While social democracy, competing with all others in equivocations and lies, scurries towards Montecitorio the Communist Party fights, steadfastly, for the dictatorship of the proletariat

Il Comunista, May 19, 1921

We know the results of the electoral gazzarre very piecemeal. We do not tremble at this.

The Communist Party, alone among all parties and pseudo-parties, has not, while old men and old ideas are fighting for the conquest of the yearned for badges, uttered a single word with the aim of gaining a vote for its list, or just some sympathy. Rigidly it waved its flag that ignores contradictions and retreats with a firm hand.

Firmly bound to the discipline of the 3rd International, it has faithfully interpreted its electionist tactics; exploiting the convocation of electoral rallies to spread among the proletarian masses the revolutionary word, denial of any positive value to the parliamentary institution, the genuine expression of the bourgeois dictatorship with a democratic slant.

The bourgeois newspapers hasten, commenting on the election results, to document with accurate statistics the failure of our party. These funny gasconades will be a source of good cheer for us. If we were aiming – like the party to which we belonged until yesterday – at the conquest of power through the parliamentary institution, then we would only have cause for sadness, but we, on the other hand, have written on our flag: ‘We also go to parliament to fight against parliament, against all bourgeois institutions’.

Nor will we protest, rail with empty chatter against the violence used by the bourgeoisie to forge for itself – among its other aims – a parliament containing only its defenders or its tame opponents. We say instead: it is right that it should be so; indeed: it is necessary that it should be so. If the bourgeoisie, with all its weapons, did not defend itself, this would be an indication of our weakness, but the bourgeoisie defends itself – and in order to defend itself it has found it necessary to be the first to offend – this proves our strength.

We know that even the proletarians who did not cast their ballot for us today – and we therefore do not blame them – will only be with us tomorrow, when, forced by the inflexible dialectic of necessity, they will leap over all the bourgeois-democratic lies and through overwhelming violence conquer power for themselves through the great days of insurrection.

Animated by this unshakeable faith – which repeats its origins in the Marxist doctrine ever more victoriously affirmed by the evidence of facts – we know no other way to comment on the outcome of today’s contest of exhibitionism and invertebrate contortions than with our unchanging cry: Long live the revolution!

THE SAFE TRACK

We write while the outcome of the election cannot yet be known to us. In these hours of anticipation, we are certain that we are, among the participants in the struggle, the only ones immune from the anxieties of the last waits, that we are infinitely above the repugnant game of the basest resources and the vilest ploys to which, once again, the ignoble mechanism of the bourgeois democratic system has made us witness.

The fantastic jumble of figures who stand out in the opposing camps, and who are, to a very great extent, the same ones who once, with the same acts, in the same spirit and under the fire of our same contempt, danced their careerist saraband in other groupings and combinations, makes us smile with compassion; but looking into this abyssal whirlpool of political degeneration does not make us dizzy, because we are too solidly planted on unshakable ground, because we have too firm a sense of direction towards the goal to which we tend, because we too proudly feel, amidst the despicable contortions of these people, that we are still and always on the same path and under the same flag.

The magnetic storm that dazzles and inebriates them all in the sadistic eve of their basest appetites of groups and individuals, cannot make our compass go haywire, make us fail our course.

What more do we have than all these rutting people? What distinguishes us from them? One little thing on which, time after time, they have rained down the foam of their sophistry and irony without succeeding in dismantling us: our consistency with a doctrine and a faith.

We repeated and repeat in the manifold contingencies and vicissitudes of political life, which from the daily chronicle presses on today in a precipitous becoming of history, what for our critics of today and of a thousand other previous moments is a sterile formulary, outdated by the weird gimmicks of which each of them boasts himself as the repository: coherence, discipline, intransigence of thought and action.

We believed and believe in a trace of history – oh, simplistic, schematic, abstract, gentlemen interpreters of reality! – along whose path an unceasing struggle separates the opposing classes, at the end of which there is in the flames of revolution the overthrow of this hated regime. We followed and continue to follow this path with the same conviction and faith that it is the goal, with the same decision to fight for it and for it alone.

From the other shores did they see us go and say we were mad or criminals? From our ranks, on a hundred occasions, for a hundred reasons, with a hundred arguments, hundreds broke away, trying to persuade us, or insulting us, as we were foolish not to realise that the path had to be changed, that it was not the great track of history but one of the many blind alleys of illusion and theorisation; that not to leave it meant not knowing how to go further than the terminal wall against which our useless stubbornness would ridiculously clash.

Well, it is interesting to take a look at all of them at a time when the erotic zeal of the electoral challenge makes them abandon all restraint and all memory of past commitments – is it not the intelligent and superior political practice of these people that is so much more enlightened and skilful than our flat monotony, the first rule of what was done and said? – in which they most obscenely indulge in their instinctive poses revealing their being.

All of them, as they left, pretended to ‘surpass’ us, to remove themselves from our course so as not to share our shipwreck and to draw shores we had not glimpsed, some pitied us, others vilified us, all of them had something to teach us that it was our fault for not understanding.

Is it worthwhile to review distinctly the different groups, the different ‘types’ of deserters? The different ‘discoveries’ of our errors that they made and the different formulations of new truths that they paraded before our astonished eyes, looking down on us, making of our disciplinary sanctions, in whose effectiveness we had and still have the naivety to believe, the halo of martyrdom? Should we take a raid through the thousand heresies that we, tireless red priests, ruthless and hardened custodians of dogma, have condemned, recall the thousand forms of violation of our intransigence that in so many and so many circumstances were perpetrated by intriguing with the elements of the opposing class, pontificating to explain to us that true socialism was not the [an illegible word] and shrivelled socialism in which we had crystallised, but that which with refinements of criticism and tactics was adapted to colonial or national war, to Masonic practices and electoral blockade concoctions and to a thousand other more or less glorious enterprises. ..

Resuming the polemic with all these degenerative deviations, reducing them to the result of subsequent facts that we have been waiting for in the same critical position, and which we set in a victorious ascertainment of the rightness of our views, but which the others experienced each time under different visual angles in their sublime excursions between the various schools of social doctrine and the very different colours of the political alignments, this is not the task of this article but the balance of our entire party battle that is made up of study, criticism, preparation and action.

But it is worth noting the common (monotonously, flatly common) direction that all of them, starting from very different, as we say above, attitudes and postures, end up taking, bartering that merit in which it pleased them to change our heavy rule of continuity into one doctrine and one discipline, the direction of originality, of novelty, of mutability towards new and previously unknown things.

They all told us, when leaving us, beautiful things, and with the same complacency the bourgeois audience felt their decadent sensibilities tickled by the new and peregrine intellectual gimmicks of those who opposed our constant and uniform asininity. Those who set off towards the new discoveries of an economy for which the old Marx was a beginner, those who declared our historical materialism stinking of rancidity in the face of the luminous gimmicks of modern thought and fashionable philosophers, those who scoffed at our messianic historical expectations of a revolutionary development that a shrewder study of reality proved to be relegated to the realm of illusions, each left our platform looking as if they were setting foot on a higher step. Instead, they all descended, in the same way, into the most lubricious depths of politicking! And the history of one is the history of all, and they all hate us and fight us today from the same front and with the same weapons with which we were offended when they were among us.

Somebody, endowed with culture and cerebral sparkle, said that theories, to which we clung like oysters to a rock, are rafts for crossing an obstacle that cuts our path, but once on the other shore we must abandon them. Others who happened to be with us against these and similar heresies, discovered afterwards with an arrogance equal to their flippancy (and preached with equal superiority over our discoloured insistence on the usual theorems), that by ‘overcoming’ – and whoever has nothing to overcome, let him come forward! –  our old conceptions of party relations, of the left and the right, it is asserted that the truly modern, innovative movement, the one that buries our idealistic carrion, is the one that makes an honour and a boast of betrayal and desertion and, by destroying the manifestations of communism with all forms of violence, fights not against our mirages of a new civilisation, but against the dark barbarism that we are plotting…

Everyone possesses an allegedly original formulation of the same faithless behaviour. War, in the extreme decomposition of all the manifestations of an epoch, has honed this morbid capacity to chisel into formal prostitution very old and notorious substantial shames.

Just look at them, these cerebrals of political hyper-revolutions in electoral travail. You see how terribly they resemble each other, how they practise the same traditional compromises, how they follow, not each one his own particular and harsh path towards the future, but the same path, pressing on, fighting with their elbows to achieve the same goals and the same conquest, which, when it is the last and ultimate conquest, is a livery.

In order to understand the complicated and differentiated development of these champions of the most modern politics, there was really no need to follow their elevation, from an apprenticeship made among us in the audacities of revolutionary ideas, to alleged higher spheres of research, knowledge and activity… they are much less incomprehensible, and in their spiritual complications one finds a vulgar simplicity, a monotony that is very old and well-known. They had contempt for our unattractive single-minded function as custodians of an idea and a method; to follow multicoloured fashions, for a uniformity that is the most horrendous, they lost the merit of coherence and seriousness but did not gain that of originality and novelty… Harlequin’s multicoloured suit in his somersaults appears a dull and fetid grey, if the colours of the spectrum are recomposed in the monochromatic light of black and white.

In order to understand them, it is pointless to rehash the refinements of their politics against us. They are far, far lower! It is not to elements of a very modern criticism that we will resort to in order to decipher them. Their figure is well known, it has been drawn long ago, it is the most stereotypical that traditions have consecrated. It is that of the politician who treads the witty boards of Greek comedy in the fifth century B.C., who reappeared as subject to literary satire, in all epochs, up to the Rabagas and the excellence of modern dramas and operettas, who delights today’s audiences in the clamorous and solemn revues.

It is the jumble of vulgar pushiness, which is performed on its universal theatre, the filthy stage of bourgeois parliamentarianism. But the boards are eaten by woodworms, and the abyss is open beneath the feet of the obscene characters of human comedy, of the tragedy of this agony of a regime.

Far from them we follow on our sure track. It is not only the ardour of a faith or the tension of a will that build our constancy and tenacious security. It is the continual testing of an unceasing proof, a work that transcends personal attitudes and activities, and that in the fate of every adverse movement, school, sub-school, reconfirms the certainty that has emerged from our doctrine, from its incessant elaboration in the crucible of reality by the multitudes that, by becoming restless, consecrate it in the formidable unity of their effort and go, on that same track, to the final collision that nothing will resist.

THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

We interpret what has happened by trying to keep out of the clichés of parliamentarist interpretation, since for us parliamentarism is not the only terrain for the parties and political forces to meet and confront each other; on the contrary, it is the most equivocal and deceptive terrain.

Today’s Italian situation is all the more interesting to study insofar as it is [an unreadable line] and legal, and elections are merely a datum of the ongoing political process, never the conclusion or even the index for the definitive judgement on the character of this process.

* * *

Recapitulating the precedents, as they are presented in the interpretation we have constantly given them, and which we want to extend to the explanation of the most recent phase, to see if it keeps shedding light on the facts without receiving denials or corrections from them, the post-war elections constituted the venting of the discontent of the proletarian classes against the damage and consequences of the war wanted by the ruling class. The class party should have had the task of clarifying and organising this negative tendency into a positive direction of programme and action. But the Italian proletarian party, the socialist party, was not up to this task due to the incomplete formation of its structure and training. It adopted a revolutionary programme, but more out of a necessity to formulate the negatively revolutionary pressure of the masses anyway, and out of the convenience of finding it beautiful and formulated in the events of the Russian revolution, poorly understood to boot, than because it was intrinsically capable of deducing it as a mature conscience and experience of its past work, from which it had only been able to draw formulas whose value in solving radical post-war problems was zero, such as aversion to war and formal intransigence.

The programme served the party to gain the confidence of the masses, not to give them something that would increase and define their power of real intervention in the political social conflict. Thrown into the election, the party fearfully embraced its programme set-ups, and devised no other way to translate them into tactical action than by waving them as an electoral flag.

With the ‘avalanche’ of proletarian votes for the socialist party converged the instinctive impatience of the masses with their traditional participation in the social-democratic mechanism of normal times. Therefore, determined by the tremendous crisis underway, the 1919 elections served above all to immobilise the masses’ expectation and need for struggle in the electoral experiment with its unusual results – 160 deputies! – and to exempt the party from the further travail of translating the theoretical promises adopted under the very real pressure of the situation into facts and deeds by other means and to test and temper them [two lines illegible].

All this, while balancing the crisis in the bourgeois world, brought crisis into the party by imposing the split in it. The split came about as the detachment of that part that had understood how different the path and task of the revolutionary party had to be through the becoming of the class struggle in Italy.

The communist party resumed, or rather continued its work as the extreme minority of the old party, in giving the ideal and tactical revolutionary preparation a basis of serious consistency [an illegible line] consequences of this disastrous counter-revolutionary process – counter-revolutionary not because it traded the sure card of the revolution, but because it wasted its best cards in the game of class struggle, losing the most useful periods for revolutionary preparation; all the more counter-revolutionary for having concealed the defeatist reflections of its work under the trappings of its programmatic declarations.

Meanwhile, the unfolding of the situation precipitated. We had the fascist reaction, of which we have spoken so much in order to establish its characters. The ruling class felt at a certain point that the proletariat was no longer a pacifically administrable matter for it, a docile instrument of social activities. At a certain point, the working masses, even if still unable to conquer their own suitable regime equilibrium, demonstrate with a thousand manifestations the incompatibility of functioning any longer as the central engine of the present social machine. The time spent organising the revolutionary offensive, the specific task of the class political party, a capacity that the party must therefore possess, formed through past struggles and mistakes, clarity of historical vision and disciplined capacity for movement, does not delay the violent struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie, which is in the fatal consequences of an irrepressible, unchangeable state of affairs by the bourgeoisie, even if the revolutionary pressure does not clamp down on it. The bourgeoisie launches its offensives. This offensive has had fascism as a protagonist among us.

Let us say it again. The gross error would be to believe that this offensive has as its aim a change in the current political institutional relations, an impairment of democratic forms. This is the error of social democrats stemming from the fact that they admit that democratic forms guarantee freedom of movement and subsequent conquests for the working masses, whereas it is for Marxist communists a fundamental truth that they only guarantee bourgeois rule, and at some point the working class if it wants to breathe must confront and break them.

By anticipating the struggle, the bourgeoisie does not alter its objective of defending the democratic regime against the proletariat’s effort to violently overcome its cadres and realise its dictatorship; the only possible terrain in the current situation for its conquests. Just as in the proletarian offensives in Russia and Germany, history has proved our fundamental theorem that bourgeois reaction and the democratic regime are concomitant, allying the white forces with the socialists who believe in democracy, against the communists who want to destroy it, so in the offensive aspects of this struggle from the bourgeois point of view the term of contention is the same: bourgeois democracy against proletarian dictatorship.

The bourgeoisie is not overshadowed by the ‘free’ representation of the working class in parliament; it is only overshadowed by the fact that this can be the expression of forces ready to attack outside the parliamentary system, against the system itself.

The bourgeoisie needs to turn to its defence the political forces still relevant to the proletariat, who sign a promissory note on the observance of democratic and parliamentary methods of struggle.

Bourgeois fascism in Italy had therefore attacked to avoid the revolutionary anti-parliamentary offensive, not to suppress the function of social democrats within the proletariat, but to disarm them of any revolutionary intentions, even verbal ones.

That fascism was in principle ready to take the struggle to bloodless parliamentary terrain is shown by the way it welcomed the dissolution of the Chamber, enthusiastically accepting the electoral battle.

* * *

After the split, the socialist party did not formally renege on the revolutionary programme it had adopted, it did not openly declare that the intention to use violent methods to overthrow the current political and social regime had to be abandoned, but in the face of the fascist offensive it gave the word not to accept the challenge and to fight on ‘legal’ ground. The renunciation was implicit, as it did not invoke transitory reasons and momentary relations of forces, but socialism’s principled repugnance to violent methods. The socialist party prepared the general elections as a means to repel the violent offensive of the bourgeoisie and give the proletariat the chance to resume an upward path, on which there was no longer any mention of what forms of social change would be found. The party neither said nor could say anything more precise about the path that electoral action would open up to the masses. In 1919 this preluded, at least in noisy declarations, to extra-legal revolutionary action. Initiated by the bourgeoisie, the struggle is rejected in order to fall back on parliamentary terrain. To do what? To show that the fascist offensive did not take away the party’s electoral strength to hold those positions. But the fascist offensive aims to exclude them from serving as a starting point for revolutionary preparation. To take them back without this value is to have lost them, to the effects of the development of action then being exhibited to the masses.

It is a terrible vicious circle that today [an illegible line] at the point where it fatally closes in on itself. Fascism does not want to suppress the electoral regime. If it wanted to, if it really did prevent the democratic mechanism from functioning, this would only make the tactical line adopted by the socialist party more absurd: respond with the ballot paper. If you can’t use the ballot, you either have to return empty-handed or accept the battle with other weapons; in either case the socialist tactical formula is ridiculously destroyed.

But the socialist party was not prevented from making use of the electoral machine. It did not find itself completely in the position of having to declare that it was renouncing the struggle, without attempting to respond with violence to the adversary’s overpowering. It only needed to threaten this passive withdrawal for the opponents, who are not only supporters of the parliamentary system but who have come to understand that the true bourgeois application of this system lies in the participation of the proletariat in its mechanism, to renounce systematically preventing the exercise of the vote and only to do so, accentuating it in certain areas, through violence, corruption and fraud, which, apart from the measure of it this time, is an inevitable characteristic of the electoral system.

The socialist party gave the word to go to the polls, promising that from the disciplined execution of this watchword by the proletarian masses would come the best response to fascism.

Today the response has come, today the socialist party, facilitated by the detachment of the extremist communist elements, who counted themselves with an unusual electoral discipline, not with the formula of grabbing votes but with rules of opposite effect – and found themselves in comforting numbers, when all circumstances are taken into account, and it must be remembered that electoral lotteries are disastrous accidents from the proletarian and revolutionary point of view – today, however, when that figure of elected members or votes, which according to the latest clamorous official socialist preaching constitutes a real force, a decisive coefficient of political action, is assured, with great complacency with our former comrades, they must say what they want to do with it.

Since, unfortunately but predictably, a great many workers’ votes have concentrated on socialist lists, this question must be propagated among those voters.

There are two hypotheses. Either the socialist party retains the vision of revolutionary class action according to the Bologna programme, and then it was only waiting for electoral success in order to boost the morale of the masses, to re-establish in the proletariat that offensive capacity it had had in recent years and which appeared to have been lost, and then the momentum of victory had to be turned immediately into a counter-offensive against fascism.

By 15 May this had already taken shape. In many places the proletarians, communists in the front row, fought real battles with the whites, the balance of which was unfavourable, perhaps for the first time, to the latter. The wave of proletarian awakening was about to overwhelm them. Perhaps a similar application of the morale boost produced by the ballot box statistics was possible. Government, bourgeoisie, fascism, had a moment’s hesitation. They had to be hit. Maniples of communists did so in many places, but the word was with the party around which the most votes were polarised. Now the facts have already shown that that was not the directive of the P.S.I. Once again its word is disarm. Once again, it may well be said, it betrays by restraining the masses. The document is in the directorate’s latest proclamation, in all its manifestos exhorting proletarian voters to shun acts of violence, excessively ostentatious demonstrations, to ‘contain joy’.

Then the directive must be a different one. The use of electoral force, the socialist party must propose it on another level. Which one? It is the other hypothesis. This hypothesis has but one name: collaboration.

The socialists may formally deny it as much as they want. If they do not tend towards collaboration, to what further development of action must their electoral success, to which they attribute thaumaturgical virtues, lead? Is it perhaps the votes, the parliamentary mandates, an end in themselves? And if so, is this not another deception played on the masses?

The socialists might say that they will work for … other elections. In that case they still confirm their social-democratic directive. But in that case, the facts still confirm that this directive a dead end. The great electoral success already existed in 1919. Fascism has revealed its insubstantiality by demonstrating in the southern light that one hundred and fifty deputies are not even a sufficient defence for the proletariat’s achievements in the face of white violence. The proletariat responded by re-electing almost as many, we grant it. But to do what? Nothing! the socialist party answers! The situation had, from the revolutionary point of view, become so poisoned that this further turn in the vicious circle was necessary. Soon the workers will realise where social-democratic electoral success will lead [some words illegible] one cannot eternally turn in on oneself, the socialists will take the big step towards bourgeois collaboration.

The Communist Party is at its post. Ready to fulfil its mission. In spite of the boastfulness of vote-hunters, facts work for it.