China, ‘Communist Variant’ of capitalism

The 17th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party took place in Beijing with 2,200 delegates in attendance, 100 more than the one before. The new slogan, ‘Development in Social Harmony’, has been imparted, setting aside, therefore, all reference to the Maoist ‘class struggle’ of that great country’s period of national-bourgeois revolution. From the ideological and the external apparatus of Chinese society, the very last trappings of the ‘communism’ that it never hosted in the first place are being removed.

The Congress intends, “to scientifically integrate market economy with state control”, which is actually the function of every bourgeois State once the image in the mirror is readjusted: capital controls; the State carries obeys.

According to the model of the mass party invented by Stalinism, fascism and nazism, the party-State apparatus is limitless, as opposed to the communist party of Marx, Lenin and the Left which it never remotely resembled. The party has 73 million members, with more joining all the time, and they are drawn mostly from the universities and the governing class. Pierre Haski writes: the party is “the point of departure for every young careerist (...) for everyone from the company managing director to the secretary of the local party section”.

“The party is the custodian of stability for all those with something to lose in a changeover of power, of which there are quite a few”. Clear admission of the class matrix of the CCP, which, as well as being the party of Chinese national capital, although originally a peasant party, is now the party of the bourgeoisie; who fear “a change of power”, that is, communism, real communism.

The condition of the working class, at the other social extreme, is amongst the worst in the World: only the privileged few have access to pensions and healthcare and the entire peasantry is entirely excluded. Only 12% of GNP goes on education, health and pensions as opposed to 50% in the West: the majority of workers have to pay for healthcare and education.

The trade unions are State controlled, and yet the number of public protests, according to the Minister of Security, has gone up from 10,000 in 1994 to 87,000 in 2005, and in 2006, although the number of protests diminished, they were more violent.

In the countryside, as happened centuries ago in the old world, violent and pitiless capitalist expropriation, of the common land and the land attached to the villages, is gathering apace.

Banks, the insurance and energy sectors, transport and telecommunications all remain State property but are managed, it goes without saying, in an entirely capitalist way.

Thus we have the highly absurd situation where a country that is clearly one of the biggest of the industrial nations founded on capitalist economic relations, in fact a ‘turbo-capitalism’ as they like to call it, a country ruled by a party-State which not only doesn’t set itself the future objective of attaining communism but totally excludes it, and therefore doesn’t recognize the existence of the elementary class struggle, is universally and indisputably categorized as communist.

The magic of words. The counter-revolutionary pressure which has born down on the international workers’ movement unopposed for 80 years, and so completely distorted its indispensable references and keys to reading history and the world, has, de facto, erased from the vocabulary, and from people’s thoughts, the very notion of communism as the negation of capitalism. In exact proportion to the historical maturation of genuine communism, which corresponds to the crises and extreme fragility of every aspect of the capitalist mode of production; the more that genuine communism objectively imposes itself as an absolute and inevitable necessity, the less it becomes possible to even mention it.

Just as Christianity at a certain point started to hide anxiety about death behind the illusion of eternal life, so the general need of the bourgeoisie, with counter-revolutionary intent obviously, was to portray as imperishable and unchanging, as laws of nature, the prevailing economic relations based on accumulation of profit and the sale of labour power, and to reduce communism to being simply a variant of the unavoidable and eternal capitalism.

Ever since Marxism suddenly appeared in the middle of the 19th century, it has always predicted that the economic sub-structure of capitalism would be channeled, always and everywhere, within the bounds of univocal and necessary economic laws. History has provided the fullest confirmation of this dialectical determinism of ours which transcends race and language, and even millenary histories and cultures. Within the skyscrapers which now surround the Forbidden City the same lifeblood now courses through them, and the same words are spoken – those of capital and finance – as in London’s ‘City’. On the workers’ estates, meanwhile, there is the same subjugation of the working class, and the conditions under which capitalist surplus value is extracted also become ever more identical.

If the Capital that today vertiginously eddies and swirls above the continents retains an essential underlying unity, the ways that the various bourgeois classes have attained power in their respective nations has nevertheless proved to be many and various. This has meant that the relationships, and the clashes, between the dominant classes, and their succession to, and division of, State power have followed different evolutionary paths, which explains the various different forms of government obtained when the bourgeoisie and big landowners have shared power. The western bourgeoisies boast about their long tradition of multi-party parliamentary democracy and, in an arrogantly euro-centric spirit and with a view to sowing confusion in the workers’ ranks, they trumpet it as the perfect ideal; as the one which most responds to the requirements of modern society, in other words of capitalism, based on individualism and the market.

However, while the economic sub-structure continues to evolve, although remaining entirely capitalist, in the sense of ever increasing concentration of production, capital and banking and loss of social power on the part of the petty bourgeoisie, at the same time the government centered on parliament becomes redundant and emptied of any real power. Its continued survival in a few Western countries today is merely for decorative purposes. It is kept alive within a kind of ‘virtual’ reality, in a self-referential media orientated world, its sole aim being to get the proletariat to vote, to spread the illusion that through elections the latter can obtain their quota of power when in fact, whoever gets in, it is the big bourgeoisie which continues to exert control.

The “communist” variant of capitalism, which may be characterized by the presence of a state apparatus openly governed by a one party State, and by a tighter regulation of the rights of oppositional elements than in the West, meets the requirements of modern capitalism just as well, if not better, that the liberal regimes. What is more, just because a single party heads the State doesn’t mean it will also necessarily be monolithic, or that, especially in Russia and China, there won’t be continual violence and bloody in-fighting between the party factions. The story of Maoism and its inglorious end demonstrate this well enough.

In Moscow and Beijing, over a modern capitalist economy and its corresponding class structure, and dominating over older class relationships in the countryside as well, we therefore find bourgeois regimes and forms of government which are adapted to their class function, and which are less hypocritical and insincere that those in Washington, in Europe and in New Delhi. If the “harmonious society” of the national communists in Beijing is perceived by western ideologists of the Haski stamp as a “hybrid model”, that is, as an incomplete or failed liberal democracy, a type of enlightened despotism, as a celestial mandate derived from Confucianism, we Marxists consider that it should be numbered instead amongst the forms of fascist organicism, indeed as its most classic, modern, and... western, exponent.

In conclusion, we will say that all of this clearly has nothing to do with Communism; the communism that will eventually, in both East and West, rout both liberals and ‘illiberals’.





(Translated from Il Partito Comunista, no 326, November-December 2007)

Communist International

Two Reports on Fascism

by the delegate of the Communist Party of Italy

2008 Introduction

The following two Reports on Fascism were presented by the Italian Communist Left’s representative, in Moscow on 16 November 1922 and 2 July 1924, to the 4th and 5th Congresses of the Communist International.

Today, eighty years later, the formidable dialectic is still as valid now as it was then, if not more so.

The international bourgeoisie had managed to isolate the Russian Revolution within the narrow confines of ex-tsarist and semi-feudal Russia; it had also recovered from a period of initial disorientation, in which it had almost become resigned to the fact that the proletariat would overthrow it and take power by force of arms; in those years it had moved on to the counter-attack, and on an international scale. In Italy, casting aside its uncomfortable democratic mask, it had installed a regime which was plainly a class dictatorship. Despite all this the proletariat hadn’t accepted defeat, but had soldiered on, in preparation for the counter-attack.

Within the communist parties and the International, however, the first signs of weakness, and first signs of opportunist penetration within the revolutionary body, were starting to appear. But even if the framework of the global revolutionary organ was being put seriously at risk, it was not yet inevitable that all was lost: a flaring up of the class struggle might still have carried the parties and the International back onto the right, and necessary, road to revolution.

But unfortunately it didn’t happen, and today communism, revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat appear to brainwashed public opinion as utopias of a past world, proved by history to be the unrealisable and foolish dreams of those incapable of facing up to the overwhelming power of the bourgeoisie,

We, on the other hand, assert that the main defeat suffered by the proletariat, then as well, wasn’t so much in the armed conflict with the bourgeoisie, with one class openly struggling to maintain power and the other determined to take it away: rather it was due to a betrayal of its general staff; because of the counter-revolutionary degeneration which had corrupted the parties and the International, first of all distorting its theoretical and programmatic foundations and then turning it on its head.

And still today, a return to the original doctrine and the uncorrupted communist program of Marx, Lenin and the Left is the indispensable basis for tomorrow’s reorganisation of the revolutionary proletariat on an international scale; a reorganisation which is the necessary condition for the next bold attack on the strongholds of capitalism in order to achieve the revolutionary conquest of power.

This necessary affirmation of the need for the party is what prompts us to republish these reports on fascism. Although written a long time ago, just after the First World War, they are nevertheless still imbued with the ardour of revolutionary class struggle: not just historical research but critical arm indispensable to our movement, to our comrades and to proletarians in search of their authentic party.

* * *

Since these initial two reports, our party, continuing on the left Marxist road, has dedicated numerous studies to the theme of fascism. When asked, what is Fascism, we do not answer with the platitude that describes it as “a dictatorship which denies liberty” and the antithesis of democracy, with the latter supposedly representing the safeguard of all liberties. Although useful insofar as it disguises the character of class power, Fascism is nevertheless just one of the many aspects that bourgeois domination has historically assumed. But it is the most modern, the most effective, the most perfected, the most responsive to the necessities of capitalism in its final phase: imperialism.

Our investigation into fascism, and in fact into all of the super-structural and political forms that society assumes, is based essentially on an analysis of the economic and productive forces and class relationships over successive historical periods.

About the bourgeoisie we can say, schematising to the maximum, that after its revolutionary conquest of power, it installs a liberalistic phase of capitalism, marked by an economy in which free competition between producers and traders predominates. Corresponding to the free trade which exists in the realm of economy, freedom in politics is preached: every citizen, they tell us, stands in the same relation to the State as everyone else; Parliament holds sway over the Executive and every law and decision derives from its preliminary approval.

Of course, if during this phase democracy represents a form of government that suits the bourgeoisie, insofar as it helps to achieve a compromise between all its components, it is still a permanent swindle and a mystification as far as the proletariat is concerned; if we evaluate social relations in real economic terms, all that being free under the law really means for the proletariat is being free to sell your own labour power, or else starve.

The best demonstration that the State, even in this liberal period, was nothing more than the guarantor of the interests of the bourgeois class is given by the extension and sharpening of the class struggle, which unmasked the real dictatorial nature of the State even when in a democratic and parliamentary guise.

With the extension of commodity production and the consequent concentration of capital into a few hands, capitalism moved, bit by bit, into its final phase: imperialism. Lenin would define the characteristics of imperialism as follows:

– Concentration of production and capital has reached a sufficiently high level of development to enable the creation of monopolies, which become the key players in economic life;

– Fusion of financial and industrial capital and the formation of a financial oligarchy on the basis of this capital;

– Greater importance attributed to the export of capital as against the export of commodities;

– The rise of international monopolistic associations of capitalists who divide up the world amongst themselves;

– The completion of the dividing up of the Earth amongst the great imperialist powers.

In the modern imperialist phase, the capitalist system subjects all the canons that inspired it in its liberal phase to a radical revision. In this new epoch the bourgeoisie plays down its original myths of unlimited freedom for the citizen and free economic competition between businesses: it resorts to structures that aim to curb political opposition, and turns to state intervention in the markets and in finance.

This different economic situation is necessarily also reflected in governmental forms; State policy evolves towards ever stricter forms of control and unitary direction within a highly centralised hierarchical framework. Big capital, the financial capital that dominates the economic scene, assumes direct control of the levers of State and proves to be intolerant of any indiscipline. In this phase, even the dominant class has to do without democracy, which is substituted by forms of government that are openly despotic not only towards the proletariat but also towards the petty-bourgeoisie, peasantry and small shop-keepers, etc. Still schematising, we can say that fascism is simply one – or if you prefer, the most – characteristic expression of the modern stage of development of bourgeois society, constrained as it is to adopt forms of political totalitarianism capable of tackling, in a united and disciplined way, the revolutionary pressure of a proletariat which acts out of urgent historical necessity.

Such a concept has always been a distinguishing feature of our revolutionary left current’s historical and political evaluations. Even on the occasion of the coming to power of Hitler in Germany, our fraction expressed the view (whilst engaged in polemics with Trotsky) that the new political/social form of organisation, Nazism, had been imposed on capitalism by economic conditions, and, above all, by the class struggle.

In the age of imperialism, starting at the beginning of the 20th century and then irreversibly so, all capitalist States, even when they haven’t adopted the structure of an openly fascist regime, have assumed its characteristic features as a matter of necessity, even if still maintaining a formal democracy with a simulacrum of a parliament and an apparent multiplicity of parties. The transformation of State institutions and of civil life within every country throughout the world has clearly proved this: the multi-party system is now reduced to a trivial soap opera, with State maintained psychophants as the main actors, and State financial support given to the parties, newspapers and even the workers’ trade unions.

* * *

From the strictly historical point of view, analysis of the fascist phenomenon must necessarily start from that extraordinary historical event, the First World War.

Fascism’s first historical theorisation, and apparition, was in Italy. When the war first broke out in Europe, in Italy people of every social stratum, with the exception of nationalists, were virtually united in their neutrality. But the interests of big capital were not neutral, and therefore Italian diplomacy was quick to engage in talks with the governments of the opposing sides, with the aim of drawing the major possible advantage from the war. Unhappy with the offers made by the Austro-Hungarian government, it would end up agreeing to enter the war on the side of the opposing coalition, and sign the famous Treaty of London.

These events were preceded by a major interventionist campaign in which the role assumed by Benito Mussolini was of no small importance. Whilst the Socialist party maintained the same oppositional stance to the war it had taken up during the military campaign in Libya, Mussolini, who for two years had been the editor of Avanti!, the party newspaper, started making tentative moves in favour of participation against Austro-Hungary. But the socialists didn’t retreat from their theses of neutrality, and any concealed interventionism within the party was denounced by its left wing. Mussolini would then openly line up in favour of the war and establish formal links with an interventionist movement within whose ranks men of the most diverse tendencies had come together; a movement which would be utilised by the centres of national capital in order to make entering the war appear to Italy as the logical and natural solution.

The First World War – condemned as imperialist by Lenin, by the Left of the Italian Socialist Party and by a few others, and seen as something which must be sabotaged by the proletariat of every county – was presented by Mussolini as a revolutionary event which would open the way to the emancipation of the proletarian masses. Even after the armistice had been signed, Mussolini would exploit the suffering and disappointment of the combatants. He would write: “The war has brought the proletarian masses to the fore. It has broken their chains. It has considerably enhanced their value. A war of the masses concludes with the triumph of the masses (...) If the revolution of 1789, which was both a revolution and a war, opened the gateways and the roads of the world to the bourgeoisie which had completed its century long apprenticeship, the present revolution, which is also a war, must open the doors of the future to the masses who have completed their hard apprenticeship of blood and death in the trenches (...) The revolution has continued under the name of war for 40 months. It isn’t finished (...) As to the means, we aren’t prejudiced, we accept what will be necessary: legal means and so-called illegal means”.

Faced with the powerful class movements of the proletarian masses, Mussolini would soon show what the ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ means he intended to put at the service of the ‘revolution’ actually were.

From 1919 onwards, with his organisation at the disposal – and on the payroll – of capitalist interests, there would be a daily almost pedestrian increase in the levels of violence and brutality deployed against workers and proletarian organisations. These criminal undertakings, blessed by the church, tolerated by the State, supported by the police and the army, and unpunished by the legal system, were carried out on a territory by territory basis, leading to the gradual strategic conquest of the entire Italian peninsular. With its highly militarised organisation, fascism moved to assume control of essential services in Italy’s economic centres. From Bologna, the fascist advance advanced in two directions, on the one hand towards the industrial triangle of Turin, Milan and Genoa, and on the other towards Tuscany and central Italy in order to encircle Rome.

The revolutionary attack by the Italian proletariat in 1922 had already been defeated by the underhand dealings of social democracy, so it wasn’t in fact fascism which saved the bourgeoisie from communism. The exponents of Italian big capital were nevertheless now convinced that the one remedy which would both prevent a return of the revolutionary peril, and discipline the middle classes, was the coming to power of Mussolini and fascism: all the elderly statesmen and the political parties on the democratic side were ready to accept him into the government. The only thing that needed to be settled, through gritted teeth, was how many portfolios the fascists would be awarded; once that had been agreed, Mussolini’s triumphal entrance to Rome, who would arrive there from Milan in a sleeping-car, was just the logical conclusion.

Neither the State not the democratic parties would intervene to stop the so-called fascist ‘revolution’. At the time of the ‘March on Rome’, the king would refuse to sign the declaration of martial law, thus allowing the fascists to converge on the capital undisturbed.

The only resistance the fascists encountered was in Rome itself where the workers, led by communists, fought hard against Mussolini’s squads. On that occasion too, as was by now the custom, the Police occupied the workers’ quarter, and by depriving them of any means of defence allowed the incoming hordes of fascists to shoot the workers in cold blood. When the party now called for a general strike as a class response to the fascist takeover, the socialist leaders of the General Confederation of Labour kept their members in check and instructed them not to obey the ‘dangerous’ exhortations of revolutionary groups, whereas the leaders of the other unions didn’t respond at all.

At the end of October 1922, Mussolini submitted his first government for parliamentary approval. The Mussolini government was given a vote of confidence of 306 votes to 116. The fascists had a mere 35 parliamentary deputies, that is, less than ten per cent.

Speaking for the Communist Party of Italy, Rabezzana read a party declaration that stated: “The consolidation of all the bourgeois parties around fascism confirms the exactness of our critique. More than any number of conferences, fascism in government shows that a revolutionary period has begun. The death of democracy coincides with the death throes of the dominant class (...) You fascists are the continuers and legitimate inheritors of the entire tradition of the Italian bourgeoisie”.

The Italian communist left has always rejected the idea of fascism as a ‘historical digression’, abruptly begun and abruptly finished. It has always maintained, on the contrary, that there is a continuous historical, social, political and economic thread uniting pre-fascist democracy, fascism and post-fascist democracy. In 1945, in our review Prometeo, we wrote: “The current war has been lost by the fascists, but won by fascism (...) The capitalist world, having preserved the integrity and historical continuity of its powerful State units, will continue to try to dominate the forces which menace it, to implement a system of ever tighter control over economic processes, and to undermine the autonomy of any social or political movement which threatens the established order (...) This fundamental truth becomes every day more evident in its organisational workings, which tend towards economic, social and political control of the world”.

Consistent with our unequivocal evaluation of fascism is derived our evaluation of what would later be called ‘anti-fascist resistance’: a movement which is so entirely lacking in class connotations that it even expects the proletariat to subject itself to a section of the bourgeois parties, in order to pursue the anti-historical and reactionary aim of ‘restoring democracy’. And that is why we have always considered anti-fascism as the most pernicious of all the products of fascism. The guerrilla warfare conducted by the armed partisan bands – and this is the case in Italy as much as in Spain – even when it was composed of confused proletarian groups, couldn’t free itself of its patriotic and democratic premises; which were, and are, completely antithetical, both historically and politically, to the class movement for socialism, in spite of the thousand and one lies of democrats and Stalinists alike.











Communist International

4th Congress - November 16th, 1922

Report on Fascism by the delegate of the Communist Party of Italy

[link to the text]









Communist International

5th Congress - 23rd session, July 2nd, 1924

Report on Fascism by the delegate of the Communist Party of Italy

[link to the text]



















Fascism and Antifascism

Our view that “the most damaging thing produced by fascism was having provided the justification for antifascism” is well-known.

Marxism interprets the word ‘Fascism’ as denoting a form of government which capitalism adopts when it finds itself in particular difficulties. It is adopted when the proletariat becomes a real threat to the very existence of capital; when the bourgeoisie has to set aside and bury its differences, temporarily abandoning the mask of democracy; and indeed, the function of parliament has only ever been to represent the various factions of the dominant classes. When needs must, in order to protect their class as a whole, the cruel and ruthless executioners of the working class are unleashed to have their day.

The tendency of Capital is to become ever more concentrated, and a new form of government is adopted in conformity with the gigantic and destructive capitalist machine which results. The two things are connected: concentration is a response to the falling rate of profit, and is implemented through successive mergers although profits continue to decline. The inevitable result is an ever increasing pressure on the whole of society, and this is exerted both directly by organising an increased exploitation of the workers, and through the fact of the existence of the millions of unemployed expelled from the productive apparatus.

It is under these circumstances that the latest forms of nationalism and racism have developed. The emergency bourgeois government – the fascist government – demands unquestioning faith in the nation (with the latter having become a paltry substitute for the true global community) and at a terrible cost to those who don’t come up to the required standards of national and racial “purity”. As far back as the 18th century Dr Johnson would write that “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”. Today that is still undeniable, although we’d prefer to say it is the last refuge of the defenders of capitalism... and of its wars. More and more the nation is becoming an institution whose one aim is to imprison and oppress the proletariat within its borders. Meanwhile, the business dealings of capitalism know no frontiers. It is known, for instance, that many influential English capitalists had shares in Krupps during the 2nd World War, a fact which some say caused even more damage to the country than the actual German bombs themselves. Where-ever there is money to be had, and surplus value to extract, there will we find capitalism.

Indeed, what better way to make proletarians forget they belong to an international class than to disguise bourgeois States as ‘nations’? The workers are lined up on the war fronts, and then they slaughter each other in their millions. War is capitalism’s drastic solution to the problem of over-population, capitalism’s way of regulating population.

The workers in the trenches have often recognised the soldiers in the enemy trenches as being exploited just like themselves, and to such an extent that episodes of fraternisation have occurred despite rigidly enforced war censorship. But bourgeois propaganda continues to terrify us with the German, Arab, Jewish, and fascist menace, or indeed the “communist” or “bourgeois” menace, describing the violent atrocities of which the enemy is capable.

In opposition to this annihilation of international class power the Bolsheviks responded by offering immediate peace terms and withdrawing workers from the front during the 1st World War, even at the expense of territorial loss.

The anti-fascist movements played their part in this anti-revolutionary operation by providing the banner under which the 2nd World War would be fought, in the name of which millions of proletarians were massacred. Even the so-called left parties and trade-unions, which claimed to be representing the working class, declared themselves to be democratic and anti-fascist. But despite what they said, these movements were entirely directed towards dispersing the potential inherent in the class and getting it to directly support capitalism by supporting the principle and practice of democracy, since the latter is inseparable from capitalism.

It is an ignorance of dialectics which prevents them from understanding that both fascism and democracy are forms of bourgeois government, proper to different periods and places, and responding to diverse contingent necessities of capitalism. This is shown by historical evolution which sees the spread of the fascist model, even if it is dissimulated under a democratic veneer. Meanwhile democracy itself actually becomes the dictatorship of one party, or several parties with the same identical anti-proletarian, conservative programme. All that remains of democracy is just financial investments in the electoral circus

If we are asking the workers to desert the anti-fascist movements it isn’t because we deny the necessity of responding to the cowardly violence of fascism, but because we believe that the latter’s real power resides not in its thuggish ‘squads’ but in the real and continuous protection which democracy and the alliance of all the bourgeois fractions are prepared to give it. The proletariat doesn’t have the option of “choosing” between democracy and fascism because they are the same thing: fascism is the unscrupulous and extra-legal armed wing of democracy, and democracy is the “velvet glove” of fascism.

In any case, the living conditions workers have to endure are no better under the democratic regimes: they are no more secure on a day to day basis and their tomorrow is just as uncertain, they are just as worried about being evicted from their homes, just as liable to fall prey to spiralling debts and having to work longer and longer hours to pay them off. The proletariat in this society has one choice before it: either submission, or engaging in the struggle for its own class objectives, separate from and opposed to each and every bourgeois and petty-bourgeois faction.





(Originally appeared in Italian in Il Partito Comunista, no. 206, December 1992).





THE ITALIAN LEFT AND THE INTERNATIONAL

[ 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 ]

(PART 10 - continued from Communist Left, no.19-20; translated from Il Partito Comunista, no. 200, 202, 203)







IV - The Founding of the Communist Party of Italy: Livorno 1921

IV.3 - The political tendencies inside the PSI

b. The Maximalists (cont.)

In the months before the Livorno Congress, the Left would mount a vigorous and determined campaign to unmask the farcical revolutionism of the maximalists and reveal their role as pacifiers. In the October 24 edition of Il Soviet, an article entitled ‘Serrati’s Mistake’ (‘Il torto di Serrati’), would counter all the maximalist arguments that favoured applying Moscow’s 21 Conditions in such a way as to render them inoffensive and consequently to allow more fatal equivocating about the destiny of the proletarian movement. Actually the formal unity of the party would serve merely to reinforce the reformists, and consequently weaken the revolutionary energy of the proletariat. The Communist Fraction therefore had to take determined and intransigent action. The article in Il Soviet examined some of the arguments Serrati used and showed they were fundamentally at odds with a good part of the theses approved at the International’s 2nd Congress. Extensive quotations from this article follow: “When it comes to presenting his concluding argument, Serrati gets caught up in contradiction and sophism. We have in our hands, he says, thousands of communes [municipal councils], co-operatives and organisations; so many of them we don’t have enough people to fill all the posts. The 3rd international doesn’t condemn such conquests as heretical, in fact it encourages them, but meanwhile it expects all these posts to be filled with authentic communists, even incompetent ones. That would mean wrecking proletarian institutions. Serrati concludes not only that non-communists should remain in the party, but above all they shouldn’t be disturbed in the peaceful exercise of the official positions they occupy. The 3rd International’s overall perspective, which lies behind its prescription that the Communist parties should utilise all of these forms of action, is that the work carried out to achieve the communists’ principal aim, i.e., the overthrow of the bourgeois power (when its historic instrument exists, that is; the political class party responding to all the features and conditions contemplated by the Theses) this revolutionary work, can be usefully carried out in all these institutions. These same institutions are, however, also favourable terrain for opportunists, chiefly insofar as their function within the parameters of the present society can become an end in itself, and end up as a means, under multiple forms, of delaying the precipitation of the revolutionary crisis. Communists however must penetrate them precisely in order to combat the opportunists; in order to denounce their inability to put forward long-term solutions to questions of interest to the proletariat; in order to spread our propaganda within them; to agitate within them and thereby gaining recruits for the class war led by the Communist Party. And given that this party does exists, it has been said in Moscow, and since it responds to determined criteria, one of the most important of which is to be free of social democratic and opportunist elements, such a party is able, and indeed should, penetrate the trade unions, the co-operatives, the local authorities and parliament and put up a fight within them. To have the unions, the co-operatives, the local authorities, etc, but without that fundamental condition which is the Communist party’s existence, that would mean no revolutionary work was possible; in fact, one would run the risk of abetting bourgeois conservation. What Serrati wants, precisely in order to conserve those organisations that are presently playing this opportunistic game, is to renounce the condition, the premise, of forming the party. Even the blind can see that the contradiction lies within him, not in Moscow’s prescriptions. One could, from the dialectical Marxist point of view, find the criteria that underlie all the Moscow Congress’s tactical decisions too simple. One could, from the critico-historical point of view and through an analysis of the successive conflicts between the various tendencies and various socialist methods; by establishing a continuity in the development of the methods of revolutionary Marxism, like those defended by the left of the International against reformists and anarchists, arrive at the conclusion that the formation of truly revolutionary communist parties, and the progressive differentiation away from petty-bourgeois elements and dissentient schools, is accomplished by means of the exclusion, at given historical moments, of given methods and forms of action once emptied of any possibility of revolutionary utilisation. No criticism could be levelled against Serrat,i were he – claiming to be a representative of the left fraction of the socialist party – to instigate such a critical in-depth examination. But we cannot allow him, in order to support his idea that it is necessary to preserve the unity of the Italian party at all costs, to falsify the meaning of the revolutionary method adopted by the International.

Precisely because the International still wants all the old forms of action to be utilised, renewing them with a new and oppositional revolutionary content, from the communist movement, the latter needs to be purged of all heterogeneous elements, without which the overall balance sheet of its intervention in these institutions, hitherto the domain of reformists, would be bound to be disastrously negative. For example, a commune like the Milanese one, and organisations like the Confederation of Labour and the National League of Co-operatives, are, according to the method established in Moscow, organisations which communists must still conquer since the traditional pernicious work of the 2nd International is still being carried out within them; insofar as the various Caldaras and D’Aragonas, whilst happy to help the bourgeoisie resolve the various problems and difficulties threatening to engulf them, do absolutely nothing in terms of revolutionary propaganda, agitation and action. It is therefore necessary, according to Moscow’s criteria, that the posts within those organisations must be taken over by good communists who are disciplined to their party, who, even if technically less able to resolve contingent matters in the way the bourgeoisie would like, would, nevertheless, make use of the positions they have won to carry out work conducive to organising for the revolutionary struggle. To want to resolve this problem – set out very clearly on the basis of the incontrovertible documentation of the work carried out up until now within the aforesaid institutions – by announcing that D’Aragona and Caldara are card carrying members of the Italian Socialist Party, which in turn is part of the 3rd International, is simply ridiculous. The International can only but respond: expel Caldara and D’Aragona, even if it costs the party the Milan Commune and the Confederation. Especially since it will demonstrate that those champions of reformism only managed to obtain the votes of organised workers due to the prestige of being labelled revolutionary, which party membership bestows on them. So once again, slowly but surely, another of Serrati’s sophisms has been easily dismantled; once again he has shown how he poses as a master of intransigence, but provides only lessons in opportunism (...).

But Serrati is wheeling all this stuff out in support of his favourite thesis, i.e. that although Moscow’s 21 Conditions should be recognised, more time should be given to the member parties, each responsible unto themselves, to start cleansing themselves of opportunist elements. It is on this basis that in Florence Serrati intends to uphold the preservation of party unity, apart from a few personal expulsions to throw dust in people’s eyes. Rather than asking more time for it to become a revolutionary communist party, I maintain that the Italian Socialist Party it is already enormously behind schedule, and that the break should have happened some time ago. Furthermore, with every day that passes the problem becomes more complicated and difficult to resolve.

All this can be deduced from the our party’s recent past, and today I will only skim over it quickly, apart from returning to what I mentioned above since it is the nub of the question. Besides, I already wrote that in Moscow – in the minute or two I had to speak about Italian matters – I made a statement recording that such was the opinion of Lenin and Zinoviev and all those who have criticised the Italian Party. The particular circumstances in which the war question was posed in Italy allowed too many rightwing elements to save face by passing themselves off as opposers of the war, whilst in fact they differed in no respect from the foreign social-patriots of August 4, 1914. The presence of these people in the party was shown to be especially dangerous at the time of the Austrian invasion, when the question of national defence became a particularly burning issue. As comrade Gennari (a unitarian in Bologna in 1919) often reminds us, the right should have been expelled back in 1918 when they were championing the country’s defence. But many of the best comrades of the Left weren’t at that congress, and those who were, were naïve enough to be tricked by Modigliani and co. When first the party Directorate then the Bologna Congress voted for the party to join the International, another opportunity to separate from the Right was missed (the thousand and one reasons why it needed to happen we don’t wish to go into here). But since it didn’t happen, adherence to the International was patchy to say the least (...) The amount of time gone by since Bologna, the time being spent now leading up to Florence, and the time which, according to Serrati and his most pious desires – or profane vaticinations – should be spent after Florence, represents ever greater difficulties and dangers not only for the renewal of the party but for the historic development of the revolutionary struggle of the Italian proletariat. The bulk of the party is now more a prisoner of the Right than ever it was at the end of the war. The situation invoked by Serrati referring to leadership positions entrusted to non-communists – or rather, defeatists of the revolution – has worsened precisely because of the Unitarians, precisely because of Serrati.

After the war the big economic organisations reconstituted their membership and cadres, and the maximalists allowed their enthusiasm for the revolutionary methods established in Russia to be linked up with the horribly opportunist practice of the organisations directed by their own party. After Bologna, the party, bogged down in a unitary approach to the political elections despite everything, ended up with a parliamentary group which, although bigger than ever before, repeated all the mistakes which the previous one had been denounced for over the course of six years of polemics; and once again they were predominantly drawn from the right-wing minority of the party. And so we come today, skipping over everything else, to the local government elections; elections in which maximalism becomes even more of a prisoner to a thousand and one local situations. The party is identified with its councillors in the communes and provinces, made up of its worst petty bourgeois and opportunist elements, by all the people who stayed within, or entered, our ranks because tolerant or supportive of demagogic extremism; after they had been totally reassured that the old practice of winning electoral mandates hadn’t changed at all – given, that is, that you accept, against the heresy of the present writer, that it is susceptible to change – and that they aren’t serious, without which assurance this rabble would retreat ignominiously into the ranks of the timid, or become outright traitors.

I’ve recently seen a chart illustrating our party’s growth. The chart is one of galloping elephantiasis. We have more than two hundred thousand members: that means that in proportion to the population our membership has overtaken the Russian Communist Party, but with the simple difference that here the bourgeoisie can give us a thrashing whenever it feels like it, whilst over there the counter-revolutionary dogs hardly dare draw a breath, let alone bark. And the worst of it is all this is happening – why deny it? – while many of the best proletarian elements, ready to give themselves over to hard struggle rather than engaging in the idiotic and cowardly pursuit of comfortable positions, are going off with the anarchists, whose movement – and I hardly need to repeat my radical disagreement with them – is growing in numbers and combative energy. If it were left to Serrati and the Unitarians, the party would go on to evolve not in a communist direction, as they claim, but relapse into performing the worst of social democratic functions as the stupid servant of the bourgeoisie, holding the working masses in contempt. A good dose of courage is needed... to propose: let’s wait a bit longer! The bottom line is, you can wait if you want, but we’re not waiting any longer. At Florence, party unity will be buried, without honours; and all the worse for those, however many there are, who, persisting in their error, wish to stick by the corpse, and poison themselves with its noxious exhalations”.

(N.B. In the course of the article, Florence is often referred to as the venue of the imminent socialist congress; in fact although the PSI’s 17th congress should have been held in the Tuscan capital, it was eventually moved to Livorno for reasons of security.





c. The Communist Fraction

The article entitled ‘The 3rd International and Parliamentarism’ published in Il Soviet on August 22, 1920, was the last to be inspired by the theme of abstentionism. From that moment onwards the Communist Abstentionist Fraction would devote its entire energy to diffusing and applying the decisions of the 2nd Moscow Congress and thus clear the way of any obstacles to the formation of the Communist Party of Italy. Activity would unfold on two fronts, firstly in polemics with the Centre and Right of reformism, secondly in the organisation of those forces which sided with the Communist International.

In a bulletin issued by the Fraction’s Central Committee, appearing in Il Soviet on the day after the meeting of the PSI Directorate, it was asserted, word for word: “Since the Committee has heard comrade Bordiga’s report on the Moscow Congress, and having considered the political situation in Italy, it considers that recent events, and the development of the metal workers’ conflict, dramatically confirm the Communist Fraction’s criticisms of the PSI, regarding both the presence within the PSI of social democratic elements and the ineptitude of the maximalist majority, which can neither bring the proletarian movement under its control nor issue robust directives to guide mass action. It considers that the remedy to these extremely grave deficiencies is to apply the decisions taken at the Moscow Congress regarding the situation in the PSI, and to apply them seriously and energetically with a view to breaking up its dubious unity and liquidating the inauspicious inheritance of social democratic and opportunist tactics within Parliament and the unions, even if concealed behind a maximalist label. It invites the Fraction’s comrades to support any action that the CC and Il Soviet will take in pursuance of this aim in preparation for the next congress, from which the new Communist Party will have to emerge. It also makes a general appeal to all communists who do not belong to the Abstentionist Fraction, with a view to finding common grounds for resolute action, and in order that the forces which will ensure the victory of communism at the next congress may be organised as soon as possible”.

In the same edition an important resolution on the Turin abstentionists was published. These comrades, mainly workers who had proved their combativeness and determination to fight on a thousand and one occasions, believed the moment for separating from the PSI had already arrived and that the Fraction’s CC should immediately convene a national congress.

To these comrades, influenced to a certain degree by councilist spontaneism, the Fraction’s CC responded that the decisions of the International Congress had to be executed to the letter, and therefore it was necessary to hold on and prepare for the extraordinary national Congress.

“The Turin comrades, from whom we expect much – wrote ‘Il Soviet’ – haven’t worked that long for the Fraction at whose head they now wish to place themselves. In fact they have adopted tactical directives we don’t agree which were advanced by other groups. These directives, despite the marvellous revolutionary work of the Turin comrades, have recently indirectly contributed to the unhappy outcome of two great proletarian battles” (the ones in April and September).

The same paper contained another bulletin, which took up once again the issue of observing discipline towards the International. This was on the eve of the local government elections. The Fraction stipulated that comrades should abstain, ‘for discipline’s sake, from abstentionist activity’. Il Soviet tackled the underlying problems, the problem of the party and of the urgent need for it to be formed, linking it to the balance sheet of the factory occupations and the collapse of the myths of councilism and workers’ self-management. On October 3rd Il Soviet wrote: “The famous question of ‘control’, and all the agitation started in Turin by a group of comrades whose orientation leaves much to be desired, has never really fired our enthusiasm. From the very earliest stages we could easily predict it would open the way to new reformistic expedients and that workers’ ‘control’ over production, far from being enough to ignite a revolutionary blaze, would end up as some legislative provision of the bourgeois state (...) We don’t mean that such a question is without real content, or that the factory councils and factory occupations are movements/organisations which are artificial. Quite the contrary. We detect in them fundamental manifestations of the bourgeois crisis unravelling; a crisis in which communists, the communist party, is duty bound to intervene precisely in order to introduce the revolutionary content into them that they are ‘intrinsically’ lacking, as is the case in the traditional trade union struggle (...) Some minor breach in purely bourgeois forms of economy and bourgeois law is never revolutionary until the point is reached when the bourgeoisie forcibly represses it, thus posing the question of power; we can only move on after the establishment has been overthrown! Thus, once upon a time, postulating the right to strike was ‘revolutionary’ whereas nowadays it is taken for granted. Once these postulates – regarding workers’ control – are accepted by the bourgeoisie their dialectical efficacy becomes counter-revolutionary, in the sense that in the economic field they offer a means of ordering the anarchy of production, whilst in the political field they put a break on the impetus of the masses when heading towards a collision with the bourgeoisie (...) Truly revolutionary struggle will happen when the problem of political power, of social leadership, is posed irrevocably, and the battle is led by the conscious vanguard, the Communist Party (...) In order to get the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat on the agenda, and the masses seem marvellously predisposed to take part in it, precisely such a party will be required in Italy. The prevarications of the maximalists have maybe made constituting it more difficult, since dissatisfaction and revolutionary impatience are not sufficient material with which to build it (...) There must be a radical change of direction and the dead weight disposed of without further ado. With every passing day the party’s illness becomes more and more gangrenous. Moscow’s diagnosis is in general correct. The surgeon’s knife is required and the incision needs to be made without false sentiment”.



The Milan Meeting of October 15th

Attending this meeting were representatives from the Abstentionist Fraction, from Ordine Nuovo, from the Milanese maximalist Left, from the majority within the Youth Federation and also a number of maximalist groups without any clear physiognomy but who opposed Serrati’s line. Of those present, the Abstentionist Fraction was the only one with a solid organisation of its own at a national level, the one grouped around Il Soviet.

It was from this meeting that the Manifesto-Program of the Communist Fraction of the PSI would emerge; on the basis of which programme the so-called Imola Fraction of ‘pure communists’ would arise. Addressed to all comrades and sections of the PSI, the Manifesto-Program was published in Il Soviet on October 17th: it denounced, in the first place, the incompetence of the PSI and declared that the Fraction, at the next congress, would resolve the acute party crisis. It stated that the trade-union organisations and political organisations, to which had been entrusted the task of developing a victorious opposition to the bourgeois policy of self-preservation during this period of open class struggle, had proved inadequate, that the party hadn’t modified the criteria of its policies and that the masses, having been disappointed, were turning to organisations outside the party, for example to syndicalists and anarchists. It stated that the 2nd Congress of the CI had established the foundations for party renewal on which the next congress would have to work, namely: 1) changing the party’s name to the Communist Party of Italy; 2) revision of the program, as approved in 1919 at Bologna; 3) expulsion of all members and organisations which have pronounced against the communist program; 4) revision of the party’s internal statutes with a view to introducing into it the criteria of homogeneity, centralisation and discipline; 5) as regards action, discipline towards all the decisions of the CI Congress and the national Congress, observance of which will be entrusted with full powers to the CC elected by the Congress; 6) The directives on party action: to prepare for insurrectional action with consequent legal and illegal work; to organise communist groups in all workers’ organisations; to work inside the ‘economic organisations’; participation in the political and local government elections to be distinguished by features totally opposed to the old social-democratic practice; control to be exerted over all propaganda activity.

On October 17 Il Soviet also published the Abstentionist Fraction’s bulletin of adherence to the Manifesto-Program: “The Fraction’s Central Committee, reassembled on October 9th 1920, having listened to the report (...) on the agreements reached with the other left fractions and tendencies in the party, regarding preparations for the Congress and proposed action to achieve the most efficacious application of the resolutions of the Moscow Congress; and having examined the Manifesto-Program that was issued with this end in view, has decided to fully adhere to this movement in the name of the Communist Abstentionist Fraction. This decision has been communicated to the provisional committee in Bologna [the committee soon moved from there to Imola - ed.] and it invites all groups that adhere to it to examine the above-mentioned program in a special assembly, and then proceed to their relevant sections to seek agreement, on the basis of the program, with similar groups. It wishes to record that (...) the Communist Abstentionist Fraction still retains its own organisation and constitution, and, as regards the local council elections, stands by the criteria taken into consideration byn recent CC decisions. It hopes, moreover, that the joint effort of all communists will be crowned with success in their work of putting new life into the organisations and revolutionary activity of the Italian proletariat”.

A brief comment recorded how the Communist Abstentionist Fraction’s adherence to the Manifesto-Program wasn’t really that surprising since the abstentionists had proposed an agreement with the electionist communists before, at the Bologna Congress in 1919, at which time it was actually the latter who dropped the proposal, in the name of party unity.

The Milan Manifesto-Program, however, made no reference to the Ordinovism that taken over all the positions adopted by the abstentionists, except abstentionism itself, abandoned (for reasons we have often mentioned) even by the abstentionists themselves. The emphasis was instead placed on the question of the party, its centralisation, and on the question of conquering the trade-union organisations and the national confederations. No special role, however, was attributed to the factory councils.

A provisional CC and a three man Executive Committee had been nominated with a provisional headquarters in Bologna; it was also decided to publish the weekly Il Comunista, and to convene the Fraction’s national congress at Imola for November 28th.

That the influence of the abstentionists, at both the theoretical and organisational levels, would be a determining factor in every aspect of the work of forming the Communist Fraction, and making preparations for the national socialist Congress, is something no-one can deny. At the same time nobody can accuse them of using their theoretical, organisational and numerical superiority to impose their personnel on the governing body. As a matter of fact, then as now, our fraction has always rejected petty personalistic politics and, in 1924, in reply to a slanderous campaign against the left incited by future Stalinists, one of our comrades insisted that the abstentionists had never demanded a presence within the leadership organs which was disproportionate to their forces. The comrades of the Left never saw making bids for leadership roles as one of their political functions. On the contrary, whilst getting ready for the Imola Congress the abstentionists would maintain a certain detachment towards the Fraction’s official organs, keeping their own organisation intact right up to the Livorno Congress. In fact the Fraction’s entire network was entrusted to comrade Fortichiari, who would work perfectly well with the abstentionists even though he wasn’t an abstentionist himself.



An Historical Necessity

The great questions of principle had been cleared up once and for all with the theses and conditions of admission to the International and with the theses and writings of the Communist Abstentionist Fraction. Now it was a case of conducting an all-out battle against the opportunism of right and centre. In the second half of 1920 the Fraction fulfilled this task, through Il Soviet, with great energy and gusto. Il Soviet also published a whole series of articles aimed at unmasking opportunism and the duplicity of the CGL leadership, which whilst underwriting the documents of the Red Unions in Moscow continued to adhere to Amsterdam, thanks in part to Serrati’s support.

The internal party polemics took place while the Giolitti government was discussing “control of industry” with the unions, and offered police operations to the reformists to control subversives whilst the fascist groups started to launch their “punitive expeditions”. The October 24th edition of Il Soviet explained that it was a matter of a single counter-revolutionary policy, not opposed and contradictory government policies; and that the bourgeois tendency of the moment was in fact more predisposed to social-democratic government. To this end, the part of the bourgeoisie supporting the social democratic solution played its final card. On December 9th, Il Soviet published an article, entitled ‘Defeatist Manoeuvres’, denouncing Turati’s parliamentary speech, in which, following the events in Palazzo d’Accursio in Bologna, he had condemned not only the black-shirts, but also the “red flag fanatics”. Turati affirmed the urgent need to “disarmare gli spiriti - quell high spirits”, “deporre le armi e pacificare gli animi - lay down arms and pacify souls”, thus allowing free rein to the fascist groups, armed to the teeth and protected by the State. Even the party centre indulged in pacifism, and declared loudly against liberties trampled underfoot, invoking the protection of the public powers, and advising workers not to respond to “provocation”!

All of which would confirm the urgent necessity of constituting the Communist party, a necessity dictated by considerations of principle: as long as the proletariat remains under the influence of a party which orders it to disarm precisely when the class enemy is mustering its forces, it will never be able to defend itself if. The workers’ struggle to defend itself against fascist and state repression was inseparable from the liquidation of the socialist right and centre. The victory of reaction was largely the product of the excessive delay in achieving the split and the consequence of the reformist influence over the working masses.





b - The Imola Congress

In the Autumn of 1920 there was held a congress of communists who believed in acceptance without reserve of the resolutions of the International’s 2nd Congress, and consequently in the expulsion of the reformists from the party. Present at the conference were representatives of the Abstentionist Fraction, Ordine Nuovo and the left maximalists. The abstentionists’ representative gave an introductory speech in which he declared that it wasn’t just the social-patriots who had deserted the proletarian cause but also the social democrats, who rejected the violent destruction of the bourgeois power and the dictatorship of the proletariat in the same way they refused to accept the new communist program elaborated by the International. His speech was seconded by the delegates from the other groups. Naturally there was argument and differences of opinion on certain points, but not such as to erode the principles on which the Communist Fraction was built. It was an open secret that the communists had met at Imola to organise the Communist Party of Italy, not to win votes at the next congress of the PSI. The overriding question, which had been deliberated on in Moscow, was that of the purging of the party: nothing remained now but to put it into practice, severing links both with the reformists and the maximalists, whichever way the vote went at Leghorn (Livorno). At Imola it had already been accepted, even if not decided on formally, that if the congress vote put the communists in a minority, the latter, already organised in the Fraction, would abandon the congress and the socialist party in order to constitute the new Communist Party of Italy (section of the 3rd International). Indicative of the underlying consistency is the fact that the motion approved unanimously at Imola would be the same as that presented by the Communists to the Leghorn Congress.

The article which follows poses in the clearest possible way the question of the split as a historical necessity independent from any considerations of a numerical character, that war-horse of the usual traitors. The article, entitled ’Towards the Communist Party’ was published by the Fraction’s newspaper Il Comunista on the 19th and 23rd of December, and also in Avanti!





c. Towards the Communist Party

«The Imola Convention believed it opportune not to pronounce on the attitude that our fraction should take if the vote at the national congress puts us in a minority. This was because it would have contradicted the convention’s character as one based on fractional work, which aimed to organise the conquest of the majority of the party at the congress.

«On the other hand, as Gramsci observed, there was a sense in which the convention was not just working towards a congressional victory, but towards the constitution of a new party. And the true objective of our entire work is precisely that. We need to bear in mind that a matter as important as the constitution in Italy of the Communist Party will not, in the final analysis, be settled by a majority at the national congress; rather it will be after the congressional vote that the matter can be tackled directly, and resolved. The elements of the solution are to be found in the entire experience and political preparation of the Left of the present party, the Left party, or rather, the two of them that have co-existed up to now, and even more are they contained within the Communist International’s program of action.

«Anti-democratic even as regards this, we cannot accept as ’ultima ratio’ the arithmetic expression of the consultation of a party which isn’t a party. We can start to recognise the correctness of the opinion of the majority at the point where homogeneity of program and purpose begin; in a society divided into classes we cannot accept it; not within a proletariat necessarily dominated by bourgeois influences; not within a party with far too many petty bourgeois members, and which historically has oscillated between the old and the new internationals; which, therefore, isn’t, either in its thinking or its practice, the class party of Marx.

«And so we need to immediately start thinking about all the possible situations which could arise immediately after the vote; which must not, and cannot, cause a break in the continuous development of our activity towards that fundamental objective. Let us set out from this initial consideration in which is summed up precisely the most important result of the Imola Convention: the communists will vote for the motion already deliberated on at the convention. There must be no changes introduced or any kind of softening or toning down of the motion. If certain elements end up oscillating between us and the Unitarians, we won’t be making any concessions to win their votes. Nothing therefore remains but to examine the two hypotheses: of our motion gaining a majority, or a minority, of the votes.

«In both cases, we must make sure we follow the same directives. The Italian proletarian movement is at a crossroads, but the choice before it is not between the politics of Reggio Emilia or the politics of Communism but between our program of action, and that of the Unitarian social-communists. Despite the latter constantly assuring us that we only diverge on minor points, and that we are all chips off the same programmatic block, the truth is that it is through them that the right conducts its politics: a pure reformism if it emerged would be immediately ruled out, whilst the effort of the reformists is applied according to the laws of least resistance, i.e., aiming to get their method to permeate the majority of our plethoric party under the label of intermediate tendencies.

«The Unitarians cannot be clearly distinguished from the reformists. The whole of their argumentation during these fervent and extremely animated debates has been virtually identical. Everywhere the Unitarians defend the policies of the right fraction and above all of the General Confederation of Labour. They emphasise that their purging of the party of the extreme right is on the same level as purging it of extreme left elements.

«Yet more proof: the Unitarians are in favour of hitting out at the present party leadership for the stance they have taken from Bologna up till now, blaming it for the failure of the revolutionary bids made by the Italian proletariat, and clearing the reformists of all blame. It is almost as though, politically and historically – leaving aside any personal positions taken by any of its members today – the present leadership wasn’t the executor of the maximalist and Unitarian majority led by Serrati at Bologna. The Unitarians fail to see that the leadership couldn’t pursue a purely maximalist policy precisely because it was impossible to do on the basis of the ambiguous Unitarian positions. They can’t see that in such a way they produce arguments against their own theses and against their political direction, and they can’t see it because in fact they have more or less taken over all of reformism’s polemical positions against maximalism; as is proved too by the fact that they address the entire problem of what the conditions and possibilities of revolution are in the same way as the right-wingers. One part of the maximalist majority therefore goes beyond Bologna, and the abyss is opening up between them.

«There is a clear split between Unitarians and communists, and discussion between them is sometimes immeasurably violent. This clear split isn’t attenuated at all by those subtle differences which may exist amongst the extremists, but which are usefully integrated into the elaboration of a better awareness for all of the best way to go forward, compact and united. In local discussions, therefore, we see communists and Unitarians lining up into two opposed camps, with the right manoeuvring in the background and not very easily distinguishable from the Unitarians. And it’s not that surprising. Just as the bourgeoisie delegates its defence, at critical moments, to reformism, so reformism, when it is losing ground among the masses, is forced to delegate its counter-revolutionary function to the centrism, labelled right-wing communism, which we can see at work in all countries. When attending the party assemblies and conferences the feeling you get today is that it is really the communists and Unitarians who are heading for a definitive split; they for whom existing alongside one another has become an impossibility.

«The conclusion is this: we must strive to form a communist party which is not influenced by today’s kind of politics based on the thesis of party unity, one not led in collaboration with the exponents of today’s Unitarian communisms. Lenin in his article explained this to us very well, and it must be our open objective.

«I hope that not all Unitarian communists break away from us in order to form an independent party, or a social-democratic party with the reformists. I think our situation is at least as mature as the situation in Germany. The mass of the Unitary communists, our home-grown independents, need to be set free, and their leaders put out to grass.

«If we end up in the majority, therefore, we will set them free by means of the steady application of our Imola motion, ostracising the right and the right-leaning, and making sure that all the leading party organs are exclusively under the sway of extremist communism.

«But what if we find ourselves in the minority? We could neither put up with a party led by the Unitarians, nor sharing the leadership with them. Our task as a fraction is over. With the present massing of the party’s extremist groups on the base of the deliberations in Moscow, of our program, of our motion, and, based on the latter, of the struggle inside the party against both reformism’s direct and indirect manifestations, our duty as a party is starting. We are not going to stay, resuming the hard work of proselytism, if it means the proletariat and ourselves are immobilised until the next congress is called. And neither will we make the criminal blunder of entrusting the leadership of Italian proletarian movement to a confused and imprecise mixture of communist and centrist directives: this would be the triumph of the Unitarian theses, already condemned both in Italy and within the Communist International.

«It is therefore strikingly obvious that immediate departure from the party and the Congress, as soon as the vote has put us in the minority, is the logical, courageous and tactically appropriate solution. From this there would follow, in line with the norms we have indicated, the setting free of the centre: in fact I think that this important objective of ours is more likely to be achieved under these circumstances.

«Let us therefore be prepared for such a resolution. More than any other it corresponds to the directives of the Communist International, it is therefore inappropriate to suppose that it wouldn’t meet with the latter’s approval; and to invoke this supposition to postpone an act which, once delayed, would undermine its beneficial and positive effects.

«I think that the groups in the Fraction should confront this issue and say something about it to their Congress delegates. However, on this basis our fraction – which is the kernel of a genuine and viable party – cannot and must not under any circumstances be divided. It must make its move, intentionally and deliberately, all together, as one body. I am certain that this stance will be met with your virtually unanimous approval.

«Let us therefore look at the situation squarely in the face and let’s take full responsibility for it. What we are conducting is a battle without quarter against all wavering and all misunderstanding».





























Capitalist Development and the American Civil War

Chapters expounded at the September 2003 party meeting.

(Part 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 )





A War of Long Duration

After the bombardment of Fort Sumter – which can be considered as having given the North an initial advantage, since the South appeared as aggressors, therefore silencing those in the North who were opposed to the war – the rush to arms was enthusiastic, with both sides convinced, for different reasons, that the war would not last long.

Recruitment was initially dependent on volunteers, who would flock to both camps in considerable numbers, but by the second year of the war conscription had already been introduced, particularly in the South. In the North the system didn’t take definite shape until 1863.

Since there could only be a quick resolution to the war in the East, with the fall of one of the two capitals, it was here that attention would therefore be focused in the summer of 1861. In the North public opinion was clamouring for a decisive victory, not least because most of the troops were only enrolled on three-month terms, giving an idea of how long Washington thought the war would last. “Forward to Richmond!” was the battle-cry of politicians and hack journalists alike; the battle-cry, that is, of those who thought they would be travelling there in carriages or trains, not marching, or languishing in trenches. But they would have to wait a few years: the battle which took place on July 12th 1861 at Bull Run in Virginia saw the North soundly defeated, even if it was little more than skirmish compared to the ones which followed.

The Northerners dug themselves in around fortified Washington to take stock of the situation. For Lincoln, at least, defeat be transformed into victory insofar as it confirmed Congress’s determination to press forward to victory. Lincoln was allowed to float a huge 400 million dollar loan, and enrol 500,000 volunteers for either a 3 year term or for the duration of the war. Apart from parties, frondes and interest groups, this was the way the bourgeoisie would express its unitary determination to achieve its economic and political objectives.

Even if there was contact between the rival armies in Missouri, in West Virginia and in the peninsular to the South-east of Richmond, as well in Virginia itself, the rest of the year would roll by without further major engagements. The North would also deploy its overwhelming naval superiority to impose a blockade and would conquer a certain number of coastal forts and islands.

What should be done? For the Southerners the decision was relatively simple: whilst defending themselves from attack, they needed to bide their time and allow defeats, attrition and pressure from the foreign powers to convince public opinion in the North that the war wasn’t worth continuing. But for the North, which had set itself the task of defeating an enemy occupying a limitless territory which could count on a massive population, there was nothing for it but to attack. But where?

Winfield Scott, the General-in-chief of the Northern forces, predicted it would take a war of three years at least, with heavy losses, to subdue the South. Along with the naval blockade, he considered driving down the Mississippi as a primary objective. In Northern hands it would effectively separate the South from the West, and the South would be slowly strangled due to its isolation, lack of supplies and the military pressure exerted on it from all sides. Due to these characteristics, Scott’s plan would become known as the ‘anaconda plan’, and although it had its weak points, it was better than many later ones. Lincoln, after Bull Run, didn’t want to modify it that much, but when McClellan was entrusted with the command later on this would force a change of direction. McClellan saw the East as the one spot where pressure needed to be applied to crush the rebellion, whereas the West he saw as a very secondary theatre of war. And on this basis he directed his next campaign. In fact Richmond had a psychological rather than a strategic value: if the city fell, the Southerners could retreat into their limitless hinterland and choose the time and the place from which to launch their counter-attack.

In any case, war was continuing. In the West the Southerners occupied Columbus, a city in Kentucky, leading the State to abandon its neutrality and definitely side with the North. The North would then counterattack in the same zone with a series of attacks on cities and fortified positions, with the consequence that the Southerners abandoned the State in February 1862. The commander in the west was actually Halleck, but later history would consider Grant as the military star of the age.

A good description of this campaign can be found in an article by Marx from March 27, 1862, which also gives his opinion on the general strategy of the war. A communist, sat in a library in London, would see more clearly than the generals strutting around the battlefields equipped with all the available information: “In densely populated and more or less centralised states there is always a centre, with the occupation of which by the enemy the national resistance would be broken. Paris is a brilliant example. The slave states, however, possess no such centre. They are sparsely populated, with few large towns and all these on the seacoast. The question therefore arises: Does a military centre of gravity nevertheless exist, with the capture of which the backbone of their resistance will be broken, or are they, just as Russia still was in 1812, not to be conquered without occupying every village and every plot of land, in short, the entire periphery?

“Cast a glance at the geographical shape of the secessionists’ territory, with its long stretch of coast on the Atlantic Ocean and its long stretch of coast on the Gulf of Mexico. So long as the Confederates held Kentucky and Tennessee, the whole formed a great compact mass. The loss of both these states drives an enormous wedge into their territory, separating the states on the North Atlantic Ocean from the States on the Gulf of Mexico. The direct route from Virginia and the two Carolinas to Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and even, in part, to Alabama leads through Tennessee, which is now occupied by the Unionists. The sole route that, after the complete conquest of Tennessee by the Union, connects the two sections of the slave states goes through Georgia. This proves that Georgia is the key to the secessionists’ territory. With the loss of Georgia the Confederacy would be cut into two sections, which would have lost all connection with one another. A reconquest of Georgia by the secessionists, however, would be almost unthinkable, for the Unionist fighting forces would be concentrated in a central position, while their adversaries, divided into two camps, would have scarcely sufficient forces to put in the field for a joint attack.

“Would the conquest of all Georgia, with the seacoast of Florida, be required for such an operation? By no means. In a land where communication, particularly between distant points, depends much more on railways than on highways, the seizure of the railways is sufficient. The southernmost railway line between the States on the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic coast goes through Macon and Gordon near Milledgeville.

“The occupation of these two points would accordingly cut the secessionists’ territory in two and enable the Unionists to beat one part after another. At the same time, one gathers from the above that no Southern republic is viable without the possession of Tennessee. Without Tennessee, Georgia’s vital spot lies only eight or ten days’ march from the frontier; the North would constantly have its hand at the throat of the South, and, at the slightest pressure, the South would have to yield or fight for its life anew, under circumstances in which a single defeat would cut off every prospect of success.

“From the foregoing considerations it follows:

“The Potomac is not the most important position in the war theatre. The seizure of Richmond and the advance of the Potomac army further south – difficult on account of the many rivers that cut across the line of march – could produce a tremendous moral effect. From a purely military standpoint, they would decide nothing.

“The outcome of the campaign depends on the Kentucky army, now in Tennessee. On the one hand, this army is nearest to the decisive points; on the other hand, it occupies a territory without which secession cannot survive. This army would accordingly have to be strengthened at the expense of all the rest and the sacrifice of all minor operations (...) On the contrary, should the anaconda plan be followed, then, despite all the successes gained at particular points and even on the Potomac, the war may be prolonged indefinitely, while the financial difficulties together with diplomatic complications acquire fresh scope”.

We will see that the road to victory for the North was precisely that, even if it was a strategy applied only partially and two years late. But that is to run ahead of ourselves.

In the spring of 1862 the Confederates were in a tragic position. After winning a few battles they had spent the winter basking in past victories. The Northerners, on the other hand, had passed the winter of undeclared truce (the last of them) forming regiments, founding cannons, and organising the logistics required for armies of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of men.

The Offensive that had got underway in January in Kentucky had “liberated” the State. The northern march had continued southwards, and on February 25, Nashville, the capital of Tennessee, had fallen. Other victories were attained in trans-Mississippi, in Arkansas and in New Mexico: a minor theatre, inhospitable and sparsely populated, where armies of reduced dimensions operated, but important nonetheless as a supply centre for the South.

After other important coastal conquests by the North, their luck seemed to have run out when suddenly a new and deadly weapon appeared in the bay of Norfolk (in southern hands but blockaded by the North): a battleship. This was the Merrimac (re-christened the Virginia) a wholly new concept in ships, impenetrable to the cannon shot then available and therefore able to get alongside war ships and sink them at its leisure. It should have given them an advantage capable of breaking the Northern blockade, but the northerners were working on a similar, possibly better, ship, the Monitor; which just a day after the attack by the Virginia would reach the bay of Norfolk where a fierce, but indecisive, duel ensued.

But in the West success continued to elude the South. An attempted counter-attack in Tennessee would lead to a bloody battle at Pittsburgh Landing. Grant was attacked whilst awaiting the rest of his army, but partial defeat would be transformed into a clear victory, and the Southerners were forced to retreat to the south of the Mississippi State border.

Meanwhile, another offensive would aim to gain control over the great river, mostly by deploying the river fleet, supported on land by the infantry. Bit by bit the forts and cities on the river would succumb; and when to avoid being outflanked the Southerners were forced to abandon Memphis, the Northern navies would descend hundreds of miles South. Memphis fell on June 6th. But already on April 25th, thanks to an extremely audacious action by Admiral Farragut’s naval squad, an even more important city on the river delta had fallen: New Orleans. The Northerners had then headed upstream, taking up a position next to the apparently insuperable fortifications at Port Hudson. Meanwhile, the river fleet which in June would follow the course of the Mississippi downstream would be brought to a halt about two hundred miles due North at Vicksburg, where formidable defences had been set in place by the Southerners. They couldn’t do otherwise; the loss of the father of rivers would mean the detachment of the States on the other side of the river, with consequences we have already described. Thus, for the time being, a communicating door with the West remained open for the Southerners, a link they couldn’t afford to lose.

In the East, leadership of the northern troops, firstly of the Army of the Potomac then of the whole of the Northern army, had been entrusted to McClellan, a grizzled and conceited organiser who dedicated himself to constructing an army whose enormity, it was thought, would make it invincible. But the general seemed reluctant to use it, and only deployed it when given explicit orders to do so by Lincoln. Faithful to his vision of a concentrated attack on Richmond, McClellan conceived a plan of attack that foresaw disembarking troops to the southeast of Richmond, on a peninsular defined by the estuaries of the York and James Rivers. From there his intention was to move his huge army towards Richmond, which would be conquered by means of a textbook siege. Luckily for the Southerners, McClellan was in no hurry to fight and his army moved off very slowly. In fact, having once disembarked, the Northerners, instead of throwing themselves in forced stages on Richmond, chose instead to lay siege to Yorktown. Getting the batteries ready to invest the city took a month, and not surprisingly, the day before the bombardment started, the Southern garrison craftily slipped away, and abandoned the city.

The delay allows Lee, the new commander in chief of the Southern army, to gather an army that isn’t the equal of the Federal one but can nevertheless forcefully oppose it. Thus the fall of Yorktown and the port of Norfolk, in itself positive, is counterbalanced by the territory left to the Confederates, who led by Jackson attack in West Virginia and threaten Washington. Federal troops are sent north, weakening a still powerful army, which nevertheless still has 125,000 troops after the division. But they aren’t enough for McClellan, who has a curious propensity of always vastly overestimating the enemy’s strength. Therefore, when attacked by Lee in the Seven Days’ battles (25 May to 1 June) he retreats to the bridgehead; here McClellan decides to re-embark his army, which emerges relatively unscathed, in marked contrast to the Confederates whose victory costs them enormous losses. But if Lee saved Richmond, McClellan expended enormous resources and achieved nothing. In fact the Southerners are given the opportunity to counter-attack, which passes into the second battle of Bull Run and carries Lee’s army up into Maryland. Here on September 17 the Battle of Antietam takes place, without winners or losers, but Lee is forced to fall back to the south.

For Marx this Federal success is extremely important and decides the outcome of the war, not least because of its effects on the battle of Perryville (Kentucky) in the following month. If the Southerners had won at Antietam, their push into Kentucky would have had far greater impact. From there, just by crossing the River Ohio and pushing forward into the eponymous State, they could have split the North in two. In a nutshell, it is almost the reverse of the tactics that Marx hoped the North would follow in his article of March 27. He is well aware of the limitless technical and economic power of the North, but knows too there is no certainty, at that point, about the attitude of the border States, nor of the European powers: the military collapse of the Union could have forced it into making a peace settlement favourable to the South.

McClellan is now replaced by Burnside, who attempts to launch an attack on Richmond from Fredericksburg, a city on the river Rappahannock. There Lee draws up his army, and from an impregnable position, on December 13, the Southerners massacre the soldiers of the Union, wave upon wave of whom are sent to die without prospect of success (12,000 dead). The Northerners fall back, Burnside is sacked (although his style of butchery would be imitated, on both sides, by every general after him), and in Virginia there is a transition to trench warfare. The Southerners, meanwhile, have started too think maybe they can win.

In the West, unlike in the East, the advance of the federal troops is constant, despite the occasional setback. Halleck is recalled to Washington and appointed general-in-chief, and the army of the West is divided in three; a factor which would weaken it, temporarily, until its command was entrusted to Grant.

The Northern advance is held up in Tennessee by a Southern counter-attack (Battle of Chattanooga) that is soon halted however and forced back to Perryville on October 8, after Grant in his turn had won at Corinth. There is a final bloody battle at Stone’s River, in Tennessee, and between 31 December and 3 January the Southerners once again have to abandon the State.



The Crucial Year

Vicksburg, the river fortress, necessarily becomes a primary target, but it requires repeated campaigns, three of which fail due to the stronghold’s particularly advantageous position, high above the water and in a predominantly marshy area. Finally, in a rapid outflanking manoeuvring, which daringly take the risk of getting trapped behind enemy lines, Grant manages to lay siege to the city, which capitulates on July 4 1863. Port Hudson suffers the same fate soon afterwards, and as well as bringing the entire course of the Mississippi under their control, the victory would yield the northerners an additional 36,000 prisoners.

In the East, command of the Northern army passes to Hooker, and he too ends up being defeated by Lee on the outskirts of Fredericksburg (Chancellorsville, 2-4 May). We need however to remember that the balance of dead and wounded in these battles wasn’t always in favour of the victor; on the contrary, sometimes the price of victory was an ample blood tribute. Therefore in every battle, barring few exceptions, the North was at a considerable advantage compared to the South due to its numerical superiority and populous hinterlands. Hence, when Lee decided to make another attempt to invade the North, he couldn’t have expected to face a weakened army. And at Gettysburg, in Pennsylvania between the 1st and 3rd of July, there was the umpteenth massacre of infantry by the artillery, after which Lee’s army, repelled with heavy losses, was forced to abandon the field and return to Virginia, from whence it would never emerge again.

After the resounding victory at Vicksburg, the year 1863 ended favourably for the North in the West as well. An impressive Northern offensive succeeded in occupying Chattanooga, an important city on the border with Georgia. But about twelve miles south of the city, on the banks of the Chickamauga Creek, the Southerners waited for Rosecrans and his Army of the Cumberland. There the latter was defeated, but, as so often was the case, not annihilated or dispersed. The battle was an extremely bloodthirsty one, one of the bloodiest of the war with the North’s casualty list running to 12,000 and the South’s to 19,000, amounting to 25% of the troops deployed. Rosecrans fell back to Chattanooga to hold out there.

Before achieving another Vicksburg, however, the federals were rescued by two armies under the direct leadership of General Grant, now commander in chief of the troops in the West, and after a battle before the gates of the city, on 23rd to 25th of November, the Southerners were forced to fall back to the South.

The war was now turning in the North’s favour, but that didn’t mean it would soon be over. In the expectation that war weariness would finally overcome the North, the Southerners can still expect to hold out in their unlimited fastness for some time to come. A strategy of conquest is therefore required and, above all, destruction of the enemy army – the one true condition of victory considering the vast dimensions of the confederate hinterland.

Lincoln now has Grant take command of all of the federal armies; the lieutenancy-general, a post that previously only Washington had ever assumed. Grant’s plan is simple, in fact the very one Marx had suggested a couple of years earlier: to attack with a strong army from Tennessee in the direction of Georgia, head for the sea and split the Confederation into two parts, head back north to rejoin the Army of the Potomac and force the Southerners to fight with the possibility of being destroyed in the process. But Grant hasn’t read Marx properly, and continues to favour the Virginian front, with the result that enormous forces, better employed elsewhere, are tied up there. The North however is so rich in all respects that it can allow waste. Especially of human life.

In the east, the attack is developed in three arenas: Shenandoah Valley; Central (River Rapidan); South (peninsular). Clearly the principal arena is the central one, and the first encounter is fought in a stretch of land known as the Wilderness on the 5-6 May 1864. It is an extremely bloody affair, as is by now the norm, and the Northerners are stopped. Grant prefers not to persevere and moves south. This forces Lee to move off quickly in order to head him off and to take up advantageous positions, which he does at Spotsylvania, where there is another huge massacre between the 9th and 19th of May. Another stalemate, another sideslip to the south by Grant; Lee once again forms up on unassailable positions and meets him in battle at North Anna on the 23rd; yet again Grant disengages himself to the south, this time moving menacingly close to Richmond. Lee lines up at Cold Harbour and Grant concentrates all his forces there. However Lee too has to deploy all of his forces and, unlike 1862, instead of sending detachments to menace the northern rear he has to recall all forces available to him, even from other theatres. It is at this point that Sherman in the west sets out on his march on Atlanta.

On June 3 Grant attacks, and his forces are beaten back (7,000 dead and wounded in one day) in a battle that would earn him the highly appropriate nickname of “butcher”. Meanwhile further north, in the Shenandoah Valley, the northerners led by Sheridan destroy the southern army facing them and threaten to encircle Richmond, forcing Lee to dispatch troops against them. Grant makes another skilful sidestep to the south and invests Petersburg, a city to the south of Richmond that forms part of its defensive system (13-8 June). Lee, taken by surprise, gets pinned down manning the city’s defences, and there he would stay for almost a year, defending the southern capital from the northern army that slowly but inexorably tightens its grip on the city. But worst of all, the possibility of carrying out those manoeuvres that had been his strength in the preceding years is precluded.

The only place with any room for manoeuvre is the Shenandoah Valley, despoiled by the northerners. In the month of July, General Early heads up the valley into Maryland and threatens Washington, but it is a threat that no longer inspires fear. He doesn’t achieve what Jackson achieved in ’62, which was forcing the North to send significant troop numbers back to defend the capital and thereby weakening the main front facing Richmond. Early thus re-enters Virginia having achieved virtually nothing; he however continues his harrying actions until Grant gives Sheridan the task of hunting him down.



The “March to the Sea”

On 4 May 1864 Sherman’s operations in Georgia begin, setting out from his base in Chattanooga. Facing him is the Army of Tennessee under the command of Joseph Johnston. The superiority of Sherman’s forces allow him to carry out continuous outflanking actions on the confederate positions, and in order to avoid being surrounded, the confederates have to continuously retreat, or accept battle under conditions which put them at a clear disadvantage. Once Sherman attacks one of these entrenched positions, he gets pushed back with losses; but then Johnston has to retreat, and then again and again, all the way to Atlanta. It is basically a repetition of Grant’s advance in the east: at last the federals have learned to exploit their superiority in men and equipment.

On 17 July, Hood replaces Johnston because of unhappiness in the South about the old general’s temporising tactics, but it is a serious mistake. Johnston, who had had no option but to retreat, had in fact significantly slowed up the progress of the Union’s army, which had only advanced 140km in two and half months: and he had achieved all that with little over half the number of combatants as the northerners, and with his forces incurring no major damage; a minor masterpiece. Hood on the other hand has no qualms about giving battle before Atlanta, and he suffers heavy losses. In the end Sherman tries another outflanking movement and Hood has to abandon Atlanta, which is occupied by the Federals on 2 September.

In 1864 victory smiles on the North at sea as well: in August, Farragut’s boats take Mobile, Alabama, last of the major ports left to the South. And as regards another thorn in the side of the Federals – the confederate commerce raiders – things also start to improve: on 19 June the famous Alabama is sunk in the English Channel; in October, in defiance of international conventions, the Florida is boarded when riding at anchor in the port of Bahia. Brazil wasn’t Great Britain, and conventions only get respected when there is someone around capable of punishing transgressors (and, those presently in charge in the “land of the free, home of the brave” are providing us with plenty of fresh examples of the validity of this axiom).

Meanwhile, in Virginia, the struggle between the armies of Grant and Lee continued. Holed up in Richmond and Petersburg, which he cannot afford to abandon, even if tactically it might have been the best option, Lee still has some room for manoeuvre, with Early’s troops, in the Shenandoah valley. But Sheridan gets put in charge of closing down this front as well, and in August he organises the Army of the Shenandoah. Grant’s orders are not just to destroy the enemy’s army, but also to devastate the valley and render