Chapter 5: The Struggle for a Split in the Italian Socialist Party

The Communist Abstentionist Fraction

After the Bologna Congress, the abstentionist communist left did not, indeed could not, break with the PSI. The one truly communist fraction was temporarily imprisoned when Italian maximalism “repainted” itself by adopting a programme compatible with the Moscow theses. For this reason, after the vote of October 8, 1919 at the Bologna Congress, the PSI’s abstentionist communist delegates published a decision which affirmed:

«Given the resolution with which the great majority of the congress has adopted the electoral tactic, they [the abstentionists] reassert their view that such a tactic contradicts the Maximalist programme, the methods of the Third International and the Italian proletariat’s preparation for revolutionary action; and that a clear separation between the followers of the social democratic method and the followers of the communist method is inevitable; however the delegates have decided to propose to the sections they represent that they remain within the Italian Socialist Party, whilst desisting from abstentionist propaganda amongst the masses, for reasons of discipline; they declare the establishment in the party of the Communist Abstentionist Fraction, and invite all sections and groups who agree with the programme presented to the congress to join it.» (Il Soviet, October 20, 1919)

Thus Il Soviet was reorganized, not to be the organ of the Socialist Federation of Naples, but as the organ of the fraction which had been constituted on a national level.

For its part, the “Ordine Nuovo” group was completely aligned with the Maximalist positions, as shown by its article of the October 18, significantly entitled The Unity of the Party. In the months following the congress, the fraction attempted to strengthen international ties, especially with Moscow, which had greeted the result of the Bologna Congress as a success for international communism, and cited Lazzari and Serrati as representatives of the left!

Il Soviet fully accepted the positions expressed by the First Congress of the Communist International, whilst favoring a greater rigidity in the criteria for admission, including the barring of economic organizations. The fraction addressed two letters to the Comintern (one dated November 11, 1919, the other January 11, 1920), but unfortunately, both of these ended up in the hands of the Italian police. These letters explained the differences with the majority over the incompatibility of the right belonging to the party. In the letters, Serrati’s maximalism was diagnosed as equivalent to the centrism of the German Independents denounced by the Bolsheviks. In addition, Ordine Nuovo’s lack of clarity was pointed out, confusing as it did those political organisms, the Soviets, with economic organisms. In its second letter, the fraction showed how the general elections of November 1919 in Italy had proved that electoral activity excluded any other, especially revolutionary activity. The fraction also denounced the German workerists, who didn’t differentiate between participation in parliament and participation in trade unions, and who consequently proposed the abandonment of the latter. Finally, the letters affirmed the necessity for the formation of a Communist Party, separate from the Italian Socialist Party.

Unmasking False Maximalism of Centrism

Precisely by virtue of its constitution, the PSI was totally incapable of leading a proletarian revolution, as was shown by the failure of the revolutionary movements in 1920. This was the result of a policy conciliating a Marxist verbalism with an opportunist practice, which would bring the party to overtly counter-revolutionary positions. The formidable proletarian actions in the class struggle set the party the task of preparing for the seizure of power. But to achieve this, unity of doctrine and discipline in the proletarian organism was essential. And this was what the Second Congress of the C.I., with its famous twenty-one conditions of admission, would seek to bring about.

Therefore, the Italian Abstentionist Fraction didn’t just attack those reformists openly allied to the bourgeoisie (Turati, D’Aragona, etc.), but above all Serrati’s false maximalism, which followed a policy with disastrous results for the revolution; a policy denounced by the fraction from the rostrum of the Second Congress of the International.

In effect, even if the PSI’s old Genoa programme was modified in a revolutionary direction at the Bologna Congress of 1919, the fact remained that the Maximalist majority tolerated the presence in the party of those who denigrated the new programme and refused to break with the old one. The PSI had joined the Communist International, but in such a way that in substance it remained the old pre-war party, pursuing its reformist and electoral policy. Self-styled maximalism, which we defined as centrism, really didn’t possess a scrap of revolutionary preparation.

In the review Rassegna Comunista of June 30, 1921 we said:

«What did the majority at Bologna know of the International’s positions of principle and tactics? Less than nothing. Most didn’t distinguish between the idea of the conquest of power and that of the expropriation of the capitalists, and they had no notions about the problem of union action or on any other question. The impending election overshadowed everything else, and stifled a new departure in the old disagreements, inevitably maturing below the surface, which loomed up with regard to the tactic to be carried out during the war. Thus was made possible the formation of that Serratian bloc, lacking in any homogeneity, which could only be broken up by a better diffusion of communist consciousness, together with painful experiences in the field of action.»

In fact, the party’s complete lack of preparation for revolution permitted the sabotage action by its right wing. The role of saboteur performed by the reformists became clear at the time when a grave economic crisis had pushed the proletariat to undertake a struggle with revolutionary connotations. This struggle was to culminate in the workers occupation of the factories and lands. In that moment, the party’s task should have been to lead and unite the struggles with a view to the conquest of political power, but, in the National Council (composed of party and union representatives) called amidst the struggles, the reformists successfully propagated the concept that the movement had a purely economic goal and was non-political and that therefore the leadership had to be left in the hands of the unions, not in those of the party! The government didn’t dare use armed force against the workers’ movement, but it was the reformists who came to the aid of the bourgeois State by establishing negotiations on the basis of economic demands alone, and this could only bring about the liquidation of the movement.

For the class struggle to reach its objectives it was therefore necessary to eliminate the reformist ideology, whether overt or camouflaged, from the party. The Abstentionist Fraction had always been conscious of this, and it knew that the “purification” of the party could come about solely by means of a split and the consequent formation of a new party.

In essence the PSI placed itself on the same level as the other social-democratic parties that were sunk in social-patriotism. The Bologna Congress, which continued to tolerate the reformist presence in the party, had, with its new programme, merely given a revolutionary veneer to a non-revolutionary organization.

After the parliamentary elections of November 16, 1919, in which 156 seats were won by the Socialist Party, the indiscipline of the MPs and the inertia of the union bodies, combined with the paralysis of the party, forced the leadership to hold a National Council meeting in Florence on January 11, 1920. This was done with the aim of saving the Right, and so to protect the leadership itself against an extreme left which was daily gaining positions on a national level. At this meeting the fraction was represented by Verdaro, but only as an observer. Il Soviet of February 8, 1920 was obliged to say that once again the Maximalist leaders had, in both practical and theoretical terms, shown themselves to be totally out of their depth.

The fraction concerned itself more with the definition of the programmatic basis of the new party than with the problem of the split. In Il Soviet, during the first quarter of 1920, there appeared a long series of articles on the nature and function of the Soviets in polemic with Ordine Nuovo, and on the European and world communist movement. As far as the Communist Abstentionist Fraction were concerned, the Ordinovists were situated on the same terrain as the German councilists of the KAPD.

The PSI’s National Council (held from April 18-22, 1920) reflected the serious internal tensions provoked by the class struggles in Italy, and the deficiencies of the party. During the great «clock hands» strike, which from its beginnings in Turin that March had spread throughout Piedmont, both the party’s leadership and that of the CGL were opposed to a nationwide extension of the action. At the National Council confidence in the leadership was confirmed yet again: 26,000 votes in favor, 10,000 against. Our comrade intervened on the question of the Soviets.

National Conference in Florence, May 1920

The Communist Abstentionist Fraction of the PSI therefore met again in Florence on May 8-9, 1920. Beside the delegates from the socialist sections and groups belonging to the fraction and its Central Committee, the following attended: for the PSI leadership, Gennari; for the Socialist Youth Federation, Capitta; Misiano for a communist tendency which had proposed a non-abstentionist agenda at the Socialist Conference held some days before in Milan; Gramsci represented those who on the same occasion had supported the no confidence vote against the PSI leadership. An appeal from the Western Secretariat of the Communist International was read out, which concluded with a call for the establishment of a communist party with the ability – beyond divergences on minor issues such as electoralism – to guide the Italian proletariat «to the conquest of power and the institution of the Italian Soviet Republic, as an integral part of the World Soviet Republic.»

In the report carried in Il Soviet of May 16, 1920, the fraction affirmed that:

1. The PSI, due to its composition then, was unable to guide the proletarian revolution, and its many deficiencies hinged upon the presence of a reformist tendency within it. In the decisive phase of the class struggle, this reformist tendency would inevitably have assumed a counter-revolutionary position, balancing a verbal extremism with an opportunist practice in political and economic action.
2. The PSI’s membership of the Moscow International was invalidated by the fact that the party tolerated in its midst a current which negated the principles of the Communist International – whether by openly defaming it, or worse still, by capitalizing on it with a view to electoral gains.
3. The true instrument of the proletariat’s revolutionary struggle was the political party of the class, founded on Marxist doctrine and on the historical experience of the revolutionary communist process already triumphant in Soviet Russia.
4. The fraction wished to consecrate all its forces to the constitution in Italy of the Communist Party (Section of the Third International).
5. The fraction gave a mandate to its CC to prepare the programme of the new party, and its statutes; to intensify international relations, with the aim of constituting an anti-electoral fraction in the Comintern, and to uphold the positions of the fraction at the next world congress; after that, to convoke the founding congress of the Communist Party; to summarize in clear theses the fraction’s positions of principle and tactics, and to spread them widely in Italy and abroad.
    

The Theses Approved at the National Conference, May 8‑9, 1920

The theses were divided into three parts:

1. The first part resumed the general definitions of the principles and goals of communism and is subdivided into thirteen theses; they affirm that communism is the doctrine of the social and historical conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. The doctrine takes the form of the Marxist critique of capitalist economy, the method of historical materialism, the theory of class struggle, the conception of the historical development of the fall of the capitalist regime and the proletarian revolution. The central and fundamental expression of this doctrine is the 1848 Communist Manifesto, on which the Communist Party is based. The theses defined the relations of bourgeois production, the political institutions of capitalism (that is, the parliamentary-democratic State) and the forms of proletarian struggle against capitalist exploitation. The instrument of revolutionary proletarian class struggle against the bourgeoisie is the class political party, the Communist Party. This party brings about the conscious organization of the advance guard of the proletariat. The organization of the proletariat into a dominant class will be realized in the form of the dictatorship, that is, in a type of State whose representatives (systems of workers councils) will consist exclusively of working-class members, while the bourgeois will lack voting rights.
2. The second part, in seventeen theses, carried out a critique of the various hostile schools of thought. The theses attacked idealism; the concept of liberalism and bourgeois democracy; the education and instruction supplied by the ruling class, denying that they could make the slightest improvement in the living conditions of the masses; the principle of nationality; bourgeois pacifism (Wilsonian illusions); utopian socialism, and all those conceptions typical of reformism and incoherent revolutionism, which serve only to disarm and disorient the proletariat.
3. The third part defined the forms of struggle and tactics of the Communist Party. These fourteen theses affirm that the communist conception and economic determinism doesn’t turn communists into passive spectators, but into tireless fighters, and that struggle and action aren’t separate from doctrinal principles. The revolutionary work of communists is founded on the international party organization, functioning on the basis of disciplined responses to the decisions of the majority and the central organs. Propaganda and proselytism are fundamental party activities, but the communist movement doesn’t make «majority consensus an essential condition for its own action.» The decisive criterion for unleashing a revolutionary action is the objective evaluation of our own forces and those of our enemies, and the numeric element is not the only determinant, nor even the most important one. Communists must penetrate «the proletarian cooperatives, the unions, the factory councils by forming groups of communist workers. These groups seek to win over the majority and the leadership positions, in order to get the mass of proletarians enrolled in such associations to submit their own action to the higher political and revolutionary goals of the struggle for communism.» However, the CP must keep out of all institutions and associations where bourgeois and proletarians participate under the same heading.

With regard to electoralism, the theses repeat that participation in elections and parliamentary activity, while presenting constant risks of deviationism, could be utilized for propaganda and the formation of the movement in the period before the possibility of overthrowing bourgeois domination had arisen. In the present period, communists had to pose the direct objective of the revolutionary conquest of power, to which all the party’s forces had to be devoted. It was therefore considered inadmissible to participate in bodies that are powerful defensive arms of the bourgeoisie. On the contrary, communists must take an active part in the great proletarian demonstrations, preparing and organizing them, even carrying out propaganda in the ranks of the bourgeois army. The Communist Party has to train itself to act as the general staff of the proletariat in the revolutionary war, therefore, to organize its own network of information and communications.

On how to deal with other parties, the theses reject the united front: no accord or alliance with other political movements which incidentally share some contingent goals with the Communist Party but diverge on the subsequent programme of action.

Concerning the Soviets, it was explained that they can exercise their true function only after the overthrow of bourgeois rule. They only became revolutionary when the Communist Party has won the majority in them.

The fourteenth thesis is fundamental from the tactical point of view:

«What distinguishes the communists is not to propose in every situation and every episode of their class struggle that all proletarian forces immediately deploy for a general uprising, rather they have to argue that the insurrectional phase is the inevitable outcome of the class struggle, and to prepare the proletariat to take it on in conditions favorable to success and the ensuing development of the revolution. According to the situation, which the party can judge better that the rest of the proletariat, it could find itself having to act either to precipitate or to delay the final conflict. In any case it is the specific task of the party to combat those who by rushing into revolutionary action at all costs, may push the proletariat towards disaster. Equally, communists must combat those opportunists who exploit circumstances in order to thoroughly disrupt the action, with the aim of stopping the proletarian movement completely and dispersing the mass action towards other objectives. The Communist Party must instead lead this mass action onto the terrain of effective preparation for the inevitable, final armed struggle against the defenses of the bourgeois regime.»

The Objectives of the Theses

The Italian Left expected from the Second Congress of the Communist International (its true founding congress) that it would define the basis of the communist theory and programme, whose acceptance would then be the primary criterion for the parties’ membership of the C.I. It was additionally expected that the Second Congress would formulate the fundamental rules for action on the union, agrarian, colonial, and other questions, which all members would have to strictly observe. Hence these theses were not to be considered the doctrinal platform of a national party, but as a draft of the programmatic and tactical foundations of the world communist party, in other words of the Communist International. The theses were closely linked to the positions of the Bolsheviks. The only divergence was tactical: it concerned, on the one hand the problem of electoral and parliamentary abstentionism (the Bolsheviks still saw in elections and in parliament a possibility for propaganda, as carried out in Russia); on the other hand, there was the problem of alliances and accords with the other parties and political groups.

The need for a single programme for all the sections of the Communist International was to be defended by the fraction’s representative at the Second Congress, in the matter of the conditions of admission, in opposition to the project which allowed parties to revise their programmes according to the “particular conditions” in their countries. In fact, the latter argument provided the opportunist groups with valuable aid in avoiding the main questions. Our representative made it as clear as he could that with regard to the programme, there could be no problem: either it was accepted, or it was rejected. In the second case, one had to leave the party. The programme is something that had to be common to all, not something proposed by the majority of the party comrades.

The Theses of the Socialist Section of Turin

The majority of the PSI’s Turin section belonged to the Communist Abstentionist Fraction; they made an agreement with the Ordine Nuovo group, together forming the Executive Council. The latter proposed the famous theses which habitually became designated the “Theses of Ordine Nuovo”. Inasmuch as they didn’t contain the anti-parliamentarian formula, the theses were to be cited as perfectly in line with the programme of the Communist International in the resolution of the Second Congress, point seventeen, on the principal tasks of the International.

The theses were supported by Gramsci at the Milan Conference, with the support of the abstentionist communists, in opposition to the Serratian leadership of the party. (The theses in question were republished in full in our review Comunismo #30.)

The Left Adheres Spontaneously to Bolshevism

From 1918 the Communist Left with its organ “il Soviet” had conducted a determined offensive first against the Right, then against the Maximalist Center, which protected the Right; in the process the Left distinguished itself from the anarcho-syndicalists. What marked off our fraction was not so much its abstentionism as its total convergence of principle with the Bolsheviks. In fact, the Italian Left’s abstentionism had completely different foundations to that of the anarchists and constituted the most effective catalyst in the process of separation from the reformists and from the false revolutionary Maximalists. The fraction had not made a principle of its abstentionism, so much so that fifty years later the representative of the Abstentionist Fraction would recall:

«At this point, I think it is opportune to recall an actual precedent which for me, even after many years, seems to take on real historical significance. The central thesis of our fraction was not abstentionism, rather it was the split in the party, which would leave on the one hand the real revolutionary communists, and on the other followers of the “revisionism” of Marx’s principles concerning the inevitable catastrophic explosion of the conflict, and the clash between the opposing social classes, as could already be seen before the war by the German Bernstein. To put our thesis to the test, at the Bologna Congress we put a precise proposal to the leaders of the Maximalist electionist fraction, among whom were numbered Serrati, Lazzari, and Gramsci. Our proposal tended to substitute a single text, quite clearly more anti revisionist, for the one they had prepared: we agreed not to speak of boycotting electoral activity, if they’d accept our thesis entailing a split in the party. Our proposal was sharply rejected by the Maximalists. In this respect, I want to remind you that shortly afterward Lenin, in writing his famous text on extremism as the infantile disorder of communism, declared that he’d received and read some issues of Il Soviet, and appreciated our movement as the only one in Italy which had understood the necessity for a separation between communists and social democrats, through a split in the Socialist Party.»

If abstentionism was not a matter of principle but only of tactics for the Left fraction, this didn’t prevent it assuming great tactical importance. With the war of 1914-18, the capitalist regime had entered a new, imperialist phase. To this new phase there had to correspond a new tactic – that is, the electoral and parliamentary boycott. If in the preceding phase, electoralism and parliamentarism could still be used as means of revolutionary propaganda, under imperialism this tactic would just represent a support of bourgeois reaction.

This was after all affirmed by the Left in the Draft Theses presented at the Third Congress of the PCd’I (Lyon, 1926) in the third part concerning “Italian Questions”:

«In the development of the aforesaid situations, the grouping which made way for the formation of the Communist Party set out with these criteria: a break from the illusory dualisms presented by the bourgeois and parliamentary political scene, and the statement of revolutionary classist dualism; destruction in the proletariat of the illusion that the middle classes would be capable of producing a political high command, of assuming power and setting the proletariat in motion towards its conquests; and based on a series of critical, political and tactical positions that are original, autonomous and firmly interlinked through successive situations – confidence in the working class carrying out its own historic task.

«These political traditions could already be recognized before the war on the Left of the Socialist Party. Starting with the congresses of Reggio Emilia (1912) and Ancona (1914), not only was a majority formed capable of setting itself against both the reformist error and against the syndicalist one which had up until then impersonated the proletarian left, but in this majority an extreme left took shape which tended toward more radical solutions. In this way, notable class problems were resolved, with respect to electoral tactics, relationships with the trades-unions, colonial war, and freemasonry.

«During the World War, if the Union Sacrée politics was opposed by all or almost all the party, better still the work of a well-defined extreme left appeared inside it. In the conferences of Bologna (May 1915), Rome (February 1917), Florence (November 1917) and at the Rome Congress of 1918, the Left supported Leninist policies such as rejection of national defense, defeatism, the utilization of defeat to pose the question of power, incessant struggle, and the demand for the expulsion of opportunist trade-union and parliamentary leaders from the party.

«Immediately after the war, the line of the extreme left found expression in the paper “il Soviet”, which was the first to set out and defend the policies of the Russian Revolution whilst countering the anti-Marxist, opportunist, syndicalist, and anarchistic interpretations of it. The paper also correctly posed the essential problems of the proletarian dictatorship and the party’s tasks, supporting a split in the socialist party from the very beginning.

«This group supported electoral abstentionism and its conclusions would be rebuffed by the Second Congress of the International; even though it’s abstentionism didn’t set out from the anti-Marxist theoretical errors of the anarcho-syndicalist type (witness the resolute polemics conducted against the anarchist press). The abstentionist tactic was forecast above all in the political environment of complete parliamentary democracy, which creates particular obstacles to winning over the masses to an accurate understanding of the word “dictatorship”; difficulties that we still believe were underestimated by the International.

«Secondly, abstentionism was proposed not as a tactic for all time, but for the general situation, today unfortunately superseded, in which great struggles were imminent and even greater mass movements of proletarians were starting up.

«With the elections of 1919, Nitti’s government opened a huge safety valve to suppress revolutionaries, diverting the proletarian offensive and the attention of the party by exploiting its tradition of unbridled electoralism. The abstentionism of Il Soviet was then the only proper response to the true causes of the proletarian disaster which ensued.

«At the subsequent Bologna Conference (October 1919), the abstentionist minority alone correctly posed the question of splitting from the reformists, and on this basis sought an accord with part of the Maximalists by renouncing the abstentionist condition. With the failure of this attempt, the abstentionist fraction remained the only one, until the Second Congress, working on a national scale for the formation of the Communist Party.

«Therefore it was this group which represented the spontaneous orientation, according to the experiences and traditions of the left of the Italian proletariat, towards the policies which triumphed at this time in the victory of Lenin and Bolshevism in Russia.»