Contents
- Brief internationalist history of the Italian Communist Left
- The Communist Party of Italy
- The Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy
- The Foundation of the Internationalist Communist Party
To better understand the context in which the “Draft Programme” of the Internationalist Communist Party came to be, was drawn up and made public in 1944 (within the confines of its forced clandestinity), we believe it might be useful to outline a brief history of the “Italian Left” from the First World War to the Second post-war period, when the contrasts between the different ‘souls’ ended in the schism of 1952. The break led to a substantial contribution to the gradual weakening of internationalist groups, in Italy and abroad.
Brief internationalist history of the Italian Communist Left
«We of the Internationalist Communist Party – Italian affiliate of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party [which is now the Internationalist Communist Tendency, ICT, ed.] - come directly from the Italian Communist Left and have made the necessary steps forward, facing the true dynamics of capitalism and the actual nature of imperialism (which, let’s remember, is not just a policy). We believe that the others who come from the tradition of the Italian Communist Left have either departed from its general methodological framework – and this is the case of the ICC – or – like the Bordigists – have remained stuck (invariant?) on the positions of 1921-22, placing themselves outside revolutionary perspectives regarding modern capitalism» (Mauro Stefanini, in an e-mail, early 2000s).
Today, the term “communist left” creates quite a bit of confusion. The groups that adhere to the ICT don’t use that term often. We prefer to be called “internationalists”. We also try to avoid using, or use very little, the term “Italian Left”, which can create a lot of confusion. In the tradition of the “Italian Left” there are three components: the Internationalist Communist Party (Battaglia Comunista, the founding group, along with CWO, of the future IBRP and later ICT), the French Communist Left, precursor of the ICC, and the Bordigists, who today are represented by many groups that can’t be easily counted, but all of them stem from The Communist Programme; Bordigist groups usually take the name of the “International Communist Party”. Then there is another grouping, which originates from the ICC, from which it has detached, or, more precisely, it was expelled from the ICC in the early 2000s: the Groupe International de la Gauche Communiste.
For us, one of the biggest sources of confusion is that, when we say that we come from the tradition of the Italian Communist Left, we often get wrongly identified with Bordiga and Bordigism.
The Italian Left has experienced two periods in which its ideas had a wide following, the years 1919-24 and, to a lesser extent, the years 1943-49.
The Communist Party of Italy
Starting with the First World War and the Russian Revolution, the big problem in Italy was the creation of a communist party that could be affiliated with the Third International instituted in 1919. The problem that the Left faced was the confusion deliberately spread by the Italian Socialist Party, under Serrati, who kept open the possibility of an affiliation with the Third International, without actually doing it. Furthermore, the PSI had kept an ambiguous position expressed in the formula “neither support, nor sabotage” regarding the war, which Italy did not join until May 1915. In this way it could further muddy the waters.
During that period (1919-20), Italy was dealing with political upheavals, with workers that occupied their factories and went on strikes that numbered thousands; this period is called “Red Biennium”. However, there was no working class party that could direct those struggles towards an assault on the state. The workers stayed shut in the factories and the ruling class merely had to wait until the movement died down. During that period the “Intransigents”, as the comrades on the left were called at the time, managed to carry out the break with the socialists and establish the Communist Party of Italy [also referred to by the initials PCd’I] in Livorno, in 1921; but the ascending movement of class struggle was already over and the bourgeoisie was already veering into fascism.
The Party just founded had been created by the Left, and its most prominent leader was the young Amadeo Bordiga. Even then, Bordiga had a tendency towards formalism and one of his errors was calling his fraction “the abstentionist fraction”, when actually it should have been called the communist fraction. The result was that many communists, who thought the parliament should be used as a pulpit to gain publicity (without actually seeing it as an avenue to gain power) hesitated to adhere, and this resulted not just in a party with a size numerically inferior to what it should have been, but also that the party ultimately appeared later than it should have. Bordiga’s tactical idea at the root of his decision on the name “abstentionist”, was that the old socialist party had become corrupt and reformist because its members had gained parliamentary privileges, and this was his way of keeping reformists out. More confusion was added by the fact that Bordiga went to the Comintern’s Second Congress and insisted on adding the 21st condition, which stated that all of the Comintern’s decisions were binding for all communist parties. This meant that he had tied the Italian Party to the work in the parliament and the trade unions, which by some was considered a step back. However, Bordiga was coherent in his insistence that the Italian section of the International should take precedence above all. This explains why one of Bordiga’s critiques of the KAPD comrades, the German left communists, was that they elevated issues they regarded as tactical to matters of principle, to be prioritised over the unity of communist action. To them he wrote highlighting that “as a Marxist I am first and foremost a centralist, and only after that an abstentionist”.
Meanwhile in Italy the situation was only getting more desperate for the working class, since the revolutionary momentum had been lost. Now it was being followed by a period of reaction. At the same time the Comintern was in visible decline; at its Fourth Congress, in 1922 (though building on the Third Congress of 1921), it had decided to adopt the “united front” tactic with those very same socialist parties that had supported the imperialist war and had seriously hampered the process of establishing communist parties. For the Communist Left the adoption of the united front marks a turning point in the history of the working class. It’s one of the elements that today sets us apart from the Trotskyist currents.
In Italy the left, which still controlled the party, suggested the idea of declaring a “united front from below” and tried to persuade the other parties of the International to adopt this interpretation. The idea was that the communists would have worked alongside the socialist workers in the factories, but not with their parties. However, even this was too much for the Executive Committee of the Comintern who, when Bordiga was arrested by the fascist government in 1923, had the opportunity of instating Gramsci as general secretary of the party. Gramsci had always recognised Bordiga as the true party leader, but Moscow prevailed over him in replacing the better-known leader. Under him the party was “bolshevised” and the left was gradually removed from power.
Bordiga did not actively oppose this process, since he recognised the central authority of the EC of the Comintern, but he didn’t hide his opposition to the new direction taken by the party and the International. This brought him to support, albeit without much enthusiasm and only at a later stage, the efforts of the comrades of Comitato di Intesa[Common Ground Committee] who had drawn up a critique of the party’s degeneration. Among the signatories were Onorato Damen and Francesca (Cecca) Grossi, who would later marry and both would be among the founders of our Italian affiliate, the Communist Internationalist Party. The Comitato di Intesa argued that
«It is mistaken to think that in every situation expedients and tactical manoeuvres can widen the Party base since relations between the party and the masses depend in large part on the objective situation.» (The Platform of the Committee of Intesa, leftcom.org).
The EC of the ComIntern asked for the expulsion of all those who had supported the Comitato, of whose members were stripped of all duties by Gramsci, but the Left kept fighting politically against the degenerations in the party. The climax came in 1926, in two events that summarise this fight: the last speech Bordiga gave to the Communist International and the PCd’I Congress of Lyon. The former saw Bordiga denounce Stalin, the Russian Revolution’s abandonment of internationalism and the way Trotsky had been treated. It is said that Stalin replied «May God forgive you». The PCd’I certainly did not. At the Congress of Lyon all the party officials who had supported the Left were told by Gramsci that if they didn’t vote for his thesis they would have lost their positions in the party along with their pay (which is a reason why, after this, our comrades have always been opposed to the idea of “professional revolutionaries”). Under this pressure many backed down, thus leaving the Left further isolated. At that point the left was expelled by the party and many went into exile in France and in Belgium. Damen never went into exile. Instead, he had to deal many times with being arrested and sent to jail, both during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. Bordiga also stayed in Italy, but he retired into private life and devoted himself to practicing his profession as an engineer in Naples. He played no further role in politics until 1945.
The Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy
The Italian Left emerged as such during the thirties particularly in France, where in 1928 (at Pantin) the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy was formed. The Fraction published Prometeo (originally the name of the revolutionary magazine made by the Party’s section in Naples, Bordiga’s section) and then Bilan.
The fraction was not a homogenous group, it couldn’t have been.
Our comrades found themselves in the midst of the counter-revolutionary process. The problem was understanding its reasons, its nature and so on. The Spanish War divided the fraction; some comrades thought they could go to Spain to try and join the war alongside the republicans, in the hope of turning it into a genuine communist struggle – even those who opposed this idea went to Spain, to try and get the others back on communist positions. In the end, those comrades who joined the militias soon realised, at their own expense, that it was impossible to win the workers over to communism in what had become an imperialist war. The main achievement was that the comrades of Bilan recognised that the anti-fascist war was the prelude to the mobilisation of the working class in support of imperialism, in one way or the other.
However two tendencies, at least, existed inside the Bilan group. For example, whilst one tendency denied that it was possible to define the nature of the USSR with any certainty, another asserted that the counter-revolutionary policy of a party and a state was the product of a counter-revolutionary social and political development, in which the State was no longer a proletarian semi-state (Lenin, The State and Revolution) and the party had crossed the class line, substituting itself to the old, traditional bourgeoisie (state capitalism). But Bilan wasn’t clear on many issues, one of which was the state during the transition period. Another was the analysis of capitalism’s economic contradictions, where an essay written by Mitchell (one of the more prominent Belgian comrades) saw in late-Luxemburgist theories the only true explanation of capitalist crises. These mistakes led to the disastrous underestimation of the 1939 crisis’ nature. Believing (as for Chapter 18 of Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital) that the arms production would have allowed capitalism to emerge from the Great Depression, they thought that capitalism could avoid another imperialist war. The fraction abandoned Bilan and substituted it with Octobre, which came out in just a dozen editions in the last months before the war. Vercesi (that is, Ottorino Perrone, the most notable member of the Fraction) asserted that the working class had not been defeated and that revolution was still possible. It was no surprise that the Left Fraction in exile crumbled at the outbreak of the Second Imperialist War. For the working class, that was undoubtedly midnight in the century. Some Fraction members would be killed by Stalin and others by Hitler, but in the brutal, though more disorganised, fascist state in Italy, the left would survive even if at the border, in jail, and under house arrest.
The Foundation of the Internationalist Communist Party
The Internationalist Communist Party came into being in 1942, although it “officially” only made its debut on the political scene in the autumn of 1943, with the first issue of Prometeo, which was, of course, published clandestinely. The comrades who formed the party were concentrated mainly in Piedmont and Lombardy, that is, at the heart of the Italian working class. Generally, they came from a long history of activism within the ranks of the “Italian Left”, which had given rise to the Communist Party of Italy in 1921, and even if back then they were labelled as Bordigist. It’s a rather inaccurate term, although Bordiga made a major theoretical and political contribution to the “Left” itself. Generally speaking, the internationalists had experienced prison and the precarious life of exile, from which they brought back the political experience of the Fraction, following Mussolini’s fall on 25 July 1943,. Even before that, many of those comrades had fought against the emergence of the Stalinist counter-revolution, a struggle that culminated in the Comitato di Intesa (1925), in which, not coincidentally, Onorato Damen was one of the main driving forces, despite – as we have seen – Bordiga’s reticence, even if he can be credited with writing most of the political documents produced by the Committee itself. The Party was founded at a time when the working class, through massive strikes, was shattering the climate of social peace imposed by twenty years of fascism and reinforced by the ongoing war, thereby objectively calling into question the war itself and the capitalist system that had brought it about. The strikes, which began in Turin – the ‘most working-class city in Italy’ – then spread to Milan and the rest of the north. Needless to say, Prometeo not only enthusiastically supported the strikes, but, together with its militants, took an active part in them.
The Party was developing, amidst enormous difficulties, just as the Italian Communist Party was, so to speak, officially bringing its downward spiral to a close by backing the “Allies” side in the imperialist war, taking part in the formation of the National Liberation Committee (CLN) and supporting the government of Pietro Badoglio, executioner of workers, mass murderer of defenceless people in the wars in Africa and in the Balkans, to mention only the civilian victims of a long career in the service of the bourgeoisie.
The organisation’s political positions – set out in the 1944 “Draft Programme”1, though in some aspects, such as on the matter of trade unions, they were still a “work in progress” – on the whole laid out with clarity the foundations upon which the revolutionary organisation would grow: certain issues that had troubled the life of the Fraction, such as the social nature of the USSR, had long been resolved by the comrades who had remained in Italy. The Soviet Union was identified for what it was: a state capitalist regime, with the “Communist” Party acting as the regime’s proxy, aimed at steering the proletariat towards support for one of the imperialist camps during the war and in the subsequent bourgeois reconstruction. Finally, it was taken for granted that the trade unions, which were necessarily absent at that time, would, with the end of the conflict, become a powerful tool in the hands of the social democracy and Stalinism. The “Draft Programme”, although a “provisional” document, was more advanced – in terms of its revolutionary framing of the issues – than the 1945 “Platform”, drawn up by Bordiga, who was not, and would never be, a member of the party. The grey areas, the theoretical and political setbacks, and the first signs of a mechanistic-idealistic regression on Bordiga’s part would take on a disruptive force over the years, until the break in 1952. The fact remains that the “Platform” was intended more as a contribution to future congress discussions than as the party’s definitive statement of identity; it already contained in embryo elements which, having developed subsequently, would give rise to the era of Bordigism. Many years later, we clarified once again what the 1945 “Platform” represented for the Internationalist Communist Party: «In 1954 the C.C. [Central Committee, ed.] received a draft of political Platform by comrade Bordiga who, we emphasise, was not a member of the Party.
The document, submitted as an ultimatum for acceptance, was deemed incompatible with the firm positions already adopted by the party on the major issues and, despite the amendments made, the document has always been regarded as a contribution to the debate, not as an actual platform» (Introduction to our Quaderno “Documenti della Sinistra Italiana” [Documents of the Italian Left] published in the early 1970s, containing the Draft Programme and the Platform of 1945).
Returning to our “Draft”, it was more than enough to guide the party through the extremely complex situation of the war, both in terms of the political and military alignments on the ground and, above all, the phenomenon of the partisan movement, which drew its strength largely from the proletariat, who were generally sincere in their desire to fight capitalism and oppose Nazi-Fascism, but were completely under the sway of the ideology and political direction of the C.L.N. Its task was to keep those forces confined to the realm of bourgeois anti-fascism, diverting and extinguishing their anti-capitalist potential in the context of imperialist war, and deploying them in support of one of the warring sides. The Party, therefore, whilst denouncing as a tragic anti-proletarian deception the C.L.N.’s policy – aimed at giving post-war capitalism a new, democratic guise – strove, as far as the very narrow operational limits allowed, to provide political clarity among the partisan forces by accurately pointing out the limitations of the anti-fascist movement that had developed, in order to move it onto the terrain of class struggle, and to unite it with the main body of the proletariat that had remained in the workplaces: this, not guerrilla warfare, was the starting point for overthrowing capitalism. It should be noted, incidentally, that the Party did not fall into abstract theorising; it knew full well that many proletarians had taken to the mountains to escape persecution, to desert the war, and that they could not simply go home: for this reason, the political and military directive given was to hold their ground in defence of themselves and their families, if necessary, to preserve their experience and weapons so as to make them available to the working class in the now imminent post-war period. Neither with Kesserling [Supreme Commander of the German Army in Italy, ed.] nor with Alexander [Commander-in-Chief of the Anglo-American forces in Italy, ed.]: not with the hangman of partisans, the mass murderer of defenceless villages under the banner of the swastika, but also not with the representative of the no less ferocious British imperialism, who invited the partisans, in the harsh winter of ’44, to return home as if this were not tantamount to a death sentence.
The lies, dictated by crass ignorance or self-serving bad faith, regarding the role of our comrades during the Second World War, have accompanied us since 1944, when the PCI pointed to our comrades as Gestapo agents and urged the partisans to treat us as such. On at least two occasions, this incitement to murder was carried out: against Fausto Atti, in the area of Bologna, and Mario Acquaviva in the area of Asti.
Ours, therefore, was not indifference – perhaps tinged with cowardice, as some liked to insinuate – but the only stance that was consistently communist with regard to the war. No one else, not even the anarchists, adopted such a distinctly class-based perspective.2
In any case, no one harboured illusions about the possibility of the party’s political positions taking hold among the working class during the final phase of fascism and the opening of a revolutionary resurgence in the post-war period, but it was anticipated (and hoped) that the grief, the misery and the economic collapse would open up spaces for the party to intervene and take root. Contrary to what some historical accounts claim, the scenario that the Anglo-American “liberators” would open up was understood, in broad terms:
«This much is certain, however: that victory – a crushing victory for the Entente powers [the Allies, Ed.] – will greatly strengthen the front of resistance of world capitalism and narrow the objective possibilities for the proletarian revolution. Proof of the correctness of this analysis lies in the observation that a section of the proletariat ‘feels’ the democratic war and regards it and its victorious conclusion as if it were ‘their’ war and ‘their’ victory.»
This assessment was, unfortunately, confirmed by the facts and reaffirmed several times in the years immediately following the end of the conflict, in the press and at the Party’s highest “moments”, such as the 1945 Turin Conference and the 1948 Florence Congress.
Indeed, if there were ever any comrades who expected the emergence of a revolutionary phase in which the party might have been able to exercise its leading role, they must be sought amongst those who, disappointed by the way things turned out, would soon theorise that ‘there is nothing to be done’ and thus the elimination of the party as an unavoidable political instrument of the class struggle, and its transformation into a nucleus of ‘thinkers’ and ‘restorers’ of Marxism. This attitude is a constant in the history of the labour movement: defeat brings to the surface and exacerbates the weaknesses of the theory, especially if the theory’s overall framework has shaky foundations.
This, of course, is a reference to Vercesi, a leading figure in the Fraction who later became one of the main channels – within the organisation – of doubts, “unspoken concerns”, second thoughts on theory and, in essence, of Bordiga’s opposition to the existence of the Party, which led to the split in 1952. If in the Turin conference of 1945 the political disagreements on individual issues – such as the trade union question – were such that they fell within the normal dialectic of a revolutionary organisation and, indeed, helped it grow both in theory and politically; in Florence, in 1948, there would already be a different atmosphere: our comrades had to fight against Vercesi’s liquidationist tendencies and his somersaults on the matter of trade unions, typical of the future Bordigism. These tendencies, unfortunately, would find their outlet in the split of 1952.3
This draft programme is based on our basic programme, the “Rome Theses”, developed and approved at the Second Congress of the Communist Party of Italy (1922).
I. Situation and Prospects
The war, in its frantic and brutal final phase, demonstrates, alongside the decline of German power, the victorious assertion of the Allied powers, with the United States and Russia clearly enjoying military and political superiority. Thus emerges the prospect for a democratic peace, ensuring, above all, the United States’ undisputed economic and financial hegemony over the world. This could mean not only victory in the war, but also a victorious peace, a consolidation, that is, of capitalism that would thus have been able to once again cut in front of the proletariat, which saw in the war’s open crisis an opportunity for the revolutionary movement to succeed. The validity of this hypothesis, since the war is still ongoing, and the unpredictable may still come into play, may not be fully confirmed by the course of events, but, in the current state of the crisis and given the elements available, nothing suggests that it might. One thing is certain, though: the Allies’ crushing victory will significantly strengthen the resistance front of global capitalism and narrow the objective possibilities for proletarian revolution. The correctness of this analysis is confirmed by the fact that a part of the proletariat “feels” the democratic war and views it and its victorious conclusion as “their” war and “their” victory.
The historical responsibility for this tragic deviation from the correct class line lies with the socialist and centrist parties, which have acted and continue to act towards the war not as the right wing of the proletariat, but as real and conscious forces of the bourgeois left.
II. Fascism and Democracy
Fascism as a necessity of bourgeois society and organic expression of the defence of privilege within the framework of an authoritarian state at the height of the capitalist crisis, is, at this point, an episode that concerns gravediggers far more directly than politics or history. But it should be noted that fascism does not die as a result of a violent, head-on struggle brought on by the proletariat, meaning it is not swept away by a revolutionary wave; this means that there is a peaceful transfer of power from one political framework to another one, better suited to the new necessities arising from the war, and that the necessities of the authoritarian State, which we have known and experienced — and which are still alive and consistent just as capitalism as a whole, from which these necessities originate, is alive and consistent — will be at the basis of the democratic State, those same necessities with the hypocrisy and the deceit of freedoms added on, freedoms which will factually be reserved to those who hold power.
It therefore goes without saying that the conditions of social conflict have not changed even slightly, and no matter the forces at the helm of the state, our party’s stance is that they are defending the interests of capitalism with all means available, the same ones fascism used, against every attempt of the proletariat to get a hold of power.
Against the democratic state, the tactics of the proletarian party remain unchanged: we believe neither in its elections, nor in its constituent assembly, nor in its freedom of press, speech, or association ; but the party will take advantage of them, as well as any concession the bourgeoisie is forced to make, for the sole purpose of getting stronger and being able to hit hard. As things stand, the war has brought fascism to its knees, but it will also not fail to bring about political ruin for the traditionally proletarian parties of the National Liberation Committee, who, tied to the triumphant forces of the war to which they owe their temporary political successes, are today forced to continue it. Our Party, just as it was alone in fighting the war of Nazi-fascist imperialism, will remain alone in fighting the war of democracies.
III. Our Party and Russia
Russia has ceased to be for our party the country of the first great revolutionary achievement of the world proletariat, and remains an open page for the critical study of revolutionary Marxism, which today is tasked with identifying and laying bare the historical causes, economic and political, that, in Russia, formed the basis of the defeat of proletarian power and became the decisive factor in the disintegration of the political forces of the Communist International. From the violent repression against the genuine revolutionaries of Kronstadt to the physical elimination of all opposition to Stalin’s nationalist politics, it is evident in the workers’ state the constant growth of this peculiar paradox: everyone is acting ostensibly to arm the revolution against any attempt to restore capitalism, and everyone, revolutionaries or not, effectively contributed to arming the militias of the most ruthless anti-proletarian reaction, which was destined to strangle the October Revolution and, along with it, its best fighters. For Marxists, the reasons for this are not to be sought in the heavens or in the wickedness of some men, but they lived inside of the proletarian state, fuelled by a policy of compromise that economic conditions carried over to the dominant ideology in the era of Lenin and Trotsky.
In virtue of the Russian experience, the proletariat’s struggle has now absorbed that revolutionary violence is historically necessary and vital only when it is carried out by class forces which veins flow with proletarian blood, and whose goal is not the resolution of generic, subjective, and situational interests, be they even tied to the life of a proletarian state, but instead pushed forward by fundamental and permanent class needs, to which the state is just an episode and a simple and temporary phenomenon. Otherwise, violence ceases to be the midwife of history and paves the way for the returns of reaction.
The Party deems that from the repression of Kronstadt to the liquidation of the Communist Party, the violence of the degenerated workers’ state was an expression of a guiding will and economic and political interests that no longer coincided with the struggle of the proletariat. So tomorrow it will be less difficult for the parties of the new International to define the terms, both theoretical and tactical, of a policy against compromise.
In conclusion, we assert:
The dictatorship of the proletariat must under no circumstances be reduced to the dictatorship of the party, even if it were the party of the proletariat, intelligentsia and leadership of the workers’ state.
The state and the ruling Party, as organs of such dictatorship, contain within themselves the germ of a tendency toward compromise with the old world, a tendency that gets substantiated and strengthened, as the Russian experience has taught us, in the temporary inability of the revolution in a given country to spread, binding itself with the revolutionary movement of other countries.
In a phase, then, of stalling politics imposed by the gradual nature of revolutionary development, the interests of the revolution are guaranteed by the active presence of the proletariat — above all of its most conscious forces — in the fundamental organs of the dictatorship, with elected positions, with the right of removal from office, with the free exercise of the workers’ union to defend its class interests against the state and all economic strata that are not yet socialist: in a word, with the broadest possible exercise of workers’ democracy. If at this stage of class dictatorship the free existence of parties is an anachronism, then criticism and opposition must be allowed within the sphere of the dictatorship’s party. The exercise of the broadest possible democracy in the relations between the proletariat and the party, between the proletariat and the workers’ state, presupposes a very high degree of political maturity achieved by the proletariat and the existence of objectively sufficient conditions for such implementation in all economic and social spheres of the workers’ state. It is understood that it’s the duty of the party exercising the dictatorship to raise these backward strata to the level of revolutionary class interests through the means and methods permitted by workers’ democracy itself, such as free discussion, free expression of opinion at meetings etc…
The state — a bourgeois relic that the proletariat cannot do without to eliminate the remnants of class society, but whose disintegration it must accelerate — tends all the more to survive and grow stronger, rather than wither away, the more it isolates itself from the movement of the international proletariat, claiming to build socialism in its own sphere and posing itself as a workers’ state in opposition to bourgeois states on the world stage.
IV. The New International
The scale and duration of the conflict, the depth and harshness of ideological clashes, the negative experience of the first proletarian state and its International, must have determined the favourable conditions for the formation and strengthening of communist organizations in individual countries, which are awaiting the moment to unite and lay the foundations of a new International.
The latter will have to take into account above all their previous negative experiences, in order to effectively become the organ of the world communist revolution. Our Party, which in recent decades more than any other has felt the lack of an international directive organ that could actually be a guide and an incentive to the proletarian struggle, and has boldly exposed its shortcomings, errors, deviations, and ultimately betrayal, and which has missed no opportunity to restore contacts among the forces of the international left, will be able to take initiative at the opportune moment. Our Party is ideologically prepared for this task of revival and states already that the new International:
a) must avoid becoming an instrument of the workers’ state and its politics, but, considering itself the highest assembly of workers throughout the world, must defend the interests of the revolution even towards the workers’ state;
b) must avoid bureaucratization, making of the directive centre, as of the peripheral centres, a field for bureaucratic careerism;
c) must avoid class politics being thought and realised following formal and administrative criteria.
The danger of opportunist accretions and bureaucratic authoritarianism can be neutralized in time and eliminated only through the active participation by the political organs of the proletariat of various countries in the political life of the International, through its vigilant control over the people and organs at the head of the leading and responsible centres.
V. Our Tactics
We have already stated that the party’s tactics do not change with the apparent and merely formal changes in the external and political conditions of the State. Unless the course of the war is brutally interrupted or radically altered by the collapse of some front as a result of a successful workers’ uprising, contrary to the anticipated democratic experience, under the tutelage of the victorious Allied forces, our party will put the proletarian struggle in terms of revolutionary tactics, which consists in promptly interpreting situations from the class standpoint, in adapting the watchwords of action accordingly, and in equipping in time the proletariat with the essential ideas that nourish its struggle and with the means necessary to consolidate victory. In the immediate post-war period, while under the leadership of the socialists and centrists the manoeuvre so dear to democratic reaction will be repeated: diverting the revolutionary thrust in order to run it aground on the shoals of partial and immediate demands and of compromise by taking advantage of the inevitable political, economic and moral disorientation that will descend upon all the organs of the State and upon the consciousness of the masses, as well as of the inability of the ruling class responsible for the war to organise the peace in the sense of resolving the enormous problems posed by the war, our party will adapt its tactics accordingly with the maturation of favorable objective conditions and will conduct the struggle within the channel of revolutionary tradition, so as to provide true leadership rather than trail behind events. It is therefore obvious that the tactical expedients of democracy will be cast onto the scrapheap of politics as soon as the party judges that the situation is moving towards a revolutionary outcome.
Because our political line will not be influenced by idealistic temptations or theories of spontaneity, this will allow the party’s will to fight to coincide with the will of the masses, so that they will express in a concentrated form the urgency of a practical necessity in the sense of a revolutionary assault for the conquest of power.
But there will be no serious conquest of power, unless the party first gains influence over the masses of the proletariat. To this end the party defines its tasks as follows:
a) the masses cannot be won over when and how one wishes, if objective conditions do not stir them, the tactical acrobatics of parties that would like to influence them and make them spring into action at the touch of a magic wand are useless;
b) the fighting spirit of the masses, when ignited in struggle, indicates as if in a diagram the process of instability and crisis that pervades the productive apparatus of capitalism, its markets and the whole of its political organisation. At this moment, the party can insert itself into the struggle, and be one of its determining elements, drawing the masses into its orbit to unite their energies and direct them towards the achievement of specific objectives;
c) the success of such an intervention is possible to the extent that the party has been able to create permanent organisations for propaganda, recruitment and agitation within the masses; to the extent that it has been able to win trust, through constant adherence to the life and struggles of the proletariat and its class demands; finally, to the extent that it has demonstrated that it has not deluded the masses with untimely and insincere agitation, with empty gestures such as strikes for the sake of strikes, or strikes for purposes that are contrary to the spirit and interests of the class;
d) our party, which does not underestimating the influence of other parties with a working-class tradition and the importance of that influence upon the masses, advocates the “united front”, the organic expression of proletarian unity outside and beyond the parties, indispensable for the struggle and victory, a natural and free arena for the confrontation of opposing political currents, within which our party will play its leading role as the guide of the majority of the proletariat, because it is its faithful interpreter, because it represents its fundamental interests and because, above all, it has proved itself to be its sole and reliable guide in the revolutionary struggle.
VI. The Union Question
At present, the union question does not exist, and the remnants of the old union organisations surviving in clandestinity have proved to serve more as instruments of political agitation connected with the war than as genuine organs of the workers’ struggle.
The revival of the union movement, that will follow the end of the war, will bear the imprint of its political vicissitudes and will see the traditional Social-Democratic domination of the unions greatly strengthened and its bureaucracy becoming still more authoritarian. Despite these prospects our party will raise as soon as circumstances permit the problem of the unified reorganisation of the workers’ movement, it will reconstitute the network of its union fractions from the communist factory group (composed of communists and workers without a party) up to the national communist Union committee: and if it deems this necessary it will take the initiative in forming a “Front of the Union Left” to overthrow the leadership of the Confederation of Labour.
Meanwhile, the party will concentrate its attention and activity on establishing systematic links with the factories with the aim not only of building an internal apparatus, but also creating a network capable of directing the movement of the broad masses.
VII. Work among the Peasantry
This war, like the previous one, and certainly on a far greater scale, must have deepened among the peasants their detachment from the world of age-old traditions, of economic and political subjection and it must have acted as a demolishing pickaxe on the one hand against the obsolete and narrow forms of agricultural cultivation and on the other against the domination of the parasitic cliques of agrarian slavery. The separation between the rural and urban populations has gone diminishing and many misunderstandings as well as more than one difference have disappeared; both have been brought closer together and almost united by the physical sufferings and the moral and political constraints violently imposed by a ruthless dictatorship and a ferocious war.
If the peasant who thinks slowly, but with clear and profound logic, has come, after so many experiences, to perceive the bond of shared responsibility linking the owner of the land he cultivates with the political forces that wanted this war of extermination, then a great step will have been taken towards the revolution.
Our countryside, which the war was supposed to transform by driving it, as it has done to some extent, towards higher levels of economic development, in the fifth year of the war finds itself alarmingly depleted of manpower and reserves as a result of the systematic plunder carried out by belligerents, both enemy and allied, caught between the fleeting allure of the black market and monetary depreciation, which nullifies its sacrifices and subjected to the oppressive burden of the State’s monopolistic and predatory intervention. We do not doubt that these developments have fostered among the peasant masses aversion and hatred against an economic and political regime which experience has shown to be both irrational and criminal.
The post-war period therefore holds rich revolutionary possibilities in this sphere as well, a sphere in which the industrial proletariat had until yesterday encountered stubborn and tenacious opposition to the common struggle for emancipation. Our party has always recognised the role that the peasantry, especially the poor peasantry, is destined to play in the Italian revolution, and from this very moment places the peasant question on the agenda, making its own the programme adopted at the Second Congress of the Italian Communist Party — a programme that remains fully alive and relevant both as a tactical orientation in the phase preceding the conquest of power and as a concrete and constructive guide during the first difficult phase of the realisation of a socialist economy.
From a practical standpoint, the party relies upon the reorganisation of the unions of agricultural labourers and of the leagues of sharecroppers and small tenant farmers; and, for the small proprietors upon the organisation of an association for the defence of their economic interests.
Central Committee of the Internationalist Communist Party
September 1944
Presented by the Central Committee in November of that year.
From a brochure published by the Internationalist Communist Party, 1945.
Footnotes
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Draft Programme of the Internationalist Communist Party, 1944 ↩
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«At the bourgeois game showed up (need we say more?) even… the terrible champions… of the most “uncompromising” form of revolutionism: the anarchists. The non-historicist but crudely voluntarist nature of their doctrine, their particular passionate, confused and often illogical ‘forma mentis’, and the superficiality of their analyses led [the anarchists] into the ranks of the C.L.N. side by side […] with priests, Mazzinians [followers of Mazzini, ed.] and bourgeois. [The anarchists] were not in the least touched by the doubt that the war they were fighting fell within the category of imperialist conflicts: by joining the C.L.N., the “most radical deniers of any form of government” did not in the least suspect that they were lending their support to new organs of the bourgeois state which they “definitively overthrow”… in theory, and consolidate in practice by all means […] A sad historical irony would have it that the first and last acts of the war tragedy (Spain and Italy) saw the anarchists come to terms (ministers, liberators, C.L.N.) with capitalism, helping to make the defeat of the working class truly totalitarian», The Proletariat and the Second World War, articles taken from Battaglia Comunista of November 1947 - February 1948 ↩
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From the report presented by the E.C. in the run-up to the Party’s National Congress, December 1947, in Quaderni Internazionalisti, op. cit., p.67:
«The Party neither entertained nor fostered illusions in this regard [the onset of a revolutionary phase]; it foresaw, at the end of the conflict, the emergence of an openly reactionary historical situation, and prepared itself to speak out in it with firmness and courage, just as it had been able to do so against all odds and against all adversaries in the midst of the world war.»
And Aldo Lecci, at the 1948 congress, expressed himself as follows:«However, he [Vercesi] claimed to have been mistaken in 1945 in Turin when he believed in a revival of the revolutionary course, whereas today he realises that throughout the world the proletarian class is allied with capitalism and that everything we do can only benefit one or the other imperialist bloc […]. Comrade Vercesi’s speech today conceals an attempt to reduce the party to a club of supermen, of self-proclaimed Marxist scientists, who feel superior and disdain to engage with the reality in which the masses live […]. These elements, who seek to hide their pessimism behind our supposed optimism, come—politically inactive—to throw grandiloquent phrases amongst us without making any positive contribution to the positions we defend and advocate, without theoretical or political refutations of our ‘errors’ and deviations. The comrades who have worked with us know that we have never deluded ourselves nor have we ever deluded anyone with fixed positions and perspectives. We have always been firm and precise; we have always told our comrades: “Recruit with caution; dismiss anyone who shows political incomprehension; we may have to downsize further; the situation does not allow for the development of a class-based party; the task is to train the cadres, the backbone of the party.» (Reports: Turin conference of 1945, Florence congress of 1948, p.16)
Draft Programme of the Internationalist Communist Party ↩