses’ attacks, but that it was still in thrall to a political and trade-union leadership which maximalism was incapable of opposing.

This state of affairs was blocking all serious attempts at revolutionary preparation for favorable situations in the future, however near or far off they might be. It also prevented the defense of working-class positions from the moment that opportunism encouraged the councilist and democratic illusions of workers’ control. For these reasons, following the harsh experience of September 1920, the best proletarian elements, even if they held very different positions to “Il Soviet”; even if they were badly prepared from a theoretical point of view, orientated themselves towards a party split.

The balance-sheet of the factory occupation movement was an unhappy one, but valuable lessons were learnt.

The Political Tendencies Inside the PSI

The Turatian Right

The episode of the factory occupations showed that the PSI was dominated by its right wing both on the political, and on the trade-union and organizational levels. The mass of the party, as Il Soviet would write on October 24, 1920, was even more the prisoner of the right than it had been at the end of the war.

In Moscow, Serrati had defended the reformists Turati, Treves, D’Aragona etc… endlessly repeating to Lenin that they represented only themselves and, furthermore, that they couldn’t be compared with the Russian Mensheviks, who the party would have subjected to its discipline and who wouldn’t have been able to sabotage the revolution!

As a consequence, and in clear contravention of the regulations issued at the Second Congress of the Communist International, the Italian Socialist Party didn’t take any measures to purge the party of counter-revolutionary elements. Although the Second Congress of the CI had finished on August 7, 1920, the PSI Directorate didn’t meet until September 28 to discuss its conclusions, and the famous letter from the International’s Executive Committee to the Italian socialists (a letter the PSI was careful not to publish – so at that time it was the socialists who were keeping the archive documents secret!). It would take three days of discussion – until October 1 – to finally pass a resolution declaring acceptance of the Moscow’s 21 Conditions and agreeing to a “radical purging” of the reformists in the party, referring to procedures and ways and means to the national congress.

In the meantime, the Turatian Right had organized itself into the “Concentration Fraction”, and in Milan, on August 30, it issued a manifesto attacking the Maximalists for their demagoguery and inertia and blamed them for reinforcing the power of the ruling class. At its congress in Reggio Emilia on October 10 to 11, 1920, the Concentration Fraction declared that only they were truly revolutionary and accused maximalism of having, by its inaction, dispersed the revolutionary impetus. In their final motion, drawn up by Baldesi and D’Aragona, the reformists laid claim to “the name of the party, the intentions and educational spirit of its propaganda, the good day to day administrative and organizational work, and the work within the cooperatives and trade-unions”.

They confirmed their adherence to the Third International, their acceptance of the 21 Conditions in respect of “interpretative autonomy” and the “conditions in each country” and asked for the expulsion from the party of the masons and groups with anarchistic leanings. They even recognized the dictatorship of the proletariat (though only as a transitory necessity and not as a programmatic obligation), and the use of violence and illegal methods in the class struggle.

The motion declared that the reformists would support, “all possible attempts at approximation to the socialist regime”. In “Critica Sociale”, Treves finally noticed that, polemics aside, the reformist theses were in substantial agreement with Serrati’s. And it was true. By leaning in the direction of Maximalist centrism, the reformists were trying to don a mantle of political virginity in order to ward off their expulsion from the party.

This puerile maneuver was unmasked by the right fraction itself. In the December 24 edition of “La Giustizia”, its newspaper, the Right professed to support, “the major part of the theoretical assertions of the Mensheviks, with the exception of the proposal to constitute a Fourth International. On the contrary, we must enter the Third International and work in such a way that the decisions taken at the Second Congress are modified in order to allow the International to bring all the socialist forces together”. Opportunism could hardly have enunciated its programme more clearly: to penetrate the International with the aim of removing its historical character of harsh selection of the “socialist” forces!

The Maximalists

The Maximalist current, led by Serrati, appeared lifeless compared with the dynamic Right. If in France and Germany a considerable number of centrists accepted Moscow’s 21 Conditions for entering the new party, in Italy, the representatives of the majority of the PSI, a party which had been a member of the Third International since 1919, took up a stance which rendered the split inevitable. Inadvertently, they thus made possible the constitution of a party founded on theoretical foundations which were untainted by misunderstandings or reservations.

But Moscow’s 21 Conditions didn’t appear in Avanti! until September 21, and the review, Comunismo, didn’t publish the letter from the ECCI until October 15. According to Serrati, these delays could be explained by the fact that the resolutions of the Second Congress needed revising for more than one reason; most importantly of all, as Comunismo wrote on September 15, because the congress hadn’t been properly prepared and organized, and because the Bolsheviks weren’t very well informed.

The meeting of the PSI Directorate finally took place on September 28 and was the first to be held since the Second World Congress. So the unitarian formula of Serrati was:

“It is just a matter of liberating the party by means of an energetic purge of those elements, who, both during and after the war, continually provided weapons to our enemies […] The unity of our party – along with all the reconstructive organisms that it managed to create in the class revolution – must remain intact, against every attack from right and left. All those who want to be with us, right and left, we must keep them; especially since it is events themselves, more powerful than men, which conduct everybody inevitably to the left, towards revolution.”

Serrati maintained that, “ill-advised Russian expressions and norms should be tempered by that Italian shrewdness, which, without abandoning the communist programme, adapts them to the particular circumstances of our country.”

The meeting of the PSI Directorate (September 28 – October 1, 1920) marked the beginning of the Maximalist crisis. In response to the vote in favor of the Moscow resolutions, Serrati handed in his resignation to Avanti!. As we know it was not accepted by a unanimous decision. A few days later, however, Serrati would tender his resignation as the director of the Turinese edition of the paper following an article about D’Aragona, Colombino, etc., (who were members of the trade union delegation to the Second Congress in Moscow).

Some days earlier, in Milan, there had been a meeting of representatives of the extremist fractions within the PSI at which the Communist Fraction had been officially constituted. A further controversy, of far greater importance, was subsequently sparked off between Serrati on the one side, and Lenin and Zinoviev on the other.

Two open letters to Serrati, written by Zinoviev on October 22 and 23, stated that the destiny of the Italian revolution would depend on the capacity of the Socialist Party to free itself from the reformist elements who were sabotaging the proletarian revolution. Zinoviev affirmed, furthermore, that anyone who, at that moment, was trying to unite with the reformists or semi-reformists was, as far as the revolution was concerned, committing a crime. A message from the ECCI to the Communist Fraction (October 23, 1920) stated: “If Serrati and his friends want to defend the Communist International, if they want to make an effective contribution to the formation of a real Communist Party in Italy, they must join your fraction. This is the only possibility, and the ECCI is unable to agree to, or approve, any other solution […] We recognize no other Communist fraction in Italy apart from yours. All those who aren’t with us are against us”. The text of the message appeared in “Il Comunista” (the fraction’s organ) on November 21. In the same number, notice was given of the convocation, at Imola, of the Communist Fraction’s congress on November 28-29.

In two related articles on the Italian Socialist Party (November 4 & December 11, 1920), Lenin wrote:

“What constitutes this specific feature of Italy is the fact that the reformists have already proved incapable in practice of carrying out party decisions and pursuing party policy. By evading this fundamental issue, the resolution of the advocates of unity with the reformists utterly defeats itself. By this fact alone, Serrati, Baratono, Zannerini, Bacci and Giacomini have already shown quite clearly and irrefutably that they are fundamentally wrong, that their political line is fundamentally false. The discussion in the Italian party’s Central Committee has ever more forcefully revealed the total falsity of Serrati’s line. The Communists were right in saying that as long as the reformists remained what they were they could not but sabotage the revolution, as they had already sabotaged it during the recent revolutionary movement of the Italian workers who were taking over the factories. That is the pith and marrow of the question! How is it possible to prepare for revolution and advance towards decisive battles, when there are people in the party who sabotage the revolution? That is not merely a mistake but a crime.”

In the December 11 article, he wrote: “On the eve of the proletarian revolution, the liberation, the freedom, of the parties of the revolutionary proletariat from opportunists and ‘Centrists’, from their influence, their prejudices, their weaknesses and vacillations, is the main and essential condition of success”.

Assembled in congress on November 20-21 in Florence, the Communist Unitarian Fraction of the PSI voted on a motion which stated that the Socialist Party had, “already effectively conquered political power”, and therefore it alone could, “assure the proletariat of the overthrow of the bourgeois regime, reconstruction, and the communist order”. What’s more, it was stated that, following the congresses at Reggio Emilia, in 1912 (expulsion of the reformists), and Ancona, in 1914, (expulsion of the masons), “the revolutionary and totally intransigent tendency has dominated the party unopposed, drawing behind it the Right fractions and the confederated trade union organizations by subordinating the former with strict discipline, and the latter with a clear pact of alliance”. In conclusion, the Maximalist convention declared, “the necessity for our party to conserve its unitary membership in order that by our action we achieve the best, and most rapid, revolutionary outcome”. On the relations with the International it was said that the PSI accepted Moscow’s 21 Conditions in their entirety, but that these conditions should be interpreted, “according to the particular historical conditions of our country”.

The Maximalist convention in Florence was held shortly after a new socialist “victory” in the administrative elections, and at the same time as the fascist offensive in Bologna against “red power”. As a consequence of this latest electoral victory, maximalism would argue for uniting the party with the right wing which controlled a good part of the municipal and provincial administrations. Thus, from the columns of “Avanti!”, on December 16 Serrati responded to Lenin in the following terms: “The only country – after Russia – which finds itself socialistically in a favorable condition to fight against the bourgeoisie, is Italy […] Our party has a membership of 250,000, 150 members of parliament, and controls 2,500 municipalities. The organizations of economic resistance have more than two and a half million members. We control around a thousand cooperatives. We have the terrain and the materials for the reconstruction”.

On December 7, Serrati sent a letter to the CI in which he declared:

“The position we are in, in Italy, is very different to that in countries. Here there is nobody asking to leave the Third International, and nobody supports the Berne Congress. If there were a split, it would be entirely to the advantage of our enemies, and our movement would find it absolutely impossible to emerge from the deadlock in which it has been placed due to the inexperience of the left insurrectionists.”

Serrati’s opportunism didn’t just restrict itself to presenting the Italian right wingers as indispensable elements of the party and of the revolutionary cause, it went one step further, accusing the revolutionary Left of having condemned the proletarian movement to political deadlock and even holding it, in consequence, responsible for the failure to take power. Moreover, posing as the true representative of orthodoxy in contrast to the political manipulation and opportunism of…Lenin, Serrati would ingeniously claim that the Noskes and Scheidemanns had already been expelled from the party in 1912, and if there hadn’t been a revolution in Italy yet it wasn’t Turati’s, or Modigliani’s, fault. To say that it was, explained Serrati, was tantamount to giving in to “a belief in miracles and superficial prejudices”. Only the Italian socialists were capable of being “the judges of the developing situation and deciding which steps needed to be taken to defend the Italian socialist movement”. Serrati asked that a “relativist criterion” be applied to Italy, and addressing himself directly to Lenin he declared: “We ask nothing more, dear comrade. And if afterwards, having pardoned the Zinovievs who opposed the revolution, and the Cachins who proposed class collaboration and were international ambassadors of the great ‘democratic’ war, you still condemn us – we, who have never hesitated for one moment to defend the proletarian revolution – we will be neither surprised nor will we complain. But we will continue our work”. (Comunismo no. 1, December 15, 1920).

Serrati was feigning ignorance of the fact that the right wing of the PSI formed a homogeneous fraction, with a newspaper of its own, with its own steering committee, which was appearing at the party congress with a motion of its own, and that from the time of the Bologna Congress onwards it had continuously sabotaged every initiative taken by the Maximalist leadership!

If Serrati was to defend the so-called unity of the party nothing was left to him but the weapons of two-bit polemics. Thus he would declare that the real opportunists were to be found inside the Third International; that the communist parties of France and Germany were full of ex-supporters of the war whilst the Italian reformists were immune from such defects. And he wasn’t averse to borrowing a few lies from the bourgeoisie in order to denigrate soviet Russia either.

Eventually it got to a stage where he was talking about, “Red masonry which operates outside and above the party”.

Lurking behind this hymn to party unity, for whom it served as a convenient disguise, was the left wing of opportunism. Indeed, the Maximalists, in the name of unity, preferred to remain with 14,000 Social Democrats rather than join the 58,000 Communists and the Communist International! The problem lay elsewhere. The Maximalists couldn’t support communism since their programme was clearly opposed to that of the Communist International.

On December 20, 1920, acting on behalf of the ECCI, Zinoviev sent a final letter to the Directorate of the PSI, and to Serrati in person. Zinoviev was clearly convinced that Serrati had started down the slippery slope to opportunist and centrist politics: “Making concessions to the reformists just to keep Serrati happy would ruin the party […] Only the Italian Communist Fraction which met recently at Imola has posed the problem in a way which is clear and distinct. In Italy, those who want to march with the Communist International must support this fraction […] Long live the Italian Communist Party purified of reformist and semi-reformist elements!”

At the Livorno Congress, Turati put up a coherent defe°nse of reformism showing how deeply rooted it was inside the PSI. A few days earlier, he had written that it wasn’t a case of conflicting tendencies in the Socialist Party anymore, but of conflicting ideas. And Serrati’s Unitarian Fraction didn’t present itself as a right-communist tendency, but as the left wing of social democracy, which had become, in its turn, the left wing of the bourgeoisie.

In the December 19 issue of Il Comunista, an article entitled Towards the Communist Party affirmed that, “just as the bourgeoisie delegates its defense, at critical moments, to reformism, so reformism, when it is losing ground amongst the masses, is forced to delegate its counter-revolutionary function to that centrism labelled ‘right-communism’ which we can see at work in all countries. The feeling you get nowadays at party assemblies and congresses is that it is actually the communists and the unitarians who are going to separate from each other once and for all; it is they for whom cohabiting has become impossible.”

It is a view which was soon to be confirmed at the Livorno Congress.

In the months before the Livorno Congress, the Left would mount a vigorous and determined campaign to unmask the farcical revolutionism of the Maximalists and reveal their role as pacifiers. In the October 24 edition of “Il Soviet”, an article entitled “Serrati’s Mistake” (“Il torto di Serrati”), would counter all the Maximalist arguments that favored applying Moscow’s 21 Conditions in such a way as to render them inoffensive and consequently to allow more fatal equivocating about the destiny of the proletarian movement. Actually the formal unity of the party would serve merely to reinforce the reformists, and consequently weaken the revolutionary energy of the proletariat. The Communist Fraction therefore had to take determined and intransigent action. The article in “Il Soviet” examined some of the arguments Serrati used and showed they were fundamentally at odds with a good part of the theses approved at the International’s Second Congress. Extensive quotations from this article follow:

“When it comes to presenting his concluding argument, Serrati gets caught up in contradiction and sophism. We have in our hands, he says, thousands of communes [municipal councils], co-operatives and organizations; so many of them we don’t have enough people to fill all the posts. The Third International doesn’t condemn such conquests as heretical, in fact it encourages them, but meanwhile it expects all these posts to be filled with authentic communists, even incompetent ones. That would mean wrecking proletarian institutions. Serrati concludes not only that non-communists should remain in the party, but above all they shouldn’t be disturbed in the peaceful exercise of the official positions they occupy. The Third International’s overall perspective, which lies behind its prescription that the communist parties should utilize all of these forms of action, is that the work carried out to achieve the communists’ principal aim, i.e., the overthrow of the bourgeois power (when its historic instrument exists, that is; the political class party responding to all the features and conditions contemplated by the Theses) this revolutionary work, can be usefully carried out in all these institutions. These same institutions are, however, also favorable terrain for opportunists, chiefly insofar as their function within the parameters of the present society can become an end in itself, and end up as a means, under multiple forms, of delaying the precipitation of the revolutionary crisis. Communists however must penetrate them precisely in order to combat the opportunists; in order to denounce their inability to put forward long-term solutions to questions of interest to the proletariat; in order to spread our propaganda within them; to agitate within them and thereby gaining recruits for the class war led by the Communist Party. And given that this party exists, it has been said in Moscow, and since it responds to determined criteria, one of the most important of which is to be free of social democratic and opportunist elements, such a party is able, and indeed should, penetrate the trade unions, the co-operatives, the local authorities and parliament and put up a fight within them. To have the unions, the co-operatives, the local authorities, etc., but without that fundamental condition which is the Communist Party’s existence, that would mean no revolutionary work was possible; in fact, one would run the risk of abetting bourgeois conservation. What Serrati wants, precisely in order to conserve those organizations that are presently playing this opportunistic game, is to renounce the condition, the premise, of forming the party. Even the blind can see that the contradiction lies within him, not in Moscow’s prescriptions. One could, from the dialectical Marxist point of view, find the criteria that underlie all the Moscow Congress’s tactical decisions too simple. One could, from the critical-historical point of view and through an analysis of the successive conflicts between the various tendencies and various socialist methods; by establishing a continuity in the development of the methods of revolutionary Marxism, like those defended by the left of the International against reformists and anarchists, arrive at the conclusion that the formation of truly revolutionary communist parties, and the progressive differentiation away from petty-bourgeois elements and dissentient schools, is accomplished by means of the exclusion, at given historical moments, of given methods and forms of action once emptied of any possibility of revolutionary utilization. No criticism could be levelled against Serrati were he – claiming to be a representative of the left fraction of the Socialist Party – to instigate such a critical in-depth examination. But we cannot allow him, in order to support his idea that it is necessary to preserve the unity of the Italian party at all costs, to falsify the meaning of the revolutionary method adopted by the International […]

“Precisely because the International still wants all the old forms of action to be utilized, renewing them with a new and oppositional revolutionary content, from the communist movement, the latter needs to be purged of all heterogeneous elements, without which the overall balance sheet of its intervention in these institutions, hitherto the domain of reformists, would be bound to be disastrously negative. For example, a commune like the Milanese one, and organizations like the Confederation of Labour and the National League of Co-operatives, are, according to the method established in Moscow, organizations which Communists must still conquer since the traditional pernicious work of the Second International is still being carried out within them; insofar as the various Caldaras and D’Aragonas, whilst happy to help the bourgeoisie resolve the various problems and difficulties threatening to engulf them, do absolutely nothing in terms of revolutionary propaganda, agitation and action. It is therefore necessary, according to Moscow’s criteria, that the posts within those organizations must be taken over by good communists who are disciplined to their party, who, even if technically less able to resolve contingent matters in the way the bourgeoisie would like, would, nevertheless, make use of the positions they have won to carry out work conducive to organizing for the revolutionary struggle. To want to resolve this problem – set out very clearly on the basis of the incontrovertible documentation of the work carried out up until now within the aforesaid institutions – by announcing that D’Aragona and Caldara are card carrying members of the Italian Socialist Party, which in turn is part of the Third International, is simply ridiculous. The International can only but respond: expel Caldara and D’Aragona, even if it costs the party the Milan Commune and the Confederation. Especially since it will demonstrate that those champions of reformism only managed to obtain the votes of organized workers due to the prestige of being labelled revolutionary, which party membership bestows on them. So once again, slowly but surely, another of Serrati’s sophisms has been easily dismantled; once again he has shown how he poses as a master of intransigence, but provides only lessons in opportunism […]

“But Serrati is wheeling all this stuff out in support of his favorite thesis, i.e., that although Moscow’s 21 Conditions should be recognized, more time should be given to the member parties, each responsible unto themselves, to start cleansing themselves of opportunist elements. It is on this basis that in Florence Serrati intends to uphold the preservation of party unity, apart from a few personal expulsions to throw dust in people’s eyes. Rather than asking for more time for it to become a revolutionary communist party, I maintain that the Italian Socialist Party is already enormously behind schedule, and that the break should have happened some time ago. Furthermore, with every day that passes the problem becomes more complicated and difficult to resolve.

“All this can be deduced from our party’s recent past, and today we will only skim over it quickly, apart from returning to what I mentioned above since it is the nub of the question. Besides, I already wrote that in Moscow – in the minute or two I had to speak about Italian matters – I made a statement recording that such was the opinion of Lenin and Zinoviev and all those who have criticized the Italian party. The particular circumstances in which the war question was posed in Italy allowed too many right-wing elements to save face by passing themselves off as opposers of the war, whilst in fact they differed in no respect from the foreign social-patriots of August 4, 1914. The presence of these people in the party was shown to be especially dangerous at the time of the Austrian invasion, when the question of national defense became a particularly burning issue. As comrade Gennari (a unitarian in Bologna in 1919) often reminds us, the right should have been expelled back in 1918 when they were championing the country’s defense. But many of the best comrades of the Left weren’t at that congress, and those who were, were naïve enough to be tricked by Modigliani and co. When first the party Directorate then the Bologna Congress voted for the party to join the International, another opportunity to separate from the Right was missed (the thousand and one reasons why it needed to happen we don’t wish to go into here). But since it didn’t happen, adherence to the International was patchy to say the least […] The amount of time gone by since Bologna, the time being spent now leading up to Florence, and the time which, according to Serrati and his most pious desires – or profane vaticinations – should be spent after Florence, represents ever greater difficulties and dangers not only for the renewal of the party but for the historic development of the revolutionary struggle of the Italian proletariat. The bulk of the party is now more a prisoner of the Right than ever it was at the end of the war. The situation invoked by Serrati referring to leadership positions entrusted to non-communists – or rather, defeatists of the revolution – has worsened precisely because of the Unitarians, precisely because of Serrati.

“After the war, the big economic organizations reconstituted their membership and cadres, and the Maximalists allowed their enthusiasm for the revolutionary methods established in Russia to be linked up with the horribly opportunist practice of the organizations directed by their own party. After Bologna, the party, bogged down in a unitary approach to the political elections despite everything, ended up with a parliamentary group which, although bigger than ever before, repeated all the mistakes which the previous one had been denounced for over the course of six years of polemics; and once again they were predominantly drawn from the right-wing minority of the party. And so we come to today, skipping over everything else, to the local government elections; elections in which maximalism becomes even more of a prisoner to a thousand and one local situations. The party is identified with its councilors in the communes and provinces, made up of its worst petty bourgeois and opportunist elements, by all the people who stayed within, or entered, our ranks because tolerant or supportive of demagogic extremism; after they had been totally reassured that the old practice of winning electoral mandates hadn’t changed at all – given, that is, that you accept, against the heresy of the present writer, that it is susceptible to change – and that they aren’t serious, without which assurance this rabble would retreat ignominiously into the ranks of the timid, or become outright traitors.

“I have recently seen a chart illustrating our party’s growth. The chart is one of galloping elephantiasis. I have more than two hundred thousand members: that means that in proportion to the population our membership has overtaken the Russian Communist Party, but with the simple difference that here the bourgeoisie can give us a thrashing whenever it feels like it, whilst over there the counter-revolutionary dogs hardly dare draw a breath, let alone bark. And the worst of it is all this is happening – why deny it? – while many of the best proletarian elements, ready to give themselves over to hard struggle rather than engaging in the idiotic and cowardly pursuit of comfortable positions, are going off with the anarchists, whose movement – and I hardly need to repeat my radical disagreement with them – is growing in numbers and combative energy. If it were left to Serrati and the Unitarians, the party would go on to evolve not in a communist direction, as they claim, but relapse into performing the worst of social democratic functions as the stupid servant of the bourgeoisie, holding the working masses in contempt. A good dose of courage is needed… to propose: let’s wait a bit longer! The bottom line is, you can wait if you want, but we’re not waiting any longer. At Florence¹, party unity will be buried, without honors; and all the worse for those, however many there are, who, persisting in their error, wish to stick by the corpse, and poison themselves with its noxious exhalations.”

The Communist Fraction

The article entitled The Third International and Parliamentarism published in Il Soviet on August 22, 1920, was the last to be inspired by the theme of abstentionism. From that moment onwards the Communist Abstentionist Fraction (CAF) would devote its entire energy to diffusing and applying the decisions of the Second Moscow Congress and thus clear the way of any obstacles to the formation of the Communist Party of Italy. Activity would unfold on two fronts, firstly in polemics with the Center and Right of reformism, secondly in the organization of those forces which sided with the Communist International.

In a bulletin issued by the fraction’s Central Committee (CC), appearing in Il Soviet on the day after the meeting of the PSI Directorate, it was asserted, word for word:

“Since the Committee has heard comrade Bordiga’s report on the Moscow Congress, and having considered the political situation in Italy, it considers that recent events, and the development of the metalworkers’ conflict, dramatically confirm the Communist Fraction’s criticisms of the PSI, regarding both the presence within the PSI of social democratic elements and the ineptitude of the Maximalist majority, which can neither bring the proletarian movement under its control nor issue robust directives to guide mass action. It considers that the remedy to these extremely grave deficiencies is to apply the decisions taken at the Moscow Congress regarding the situation in the PSI, and to apply them seriously and energetically with a view to breaking up its dubious unity and liquidating the inauspicious inheritance of social democratic and opportunist tactics within parliament and the unions, even if concealed behind a Maximalist label. It invites the fraction’s comrades to support any action that the CC and Il Soviet will take in pursuance of this aim in preparation for the next congress, from which the new Communist Party will have to emerge. It also makes a general appeal to all communists who do not belong to the Abstentionist Fraction, with a view to finding common grounds for resolute action, and in order that the forces which will ensure the victory of communism at the next congress may be organized as soon as possible.”

In the same edition an important resolution on the Turin abstentionists was published. These comrades, mainly workers who had proved their combativeness and determination to fight on a thousand and one occasions, believed the moment for separating from the PSI had already arrived and that the fraction’s CC should immediately convene a national congress.

To these comrades, influenced to a certain degree by councilist spontaneity, the fraction’s CC responded that the decisions of the International Congress had to be executed to the letter, and therefore it was necessary to hold on and prepare for the extraordinary national congress.

“The Turin comrades, from whom we expect much haven’t worked that long for the fraction at whose head they now wish to place themselves. In fact, they have adopted tactical directives we don’t agree with which were advanced by other groups. These directives, despite the marvelous revolutionary work of the Turin comrades, have recently indirectly contributed to the unhappy outcome of two great proletarian battles [the ones in April and September].” (Il Soviet)

The same paper contained another bulletin, which took up once again the issue of observing discipline towards the International. This was on the eve of the local government elections. The fraction stipulated that comrades should abstain, “for discipline’s sake, from abstentionist activity.” Il Soviet tackled the underlying problems, the problem of the party, and of the urgent need for it to be formed, linking it to the balance sheet of the factory occupations and the collapse of the myths of councilism and workers’ self-management. On October 3, “Il Soviet” wrote:

The famous question of “control”, and all the agitation started in Turin by a group of comrades whose orientation leaves much to be desired, has never really fired our enthusiasm. From the very earliest stages we could easily predict it would open the way to new reformistic expedients and that workers’ “control” over production, far from being enough to ignite a revolutionary blaze, would end up as some legislative provision of the bourgeois State […] We don’t mean that such a question is without real content, or that the factory councils and factory occupations are movements/organizations which are artificial. Quite the contrary. We detect in them fundamental manifestations of the bourgeois crisis unravelling; a crisis in which communists, the Communist Party, is duty bound to intervene precisely in order to introduce the revolutionary content into them that they are “intrinsically” lacking, as is the case in the traditional trade union struggle […] Some minor breach in purely bourgeois forms of economy and bourgeois law is never revolutionary until the point is reached when the bourgeoisie forcibly represses it, thus posing the questiBut Serration of power; we can only move on after the establishment has been overthrown! Thus, once upon a time, postulating the right to strike was “revolutionary” whereas nowadays it is taken for granted. Once these postulates – regarding workers’ control – are accepted by the bourgeoisie their dialectical efficacy becomes counter-revolutionary, in the sense that in the economic field they offer a means of ordering the anarchy of production, whilst in the political field they put a break on the impetus of the masses when heading towards a collision with the bourgeoisie […] Truly revolutionary struggle will happen when the problem of political power, of social leadership, is posed irrevocably, and the battle is led by the conscious vanguard, the Communist Party […] In order to get the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat on the agenda, and the masses seem marvelously predisposed to take part in it, precisely such a party will be required in Italy. The prevarications of the Maximalists have perhaps made constituting it more difficult, since dissatisfaction and revolutionary impatience are not sufficient material with which to build it […] There must be a radical change of direction and the dead weight disposed of without further ado. With every passing day the party’s illness becomes more and more gangrenous. Moscow’s diagnosis is in general correct. The surgeon’s knife is required and the incision needs to be made without false sentiment.

1. In the course of the article, Florence is often referred to as the venue of the imminent socialist congress; in fact although the PSI’s Seventeenth Congress should have been held in the Tuscan capital, it was eventually moved to Livorno for reasons of security. ↩︎