Introduction

We reproduce below a translation of the third section of the fourth part of the book “Les années terribles (1926-45)” subtitled “The Italian left in emigration amongst the oppositionist communists” by Michel Roger. Although the book came out in late 2012 it was based on an academic thesis written in 1981 which would have made it a pioneering work in its time. Since then the work of Philippe Bourrinet and Sandro Saggioro have added further information to the story of the Italian Left and these have been incorporated into the new edition. The CWO is publishing it here as part of our investigations into the history of the Italian Left and in particular to bring documents hitherto untranslated to an English-reading audience. We are particularly aware that English-reading comrades will have only had access to this history through the works of Philippe Bourrinet whose writings began under the influence of Mark Chirik, the founder of the International Communist Current (as did those of Michel Roger as the list of sources make clear). The ICC have continued to publish “The Italian Communist Left” though with some later amendments. Philippe, like Michel, has long since left the ICC and appears to have taken an “anti-party” direction and although we do not wish to impugn his integrity or indeed the usefulness of his work, which should be read, we would like to redress the balance in some of his judgements on the Internationalist Communist Party. For example he implies that Stefanini and Damen did not share the same position on the unions. In a footnote to Chapter 8 of his work “The Bordigist Current”⁽¹⁾ he wrote

Another member of the anti-union tendency was Luigi Danielis (known as “Gigi”). Stefanini and Danielis resolutely defended their position on the unions against the majority of the PCInt founded by Damen.

This is based on his reading of the account of the Convention of Turin in 1945 and could be read to imply that Damen and Stefanini did not share the same position on the unions. This is not true. It is also not true that Stefanini and Danielis had the same anti-union position. Danielis called for the destruction of the unions whilst Stefanini thought that was unrealistic and was more concerned about how to connect the economic and political struggles. Furthermore Philippe does not point out the confusing context in which the discussion on the unions took place (the existing ones were from the fascist era and new ones were in the process of formation in the context of a British occupation of Northern Italy) so that there were a number of different positions expressed in the Congress about how best to relate to the union question. Damen himself took no part in this as his spokesman was Stefanini who had been the first to contact him about founding the “party of Damen” when he was in internal exile in Cantú (a town in Como province north of Milan). We have translated the discussion on the unions from the proceedings of the Congress into English but have decided now to wait to publish the document as a whole with the explanatory introduction of our Italian comrades. Instead to confirm Damen’s own views we also reproduce the two documents on the unions that Damen exchanged with Bordiga in 1951 which demonstrate that Damen already had an understanding that the unions were lost to the working class. The position of Bordiga was confused and this confusion translated into splits in the Bordigist current (the International Communist Party) on the union question even before Bordiga died.⁽²⁾

Similar disagreements of interpretation could be made against Sandro Saggioro whose 2011 work in Italian “Neither Truman nor Stalin” was reviewed by our Italian comrades in Prometeo demonstrating that for all its worth it still exhibited a strong bias in favour of Bordiga. This review article is also being translated as it makes a contribution in its own right to the story of the split in the Internationalist Communist Party in 1951-2 between the followers of Damen and those of Bordiga. We should make it clear that in these historical publications are not looking to sanitise the past of the Italian Left but to understand it and the inevitable errors and hesitations that occurred in the context of their time. This is not an exercise in archaeology or ancestor- worship but an essential element of revolutionary formation. We certainly agree with Michel Roger that we have had too many “isms” and have no wish to give rise to a new one.

Although Michel’s work is more positive about the Internationalist Communist Party it does not shrink from criticism of its weaknesses as he sees them. At the end of the chapter he reproduces the resolution taken on the Vercesi affair. Vercesi and members of the Italian Left in Belgium had, against the entire internationalist framework of opposing both sides in the imperialist war joined an antifascist committee in Brussels though they had eventually resigned from it. However the International Bureau of the Party condemned the politics not the men. Vercesi (who had been a major contributor to the opposition to Stalinism in the 20s) was basically wrapped over the knuckles with a feather and allowed to enter the party. This was not without its controversy even in the Party at the time. According to Luciano Stefanini (Mauro) some comrades turned up at the Turin Congress of the Party in 1945 with revolvers intending to forcibly prevent Vercesi’s entry and had to be persuaded to accept it. The idea that the issue was quietly swept under the carpet as the Gauche Communiste de France (who were not present at the Congress) insisted is not true but the fact is that it remained an error.

However the decision of the IB in 1945 played little part in the later split with the Bordigists (by now headed by Vercesi himself) in 1951 as Michel implies. The fact is that the stabilisation of capitalism after the war (In Italy largely through the combined efforts of the PCI of Togliatti and Marshall Aid) had begun to reduce the influence of the party as it would any organisation of revolutionaries. From 1948 onwards the whispering against the founding of the party in 1943 began and it was against this background that the split occurred with Damen insisting that the Party should exist as a revolutionary nucleus whatever the objective circumstances and the followers of Bordiga returned to something like the old “wait and see” position which some of the Italian Left had adopted so disastrously in the 1930s. We will go into this discussion more deeply as we present further documents but it is important to stress here that the party grew for the first three years of its existence when post-war Europe was in a political and economic crisis. Its subsequent decline (as well as that of other tendencies on the communist left) only came when those objective circumstances receded. One thing above all else this chapter reveals is the courage and determination of the precursors of today’s Communist Left.

The Internationalist Communist Party of Italy

In Italy the “Bordigist” current had not disappeared. The combined forces of the Communist Party of Italy (now Stalinised) and Mussolini had neither reduced the influence nor the tenacity of its members. Under the dictatorship of Mussolini, an “internal centre” always existed in Italy. It regrouped some ex-members of the Italian Left around Damen. We have already indicated that Bilan and Prometeo penetrated clandestinely in Italy before the war. It seems that this penetration came through several channels and in particular through the efforts of Lanfranqui who, thanks to his commercial activities, had professional relations in many countries.⁽³⁾

However, if a “Centre” existed the individual militants remained isolated and scattered, the only ones able to continue political activity were those militants who were condemned to internal exile in the famous “confini”. This was how Damen continued to remain active. In 1933 he organised a hunger strike among the prisoners of Civitavecchia gaol.⁽⁴⁾ It ended with his release “as unshakeable”. His Fascist gaolers could do no more with him and found it was better to free him and put him under house arrest.⁽⁵⁾

In 1942, the economic and social situation changed in Italy. In October 1942 the first important strike took place in FIAT then in March 1943, the first mass movement appeared. After 20 years of the Fascist regime these were the biggest strikes against “starvation-level wages and the war”.⁽⁶⁾

The extent and intensity of these workers reactions were significant throughout the length and breadth of the country. In Piedmont alone there were 107 strikes involving 94,453 workers, in the other industrial centres the strikes involved at least 100,000 metalworkers, 27,000 workers of the textile and other categories like chemicals as well as other branches of industry. At the same time within the Army there were a phenomenal number of desertions.⁽⁷⁾

Political parties and groups began to appear. On 1 July 1942 the Communist Party published the first clandestine number of its clandestine l’Unità. To its left there was a veritable flowering of groups who often published newspapers composed of a single sheet. This phenomenon shows the strength of the Italian proletarian movement as well as the force and the penetration of the ideas of the communist Left. These simple printed sheets often did not have any links with the others and remained localised in this or that city.

These groups did not have any financial means beyond their own militants, nor any support compared to that provided to the official Communist Party. The spontaneous movement which impelled all these small isolated groups seemed very powerful.

Only the attempt of the Internationalist Communist Party around Damen which tried to regroup the workers in struggle and the former members of the “Sinistra italiana”, seemed resolute and organised. It was around Damen in the north of Italy that the initial core of the Italian Left gathered.⁽⁸⁾

The party was born at the end of 1942 […] We were a small group in Lombardy and Piedmont based on a platform, a short document in which we had agreed that the Party had to be maintained as a body right up to the present. We demolished the propagandist scaffolding of the war and its ideological crusade, we denounced the degeneration of the workers’ state and the International and we explained certain important events of contemporary history with the reaffirmation of the need for a class party, on the ideological framework which had presided over “the unrelenting sharpness of Livorno”). [9] The presence of small groups of comrades claiming historical continuity with the positions theoretical and political position of the communist left at the end of the Second World War was announced in Italy in the first half of 1942 […] around Onorato Damen and of Bruno Maffi, with its principal centre at Cantu [10] in the house of Damen and then in Milan.⁽¹¹⁾

Who Was Onorato Damen?

Born in Monte San Pietrangeli in the Marche on 4 December 1893, he took his first political steps in the Italian Socialist Party [PSI] and very quickly moved to the left of the party.⁽¹²⁾

During the First World War he gave out various leaflets inciting soldiers to desert and was condemned to two years in prison between 1917 and 1919. From Imola to Livorno, two key dates in the formation of the fraction that would give birth to PCd'I, he fought alongside Repossi and Fortichiari and members of the Milan Federation of the PSI to detach the largest number of activists from the PSI to create a true communist and internationalist party. The revolutionary current which existed in the Milan Federation of the PSI was the third component, alongside Ordine Nuovo and Bordiga’s abstentionist fraction that together would lead to the founding of the Communist Party of Italy (PCd’I) in 1921.

Very quickly, this tendency found itself on the left of the PSI and, with its own characteristics it came to be called the “sinistra italiana” (or Italian Left). Subsequently, in particular in 1925, Damen represented the more determined wing even within the “sinistra”, whilst Bordiga was sometimes the more conciliatory.

Damen was, with Perrone, one of the initiators of the “Committee of Entente” in 1925.⁽¹³⁾ He was among those who, following the Lyon Congress in 1926 wanted to break with the PCd’I to found a fraction. This line was opposed by Bordiga, who until the end, thought that the Party could be reformed, or that they had to allow its “discipline” to run its course.

But in 1926, the most well-known members of the PCd’I were arrested; in November 1926 Damen was confined to Ustica, then a court convened in December 1926 in Florence tried him on the same charge as that of the Communists of Florence and condemned him “for attacks on the State.” He was also sentenced to 12 years in prison including 7 years in Saluzzo Pallanza, Civitavecchia and Pianosa before being pardoned in 1933 whereupon he was allowed to live in Milan under surveillance.

Upon his release, he went back into political work so he was arrested again in 1935 and again in 1937 for “making Communist propaganda.” The police indicated that he had distributed political material of the International Left Opposition “against the policies of the Comintern and against Stalinism in Spain”.⁽¹⁴⁾

Incidentally, it is amusing to note that the Italian police confused the Trotskyist Left Opposition and the “sinistra italiana”, as can be read in all police reports. This error is all the more odd since the OVRA had more to do with ex-members of the “sinistra” than with Trotskyists. A partial explanation of this phenomenon was due to the fact that police thinking was mostly formed in the 1930s when the existence of the Left Opposition was denounced in official Stalinist newspaper columns, and when militants of the left of the PCd’I were either abroad or in prison.

Damen was a tireless and determined fighter, nothing could bend his revolutionary will. He was arrested again at the outbreak of war and released on the fall of Mussolini in July 1943 during the formation of the Badoglio government.⁽¹⁵⁾ Upon release, the old fighter got back to work to found the Party during the 45 days of the Badoglio government.

Around the nucleus formed in northern Italy we already talked about, two other components regrouped: the elements of the external fraction that had returned to Italy such as Gigi Danielis, Luciano Stefanini, etc. ... and then in 1945 the Frazione di Sinistra e dei Comunisti Socialisti Italiani that had developed in Rome.⁽¹⁶⁾ Vittorio Faggioni⁽¹⁷⁾ was one of the key elements of the southern Italian Frazione. According to Sandro Saggioro the confluence of these three components formed the backbone of the party.

From the end of 1942, the political situation in Italy was very lively with an increasing number of small groups in Piedmont and Lombardy being formed on the political basis of the Italian fraction established in Pantin [then a suburb of Paris] in 1928 and that of the “sinistra italiana” of 1921 to 1926⁽¹⁸⁾ to finally culminate in July 25, 1943 in the founding of the Internationalist Communist Party. The organisational existence of the party could then turn to the more important task of external propaganda from September 8, 1943.⁽¹⁹⁾

Our struggle against the war, against all its manifestations was extremely clear ... We openly criticised the ideological mystification of the partisans as a capitalist weapon of war against the resumption of the class struggle”.⁽²⁰⁾

emphasis added

It was on the 1st November that the first clandestine issue of Prometeo was issued. It carried “21st year” on its front page to show its political continuity with the first newspaper of Bordiga in 1924.⁽²¹⁾

A huge title dominated the first page: “The proletariat opposes the imperialist war with the strong desire to reconnect to its historic goals.” A police report to Mussolini on the underground press said about Prometeo:

The newspaper said without hesitation it is the opponent of Stalin's Russia and Stalin, while proclaiming itself a faithful fighter for Lenin's Russia”.⁽²²⁾

The party was growing very quickly, especially among workers in northern Italy and 11 federations with a further 3 in process of formation were created in northern and central Italy. The implantation of this new party was more difficult to achieve in the south since the split between the north and south of Italy prohibited any contact between the two areas. There were 47 sections with 25 more being formed I the South. In 1944 the party had more than 3000 members, but it was sorely lacking in experienced cadres.

The party was made up largely of workers and very active and enthusiastic activists who were ready for a fight but were not ready for a new period “in the wilderness” if the social situation should again become more stable and normal.

What other political groups were formed in the rest of Italy? ⁽²³⁾

We can point to the formation of the integral Communist Party formed in Turin which published Stella Rossa, the group “The Italian Communist Movement” or Bandiera Rossa in Rome⁽²⁴⁾ and Group of Il Lavoratore of Fortichiari⁽²⁵⁾ and Venegoni⁽²⁶⁾ which had a very short life, these groups did not take a clear position as far as the Italian Left was concerned on the imperialist nature of the Soviet Union.⁽²⁷⁾

Particular attention must be paid to the “Left Fraction of communists and socialists of Naples.” It was through this group that Bordiga took his place in the political struggle without formally joining it. The group was founded by Renato Pistone and Libero Villone. ⁽²⁸⁾ The Neapolitan fraction had some influence in southern Italy and Naples in particular. It had three newspapers, Il Proletario in Rome, the Sinistra Proletario in Naples and Avanguardia in Salerno. The fraction also had two other sections in Puglia and Calabria.⁽²⁹⁾

First of all nothing could be further from the truth than to believe that the thought of Bordiga was all one. For our part, we believe that we should not confuse the Bordiga of 1926, the popular fighter involved in the PCd'I, and the Bordiga of 1944 and especially 1952, when he became at times a somewhat obscure theorist. Let’s stop the "isms"! The revolutionary movement is not a dogma but a living revolutionary theory that feeds on the class struggle. There is no more a “Trotskyism” (an invention of Zinoviev in the struggle for power in Russia) than a “Leninism” an invention which came from the degeneration of the revolutionary movement in the 20s), or a “Bordigism”.

We could ask what Bordiga was thinking in isolating himself from 1926 and 1943. Some, like Piero Corradi, think he retired from politics in order to avoid the fate of Trotsky. Emissaries of Stalin would have made him understand it was better for him just to stick to architecture.⁽³⁰⁾ For our part we believe that Bordiga saw that the period could only end in imperialist war and had withdrawn from activity pending the arrival of more favourable days.

The Naples left fraction of communists and socialists was ambiguous on the possibility of reconquering the Socialist and Communist parties for the proletariat.⁽³¹⁾ “The left is organised as a fraction inside the proletarian parties”.⁽³²⁾ But this passage shows that there was no longer any ambiguity. This group was against imperialist war and defended “proletarian internationalism”, however, it recognised that the partisan struggle had a special status. In Rome the group which published Proletario came from a group of partisans.

The Naples fraction’s position on Russia was quite complex:

The fraction is defined not against the Russia of soviets but against the policy of the current Russian ruling class, because it is harmful to the development of the proletarian revolution.⁽³³⁾

That may be why Bordiga took his later position vis-à-vis the Russian army.⁽³⁴⁾

The Naples fraction played an important role in the union question. It was Enrico Russo⁽³⁵⁾ who was a member of the central committee of the Italian Left abroad who reorganised the Italian communist left in Naples and southern Italy. The influence of the memory of Bordiga through his imprint on the first PCd'I was so great that Togliatti was forced to come to Naples to fight against this new organisation. This struggle of the PCI resulted in the union split of 1944, which after 6-7 months of existence had 150,000 registered members in 30 federations.⁽³⁶⁾ Sandro Saggioro has written about the fears of the Stalinist Party that Bordiga might really spring back to political life. ⁽³⁷⁾ The southern fraction operated until June-July 1945 when it regrouped with the Internationalist Communist Party in the North of Italy.⁽³⁸⁾

The Internationalist Communist Party at that time, as we have already pointed out, found a great echo in the working class. The official Communist Party was not mistaken when it wrote internal circulars designating “Bordigists” as “dogs to kill.” Battaglia Comunista published⁽³⁹⁾ facsimiles of a circular of the PCI’s Bari Federation of August 18, 1945 which had the following slogan, "Death to the Trotskyite dogs!" and had the following sentence: “These are enemies of the proletariat, these traitors, and as such we should treat them”. The circular is signed by the secretary of the Federation A. di Donato.

Dante Corneli recounts in his book all the murders committed by the Italian Communist Party during the Liberation. He pointed to the failed assassination attempt against former party leader Tasca in 1952⁽⁴⁰⁾, and the assassination of Pietro Tresso by French partisans and that of Temistocle Vaccarella⁽⁴¹⁾ on June 19, 1944 who had founded the “Integral Communist Party”.

Then he also talks about the liquidation of known members of the Italian Left.

On March 27, 1945 Fausto Atti was killed in his bed during the night, when he was ill, by a group of supporters who just entered his home in Trebbo in the province of Bologna.⁽⁴²⁾ Mario Acquaviva was killed by six pistol shots on July 13, 1945 in Casale Monferrato on leaving his work at 18:30. The killing came after a campaign by the Communist Party who wanted to pass Acquaviva off as an agent of the OVRA and Gestapo.⁽⁴³⁾ At Schio L'Unità(44) also tried to compromise Riccardo Salvador, who was well known among the local proletariat, as an OVRA agent.⁽⁴⁵⁾ Here the operation was stillborn and the matter ended there.

Italian Left activists had experienced many difficulties for over 30 years, but for the most part, these events only helped to make them stronger. After the difficulties of the war, the Internationalist Communist Party met for its first congress in December 1945. It would allow the party to weld itself together at national level. During the Congress a dispute arose between the French Fraction and Internationalist Communist Party of Italy because of the return of Perrone.

The French Fraction did not call into question the need for the party in this period, as their report of the Congress of the Italian Left stated:

Against the revisionist and opportunist trend known by the name of its leader Vercesi (Perrone). Against this current which denied the existence of the proletariat in the political arena ... we argued that 1943 marked a political rupture in the course of the imperialist war. This analysis led us to the political conclusion expressed in the formula: the era of building the class party is open.⁽⁴⁶⁾

If all the Italian Left was agreed on the need to found the party it was on the method of formation of this body that disagreements persisted.

The report continues:

The political platform came out against any policy of the Antifascist coalition Committee. It therefore implicitly condemns ... Vercesi. So, why is this implicit condemnation kept secret; it is worthless. Only an explicit condemnation through a public debate in the Congress (...) could have been used as a political weapon for the proletariat.⁽⁴⁷⁾

The Congress then discussed the international and domestic situation, the union and agrarian questions and the creation of the International Bureau.⁽⁴⁸⁾ This Bureau would regroup the Internationalist Communist Party of Italy, as well as the French and Belgian Fractions of the Communist Left.

However, Perrone went on to create a new French section in the month of March 1945, which began its public interventions at the end of 1945 and whose organ L’Internationalist appeared in September 1946. The French section of the Communist Left was created from scratch around Suzanne Voute and “Vega”, it included also former members of the Union Communiste such as “Chaze” or Gaston Davoust and Lastérade and some ex-members of the former minority of the Italian fraction. These events would eventually poison relations between the International Bureau and the ex-French Fraction which was permanently excluded in the early months of 1946, despite its efforts to open a public debate on these issues.⁽⁴⁹⁾

This group changed its name in order to not be confused with the New French Fraction and took the name “Communist Left of France” (GCF) , then turned to the other “left” currents and the “German-Dutch Left” as well as dissident Trotskyists in Europe and the USA.

After the last fires of liberation died down the lack of method shown by the International Bureau, led to the first and most serious split in the “sinistra”, between the Internationalist Communist Party of Damen, and the International Communist Party of Bordiga. But that's another story … which remains to be written.

Document

DRAFT RESOLUTION ON THE COMMITTEE OF ANTIFASCIST COALITION

The IB has considered the question of the participation of some Italian comrades, supported by the Belgian Fraction, in the Committee of Antifascist Coalition in Brussels from 1944 to 1945.

It considers that this participation has not been justified up to now by a clear, precise and definitive theoretical premise, which can only give grounds for stating that this was a breach of our principles. On the other hand, the formulation of the theory of the war economy which has established a pretext for some biased and partisan criticism in order to make political scandal against our movement has never been maintained by anyone as a theoretical justification for participation in this hybrid united front organisation.

The IB recognizes the Antifascist Coalition Committee did not have the character of a Committee of National Liberation, and notes that the comrades resigned as soon as its transformation into a C. d. L. N. (Committee of National Liberation) was projected. This does not, however, diminish the seriousness of the attitude taken by these comrades. In order to agree to this policy, not only did they underestimate the historical role of the proletariat in the imperialist war, but particularly important and fundamental, the forces of its political vanguard. It raised no class issues based on the experience of the Left Fraction in Italy which gave birth to the Internationalist Communist Party (the fight against war, no alliance even temporary and limited to the purposes of assistance and culture as in the case of the Brussels Committee of Antifascist Coalition, with the forces who had solidarised with the war).

Any theoretical formulation which tries to justify tactics such as participation in the Brussels Committee of Antifascist Coalition has to be recognised as erroneous and in contrast with the ideas and tactics of the Communist Left. It is an attitude that the BI condemned at the time both in principle and in practice, while it stood against the campaign unleashed by international groupings seeking to accuse the comrades in question and all the Italian Communist Left of participation in the imperialist war.

Notes

(1) See left-dis.nl. df

(2) The Florence (Firenze) section of the International Communist Party broke away in the 1960s over the issue of forming “red trades unions”. They confusingly also kept the name International Communist Party but as their paper is called Il Partito Comunista they are usually referred to by that. They now also publish in English as “Communist Left”

(3) Mario Lanfranqui was born in Bressana Bottarone (Pavia) on 10 February 1902. Founding member of the Communist Party of Italy (PCd’I) in 1921 he was obliged to leave Pavia following the assassination of some fascists and sought refuge in Milan and later in Paris. In 1924 he returned to Italy where he took part in the Committee of Entente (Comitato d’Intesa). He was expelled from the PC d’I in 1926. He created a tractor importing firm in Italy and Libya. This trading status allowed him to remain in contact with the fraction abroad. After the war until his death on 25 January 1959 he remained a generous patron of the Italian Left, financing it in part, he notably enabled several children of its militants to go on to higher education (information from Pierre Corradi)

(4) D. Montaldi, Saggio sulla politica comunista in Italia, Quaderni Piacentini, Piacenza, 1976, p. 205.

(5) ibid

(6) ibid p.210

(7) In Resoconti : Convegno di Torino 1945, Congresso di Firenze 1948, Edizioni Prometeo, Milano 1975, p. 210; D. Montaldi Saggio..., op. cit. p. 210 et Dolléans, Histoire du mouvement ouvrier, Volume 3, Paris, Colin, 1967, p. 201 et sq

(8) Sandro Saggioro, Né con Truman, Né con Stalin, Edizioni Colibri, Milan, 2010, 413p.

(9) Cf. Battaglia Comunista, Year 1, No.2, Rome, 23-30 January 1946.

(10) A town in the province of Como in Lombardy

(11) Il processo di formazione e la nascita del Partito Comunista Internationalista, Quaderni di Battaglia Comunista, No.6, December 1993, p.16.

(12) Battaglia Comunista, Year XXXXVII, n° 14, du 10 au 31October 1979 (Special edition in memory of O. Damen, who died Sunday 14 October 1979)

(13) This has been translated by the CWO and printed with a historical introduction. It is available from the group address (£4 includes postage)

(14) Battaglia Comunista, op cit p.4

(15) Marshal Pietro Badoglio, born in Grazzano Montferrato (1871-1956), Governor of Libya en 1929 et Viceroy of Ethiopia in 1936.

(16) Sandro Saggioro, op.cit, p.36

(17) D. Montaldi, Saggio..., op. cit. p. 238. Vittorio Faggioni (1918 – 2005), cf www.avantibarbari.it.

(18) "Rapporto politico organizzativo", presented by B. Maffî in the Congres de Turin 1945, in Resconti..., op. cit., p.4. V. Faggioni was from Naples.

(19) Resoconti, op. cit., p.5.

(20) ibid

(21) The police did not even manage to make a link with Bordiga and the past of the Communist Party of Italy. The report on this group which was consulted mentions 21 years of political work in Rapporto a Mussolini, sulla stampa clandestina, 1943-1945, State Archives, n° 086713

(22) Op. cit. n° 086714, p. 6.

(23) Arturo Peregalli, L’Altra Resistenza. Il PCI e le opposizioni di sinistra, 1943-1945, Graphos, Genova, 1991.

(24) For English readers Peregalli also wrote an article on the Italian Communist Left for the Trotskyist journal Revolutionary History called “The Left Wing Opposition in Italy during the Period of the Resistance”. It is factually accurate but written from a standpoint critical of the Internationalist Communist Party. See marxists.org

(25) Bruno Fortichiari (1892 - 1981) was among the founders of the Communist Party of Italy in 1921.

(26) Carlo Venegoni

(27) Saggio.., op.cit., p. 239 et seq and Resoconti, op. cit. p. 4.

(28) Saggio... op. cit. p. 245 et seq

(29) Saggio... op. cit. p. 246

(30) We think this should be “engineering” as Bordiga’s had a degree in that discipline [CWO].

(31) "La situazione dopo Roma", in Il Proletario, 15 July 1944

(32) ibid p.19

(33) A. Bordiga L. Villone, R. Pistone, "Per la cotituzione del vero Partito comunista", Milan, 1945.

(34) Gazette de Lausanne, op. cit. n°142. Bordiga’s position on Russia was the key issue in the Five Letters between him and Damen published in our last issue of Revolutionary Perspectives. See leftcom.org

(35) Nicola de Ianni in Italia Contemporanea, Milan, July-September 1979, n° 136, p. 30.

(36) Paolo De Marco in Italia Contemporanea, op, cit. p, 64.

(37) Sandro Saggioro, Né con Truman, Né con Stalin, op.cit.

(38) Saggio… op.cit p. 248

(39) Battaglia Comunista, 1st September 1945, n° 9.

(40) Dante Cornelli, Persecutori e vittime, Rome, Tivoli, 1979, p. 100 (Book III)

(41) Op. cit. p. 104 and G. Zaccaria, 200 Comunisti, Ed. Azione Comune, pp. 99, 102,

(42) Corneli, op.cit. p. 100. Atti was born in Trebbo, he was one of the founders of the Communist Party. He joined the Fraction in Paris in 1928. Under the Nazi occupation he was arrested in Belgium and returned to Italy where he was exiled to the Island of Ventotene. From the moment of his liberation he adhered to the new Internationalist Communist Party.

(43) D. Corneli, ibid., p. 98. Acquaviva was born in Acquapendente (Viterbo) on 20 June 1900. He was a militant in the PSI then in the PCd’I. He was condemned by the Special Tribunal on 23 September 1927 to 8 years and 6 months of house arrest. He had married Maria Platone sister of Felice Platone, a Communist deputy who was at first a member of Bordiga’s abstentionist fraction then remained loyal to the Party after 1926. In 1940 Mario Acquaviva made contact with those close to Damen in order to reconstitute a political group. The police account from Alessandria noted “He still maintains subversive ideas .. he acts in a subversive way” ibid p.99

(44) L'Unità du 13 juillet 1945

(45) Un comunista di meno, Ed. Prometeo, Milan, 1972.

(46) L’Étincelle, n° 10, January-February 1946

(47) ibid.

(48) Compte rendu de la première conférence nationale du Parti Communiste d'Italie, publication de la Gauche communiste internationale, Milan, 1946 (28 December – 1 January 1946) et Resoconti convegno di Torino 1945, Éditions Prometeo, Milan

(49) Internationalisme, n° 16 December1946