The document which follows was originally written in 1979, and translated in 1981 in handwritten form for discussion inside the Communist Workers’ Organisation on the tradition of the Italian Communist Left. It has recently been published in the online journal Intransigence (https://intransigence.org/2018/11/02/fraction-and-party/) but the introduction here is a much expanded.
The original article was written during the period of the International Conferences of the Communist Left (1977-80) which had been called by the Internationalist Communist Party (PCInt). It was partially a reply to the claims of the International Communist Current (ICC) that the Italian Fraction of the International Communist Left around the journal Bilan was the highest expression of the Italian Left. The Fraction (made up of comrades exiled in France and Belgium) was part of the history of the entire Italian Communist Left (a fact denied only by the various International Communist Parties of Bordigist inspiration) but was not its highest expression. Most of its members returned to Italy and joined the PCInt at the end of the Second World War but many issues even then had not been clarified. It could hardly have been otherwise. Given the extent of and form of the counter-revolution in which a one-time proletarian organisation, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) became the agent of counter-revolution it took time to understand and draw the lessons. The CPSU had not only created a state capitalist monster against the working class in Russia but had turned the Communist International into a tool of its increasingly imperialist interests but the Fraction failed to grasp many issues. They did not, for example have an analysis of the class nature of the USSR an issue only resolved by the comrades who founded the PCInt.
However the article which follows is not about a “bilan” (balance sheet) on Bilan. Its purpose is much more precise. It explains that the experience of the Italian Fraction of the Internationalist Communist Left abroad refers to a particular historical phase, that of fascism in Italy that forced many militants of the left to flee abroad. The term Frazione was used in 1928 and was intended to indicate political continuity and unity with the old “party of 1921” just as the communists had formed a fraction inside the old Socialist Party before breaking with it. The militants of the Left had founded this Communist Party of Italy, Section of the Third International (to give it its full title) and they still claimed political and organizational continuity with the Communist International while being physically detached from it. Hence why they saw themselves as an internationalist “fraction”. They also knew that the Comintern and the Italian Party under Gramsci and Togliatti were on the road to counter-revolution but, until they finally got there, they were designated as “centrist” and the main efforts of the fraction, as their name suggests, were directed against them in an attempt to turn them back to revolutionary politics.
In 1935, when it became obvious that the degeneration of the USSR, the Comintern and all its parties had finally taken them into the arms of the class enemy, the Fraction was faced with a new dilemma. It could no longer remain a fraction of a party that was lost to the class but they could not decide at what point they should launch a new party. Vercesi, in particular, thought they should wait until the conditions for a mass party would arise again. As the article below shows, this was contested by a number of members of the Fraction. Hence, the Fraction became paralyzed at the start of the Second World War, and eventually dissolved. It was only in 1943, with political and economic chaos looming that gave rise to a post-war potentially revolutionary class struggle, that the Party issue would be resolved in the birth of the Internationalist Communist Party before the end of the war.
In short, what the article argues is that the experience of the Fraction was unique to a specific historical situation. Anyone who claims to be a fraction today has to answer the question “fraction of what”? These old parties no longer exist. The old battles have been fought and the problems surrounding the issues of their time have been decided. Today we are not in the same position. Whilst we take all that the proletarian experience of the past offers us, we take it to build on for a future international. We do not lock ourselves into a long-past political experience although, as Marx noted in the Eighteenth Brumaire, there is a tendency, even amongst revolutionaries, to look too much to the past.
"At the very time when [we] appear engaged in … in bringing about what never was before, at such very epochs of revolutionary crisis do [we] anxiously conjure up into their service the spirits of the past, assume their names, their battle cries, their costumes to enact a new historic scene in such time-honored disguise and with such borrowed language."
Today we are setting out on a new road with a newly formed proletariat creating groups which are the nuclei of a future party not fractions of a long dead one.
This is also true for the question of the so-called “historic course” which Vercesi (the main spokesman for the Italian left abroad) did not recognise despite his insistence that the formation of the party would have to wait until the working class was already moving. The idea of the “historic course” was though promoted by others, notably Marc Chirik, the future founder of the ICC. In his view, which is the view of the ICC, today any attempt to form the class political is doomed if the “historic course” is towards counter-revolution. Like Vercesi the argument is that the actual balance of class forces is the decisive factor in the formation of the class political party. Chirik decided that the historic course was towards war and counter-revolution and thus refused to join the PCInt unlike most of the rest of the Fraction. It was very similar to the position initially taken by Bordiga a few years later in 1948-52 when he began to question the very formation of the Internationalist Communist Party (founded 1943). This had been formed at a time of a massive strike wave in Northern Italy, alongside other signs of working class ferment elsewhere, and seemed to presage a post-war revolutionary wave, like that at the end of the First World War. However, by 1948 it was clear that capitalism had weathered that particular storm. Bordiga now insisted that this was “not the time” to have a party and even initially suggested that the PCInt should be dissolved. This was at a time when it still had over 4000 members in Italy alone!
For the defenders of the “historic course” the counter-revolution was not over and thus the question of the party should not have been posed at that time. Marc Chirik was not alone in seeing that the Cold War was creating a new threat to the working class but he was the only one to decide that its consequences would be a nuclear holocaust and abandon Europe for Venezuela at the outbreak of the Korean War. World War Three did not happen. The PCint, despite the split with the Bordigists in 1952, despite declining numbers, continued the patient work of fighting inside the working class against the imperialist forces on both sides. For them the idea of a “historic course” was simply an intellectual construct which also served as a justification for abandoning the task of trying to keep revolutionary organisation alive.
Marc Chirik and his followers shared the same methodology as those in the Fraction in the 1930s who argued that the question of the party should wait until the time when the objective conditions are ripe. This underlines both the position of the “wait and see” tendency in the Fraction and the defenders of the “historic course” idea. The error here is to assume that the party should only be formed when it had the instant possibility of becoming a mass party. Not only is this a nod to social democratic (and Comintern) conceptions of the nature of a proletarian party but is not even borne out by history.
Despite being a tiny minority of the Russian working class (8000) after they separated from the Mensheviks in 1912 the Bolsheviks were already present, and sufficiently known, to be accepted by the class in 1917 when it became clear that they were the one organized force which defended soviet power. This contrasts sharply with the German Spartakists who did not even form a distinct organization during the First World War but were swallowed up as a fraction inside the centrist USPD. Only AFTER the proletarian revolt in November 1918 did they actually consider forming a communist party which soon succumbed to putchism, opportunism and was torn between revolutionary and conservative policies.
As the article below states, the political party cannot be set up over night. It needs a lot of preparation, not just in theoretical work but to establish its political message (programme) and a way of working, which prepares every one of its members to act in a revolutionary manner in any given situation. The party is the subjective part of the equation, a tool for liberation, which is forged in struggles before any revolutionary outburst. As Onorato Damen stated, the working class, whatever its immediate hopes and condition has a permanent need for a party and the Fraction was only a unique historic interlude at a time of acute confusion brought about by a historic betrayal.
When the first signs of the end of the post-war boom were becoming evident in the late 1960s Marc Chirik, working from the premise that the historic course was now reversed, returned to Europe. The return of the economic crisis due to the fall in the rate of profit meant that the capitalists had to step up their attacks on working conditions and wages. Workers put up a resistance but this was largely on the basis of corporate struggles controlled by unions. Internationally there were notable attempts to go beyond this framework but they were exceptions. However, they were enough for Marc Chirik to proclaim that the counter-revolution was over and that now was the time to form new revolutionary organisations (the existing ones being “sclerotic”). A number of formerly councilist groups (many of recent formation) were joined together in 1975 into the International Communist Current, which now proclaimed that it was “the pole of regroupment” for revolutionaries. Now that the counter-revolution was over the ICC believed that the working class was already revolutionary and only needed to be “demystified” since the “historic course” was now towards proletarian revolution. Once workers were told that the unions were against the working class the scales would fall from their eyes and the road to revolution would be open. Unsurprisingly the course of history proved a good deal more complicated. The 1970s like the 1940s was another period where a revival of class struggle did not naturally translate into revolutionary consciousness amongst the broad masses of the working class. Those who insisted the new wave of struggle did not signal the “end of the counter-revolution” but was evidence of the new crisis of capitalism were to be condemned as “rudderless” by the ICC for the next 25 years. Armed with the certainties of the “historic course the ICC were convinced that they were the “pole of regroupment” around which the rest of the communist left should regroup.
As the 1980s opened, the ICC announced that these were “the years of truth”, of growing class confrontation. In some ways this turned out to be true as the restructuring brought on by the crisis was leading to the wholesale writing off of capital in the old industrial centres as production was transferred to low wage economies like China (unacknowledged at the time by the ICC). Workers fought a desperate rearguard action, but striking to save a job when the capitalists are already prepared to write off constant capital, is never a comfortable position. Demoralisation set in and the class began to retreat. However, the supporters of the idea that the “historic course” was towards greater class confrontation did not see this and it was only with the collapse of the USSR and its bloc that they saw the need to re-evaluate the theory. There was no suggestion though that the idea of the “historic course” had ever been wrong. For the ICC it was just that neither the working class nor the capitalists had succeeded in imposing their agendas on each other. The fact that workers’ living standards have declined consistently since 1979, that restructuring had destroyed whole communities, does not seem to enter into this balance sheet.
Instead, the ICC joined the post-modern scene and came up with their own ideological constructs of “chaos” and “decomposition”. Capitalism was now decomposing (a metaphor, which suggests that “decadence” was not enough – now it was really, really decadent). For the ICC “chaos” and “decomposition” was always a stop gap theory to cover the collapse of their perspective that the “historic course” was towards revolution. We are not denying that there are increasing signs of capitalism’s decline but this is rooted in the one material factor ignored by the ICC (for them the economic crisis of capitalism is “permanent”) and that is that the capitalist crisis has not gone away, and intensifies the longer it is prolonged.
Capitalism has had mechanisms to try to either manage the crisis or raise the rate of profit over the decades. But, the one single factor which remains as stubborn today as it was in 1971 is that the over-accumulation of capital means that a new revival of its cycle of production can come about only through the devaluation of capital. Today only, the massive destruction of a widespread war or series of wars can achieve this. This brings us back to the perspective that we have had since the imperialist epoch opened – war or revolution is the only solution to the increasing contradictions of the system. Those who dance about claiming that the situation is not urgent and that we do not need to start working for an international proletarian party based on the experience of the communist left have their heads in the sand.
This may now include the ICC. We say “may” because we are not sure where they stand today so confused has been there more recent reponses. In 2014 the ICC went through some kind of internal crisis but it was never made clear, even to their sympathizers, what the nature of that crisis was. Instead in 2016 they produced a new balance sheet entitled “Forty Years of the ICC” in International Review 156. They now criticized some of their past positions. We can only summarize some of them here. They include, in their words:
* its analyses of the balance of forces between the classes: the tendency to see the proletariat constantly “on the offensive”
* a “catastrophist” vision
* a tendency to retain the illusion that the deepening economic crisis and attacks against the working class would necessarily, and in a mechanical way, provoke “waves of struggle” that would develop with the same characteristics and on the same model as those of 1970-80
The ICC is not the only organisation to have made errors over the years (those who make no errors make nothing in general) but these errors are all the consequences of their insistence that the “historic course was” towards proletarian revolution. Whilst this re-examination is to be welcomed (even if it does not come with the recognition of the real cause of their problem) the article quoted was followed in the same issue by another entitled “Report on the Role of the ICC as a Fraction”. This is a very confusing document which has caused some discussion on the ICC’s Forum. In World Revolution 376 (2017) one sympathizer, Link, asked about the document.
"The ICC appears to be now adopting a role as a Fraction but I am struggling to understand the reasons and the possible consequences. What does this role mean and what is the political justification for this change i.e. what is the analysis of current situation leading to this outcome. _
I have previously made the statement on this forum that the ICC has given up on its role as ‘pole of regroupment’ and drew no criticism or rebuttal. The ICC has simply avoided explaining or clarifying its direction. It would appear however to tie in with this new role of the Fraction."
In response the ICC offer only more obfuscation and a little rewriting of history but to the key question posed by Link there is no straight answer. Do they now consider themselves a fraction (and if so of what?) and what does that mean for their work. When Link asks why they have not responded to his criticism they deflect this into a criticism of the rest of the communist left camp.
"The low morale of the left communist milieu in general may help to explain the background to the dearth of response to the 40 year self-critique of the ICC."
We can assure the ICC that those of us who have muddled along “rudderless” for so long are in good heart. They should not project their own apparent current demoralisation onto others. We did not have a chiliastic vision of a “course of history” to define our work. The capitalist mode of production is inherently crisis ridden but the final outcome is not a given. It is still the same as that enunciated by Marx in the Communist Manifesto “either the revolutionary reconstitution of society or the common ruin of the contending classes”, or in later forms “socialism or barbarism”, “war or revolution”.
Revolutionaries have no crystal ball and unlike in Hegelian teleology history always offers more than one possibility. Currently, we as a class are losing the class war but that may not always be the case. Since the bursting of the speculative bubble, which had previously maintained the fraudulent idea that capitalism was booming, things are beginning to slowly shift. Communists can now talk openly of “capitalism” without being laughed at, new mass movements which ask questions of capital, but which cannot themselves answer them because of their lack of class basis (from the Indignados to yellow vests), underline the failures of the system and, as even the ICC notice, a new generation of young revolutionaries are coming to the communist left in numbers not seen since the early 1970s. All this makes us all the more determined to widen the revolutionary internationalist camp whilst at the same time doing what we have always done, and stare reality in the face
The fundamental condition for the formation of the future party is of course the class struggle itself. But, it is also dependent on the real active work of revolutionaries in the class struggle today. Placing the revolutionary minority into a passive category of history is to close off any real understanding of the complex dialectical relations between two active poles. It is like claiming that history will solve these problems itself and forgets that real human beings make history. It is a retreat into passive observation. And at a time when the capitalist crisis looks more like worsening rather than improving, when capitalism is developing its own preparations for its “solutions”, when the ecological degradation of the planet demonstrates daily capitalism’s threat to our existence, and when many of the younger generation are looking for answers, the last thing we need to do is to “wait and see”.
FRACTION AND PARTY - THE ITALIAN LEFT EXPERIENCE
(from Prometeo 2 Series IV July 1979)
When Fascism brought in the Exceptional Laws, after the Matteotti crisis, the Communist Party of Italy (PCd’I) was almost caught by surprise. To make the defeat worse, besides the lack of organisational preparation by the Ufficio Uno (a clandestine office run by Bruno Fortichiari) and the entire Party structure, the constantly shifting ambiguity of the Third [Communist] International's policy towards the old socialist parties played a decisive role. This further disoriented the Italian proletariat and denied the centrist party itself any real possibility of limiting the damage by a more orderly withdrawal.
On the night of 8 November, 1926 almost the entire parliamentary group was arrested. Ferrari, Picelli, Riboldi, Alfani, Molinelli, Borin, Srebnic, Maffi, Losardo, Fortichiari, Damen and Gramsci were secured in Mussolini’s prisons, only Grieco, Gennari and Bendini managed to save themselves. In the previous months the fascist reaction had already got rid of Bordiga, Scoccimarro, Terracini, Oberti, Bagnolati, Allegato, Flecchia and Roveda; Togliatti and Gnudi only escaped because they were in Moscow. Thus, in one fell swoop, the old Left and the centrist leadership of Gramsci and Togliatti, were eliminated. The Mussolini regime now had a free hand to dismantle the entire organisational structure of the party, composed of hundreds of intermediary cadre operating on a national scale. In the space of a week, in Rome, amongst all those arrested were six thousand Communist militants who fell into the hands of the regime’s police. In Milan there were more than two thousand arrests, in Turin three hundred and fifty, in Padua two hundred, and in Verona two hundred and sixty. With the Rome “show trial” (May 1927), another 570 militants were arrested, including Licausi, recently co-opted to the new leadership, Stefanini (secret courier) and R. Ferragni (Red Aid lawyer). The Exceptional Laws and their practical consequences marked the highest point of the counter-revolution in Italy in the twenties, not only in its most obviously repressive aspect, but also for the process of political decomposition that it set in motion. Furthermore, and above all this took place within the PCd'I under the pressure of international events (especially in Russia) with tragically rapid consequences.
The hammer blows of Italian bourgeois reaction, which in those years was in the vanguard of a similar process throughout Europe, was compounded by the progressive isolation of the Soviet experience with its consequent sliding towards counter-revolutionary positions. On the basis of this class isolation that lasted for a decade, the tactical expedients of the Bolshevik Party, and of the Communist International (CI), gradually took on a strategic vision which completely distorted the revolutionary purpose for which they had arisen. Until the Second Congress, the CI it had acted as the emerging point of the class struggle on a world scale, linking all its tactics to a single strategic goal: the international revolution. The Russian experience was not considered as a fixed and established reference point but as the first breach in the international imperialist order, that in order to survive and progress needed other similar experiences to occur in Europe, especially in the most industrialised countries. Not only did this not happen, but the CI itself, in the face of an objectively negative situation, adopted a series of tactical resolutions, from the Third Congress onwards, which in the space of a few years went from opportunistic expedients to a definite counter-revolutionary political approach.
So, the international revolutionary perspective, the theoretical elaboration of the pitiless struggle against social democracy, and for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the only forms and instruments to guarantee the construction of socialism, was abandoned in Congress after Congress. Instead we got the attempt to implement the compromising politics of the united front, of the workers' government, and last but not least, the possibility of building, in the face of proletarian internationalism, socialism in an isolated Russia.
The Exceptional Laws came only a few months after the VIth Enlarged Executive of the CI, by which time this political decomposition was already an established fact. Within the CI, as well as in the Bolshevik Party itself, the Bukharin-Stalin Right was about to finally gain the upper hand over the Trotsky-Kamenev-Zinoviev Left, with the consequent possibility of bringing about an economic policy of a capitalist type in Russia and to pass it off, through their "centrist appendices" across the world, as building “socialism in one country”.
Neither the Italian nor the European proletariat, were aware of what was happening in Russia in those years or of the struggle that left-wing minorities were leading against the absurd tactics of Stalin and his comrades. Few thus knew what lay behind J.H.Droz’s recommendations in June 1923 that Bordiga, with almost all of the Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Italy who were not willing to accept Moscow’s tactical line, be replaced by individuals of proven right-wing faith, such as Vote, Tasca and Togliatti, and at the same time invited to enter the Presidium of the CI. Even the often fierce criticism that Bordiga articulated within the CI, was very often silenced, as in the final resolution of the work of the VIth Expanded Executive, where the exponent of the Italian Left repeated his criticisms about Russian and international issues, about the relationship between the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) and the Bolshevik Party, and about the united front and the concept of the workers' state. For Moscow, as for the centrist leadership, it was important, in order to isolate the Left of the Party, that certain problems and certain discussions were only partially reported so that they did not fully reach the Party rank and file. In this regard, the letter that Togliatti sent to the Party secretariat is significant:
"The study of the Russian question has convinced me that it concerns topics that are of fundamental importance for the perspectives and tactics of the proletariat in the present moment. It is not possible not to pose these problems to the masses without running the risk of detaching ourselves from the masses themselves.(1)"
He was right to be worried if we take into account that even in 1926, despite the success of centrism at the IIIrd Party Congress in Lyon, the new leadership seemed to be a head still detached from a Party body which, although confused and disoriented, was more likely to listen to the political demands of the Left rather than the tightrope tactics of the new leadership. It should also be remembered that, almost a year after the first restructuring at the top of the party, at the Como conference of the responsible cadres of the organization (1924), 35 out of 45 Federation secretaries sided with the positions of the Left, as they did a year later, with the initiative of Repossi, Damen and Fortichiari for the Committee of Agreement (Comitato d’Intesa). In addition to individuals on the Left, entire federations such as Milan, Turin, Rome, Naples, Cremona, Pavia, Alessandria, Novara, Trieste, Foggia and Cosenza supported it. It is at this point that Gramsci, in preparation for the IIIrd Party Congress, used the iron fist, by requiring the members of the Committee of Agreement to renounce the initiative, under penalty of expulsion, and blackmailing all those who had sided with the positions of the old leadership created at Livorno.
On 4 June, Gramsci summoned the inter-regional secretaries and set them a dilemma: either follow the line of the centre, which meant, on the practical side, to stay within the organisation, taking advantage of its financial support as a party official, or be expelled, with all the consequences that fascism would quickly demonstrate if the opportunity arose. Naturally individuals like Gramsci and Togliatti, had every interest in not saying what was happening in Russia (the Trotsky case), whilst striking with all means against the most active members of the Left. After the Exceptional Laws and the Rome show trial, the break between the centre and the Left, went beyond polemics, to more or less official recalls, to blackmail and expulsions. It became a fact that came to define the character of the specific conditions of general demobilisation.
Inside the prisons, in the places of police controlled internal exile, in the penal colonies, the two sides confronted each other both on the political and organisational level; even in the hours of "free time", this attitude of intransigence did not diminish. Centrism reproduced in the jails, as far as was objectively possible, that minimum of organizational ties of increasingly blind and uncritical adhesion to the CI. This included unending attempts to politically discredit and isolate the Bordigists or Trotskyists, who within a few years, would be synonymous as “agents of imperialism”. The Left, trapped in this centrist-fascist grip, learned to fight on the edge of the abyss that had opened up, transforming, wherever it was possible, the fascist jail into a real university of Marxism, with moments of proselytism, in the tough and laborious work of forging revolutionary cadres. Others managed to escape abroad, particularly to France to Belgium, giving rise to the phenomenon of political migration that was very important in the debate between the leftist oppositions that arose in those years both inside and outside the CI.
The Degeneration of the Third [Communist] International
The process of political degeneration of the CI that involved all the communist parties, with greater or lesser rapidity, sprang rapidly from the negative evolution of events in Europe. From 1921 to 1926 there was no episode of defeat or failure that did not increase Moscow’s readiness to partially or totally change the programmatic points issued by CI’s Second Congress.
The Spartacist Revolt and the Hungarian revolution confirmed the need for a policy and a tactic which, for a revolutionary victory, would have had to be based on a more authentic concept of political and organisational autonomy of revolutionaries, in order to arrive, without intermediate stages, at the only possible outcome, the dictatorship of the proletariat. However with the failed attempt to export the revolution by force in Poland (defeat of the Red Army at Warsaw, August 1920), the revolutionary failure in Italy after the factory occupations (September 1920) and the gradual extinction of the Ruhr miners’ uprising (March 1921), the persistence, after five years, of the isolation of the Russian revolution, with a catastrophic internal situation, both economically and in terms of dealing with social tensions, led to the germination of a u-turn in ECCI’s tactic.
At the Third Comintern Congress (Moscow, June/July 1921) and in the subsequent Enlarged Executive, while considering the situation was still likely to produce revolutionary solutions, (2) on the important issue of a mass following for the newborn communist parties, the CI came up with the tactical formula of the united front with the forces of social democracy for a temporary coalition, a “workers government”, with the false pretext of unmasking the opportunist and objectively counter-revolutionary attitude of the "workers' parties" linked to the Second International in the eyes of the workers.
In fact, the theories of the united front and the workers' government were not a tactical, "necessarily" dangerous retreat, in order to pave the way for the various communist parties to conquer the masses still linked to the old social democratic parties, but the first step in a much more drastic and irreversible process of political revisionism which made the occurrence of a revolutionary event on an international scale all the more unlikely. The confirmation came at the Fourth Comintern Congress (Moscow and Petrograd, November-December 1922) in which the social democracy of Kautskv, Turati and Van der Velde ceased to be a bastion of conservatism, the “left wing of the bourgeoisie” (Zinoviev) and even less “the little sister of fascism” (Stalin), but was re-labelled an "important sector of the labor movement". Along these lines, the united front, a momentary instrumental alliance, was declared as the most suitable instrument for the project of unification between the two sections of the labour movement in a single organisational structure that was better placed to recover the ground lost in relation to the masses by ending their confusion and disorientation.
But for such a project to have any chance of success demanded the impossible. The adherents of the old socialist parties would not accept reunification on the basis of a revolutionary programme that had been, the basis for the split only two years earlier. It was also necessary that the “workers' gover