Visit the website section Introduction to Our History, where we will periodically insert articles on the history and political positions of the Internationalist Communist Tendency.

Inside the Italian Socialist Party (PSI)

In Italy, the earliest sign of an organised Marxist movement of the Left in opposition to the reformists came at the Milan Congress (1910) of the PSI. A bitter clash took place later around the Socialist Youth Federation, considered a "cultural" organ by the Right and a school of revolutionary struggle by the Left.

In 1912, at the Reggio Emilia Congress of the PSI, the Left organised itself as an Intransigent Revolutionary Fraction. At the following Ancona Congress, the Left defended the revolutionary programme against the Right, while in Naples the Marxist socialists, with the young Amadeo Bordiga, founded the Karl Marx Revolutionary Socialist Circle.

In 1912 the Youth Congress was held in Bologna in which the Left of the Socialist Youth Federation was consolidated (with L'Avanguardia as its publication); in particular a group of young intransigents headed by Bordiga highlighted a clear vision of the party as the organ of action and revolutionary leadership. Bordiga put forward a motion on behalf of the Left which won a majority over the followers of Angelo Tasca who intended to make L'Avanguardia an "essentially cultural organ" for young socialists in reading and study circles.

The imperialist war of 1914 saw many socialist parties of the Second International side with their own governments and even vote for war credits. In Italy, the Left was the only current to support revolutionary defeatism in the face of the interventionists who left the PSI with Benito Mussolini, and the Centrists who supported the ambiguous formula: "neither support nor sabotage". The Italian Left totally agreed with the positions of the international Left (at the Zimmerwald and Kienthal Conferences): “fierce defence of the ideological frontiers of Marxism” against the betrayal of Social Democracy, and for "transforming the imperialist war into a proletarian revolution”. (Lenin)

The October Revolution in 1917 was greeted by the Italian Left as the first act of the "international socialist revolution", and Bolshevism as a "plant for every climate". Against the Right and Centre tendencies that predominated in the PSI, the Left supported all of Lenin's theses, and in December 1917 founded its own newspaper, il Soviet. On the question of the factory councils it entered into direct conflict with L'Ordine Nuovo, the Turin group around Antonio Gramsci, which propagated somewhat gradualist positions, based on the identification of local bodies of a trade union nature as the “prefiguration of a future society”.

In 1919 at the Bologna Congress of the PSI, the Maximalists of Giacinto Serrati obtained a clear majority, but the new Left, which now gathered around Bordiga as the Abstentionist Communist Fraction against electoral illusions and for the organisation of the revolutionary conquest of power, took shape more and more clearly. All within a party divided on whether this was the right time or not, as well as on the means, of taking power. The Abstentionist Communist Fraction proclaimed its theoretical base in Marxism, in complete agreement with the tactical line and strategic objectives of the recently founded Third International (Comintern). The only dissent concerned participation in elections and the revolutionary parliamentarism supported by the Bolsheviks.

At the Second Congress of the Comintern (1920), the Italian Left made its contribution to the rigorous break with opportunist elements (set out in the 21 Conditions of Admission).

The Italian Left at the head of the Communist Party of Italy (PCd’I)

The Imola Conference was held on 28 November 1920. The nucleus of the Abstentionist Communist Fraction was joined by the Turin group, L'Ordine Nuovo, in deciding to propose to the next Congress of the PSI at Livorno a motion for acceptance and application of all the decisions taken at the Second Congress of the Comintern.

In January 1921, at the Livorno Congress, the Left broke with the old and reformist PSI: on the basis of Moscow's 21 Conditions it founded the PCd’I as a Section of the Third International. The new party was headed by the Left.

By engaging in battles on all fronts – trade union, political and international – the Left openly fought Social Democratic reformism and insurgent Fascism. While for the Centrists, Fascism was a feudal reaction, for the Left, Fascism was identified as a political manifestation of capital as it attempted to face up to its serious social and economic crisis.

However, the isolation of the soviet experience in Russia was by now progressively evident. At the Third Congress of the Comintern the first slide towards ever more opportunist positions took place. It was the beginning of a series of expedients and tactical elasticities epitomised in the “united front” with other political forces on the basis of the ambiguous formula of a “workers’ government”, arriving in the end at the counter-revolutionary idea that you could have “socialism in one country”.

With its Theses on Tactics (written by Bordiga and Umberto Terracini) approved at the Rome Congress (1922) of the PCd’I, the Left made a contribution, unique in the international camp, to the solution of the most burning problems: from the definition of the nature of the party to the consistent practical application of communist strategy in dealing with the evolution of bourgeois politics.

In the Enlarged Executives of the Comintern (right down to the Sixth, in 1926), the Italian Left, represented by Bordiga, was the only voice courageously denouncing the seriousness of the situation created in the Bolshevik Party and in the Comintern.

In June 1923, the Italian Left was ousted from the Executive Committee and thus the leadership of the PCd’I. It must be remembered that between the end of January and the beginning of February, following the establishment of the Mussolini Government, the Fascist police arrested most of the central and local leaders of the PCd’I, including Bordiga himself, rendering the functioning of the Executive Committee impossible. They were tried for "conspiracy against the state" and the occasion was promptly exploited by the Comintern to "advise" the formation of a new leadership, provisionally entrusted to Palmiro Togliatti and later directly to Gramsci. The Comintern's control over the Italian Party was growing.

The new Centre, imposed by Moscow and personified by Gramsci, immediately launched a campaign of intimidation and censorship against the supporters of the Left: from the suppression of the journal Prometeo, founded in Naples in 1924 by comrades who took Bordiga as their political reference point, to the dissolution of sections controlled by the Left. Despite the change of political climate, the PCd’I remained solidly behind the “old” positions as the Como National Conference in May 1924 showed. The results of this clandestine conference of the Party leadership were very clear. Of the 45 federation secretaries, 35 plus the secretary of the youth federation voted for Bordiga’s Left, 4 for Gramsci’s Centre and 5 for Tasca’s Right.

Against the attempts of the Centre to illegally impose itself on the leadership of the Party, in 1925 the Left responded with the formation of the Committee of Intesa as the first alarm bell against the Party’s loss of its class character. The most experienced and effective of the Italian Left regrouped around this committee in order to defend their own political line against the leadership of the Party and to maintain their own platform in opposition to the new course the Party was taking.

The Committee of Intesa was formed by comrades of the Left (Onorato Damen, Bruno Fortichiari, Ugo Girone, Francesca Grossi, Fortunato La Camera, Mario Lanfranchi, Mario Manfredi, Ottorino Perrone-Vercesi, Luigi Repossi, Carlo Venegoni) to coordinate the action of the current — which still held a majority in the party — in the face of "Bolshevisation" then taking place under Moscow’s orders. Initially Bordiga disagreed with the initiative but later joined the comrades’ action who, however, threatened with expulsion, had to dissolve the Committee of Intesa to face the upcoming Lyon Congress politically and organisationally marginalised. The Committee of Intesa can be considered the birth of the Italian Left in opposition – both at the national and international level – to the first signs of the counter-revolution then taking place in Russia and the world.

It was only at the Lyon Congress (1926) of the PCd’I that the sidelining of the Left was made official. Faced with a Left which presented its own set of theses in opposition to the Centre, the leadership of the Party responded with a series of manoeuvres, such as counting all the votes of absent delegates – unable to attend due to the very tense situation created by the Fascist dictatorship in Italy – for itself, as well as threatening that any delegate voting for the Left would lose their party salary and support. Thanks to such manoeuvres the Centrists could finally permanently take over the leadership of the Party. The Congress of Lyon therefore agreed to the removal of the Left current from any directing body in the Party. The leadership, headed by Gramsci “ensured that in Lyon the Bordigan extreme Left was represented in a way that was not adequate for the forces that it still had in the party” (Berti, I primi dieci anni di vita del PCI p.188). Bordiga would later comment: “because all activity had to be clandestine, the trick of the Centrist leaders was very elegant; it was decided that all the ballot papers which did not vote either for the Centre or for the Left opposition would be counted as in favour of the theses of the Centre.” (Storia della Sinistra comunista, in Programma Comunista 12, 1961). Thus, in the absence of most of the delegates of the Left (their passports suspended by order of the Italian Ministry of the Interior), Gramsci’s Centre obtained 90.1% of the votes. The Left was marginalised and the PCd’I was now run by a new leading group aligned with the political dictates of Moscow, which introduced into the Party the omnipotent post of General Secretary.

From the Fraction to the Internationalist Communist Party (PCInt)

The Italian Left, which opposed the "Bolshevisation" of the PCd’I, expressed solidarity with Trotsky's opposition within the Russian Party. From this moment, Fascism and Stalinism unleashed their repression on the militants of the Left, forcing most of the survivors into emigration to France and Belgium.

After his 1926 speech in the Sixth Enlarged Executive of the Cominern, Bordiga remained in Italy but ultimately retired into private life and dedicated himself to the exercise of his profession as engineer in Naples.

In 1927 the Italian Left abroad united as a Fraction, and in 1928, in Pantin (Paris), it officially formed the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy (from 1935 the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left) publishing the magazines Prometeo and Bilan. Among the leading advocates of the Fraction were: Perrone (Vercesi), Virgilio Verdaro (Gatto Mammone), Alfredo Bianco (Bibbi), Giovanni Bottaioli (Butta), Luigi Danielis (Gigi), Aldo Lecci (Tullio), Otello Ricceri (Piccino), Enrico Russo (Candiani), Giacomo Stefanini (Mauro) and others.

Via this red thread, which involved the interpretation, application and defence of revolutionary Marxism against various denials and betrayals, the Italian Communist Left formed the PCInt in 1943. It was created by comrades then resident in Italy, the likes of Damen and Bruno Maffi, and those returning from abroad (France, Belgium, Switzerland). Its publications were, originally, the clandestine Prometeo, then Battaglia Comunista. The organisation expanded and strengthened especially in the areas of Turin, Casale, Asti, Milan, Sesto San Giovanni, Parma and Florence. It was joined by comrades of the old communist guard, those facing prison and exile who had kept up their revolutionary militancy and the communist style of work, militants forged by organisational, theoretical and political battles of all kinds: against the degeneration of the Comintern, for the construction of the Fraction abroad, those keeping alive the ties in Italy with the aim of rebuilding an active party in the darkest underground period.

As well as attacks from the Fascists, the internationalist communists were also subject to attacks from the Stalinist Italian Communist Party (PCI). These were not just verbal and defamatory accusations and provocations (“spies of the Gestapo”) but also physical violence which in 1945 led to the assassination of two comrades, Fausto Atti and Mario Acquaviva. The clandestine Prometeo was defined by the Stalinists as a “filthy rag… distributed by the police ... in which counter-revolutionary rot mingles with espionage and provocation, with the OVRA [Italian secret police] and Gestapo for whom this sheet has become a tool.” (From La Nostra Lotta, Organ of the PCI). The PCI thus instigated workers to “smash the faces” (from the PCI paper La Fabbrica) of the militant internationalist workers who were active in the 1943 strikes in Asti, Casale Monferrato, Turin, Milan, and Sesto San Giovanni, suffering, in some cases, deportation to Germany.

In line with the difficult work developed by Communist Left in following (and experiencing) the course of the counter-revolution in Russia and the International, the PCInt was immediately characterised by:

• the unmasking of anti-fascism, which both the liberal-democratic bourgeoisie and the national-communists saw not as a struggle against capitalism but as an alliance with the national forces of capitalism;
• the refusal and criticism of the inter-class politics of the "popular" and "united fronts" supported by the Social Democrats and Stalinists;
• the rejection of support for any side in the imperialist war, whether in the “democratic” clothing of Washington and Moscow or the nazi-fascists in Berlin;
• the fight against Stalinism and the national road to socialism.

Notes:

Picture: Livorno Congress (1921) at which the Communist Left broke with the old and reformist PSI.