Chapter 8: The Trade Unions, Italian Question, and the Founding of the Communist Party of Italy

The Trade Union Question

The final body of theses on the trade union question was the result of a long debate in the commission chaired by Radek. The theses presented at the congress by comrade Radek on the The Trade Union Movement, Factory Committees, and the Third International corresponded to the positions supported by the German CP against the KAPD opposition and were directed against neo-syndicalist tendencies. Apart from some statements which attributed a revolutionary role to the trade unions which the Italian Left found a bit excessive, these theses reasserted the revolutionary Marxist point of view upheld by “Il Soviet”. The unions and factory committees only become revolutionary when conquered and directed by the communist parties. The factory committees cannot be substituted for the trade unions which, organized at an industrial level, play a very important part within communist economic organization.

The communist tactic doesn’t therefore consist of boycotting the traditional trade unions, even when they are directed by reformists and yellows, but of conquering them from within.

Maybe it would have been beneficial to link criticism of «boycotting of the trade unions on principle» to a condemnation of the «erroneous conception which holds that the proletariat would be mobilized not by the party’s political struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat, but around the economic action of a revolutionary trade union organization» which, having expropriated the capitalists, would directly take over management of production. This point of principle wasn’t highlighted by Moscow. The debate showed that theoretical divergences still persisted and numerous questions remained unresolved.

Article 14 of the Statutes of the Communist International asserted the dependence of the trade unions on the party:

“Trade unions which accept communist ideas and are united on an international scale under the leadership of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) are, at the present time, forming a trade-union section of the Communist International. These trade unions send their representatives to congresses of the Communist International through the communist parties of the countries concerned. The trade-union section of the Communist International delegates one representative to the ECCI with full voting rights. The ECCI has the right to send a representative with full voting rights. The ECCI has the right to send a representative with full voting rights to the trade-union section of the Communist International.”

This resolution obviously encountered bitter opposition from the revolutionary syndicalists. A year later, a compromise was reached with the constitution of the Red International of Labour Unions.

The Italian Question

The PSI leadership’s tolerant attitude towards the Right had already been sternly condemned when the Conditions of Admission to the International had considered the Italian Question. Then Lenin’s pamphlet, Zinoviev’s speeches on the Conditions of Admission, Lenin’s speech, and Bukharin’s introductory speech to the Theses on Revolutionary Parliamentarism would sternly criticize the PSI. Serrati answered with protests, Graziadei put forward reservations, Bombacci, and Polano backed the criticisms put forward by the Russian comrades, the representative of the Communist Abstentionist Fraction (CAF) rather than treating Italy as an isolated case intervened in a more general manner setting out from a position of principle.

The problem was bound to come to the fore in the debate on Lenin’s theses on the Fundamental tasks of the Communist International. The commission invited all the Italian delegates to voice their opinions on the famous seventeenth thesis:

“In regard to the Italian Socialist Party, the Second Congress of the Communist International recognizes that the revision of the programme undertaken by this party at its congress at Bologna last year represents a very important stage in the transformation to communism and that the proposals made to the National Council of the Party by the Turin Section and published in the magazine Ordine Nuovo of May 8, 1920 all correspond with the fundamental principles of communism. The congress asks the Italian Socialist Party to examine at its next congress, which will take place in accordance with its own statutes and the general conditions of entry into the Communist International, the proposals that have been made and all the decisions of the Second Congress of the Communist International, especially with regard to the parliamentary faction, the trade unions and the non-communist elements in the party.”

There were those amongst the Italian delegates who didn’t accept this formula. Serrati and Graziadei observed that at the time of the National Council the Turin section had taken sides against the party leadership over the Piemontese disbandment; extolling the value of this section would mean approving of its undisciplined attitude. Bombacci observed, moreover, that it would have been dangerous to approve the syndicalist tendencies of the Ordine Nuovo and its vision of factory councils. Polano argued that the Executive Commission of the Turin Section was composed for the most part of abstentionists and, as a consequence, approving of the work of our fraction meant disavowing the parliamentary question. The representative of the CAF also pointed out the possibility of misunderstandings arising around the acceptance of the positions of Ordine Nuovo: positions which weren’t only contrary to the congress’s directives on the trade-union question and the Soviets but had supported party unity right up to immediately before the Milan Convention. Lenin and Bukharin declared that they weren’t well informed on Ordine Nuovo’s positions and that a particular document was being referred to. Serrati tried in vain to avoid the convocation of the national congress.

The question was discussed again during a congress plenary session. Serrati protested again, Bombaci and Polano would agree, Graziadei attempted to round off the corners by demanding that the position of the Maximalist majority at the Bologna Congress be recognized. The abstentionist representative made a brief declaration in which he stated that he wasn’t interested so much in the form of the theses concerning the PSI as its content. He noted that the behavior of the PSI after the Bologna Congress didn’t correspond to the criteria for membership of the CI given the presence in its ranks of openly opportunist and social-democratic elements. He stated also that as regards the question of anti-parliamentarism, his fraction would be disciplined subject to the decisions of the congress, but he asked that all the other resolutions be rigorously observed by the PSI as regards non-Communist members, the parliamentary group and the trade unions led by reformists.

After the closing of the congress, the Italian delegates were invited to an extraordinary session of the ECCI in the course of which was read a draft appeal to Italian comrades presented by Bukharin with a few additions by Zinoviev. This appeal prompted lively discussions. Bombacci, Polano, and the CAF would recognize its timeliness. Our comrade expressed reservations regarding the factory councils and trade union movement. Serrati would oppose the appeal itself, but his polemicizing on the details couldn’t put in question the fundamental necessity of the supreme organ of the CI formally inviting the Italian workers’ movement to abide by the decisions of the congress and to assume a truly communist character.

The ECCI reserved to itself the prerogative of making the final draft of the appeal which was then sent to Serrati. The letter, having expounded on the political and social situation in Italy and affirmed that it was eminently revolutionary, declared that whilst rejecting the method of fragmentary action, it was indispensable to create the conditions for a generalized revolutionary movement and to take account of the fact that every day’s delay could be of advantage to the bourgeoisie which was in the process of organizing to defend itself. There was also an analysis of the deficiencies of the proletarian movement, the incapacity and uncertainty of the majority of the party faced with the right-wingers of the parliamentary group and the trade unions.

The letter concluded by saying that all the conditions of membership of the international were put to the PSI in the form of an ultimatum: if they weren’t fulfilled, the International would be forced to address the Italian workers directly, that is to expel the PSI from the Comintern.

The behavior of the PSI was therefore severely judged by the International’s congress. This can be explained by the fact that as far as the Bolsheviks were concerned the Italian proletariat would in the very near future be called to take part in highly important actions and maybe to give the signal for the armed insurrection in the capitalist West. And if Moscow was more exacting in its demands towards the PSI than parties in other countries it was because it knew there was a core of real communists which it could trust, which wasn’t the case in France or Germany where there hadn’t been a radical split as had happened at Livorno.

Thus, Moscow demanded that the Right be expelled in the very near future; for the Maximalists it was a drastic requirement, but for the abstentionist Left it was not enough: the split should also involve the Center! From that autumn, Lenin would however launch a vigorous campaign against Serrati.

The Formation of the National Sections

Following the International’s Second Congress, several communist parties were formed. Apart from the PCd’I, however, most of the new communist parties only answered very approximately to what had been fixed in the well-known Conditions of Membership to the CI. This was in large part due also to the fact that the Bolsheviks had a tendency to widen the net of the tactical and organizational criteria used in the admission procedures. Later on, these factors would inevitably weigh heavily on the fortunes of the International, and the situation would be aggravated by Soviet Russia’s prolonged isolation. Thus it happened that the Comintern leadership, instead of getting the vital support which it so urgently needed form the proletarian movement in the West, found its difficulties compounded with further obstacles: namely the inveterate traditions of theoretical, programmatic, and organizational laxity inherited from the parties of the Second International.

Thus in the majority of cases new parties rose on foundations far closer to the Second than the Third International. In western Europe, with the exception of the Italian Left, the groups which had opposed the increasing degeneration of the Second International were too weak, too fragile on the theoretical plane, to be able to counter-pose a real revolutionary alternative to the dominant course. The International Executive was faced with a dilemma: what was it to do with the parties still linked by a thousand threads to the democratic and parliamentary tradition of the Second International which, nevertheless, pushed along by the masses, had arrived at Moscow? And what was it to do with those revolutionary vanguards who were sincerely revolutionary, but as far as their Marxism was concerned, weren’t much better than the Right and Center?

These dilemmas were nascent in the early 1920s, at a time when the masses were lined up in the revolutionary camp and were placing the problem of taking power firmly onto the agenda.

The Founding of the Communist Party of Italy: Livorno, 1920

Following the Communist International’s Second Congress, the problem arose, for both the Socialist and the Communist Parties, of immediate expulsion of the reformists. This had been decided at the congress.

In Italy, the Maximalists, profiting from their numerical superiority inside the PSI, obstructed Moscow’s directives. This had the positive consequence of bringing about the constitution of a Communist Party on the basis of a rift with maximalism, which was thus free from reformism and centrism. The process of forming the PCd’I, compared with that of other parties in the Western countries introduced features which were not only different but opposed: thanks to the existence of a well-defined communist nucleus.

Thus at the Livorno Congress the birth of the Italian section happened on the basis of a radical break not only with the reformists but above all with the Maximalists. This split was the fruit of a long process of decantation. The Communist Abstentionist Fraction played a determining role in this process of decanting the forces destined to form the future Communist Party. At the October meeting in Milan, as at the Imola Conference in November, and also at the time of the Livorno Congress in 1921, three currents, with different origins and line-ups, came together around a single platform which regrouped the theses and considerations about the conditions of admission established at the CI’s Second Congress.

The first of these groupings, the abstentionists, had a well-structured national network which covered the North as well as the South; our denigrators wish to view the Abstentionist Fraction as a Southern-Neapolitan phenomenon, that is, restricted to a zone which they consider capitalistically backward, which, incidentally, it isn’t. The fraction’s theses, with its organizational network and its centralized way of functioning, represented the highest point, parallel to that of Bolshevism, of the workers’ movement in the West.

The work of theoretical, programmatic, and organizational preparation which brought the Italian party into being was carried out first by “Il Soviet” in Naples and then by the national organ “Il Comunista” in Imola.

The second of these groupings corresponded to the Turinese Ordine Nuovo group which declared that it wanted to set itself up as a “school of thought”, a place to meet and debate; it had a very elastic network of readers with no organizational structure and was numerically ill-defined. The Ordine Nuovo group, whose theoretician, Antonio Gramsci, was closer to idealism than Marxism, disciplined itself to the fraction’s positions more through revolutionary instinct than through theoretical clarity.

The third of the groups was represented by the extreme left of maximalism.

To our detractors, who have always depicted our current as suffering from sectarian authoritarianism and as incapable of meeting politically with other groups, we can state that the three component parts mentioned above, from 1920 to 1922, submerged each of their particular political identities and united around the same political faith, determined to work with alacrity towards a split which was considered inevitable, and of benefit to, the revolutionary movement.

The Communist Fraction of Imola, formed by the fusion of these three currents, appeared at the Livorno Congress with a programme conceived not as a platform striving to gain the maximum consensus, but, on the contrary, as basis of the programme, which couldn’t be discussed, of the new party. A comrade belonging to the fraction wrote in Il Comunista of December 19, 1920 an article entitled Towards the Communist Party’ from which we cite the following passage:

“We cannot accept, antidemocratic though it might be, as “ultima ratio” the arithmetical expression of a party consultation which isn’t a party. The recognition of the correctness of the majority opinion starts where homogeneity of programme and aims start; we don’t accept it in a society which is divided into classes, within a proletariat necessarily dominated by bourgeois suggestions, within a party which includes too many petty bourgeois elements, and which historically has oscillated between the old and new Internationals, and which isn’t therefore in its thought or practice the class party of Marx.”

At Livorno, the Communist Fraction appeared determined to split regardless of the voting outcome in order to not paralyze the fraction and the proletariat up until the next party congress.