2000 Introduction to Theses presented by the Left at the III Congress of the Communist Party of Italy (Lyon, 1926)

     At the end of a speech lasting 7 hours, the Left’s representative at the Lyons Congress addressed Gramsci, and declared that: «We don’t have the right to call ourselves Marxists, or even historical materialists, just because we accept as party bag and baggage certain theses relating to particular aspects, whether union activity, economics, parliamentary tactics, or questions of race, religion and culture.  Only when we believe the same conception of the universe, and of history and mankind’s role within it, can we properly be said to be standing under the same political banner». Gramsci replied by acknowledging the correctness of the fundamental conclusion enunciated by the Left «and indeed admitted that at that moment he saw that important truth for the first time».

     To tell the truth, during the previous year’s polemics with the Left, even Gramsci’s group had asserted that “Leninism” was a complete vision of the World and not just of the world revolution. Probably they said this without understanding it though. Indeed the Left had no difficulty highlighting the contradiction between this assertion and the fact that the leaders of the Ordine Nuovo subscribed to an idealist philosophy, that is; a conception of the World which was characteristic not of Marx or Lenin, but of the Neo-Hegelians, and particularly Benedetto Croce. Where was the consistency in Gramsci subscribing to Croce in philosophical matters, and to “Leninism” for a world view?

     The revolutionary communist movement is based on a theoretical system which reflects an organic conception of the World: the Marxist doctrine of historical and dialectical materialism which found one of its most powerful champions in Lenin.  This is why we give the name of doctrine to the completed theoretical-scientific corpus, and why we will always jealously defend it against every type of contamination, or “enrichment” as some would say, from other schools of thought.

     To call this doctrine “Leninism” is therefore entirely superfluous, and Lenin himself certainly never thought it necessary.  If Lenin had been a revisionist, then we could justify the use of such a term, but instead he fought a fierce battle against revisionists of every stamp, and challenged their right to adopt the Marxist name and Marxist traditions.  He defended Marxist orthodoxy, drawing on material from living History, and with his formidable exegeses on the work of the founders of scientific socialism, he dissected the corroborating evidence, provided by History in support of our common doctrine, down to the very last detail.

     The battle conducted by Marx, Lenin and the Italian, and by the our party today is, at one and the same time, a revolutionary struggle involving study, organization, preparation for the insurrection, and defence of the total coherence of programme and tactics, the outcome of more than a hundred years of experiences and lessons of proletarian class struggle.

     Culminating in the 3rd congress at Lyons and at the 6th Enlarged Executive in Moscow, the divergences which would prompt the Left to oppose the deviationist politics of both the International and the Gramscian, or centrist, leadership of the Communist Party of Italy (PC d’I) originated in fact from the worrying tactical eclecticism which, in the name of the conquest of the masses, was diluting the classist positions of revolutionary Marxism with the bastard ideologies of the petty-bourgeoisie. The concerns of the Italian Left were, regrettably, not without foundation, and tactical errors would quickly turn into a distortion of revolutionary principles. And it was but a short step form here to open betrayal.

    We have only a fragmentary record, 75 years later, of the discussions which took place at the 3rd Congress in Lyons. If not destroyed at the time, they remain today buried somewhere in the Moscow or ex-Italian Communist Party archives.  And yet, even if we never know the contents of the lengthy report delivered by the Left’s official representative or the interventions were made by its delegates, we do still have the magnificent body of theses which was presented at the congress: the “Left’s theses”, a thorough knowledge of which is indispensable for every militant communist.

     Remaining true to the Left’s tradition, the theses presented at the 3rd Congress relegated Italian and contingent questions to last place, whilst ample space was given over to the theses on the general and fundamental nature of the Party.  The Left’s theses presented at the Lyons Congress shouldn’t therefore be considered as relevant just to that particular congress, or that particular city or year, but should be seen as the party’s doctrinal corpus, defining its past, present and future existence.

     The reason for publishing them in the English language now isn’t because we want to contribute archive material for a study of the revolutionary communist movement in the 1920s, but because it represents a weapon in the theoretical battle being fought out today in preparation for the revolutionary battle of the future.

     It is precisely for this reason that we need to take a brief, if incomplete, look at the general situation during those years before going into the question of the P.C d’I’s 3rd congress.

*  *  *

     With the ending of the 1st World War in 1918, whose raging apparition had dowsed the flames of class struggle, the years 1919-1920 which followed would see the bourgeoisie trembling in terror before the revolutionary victory.  The unexpected eruption of the revolutionary attack on the established powers, which had spread from Tsarist Russia to the whole of Europe, gave the bourgeoisie to predict that the general war between States would not usher in a period of capitalist peace, but would be followed by a renewed eruption of class struggle and civil war.

     This stage marked the high water-mark of the international Communist movement: victory of the insurrectional battle against the swarm of petty-bourgeoisie parties (classical adversaries) and social-democratic parties (classical traitors); then military victories over the white counter-revolutionary hordes and their German and Entente Cordiale backers.  At the same time, it marked the theoretical victory of the revolutionary Marxist doctrine which had served as the vital oxygen to enable the Bolshevik party to be set on foot, and which the Bolsheviks had defended in its entirety against the ignominies of the reformists and traitors of 1914.

     While the bourgeoisie was witnessing the collapse of its cowardly ideals, and was trying to reshape its decrepit world around the sanctimonious formulas of Wilson and Co., boundless was our contempt, in the light of our doctrine, towards all the bourgeois baggage of crumbling political ideologies, towards its decrepit philosophies defeated by Marxism in its earliest days, towards its false and corrupted academic sciences and particularly towards its hypocritical and puritanical philanthropisms.

     The ignorant proletarian masses, without God or country, put up their calloused fists in order to deal a death blow to the bourgeoisie and consign the dominant class’s ’wisdom’ to the dustbin.

      The burning faith of those prolific years meant it was easy to be swept along in a mood of hopeful optimism and believe that a historical resurgence of the collaborationist social-democratic forces, a relapse into opportunism, would be impossible after such a vigorous advance. The Communist Left in Italy was the first to be aware of this danger, and from then on, on a host of occasions, it would be the Italian Party (as long, that is, as the Left defined its politics) which would draw attention to the fact that neither faith in the revolution, nor the Party’s organizational stability, would succeed in linking up the revolutionaries’ will to the action of the working class.  Party militants have to be possessed of enthusiasm and self-assurance, but this cannot be transmitted automatically to the proletarian masses merely through their activity as orators, agitators, and writers.  Not even an executive group composed of famous leaders is capable of setting the proletarian masses into motion in pursuit of revolutionary objectives.  A central thesis we adhere to is that the revolution does not consist in choosing a group of particularly gifted people to be the general staff of the party: the process is one of social physics, we observe what is happening, we don’t cause it to happen. In other words, the Communist Party can, and indeed must, guide the revolution, but it can’t generate it.

     As the years went by, with the recession of the revolutionary wave and a succession of  proletarian defeats, especially after the disastrous events in Germany in 1923, the Communist International failed to apply a Marxist dialectical approach to the complexities which arose from the fact that Russia and the West were at different levels of economic development, and thus was unable to respond to the various defeats and failures with a calm, sober assessment of its tactical policies.  On the contrary, it found it far easier to launch a witch-hunt for right-wing deviationists- despite the fact the ’culprits’ had been faithfully towing the party line and held up as examples until immediately before. Repeating the success of the Russian Revolution in the West (the zone of senile capitalism) was thought to simply consist of imitating the  Bolshevik party organization and its process of formation, as if the revolution depended simply on a set of organizational recipes and acts of voluntarism.

     Errors in methodology quickly led to a repudiation of objectives.  And if that was not easy to maintain earlier on it became evident from the moment that Stalinism decreed that Russia would be the one country of proletarian dictatorship and socialism; a declaration which would involve an increasingly clear renunciation of the aim of working towards the revolution in Europe.

     As congress followed congress, the International started to weigh up the situation, but not in the sense that it made a realistic assessment with a view to adopting those procedures for taking action which the world party’s revolutionary tactics should have provided for in the first place.  Instead, under the pretext of trimming its sails to suit the winds of various political and social contingencies, it became prey to a dangerous mania for imposing sudden, unexpected and always disorientating changes followed by ’clever’ counter-moves.  Eventually it was thought ’the situation’ could be judged on a month by month basis according to whether it was more or less revolutionary.  If it was, it was argued, a shift ’to the left’ was required, and ’left-wingers’ should be put in control of the parties.  If instead the situation was thought to have cooled off, then the opposite conclusion was reached, and a shift ’to the Right’ was decided upon, and new elements installed in the party leadership who were suited to carry out the latest policy.

     The sorry tale of the Comintern, after its all too brief glory years, relates how each new circumstance prompted a search for the men most ready to adapt, men who could be raised to the highest echelons of the party as easily as they could be cast down, unless they were opportunist enough, and slimy enough, to be able to quickly adapt to the new changes.  A practice, this, denounced by us as “selezione alla rovescia”: back-to-front selection.

    But it wasn’t just Stalinism which was guilty of aping the bourgeoisie’s most noxious traditions of diplomatic manoeuvrings and parliamentarism.  The sad fact is that no part of the Communist International was immune from it.  Not only did nobody denounce this suicidal method but everybody, excluding us, including the various left opposition movements, made use of it without taking into account the fact that the method itself was a dangerous symptom of the opportunist disease. Even the greatest champions of the revolutionary method, as if ignorant of the fact that the world revolution’s victory or defeat wouldn’t depend on the balance of forces within the Comintern or its member parties, adapted themselves to the tactics of manoeuvring and instrumental negotiations. What was actually happening, unfortunately, was exactly the opposite. The game being played out on a global scale was determined by quite different power relations, with international capitalism on one side, and the proletariat on the other.

     The Communist Left was the only group to clearly and consistently denounce this policy as a general march in the direction of a neo-opportunism; this was what we saw the Comintern heading towards with its far from straightforward oscillations, and we could foresee the liquidationist tendency arising out of it.  Confronted with these tactics, composed of swings first in this direction then that and where every swing to “the left” made a swing to “the right” equally inevitable, we were on more than one occasion led to make the scandalous assertion that the ideas of the “Right”, even if wrong, were often far more consistent in method and application than those of the centrists.

     We can give an example of this from the Lyons Congress itself.  Tasca, representing the right-wing of the party, at a certain point in the political committee’s debate referring to Gramsci’s theses, stated that «I don’t accept the paragraph in the political theses in which we deny that social-democracy is the right-wing of the workers’ movement’s, considering it instead the left-wing of the bourgeoisie. If that were so – Tasca correctly commented –  the United Front tactic would be absurd, because it would be a tactic of coalition with an enemy class. By making such a statement – Tasca was worried that – a justification would therefore be provided for the extreme Left’s criticism of the United Front. It is true that social-democratic ideology is the reflection of the bourgeoisie’s influence on the workers’ movement, it is true that this influence, especially affecting the leaders, also affects broad layers of the masses, but this hasn’t yet divested the workers’ movement, even where it follows social-democracy, of its social class structure. This is especially true where social-democracy constitutes a historical phase as an outlet for the entire workers’ movement, as in the case of the English Labour Party, and, if this wasn’t the case, communists joining the Labour Party would be an absurdity». And the Left’s representative, holding that Tasca’s reasoning was entirely logical, couldn’t fail to declare that: «[Rienzi] (Tasca- ed.) is right. If you say that social-democracy is a left-wing of the bourgeoisie you have to admit that the United Front tactic is a tactic of making a coalition with a bourgeois party.  There is however a contradiction in what Rienzi says about the social basis of social democracy and what he asserts about the nature of the party. If it is true that you judge a party by the social basis of its members, then social-democracy is still a proletarian and revolutionary party». And this additional comment was even more relevant to Gramsci than to Tasca,  with Gramsci supporting the theses on the “Party as part of the working class”.

      The Comintern’s tactical eclecticism was opposed by the Italian Left from the outset, for even if it did remain within the framework of a strategy whose general outlines remained unchanged up to 1923/24, it still served as fertile terrain for the subsequent opportunistic deviations to develop, prosper and become ever more pronounced and dangerous. The various Left tendencies and international opposition movements failed, firstly, to pick up on all this, and later were unable to assess the situation correctly.

     Evidence for this increasingly widespread corruption of principles is not in short supply and can be summed up briefly as follows:
1. The reconciliation with social-democracy: both with the project to dissolve The Red International of Labour Unions and subsequently merge it with the Amsterdam International, emanation of the League of Nations, and with the theorization of the Left Government as an intermediate stage which favoured revolutionary development.
2. The return to ambiguous formulations of the united front extended to include bourgeois parties, as in the case, in Italy, of participation in the anti-fascist opposition in the Aventine secession; a bourgeois, democratic, legalitarian and pro-monarchist institution.
3. An overrating of the “Left” fractions within the social-democratic and bourgeois parties and in the trade unions.
4. The tendency to minimize, to the point of erasing, any distinction between the Communist parties, the peasant parties and the national-democratic parties, both in the colonial areas and in the heart of Europe.
5. The way in which the internal problems of the various parties were resolved by reshuffling their leadership, thereby adopting the most consummate  of democratic-bourgeois methods.
6. The system of ritual humiliation and corruption which sought to extract confessions and disavowals of past errors from the “miscreants” whilst, meanwhile, the old lags of Russian Menshevism and international opportunism were awarded certificates of Leninism.
7. The International’s refusal to discuss the Russian Question.

*  *  *

     In Italy, following the 3rd congress of the P.C.d’I, total control of the party was handed over to the centrists in 1926. And Gramsci, and indeed the whole “Ordine Nuovo” group would share in the wholesale corruption of the correct doctrine and consequent correct revolutionary tactics which would form the basis of the Stalinian counter-revolution. Inexorably they were heading towards the worst of degenerations, insofar as the hidden agenda was the renunciation of the European revolution whilst setting out the ideal premises for Soviet Russia to participate in the imperialist war.

    And yet the various stages of this defeatist policy would have to be well camouflaged if the proletariat was going to believe that the International was not only not taking a backward step, but was on the contrary moving further and further to “the left”. As a matter of fact, a couple of years later, a tactic which would come to be referred to as social-fascism would predominate. This latest change appeared as the exact negation of the theory in whose name the Gramscian centrists had fought against our positions in Italy, by making a merit of the fact they were faithfully executing the International’s instructions. The Italian Left had always held to the view (then considered heretical) that the bourgeoisie would alternate, due to its need to enforce its class domination, the fascist method with the democratic method. And yet when Moscow launched its social-fascism slogan, which declared that socialists had to be fought as much as the fascists because there was nothing to choose between them, wasn’t it saying the same thing?

     Trotski, now in exile, fought fiercely against the new slogan, fearing the “fascist danger” which was gaining ground in Germany, and which the Stalinist communists were doing nothing to combat.  Instead he would back a united front tactic of the 1922 variety which aimed to create an anti-nazi coalition. These tactics, falsely described as “Leninist”, had always been a source of disagreement between ourselves and Trotski, the latter only coming to see much later how they had been abused by Stalinism. Without welcoming Moscow’s new tactic as a left-wing success, we instead upheld the main trajectory of our criticism, and kept alive, on quite different grounds, our aversion to the popular front/coalition, completely certain that the Stalinists would return to such a formula, specially in Italy where it had never been denounced.

     All this swaying back and forth that we have briefly traced out becomes the recipe for a betrayal of the proletariat even more nauseating than what occurred in 1914: the memory of the October Revolution, and the glorious years preceding it, would be used to support a shameless adoption of the opportunist politics of class collaboration in the interests of the preservation of capitalist.

*  *  *

     The Rome Congress in 1922, with the approval of the famous theses, had given an almost unanimous ratification to the Left’s line which had emerged in an organic way a year earlier following the split at Leghorn. We may record by way of commentary that not even Tasca’s Right-wing had completely lined up behind the International’s tactical directives at this time, some of which we already disagreed with. Total adherence to the Comintern’s tactics at that time was advocated by Bombacci; indeed the very Bombacci who immediately afterwards would become an official supporter of fascism, and who would later actually even join them.

     The leadership of the PCd’I that appeared in 1926 at the next party congress at Lyon had not been elected, nor had the party had the opportunity to judge its worth.  Instead it had been officially nominated by the International, substituting it for the one elected by due process at the Rome Congress. And not only that, it had been reshuffled several times. From the time of the Rome Congress onward, the party had no further opportunities to pronounce on the policies and actions of the leadership. During the one consultation that did take place, at the clandestine congress in Como in May 1924, the overwhelming majority of delegates aligned against the policies of the new leadership by adhering to the Rome theses, that is, to the old Left leadership. As a matter of fact, the Gramscian leadership deriving from Moscow turned out to be in the minority not only with respect to the Left, but also to the Right, from whom it garnered even less votes.

     But the centrists of the 3rd congress were decided that «a whole epoch of party life needed to be brought to a conclusion». And such it was. Uprooting the influence of the Left from amongst the party membership became the top priority for centrism and the International.

      The review Prometeo, that had first appeared at the beginning of 1924 with the International’s approval, was hastily repressed under the pretext that it might «become a centre of Left-wing activity and agitation».   Contributions by Left comrades to the party press were mostly rejected.  If they were published, they were introduced by long editorials, sometimes longer than the articles themselves, which sought to discredit them by describing them as fractionist.  All the Left’s leaders were either duly removed from their responsible positions in the various federations, or the federations themselves were dissolved.

     At the 5th Congress of the Communist International, the Left, although remaining outside of the central party organs, had made a pledge not to create obstacles or a pole of opposition to the leadership.  But from the time of the federal congresses held shortly afterwards, the Italian leadership would break this unwritten agreement, arrived at in Moscow, by opening its fractionist offensive.

     The polemical argument used by the PCd’I’s Executive group was simplicity itself: the Left says the International is mistaken, the International can’t make mistakes, therefore the Left is wrong. But, in fact, the great defenders of the Comintern, who failed to distinguish between the Comintern and its Executive Committee, weren’t motivated by concerns about protecting the international organisation from the Left’s criticisms, rather they wanted to get the Comintern to protect them. And thus did the leaders of the PCd’I shift their responsibilities, and their errors, onto the Comintern, calling it into play, and compromising it, every time it got into difficulties.  This “back to front internationalism” was dictated by the greater ease and facility with which, in the wake of the immediate success, the faith and dedication working masses towards the International organ and famous names, like the much abused Lenin, could be utilised.  Thus, at every step of the way, International, Russian Revolution, Leninism and Bolshevism would be hurled at the Left by individuals who could be considered only parasites of that great gathering of forces.

      This system, even had it managed to shift the party membership from a Left to a Centre position, would only have succeeded in harming the party and the International because it would have distorted and degenerated its physiognomy, delivering it back, accomplices of the Stalinian counter-revolution, into the hands of opportunism.  From this disastrous way of going about things the party membership could only have drawn the unhappy conclusion that the Communist Party was, after all, just like all the other bourgeois and social-democratic parties, with every debate ending up in disagreements and antagonism between leaders who were prepared even to break up the political organization if it meant prevailing over their rivals, and thus proving right those who were saying that the split at Leghorn had contributed to the proletariat’s ruin by allowing Fascism to triumph.

     But, as well as those workers who were already members, the party should have been concerned to attract, convince, and mobilize those for whom the International didn’t represent an authority, and who therefore didn’t respond to calls to be disciplined to its deliberations. With its arguments, and positive methods, the party should have been able to shift these workers from a position of mistrust to one of faith.  This is the fundamental duty of a revolutionary party. And all the more so for a party which flaunted the necessity of conquering the masses. The reality, amongst much chattering about conquering the masses, was that the centrist leadership didn’t succeed in enlarging the influence of the party over the proletariat, limiting its objective to maintaining total control over those proletarians who were already party members and not hesitating, in order to achieve this end, to break up the movement as soon any discussion and criticism arose.

     The  PCd’I leadership had undergone yet another reshuffle during the 5th Congress of the Communist International following its recent fusion with the PSI’s “Third Internationalist” group. Immediately after the Congress, the revamped leadership would issue a series of Orders of the Day – for party functionaries to present at the federal congresses  – which would signal the start of their campaign against the Left. If the attack on the Left’s political positions had been conducted in a spirit of openness and sincerity, respecting the assurances given at the 5th Congress and engaging in serious discussion, perhaps it would have shown that the leadership really had the party and its internal crisis at heart. But knowing that such an approach would have deprived them of any hope of getting the party to adopt its policies (a subject which formed the substance of no few reports dispatched by the Italian Executive to the Executive Committee of the Communist International) that wasn’t what the Ordinovisti wanted. They therefore opted to go down the road we have described above, the only one which would guarantee them success. In the party’s rank-and-file organizations, at meetings of party militants, the question of which political tendency best corresponded to the hard-won experiences acquired during the revolutionary struggle, whether the centrist or the Left’s, would no longer be raised, and the leadership would transform the debate about the party’s 3rd congress into a slanderous campaign against the Left, which would be characterized as fractionist and secessionist.  During the Congress a delegate would reveal that: «the party congress’s  preliminary debate consisted of insults and muckraking. It wasn’t a debate about ideological issues».

     On May 25th 1925, L’Unità had announced that the party’s 3rd Congress would be taking place soon. The Left called for discussions to commence immediately, and since prejudicial restrictions and disciplinary measures of a fractionist nature would be of no advantage to the revolutionary movement as a whole and would only poison the congress atmosphere, they called for these measures to be suspended. Therefore, with the aim of creating an information network – not secret but open to the entire party membership – the Left had formed an Entente Committee (Comitato d’Intesa) and, in a letter of June 1st, informed the PCd’I Executive of the committee’s existence. In short, the Entente Committee urged: «… That there be sufficient time allowed for debates, such as to take into account the unprepared state of the party masses and the importance of the matter under consideration; …That the provincial congresses be held only after exhaustive discussion in the party press; … That at the federal congresses it be possible to debate the views of recognized comrades of the various currents; … That the nomination of delegates to the Party Congress take place at the respective federal congresses; in the case, however, that nominations are made by other means, authority to choose members of eventual committees to be entrusted to official representatives of the various currents. … That the right to nominate and discipline the speakers who will be explaining the thought of this or that current to the congress finally be recognized».

     It can be seen that that the document contained nothing out of the ordinary, nothing to justify accusations of fractionism. There was just the proposal that during the pre-congress discussions and the congress itself there be room for ideas to be freely expressed. When however L’Unità published the Left’s document on June 7th, the Executive “revealed” that two other “fractionist” documents had been “intercepted” by the party in April and June: clear proof, commented the Executive, of fractionist activity – and secret into the bargain – which «carried within it the germ of a split in the party».  The signatories of the document were immediately dismissed from their posts within the organization and threatened with expulsion.

     To give us an idea of the climate of the real terror which, along the lines of the prevailing Stalinism, had established itself in Italy (and during the period of the fascist dictatorship to boot) we quote from the “top secret circular” sent out to interregional officials. Here they were instructed to: «immediately get rid of  those who (were attempting) to splinter the party’s forces and change it into a disguised social-democratic party». This “top secret circular” went on to give the following  practical instructions: «The Left Fraction’s national committee takes advantage of the work of some travelers in order to establish links with the various federations (…) You need to arrange, in the case of these people arriving at our branches or you meeting them in the course of your travels, that after having obtained help from local comrades both they and their dwellings are immediately searched.  All fractionist material that may be found on them (circulars, addresses, letters etc) must be sent to us. Naturally by engaging in this party police-work, you will need to state to those concerned that you are executing a definite peremptory instruction issued by the Executive Committee». Shortly afterwards the Entente Committee was dissolved with the approval of the International’s representative. Anybody who didn’t abide by the order was threatened with expulsion.

     Although Humbert-Droz had promised «complete freedom of ideological debate», during the party talks, the Left had no qualms about defining the voting procedures as “Giolittian” (Giolitti, one of Liberalism’s and post-war democracy’s most illustrious figures, formed a coalition with Mussolini in the 1921 elections which allowed the fascists to enter parliament. The “Giolittian method” to which the Left referred was the one used by the democratic leader to ensure his constant victories in  the elections, and consisted of gathering a broad consensus both with the help of the mafia organizations, and aided by the squadre mazziere financed directly by his political supporters: a kind of forerunner of fascist squadrism).

     It was therefore entirely predictable that rather than an ideological conflict between two party tendencies instead a suffocating alternative between division or unity, fraction or discipline, would form the backdrop to the PCd’I’s 3rd congress.

     The Executive Committee of the International would unleash its attack on the Italian Left at the end of April, 1925, when the 5th Enlarged Executive approved a “Resolution on the Italian Question” in which it was stated that: «Today it is clear that Bordigist ideology constitutes the principal obstacle to the party’s bolshevisation. Therefore the maximum effort must be directed toward the elimination of this obstacle». No indication of the duties and tactical tasks that the party should set itself was to be found in this resolution; it consisted solely of an attack on the “ideology” of the Italian Left, defined as a “by-product of the Second International” and in conflict with “Leninism” on three fundamental issues: abstentionism, the party’s role, and the party’s tactics. The Italian Left, we read in the document, could still be characterized as parliamentary abstentionist, despite dropping this policy it at the 2nd Congress; this characteristic feature would drive the party into a state of political inertia because it involved a rejection of the need to conquer the masses; it would blind it to the nature of the fascist phenomenon, and finally; it would ossify its tactics. This was in contrast with “Leninism”, which «represents flexible tactics, constantly adapting to the world’s changing economic and political situation; ready to speedily adapt its slogans and attitude so as to stay in contact with the masses».

     On September 4th, the Comintern’s Executive Committee would send a letter to the Direction of the PCd’I, published in Unità on October 7th, reiterating and enlarging upon all the accusations already levelled against the Italian Left. There are two characteristic positions – on the antifascist struggle and the conception of the party – which we now find being stated openly, and which already give a premonition of the Stalinist counter-revolution (and yet, irony of ironies, the document was written by those who would later become victims of Stalinism themselves).

     The Left had stated on numerous occasions that why it considered fascism unfortunate was above all because it had breathed life, due to its train of violence and persecutions, into the legalist and democratic anti-fascist movement. This was why the Left considered it appropriate to attack democracy and social-democracy with the same degree of force as it attacked fascism. It had been democracy and social democracy which had generated, nurtured and provided support to the fascist movement. The Left had unceasingly unmasked the complicity and class nature of those so-called oppositions which proposed legal and constitutional methods.

     This clear classist position was decisively condemned by the Communist International, which by now was desperately in search of immediate successes,  whether real or imaginary. They accused the Left of omitting to carry out «an analysis of the various social strata which formed the basis of fascism, of their interests and of their differences».  The Left was held to blame for «not warning that a social-democratic or left-wing bourgeois government, and a fascist government, were not the same thing» and that therefore the party, not wanting to appear to the proletariat as though they were «maintaining fascism in power if it had the possibility of getting the Aventine Parliament to replace it» should have intervened «with its electoral forces in favour of one or the other bourgeois adversaries».

     This bogus problem, so dear to the hearts of renegades of every stamp, was resolved in a masterly way by the Left with the Lyons theses. Here they would demonstrate that fascism was no different from democracy since both were rooted in the same social class and above all articulated the interests of that same social class: the bourgeoisie.  The fascist movement was best understood, purely and simply, as an attempt, with a counter-revolutionary aim in view, to achieve a political unification of the conflicting interests of the various bourgeois political groupings.

     Incidentally, we shouldn’t forget that Mussolinian fascism would never have come about in the first place, and Mussolini would have probably continued to militate inside the Italian Socialist Party if that party had supported the war like all the other national socialist parties in the 2nd International. It was the strong presence of the Left inside the party which had prevented Italian socialism from succumbing to the complete betrayal perpetrated by social-democracy (barring rare exceptions) in other countries. Fascism, an interventionist and democratic movement, was born in 1914 as a reaction to the Left’s classist and revolutionary approach, and it would be financed by the Entente via supporters in the French Socialist Party. In 1922, it would take power legally with the support of all the democratic parties and in alliance with the forces of Italian social-democracy. In fact, from a bourgeois legalistic standpoint, the fascist regime was legitimate leader of Italy throughout the twenties.

     The basis of the Left’s rigorous analysis wasn’t opinions but definite material and social foundations, and the authors of the International’s document therefore had to, somehow or other, settle accounts with it.  They would solve this problem in the classic way opportunism has always sought to solve it: by distinguishing between programme and tactics; betweentheory and practice.

     «Looked at from the general perspective of historical development – wrote the Executive Committee of the Communist International – the socialists are linked to fascism. They have proved this in their general attitude (…) towards fascism, from the electoral truce signed by the socialist and fascist parties (…) right up to the recent declarations in a fascist newspaper by D’Aragona and Baldesi, which proves that a year after Matteotti’s assassination the social-reformist leaders are seeking grounds for collaboration and understanding with fascism and deplore the hostility harboured by the working class against it (…) The socialists and the maximalists are linked to fascism by their defense of the capitalist order and capitalist interests against the proletarian revolution. Considered from a general historical perspective they therefore also form the left-wing of fascism. Our party’s tactics, however, whilst not losing sight of this general perspective, cannot in its day to day activity neglect the essential differences between the bourgeoisie’s various currents, so that they can be pitted against each other, and their influence among the momentarily disorientated working masses uprooted». The Left «since it could only see – continued the text – the general perspective, hadn’t understood that tactically the party must utilize the conflicts which exist in the bourgeoisie’s and fascism’s own camp».

     These were the blasphemies which the Communist International, not yet counter-revolutionary, had ended up formulating, these were the blasphemies which Gramsci and his group would repeat in Italy. And these same blasphemies would serve as the theoretical basis for the whole of the counter-revolutionary work of embracing democracy  – the appeal to “reasonable fascists” included – which would find its highest expression in the partisan coalitions, and still to this day keeps the proletariat chained to bourgeois democracy. The united front was therefore no longer considered  as a tactical instrument for unmasking the betrayal of the social-democratic leaders and uprooting their influence from the working masses, but as a means of exerting pressure in order to tip the scales this way or that in favour of one or another of the various conflicting groups within the bourgeoisie.

     The other point on which the International would base its criticism was the conception of the party and party organization. In its’ “Left Platform”, the Left had stated that «“The party is the organ that synthesizes and brings together the various individual and group initiatives provoked by the class struggle. Such a party organization must be capable of placing itself above particular categories, thereby enabling it to draw together into a synthesis elements deriving from the various sections of proletarians, from amongst the peasantry, and from amongst deserters from the bourgeois class, etc, etc.».

     This formulation, which had so scandalized the Italian leadership, would provoke the same reaction amongst the Comintern leaders, who (actually in a slightly more serious vein then their Italian epigones) were keen to detect in it the indubitable symptoms of menshevism: «If the social composition made room for deserters from the bourgeoisie – the Moscow Executive wrote – it would certainly be extremely perilous». As for the Italian centrists, they would simply accuse the Left of wanting to transform the party «Into an inter-classist organization, a synthesis of interests that it is absolutely impossible to synthesize» (L’Unità, July 7, 1925).

     In their dishonest campaign against the Left, the centrists weren’t interested in refuting their positions on doctrinal and tactical grounds, they didn’t pit their theses against the Left’s, but, resting secure in their position as monopolisers of the Party’s means of information and its executive organs, they would wage war using the most blatant distortions and denigrations. Very often, their articles were peppered with phrases such as the following: «It’s a mass of errors and rather ridiculous statements»; «It’s a load of rubbish lacking in common sense and a basic theoretical perspective»; «A farrago of commonplaces, spiced with a considerable dose of bad faith, charlatanry and demagoguery» etc, etc.

     The prediction that individual deserters from the bourgeois class would continue, as in the past, to side with the revolution and join the Communist Party was certainly no new discovery of the Italian left; neither was it was prompted by “lack of confidence” in the working class or a “pro-menshevik” stance. It was Marx who had declared that «as in former times, when part of the nobility went over to the side of the bourgeoisie, so now part of the bourgeoisie sides with the proletariat, particularly some of the bourgeois ideologists, who have arrived at an understanding of the historical movement as a whole». The Gramscian position in this regard was that the party, as understood by the Left, would have been fine in Marx and Engel’s day, when «It was restricted to registering working-class advances and undertaking propaganda work», but this was definitely not the case in the age of “Leninism”, when «The party leads the masses, directs the class struggle and doesn’t restrict itself to acting as a public notary».  Poor old Karl Marx, demoted to being a notary by Stalin’s epigones! With matters as they stand, the centrists continued, intellectuals can no longer play any role in the Communist Party, which is a proletarian party composed of proletarians.

     If it had been a matter of a serious confrontation of ideas, between the centrist tendency headed by Gramsci, and the Left, it would have been easy to reply to their criticisms by pointing out that neither Gramsci, Terracini, Togliatti, Scoccimarro nor Tasca, along with the vast majority of the party leaders, were proletarians, and, figures in hand, we could equally have shown that from 1923 onwards, under the Ordinovist leadership, the number of workers in leadership roles, both at the summit of the party and at local level, had considerably fallen compared to before.

     The question of safeguarding the party from the opportunist menace certainly wasn’t anything to do with ensuring a numerical proletarian “hegemony” inside the party by boycotting intellectuals, nor much less with “Bolshevising” it. The solution lay elsewhere, and it would be correctly expounded by the Left at the International’s 6th Enlarged Executive: «We will be told that what we are asking for is what all the right-wing elements are asking for as well; that we want territorial organizations, in whose assemblies the entire discussion is dominated by intellectuals and their long  speeches.  But the danger of demagoguery and being deceived by the leaders will always exist and it has existed since the proletarian party first arose; and yet neither Marx nor Lenin, who both dealt with this problem in depth, ever thought of resolving it through a boycott of intellectuals or non-proletarians. On the contrary, they constantly emphasized the historically necessary role of deserters from the dominant class in the revolution. It is well-known that generally opportunism and treachery infiltrate the party and the masses via certain leaders, but the struggle against this danger must be conducted by other means.  Even if the working class could manage without their leaders, agitators, journalists etc, it would  have no option but to go and find them within the workers’ ranks. However, the risk of these workers-become-leaders giving in to corruption and demagoguery is no different from that of intellectuals giving in to corruption and demagoguery. As everybody knows, in some cases it has been precisely ex-workers who have played the dirtiest roles in the workers’ movement. And finally, hasn’t the intellectual’s role been eliminated anyway by the factory cell organization as it is practiced today? Quite the reverse is true. Intellectuals, along with ex-workers, make up the party apparatus. The social role of these elements hasn’t changed and in fact has become more dangerous still. If we admit that these elements may be corrupted by their official status the difficulty remains because we have given them positions with a lot more responsibility than in the past.  In the small factory council meetings, the workers have in practice very little freedom of movement, they do not have enough members for their class instinct to influence the party. What we are warning about therefore is not the danger of a reduction in the influence of intellectuals, but, on the contrary, the fact that the workers in the factory cells are interested only in the immediate needs within their particular firm and are unable to see the wider problems of the general revolutionary development of their class». (L’Unità, July 7, 1925)

* * *

Even from an organizational point of view, opting for Lyons as the venue for the congress wasn’t a very judicious choice; indeed, it wasn’t due so much to a matter of security as to a precise political manoeuvre. The federation in Milan, which had managed to retain an effective organization and which had amongst its members the leaders of the party’s underground organization (known as L’Ufficio 1 – Office One) had offered the party’s leadership (the Centre), a suitable venue for a clandestine meeting in Milan.  Dozens of meeting-places were offered, with defence and security guaranteed by hundreds of experienced and trustworthy comrades. The Centre turned down the offer without even checking whether it was feasible. It had already been decided that the meeting was going to be held abroad. In order to get to the congress the delegates, already under police surveillance, had to cross the French border in secret. Their stay in France had to be just as secret because most of them possessed false documents. Once they’d arrived in Lyons the delegates had to meet in secret, moving from place to place because the Police were trying to track them down. Therefore, once the congress was over, their return to Italy was also illegal. But what having the congress in France allowed was for the leadership to have total and exclusive control over which delegates participated in the congress.

      The fact that 70 or so delegates were able to cross the frontier «under the noses of the border guards» is considered an enormous success by Stalinist historiography, and a clear example of the excellent functioning of the party’s illegal apparatus, by now purged of Left members. That, on the contrary, the Italian police knew their job very well, is demonstrated not only by the fact that more than one of the participants at the congress was arrested on returning to Italy, but above all by the fact that the fascist police had managed to identify Lyons as the venue of the congress, kept track of at least some of the more prominent representatives, and to have obtained, direct from France, a detailed account of the congress proceedings. At this point, we should ask how much the entire congress committee passing “under the noses of the guards” was due to the skill of the leaders of the PCd’I’s underground apparatus, and how much instead to fascism’s wish to allow the congress proceedings to be left “undisturbed”. Benito Mussolini, the ex-leftwing revolutionary, must have enjoyed what was going on inside the Communist Party (the only genuine anti-fascist party – not because it was democratic but because it was anti-capitalist) seeing the pro-Stalinist, and therefore pro-Russian, wing leading an extremely violent battle, pulling no punches, to overpower and drive out the revolutionary current from the party once and for all.

     A clear example of how the party had been “prepared” to defeat the Left we can see in a L’Unità article (June 12, 1925) entitled “Internal Democracy and Freedom of Discussion”. It provides clear evidence of the Jesuitism of the centrists. In a few words the article announces, more than six months before the event, that, whatever the congress’s verdict, the centrists would win anyway, because they were on the same side as the International. «The comrades in the “Comitato d’Intesa” reason in this way: the principle of democratic centralism is only valid in the periods between congresses (…) In the period just before a congress however things change (…) The Central Committee stays in charge to get the current business dealt with, in order to ensure continuity in the functioning of the party, but it has no right to make use of its position, to use “its  power” to further the interests of the current of thought whose exponent they are. They should place themselves on the terrain of “free competition” with the other currents and on the same terms (…) This conception is profoundly erroneous. We can state this without being guilty of party “Giolittism”. The theses we are contesting would be correct if the programme and directives of a communist party derived from no other source than free discussion and competition between ideas, and the C.C no other investiture than that of the electoral response of the party membership.(…) In a Communist Party things are different (…) the membership of a particular party is not the unique arbiter and can’t make sovereign decisions about the rightness and correctness of the various opinions and currents. There is always an opinion or a current that is in a “privileged” position, that must prevail and that must be made to prevail. And it is the one taken up by the Communist International, accepted and sanctioned by the world congresses of all sections of the International».

     First of all, the article is an obvious confession that the centrist fraction was in a clear minority inside the party, but apart from this, the priest-like methodology is very much in evidence:  the centrists seeming to be raising a correct idea, and one which the Italian Left had always defended, namely, that it isn’t admissible for a communist party to carry out policies at a local level which run contrary to those sanctioned by the International congresses. It was the Italian Left who had repeatedly affirmed this requirement, adding moreover that at the head of a national party there had to be representatives of the current which best harmonized with the Comintern’s directives. And the proof of maximum coherence with which the Left professed it was given in 1923 when it spontaneously gave up (after our insistent requests) the leadership of the party, despite the fact that virtually the entire membership subscribed to its policies.

     The Left has never asked for democratic guarantees as it has never recognized the thaumaturgical function of the democratic method. Democracy has always been considered by communists as a tool of deception through which the dominant class exerts its dictatorship. The fact that the democratic method may be utilised even by the party of the working class, during a certain phase of its development, certainly doesn’t mean that communists accept it on principle.  In fact the sooner they emerge from this phase the better.

      The party had already stated in 1922 that «It is not a good thing to make a principle of employing the democratic mechanism.  Alongside its duty to consult, analogous to the legislative function of the state apparatus, the party has an executive responsibility which directly corresponds, during the supreme moments of the struggle, to that of an army, and requires maximum hierarchical discipline (…) We can’t see how the majority of the party can be expected to aprioristically make the right decision as if it were an infallible judge (…) Even in an organization like the party, where the composition of the membership is the result of selection, through voluntary and spontaneous commitment, and the regulation of recruitment, the majority’s verdict is not per se the best one (…) The democratic mechanism has been for us a material tool, instrumental in the construction of our internal organization and the formulation of our statutes: it isn’t an indispensable policy. That is why we will never make a principle of the famous organizational formula “democratic centralism”. For us, democracy can never be a principle».(“The Democratic Principle”, Rassegna Comunista, no. 18, February, 28, 1922).

     Back in 1922 the Left was already hoping that the “Democratic Centralism” formula would be dropped, proposing: «that the communist party base its organization on ’organic centralism’ ». Clearly this would represent a point of arrival, when correct tactical policies had managed to arrive at complete homogeneity within the party, over and beyond currents and fractions.  To reject and repress the democratic process and the existence of fractions, whilst maintaining the democratic form of consultation and engaging during the Congress in the most bitter political battle against dissenters represented instead a clear example of fractionism from above and the adoption of the worst of democratic methods, i.e., Giolitti’s.

     By exploiting the fact that it was impossible for many sections to get their votes sent through, the manoevring of the leadership would dramatically distort the fact of the Left’s still predominant majority in the party, which was admitted even by the centrists. However, at the time of the Lyons Congress, despite all the ruses deployed by the party Centre, the Left still retained a majority inside the party. Despite the “filters” put in their way by the party leaders, at Lyons there was a roughly equivalent number of delegates on both sides.  As for the famous “base” it was extremely difficult to consult because the fascists, as everyone was well aware, were in control in Italy and therefore section meetings, and especially the provincial federation congresses, hadn’t been very effective due to the need for all activity to be conducted in secret.

     Still, the centrist leaders had a rather clever idea: it was arranged that any registered party member who hadn’t managed to cast a vote either for the leadership or the Left would be calculated as having voted in favour of the leadership’s theses. Even the possibility of abstaining was denied as any abstentions were calculated as having voted for the Gramscian centre as well. Considering that the preparatory work for the congress had started back in 1925, the membership roll was, in theory, that of 1925 anyway. If the Left’s effective voting strength at Lyons was 10% of the previous year’s membership, it was easy to attribute to the Centre the 90% which was claimed!

     Further evidence that the parliamentarist method had really put down its roots in the International and in the Italian party’s leadership is provided by the fact that (in the name of that most noxious of bourgeois democrat hypocrisies – the “representation of minorities”) the Left was forced – on pain of expulsion if it refused – to join the new leadership of the party.  The Left’s representatives, just as when they had voluntarily surrendered the direction of the party to Gramsci’s group in 1923, were refusing now to participate in the leadership; not to “sabotage the party”, not in a spirit of a fractionism, but because they considered it inadmissible to take on the burden of an executive whom they considered to be in conflict with the programmatic foundations of revolutionary Marxism. The Left’s proposal was, as usual, a very loyal one «We give you our assurance that we will not engage in fractionist work, that we will not attempt to carry out any fractionist activity. We also reiterate our offer to collaborate on the periphery of the party, but wish to be excluded from participation in the leadership. On the other hand, since there is nothing in our statutes that can to compel us, we beg you not to impose this measure by force».

     Humbert-Droz, the Comintern’s representative, threatened the Left comrades that: «They must work wholly within the party, in an active manner, in the posts they are appointed to (…) or else they will have to be expelled». Thus it came about that two of the Communist Left comrades, the current accused of menshevism, anarchism, syndicalism, and opportunism, were obliged to join the party’s central committee. The Lyons Congress would conclude with a statement from the Left which openly condemned the traitors on the march, citing not so much the fraudulent vote-count, but rather the hypocritical sham of putting two men of the Left in the new leadership.
     Against the use of such methods, and the outcome which had been obtained in such a fraudulent manner, the Left would have no other recourse but to appeal to the Comintern’s Control Commission. The Control Commission refused to examine the Left’s accusations against the PCd’I’s leadership, and of this official complaint nothing further was heard.

* * *

     In 1970, in our collection of fundamental party texts entitled “In Difesa della Continuità del Programma Comunista”, we wrote: «The Lyons Congress took place only a few months after the Russian party’s 14th Congress at which virtually the entire Bolshevik old guard, starting with Kamenev and Zinoviev, rose up in a protest, as passionate as it was unexpected, against the “embellishment of the NEP”; against the “Peasants Enrich Yourself” slogan of Bukharin and the “red professors”, against the stifling regime installed by Stalin within the party. And only a month after the Lyons Congress the 6th Enlarged Executive of the Communist International would turn the big guns of bureaucratic oratory on the only international force which had stood up and denounced the profound crisis in the Comintern, the “Italian” Left in fact, and it would thereby pave the way for the later stigmatisation of the Russian Opposition in November and December.

 The international Communist movement had reached its fatal crossroads and, just as at the 14th congress of the Russian Communist Party Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Krupskaya, had been conscious of expressing in their words the revolt of one set of social and material forces against another within the ambit of the Russian State (forces which were a thousand times more powerful than the particular individuals taking their turns at the rostrum), so also on the international plane the Italian Left knew that its body of draft theses – which as usual, overstepped the narrow confines of the “Italian Question” and examined the entire, global field of communist tactics – was the expression of a historic course, which in the space of a few months would flow through China and, due to a rare and for many years unique convergence of objective circumstances, England; that is, through both a semi-colonial country and the imperialist metropolis par excellence.

 The year of the supreme test was 1926 and, in the final analysis, the outcome of the titanic struggles fought by the Chinese workers and peasants and the British proletariat would determine the destiny of both Soviet Russia and the Communist International. During 1926 the Russian Opposition would sense the terrible urgency of unravelling the tangled knots which were building up in the toothcomb of history, and Trotski and Zinoviev would smooth over past differences in order to form a desperate coalition against the looming peril of the counter-revolutionary forces. Trotski in particular would put up a remarkable fight, and emerge defeated only towards the end of 1927. The defeat of the Russian Opposition, the failure of the Chinese revolution, and the defeat of the General Strike in England would mark the destruction of the entire international communist movement».

The rebirth of the world communist party, and a move back onto advanced revolutionary terrain by proletarians the world over, will require that we obstinately and intransigently revive and follow the programme which was cast aside in 1926.