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Alessandro Mantovani, Amadeo Bordiga and the Internationalist Communist Party facing to the ‘new party’ (1942-1952) (https://books.openedition.org/aaccademia/15231#ftn4 - p. 96-119)

Publié le 30 Décembre 2024 par Alessandro Mantovani, rottacomunista

Introduction

Nous publions, traduit de l'italien en anglais, avec l'aide de deepL et vérifié par nous, ce très synthétique article d'Alessandro Mantovani de décembre 2024, sur le Parti communiste internationaliste de 1945 à 1952.

Bonne année internationaliste 2025!

Pantopolis.

Amadeo Bordiga and the Internationalist Communist Party facing to the ‘new party(1942-1952)

(https://books.openedition.org/aaccademia/15231#ftn4 - p. 96-119)

 

As is well known, Amadeo Bordiga, with the Communist Abstentionist Fraction of the PSI (which in 1919 took its cue from the Neapolitan group ‘Il Soviet’), was the main architect of the 1921 split in Livorno and the foundation of the Communist Party Italy (PCD’I). He was its leader until 1923, when at the behest of the leaders of the Communist International (CI) the leadership passed to the ‘centre’ led by Gramsci. Bordiga was then expelled from the party in 1930, officially for siding with Trockij.

The militants of the currents that in whole or in part refer to Bordiga never accepted the definition of ‘Bordighists‘ 1 , preferring to define themselves as Sinistra Comunist a Italiana (SCI), i.e. the majority tendency in the PCD’I until the Lyon congress of 1926. This is a matter of political scruples and not historiographical accuracy. Nevertheless, for the purposes of latter, some clarifications seem appropriate.

First of all, the ICS should not be considered a direct offspring Neapolitan abstentionism: in fact it included elements, such as Fortichiari, of the ‘Milanese left’, as well as numerous exponents of the PSI Youth Federation; realities aligned on positions similar to, but not collimating with, those of ‘The Soviet’: they were not, for example, on the question electoral abstentionism; which, however, in the perspective of the founding of the communist party, the militants clustered around Bordiga renounced in compliance with the deliberations of the 2nd Congress of the CI. Secondly, it should be borne in mind that when, with the crisis fascism, the militants of the communist left of the PCD’I began to reorganise themselves in northern Italy, they did not do so by referring to legacy of the abstentionist Fraction, but to the political tradition of the first two congresses of the PCD’I.

As for Bordiga – believing the time was immature for the constitution of a fraction – he did not share the efforts of those who, like Ottorino Perrone, Onorato Damen, Bruno Fortichiari and others, set up the Comitato d’Intesa in 1925 to defend the theses of the SCI in view of the 3rd congress of the PCD’I, nor did he ever agree to get involved in the organisational attempts of the communists who remained faithful to the Livorno line in the emigration2 . Consequently, however eminent the influence of the Neapolitan leader may have been, it seems reductive to define the ICS as ‘Bordighist‘ 3. From the time of its formation after the First World War until 1952, in fact, positions coexisted that were not entirely similar to those of the Neapolitan communist. Therefore up to that date, for purely historiographical reasons, it seems to me that SCI could be accepted as a useful definition to better represent its relative heterogeneity. Only after 1952 – as we shall see – would it become fully appropriate to define as Bordighist the group that organised itself around Bordiga assuming bloc, often uncritically, his legacy. For the other groups that refer to the ICS, who instead make distinctions and criticisms of it, the qualification tends to obscure their specificity. However, since ‘Bordighism’ and ‘Bordighist(s)’ are terms now in current use, I will use them in turn, quoting them when they refer to militants or tendencies that did not refer to Bordiga in full, or that he himself did not recognise as fully situated in his own positions.

At an academic level, in Italy, if the figure of Bordiga, after the years of ostracism, has been the subject of a certain interest in more recent times, for the movements more or less inspired by him there is a substantial absence of research4. It is not just lack of interest: the material, which is abundant (periodicals, leaflets, letters, circulars, etc.), is scattered in archives with a few exceptions belonging to militants 5 mostly reluctant to make it available. The few works that are available, either emanate from groups that refer to the ICS, or are the work of scholars sympathetic to the current (6) .

 

1 Cf. Pas de ‘Bordiguisme’, in ‘Bilan’ No. 2, 1933, pp. 70-71.

2 FRIEND (2021), GREMMO (2009), PEREGALLI – SAGGIORO (1998).

3 OTTAVIANI (1990/1991), pp. 3-4.

  1. Exceptions are OTTAVIANI (1990/1991) and, more recently, on the relations between the ICS and the international Left Opposition: MASTROLILLO (2022). Another and even more recent text dedicating attention, among others, to the ‘Bordighist’ current: FRANCESCANGELI (2023).
  2. Among the exceptions are the Fonds Ottorino Perrone and Fonds Ersilio Ambrogi at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, the Bordighsten Archives deposited (by Philippe Bourrinet) at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, and the Fonds Ersilio Ambrogi at the Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli.
  3. GRASS (2012), SAGGIORO (2010), PEREGALLI (1990).

This contribution will examine the constitution and characteristics of the Italian groups of the S CI7, their relationship with the PCI and their assessment of the USSR and the international communist movement, and then consider the reasons that led to the split and marginalisation of the Communist Party Internationalist (PCINT) at a time when the PCI was becoming the main opposition party in Italy.

The Internationalist Communist Party (CPInt)

In the situation of marasmus between the birth of the Republic of Salò and the fall of Mussolini, the PCI of Togliatti still counted a few thousand adherents, there were different orientations and in some cases, especially in the south, it even found itself contending for influence over the proletariat with other groups born and sprouting from the crisis of Fascism 8 . Among them, that of the ‘Bordighists’ was to be one of the most significant, also because of its national character.

The manifestations of the PCINT date back to mid-1942, in Lombardy and Piedmont. The main promoters were a historical and indefatigable exponent of the ICS, Onorato Damen, and Bruno Maffi, who had joined the movement a few years earlier after a militancy in Giustizia e Libertà. On 1 November 1943, the party’s official organ, ‘Prometeo’ (year XXI, series III) 9 , made its clandestine appearance, but several local newspapers also joined it. In 1943 and 1944, taking advantage of the participation of its members in the big strikes in Milan and Turin, where the PCINT launched the watchword workers’ councils’ in opposition to the internal commissions’ controlled by the National Liberation Committee (CLN), the organisation’s ranks were strengthened.

In the face of the partisan war, the PCINT differed from the other formations to the left of the PCI. Clear from the start are the call to the proletariat not to side with either the allies or the Nazi-fascists and to reject the alliance with the bourgeois parties, the denunciation of the non-socialist character of the USSR, that of the CLN as a bourgeois manoeuvre to replace the discredited fascist regime, the indication not to fall into partisan illusions and to position itself in the war context with decisive class independence. While Bandiera Rossa of Rome or Stella Rossa of Turin criticise the CLN but admit participation in the partisan war 10, the internationalists call for desertion 11 . To the anti-fascist front the PCINT opposes, in line with the old positions taken by the PCD’I under Bordighian leadership, a single front from below 12 . The choice to call itself ‘internationalist’ recalls the continuity with Zimmerwald and Kienthal, the conferences that opposed the First World War. In this respect, PCINT makes Lenin’s ‘revolutionary defeatism’ its own. This does not mean, however – and it must be said because of collusion with fascism and Nazism the ICS was accused13 - indifference in the face of fascism, which the "Bordighists" invite the workers to fight with arms, but autonomously (14) .

In front of the PCI and the Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity (PSIUP), heir of the old Italian Socialist Party, PCINT maintains a position of clear denunciation of what it judges as collaborationism, but retains the hope of recovering its honest militants. In fact, it turns to them too, and not only to the movements to their left, in launching the watchword of united front committees from below on a proportional basis15. In 1944, the PCINT drew up a Programm in which, among other things, a "Front of the Trade Union Lefts" to overthrow the leaders of the Confederation of Labour" was still given as possible.

The Left Fraction of Communists and Italian Socialists

Between 1943 and 1945, in southern Italy, as the Allies advanced, left-wing political initiative reborn. The PCI, however, encountered considerable difficulties in asserting its line. The Chambers of the

  1. For biographies of the militants, I refer to the profiles in BOURRINET (2016) and ERBA (2015).  8      SPRIANO (1975), pp. 62, 68, 76-77, 80-82, 138-165.
  1. To express the continuity with the ‘Prometheus’ published in Naples in 1924 by the left-wing militants of the PCD’I and with the one published in emigration by the ‘Frazione all’estero’ (infra).
  2. Unsuccessful meetings took place with Lelio Basso’s Proletarian Unity Movement, with Stella Rossa (Integral Communist Party), with Ruggero Zangrandi’s Revolutionary Socialist Party, as well as with some partisan bands (some partisans disappointed by the turn of events individually later joined the PCINT).
  3. GREMMO (1995), PEREGALLI (1991).  12 FRIEND (2003).
  1. F. Plato, Vecchie e nuove vie della provocazione trotzkista, "Rinascita", n. 4, April 1943; P. Secchia, Il "sinistrismo" maschera della gestapo, "La nostra lotta", n. 6, 1943.
  2. PCINT Executive Committee Circular of 13 April 1945, in SAGGIORO (2010), p. 51.
  3. In ‘Prometheus’, no. 19 of 1944 and no. 1 of 1945.
  4. Published in 1945 by PCINT itself.

Labour, also animated by old left-wing communists like Enrico Russo, Nicola Di Bartolomeo and Libero Villone. In November 1943, the Southern Secretariat of the General Confederation of Labour (CGL) was formed in Naples, which was also joined by members of the PSIUP and PCI. Between the end of 1943 and the beginning of 1944, the CGL spread throughout the south. Its classism is intertwined with dissent in the PCI and PSIUP. In Salerno, ‘Il Soviet’, published by the former communist leader Ippolito Ceriello, clearly takes a left-wing stance. In Naples, a large group was formed, animated by an old collaborator of Bordiga, Ludovico Tarsia. In the second half of 1944, the dissidents constitute in Naples the Left Fraction of Communists and Italian Socialists (FSCSI), with the aim of unifying the opposition groups that had arisen in many southern localities 17 . In Rome, some militants of the Communist Movement Italy (Bandiera Rossa) joined it, including Otello Terzani. The Fraction invites them to remain in the "opportunist" parties to clarify the ideas of those who still have illusions (18) .

As soon as he arrived in Naples, on 27 March 1944, this is how Togliatti apostrophised Maurizio Valenzi: ‘What is Bordiga doing?

"Nothing," replied Valenzi. "Not possible, try to understand" 19 . Bordiga, it is true, had no intention at the moment – despite the pressing requests of many comrades – to take the lead in anything: he did not see revolutionary possibilities on the horizon and believed that a long process of clarification was the condition for any political initiative; but, while avoiding direct organisational involvement, he shuttled back and forth between Rome (where he had temporarily moved) and Naples, meeting with the comrades of the FSCSI, discussing, advising. Contrary to a widespread interpretation of his attitude as clearly refractory to the foundation of the party 20 , he has no preconceived preclusion towards the initiatives of left-wing militants. This is borne out by an interview he gave in November 1944 to a journalist (actually an agent of the US secret services), in which he announced that the "real" communist party was being formed with the participation of PCINT, FSCSI, Fortichiari and Repossi (who actually intended to rejoin the PCI), and even the Communist Movement of Italy 21 . If the interviewer’s objectivity in interpreting Bordiga’s words raises doubts, it is undeniable that a few months later, the old leader was owed a text affirming the primary need for the "meeting in an international political body of all local and national movements which have no doubt [...] in placing themselves outside the blocs for bourgeois freedom and for the generic anti-fascist struggle [...]. The first task of the proletarian class party [...] the reconstitution of its own organisational framework."22

In December 1944 the FSCSI drew up a document, in the drafting of which Bordiga himself seems to have participated: Per la costituzione del vero partito comunista (For the constitution of the true communist party), in which, having ascertained the impossibility of straightening out the ‘opportunist’ parties, the need to found a new party and merge with the PCI NT23 was put forward. The text was illustrated in January 1945 in Naples, with Bordiga present, at a conference between the FSCSI, Movimento Comunista d’Italia (on pro-Soviet positions), Carlo Andreoni’s Unione Spartaco and other minor formations. The meeting failed. In June 1945, at the first national conference of the PCINT in Milan, the FSCSI disbanded and 24 joined. A minority choice that would later lead to the exit of elements like Villone, Russo and Pistone.

 

The Turin conference

Starting in May 1945, the PCINT published the weekly ‘Battaglia Comunista’. Its activity is very intense, and not without success 25 . In the Asti area, Mario Acquaviva, on the strength of his prestige as a political prisoner in the prisons of the fascist regime, sought dialogue with partisan groups to persuade them to

 

17 FRANCESCANGELI (2023), pp. 121-122; SAGGIORO (2010), pp. 56-87.

18 PEREGALLI (1991), p. 75.

19 VALENZI (1995), p. 19.

20 Interpretation shared by both admirers: LALBAT (2012); PEREGALLI – SAGGIORO (1998); SAGGIORO (2010), and detractors: AMICO (2021). ERBA (2012) escapes this cliché; CAMATTE (1970) and BOURRINET (1981 and 2016) reproach Bordiga with a contradiction on the subject. I propose an evolution of Bordiga from a cautious possibilism to an accentuated scepticism towards the prospect of a new party.

21 FAENZA – FINI (1976), p. 47.

  1. Political Platform of the Party (1945), in Per l’organica sistemazione dei principi comunisti, (1973), Edizioni il programma comunista, Milan, p. 111-112.
  2. FSCSI pamphlet (1945), in SAGGIORO (2010), pp. 240-251.
  3. At that time the FSCSI still seemed to count, potentially, 1,700 adherents (cf. Circular from the secretariat of the CE of the PCINT to comrade Ceriello, Milan, 21 December 1945, ibid., p. 87).

25 ERBA (2012), cit.

abandoning the line of collaboration with the CLN. He was assassinated in circumstances that have never been fully clarified. A fate that also befell Fausto Atti, active among the partisans of the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines. Crimes attributed by the PCINT to elements close to the P CI26. Whichever way things went, it is certain that where the PCINT militants succeeded in making themselves known, they worried the PCI leaders, who resorted to defamatory methods to oppose them. For example, Riccardo Salvador, who manages, for a short time, to be secretary of the Chamber of Labour of Piovene Rocchette 27 , in the province of Vicenza, is indicated by the "Unità" as one of the "Trotskyist provocateurs" possible authors of the "Schio massacre", of which partisans connected to the P CI were then recognized as the authors28. As for Damen, the intervention of Togliatti, Lussu, Scoccimarro and Romita prevented his appointment to the National Council (29) .

 

In addition to the FSCSI, a certain number of militants who had been inspired by the PCD’I of Livorno and the figure of Bordiga in their emigration, especially to Belgium and France, joined the party back in Italy. They had founded in 1928, at Pantin in France, the Left Fraction of the PCD ‘I30. Their choice to be a ‘fraction’ and not a party was at first congruous with the situation of lack of clarification within an CI in which genuinely classist proletarian forces remained, but was later upheld as the only possible one even when the CI was dissolved. This was because a new International could only have arisen in a phase of revolutionary recovery 31 . While in the run-up to the Second World War the Fraction had harboured illusions of revolutionary recovery, when it exploded one section, following its most influential exponent Ottorino Perrone (Vercesi), had come to theorise the disappearance of the proletariat as an independent class. For the communists there was therefore nothing more to be done on a practical and organisational level. The militantsenergies therefore had to be directed towards taking stock of past experiences. At the end of 1945, the party met in Turin. At that date it represented a significant, albeit minority, force: it boasted around seventy sections and between 2,000 and 3,000 adherents 32 . In addition to the factories, it also deployed its activities among the labourers and poor peasants of Polesine, Calabria and Puglia. This was despite the fact that the birth, in June 1944, of the Italian General Confederation of Labour (CGIL) founded by the PCI, socialists and the Christian Democrats was taking control of the world of labour, of which the Allies recognised it as the sole representative, despite some initial difficulties. Bordiga, who from joining PCINT, was absent. Despite this, the Platform he had drawn up a few months earlier is approved. The manifesto that the PCINT addresses to the workers after the conference states that the 5th PCI congress held in Rome almost the same days marks its definitive break with the interests of class33.

Characterising positions

The attitude of open opposition that the ICS militants took towards the PCI during and after the Second World War would be incomprehensible outside the framework of their more general positions. It is therefore essential to summarise them, not without noting – it is important to do so – that Bordiga only contributed to them after the Second World War (34) .

 

  1. Centrism killed in Mario Acquaviva, like German social democracy in Karl Liebnecht [sic], the champion of the struggle against war and proletarian revolution, in "Battaglia Comunista", 28 July 1945. On the end of Acquaviva and Atti see ZACCARIA (1964), who was a collaborator of Pier Carlo Masini, who made possible the publication of his pioneering research on Italian communists victims of Stalinism. According to ZACCARIA (ibid., p. 113) Riccardo Lombardi confided to Damen that the PCI had asked (unsuccessfully) the other parties in the CLN for ‘free hands’ towards the Bordighist militants. On the methods of the PCI in the Asti area at that juncture see RENOSIO (1999), pp. 143-150. The affair also inspired two novels by PANSA (1994 and 2000); see also PANSA (2006), pp. 218-231. Another novel on Acquaviva is by BONA (2012).
  2. SALVADOR (2012).
  3. On the ‘Schio massacre’, see e.g., with a different approach: MORGAN (2008); SIMINI (2000); VILLANI (2016). The issue ‘Unità’ in question is that 12 July 1945. Salvador had reacted to the accusation with an open letter to PCI militant Vito Pandolfi, published in ‘Battaglia Comunista’ on 28 July 1945.
  4. FRANCESCANGELI, (2023), p. 104.
  5. For a brief excursus on this I refer to Labeÿ’s contribution in this volume [from which, as per the subtitle, I transcribe Manotovani’s text] . For the Fraction’s relations with the International Left Opposition inspired by Trockij see MASTROLILLO (2022), pp. 82-93 and 156-157; CORVISIERI (1969); See also FRANCESCANGELI (2005), pp. 117-122 and passim. For the history of the hamlet see BOURRINET (1981 and 2016); ROGER (2012).
  6. The Left Fraction Facing the Party, in ‘Prometheus’, no. 85, 1933.  32 BOURRINET (2016), p. 65, OLIVIER (2001), p. 14.
  1. Battaglia Comunista’, No. 1, 1946.
  2. He returned from exile in November 1929 and renounced all political activity for the duration of Fascism, which gave the PCI leadership the right to even point him out as a collaborator of the regime: PEREGALLI – SAGGIORO (1998); GREMMO (2009); AMICO (2021).

 

While the majority of the ‘western’ communist left had ended up explaining Russian degeneration and Stalinism as the result of an original sin of ‘Leninism’, thus returning to the libertarian school, the ICS pursued its critique of the course of CI (especially since 3rd congress) without denying the revolutionary value of this experience. In interpreting Stalinism, it adhered to deterministic analysis: it Russia’s pre-capitalist backwardness and the lack of revolution in the West that thwarted the resistance of its proletarian power in the face of the eruption of internal social forces that overwhelmed it, triggering the struggle in the Bolshevik party. For the ICS, Stalinism represented the progression within Russia of ‘bourgeoisproduction relations 35 (and not the impossible construction of socialism in a single country) 36 . This, according to those militants, had led the Soviet regime to enslave the CI (and thus the national communist parties, including the PCI) to Moscow’s foreign policy and assume a fundamental counter-revolutionary role. An analysis that clearly distinguished the militants of the IC from the other communist groups to the left of the PCI, in which the myth of the USSR remained strong, and from Trotskyism, which insisted on the working-class, albeit degenerate, character of the Soviet state, and therefore accepted the call to defend it against Nazi aggression, as well as militancy in the partisan armies.

In order to understand the role that the ‘Bordighists’ assigned to the PCI (and later to the CGIL) in the post-fascist context, it is essential to recall the sui generis interpretation they gave to Nazism and fascism: in their view, it was not a matter of reactionary monsters to which they opposed democracy as a lesser evil or a stage on the way to socialism, but rather one of the possible forms of domination of the bourgeoisie, historically even more modern than the democratic one because it was the bearer of those instances of statism and control of trade union movements and the middle classes that were also characteristic of e.g. the New Deal. also of the New Deal. Statism, which in their opinion the democracies that emerged victorious from the Second World War would be careful not to liquidate, indeed pushing it further, despite the maintenance of an increasingly facade parliamentary institution and free trade unions only in appearance 37 . From this point of view, if the popular fronts had represented the yoking of the working class to the respective national policies 38 , the anti-fascist resistance and the Spanish civil war itself lost its presumed revolutionary character 39 , representing on the contrary the tragedy of the substantial enslavement of the world working class to the "imperialist"war 40 and then to post-war reconstruction. Being the instrument of such a policy was thus the fundamental accusation made against the P CI41. From this all others derived.

The PCInt facing to the ‘new party

To frame the posture of the "internationalists" vis-à-vis the PCI, one must consider two aspects of the ICS which go back to its origins: the propensity to restrict the work of the avant-garde to the sphere of the workers’ organisms of economic resistance and the related indifferentism in political matters 42 . That is, the rejection not only of political manoeuvres, but of partial political demands, such as reforms, in favour of the supreme perspective of revolution. An example of this after the Second World War is the indifference towards the monarchy-republic alternative. With these premises, it is understandable why the criticism of PCINT rarely went into the merits of the concrete political proposals of Togliatti’s new party’, and why it was generally limited to the ‘unmasking’ of the PCIs abandonment of the revolutionary perspective 43.

In the early days of the new formation, when the PCI itself was in the process of rebirth and reorganisation, it was defined as ‘centrist’ (a reference to the Gramscian ‘centre’ that had taken over the party’s levers in Lyons, but also to tendencies, such as the ‘independents’ in Germany and the ‘maximalists’ in Italy, who had taken a middle position between social democracy and communism in the early post-war period). Even in late 1945, according to Battaglia comunista, that of PCI is central position between the

 

  1. Cf. GRILLI (1982)
  2. Alfa [A. Bordiga], La Russia sovietica dalla rivoluzione ad oggi, in ‘Prometeo’, No. 1, 1946, pp. 24-38.
  3. [A. Bordiga] Outline of approach, ibid. pp. 1-16 (10-11).
  4. Le front populaire, in ‘Bilan’, No. 43, 1937.
  5. La leçon des événements d’Espagne, ivi., no. 36, 1936.
  6. Vers la révolution communiste en Italie, ivi, no. 42, 1937.
  7. Il centrismo alla barra, in ‘Prometeo’, No. 8, 1944.
  8. Evidence of this in the post-World War I period, e.g. the Bordighian-led PCD’I’s proposal of the single trade union front’ by rejecting the political one, the non-participation in the Arditi del Popolo movement, the indifference to fascisms destruction of the formal protections that the proletarian movement enjoyed in the democratic sphere.
  9. An exception was the criticism of the PCI’s land reform proposals, which proposed the transformation of farm labourers into sharecroppers and small farmers. For the PCINT, instead, the widest possible socialisation was necessary (La riforma agraria e Ruggero Grieco, in ‘Battaglia comunista’, No. 23, 1948).

 

avowedly reformist and the revolutionary party", making it "a tendentially reformist party" 44 . This denotes that in the PCINT the evaluation that had prompted the Bordighists in the emigration to define themselves as a ‘fraction’ remained, i.e. the supposed persistence in the PCI of workers’ strata that were still conquerable to the revolutionary line. In later years this term was gradually abandoned and replaced. For example, by the derogatory one of "big party" (almost to proudly claim a minority connected to revolutionary purity) or, often, of "(neo)opportunist" party, bearing a clear imprint of the first post-war period, when the sections of CI accused of opportunism social democrats and supporters of the International "two and a half" 45 . The most original definition would be that national-communist’ party, to express that the PCI was only left with the name of communist (for the PCINT, communism is internationalist, or it is not) 46national independence (albeit in an anti-American function), proves that the internationalist ‘party’ is no longer so 47. The proletariat must not aspire, as the "new party" wants, to become the national "ruling" class, but to destroy the bourgeois state in view of the world revolution 48 . It cannot therefore allow itself to be involved in the effort to rebuild the post-war economy, which is on its shoulders to the benefit of capital, and it must reject the appeals of the PCI leadership in favour of the discipline and productivity of labour49. To the "progressive democracy" advocated by the "new party" the internationalists – faithful to their old polemic against the watchword of the "workers and peasants government" – oppose, sic et simpliciter, the dictatorship of the proletariat 50 . Violent is therefore the criticism of the renunciation of revolutionary means and the assumption of a peaceful and gradual path to socialism 51 . As for the opening of the PCI’s doors to non-Marxist or Catholic elements, the judgement could not be more severe (52) .

Another specificity of the internationalists – which goes back to an anti-Gramscian polemic dating back to the first post-war period – is the criticism of the support that the party led by Togliatti considers it useful to give to the part of the bourgeoisie, including the agrarian, defined as ‘progressive’. For the PCINT militants, the alleged feudal residues of southern Italy on which the PCI bases this strategy basically do not exist, and there is therefore no reason to give support to one of the bourgeois fractions (53) .

One point that distinguishes PCINT from other nuclei to the left of the PCI is the contestation of the nationalisation programme of industry and services. According to Battaglia Comunista’, national ownership is not socialist, not even in embryonic form. To constitute a first step towards socialisation, it must be preceded by the seizure of power by the proletariat 54 . In the absence of this premise, this programme corresponds to emergence of the new and modern state capitalism that is the hallmark common to both post-war democracies and self-styled socialist Russia, as it was to Nazism and fascism. The PCI and socialists’ defence of the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI) (55), which for "Battaglia communista" is an instrument for the statist ("fascist") implementation of the economy 56be taken for granted. In the analysis of the internationalists, the construction of this scaffolding requires, as during fascism, the regimentation of the working class, and that

"the mass organisations that the proletarians had given themselves as instruments of their struggle, become the subsidiary, but absolutely indispensable, means in the hands of capitalism to

 

  1. Un giovane astigiano, Che cos’è il centrismo?, in ‘Battaglia comunista’, No. 7, 1945.
  2. This is how the Union of Socialist Parties for International Action, consisting of the ‘centrist’ socialists (primarily the German ‘independents’ and Austro-Marxists) and other socialist fractions, founded in Vienna in 1921, was ironically called by the communists. In 1923 it merged – together with what was left of the Socialist International (the ‘Second International’ that imploded in 1914 at the outbreak of the ‘Great War’) – into the Socialist Workers’ International.
  3. Theory of National Communism, in ‘ Battaglia Comunista’ No. 8, 1945.
  4. He who invokes the fatherland prepares for war, ibid., No. 18, 1952.
  5. The neo-opportunist theory, ibid., no. 15, 1945.
  6. Worker control, another destroyed idol, ibid., No. 8, 1945.
  7. Progressive Democracy or Revolution?, ibid., nos. 5-6, 1945.
  8. The theory of neo-opportunism, ibid., no. 19, 1946.
  9. Towards Labourism, ibid., No. 7, 1945.
  10. See e.g. La storiella del feudalesimo nelle campagne, ivi, no. 8, 1950; Alfa [Bordiga], Il rancido problema del sud italiano, in "Prometeo", no. 1, 1950, pp. 4-14.
  11. What does nationalisation mean for the proletariat? In ‘ Battaglia Comunista’, No. 6, 1945.
  12. The IRI, created in 1933 by the fascist regime first as an entity to rescue the ailing banking and industrial system, later became a pillar of state intervention in the economy. Its fate was debated among the parties that arose at the fall of fascism. The PCI and the socialists were among those supported its importance for the revival and modernisation of the Italian economy.
  13. Demetrio [G. Benelli], Destre e sinistre all’assalto dell’IRI, ‘Battaglia comunista’, No. 11, 1947.

to realise its plans: this is because the Italian Communist Party presents itself [...] as the surest means of muddying and annihilating class consciousness.57

The PCI," wrote Battaglia Comunista’ later, "is "an opposition representing the young forces, the advanced and most modern points of capitalism, which, to the consummate art of government of the Christian Democrats, knows how add another very refined art; that of binding the working masses to the state and mobilising them for the purposes of national reconstruction. "58

In short, as the main factor of class conciliation and control over the proletariat, the PCI becomes, in this vision, the pivotal instrument of what the PCINT perceives as post-war "fascistisation" 59. An evaluation that contains echoes of the theory of "social-fascism" which the ICS had always rejected.

If the polemic against the ‘national-communists’ suffers from a certain abstractness, this does not worry the militant internationalists. Always running through the pages of their organ is the illusion that facts would soon show the workers the true nature of the PCI and PSIUP. At first, it is predicted that the passage from war economy to peace economy would have exhausted their possibilities of manoeuvre 60 , determining their break-up and class revival 61 . Then it was PCI’s ouster from the government that created the illusion of its crisis 62 . In this phase, it should be noted, ‘ Battaglia Comunista’ still finds reason to address the ‘comrades’ who, while looking sympathetically at the PCINT, do not have the courage to break with the PCI, hoping that they may one day still find themselves in the ranks of revolutionary militants 63 . On the contrary, Communistsexit from the executive proved to be an obstacle. From the opposition, and intercepting social unease and struggles, the PCI gained ground among the masses. For the PCINT it was a manoeuvre to return to the government, and this desire – while the opposition between the blocs that was to become known as the ‘cold war’ was opening up – was in turn interpreted as an intent to move the Italian state from the western to the eastern side. This is a simplistic view, which should be framed in the belief that the world was moving towards a new world conflict, of which the ‘falsely communist’ parties (and in Italy, also Nenni’s party) would be the coach fliesin favour of the Kominform 64 (considered to be feudalised to Moscow), unmasking themselves. Thus, the escalation of international tensions and the approach of a conflict are interpreted once again as symptoms of a "situation objectively favourable to a resumption of class movement" 65 . A viewpoint in which the sporadic signs of fronde to the leadership of the ‘Best‘ 66 arouse no sympathy.

The riots that followed the assassination attempt on Togliatti, revealing the enormous grip that the PCI had managed to gain in spite of everything, call for reflection: in the episode – "Battaglia comunista" must admit – the workers saw an attack directed primarily against them, but they were tragically mistaken in deluding themselves that the "national-communists" would go all the way by indulging the "revolutionary instinct" of the working class, while they would rather have tried to cage the spontaneous reaction of the masses within the meshes of democracy, in favour of a mere change of government 67 . For " Battaglia Comunista", the fundamental error of the proletarians is to believe that the PCI is still that of 1921 68 . A naive view that assumes the persistence of a revolutionary potential among Italian workers.

In the meantime, the PCI has transformed itself into a large mass democratic party. At rallies it replaces -

 

  1. Against Waiting, ibid., No. 14, 1945.
  2. Workers: government and opposition vie for the prize of the most rational exploitation of your labour , ibid., no. 22 1-7 October 1947.
  3. First steps of national communism towards fascism, ibid., No. 31, 1949.
  4. The fate of the two parties, ivi, no. 17, 19 November 1945.  61o. d. [O. Damen], Interview of Fear, ibid., no. 26, 1946.
  1. With the tripartite party, the idea of the democratic conquest of power dies, a weapon opportunism, ibid., no. 12, 1947-
  2. The Age of Half-Consciousness, ibid., No. 19, 1947.
  3. The Information Office the Communist and Workers’ Parties was set up in 1947 to coordinate them since the CI had been disbanded in 1943.
  4. Capitalist crisis and the crisis of mass parties, in ‘ Battaglia Comunista’, No. 5, 1948.
  5. Dedicated to Terracini, ivi, n. 26, 29 October-5 November 1947. The same applies to later episodes: Can the PCI change its programme?, ivi, n. 23 and n. 24, 1950. On the Cucchi-Magnani affair see Il piatto di tutti i giorni, ivi, n. 6, 1951.
  6. Tragic Balance Sheet, ibid., No. 25, 1948.
  7. TULLIO [A. LECCI], The hard lesson of the strike, ibid.

reproach the internationalists – the popular festivals 69 , and its flourishing finances are the fruit of profiteering: not only and not so much subscriptions, but publishing, the use of real estate (people’s houses, cinemas, etc.), but above all agencies for trade with Eastern European countries (70) .

When Catholics and then Republicans and Social Democrats left the CGIL, PCINT did not see this as a substantial change, as the three confederations were in its view equally organic to the bourgeois state that had emerged from the war (71) .

On the occasion of the PCI’s 7th congress, ‘Battaglia comunista’ summarised the nature and politics of that party:

"The watchword of popular unity [...] expands in a single sense: that embracing [...] ever wider social strata, the ‘Nation’ as a whole. The PCI embraces the claims of the strata furthest from the proletariat as long as they are the healthy strata of the country, it sees itself as heir to the old ruling classes because these ‘no longer [...] manage [...] to satisfy the interests of all strata of the population’, [...] it burns with indignation at the spectacle of an Italy treated as a servant in international assemblies and struck down in its national and colonial interests, it launches programmes for the rehabilitation of industry [...]. The appeal is pathetic, it is addressed to all ‘good citizens’, [...] it invokes respect for the laws, it makes the Constitution the bronze plank of the proletarian movement, it traces out the lines of an action aimed at grouping all classes around the three-coloured banner of ‘communism’, in the ardour of a patriotic impulse, it claims responsibility for creating a national army, for strengthening economic apparatus and political scaffolding of Italy. And, one by one, the specialists [of the PCI] illustrated [...] the mirific picture of a perfect corporate state, embracing in a single embrace the reconciled social classes [...] once the backward classes had been eliminated [...] From popular unity to national unity: this is the path [...]. "72

When, faced with the liberalising ‘exceptional laws’ of 1950, PCI called for a strike, the PCI’s reaction was as follows:

"Under national-communist leadership the strike has no class character, but becomes merely a means of war as the partisan struggle was in its time. It is pure illusion to hope that any of these initiatives can leave the proletariat the slightest chance of glimpsing a class purpose. National-communist demonstrations do not straighten themselves out, do not lead back to the path of the class struggle, but sabotage themselves, reject themselves, recuse themselves." 73

In the event of a world war, the PCINT argued, the ‘national-communists’, linked to Moscow, would not hesitate to mobilise the proletariat to create problems for the pro-Atlantic government. The strike would then become a means of involving the working class in the conflict 74 . In this respect ‘ Battaglia Comunista’ warns the proletariat about the promise of revolution in the event of war. It would only be a form of involvement in it, as resistance to Nazi-fascism was 75 . The PCINT basically called on the workers to boycott strikes called by left-wing parties. An extreme position, not shared by all its militants.

The Rise of the PCI and the Crisis of the PCInt

A red thread connects the affirmation of the PCI as the principal opposition party and the marginalization of the PCINT, which, in spite of everything, unrealistically bets on a class revival 76 , which provokes defections, calls for discipline and expulsions within itself. Different sensitivities were at the origin in the small organisation: the Northern group (animated by Maffi, Stefanini and Damen), rather than theoretical rigour, aimed action; the Central-Southern group was more permeated by the influence of Bordiga and the abstentionist tradition; the militants coming from emigration conserved, at least in part, the particular

 

 

  1. FABBROCINO, Dal comizio alla festa popolare, ivi, no. 25, 1947.
  2. The Richest Party in Europe, ibid., No. 46, 1949.
  3. Let us take stock of the trade union problem, ibid., No. 23, 1949.
  4. Supernationalism has made its home at the Botteghe Oscure, ibid., no. 7, 1951.
  5. First strike: against the National Communists, ibid., No. 7, 1950.
  6. Dem. [G. Benelli], National Communism, mortal enemy of the proletariat, ibid., No. 8, 1950.
  7. The proletarian revolution must pass over the corpse of national communism, ibid., No. 1, 1951.
  8. o. d. [O. Damen], Interview of Fear, cit.

positions I mentioned above (77) .

In July 1946 the PCINT had started publishing the theoretical journal ‘Prometeo’. Right from the start Bordiga (signing himself ‘Alfa’ or ‘A. Orso’) had taken the opportunity to pour his own important thoughts into it. Although not a party member he tried to influence it 78 . If the agreement between the various souls of the party is total fascism and anti-fascism, and if the judgement on the PCI and the Kominform poses no problems, the same cannot be said of other issues. One of the unresolved ones whether or not the tactics of revolutionary parliamentarism should be resumed. On one side are those who, like Damen, still consider the electoral contest useful and on the other those who dust off the abstentionist tradition of the ‘Soviet’ of Naples.

At the First Congress (Florence, May 1948), confusing differences emerged: for Damen, there was no shortage of ‘objective conditions of the revolutionary course, as much as [...] the leadership, the class party’, and activity and centralisation must be intensified; Vercesi, on the contrary, accuses party line of "voluntarism"79. Bordiga, who was absent from the congress, considers that "each of the opposing groups or comrades" has gone off the rails 80. And he detests what he considers the voluntarism and organisational formalism of Damen and the militants who follow him 81 . Central to this is the evaluation of the historical phase, considered by Bordiga and Vercesi, and increasingly also by Maffi, "unfavourable" and distant, even decades, from a possible class revival, making a work of doctrinal rearrangement a priority; for them it is clear that the influence of the "big party" is destined to last for a long time, while Damen, Bottaioli, Lecci and other comrades continue to underestimate its strength and believe a reversal of the situation is possible in the near future.

For Bordiga, only in certain, rare and brief historical revolutionary moments, the conscience and will represented by the class party, and never by individuals, are able to influence the unfolding of situations82; a theory which is gaining the consensus of Maffi and Perrone, who even considers the organisational link 83 as abusive and damaging, in the counter-revolutionary phase. On the contrary, for Damen and his, the party must, at every juncture, favourable or unfavourable, be a dialectical "factor" of the political maturation of the proletariat and of the revolutionary situation (84) .

The most burning divergence is precisely the one that relates to the hegemonic role of Togliatti’s party in Italys main post-war trade union, the CGIL. It concerns in fact the attitude towards the post-war trade unions: they all shared the idea, borrowed from Trockij, that – after the fascist experience – trade unions now tended, even in a democratic regime, to integrate themselves into the state. Hence one part of the party, under the influence of "consiglist" theses, considers the trade union substantially an organ of the State, no longer conquerable through an internal battle; it therefore identifies in the factory councils, or in organisms like the Soviets, the possible transmission belt between party and class in the revolutionary process 85 . A line that contrasts with that of the PCD’I in the early post-war period, which was aimed at the conquest of the General Confederation of Labour. The divergence is exacerbated when, with the passage of the PCI to the opposition, the agitations called by it intensify, pushing some PCINT militants, as already seen, to boycott the strikes86. A position to be linked to the marked anti-unionism of part of the executive committee (Maffi in primis), and to Perrone’s theories on the disappearance of the proletariat as a class. Damen and others disagreed with this boycott, but in turn rejected the possibility of taking up trade union positions in the CGIL, which they considered irredeemable to class politics. Bordiga and the ‘Neapolitans’, on the other hand, refuse to consider the trade union, albeit integrated with the state, as an organ of the latter, not

 

77 OLIVIER (2001); BOURRINET, (1981 and 2016).

  1. It is the custom of Bordighist historians to ignore the fact that Bordiga himself, in those years, is far having set all the problems. I will only mention that in the 1946 essay Soviet Russia from the Revolution to Today (cit.) he qualified Russia as ‘state capitalism’, a definition later abandoned, while Damen remained attached to it (infra). There is no doubt, however, that the level of his contributions clearly stands out from the others.
  2. Report I Congress of the Internationalist Communist Party, Florence, 6-9 May 1948. Cyclostyled.
  3. Bordiga’s letter of 13 June 1948, in SAGGIORO (2010), pp. 150-152.
  4. A. Bordiga, Activism, in ‘Battaglia Comunista’, nos. 6 and 7, 1952.
  5. Teoria e azione nella dottrina marxista, in ‘Bollettino interno’, No. 1, 1951, now in Partito e classe (1972), Edizioni Il programma comunista, Milan, pp. 119-137.
  6. Perrone’s letter of 14 February 1950. See Ottorino Perrone’s document (February 1950) in ‘Quaderni internazionalisti di Prometeo’, La scissione internazionalista del 1952, supplement to ‘Prometeo’, 2015, pp. 11-12.
  7. o. d. [Damen], Foreword, in ‘Prometheus’, series II, no. 3, 1952, pp. 1-6.
  8. Theses on the Party’s trade union policy presented for discussion at the National Convention, 1945, in ‘Battaglia Comunista’, No. 17, 1945.
  9. This was the case of the Asti section in early 1951.

thus excluding the possibility of its future, and certainly distant in time, reconquest 87 . More realistically, they dissent as much from the boycott of strikes as from the rejection on principle of taking on trade union functions 88 . In their view, while it is certain that the PCI’s grip on the CGIL is destined to remain predominant, it should nevertheless be opposed, if possible, where workers act to defend their own economic interests.

Less important issues, however, part of the disagreement that led to the split, was the judgement on the nature of the Soviet state and the anti-imperialist and national-colonial movements. Regarding the USSR, for Damen, who represents the classic PCINT position, it is ‘state capitalism’, i.e. a modern imperialist capitalist type. For Bordiga it, while containing elements of state capitalism, is in reality a still backward country that as a whole ‘tends’ towards capitalism, nor can it be compared to the overripe capitalism of the West89. Hence main enemy of the world proletariat was American imperialism, and only secondarily Soviet imperialism 90 . For Damen, this distinction was absurd and dangerous. With regard to national liberation movements, the overwhelming majority of militants of all hues took an indifferentist position91: they were the manifestation of the division of the world into imperialist blocs, and functional to Soviet foreign policy, so the proletariat had to deny its support to the democratic bourgeoisie. Bordiga, who at first had partly endorsed this approach 92 , was instead maturing – on the basis of the approach sanctioned in 1919 by the 2nd congress of the CI – a historically positive evaluation of themselves93.

Faced with this crisis, Bordiga, who until now had not participated directly in the organisational life of the PCINT, decided to get involved. He does not approve Maffi’s anti-unionism 94 , opposes the Perronist theory of the disappearance of the proletariat as a class and Damen’s activism. He therefore drew up a body of ‘characteristic theses‘ 95 , which he paradoxically called a ‘catechism’, as a new basis of adherence capable of refounding the party. A basis that corresponds neither to the positions of the ‘fraction abroad’, nor to those on which the PCINT had been formed, but to those that he had come to elaborate. And on which he calls comrades to an adhesion "unconditional’. Bordiga’s “catechism” was presented in Florence on the 8th and 9th of December 1951, at one of what he liked to call informal "work meetings" from then on, in which, until 1966, he would dispense his followers with reports and summaries deliberately without debate (a method which, together with the abolition of all organisational formalism such as congresses, he would call organic centralism" 96 ). On this occasion Maffi and Faggioni obtorto collo renounced their anti-unionism, staying with Bordiga. In the meantime Damen and Bottaioli were expelled and the party split (97) .

From that moment on, there were two PCINTs: one, ‘Damenist’, continued to publish ‘ Battaglia Comunista’ and "Prometheus"; the other, from September 1952, published "the communist programme" 98 . This is the organisation that can be defined as ‘Bordighist’ in the strict sense (which, incidentally, corresponds to the adjective used to qualify it by the other groups that refer to the ICS). Not only because general direction and theoretical work there was for many years – albeit under the cloak of anonymity and a supposedly "collective" and "impersonal" work – the undisputed monopoly of the Neapolitan leader, but also because the doctrinal inheritance of "The Soviet" and the abstentionist communist fraction 99 was claimed in full. A

 

  1. For Bordiga, ‘any prospect of any revolutionary movement’ requires ‘a large movement of associations with economic content’; he therefore seems to play down the experience of the Russian October, in which trade unions played a marginal role compared to eminently political bodies such as the Soviets (cf. Theory and Action in Marxist Doctrine, cit., pp. 124-125).
  2. Letter from Bordiga to Maffi of 5 January 1951 in SAGGIORO (2010), p. 177.
  3. See the 1951 correspondence between Bordiga and Damen in ‘Prometeo’, series II, no. 3, 1952.
  4. [A. Bordiga], Olympics of Amnesia, in ‘Battaglia comunista’ No. 16, 1952.
  5. See e.g. A demagogic watchword. Independence for colonial peoples, ‘Battaglia Comunista’, No. 7, 1947
  6. Political Platform of the Party, cit., paragraph 21.
  7. Most of his writings on the subject belong to the period after the split of the PCINT, but the position was taking shape while the crisis was ongoing, as his articles Oriente, in ‘Prometeo’, Series II, No. 2, 1951, pp. 53-59; and Le gambe ai cani, in ‘Battaglia comunista’, No. 11, 1952, show.
  8. Letter of 5 January 1951, in Bulletin for the Preparation of the 2nd Congress of the Internationalist Communist Party (1951), published by the Damen Group, pp. 16-17.
  9. In defence of the continuity of the communist programme (1970), Edizioni il programma comunista, Milan, pp. 145-164.
  10. On this eccentric working method cf. SAGGIORO (2014), pp. 17-23 and therein pp. 255-268, the Intermezzo due to the pen of Cesare Saletta. On the ‘shamanic’ role assumed by Bordiga from this moment onwards cf. SAGGIORO (2010), pp. 219-227 and BOURRINET (2016), pp. 84-85.

97 See SAGGIORO (2010), pp. 173-218; BOURRINET (2016), pp. 83-93.

  1. In 1965, this group took on the name of the International Communist Party.
  2. Cf. History of the Communist Left I (1964). Text appeared anonymously but certainly due to the pen of Bordiga.

work whose merits and limitations are beyond the scope of our subject, but which did not prevent further ruptures and divisions, to the point that today the Bordighist group is a nebula of small groups fighting each other.

The history that concerns us stops in 1952, a date that effectively marks the end of the ICS as a political force – albeit a minority one – rooted in the workers’ movement. Its marginalisation corresponded, not surprisingly, with the rise of the PCI as a mass democratic party.

Alessandro Mantovani (20/12/2024)

 

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