TO THE ITALIAN PROLETARIAT, ON THE OCCASION OF THE ELECTORAL STRUGGLE

Il Comunista, May 12, 1921

DEAR COMRADES !

A decree of your government dissolved parliament and called for new new electoral meetings. Giolitti’s government, which the whole world calls the last government of the king of Italy, is attempting to stage a new parliamentary comedy, in order to better oppose the revolutionary proletariat with a united front of the organised bourgeoisie, strengthened by the support of the hired gangs of fascist terrorism.

COMRADE WORKERS !

The conditions under which you will go to the polls this time are no longer those of last time. Now the bourgeoisie has regained its audacity.

Since the armistice, Italy has been in an acute revolutionary crisis. All the successive bourgeois ministries in power have demonstrated their impotence to save the country from economic chaos. Italy, of all the victorious countries, is the one that has most painfully felt the results of the victory. All the manoeuvres and fine promises made to you by Nitti and Giolitti served only to gain time, making concessions on paper, but taking away with the right hand what with the left they handed over. In reality, the measures taken seriously by the Italian rulers were those tending to strengthen the armed defence of bourgeois privilege: the ever-increasing increase in the development of the Guardia Regia and the Carabinieri was countered by the increase in the price of bread and the fabulous increase in taxes. The monetary crisis became more and more serious and unemployment took on ever more catastrophic proportions. The Italian bourgeoisie feels its last hour approaching: and with desperate, savage fury it devotes itself to provocations and terrorism, through its mercenary bands.

Unemployed officers, sons of owners, bourgeois students attack workers, burn cooperatives and labour chambers, destroy proletarian newspapers. Civil war is now a reality in Italy; the bourgeoisie’s offensive precedes that of the proletariat.

And it is thanks to the old socialist party, made up of heterogeneous elements, that favourable opportunities — which presented themselves several times — to engage the proletariat in a decisive revolutionary struggle were not exploited. The reformists of Italy, because this is their function, have played and continue to play into the hands of the bourgeoisie, helping it to shore up the shabby economic edifice of capitalism.

COMRADE WORKERS!

From the armistice onwards, they have stunned you with talk of the need to ‘produce more and consume less’: and this talk is given both by the bourgeoisie and by the social-reformists who have remained in the old socialist party, within which they intensify their propaganda for collaboration with the bourgeoisie.

The history of the last few years has taught these gentlemen nothing; conversely, it has taught the proletarians a great deal, as they now know how to distinguish their friends from their enemies. Your reformists dilate on lamentations every time fascist gangs wet the streets of towns and villages with proletarian blood; reformists call for calm and disarmament… What is the meaning of the reformists’ attitude? The capitulation and disarmament of the working class before the bourgeoisie armed to the teeth. It is not with speeches that the bourgeois reaction can be curbed, but with violence exercised by the entire, united oppressed class. In response to bourgeois violence, the Italian proletarian class must continuously and energetically put into practice its motto: ‘disarm the adversary, arm the proletariat’.

COMRADE WORKERS!

For the first time, the young Communist Party of Italy is taking part in an electoral struggle.

You all, of course, know how the Communist Party of Italy came into being at the Livorno Congress, from the split with the socialist party in which – due to the attitude of the Serrati current — the reformists remained. Subsequent events in Italian political life and in the socialist party have shown that the unitarians have favoured and continue to favour the pernicious and demolishing influence of the opportunists: and this, in the end, is all to the advantage of the bourgeoisie. This is precisely what the wily old fox of the bourgeoisie — Giolitti — is counting on. He knows that in the old socialist party the reformist elements are very strong (strong in parliament, in the labour confederation, in the cooperatives) who do not conceal their desire to enter the government and collaborate with the bourgeoisie ‘to — they say — carry out reconstructive work’.

We believe — and we hope — that the Communist Party has, despite its recent constitution, won the sympathy of the entire Italian proletariat through its unlimited devotion to the workers’ cause. Only the Communist Party has stood in solidarity with the workers who fought and lost in Florence and Puglia and who continue to fight everywhere. It alone openly and frankly declares its revolutionary communist programme. It alone prepares to organise armed insurrection. It alone does not hide its motto: ‘bourgeois violence must be answered with the organised violence of the proletariat’.

COMRADE WORKERS!

The MPs and the confederal bureaucracy of the old socialist party will not fail to make you, as always, at election time, fabulous promises of all kinds. But only the Communist Party, a section of the Communist International, having the banner of the Republic of Soviets on its flag, unambiguously declares to you that it enters parliament not to begin reconstructive work on what is doomed to ruin, but to propagandise communist ideas, to use the parliamentary forum for the purpose of increasing the cohesion and consciousness of the proletariat as it prepares for the final revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie.

COMRADES!

Do not forget your duty of fraternity towards Russia, which for four years, rejecting all the attacks of the world bourgeoisie, has been striving in the peaceful work of reconstruction, useful not only to the masses of workers and peasants of Russia, but also to the proletariat of the whole world.

You will once again demonstrate your solidarity with the Russian proletariat and the Federation of Russian Soviets by sending as many communists as you can to the parliament, the bourgeois citadel. They will use all the means indicated by communist tactics to prevent the bourgeoisie from deceiving the proletariat; and, through the support of the broad masses, they will be able to hasten the day of the proletariat’s complete victory and the triumph of communism in Italy.

Vote, therefore, only for the candidates of the Communist Party of Italy. 

Vote for the Communist International and its section of Italy. 

Vote for Soviet Russia and for the Party linked to it by fraternal bond: the Communist Party of Italy. 

Long live the Italian proletariat and its only representative: the Communist Party of Italy! 

The Executive Committee of the Communist International