PART IV – REVOLUTIONARY PARLIAMENTARISM

PART IV

REVOLUTIONARY PARLIAMENTARISM

After the decision of the Second Congress of the Communist International, in favor of the theses envisaging the use of electoral campaigns and parliament for the purposes of propaganda and revolutionary action, the Left, which directed the Communist Party of Italy from its founding to 1923, scrupulously adhered in its practical action to the letter and spirit of the Lenin-Bucharin-Trotski theses: indeed, it can be said without fear of contradiction that it was the only one to give, in the retreating phase of the postwar wave, the examples of revolutionary parliamentarism that Lenin hoped for and that Liebknecht had embodied in the ascendant phase of the German revolution. Characteristic in this regard is Party’s action in the 1921 election campaign, in which, as its ”Manifesto” shows, the Left knew how to make a great propaganda movement and political mobilization of the working class in the face of the pressing fascist offensive.

Under the same circumstances, the article ”Elections” defended the need to participate in the election campaign, despite the deep abstentionist convictions of many proletarians, with arguments of particular importance. First of all, the article recalls how the 1921 situation, in which fewer ballots were counted than bludgeon blows, was one that best corresponded to the Leninist tactical scheme of revolutionary parliamentarism and instead was less suited to the abstentionist tactics of the Left, which was hostile to participation especially in countries and stages of bourgeois democracy and ”constitutional freedoms.” An examination of the 1921 situation, however, is not a decisive argument in favor of the International’s tactics.

Always convinced that the parliamentary theses of the Second Congress should be revised, the Left had nevertheless vigorously advocated international discipline and centralism: as a Marxist Left, it was first centralist and only then abstentionist. Precisely because our tactical conception was fully integrated into the theory and principles of communism, the Left never resorted, in order to make its case, to corridor bargaining, to ”special situations,” and, even worse, to those ”national ways” that served as a pretext for the renegades to smuggle in the most conformist parliamentarianism. In the history of the World Communist Party, abstentionism was not supposed to enter through the back door, least of all by indirect ways antithetical to our doctrine.

The article ”Abstentionist Nostalgias” (1924) and the excerpt reproduced here from the ”Lyon Theses” (1926) contain our denunciation of the democratic anti-fascism that from 1924 tended to undermine – and will finally completely disfigure – the line of the Party, no longer directed (by decree of the International ) by the Left. To properly assess its significance, it will be worthwhile to briefly recall the historical context and, in particular, the situation in 1924, of which the article ”Abstentionist Nostalgias” is in a sense the prediction and the ”Lyon Theses” represents the political balance sheet.

In the early months of 1924, the P.C.d’I., now headed by the party “Center” and loyal to the ”elastic” directives of the Comintern, presented itself at the elections as the ”Bloc of Proletarian Unity,” under the illusion of crystallizing around it a vast movement not so much and not only proletarian, as ”popular,” but failing to unite under that confused banner but the scattered group of ”thirdinternationalists”. Now, as is clear from the Feb. 28 article, the elections, destined to legitimize the Fascist regime, provoked an initial uprising in favor of abstention – an uprising stemming not from our reasons of strict Marxist orthodoxy, but from bourgeois constitutional prejudices, from ”outrage” for the ”illegality,” ”frauds”, ”poll-riggings” and violence that characterized the election campaign, an anticipation of the hubbub that would take place thirty years later over the ”fraud law.”

It fell to the Left to defend participation in elections not only in the name of discipline toward the International, but in reaction to the first symptoms of democratic, constitutional and legalitarian nostalgia spreading among our ranks. Once the criterion of revolutionary parliamentarianism had been internationally sanctioned, it had to be practiced thoroughly and on its true bases, not entrenched behind ”unconstitutionality” or the dangers of a particular campaign to desert it, moreover justifying it with abstentionism dictated by ”moral” reactions or scruples of… democratic correctness.

The alarm was more than justified. When the Matteotti crisis broke out in June, the centrist leadership of the P.C.d’I. followed the democratic-bourgeois oppositions (Socialists included) in making the vile affair a ”moral issue,” walked out of parliament, mistook Aventinism for the ”cornerstone of the popular anti-fascist movement,” and, even after the failed attempt at a general strike and united front with the Socialists, insisted on offering joint action to the Aventinian parties and groups, pushing it as far as the proposal – of a blunt democratic brand – to constitute itself into an ”anti-parliament.” So much for ”destroying the parliament from the outside”! Another, a more ”honest,” a ”more legal,” ”better” Montecitorio would be held… In short, it went from the extreme of pro-democratic-inspired parliamentary abstentionism to the opposite extreme of ultra-democratic-inspired parliamentary overzealousness.

Once again, it was the Left that reacted vigorously: if ever there was a situation in which revolutionary parliamentarianism, that is, the tactic of using parliamentary grandstanding to denounce both parliamentarianism and fascist-democracy collaboration in defending the foundations of bourgeois society, made sense, that was it. Had we gone to parliament? Then we had to stay there at the risk of being truncheoned, exposing at once the ”government of murderers” and its cowardly last-minute ”opponents.” Had we wanted to adopt the tactic of revolutionary parliamentarism? Let us at least practice it, courageously, instead of falling back into a new and cowardly version of reformist parliamentarism. It was necessary to follow our independent path to the end, mobilizing around revolutionary watchwords the masses, more willing than ever to fight in the cities and the countryside, and to this end not letting slip the unique though subsidiary opportunity to use the megaphones of the parliamentary forum, deserted by all, to reiterate the notion that the real solution to the crisis had to be sought not in there, but in the squares.

Only the categorical refusal of the ”oppositions” to join the albeit democratic initiatives of the P.C.d’I. persuaded the Gramscian leadership to accept the Left’s thesis by re-entering Montecitorio, and it is no coincidence that to deliver the bold ”re-entry” speech in the Chamber, on November 12, 1924, amid shouts of menace and raised fists, was called precisely a member of the Left, a member of the old Executive deposed in 1923: Luigi Repossi, just as it is no coincidence that the first speech in the new legislature was given on behalf of the Party, on January 14, 1925, by another ”abstentionist” (not yet capitulated before Moscow), Ruggero Grieco, not so much to carry out the critique of the new electoral law as to reaffirm the Communist principles of class struggle, violent conquest of power and proletarian dictatorship. The balance sheet of the Aventine period, made by the Left, is finally summarized in the ”Lyon Theses” paragraph with which this chapter concludes.

The last battle of the Marxist Left on the parliamentary question was not only an extreme example of revolutionary parliamentarism as Lenin had understood and envisaged it. By defending revolutionary parliamentarism against the relapse into parliamentarianism tout court, the Left then knew how to defend at the same time its typical abstentionism against the ”contingent abstentionism” of the anti-fascist democrats, ready to commute between parliament and ”anti-parliament” for the sole purpose of the preservation of the bourgeois order.

After the ordeal of the popular fronts and the partisan resistance blocs into which anti-fascism then succeeded in dragging the proletariat, destroying the very cornerstones of the communist program, it is an integral and definitive abstentionism that the Left is passing on to future revolutionary generations.