Introduction to the “Draft Programme” of the Internationalist Communist Party 1944

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

Footnotes

1. Draft Programme of the Internationalist Communist Party, 1944 ↩

2. «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 ↩

3. 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) ↩