Until the Second Congress of the Communist International (Moscow, July-August 1920), it had not yet been clearly established whether the sections of the new International, while denouncing the deception and pointing out to proletarians the need to overthrow the institutions of parliamentary democracy, should or should not include among their tactical means, for purely revolutionary and therefore anti-democratic propaganda purposes, participation in elections and parliaments in the capitalist West.

The question had had, depending on the countries, different developments. No one questioned that the new organisation of the revolutionary proletariat should only accept movements that had fought against the imperialist war, breaking with the social traitors who had supported it, nor that the sections of the Third International should act on the terrain of armed insurrection to overthrow bourgeois power and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, as in Russia in October 1917.

But the theses and resolutions of the first congress in March 1919, although very explicit, did not seem to exclude, in the spirit of the Russian Bolsheviks themselves, that certain movements of anarchist or revolutionary syndicalist orientation might come to swell the great revolutionary wave: suffice it to mention the libertarian Spanish National Confederation of Labour, the extreme left of the French General Confederation of Labour (C.G.T.), the American I.W.W. (Industrial Workers of the World), and the Scottish and English Shop Stewards Committees (committees of workplace delegates).

These movements did not hesitate to condemn social patriotism and reformism, they did not doubt the necessity of insurrection, but they did not have a clear position on those problems of revolutionary power and terror, of the State and the political party, which the Bolsheviks, for their part, had fully resolved. Almost all of them, whether out of ideological tradition or reaction against opportunism, opposed the use of parliament.

In Italy, the question was posed with extreme clarity already in the final months of the world conflict. The Socialist Party, which had split from the anarchist current in 1892 and from the anarcho-syndicalist one in 1907 (the following year there was also a trade union split with the birth of the Italian Syndicalist Union, which later split over the issue of the war), had indeed hesitated to fall into the deception of the union sacrée, but the action of its parliamentary group, dominated by the right, ran counter to any prospect of a revolutionary solution to the post-war crisis. The intransigent revolutionary faction, despite having triumphed in the party before the war, had not dared to break away except from the ultra-reformist extreme right of Bissolati and his associates, expelled in 1912. Thus, the most determined elements of the party’s left wing – which during the world war had advocated open defeatism toward national defence – began to sense the need for a split from the old party and came to the historic conclusion that, if the proletariat was to be prepared and led to the revolutionary assault, it was necessary to put an end to the electoral and parliamentary method from which the leadership of the ‘intransigent’ faction itself had become mired (see volumes I and I-bis of our History of the Left and the extensive documentation contained therein).

This position, defended in the newspaper Il Soviet, founded in Naples in 1918 as the organ of the communist abstentionist faction, was rejected by the majority of the party at the Bologna Congress in 1919. But the partisans of participation in elections and parliament, even while relying on Lenin’s approval, made the huge mistake of maintaining the unity of the large electoral party, thus openly opposing Lenin and the fundamental directives of the Third International and not hesitating to reject the abstentionists’ offer to renounce their anti-parliamentary precondition, provided that the split were carried through.

The situation was different in Germany. Here, the anarchist movement was negligible, Sorelian syndicalism did not exist, and no split had divided the trade unions. At the outbreak of the war in 1914, the entire political and trade union movement initially followed the social-patriotic line. The split began in the political arena with the formation in 1915 of the glorious ‘Spartacus League’ and with the breakaway of the Independent Socialist Party from the old Social Democracy in 1916, until, at the end of 1918, the Spartacists formed the Communist Party of Germany (K.P.D.). Two tendencies emerged within it, not only over parliamentary tactics, but also over the much more important and principled question of the trade union split. The left wing of the Spartacists, which went so far as to split off to form the K.A.P.D. (German Communist Workers’ Party), argued that, given the betrayal of the trade unions linked to social democracy, it was necessary to advocate boycott and the creation of a new revolutionary trade union organisation, oriented to the left.

The problem was serious: the K.A.P.D. current was, in fact, influenced by syndicalist errors which, in addition to being widespread in Latin countries, also found a certain echo in the Dutch movement through the newspaper De Tribune, edited by the theorists Gorter and Pannekoek. It tended to downplay the importance of the political party and of the necessary centralisation and discipline, and betrayed the same hesitations on the question of the State, thus showing that they did not share the Russian conception of the political party that administers the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is well known, moreover, that the K.P.D. itself, while remaining linked to Moscow, did not clearly understand, at the beginning, that the revolutionary political party must take power directly into its own hands.

It goes without saying that the Russian Bolsheviks and the leadership of the new International attached the utmost importance to the German question; Lenin placed it at the centre of his famous pamphlet on Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, whose essential purpose was to prevent the infiltration into the communist movement of tendencies of an anarchist background, incapable of understanding the question of authority within the party and the State. Lenin’s critique, dominated by the attention he pays to the development of the German movement, of fundamental historical importance, addresses this problem in parallel with that of parliamentary tactics, and it is indisputable that he condemns both trade union splitism and electoral abstentionism.

Meanwhile, the Italian abstentionist faction had endeavoured to clarify in two letters to the Executive Committee of the International that in Italy these two questions did not interfere with one another; that the left fraction of the Socialist Party fully shared the Marxist positions on the party and the State, and that not only did it have no sympathy for the anarchist and syndicalist movement, but had been waging an open polemic against it for some time. Although these letters had to overcome many obstacles before reaching Moscow, it is a fact that Lenin personally intervened to ensure that a representative of the communist abstentionist faction participated in the second world congress.

It is worth adding that, during the preparatory meetings for this, when it came to admitting representatives from different countries, the Italian abstentionists argued that organisations without a definite political character, such as the Spanish, French, Scottish and English movements mentioned above, should not have a deliberative vote and in the sessions devoted to the vital question of the conditions for admission to the C.I., they were the most energetic supporters of theoretical and programmatic homogeneity and organisational centralisation of the new world organisation of the revolutionary proletariat.

* * *

During the congress sessions, some of whose most important documents we will reproduce here, the discussion immediately highlighted the clear difference between the opposition to electoral participation defended by the Italian Left and that led by syndicalists and semi-syndicalists in other countries.

The speaker on the question of revolutionary parliamentarism was Bukharin, who spoke during the session of 2 August 1920, presenting the theses he had drafted with Lenin, and to which Trotsky had presented an introduction entitled: ‘The New Epoch and the New Parliamentarism,’ and announced a counter-report from the representative of the Italian abstentionists, who had also submitted a set of theses to the congress. He added that comrade Wolfstein would report on the work of the Commission, and argued at length against the opponents of the parliamentary tactic, distinguishing, however, between the two groups of different theoretical orientation. This was followed by the counter-report of the representative of the Italian Left who, also taking into account the arguments put forward by Lenin in Left-Wing Communism, illustrated the concepts contained in his theses. The Scot Gallacher then spoke against parliamentarism, later refuted by the Englishman Murphy; Shablin from Bulgaria declared himself in favour; the Swiss Herzog and the German Suchi, against, the latter, however, being anti-parliamentarian in the anarcho-syndicalist manner.

Lenin then took the floor, and his speech was, as always, of utmost importance. Since the discussion had already gone on for a long time, the speaker on the abstentionist theses replied to him very briefly, expressing his grave concern about the arguments themselves, of a tactical nature, used by Lenin to argue that it was not only possible but necessary to act in parliament with the aim of destroying it from within. Brief statements were made by Murphy, Shablin, Goldenberg (who proposed an amendment in favour of boycotting the elections during the insurrectionary phase); the representative of the Italian youth, Polano, while voting in favour of the theses on revolutionary parliamentarism, acknowledged that the youth movement in Italy was largely abstentionist; Serrati exonerated, amid loud protests from the assembly, the parliamentary group of the PSI; Herzog responded to the protests of the Bulgarians over his criticism of their party’s parliamentary action; and finally Bukharin closed the debate by responding briefly to the anti-parliamentarians and concluding with a call to go to parliament shouting ‘Down with parliament’. Put to the vote, the Bukharin-Lenin theses were approved by a large majority against just seven ‘no’ votes. Of the seven votes against, at the express request of the abstentionist speaker, anxious to avoid any confusion with the arguments of the revolutionary syndicalists, only three went to the theses he had presented: those of the Swiss Communist Party, the Belgian Communist Party, and a faction of the Danish Communist Party. As for the speaker, he had no deliberative vote, only an advisory one.

* * *

The very nature of the documents we publish facilitates their presentation. It can be said that, in examining the historical function of the bourgeois parliament, Trotsky’s introduction, the theses of Bukharin-Lenin, and those of the abstentionist Marxists do not present any differences. From the standpoint of principles, all three establish that the power of the bourgeois State must be overthrown by violent action and its machinery destroyed down to the last cog; that parliament is one of the most counter-revolutionary elements of the bourgeois state apparatus and must therefore be eliminated by force. This is what the Bolsheviks had done with the Constituent Assembly, despite having participated in its election. This is what Marx had suggested in 1871, when he hoped that the Communards would march on Versailles and disperse the ignoble National Assembly from whose womb the Third Republic emerged. After its victory, the proletariat must therefore build a new State, the State of its dictatorship, based on Workers’ Councils, and thus mark the historical end of bourgeois power, of the capitalist State and parliament.

Many years have passed since the Second Congress of the Communist International. But a legitimate observation must be made: the parliamentary practice adopted by the false communist parties, which have the utmost audacity to hide behind the arguments of Bukharin, Lenin, and Trotsky, has completely renounced those fundamental principles, identifying itself with the old parliamentarism of the Second International. Parliament is now openly presented as an eternal body, just as the bourgeois State is considered a structure capable of hosting an authentic representation of the forces of the proletarian class. Faced with this, one cannot help but recall the easy prediction made by the abstentionist representative at the end of his reply to Bukharin: ‘I hope that the next congress of the Communist International will not need to debate the results of parliamentary action, but will much rather examine the victory of the communist revolution in a great number of countries. Should that not be possible, then I wish for Comrade Bukharin’s sake that he will be able to present us with a less dreary picture of communist parliamentarism than that with which he had to begin his introduction this time’.

We have already discussed Lenin’s speech. It clearly shows how the great revolutionary was firmly convinced of the possibility of sending groups of communist deputies to the bourgeois parliament who were capable of attacking capitalist institutions not only with theoretical speeches, but with offensive action, sabotage, violently destructive, and integrated with the armed action of the masses (today, we have the right to think that this prediction could not have come true even if the revolution had broken out within a short span of a few years, as Lenin and all communists then were convinced). But the formulations contained in Lenin’s speech, with all its dialectical power, were enough to arouse serious apprehensions, not so much for what the International he led might have done, as for the interpretations that would inevitably exploit in a despicable manner his overly broad authorisations for tactical flexibility.

Lenin said: ‘Does [the speaker] then not know that every revolutionary crisis has been accompanied by a parliamentary crisis?’ And he insisted on the need to take account of the facts, which required parliament to be regarded as an arena in which class struggles are inevitably reflected and through which the development of situations can be influenced in our favour. Distressed by these and other statements, the representative of the abstentionists dared to ask his great opponent whether such dialectical audacity did not introduce the risk of one day renouncing the condemnation of all participation by proletarian deputies in bourgeois ministries, which radical Marxists had always pronounced.

* * *

For us, it is clear that Lenin’s thinking was a thousand miles away from the developments that neo-opportunism has given to this formula, completely distorting it. Today we are told that every class struggle not only is not reflected in parliament, but can actually develop and find its solution in parliamentary debates. One step further, and all the initial theses, those of Lenin himself, are repudiated, and with them the fundamental thesis that the transfer of power from one class party to another cannot historically be achieved through democracy, but only through revolution. Only the most brazen traitors can insinuate that Lenin’s thought is compatible with the ignoble assertion that it was essentially by chance that the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia through civil war, and that therefore, in other countries, or even in all countries, it will be enough to take the parliamentary and democratic path which the texts of Lenin, Bukharin, and Trotsky declared an irrevocable historical condemnation of, even while admitting the possibility of action within parliaments for communist parties expressly constituted with a view to insurrection.

In subsequent congresses, the desire to reconcile obvious theoretical contradictions with immense political willpower developed dangerously, especially when Lenin was no longer there to resolve them; and so the foundations were laid for the catastrophic plunge into opportunism, the many phases of which we have experienced over the last few decades.

It is now clear that it is no longer a matter of theoretical predictions, but of observing real historical facts; and our perspective finds easy confirmation in an in-depth reading of the historic debate of 1920.

The Communist Left did not it any way lay itself open to the traditional prejudices of Latin anarcho-syndicalism, while it was perfectly immune to the ‘infantile disorders’ that afflicted Anglo-Saxon communism in 1920. Such maturity was not the privilege of a few leaders, but stemmed from the very characteristics of Italian socialism before 1914, which had long since broken with anarcho-syndicalism (Genoa Congress, 1892) and, subsequently, had never allowed it to monopolise the struggle against the reformists (expulsion of the social imperialists during the war in Libya in 1912). These and other circumstances made the 1913 election campaign a vigorous manifestation of revolutionary propaganda. As the article ‘Against Abstentionism’ shows, the representatives of the Left not only defended participation in the elections, but denounced the anarchist recipe of abstention as a form of apoliticism and neutralism whose only conclusion could be the worst kind of class collaboration.

The three articles of 1919 echo the elections of the immediate post-war period, which in all countries had such a disastrous influence on the struggle and organisation of the revolutionary proletariat and, in Italy in particular, delayed the process of selection of the class party. Since then, the anti-parliamentarism of the Communist Left has been based on a double analysis: that of the situation, on the one hand, and that of the strategy of the class party in the phase of imperialist wars and proletarian revolutions, on the other. On the first point, Lenin’s assessment, formulated in the ‘Letter to the Workers of Europe and America’ (21 January 1919), and that of the Left are strictly identical: calling the proletariat to the polls in 1919 means stabbing the Soviet republics of Bavaria, Hungary, and Russia in the back; it means admitting that the struggle must necessarily remain ‘confined within the limits of the bourgeois order’. The second point is strongly developed in the article ‘Revolutionary Preparation or Electoral Preparation’ and further clarified in the article ‘The Contradictions of Electoral Maximalism’, and will be at the centre of the tactical differences at the Second Congress in Moscow. For the Left, in fact, ‘the incompatibility of the two forms of activity is not a temporary incompatibility,’ but characterises an entire imperialist and fascist phase into which the old democratic countries have irreversibly entered. Therefore, the rejection of parliamentary tactics must be adopted regardless of the ebb and flow of revolutionary situations, as a fact imposed on the class party by the objective conditions of its final struggle.

In the upcoming electoral battle, our party, which faces it alone against all, in the name of its entire programme, must not forget to watch out for and defend itself against a danger no less serious than all the others: the danger of abstention. Although the anarchist and syndicalist movements are not in very good shape today, nevertheless the socialists, and revolutionary socialists above all, must not remain indifferent to the sabotage attempted by the anti-electionists against the Party, and to their smear campaign against the sincerely revolutionary line taken by socialism in Italy after the latest events. The entire campaign waged by revolutionaries against the reformist degeneration of the party and its parliamentary action had to remain, and did remain, perfectly immunised against any sentimentality towards a rapprochement with anarchist or syndicalist abstentionism. And it is precisely the revolutionaries who must refute the convenient abstentionist arguments based on the errors and weaknesses of a fraction of the party that had seriously deviated and is today almost completely eliminated from it.

The revolutionaries have reaffirmed the political value of the revolutionary class struggle, according to Marxist conceptions, in opposition to all the ambiguous forms of apoliticism and neutralism that had robbed the Party of its subversive character. Therefore, they must more than ever uphold the revolutionary necessity of the class political party, the necessity of politically ‘colouring’ all the action of the working class in order to direct it towards its communist goals. This concept is opposed to the opportunist neutralism of the workers’ organisations, advocated by reformism in its narrow and vulgar conception, which completely disregards any organic and integral tendency towards a goal that is not immediate and limited. Syndicalism and reformism have now converged in the concept of trade union apoliticism, which is to say that they have shown us that the proletariat can never carry out the revolution by the strength of its economic organisations alone. The social revolution is a political fact and is prepared on the political terrain. Within the concept of the general political action of the party, the electoral struggle enters as one of the many facets of socialist activity. It must not exclude all other forms of it. But in our opinion, it is necessary that the party demands from all its militants a clear and positive affirmation of their opinion and their decision.

Elegant discussions can be had about the influence of the parliamentary environment and about the daily ‘corruption’ of elected socialists. We do not dispute this influence. We only believe that if all voters, according to our intransigent point of view, were true ‘socialists’, the mistakes made by their representatives should have no effect on them. But if voters are gathered by other parties, lured by promises of a whole series of reformist favours and immediate advantages, then it is no wonder that the elected representative becomes a renegade.

This is precisely the accusation we level at reformism, is used by the abstentionists as an argument against participating in elections.

Now, we do not hide the serious difficulty of giving the class politics of the proletariat, carried out by the Socialist Party, a character so profoundly different from bourgeois politicking. But true revolutionaries must strive to work in this direction and not desert the struggle. Abstentionism is not a remedy; on the contrary, it is the renunciation of the only method that can give the proletariat a consciousness capable of defending it from the opportunist politicking of non-socialist parties. Electoral neutralism becomes neutralism of consciousness and opinion in the face of the great social problems, which, although built, as we Marxists maintain, on an economic structure, always have a political character.

* * *

It is not our intention to deal with such a complex problem in a few lines. We only wish to sound the alarm against the anti-electionism propagandists who will come to sabotage our propaganda work at election rallies. We intend to test the political consciousness of the people of Italy in a great anti-bourgeois battle. Ours is the only party that will fight against the clerico-monarchic-democratic dictatorship. We await the election period not because we are fetishists of parliament, but to shake the proletarian consciousness that has been lulled to sleep by all forms of neutralism. We feel we are carrying out a deeply subversive task and we intend to slap down every form of class collaboration.

The syndicalists, who are concocting a smear campaign to award De Ambris a small medal, the anarchists, who are drowning in the democratic milk and honey of culture, school, and popular education, in harmony with the bourgeois ‘intellectuals’, will try to come along, posing as monopolists of the revolution, to accuse us of compromise because we resort to the weapon of the vote.

We must be prepared to respond so as not to lose the votes of any true revolutionary, whom we value far more than a hundred ambiguous non-socialist votes. These champions of abstentionism eagerly wait for Giolitti to open the election campaign so that they can come and spout their dishevelled tirades, full of clichés, mainly against us, whom they call their ‘cousins’. But the Socialist Party no longer has any kinship, either on the right or on the left! These anti-parliamentary gentlemen ultimately attach more importance to the action of parliament than we do. We fundamentally care more about the streets and the voting booth than the Chamber of Deputies. They, on the other hand, are the fervent lackeys of the candidate Nobody. And this Mr. Nobody is nothing more than the representative of the most amorphous ‘bloc’: anarchists, syndicalists, Mazzinians, and... intransigent Catholics.

He is the candidate of the immense party of indifference. All people we do not want to have anything to do with. And we await the revolutionaries, not as a joke, at the test of the ballot box. Just as we will await them tomorrow at the test of the barricades!

While on the one hand many comrades are unfortunately beginning to focus their attention on the upcoming struggles at the ballot box, on the other hand a current opposed to participation in the elections is spreading within the Party ranks, and the need for a National Congress is being insisted upon from all sides. However, the Leadership remains silent, and as the elections approach, the convening of the Congress is being increasingly delayed.

We would like to point out that, in a letter to the workers of Europe published in the ‘Riscossa’ of Trieste, comrade Lenin writes, among other interesting things: ‘...There are men today such as Maclean, Debs, Serrati, Lazzari, etc., who understand that we must put an end to bourgeois parliamentarism... [censored by Trieste]’. After this consideration, which is logically deduced from our party’s adherence to the Third International, Lenin writes: ‘The bourgeois parliament, even the most democratic in the most democratic republic (...) is a machine for the suppression of the working millions by small groups of exploiters. The socialists (...) had to utilise the bourgeois parliaments as a platform, as a base, for propaganda, agitation and organisation as long as our struggle was confined to the framework of the bourgeois system’.

Here too, censorship interrupts the text. But, we add, the struggle of the proletariat is international, and its tactics, as clearly stated in the Moscow programme accepted by our Leadership, are internationally uniform. There are already three communist republics, we are therefore in the midst of the historical course of the revolution, outside the period when the struggle was taking place within the bourgeois order. To call the proletariat to the polls again is tantamount to declaring outright that there is no hope of realising the revolutionary aspirations and that the struggle must necessarily take place within the bourgeois order.

The programme of the proletarian dictatorship, and the adhesion to the Third International, the Leadership has therefore renounced it with its decision to participate in the elections. How can we fail to see this disastrous contradiction? How can we fail to understand that telling the proletariat today to ‘go to the polls’ means inviting it to disarm itself of all revolutionary efforts for the conquest of power?

We shout loudly: Congress! Congress!

We cannot go on like this. And while the bourgeoisie prepares to strangle the Soviet republics, the illusions of our easy-going comrades are falling away, who, although they are convinced revolutionaries, believing programmatic and theoretical discussions sterile (horror!), get by with saying: we won’t get to the elections anyway! Practical friends: there will be elections, and while the sacrifice and honour of saving the revolution will fall entirely to the Russian and Hungarian proletarians who are shedding their blood without regret, trusting in us, we will lead a hundred honourable heroes of the bloodless electoral struggle to the Montecitorio symposium, in the cheerful oblivion of all dignity and faith that ballot box orgies give.

Will we be able to avert it?

We believe that we have entered a revolutionary historical period in which the proletariat is on the verge of overthrowing bourgeois power, since this result has already been achieved in many European countries, and in which communists in other countries must focus all their efforts on achieving the same goal.

The communist parties must therefore devote themselves to revolutionary preparation, training the proletariat not only to conquer political dictatorship, but also to exercise it, and taking care to enucleate from within the working class the organisations capable of assuming and managing the leadership of society.

This preparation must be carried out in the programmatic field, by raising the masses’ awareness of the complex historical process through which the era of capitalism will give way to that of communism; and in the tactical field, by forming provisional soviets ready to take over local and central power, and by preparing all the means of struggle indispensable for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.

During the period devoted to this preparation, all the efforts of the communist party are devoted to creating the conditions for the proletarian dictatorship, supporting with propaganda, not only in words but above all in deeds, the cardinal principle of the dictatorship, namely the rule of society by the proletarian class with the deprivation of all political rights and privileges for the bourgeois minority.

If, at the same time, electoral action were taken to send representatives of the proletariat and the party into the elective bodies of the bourgeois system, based on representative democracy, which is the historical and political antithesis of the proletarian dictatorship, all the effectiveness of revolutionary preparation would be destroyed.

Even if in election rallies and from the parliamentary tribune the maximalist problem were agitated, the speeches of candidates and deputies would be based on a contradiction: claiming that the proletariat must politically lead society without the bourgeoisie, while admitting that proletarian and bourgeois representatives continue to meet with equal rights within the legislative powers of the State.

In practice, all moral, intellectual, material, and financial energies would be dispersed in the vortex of electoral contestation, and the men, propagandists, organisers, press, and all the resources of the party would be diverted from revolutionary preparation, for which they are already, unfortunately, ill-equipped.

Having established the theoretical and practical incompatibility between the two approaches, we believe that there can be no hesitation in the choice, and that electoral intervention can logically be accepted only by those who have not even the slightest hope in the possibility of revolution.

The incompatibility of the two forms of activity is not a momentary incompatibility, such as to make the succession of both forms of action admissible. Both require long periods of preparation and absorb the entire activity of the movement for a considerable period of time.

The concern of those comrades who see the possibility of electoral abstention without the revolutionary goal being achieved is completely unfounded. Even if remaining without parliamentary representatives were a danger rather than an advantage – as we firmly believe, backed by vast experience – such danger would not even remotely compare to that of compromising and even delaying the preparation of the proletariat for the revolutionary conquest of its own dictatorship.

Therefore, unless it can be proven that electoral action, not only in its historical setting in theory but also in its well-known practical degeneration, is not fatal to revolutionary training, we must unhesitatingly discard the electoral method and, without looking back, concentrate all our forces on the realisation of the supreme maximal objectives of socialism.

The comrades of the electionist maximalist fraction maintain that for them the electoral question is entirely secondary, nor is it such as to divide communists! This does not seem to be the case, judging by the fact that it was enough to put forward the proposal of abstention for the supporters of electoral participation to flock together, who, moreover, do nothing but pass around a few highly questionable arguments.

And the maximalist fraction is more concerned with polemicising with us on this ‘secondary’ question than with countering the objections directed at them – directed at us – by the reformists. We reserve the right to respond in due course to the arguments of Turati, Ciccotti, Zibordi, etc., and for now we will limit ourselves to pointing out the inconsistency of electoral maximalism based on common premises.

All of us maximalists believe that it is possible – and therefore necessary – to move in the current period toward organising the conquest of power by the Italian proletariat, and we see the Russian communist revolution as only the first act of the World Revolution. We therefore stand on the terrain of the Third International and accept its programmatic and tactical task: to spread among the masses awareness of the process of revolutionary realisation, and to prepare the means of action for the violent conquest of power and the subsequent exercise of social management by the proletariat.

Is this preparation a trivial matter? Far from it. What has been done for the second part (for material preparation)? Nothing. The comrades do not even bother to discuss the appropriateness of Lenin’s tactical conclusion regarding the formation of Soviets and the conquest of communist majorities within them. What has been done for the first part (spiritual preparation, so to speak)? Little, and with scant programmatic clarity. The leadership had adopted the formula of the ‘proletarian dictatorship’, following the vague formula of the ‘expropriatory strike’, creating in the party and among the masses more of an indistinct expectation of who-knows-what than an organic consciousness of the task to be carried out. The fault lies not with the leadership, but with the Party, which had not yet carried out the necessary programmatic revision to orient itself and ‘select itself’ – without which organic tactical preparation is impossible, and it is likely, in the event of unforeseen events, to be taken by surprise and overwhelmed. What is more, many comrades believe that being convinced of the necessity of a violent clash between the classes authorises them to dispense with an organic programmatic orientation ‘before’, ‘during’, and ‘after’ the insurrection. They are in reality anarchists and deserve to the criticism of attributing thaumaturgical virtues to violent action. Since they limit it in time and make the proletarian expectation and triumph culminate in it, they do not see why the preparation of the party and the proletariat for the revolution should be undermined by intervention in the electoral and parliamentary campaign.

The Congress should lay the foundations for the further development of this revolutionary preparation. Will it do so? Academy: many of us reply. But in the meantime, Lenin is waiting in vain in Moscow for our ‘document’. It seems he is a pen-pusher too.

Having summarily defined this dual preparation: spiritual and material, we declare that the party’s electoral and parliamentary action diminishes and compromises it. Just as the revolution cannot be understood in the days of the insurrection, so electoral participation cannot be understood on the day of the vote. This is why the objection that says: we will only renounce the ballot box at the moment of armed struggle, is foolish. Elections are a political act of the Party that has repercussions over the next four or five years and over some months of total and feverish preceding activity.

This method, on the contrary, must be abandoned as soon as it can be replaced by organic preparation for the conquest of the proletarian dictatorship. The undersigned who... is less impatient than many others, believes that the moment may be closer than the end of the next bourgeois legislative assembly.

Those who assert that the Russian Revolution is not destined to be followed by revolution in other countries and in Italy are logical in going calmly to the polls. But those who want – within the Third International – to work in practical solidarity with the Russian proletariat and that of other countries, ‘subordinating the national demands of the movement to the general ones’, must be for the mobilisation of communist forces in order to be able to open hostilities at the right moment. That mere electoral action is incompatible with the period of hostilities is self-evident: what we maintain is quite another thing: electoral action is incompatible with the mobilisation of the proletariat for the achievement of its doctrine. Now: either this mobilisation is carried out or it is renounced, and then this must be clearly stated to our comrades in other countries who are waiting for us to take action.

Returning to preparation: spiritual preparation consists in the active and intense propaganda of the communist programme, criticising the bourgeois system of government on the basis of fundamental Marxist arguments, parliamentary democracy, and popularising the bold innovative concepts of the dictatorship of the proletariat, of the socialist system of organisation of the proletariat into the ruling class – arguing that the crisis of development of society is such that the time has come to break the first system through the violent action of the masses in order to replace it with the second. To do this at rallies convened precisely to elect representatives to bourgeois representative bodies? This is a foolish contradiction. If it were only a matter of criticising these institutions, it might be acceptable; although the past teaches us that this path has always led to disaster. But when it comes not only to criticising, but to demolishing, uniting theory and action in a Marxist manner, overcoming that antithesis between programme and realisation which reformism has instilled in the minds of so many revolutionaries, then the absurdity becomes evident. We criticise the bourgeois political system and say to you: prepare to suppress it; nevertheless, we ask you to send us to participate in it, in its structure, in its functions. This is enormous! In this way confusion is created, not awareness and programmatic clarity among the masses. By intervening in the workings of the democratic system, one implicitly recognises its functional laws; one must complain if voting, counting, and the conduct of parliamentary debates do not take place according to the laws and rules established by the current constitution, and the whole system is strengthened in its functionality.

The maximalist programme speaks of helping the demolition ‘from within’. A theorem of mechanics teaches us that a system cannot move in space due to forces internal to the system. But physics has nothing to do with it. What does have something to do with it, however, is logic and experience, which amply demonstrate how socialist parliamentarians have always worked to defend parliamentary prerogatives and norms and the entire system.

Proposing that proletarians vote already destroys all the most eloquent statements of the communist programme. Voting, under the present regime, means delegating one’s share of supposed sovereignty for a certain period, exhausting the individual’s intervention in politics for that entire time. But the voters are told that this must not be. And so we must conclude: do not vote. The propaganda of the communist programme and method is not a simple matter; its fundamental concepts are not easily grasped by the collective consciousness. The antithesis between them and the principles of bourgeois democracy must be brought out in the clearest possible light. Now the party must place itself in a position that shows how its preaching is nothing more than a projection in advance of events that are about to take place. Only abstention from the elections can respond to this delicate need. Otherwise, the naive objection that maximalism is nothing more than a set of phrases to enthuse the masses and win their votes, if it is not true, will nevertheless be the translation of a more complete but analogous truth.

Is abstention a negative act? No, if it amounts to tangibly proclaiming the transition of the party’s forces onto the terrain of the conquest of political power. Abstention appears negative only to those who mistakenly see the positive phase of revolutionary action only in the insurrectionary moment, not to those who realise that this must be preceded by an entire period of political activity by the party, such as to require all its forces. Just as voting is in deplorable contradiction with the spiritual preparation of the proletarian dictatorship (even in this, it is true, there will be voting, but without the bourgeois: it is therefore essential to reject not the vote, but the system of voting with equal rights between proletarians and bourgeois; and therefore abstention is necessary), so too is the existence of a parliamentary representation of the party.

The deputies will say what they want; but they will say it with exactly the same credentials as a bourgeois deputy, and the effect of their propaganda will be to confuse rather than clarify the concepts of the communist programme.

Until now, socialist propaganda has been carried out (converging in this the programmatic imperfections of reformism and anarchist utopianism) above all by contrasting the rational structure of the communist economy with the irrational structure, heavy with harmful consequences, of the capitalist economy. The two systems were counterposed abstractly, and therefore this preaching could be carried out on any platform. Today, as we live in a period of transformation, we must bring our propaganda (drawing on the wonderful ‘divinations’ of Marxist doctrine) into the field of the concrete historical process that leads from the regime of the bourgeois economy to communism, illustrating this transition. This realist propaganda, a prelude to imminent action, can only be carried out with arms in hand, facing the enemy. If the essential key to the revolutionary transition is the overthrow of the bourgeois democratic system, the programmatic preparation of the masses must be carried out outside and not inside the organs of the system – the elimination of which is the first historical condition for the emancipation of the proletariat.

‘The bourgeois parliament, even the most democratic in the most democratic republic, in which the property and rule of the capitalists are preserved, is a machine for the suppression of the working millions by small groups of exploiters. The socialists, the fighters for the emancipation of the working people from exploitation, had to utilise the bourgeois parliaments as a platform, as a base, for propaganda, agitation and organisation as long as our struggle was confined to the framework of the bourgeois system. Now that world history has brought up the question of destroying the whole of that system, of overthrowing and suppressing the exploiters, of passing from capitalism to socialism, it would be a shameful betrayal of the proletariat, deserting to its class enemy, the bourgeoisie, and being a traitor and a renegade to confine oneself to bourgeois parliamentarism, to bourgeois democracy, to present it as “democracy” in general, to obscure its bourgeois character, to forget that as long as capitalist property exists universal suffrage is an instrument of the bourgeois state’.

Lenin, Letter to the Workers of Europe and America, 24 January 1919.

With the two texts by Zinoviev and Trotsky that open this instalment, the problem of parliamentarism and the struggle for the Soviets appears in all its light in the class battles of 1919. That year had begun with great revolutionary promise. On 1 January, the Spartacists had announced the formation of the German Communist Party, about which Lenin would say: ‘[The Communist International] became a fact when the Spartacus League changed its name to the Communist Party of Germany’. But the year 1919 is also the high point of the German revolution; there are the victories, albeit short-lived, of the Soviets in Hungary and Bavaria; there are the most powerful waves of post-war strikes in Italy; finally, there are the beginnings of foreign intervention against Russia and the first successes of the young Soviet republic against the White armies supported by ‘democratic’ England and France.

Thus, history marked in letters of blood the irreconcilable opposition between parliamentary democracy and proletarian dictatorship. But would the proletariat be able to decipher its meaning? Because 1919 was also a ‘great electoral year.’ In Germany, the January elections bring to power the ‘socialist’ executioners of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. In Italy, as in France, the reformists’ election campaigns openly pose the dilemma: either elections or revolution. But the masses rarely know how to read the history they make. When the German National Assembly met in Weimar on 6 February 1919, the Central Council of Soviets of all Germany decided to return its powers to it. Later, in his Memoirs, Prince Max von Baden would write of the events of late 1918 and early 1919: ‘I said to myself: the revolution will triumph; we cannot defeat it, but perhaps we can stifle it... If the square presents Ebert to me as the tribune of the people, it will be the republic; if it designates Liebknecht, it will be Bolshevism. But, if the Kaiser abdicates and appoints Ebert chancellor for the monarchy, there will still be a glimmer of hope. Perhaps it will be possible to divert the revolutionary energy into the legal frameworks of an election campaign’.

This was the situation as seen by an old defender of the Empire. Lenin’s International could not conceive of any other role for the masses on the one hand and parliament on the other in the European revolution. Zinoviev in his circular and Trotsky in his letter on Longuet indicate what must be overthrown: not only the parliamentary practice of the heroes of the Second International, but parliament itself, this mill of words of democratic illusions; not only the socialist deputies who had betrayed most openly, but the entire politics of social democracy, patriotic, pacifist, and parliamentarist. Who does not recognise in the masterful portrait of the centrist Longuet the characteristic features of the ‘communists’ Cachin and Thorez, Togliatti, and Longo, and the favourite themes of parliamentary variation of which the P.C.F. or the P.C.I. have later given us such a miserable spectacle?

Zinoviev’s circular – whose critical examination by the ‘Il Soviet’ we publish below – energetically raises the issue that will be debated a year later at the Second Congress of the Communist International. It shows the necessity of destroying the bourgeois parliamentary machine, and opposes the vain hopes of ‘[organising] new, more democratic parliaments’ with a single slogan: Down with Parliament! Long live Soviet power! Zinoviev also emphasises that there is no logical contradiction between this position of principle and the ‘parliamentary’ tactic of the Communist International, which advocates the use of the parliamentary tribune and electoral campaigns for revolutionary agitation, for the organisation of the masses, and for the call to open struggle against the bourgeois State, up to and including armed insurrection. Undermining the building from within while waiting to hand it over to the assault of the masses—this, and nothing else, was the ‘revolutionary parliamentarism’ of Lenin and Liebknecht.

Lastly, Zinoviev makes an important observation: ‘[I]n France, America, and England’ – the most advanced capitalist countries, where the democratic mechanism has been functioning for many decades – ‘no such parliamentarians have yet arisen from the masses of the workers’. From this observation, the Italian abstentionist fraction had concluded even then that there was a ‘theoretical and practical incompatibility between [revolutionary preparation and electoral preparation]’ in the countries of old democracy (see further, ‘Revolutionary Preparation or Electoral Preparation’, and also History of the Communist Left, vol. 1, pp. 406-7).

As Zinoviev’s circular shows, the C.I. believed in the possibility of a revolutionary parliamentarism if the proletariat succeeded in creating strong revolutionary parties. ‘If there is such a party then everything can become quite different’, says Zinoviev. This, then, was the aim of the Communist International’s tactical flexibility on this question in 1919. Under the irresistible push of the revolutionary crisis, it was legitimate to hope that strong communist parties would arise in Western Europe, as in Liebknecht and Luxemburg’s Germany, capable not only of setting great examples of revolutionary parliamentarism, but of ‘doing as in Russia’: disperse all bourgeois constituent assemblies, all the parliamentary fetishes of the petty-bourgeois socialists, and erect on their ruins the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Dear Comrades!

The present phase of the revolutionary movement has, along with other questions, very sharply placed the question of parliamentarism upon the order of the day’s discussion. In France, America, England, and Germany, simultaneously with the aggravation of the class struggle, all revolutionary elements are adhering to the Communist movement by uniting among themselves or by coordinating their actions under the slogan of Soviet power. The anarcho-syndicalist groups and the groups that now and then call themselves simply anarchistic are thus also joining the general current. The Executive Committee of the Communist International welcomes this most heartily.

In France the syndicalist group of Comrade Pericat forms the heart of the Communist Party; in America, and also to some extent in England, the fight for the Soviets is led by such organisations as the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World). These groups and tendencies have always actively opposed the parliamentary methods of fighting. On the other hand, the elements of the Communist Party that are derived from the Socialist Parties are, for the most part, inclined to recognise action in parliament, too (the Loriot group in France, the members of the SPA in America, of the Independent Labour Party in England, etc.). All these tendencies, which ought to be united as soon as possible in the Communist Party, at all costs need uniform tactics. Consequently, the question must be decided on a broad scale and as a general measure, and the Executive Committee of the Communist International turns to all the affiliated parties with the present circular letter, which is especially dedicated to this question.

The universal unifying program is at the present moment the recognition of the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat in the form of the Soviet power. History has so placed the question that it is right on this question that the line is drawn between the revolutionary proletariat and the opportunists, between the communists and the social traitors of every brand. The so-called Centre (Kautsky in Germany, Longuet in France, the ILP and some elements of the BSP in England, Hillquit in America) is, in spite of its protestations, an objectively anti-Socialist tendency, because it cannot, and does not wish to, lead the struggle for the Soviet power of the proletariat. On the contrary, those groups and parties which formerly rejected any kind of political struggles (for example, some anarchist groups) have, by recognising the Soviet power, the dictatorship of the proletariat, really abandoned their old standpoint as to political action, because they have recognised the idea of the seizure of power by the working class, the power that is necessary for the suppression of the opposing bourgeoisie.

Thus, we repeat, a common program for the struggle for the Soviet dictatorship has been found.

The old divisions in the international labor movement have plainly outlived their time. The war has caused a regrouping. Many of the anarchists or syndicalists, who rejected parliamentarism, conducted themselves just as despicably and treasonably during the 5 years of the war as did the old leaders of the Social Democracy, who always have the name of Marx on their lips. The unification of forces is being effected in a new manner: some are for the proletarian revolution, for the Soviets, for the dictatorship, for mass action, even up to armed uprisings – the others are against this plan. This is the principle question of today. This is the main criterion. The new combinations will be formed according to these labels, and are being so formed already.

In what relation does the recognition of the Soviet idea stand to parliamentarism? Right here a sharp dividing line must be drawn between two questions which logically have nothing to do with each other: the question of parliamentarism as a desired form of the organisation of the state and the question of the exploitation of parliamentarism for the development of the revolution. The comrades often confuse these two questions, something which has an extraordinarily injurious effect upon the entire practical struggle. We wish to discuss each of these questions in its order and draw all the necessary deductions.

What is the form of the proletarian dictatorship? We reply: The Soviets. This has been demonstrated by an experience that has a worldwide significance. Can the Soviet power be combined with parliamentarism? No, and yet again, no. It is absolutely incompatible with the existing parliaments, because the parliamentary machine embodies the concentrated power of the bourgeoisie. The deputies, the chambers of deputies, their newspapers, the system of bribery, the secret connection of the parliamentarians with the leaders of the banks, the connection with all the apparatus of the bourgeois state – all these are fetters for the working class. They must be burst. The governmental machine of the bourgeoisie, consequently also the bourgeois parliaments, are to be broken, disrupted, destroyed, and upon their ruins is to be organised a new power, the power of the union of the working class, the workers’ ‘parliaments’, i.e., the Soviets. Only the betrayers of the workers can deceive the workers with the hope of a ‘peaceful’ social revolution, along the lines of parliamentary reforms. Such persons are the worst enemies of the working class, and a most pitiless struggle must be waged against them; no compromise with them is permissible. Therefore, our slogan for any bourgeois country you may choose is: ‘Down with Parliament! Long live Soviet power!’

Nevertheless, a person may put the question this way: ‘Very well, you deny the power of the present bourgeois parliaments; then why don’t you organise new, more democratic parliaments on the basis of a real universal suffrage?’ During the Socialist revolution the struggle has become so acute that the working class must act quickly and resolutely, without allowing its class enemies to enter into its camp, into its organisation of power. Such qualities are only found in the Soviets of workers, soldiers, sailors, and peasants, elected in the factories and shops, in the country, and in the barracks. So the question of the form of the proletarian power is just this way. Now the government is to be overthrown. Kings, presidents, parliaments, chambers of deputies, national assemblies – all these institutions are our sworn enemies that must be destroyed.

Now we take up the second basic question: can the bourgeois parliaments be fully utilised for the purpose of developing the revolutionary class struggle? Logically, as we just remarked, this question is by no means related to the first question. In fact, a person surely can be trying to destroy any kind of organisation by joining it and by utilising it. This is also perfectly understood by our class enemies when the exploit the official Social Democratic parties, the trade unions, and the like for their purposes. Let us take the extreme example: the Russian communists, the Bolsheviks, voted in the election for the Constituent Assembly. They met in its hall. But they came there to break up this assembly within 24 hours and fully to realise the Soviet power. The party of the Bolsheviks also had its deputies in the Tsar’s Imperial Duma. Did the party at that time ‘recognise’ the Duma as an ideal, or, at least, and endurable form of government? It would be lunacy to assume that. It sent its representatives there so as to proceed against the apparatus of the Tsarist power from that side, too, and to contribute to the destruction of that same Duma. It was not for nothing that the Tsarist government condemned the Bolshevist ‘parliamentarians’ to prison for ‘high treason’. The Bolshevist leaders were also carrying on an illegal work, although they temporarily made use of their ‘inviolability’ in welding together the masses for the drive against Tsarism.

But Russia was not the only place where that kind of ‘parliamentary’ activity was carried on. Look at Germany and the activities of Liebknecht. The murdered comrade was the perfect type of revolutionist; so was there then something non-revolutionary in the fact that he, from the tribune of the cursed Prussian Landtag, called upon the soldiers to rise against the Landtag? On the contrary. Here, too, we see the complete admissibility and usefulness of his exploitation of the situation. If Liebknecht had not been a deputy he would never have been able to accomplish such an act; his speeches would have had no such echo.

The example of the Swedish Communists in parliament also convinces us of this. In Sweden Comrade Hoglund played and plays the same role as Liebknecht did in Germany. Making use of his position as a deputy, he assists in destroying the bourgeois parliamentary system; none else in Sweden has done as much for the cause of the revolution and the struggle against the war as our friend. In Bulgaria we see the same thing. The Bulgarian Communists have successfully exploited the tribune of parliament for revolutionary purposes. At the recent elections they won seats for 47 deputies. Comrades Blagoev, Kirkov, Kolarov, and other leaders of the Bulgarian Communist Party understand how to exploit the parliamentary tribune in the service of the proletarian revolution. Such ‘parliamentary work’ demands peculiar daring and a special revolutionary spirit; the men there are occupying especially dangerous positions; they are laying mines under the enemy while in the enemy’s camp; they enter parliament for the purpose of getting this machine in their hands in order to assist the masses behind the walls of the parliament in the work of blowing it up.

Are we for the maintenance of the bourgeois ‘democratic’ parliaments as the form of the administration of the state? No, not in any case. We are for the Soviets.

Are we in favour of using these parliaments for our communist work, as long as we do not yet have the strength to overthrow them? Yes, we are for this – in consideration of a whole list of conditions.

We know very well that in France, America, and England no such parliamentarians have yet arisen from the masses of the workers. In those countries we have up to now observed a picture of parliamentary betrayal. But this is no proof of the incorrectness of the tactics that we regard as correct! It is only a matter of there being revolutionary parties there like the Bolsheviks or the German Spartacists. If there is such a party then everything can become quite different. It is particularly necessary: (1) that the deciding centre of the struggle lies outside parliament (strikes, uprisings, and other kinds of mass action); (2) that the activities in parliament be combined with this struggle; (3) that the deputies also perform illegal work; (4) that they act for the Central Committee and submit to its orders; (5) that they do not heed the parliamentary forms in their acts (have no fear of direct clashes with the bourgeois majority, ‘talk past it’, etc.). The matter of taking part in the election at a given time during a given electoral campaign, depends upon a whole string of concrete circumstances which, in each country, must be particularly considered at each given time. The Russian Bolsheviks were for boycotting the elections for the first Imperial Duma in 1906. And these same persons were for taking part in the elections of the second Imperial Duma, when it had been shown that the bourgeois-agrarian power would still rule in Russia for many a year. In the year 1918, before the election for the German National Assembly, one section of the Spartacists was for taking part in the elections, the other section was against it. But the party of the Spartacists remained a unified communist party.

In principle we cannot renounce utilisation of parliamentarism. The party of the Russian Bolsheviks declared in the spring of 1918, at its 7th Congress, when it was already in power, in a special resolution that the Russian Communists, in case the bourgeois democracy in Russia, through a peculiar combination of circumstances, should once more get the upper hand, could be compelled to return to the utilisation of bourgeois parliamentarism. Room for manoeuvring is also to be allowed in this respect.

What we wish especially to emphasise is that in all cases the question is really solved outside parliament, on the streets. Now it is clear that strikes and revolts are the only decisive methods of struggle between Labour and Capital. The comrades’ principal efforts are to consist in the work of mobilising the masses; establishing the party, organising their own groups in the unions and capturing them, organising Soviets in the course of the struggle, leading the mass struggle, agitation for the revolution among the masses – all this is of first line of importance; parliamentary action and participation in electoral campaigns only as one of the helps in this work – no more.

If this is so – and it undoubtedly is so – it is a matter of course that it doesn’t pay to split into those factions that are of different opinions only about this, now secondary, question. The practice of parliamentary prostitution was so disgusting that even the best comrades have prejudices in this question. These ought to be overcome in the course of the revolutionary struggle. Therefore, we urgently appeal to all groups and organisations which are carrying on a real struggle for the Soviets, and call upon them to be united firmly, even despite the lack of agreement on this question.

All those who are for the Soviets and the proletarian dictatorship will unite as soon as possible and form a unified communist party.

With communist greetings,

The President of the Executive Committee of the Communist International: G. Zinoviev

(From Die Kommunistische Internationale, no. 5, September 1919).

A fortunate accident and Jean Longuet’s courteousness, which has become proverbial, provided me with a stenographic text of a speech delivered on September 18 by this Socialist Deputy in the French Chamber of Deputies as it was last constituted. This speech is entitled, Against Imperialist Peace – For Revolutionary Russia! For half an hour I was plunged by Longuet’s pamphlet into the French parliamentary atmosphere in the epoch of the bourgeois republic’s decline, and it led me to recall the refreshing contempt with which Marx used to refer to the artificial atmosphere of parliamentarianism.

In order to immediately placate his opponents, Jean Longuet begins by reminding his ‘colleagues’ that never, never did he lose his sense of proportion nor his courtesy before the assembled body. He associates himself entirely and wholeheartedly ‘with those correct considerations which were upheld here by our colleague Viviani with his wonderful eloquence’. When Longuet tries to set to work with his lancet of criticism, the most brazen swashbucklers of imperialism instantly try to gag him by shouts of Alsace-Lorraine. Ah, but urbanity is the outstanding trait of Jean Longuet! Out of considerations of urbanity he seeks first of all to find a common ground with his opponents. Alsace-Lorraine! Why didn’t he, Longuet, just say that he himself finds a number of fortunate paragraphs in the peace treaty? ‘An insinuation has just now been made here concerning Alsace-Lorraine. We’re all in accord on this score’. And Jean Longuet hides instantly in his vest pocket his critical lancet, which bears a remarkable resemblance to a nail-file.

In his criticism of the peace treaty Longuet proceeds from the same concept of the nation as the one proffered by none other than Renan, that reactionary godless Jesuit. From Renan who serves to assure a common ground with the nationalist parliament, Longuet passes on to the liberationist principle of the self-determination of nations, which had been ‘advanced by the Russian revolution and embraced by President Wilson’. ‘It is precisely this principle, Monsieurs, yes, this noble high principle of Renan, Lenin and Wilson’ that Jean Longuet would like to see embodied in the [Versailles] peace treaty. However, ‘in a certain number of cases (these are the actual words: in a certain number of cases) the principle of self-determination of nations remained unrealised in the peace treaty’. This circumstance makes Longuet sad.

The courteous orator is heckled; he is called an advocate of Germany. Jean Longuet energetically defends himself against the charge that he is a defender of Germany, that is, a defender of a crushed and an oppressed country, as against France, in the person of her ruling executioners. ‘My friends in Germany’, exclaims Longuet ‘were those who rose up against the Kaiser, those who suffered years of imprisonment, and some of whom gave their lives for a cause which we are defending’. Just what ‘cause’ is referred to here – whether it concerns ‘the restoration of the right trampled upon in 1871’ or the destruction of the bourgeois system – Longuet omits to say. The corpses of Liebknecht and Luxemburg are used by him to fend off the attacks of French imperialists. If during their lifetimes these heroes of German Communism were a constant reproach to all the Longuets, who were shareholders in the imperialist bloc, containing the Russian Tsar in one of its wings, then after their deaths they serve most conveniently for gulling the French workers with one’s claim of their alleged friendship and for tossing their heroic martyrdom as a bone to propitiate the enraged watchdogs of French imperialism.

And immediately following this operation Jean Longuet addresses himself to ‘the eloquent speech of our friend Vandervelde’. I count: exactly three lines in the text separate the reference to the martyred memory of Liebknecht and Luxemburg from the reference to ‘our friend Vandervelde’. Where life itself has dug an abyss, leaving between Liebknecht and Vandervelde nothing save the contempt of a revolutionist toward a traitor, there the courteous Longuet with a single gesture of friendship puts his arms around both the hero and the renegade. Nor is this all. In order to legitimise his respect for Liebknecht – in the parliamentary sense of the word – Longuet calls as witness His Majesty’s Minister Vandervelde who recognised – and who should know this better than Vandervelde? – that two people had saved the honour of German Socialism: Liebknecht and Bernstein. But Liebknecht, after all, considered Bernstein a paltry sycophant of capitalism. But Bernstein, after all, considered Liebknecht a madman and a criminal. What of it? On the footboards of expiring parliamentarianism, in the artificial atmosphere of falsehood and conventionality, courteous Jean Longuet effortlessly couples Liebknecht with Vandervelde and with Bernstein just as he had a while earlier effected a merger between Renan, Lenin and Wilson.

But the parliamentary lieutenants of imperialism are in no haste to take their stand upon a common ground, which Longuet has fertilised with his eloquence. No, they refuse to yield an inch of their position. Whatever may have been Vandervelde’s testimonials to Liebknecht and Bernstein, the Belgian Socialists did, after all, vote for the peace treaty. ‘Tell us, Monsieur Longuet, whether the Belgian Socialists voted for the peace treaty? Yes or no? (Hear! Hear!)’ Jean Longuet himself is preparing, in order to belatedly repair his Socialist reputation, to vote against the treaty, whose appearance he had prepared by his entire previous conduct. For this reason he simply does not answer this yes-or-no question. Did your Belgian ‘friends’ vote for the infamous, ignoble Versailles Treaty, so utterly permeated with cruelty, greed and baseness? Yes or no? Jean Longuet keeps silent. So long as a fact is not mentioned from a parliamentary tribunal, it is virtually non-existent. Jean Longuet is not obliged to cite the ignoble actions of his ‘eloquent friend Vandervelde’, so long as he is able to quote from Vandervelde’s stylised speeches.

And so... Vandervelde! Belgium! Violation of Neutrality! ‘We all stand united here’. We all brand this violation of a small country’s independence. True, the Germans issued their protests somewhat belatedly. Alas, such is the march of history. ‘Only slowly, only gradually’, with melancholy, Longuet explains, ‘does the consciousness of a raped and a deceived people awaken. Wasn’t that the case in our own country 47 years ago after the Empire?’ Just at that moment the vigilant lieutenants of capitalism prick up their ears lest Longuet say: ‘Don’t our own people suffer your rule up to the present day? Aren’t our people deceived, scorned and oppressed by you? Isn’t it converted by you into an international hangman? Was there ever an epoch, was there ever a people which was constrained by the will and the violence of its government to play a more ignominious, criminal and hangman’s role than is now being played by the enslaved people of France?’ At just that moment our most courteous Jean Longuet by merely turning a phrase unloaded 47 years from the shoulders of the French people in order to unmask the criminal clique of oppressors, deceiving and trampling upon the people, not among Clemenceau’s government of victory but rather among the government of Napoleon III, long ago overthrown and since far surpassed in vileness.

And here again the deputy’s hands wield a harmless little lancet. ‘You are supporting Noske and his 1,200,000 soldiers, who may on the morrow provide the cadres for a great army against us’. An amazing charge! Why shouldn’t the representatives of the Bourse (the French stock market) support Noske who is the German watchman of the Bourse? They are united in the league of hate against the revolutionary proletariat. But this question, the only one that is real, doesn’t exist for Longuet. He dangles before his colleagues the threat that Noske’s army will move ‘against us’. Against whom? Noske strangles Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and their party. ‘Against us’ – against the French Communists? No, against the Third Republic, against the joint state enterprise of Clemenceau-Barthou-Briand-Longuet.

And again, Alsace-Lorraine. Again, ‘we are all united on this score’. Of course, it is sad that no plebiscite was held. All the more so since ‘we’ had absolutely nothing to fear from a plebiscite. Incidentally, the coming elections will take the place of a plebiscite. And in the meantime, Millerand will have had the opportunity of carrying out the necessary patriotic, purgative and educational work in Alsace-Lorraine in order thus to effect by means of a future ‘plebiscite’ a complete reconciliation between Longuet’s courteous and legalistic conscience and the stark reality of the Foch-Clemenceau policy. Longuet pleads for only one thing – that the work of purgation be done with a sense of proportion in order not to ‘abate the profound sympathies of Alsace-Lorraine towards France’. A small dose of humanitarianism for Millerand – and everything will be for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

French capitalism has seized the Saar coal basin. Here there has been no ‘restoration of violated laws’; here, not a single case-hardened reporter has been able to discover any ‘profound sympathies’. This is theft committed in broad daylight. Longuet is very hurt. Longuet is very sad. Apart from the humanistic side of the matter, ‘the coal of the Saar basin, we are told by the specialists, is not of the best quality’. Was it really impossible – chides Longuet – to obtain the coal ‘we’ need from crucified Germany, from the Ruhr basin, coal of a far better quality, and without incurring parliamentary difficulties in connection with national self-determination? The honourable deputy is, as we see, not bereft of practical sense.

Jean Longuet is, of course, an internationalist. He admits it himself. And who should know better? But what is internationalism? ‘We never understood it in the sense of the degradation of the fatherland; and our own fatherland is beautiful enough to have no need of counterposing itself to the interests of any other nation. (Chorus of friends: Hear! Hear!)’ This beautiful fatherland, which happens to be at the disposal of Foch-Clemenceau, is in no case hindered by Longuet’s internationalism from utilising the superior coal of the Ruhr. The sole requirement is: the observance of those forms of parliamentary symmetry which, you will notice, evokes the approbation of all our friends.

Jean Longuet passes on to England. If in appraising the politics of his own country he advanced the authority of Renan, then Longuet likewise appears on the arena of Great Britain’s policy in highly respectable company. Inasmuch as it is necessary to mention Ireland, ‘wouldn’t it be permissible to recall the great statesmen of England: Gladstone and Campbell-Bannerman? Should England grant freedom to Ireland, nothing would stand in the way of the unification of these countries in a federation’.

Having assured Ireland’s welfare through the method of the great Gladstone, Longuet runs up against new difficulties: France herself possesses more than one Ireland. Longuet mentions Tunis. ‘Allow me to remind you, Monsieurs, that for the sake of France this country has borne the most honourable and greatest sacrifices in the course of the war. Out of 55,000 warriors given France by Tunisia, about 45,000 have been killed or wounded – these are official figures. And we have the right to say that this nation... by her sacrifices has conquered for herself the right to a larger share of justice and a greater freedom. (Chorus of friends: Hear! Hear!) ‘ The poor, unfortunate Arabs of Tunisia, whom the French bourgeoisie flung into the fiery cauldron of war, this black cannon fodder, fell – without a flicker of ideas – at the Marne and the Somme, perishing along with the imported Spanish horses and American steers. And this revolting smear, one of the vilest in the whole vile picture of the world shambles is depicted by Jean Longuet as a supreme and honourable sacrifice which ought to be crowned with the gift of freedom. After the feeble and idle chatter about internationalism and self-determination, the right of the Tunisian Arabs to a shred of freedom is treated as if it were a tip to be thrown to its slaves by the sated and magnanimous Bourse, at the request of one of its parliamentarian brokers. Where then are the limits of parliamentary degradation?

But now we come to Russia. And here Jean Longuet, with a tact-fulness that distinguishes him, begins by bowing low before none other than Clemenceau. ‘Haven’t all of us here unanimously applauded Clemenceau. when he read from the tribunal of this Chamber the clause relating to the abrogation of the infamous Brest-Litovsk Treaty?’ On recalling the Brest-Litovsk peace, Jean Longuet loses all self-control. ‘The Brest-Litovsk peace is the monument to the bestiality and ignominy of Prussian militarism’. Longuet hurls thunder and lightning. The reason is rather simple: Parliamentary bolts of lightning against the Brest-Litovsk peace which has long ago been swept away by the revolution provides a very favourable and happy background for the deputy’s delicate critical operations on the peace of Versailles.

Jean Longuet favours peace with Soviet Russia. But, naturally, not in any compromising sense. No, Longuet has sure knowledge of a good road to this peace. It is the road of none other than Wilson who has sent his plenipotentiary Bullitt to Soviet Russia. The meaning and content of Bullitt’s mission are sufficiently well known today. His conditions represented a harsher version of the Brest-Litovsk clauses of Kühlmann and Czernin. Included were both the dismemberment of Russia and cruel pillage of her economy. But let us choose a different topic for discussion. Wilson is, as everybody knows, in favour of the self-determination of nations, and as for Bullitt... ‘I consider Mr. Bullitt to be one of the most forthright, one of the most honest, well-intentioned men whom I have had the good fortune to meet’. What a consolation it is to learn from Longuet that the American stock market still disposes of men of probity while in the French parliament there are still to be found deputies who know the true worth of American virtue.

Having paid the tribute of gratitude to Clemenceau and Bullitt for their kindness to Russia, Longuet does not refuse to address a few words of encouragement to the Republic of the Soviets. ‘No one will believe’, says he, ‘that the Soviet regime could have maintained itself for two years unless it had the backing of the broadest masses of the Russian people. It could not have built an army of 1,200,000 soldiers, led by the best officers of old Russia, and fighting with the ardor of the volunteers of 1793. This point in Longuet’s speech is the apogee. Recalling the armies of the Convention’, he becomes submerged in national tradition, uses it as a cover for all the class contradictions, embraces Clemenceau in heroic recollections, and at the same time provides a historical formula to effect indirectly the legal adoption of the Soviet State and the Soviet Army.

Such is Longuet. Such is official French Socialism. Such is the parliamentarianism of the Third Republic in its most ‘democratic’ aspect. Conventionalities and phrases, senility and evasiveness, courteous falsehoods, arguments and tricks of a shyster lawyer who, however, seriously takes the planks of the speakers’ stand for the arena of history.

Today, when class is openly pitted against class, when historical ideas appear armed to the teeth and all litigation is settled by cold steel, ‘Socialists’ of the Longuet type are an outrageous mockery of our epoch. We have just seen him as he is: he kowtows to the Right; bends curtsies to the Left; pays homage to the great Gladstone who deceived Ireland; kneels before his (physical) grandfather, Marx, who despised and hated the hypocrite Gladstone; lauds the Tsarist favourite Viviani, the first Minister President of the imperialist war; combines Renan with the Russian Revolution, Wilson with Lenin and Vandervelde with Liebknecht; slips under the ‘rights of nations’ a foundation consisting of Ruhr coal and Tunisian skeletons; and in performing all these incredible wonders, compared with which swallowing fire is child’s play, Longuet remains true to himself as the courteous incarnation of official Socialism and the crown of French parliamentarianism (...)

It is high time to put an end to this protracted misunderstanding. The French working class is faced with problems far too great, with tasks far too important and far too sharply posed to tolerate any longer a combination of contemptible Longuetism with the great reality of the proletarian struggle for power. We need above all clarity and truth. Every worker must clearly understand just who are his friends and enemies; he must clearly know where his reliable comrades-in-arms are and where the base traitor is to be found. Liebknecht and Luxemburg are with us, while Longuet and Vandervelde must be mercilessly thrown into that filthy bourgeois heap from which they seek so vainly to crawl to the socialist road. Our epoch demands ideas and words of full weight as the prerequisites for fully-weighted deeds.

We have no need any longer for the obsolete decorations of parliamentarianism, its chiaroscuro, its optical illusions. The proletariat of France needs the clean, brave air of the proletarian streets; it needs clarity of thought in its brain, a firm will in its heart and – a rifle in its hands. A definitive settlement with Longuetism is the unpostponable demand of political hygiene. And while I have reacted to Longuet’s speech with an emotion for which there is no appropriate label in the courteous lexicon of parliamentarianism, here at the close of my letter I am able to think with joy of the superb cleansing job which the ardent French proletariat will accomplish throughout the utterly bespattered edifice of the bourgeois republic, when it finally proceeds to the solution of its last historical task.

Trotsky

(From Die Kommunistische Internationale, nos. 7-8, November-December 1919).

[Referring to this ‘letter’, on 14 February 1920 Lenin would intensify his denunciation of Longuetism, and in general of the democratic-parliamentary and centrist positions in France, Germany and Austria, in ‘Notes of a Publicist’, which appeared in issue 9 of the same periodical].

‘Participation in elections to the representative organs of bourgeois democracy and participation in parliamentary activity, while always presenting a continuous danger of deviation, may be utilised for propaganda and for schooling the movement during the period in which there does not yet exist the possibility of overthrowing bourgeois rule and in which, as a consequence, the party’s task is restricted to criticism and opposition. In the present period, which began with the end of the world war, with the first communist revolutions and the creation of the Third International, communists pose, as the direct objective of the political action of the proletariat in every country, the revolutionary conquest of power, to which end all the energy and all the preparatory work of the party must be devoted.

‘In this period, it is inadmissible to participate in these organs which function as a powerful defensive instrument of the bourgeoisie and which are designed to operate even within the ranks of the proletariat. It is precisely in opposition to these organs, to their structure as to their function, that communists call for the system of workers’ councils and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

‘Because of the great importance which electoral activity assumes in practice, it is not possible to reconcile this activity with the assertion that it is not the means of achieving the principal objective of the party’s action, which is the conquest of power. It also is not possible to prevent it from absorbing all the activity of the movement and from diverting it from revolutionary preparation...’

From the Theses of the Communist Abstentionist Fraction of the P.S.I., May 1920.

The Zinoviev circular did not appear in the socialist press until early months of 1920; it was, moreover, very clear in repeated, thumping statements by the main Bolshevik leaders that the tactical question of ‘revolutionary parliamentarism’ was secondary to the crucial problems of forming the party on the basis of the unbridgeable line of demarcation of the violent seizure of power, the proletarian dictatorship, and the centralisation which, for Lenin, Trotsky, and all true communists, the necessary prerequisite: therefore, the principle of anti-democracy.

For the abstentionists of the Communist Fraction of the P.S.I., it was of utmost importance to clarify that, on those points of doctrine, not only was there no hesitation on their part, but that their proclamation and defence constituted the true centre of gravity of the current represented, with a broad national base, by Il Soviet. The Fraction opposed electoral maximalism, which veered dangerously on questions of principle and made participation in elections, contrary to the directives of the Bolsheviks, a prerequisite so imperative as to impose unity with the reformist right and the sacrifice of a real and not rhetorical revolutionary preparation of the masses in the heated post-war period. But it also opposed anarchism, revolutionary syndicalism, and workerism, which in various ways and to varying degrees denied the party and the dictatorship or even political struggle. It was important to reiterate – as in the two texts we are publishing, a prelude to the Second World Congress – that communist abstentionism did not stem from theoretical principles diverging from the most orthodox Marxism, but rather, within the framework of the latter, reaffirmed in all its scope and power, from an assessment of the negative and even ruinous weight of the electoral tradition in countries with advanced capitalism and a centuries-old democratic political structure.

In these, and only in these – where the prospect was the pure proletarian revolution, unlike in Tsarist Russia or in countries where the bourgeois revolution was still yet to be completed – abstentionism constituted, in our opinion, an indispensable tool for the ideological preparation of the masses for the revolutionary battle, a decisive means of selection from the Right and from the most ambiguous Centre within the old socialist parties, and a testing ground for the seriousness of adherence to the 3rd International beyond superficial enthusiasm and overly self-interested ‘fads’: in short, a practical reagent in the prophylaxis against the Longuetism of the Longuets and the crypto-Longuetism of the Cachins, Frossards, Serratis, and Smerals.

Time has given bitter confirmations of that critical assessment – in frank and calm polemic with Moscow, but in perfect parallel with the great theses of principle vigorously proclaimed by the Bolsheviks – and the texts we reproduce here can rightly be considered precursors of a future in which it will become not the subject of debate, but one of the cornerstones of the proletarian resurgence and its worldwide victory.

To the Moscow Committee of the 3rd International

Our fraction was formed after the Bologna Congress of the Italian Socialist Party (8–10 October 1919), but had already begun its propaganda campaign through the newspaper Il Soviet in Naples, convening a conference in Rome on 6 July 1919 at which the programme was approved and then presented to the Congress. We are sending a collection of the newspaper and several copies of the programme and the motion with which it was put to the vote.

It should be noted that throughout the war there was a strong extremist movement within the party that opposed the overly weak policy of the parliamentary group, the General Confederation of Labour – thoroughly reformist – and the Party Leadership itself, even though the latter was uncompromisingly revolutionary according to the decisions of the pre-war congresses. The Leadership was always divided into two currents on the issue of the war: the right-wing current was led by Lazzari, author of the formula ‘neither support nor sabotage the war’; the left-wing current by Serrati, editor of Avanti! In all the meetings held during the war, however, the two currents presented themselves as united with one another, and although they had reservations about the parliamentary group’s conduct, they did not take a decisive stand against it. Left-wing elements external to the Leadership fought against this ambiguity, aiming to split the reformists from the group away from the Party and adopt a more revolutionary stance.

The Rome Congress of 1918, held shortly before the armistice, was unable to break with the conciliatory policy of the deputies, and the Leadership, despite the addition of extremist elements such as Gennari and Bombacci, did not substantially change its line, mitigated by its weakness towards certain manifestations of the right wing that were opposed to the majority line of the Party.

After the war, the entire Party apparently took a ‘maximalist’ stance by joining the Third International. However, the Party’s conduct was not satisfactory from a communist point of view; please see, in Il Soviet, the polemics with the parliamentary group, with the Confederation (regarding the ‘professional constituent assembly’) and with the Leadership itself, especially regarding the preparation of the strike on 20 and 21 July.

Immediately, we, along with other comrades from all over Italy, moved towards electoral abstentionism, which we upheld at the Bologna Congress. We wish to make it clear that at the Congress we differed from the rest of the Party not only on the electoral question, but also on the question of the Party split.

The ‘maximalist electoralist’ fraction, victorious at the Congress, had also accepted the thesis of the incompatibility of the reformists remaining in the Party, but renounced it for purely electoral reasons, despite the anti-communist speeches of Turati and Treves.

This is a compelling reason for abstentionism: it will not be possible to establish a purely communist party unless electoral and parliamentary action is abandoned.

Parliamentary democracy in Western countries takes on forms of such a nature that it constitutes the most formidable weapon for diverting the revolutionary movement of the proletariat.

Since 1910–1911, the left wing of our party has been engaged in polemic and battle against bourgeois democracy, and this experience leads us to conclude that in the current period of world revolution, all contact with the democratic system must be severed.

The current situation in Italy is as follows: the Party is campaigning against the war and the interventionist parties, confident that it will reap great electoral success, but since the current government is composed of bourgeois parties that opposed the war in 1915, there is a certain convergence between the Party’s electoral action and the policy of the bourgeois government.

Since all the former reformist deputies have been re-nominated as candidates, the Nitti government, which is on good terms with them, as evidenced by recent parliamentary events, will ensure that they are elected. Afterwards, party action, already exhausted by the great efforts of the current electoral campaign, will lose itself in polemics over the compromising behaviour of its deputies. We will then have the preparation of the local elections for July 1920; for many months, the party will not engage in serious revolutionary propaganda and preparation. It is to be hoped that unforeseen events will not overwhelm and sweep away the party.

We attach importance to the question of electoral action and believe that it is not in accordance with communist principles to leave the decision on this matter to the individual parties adhering to the 3rd International. The International Communist Party should examine and resolve this question.

Today, we aim to work towards establishing a truly communist party, and this is what our fraction within the P.S.I. is working towards. We hope that the first parliamentary events will bring many comrades to us, so that we can achieve a split from the social democrats.

At the Congress, 67 sections voted for us with 3,417 votes, while the maximalist electionists won with 48,000 votes, and the reformists got 14,000.

We also disagree with the maximalists on other questions of principle; for the sake of brevity, we enclose a copy of the programme approved by the congress, which is now the Party’s programme (not a single member left the party when the programme was changed), together with some of our comments.

It should be noted that we are not in collaborative relations with movements outside the party: anarchists and syndicalists, because they follow non-communist principles and oppose the proletarian dictatorship, indeed, they accuse us of being more authoritarian and centralising than the other maximalists in the party. See the polemics in Il Soviet.

In Italy, a complex task of clarifying the communist programme and tactics is necessary, to which we will devote all our energies. If we fail to organise a party that deals solely and systematically with communist propaganda and preparation among the proletariat, the revolution may end in defeat.

With regard to tactical work, and especially with regard to the establishment of Soviets, it seems to us that mistakes are being made even by our friends, with the danger that everything will be limited to a reformist modification of the trade unions. Indeed, work is underway to establish factory committees, as in Turin, then bringing together all the commissars of a given industry (metallurgy) who take over the leadership of the trade union by appointing its executive committee.

This leaves us outside the political functions of the Workers’ Councils, for which the proletariat should be prepared, even though, in our opinion, the most important issue is organising a powerful class party (communist party) that will prepare for the insurrectionary seizure of power from the hands of the bourgeois government.

We would very much like to know your opinion:
a) on parliamentary and municipal electionism and the advisability of a decision on this matter by the Communist International;
b) on the split in the Italian party;
c) on the tactical problem of establishing Soviets under a bourgeois regime and on the limits of such action.

We greet you and the great Russian proletariat, pioneers of universal communism.

Naples, 10 November 1919

To the Central Committee of the Third Communist International – Moscow

Dear comrades,

On 11 November, we sent you another communication. We are using the Italian language, knowing that your office is headed by Comrade Balabanoff, who knows it very well.

Our movement was formed by those who voted for abstentionism at the Bologna Congress. We are sending you our programme and the accompanying motion once again. We hope you have received the collections of our newspaper Il Soviet and we are now sending you copies of issues I and II of the new series, which began publication at the start of the year.

The purpose of this letter is to submit to you some observations on Comrade Lenin’s letter to the German communists, which Avanti! reported on 31 December 1919 from the Rote Fahne of the 20th, in order to clarify our political position.

First of all, we would like to draw your attention to the fact that the Italian Socialist Party still includes opportunist socialists of the Adler and Kautsky type, whom Lenin mentions in the first part of his letter. The Italian party is neither a communist nor even a revolutionary one; even the ‘maximalist electionist’ majority is more in line with the German Independents. At the congress, we split from it not only over electoral tactics but also over the proposal to expel the reformists led by Turati from the party.

The division between us and those maximalists who voted for the Serrati motion in Bologna is therefore not analogous to that which separates supporters of abstentionism from those of electoral participation in the German Communist Party, but is rather similar to the division between Communists and Independents.

Programmatically, our point of view has nothing to do with anarchism and syndicalism. We are advocates of the strong and centralised Marxist political party of which Lenin speaks, indeed, we are the most tenacious proponents of this conception within the maximalist camp. We do not support the boycott of economic trade unions but their conquest by communists, and our directives are those we read in a report by Comrade Zinoviev to the Russian Communist Party congress published by Avanti! on 1 January.

As for the Workers’ Councils, they exist in Italy only in certain localities, but consist solely of factory councils, composed of departmental commissars, who deal with internal company matters. Our intention, however, is to take the initiative in establishing municipal and rural Soviets, elected directly by the masses gathered together in factories or villages, because we believe that in preparing for the revolution, the struggle must be primarily political in nature. We are in favour of participation in elections for any representation of the working class in which only workers take part. On the other hand, we are openly opposed to the participation of communists in elections for bourgeois parliaments, municipal or provincial councils, or constituent assemblies, because we believe that it is not possible to carry out revolutionary work in such bodies, and we believe that electoral action and preparation hinder the formation of communist consciousness among the working masses and the preparation for the proletarian dictatorship as opposed to bourgeois democracy.

Participating in such bodies and avoiding social-democratic and collaborationist deviations is a solution that does not really exist in the current historical period, as events will also demonstrate for the current Italian parliamentary experiment. We are led to these conclusions by the experience of the struggle waged by the left of our party from 1910-1911 to the present day against all the deceptions of parliamentarism, in a country that has long been ruled by a bourgeois democratic regime: the campaign against ministerialism, political and administrative electoral blocs with democratic parties, Freemasonry and bourgeois anticlericalism, etc. From this experience, we drew the conclusion that the most serious danger to the socialist revolution is collaboration with bourgeois democracy on the terrain of social reformism; an experience that was then generalised in the war and in the revolutionary events in Russia, Germany, Hungary, etc.

Parliamentary intransigence was feasible, always, however, amid constant clashes and difficulties, in non-revolutionary times, when the working class had no prospect of seizing power; and the difficulties of parliamentary action are all the greater the more the regime and the composition of parliament itself have a traditionally democratic character. It is with these criteria that we would judge the Bolsheviks’ participation in the Duma elections after 1905.

The tactic followed by the Russian comrades in participating in the Constituent Assembly elections and then forcibly dissolving that same assembly, even if it did not constitute an unfavourable condition for success, would be dangerous in countries where parliamentary representation, rather than being a recent development, is an institution that has been firmly established for a long time and is rooted in the consciousness and habits of the proletariat itself.

The work required to prepare the masses for the abolition of the democratic representative system appears to us to be much more extensive and substantial than in Russia and perhaps in Germany, and the need to intensify this propaganda campaign aimed at discrediting the parliamentary institution and eliminating its harmful counter-revolutionary influence has led us the abstentionist tactic. We oppose electoral activity with the violent conquest of political power by the proletariat for the formation of the Council State, and therefore our abstentionism does not stem from a denial of the need for a centralised revolutionary government. On the contrary, we are opposed to collaboration with anarchists and syndicalists in the revolutionary movement, because they do not accept these criteria of propaganda and action.

The general elections of 16 November, also conducted by the P.S.I. on a platform of maximalism, have proven once again that electoral action excludes and overshadows all other activities, and above all every illegal activity. In Italy, the problem is not one of combining legal action with illegal action, as Lenin advises the German comrades, but of beginning to reduce ‘legal’ activity in order to begin the ‘illegal’ one, which is completely lacking.

The new parliamentary group has set about doing social democratic and minimalist work, submitting questions, preparing bills, etc.

We conclude our presentation by declaring that, in all likelihood, although we have remained in the P.S.I. until now, disciplined by its tactics, in the near future, and perhaps before the municipal elections to be held in July, our fraction will separate from the party, which wants to keep many anti-communists within its ranks, to form the Italian Communist Party, whose first act will be to send its membership to the Communist International.

Revolutionary greetings.

Naples, 11 January 1920

The enormous influence exerted by the wise words of the great communist compels us to comment on this latest letter published in Avanti! a few days ago, addressed to the German communists, in which he advises them to participate in the bourgeois parliament. Already on another occasion Lenin, in a brief letter to comrade Serrati, had expressed his approval of the Italian Socialist Party’s intention to participate in the parliamentary elections, thus in contrast with our decidedly abstentionist point of view. Lenin, who knows how great, and deservedly so, his prestige is, hastens in both letters, very wisely, to preface that he has very little information, and this in order to warn those who might overestimate his judgement, which he openly admits may well be inaccurate due to a lack of precise data.

Of Italian socialism, he, who was at Zimmerwald, knows the party’s resolute rejection of the war, which, together with its adherence to the 3rd International, has given the party outside our country a reputation greater than its merits, making it appear to be a party with a strong revolutionary character, which is not really entirely accurate.

The repercussions of the war phenomenon within the party were more than a product of theoretical assessment; they were predominantly sentimental in nature and therefore often absurd and contradictory.

Many of our comrades, and some of the best among them, who, fierce opponents of the war, declare themselves equally fierce opponents of all violence, whatever the reason. Many of the most tenacious reformists who accept the concept of defence of the fatherland were opposed to the war. Many did so out of calculation, out of prudence, few out of deep inner conviction. Therefore, their oppositional stance never went beyond verbal statements. During the Caporetto crisis, no attempt was made to take advantage of the difficult moment faced by the bourgeoisie, which encountered no obstacles in overcoming the perilous passage. On the contrary, the party rushed at that moment and afterwards to exonerate itself from the responsibility that the bourgeoisie wanted to place on it for having participated in provoking that phenomenon, without claiming what it was entitled to for its constant propaganda against it, which could not have failed to bear some fruit.

In those days, Turati, the parliamentary group’s spokesman, echoed the words of the Prime Minister, who urged resistance, exclaiming: ‘The fatherland is on Grappa’, and wrote in the newspaper about the danger of the second enemy (the foreigner) without the party raising any protest, indeed with its almost unanimous consent.

How few at that time held firm in the depths of their souls and did not proclaim the liberating democratic victory of the Entente’s arms, which would have realised the Wilsonian gospel! The most astute remained silent and waited for the opportune moment of the electoral struggle to present to the masses their unblemished certificate of opposition to the war, while the most imprudent spoke out and are now paying the price.

And that is as far as opposition to the war is concerned, the merit for which belongs only to very few. Let us not even speak of the adherence to the Third International. The sincerity of this adherence and the awareness of it lies in the way the vote was taken, that is, by acclamation.

Those who are far away and have inaccurate information, including comrade Lenin, therefore, believe that the Italian party is homogeneously and authentically revolutionary, that is, that it has already purged itself of all the old social-democratic ballast.

Who knows what Lenin would think if he knew, for example, that the Italian communists he believes he is addressing are not actually communists but simply socialists (the importance of the difference in name is no longer questioned by anyone) or if, for example, he knew that there are social democrats in the party who are much further to the right than the renegade traitor Kautsky and who are much more explicitly and tenaciously declared enemies of Bolshevism than he is; and all this at the behest of the editor of Comunismo and the maximalists, in opposition to the proposals of our fraction, for the sole reason that the unity of the party should not be broken in the imminence of the battle fought with blows of... ballot papers for the conquest of a greater number of seats in the national Parliament.

Lenin says that there can be no peace, that it is impossible to work together with the Kautskys, Adlers, etc.; here, for us, it is not a matter of working together; unfortunately, it is a matter of living together in the same party, with the same discipline and – ironically! – even with the same... electoral programme.

Nor is it a matter of combining illegal work with legal work; unfortunately, we only do the latter, which is the only thing that much of the party considers useful and necessary to do because it is the only truly revolutionary thing.

As regards the participation in the bourgeois parliament recommended to the German communists, it is not worth mentioning the varied attitudes taken by the Bolsheviks in relation to the Duma, as these attitudes cannot be evaluated by analogy.

For us, the fundamental reason for non-participation lies above all in our assessment of the historical period we are going through, considering, as we have often stated, that during a revolutionary period, the sole and exclusive task of the Communist Party is to devote all its activity to preparing for revolutionary action aimed at violently overthrowing the bourgeois State and paving the way for the realisation of communism.

A matter of such cardinal importance involves the entire essential function of the party, as was clearly seen in Germany at the time of the collapse of the old empire, during which those such as Scheidemann, Kautsky, etc., who wanted parliamentary action, appeared as and consequently were opportunists.

In countries where democracy has no tradition, such as in Russia, this appearance manifests itself in those critical moments; in our countries, where democracy has existed for a long time, there is no need to wait for these crises to judge the conduct of certain factions, which have consistently acted in an opportunistic, collaborationist, and anti-revolutionary manner, which the parliamentary function requires and imposes.

It surprises us that Lenin equates, as if they were the same thing, the renunciation of participation in bourgeois parliaments with that of reactionary trade unions, factory councils, etc., which some German communists advocate.

For us, these are two things that cannot be combined: parliament is a bourgeois organ and can have no other function than to serve the interests of the bourgeoisie; it must therefore disappear with the fall of bourgeois rule. The workers’ union, on the other hand, is a purely class organ, which, even if it carries out reactionary work due to the unconsciousness of its leaders, can, and indeed must, be called back to its true function.

Participation in parliament is of no interest to communists, since it must be overthrown; unlike the trade union, the workers’ council, etc., which carry out revolutionary work under the bourgeois regime insofar as they are imbued with the communist spirit and act according to communist directives under the impetus and control of communists; for the same reason, they will be useful and positively effective organs in a communist regime, not only because of the form of their constitution.

If the German communists want to boycott these workers’ organisations, it is also possible that they are forced to do so for reasons of defence and preservation, to escape the persecution of the social scoundrel Noske, who has unleashed his spies on these organisations.

If, on the other hand, they did so out of a tendency towards an anarchist-individualist conception of revolution, then we need not remind them that we are strongly opposed to such an attitude, since we are in perfect agreement with Lenin on the need for a strong, centralised political party that is the brain, soul, and sure guide of the proletariat in the struggle for its redemption.

To this end, we continue our persistent efforts to divide the communists from the social democrats, a division which for us is an indispensable factor for the victory of communism.

The circular of the E.C. of the Communist International, signed by Zinoviev and published in Comunismo nos. 8 and 9, forces us to return once again to the vexed question of parliamentarism. On this matter the circular begins by stating: ‘The present phase of the revolutionary movement has, along with other questions, very sharply placed the question of parliamentarism upon the order of the day’s discussion’.

Let these words serve as a response to those who say that we have turned it into a kind of nightmare, that we alone attach excessive importance to it, whereas it is a question of tactics and not of programme, and therefore of secondary importance.

We have already said several times that questions of tactics are extremely important to us, because they indicate the action that parties must take; they discuss questions of programme precisely in order to derive from them tactical directives, otherwise, instead of being political parties they would be congregations of dreamers.

What divides the social democrats and the communists is not the distant goal that both want to achieve, but precisely the tactics, and the division is so deep that in Germany and elsewhere, not a small amount of blood has been shed between the two sides. It cannot be argued that this is secondary and of little importance.

We agree that the question of parliamentarism should be divided into two questions. On the first, namely the need to overthrow parliamentarism in order to give all power to the Soviets, there should be no disagreement among the parties, and therefore among their members, who belong to the 3rd International, because this constitutes the cornerstone, the backbone of its programme. We say ‘should’ because the P.S.I. shirks this duty, with a significant part of it openly supporting the opposite conception and another no less significant part failing to realise the profound antithesis between parliamentarism and Soviet power. Perhaps because they are aware of this ambiguous hybridism that exists in our Party, the comrades of the 3rd International, while addressing other parties, do not concern themselves with the Italian one. Are they perhaps waiting for it to emerge from its ambiguity? They will be waiting a long time!

As regards the second question, that ‘bourgeois parliaments [can] be fully utilised for the purpose of developing the revolutionary class struggle’, we do not believe it is correct, as the circular states, that it has no connection whatsoever with the first question.

If we recognise that there is a profound antithesis between the parliamentary conception and the soviet conception, we must also recognise that it is necessary to prepare the masses spiritually to realise this antithesis, to familiarise themselves with the idea of the necessity of overthrowing the bourgeois parliamentary regime and of establishing the soviets. The parties that uphold this programme can effectively carry out their propaganda only on condition that they do not in any way undermine it by their actions, by agreeing themselves to participate in the functioning of parliaments. This is especially true in countries where such participation has been enhanced by long-standing custom and by the credibility given to these bodies by the very parties that today would like to uphold, in this regard, an opposite conception.

These parties have persistently educated the masses to attach supreme importance to parliaments, preaching that all state power belongs to them and that, once a majority is won, they are the absolute masters of power.

All the more reason why an election campaign with anti-parliamentary content cannot be waged together under the same banner, in the name and with the discipline of the same party, by those who, at least in words, demand the overthrow of the bourgeois parliament ‘from within’ and those who continue to view it from the standpoint of social democracy.

The examples Zinoviev cites in support of his thesis are not convincing. To say that the Russian Bolsheviks took part in the Constituent Assembly elections in order to sweep it away 24 hours later does not prove that bourgeois parliamentarism was exploited for the sake of the revolution. Clearly, the Bolsheviks took part in the elections because at that moment they did not feel they had sufficient strength to prevent the Constituent Assembly elections from taking place, otherwise they would have done so. As soon as they realised they were strong enough, action was decided upon. This strength could not gained by virtue of their participation in the struggle, nor could they at least gain the awareness of it, since the election results were, fortunately, not favourable to them. Perhaps, if this had happened, the Constituent Assembly would not have been overthrown.

To demonstrate the uselessness of the Constituent Assembly and of any parliament, or rather, to demonstrate the usefulness of overthrowing them, we accept that intervention in electoral struggles can be beneficial, but only in a negative sense, that is, without candidates. Only in this way can the demonstration of anti-parliamentarism have real effectiveness among the masses, because it is consistent in theory and practice, not contradictory as it can be made by that renewed siren, the aspiring anti-parliamentary parliamentarian.

Similarly, it is pointless to recall that the Bolsheviks participated in the Tsarist Duma before the war, in a profoundly different historical context, when the possibility of the imminent overthrow of the bourgeois regime was not even a dream; nor is it accurate to say that the status of parliamentarian benefited Liebknecht’s revolutionary work during the war, when this status did nothing but force him to cast an initial vote in favour of military credits. Alongside him and together with him, many other martyrs faced the same struggle, which took place entirely outside parliament, where they were not even allowed to speak.

The argument that parliamentary privilege can grant relative immunity to those who enjoy it cannot enter the mind of anyone who feels a deep faith in devoting themselves to the cause of revolution, which requires an unlimited spirit of sacrifice.

On the other hand, when a deputy truly carries out revolutionary and dangerous work, he loses his guarantee, as Liebknecht himself proved, as did the deputies of the Tsarist Duma or the Bulgarian parliament, etc. As for the mines that communist deputies lay against the enemy while they are in his camp, and which are their votes, their speeches, their bills, their agendas, perhaps their shouts, their fists and the like, there is nothing to fear: with these, at most, one blows up... a ministry.

The E.C. of the 3rd International, believing that anti-parliamentarians are syndicalists and anarchists, is concerned with including them in the Communist Party in order to tone down, in a certain way, those coming from socialist parties who are more inclined towards parliamentary action than illegal action, to which they tend more than others. Therefore, while insisting that the real solution lies outside parliament, in the streets, it advises the former to engage in parliamentary action and all to unite, so as not to weaken the revolutionary forces which it ultimately considers more effective and determined than the former.

Without repeating once again how different our anti-parliamentarism is from that of the syndicalists and anarchists, we conclude that we believe, in perfect agreement with the E.C. of the Third International, that the question of parliamentarism must be defined in general terms. However, if the E.C. believes it has resolved it with its circular, we maintain that we cannot accept its resolution, which resolves nothing but leaves things as they are, with all their harmful consequences. The question must be raised at the next congress of the Third International, so that all parties adhering to it adopt and practise its decisions in a disciplined manner.

There will be no shortage of those at the congress who will explain all the reasons why, in our opinion, the Third International should adopt the abstentionist tactic that we support in relation to parliamentarism.

The article we are publishing, translated from ‘Kommunismus’, organ of the 3rd International for South-Eastern Europe, is an extremely valuable contribution to the question of parliamentarism and corresponds largely to our views.

We reproduce it in the certainty that our readers will appreciate it, as they will not fail to notice how much weight important writings have in the discussion of this vital subject, very important writings – like the present one – clarify how much Italian electoral maximalism is at odds with communist doctrines and international communist bodies.

1.

It is now generally accepted that the question of Parliamentarism is not a matter of principle, but only of tactics. Although this thesis is undoubtedly correct, it nevertheless presents many obscure points. Setting aside the fact that it is stated almost exclusively by those who, in practice, are in favour of parliamentarism – so that adherence to it almost always means adherence to parliamentarism – it is an understatement to say that a question is not a matter of principle but only of tactics. Especially because, lacking a true theory (of knowledge) of Socialism, the relationship between a tactical question and principles is completely obscure.

Without wishing to deal with this problem even briefly here, the following must nevertheless be considered certain. Tactics means the practical implementation of established principles. Tactics is therefore the connecting link between the final goal and the immediate reality. It is therefore determined on side by the firmly fixed principles and goals of Communism, and on the other by the historical reality in continuous change. When speaking of the great flexibility of communist tactics (at least in relation to what it ought to be), for a proper understanding of this concept, we must not forget that the flexibility of communist tactics is a direct consequence of the rigidity of communist principles. Only because the immutable principles of communism are destined to transform the ever-changing reality in a vital and fruitful way can they maintain such flexibility. Any ‘realistic policy’, any action not guided by principles, becomes rigid and schematic, the more it is considered original by men without principles (for example, German imperialist policy), because the immanent in the mutable, the driving force in the complexity of facts, are things that ‘realistic policy’ cannot grasp. If political action is not guided by a theory capable of fruitfully influencing events and becoming fruitful for them, in its place is custom, imitation, routine, incapable of adapting to the needs of the moment.

Precisely because of this cohesion with theory and principles, communist tactics differ from every bourgeois or social-democratic – petty bourgeois – ‘realistic policy’. Therefore, if for the Communist Party a problem is posed as a tactical problem, we must ask: 1) Which principles do the problem in question relate to? 2) In light of this connection, in what historical situation can this tactic be used? 3) Again, in accordance with the principles, what nature should the tactic be? 4) How should the connection between a single tactical question and other specific tactical questions be considered – again here in relation to questions of principle?

In order to define parliamentarism more precisely as a tactical problem of communism, we must always start, on one side, from the principle of class struggle and, on the other, from a concrete analysis of the present and real state of the material and ideological balance of forces between the classes in struggle. From this arises two decisive questions: 1) When, in general, can parliamentarism be considered a weapon, a tactical means for the proletariat? 2) How should this weapon be used in the interests of the proletarian class struggle?

The class struggle of the proletariat, by its very nature, negates bourgeois society. This does not at all mean indifference towards the State, rightly derided by Marx, but rather that a form of struggle must be employed in which the proletariat does not get its hands dirty with the forms and means that bourgeois society has fashioned for its own ends, that is, a form of struggle in which the initiative lies fundamentally with the proletariat. However, it should not be forgotten that this form of proletarian struggle can only rarely unfold in all its purity, mainly because the proletariat, although by virtue of its historical-philosophical mission is in perpetual struggle against the very existence of bourgeois society, nevertheless in actual historical situations often finds itself reduced to the defensive against the bourgeoisie. The idea of proletarian class struggle is in itself a great offensive against capitalism, and history shows this offensive to be a necessity for the proletariat. The tactical position in which the proletariat finds itself from time to time can therefore be defined in the simplest way as either offensive or defensive in nature. From what has been said so far, it naturally follows that in a defensive situation, tactical means must be used which, by their very nature, are in contradiction with the idea of proletarian class struggle. Therefore, the use of such means, albeit inevitable, is always accompanied by the danger that they may damage the very purpose for which they are used, namely the class struggle of the proletariat.

Parliament, a characteristic instrument of the bourgeoisie, can therefore only be a defensive weapon for the proletariat. With this, the answer to the question of when it should be used is undoubtedly given: in a phase of the class struggle in which, due to both the external balance of forces and internal ideological immaturity, it is not possible for the proletariat to fight the bourgeoisie with its own specific means of attack. The acceptance of parliamentary activity therefore means, for every communist party, the awareness and admission that revolution cannot be expected in the near future. The proletariat, forced onto the defensive, can then use the parliamentary platform for agitation and propaganda; it can use the opportunities, guaranteed by bourgeois freedom to members of Parliament, as a surrogate for other suppressed forms of expression; parliamentary struggles with the bourgeoisie can serve to gather forces to prepare for the real struggle against the bourgeoisie. It is easily understood that such a phase may currently last a relatively long time, but this does not change the fact that for a communist party, parliamentary activity can never be anything other than a preparation for the real struggle, not the struggle itself.

3.

More difficult than determining the moment at which parliamentary activity can be used is determining what the course of action of a communist fraction in parliament should be. (After all, the two questions are closely linked with each other). Reference is usually made (most recently by Radek, Di Entwichelung der Weltrevolutione – The Development of the World Revolution – p. 29) to the examples of Karl Liebknecht and the Bolshevik fraction in the Duma. But these two examples show precisely how difficult it is for communists to find the right path, and what a sum of extraordinary skills this presupposes in communist parliamentarians. The difficulty can be briefly expressed as follows: the communist parliamentarian must fight Parliament within Parliament itself – and with a tactic that at no point stands on the ground of the bourgeoisie and of parliamentarism. Here it is a question neither of protest against parliamentarism, nor of struggles within parliamentary sessions (all of which remains parliamentary, legalistic, pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric), but of the struggle against parliamentarism and bourgeois rule through deeds within Parliament itself.

These revolutionary acts can have no other purpose except that of ideologically preparing the proletariat’s transition from the defensive to the offensive; that is to say, through these acts, the bourgeoisie is forced, together with its social-democratic auxiliaries, to reveal their class dictatorship in such a way that it can become dangerous for the very continuation of the dictatorship.

Therefore, the communist tactic of unmasking the bourgeoisie in Parliament does not consist in verbal criticism (which in many cases constitutes an empty pseudo-revolutionary phraseology, easily tolerated by the bourgeoisie), but in provoking the bourgeoisie to proceed openly, to reveal itself through an action that may at a given moment become unfavourable to it. Since parliamentarism is a defensive tactic for the proletariat, it is necessary to direct the defensive tactic in such a way that tactical initiative nonetheless remains with the proletariat and that the bourgeoisie’s attacks become dangerous to itself. (Engels certainly has this tactic in mind in his preface, so often misunderstood – and for the most part deliberately so – to Klassenkampfe im Frankreich (Class Struggles in France) when he says that the parties of order go to ruin together with the legal institutions created by them. His is undoubtedly a description of a defensive position).

I hope that this brief and summary exposition has shown with sufficient clarity the great difficulties of such a tactic. The first difficulty, which arises almost without exception for parliamentary groups, is the following: to actually succeed in breaking out of parliamentarism within Parliament itself. For even the sharpest criticism of any action by the ruling classes remains mere wordplay, mere pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric, if it does not go beyond the parliamentary arena, if it does not have the effect of igniting, at that moment, the real class struggle, of clearly highlighting the class antagonisms and thus the ideology of the proletariat.

Opportunism – the greatest danger of parliamentary tactics – has its deepest roots precisely in the fact that any parliamentary tactic which, in its essence and in its effects, does not go beyond Parliament, or at least does not have the tendency to go break out of the parliamentary arena, is opportunistic. Even the most severe criticism exercised within the parliamentary arena cannot change this outcome. On the contrary, it leads to the opposite effect. Precisely by making it appear possible to carry out a severe critique of bourgeois society within the limits of Parliament, one contributes to that disturbance of proletarian class consciousness, which is what the bourgeoisie desires.

The fiction of bourgeois parliamentary democracy prides itself on the fact that Parliament appears not as an instrument of class oppression, but as an organ of ‘the whole people’. Since every kind of verbal radicalism – through the illusion of its parliamentary possibilism – reinforces the illusions of the unconscious strata of the proletariat in relation to that illusion, it is opportunistic and must be rejected.

Therefore, Parliament must be sabotaged as such, and parliamentary activity must be taken outside of parliamentarism. Assigning such a task to the parliamentary conduct of communists presents another tactical difficulty which, even when the danger of opportunism appears to have been overcome, is in itself such that as to seriously compromise communist work. The danger lies in the fact that, despite every effort that the communist parliamentary fraction may make, the initiative and therefore tactical superiority always remains on the side of the bourgeoisie.

But tactical superiority gives the contender who has managed to achieve it the possibility of forcing the opponent to fight under conditions that are most favourable to him. Now, it has already been demonstrated that limiting the struggle to the parliamentary arena is a tactical victory for the bourgeoisie. Thus, in many cases, the proletariat is faced with the alternative of either evading the decisive struggle by remaining on the parliamentary terrain: danger of opportunism, or breaking out of parliamentarism and appealing to the masses at a moment when this is favourable to the bourgeoisie. The clearest example of the insolubility of this problem is provided by the current situation of the Italian proletariat. The elections, conducted openly under the communist banner and with large-scale agitation, have given the Party a great many seats. But now, what is to be done! Either participate in the positive work of Parliament, as Turati and others wish, with the consequent victory of opportunism and weakening of the revolutionary movement. Or openly sabotage Parliament, with the consequence of sooner or later coming into a direct conflict with the bourgeoisie, without the proletariat having the possibility of choosing the moment of conflict. Let there be no misunderstanding. We do not start from the ridiculous assumption that one can ‘choose the moment’ for the revolution; on the contrary, we believe that revolutionary explosions are spontaneous actions of the masses, in which the Party’s only task is to provide consciousness of the direction and purpose. But it is precisely this spontaneity that is compromised by the fact that the starting point of the conflict lies in Parliament. Parliamentary action either resolves itself into empty demonstrations (the repetition of which in the long run tires and lulls the masses) or succeeds in provoking the bourgeoisie. The Italian fraction, out of fear of the latter eventuality, vacillates aimlessly between empty demonstrations and the latent opportunism of pseudo-revolutionary phrases. (Alongside these tactical errors of method, substantial tactical errors have certainly also been committed, so to speak: e.g. the petty-bourgeois demonstration for the Republic).

4.

This example clearly shows how dangerous an electoral victory can be for the proletariat. For the gravest danger for the Italian Party lies in the fact that its anti-parliamentary activity in Parliament can very easily lead to going beyond Parliament – even though the proletariat does not yet possess the ideological and organisational maturity necessary for the decisive struggle. The contradiction between electoral victory and unpreparedness clearly illustrates the weakness of the argument in favour of parliamentarism, according to which it would be a kind of review of proletarian forces. For if the votes obtained were truly communist, the preceding observations would naturally fall away, since it would mean that ideological preparation has already been accomplished.

From this it also appears that electoral agitation is not immune to doubts even as a simple means of propaganda. The propaganda of the Communist Party must serve to enlighten class consciousness. Therefore, it must be aimed at accelerating the process of differentiation within the proletariat as much as possible. Only in this way can, on the one hand, the solid conscious core of the revolutionary proletariat (the Communist Party) developing qualitatively be achieved; on the other hand, that the Party, through the objective lesson of revolutionary action, draws to itself the semi-conscious strata and leads them to a revolutionary consciousness of their situation. Electoral agitation is an extraordinarily dubious means in this regard. For casting a vote is not only not action, but, what is much worse, it is the illusion of action; and therefore it acts not in the sense of forming consciousness, but, on the contrary, of obscuring it. The result is an army that is large in appearance, but which, when serious resistance becomes necessary, disperses completely (German Social Democracy in August 1914).

This state of affairs necessarily derives from the typically bourgeois nature of parliamentary parties. Like the entire organisation of bourgeois society, so too do bourgeois parliamentary parties ultimately aim, albeit rarely consciously, to obscure class consciousness.

The bourgeoisie, forming a small minority within the population, can only maintain its dominance by drawing all the materially and ideologically uncertain strata to its side. Consequently, the bourgeois parliamentary party is the resultant of disparate class interests (although under capitalism the apparent compromise is always more significant than it really is). Now, this party structure is almost always imposed on the proletariat too when it participates in electoral struggle. The specific function of any electoral mechanism, which necessarily works for the greatest possible ‘victory’, almost always influences propaganda to win over ‘sympathisers’. And even when this does not occur, or at least not consciously, there nevertheless remains throughout the electoral technique a tendency to lure ‘sympathisers’, which conceals within itself the gravest danger: that of separating feeling from action and thus arousing an inclination towards the bourgeoisie and opportunism. The educational action of the Communist Party upon the inert and wavering strata of the proletariat can only become truly fruitful if, through the objective teaching of revolutionary practice, it strengthens revolutionary conviction within them. Any electoral campaign, in keeping with its bourgeois nature, shows a diametrically opposed tendency, which can only be avoided in very rare cases. Even the Italian Party has succumbed to this danger. The right wing has considered adherence to the 3rd International and the demand for a Republic of Workers’ Councils to be mere electoral rhetoric. The process of differentiation, the actual winning over of the masses to communist action, can therefore begin only afterwards, and probably under unfavourable circumstances. And above all, electoral rhetoric, by the very fact that it is not directly related to action, shows a marked tendency [MISSING WORD] towards the reconciliation of opposites, toward the unification of divergent tendencies. These specific qualities (of electoral action) must be taken very seriously, especially in the current situation of class struggle, where what is at stake is the real and active unity of the proletariat, not the apparent unity of the old parties.

5.

One of the nearly insurmountable difficulties of communist action in Parliament lies in the excessive autonomy and independence that is usually attributed to parliamentary groups within the life of the party. It is certainly understood that this is an advantage for the bourgeois parties, but this is not the place to provide a detailed demonstration of this. (This issue is linked to that of the advantages assured to the bourgeoisie by the so-called separation of powers). But what is useful for the bourgeoisie is, almost without exception, dangerous for the proletariat. So in this case too, if there is to be any hope of escaping the dangers inherent in parliamentary tactics, parliamentary activity must be subject in its entirety and without any limitation to the extra-parliamentary central leadership. This seems intuitive from a theoretical point of view, yet experience teaches us that the relationship between the Party and the parliamentary fraction is almost without exception reversed, and that the Party is dragged along by the parliamentary fraction. Thus, for example, in the case of Liebknecht during the war when he, naturally in vain, against the parliamentary fraction in the Reichstag, appealed to the obligations imposed by the party programme (Klassenkampf gegen Krieg [Class Struggle Against War], 53).

6.

Even more difficult than the relations between the parliamentary fraction and the Party are those between the former and the Workers’ Council (Soviet). The difficulty of correctly posing the problem once again sheds clear light on the problematic nature of parliamentarism in the class struggle of the proletariat. Workers’ Councils, as organisations of the entire proletariat (both the conscious and the unconscious), by the mere fact of their existence, transcend bourgeois society. By their very nature, they are revolutionary organisations of the expansion, capacity for action, and power of the proletariat, and as such are true barometers of the development of the revolution. For everything that is done and achieved within Workers’ Councils is wrested from the resistance of the bourgeoisie, and is therefore of great value not only as a result, but mainly as an educational means of conscious class action. It therefore seems like the height of ‘parliamentary cretinism’ to make attempts (as, for example, those of the U.S.P.D. [Independent Socialist Party of Germany]) to ‘anchor the Workers’ Councils in the constitution’, to assign them a specific legal activity. Legality kills the Workers’ Council. The Workers’ Council exists as an offensive organisation of the revolutionary proletariat only insofar as it threatens the existence of bourgeois society and fights step by step to prepare for its destruction and the construction of proletarian society. Any legalisation, that is, inclusion within bourgeois society with defined limits on its powers, transforms it into a shadow of a Workers’ Council; it becomes a mess of political chatterboxes, a refuse and caricature of Parliament.

Therefore, in general, the Workers’ Council and the parliamentary fraction can coexist side by side as tactical weapons of the proletariat. It would be easy to deduce, from the offensive character of the former and the defensive character of the latter, the theory that they complement each other. (Max Adler’s proposal to make the Workers’ Council a second chamber). Such attempts at reconciliation, however, overlook the fact that offence and defence in the class struggle are dialectical concepts, each of which contains a whole mode of action (and thus, in both cases, individual offensive and defensive actions), and can only be used in a determinate phase of the class struggle, but then excludes the other. The difference between the two phases can thus be defined briefly, but also clearly as far as the question under discussion is concerned: the proletariat finds itself on the defensive as long as the process of the dissolution of capitalism has not begun. When this phase of economic evolution has begun, the proletariat is forced onto the offensive, and it is irrelevant whether this attitude has been determined consciously or not, and whether it appears approvable or ‘scientifically’ well- founded or not.

However, since the evolutionary process of ideology does not necessarily coincide with that of the economy, and never runs parallel to it, the objective possibility and necessity of the offensive phase of the class struggle rarely finds the proletariat prepared. As a result of the economic situation, the action of the masses does indeed spontaneously take on a revolutionary direction, but by the stratum of leaders, which neither wants nor is able to free itself from the habits of the defensive stage, it is always lead onto false paths, or sabotaged outright. Consequently, in the offensive phase of the class struggle, not only the bourgeoisie and the strata led by it stand against the proletariat, but also its former leaders. Therefore, the object against which criticism must be directed is no longer primarily the bourgeoisie, already judged by history, but the right and centre of the proletarian movement, social democracy, without whose assistance capitalism in any country would have no hope of overcoming, even temporarily, its current crisis.

But the criticism of the proletariat is at the same time an active criticism, an educational work of revolutionary action, an objective form of instruction. To this end, Workers’ Councils are the best instrument imaginable. Far more important than any single advantage they may win for the proletariat is their educational function. The Workers’ Council is the death of social democracy. While in Parliament it is always possible to cover up real opportunism with revolutionary phrases, the Workers’ Council is forced to act or cease to exist. This action, whose conscious leadership must be the Communist Party, achieves the dissolution of opportunism, that is, the kind of criticism necessary today. No wonder social democracy is terrified of self-criticism, which it is forced to engage in by the Workers’ Councils. The development of the Workers’ Councils in Russia from the first to the second revolution clearly shows where such a development must lead.

With this, the reciprocal position of the Workers’ Council and Parliament would be defined theoretically and tactically. Where a Workers’ Council is possible (even if within a very limited space), there parliamentarism is superfluous. Indeed, it is dangerous, because it is in its nature that within it only criticism of the bourgeoisie is possible, not the self-criticism of the proletariat. But the proletariat, before reaching the promised land of emancipation, must pass through the trial by fire of this self-criticism, in which it strips itself of the image of the capitalist age, which manifests itself most fully in social democracy, and thereby arrive at its own purification.

G. Lukacs
Former People’s Commissar of Hungary

We have already stated, by way of preface to this interesting study, that it only partially corresponded to our views. In fact, we cannot agree with the considerations contained in the last part, for reasons that would be superfluous to repeat.

We fully agree with what Lenin writes in his letter published in issue 17 of Comunismo, that the fundamental programme that can and must unite the true revolutionaries from the working-class milieu is the struggle for the Soviet regime. Now it is precisely in relation to this fundamental problem that the question of parliamentarism must be examined, namely: whether and to what extent the participation of communists in parliaments is useful to this struggle.

Lenin cuts short the question and unequivocally and repeatedly judges non-participation to be a mistake, basing his categorical statement on two episodes in the Russian movement: the Bolsheviks’ participation in the Constituent Assembly after the fall of tsarism and their participation in the Tsarist Duma. For us, these two episodes cannot be considered on the same footing.

At the time of the Tsarist Duma, it was not a revolutionary period, bourgeois power appeared to be firmly established, and there was no sign of the possibility of a more or less imminent revolutionary conquest of power by the proletariat. The representatives of the proletariat within it criticised the bourgeois system, which could not be done effectively in any other way, and spread revolutionary propaganda.

In Russia, the parliamentary system never functioned in its full development as it did in Western countries, with all its baneful consequences. The Bolsheviks, participating in the Constituent Assembly, brought with them the same spirit of violent revolutionary opposition that had not been able to be weakened during their time in the Tsarist Duma. The value of the revolutionary experience that parliamentary action would have had during the Constituent Assembly is stated too generically, and no one has been able to say what it consisted of. On the other hand, the lifespan of the Constituent Assembly was too short for the experiment to be able to yield results of great value.

To invite communists in democratic countries to engage in propaganda for the Soviets within their parliaments, similar to the revolutionary and republican one that the Bolsheviks carried out in the Duma, means for us not taking into account the different historical period in which the struggle is taking place today, in the midst of a revolutionary period and therefore very different from that of the development and strengthening of bourgeois power, characterised precisely by the birth of that parliamentarism whose normal and complete growth was prevented by the sudden onset of the war and the proletarian revolution.

Lenin says that ‘perhaps this (i.e., revolutionary propaganda for the Soviets in parliaments) is not easy to achieve in England or in any country with a parliamentary system’ and adds: ‘but that is another question’. No, unfortunately, that is precisely the question. If we discuss parliamentarism, it is not for the sake of abstract theories, it is solely because it is an urgent tactical question for us, since we are precisely in one of those countries with a parliamentary system in which bourgeois democracy, as Lenin so aptly puts it, ‘has learned to deceive the people, to deceive them with a thousand manoeuvres, to designate bourgeois parliamentarism as true democracy, etc.’.

In this overestimation of the parliamentary function, bourgeois democracy has found and continues to find its greatest ally in these countries in the socialist parties, which have tenaciously and persistently used parliamentary action to obtain some benefits for the working masses and have educated them to place their complete trust in the persevering work carried out in their interests.

Even now, the Italian Socialist Party (without taking into account the large social-democratic bloc that it deliberately keeps within its ranks and which is decidedly opposed to the Soviet regime), while declaring itself to be mostly maximalist, communist, etc., attaches the utmost importance to parliamentary action and subordinates all other political action to it.

In these countries, preparation for the dictatorship of the proletariat, so profoundly antithetical to bourgeois democracy, cannot be achieved without intense work that is capable of destroying within the masses all the illusions that they harbour about democracy, and that have been instilled in them precisely by the socialist parties; and this work cannot be accomplished without breaking with tradition and abandoning the methods of democracy itself. The obstacle to revolutionary preparation and to the revolutionary spirit of the masses, as a result of long democratic education, is enormous, and the difficulties in overcoming it are proportional to its duration and require much of the energy that parliamentarism absorbs without any result.

Not to even mention that abstentionism also serves to rid the party of careerists, whether acting in good or bad faith, who nest within it, as well as demagogues. The long and complex experience of countries with parliamentary systems is entirely negative with regard to the revolutionary possibility of parliamentary action and it is positive with regard to the dangers of social-democratic deviation, collaborationism, etc. Against this experience, Lenin’s assertion, however authoritative, cannot suffice on its own unless it is supported by experience or convincing arguments.

Comrade Graziadei, showing a few days ago to French socialists the situation of the Italian Socialist Party and making allusion to the function of the Third International, recalled Lenin is so favourable to a reasonable autonomy of practical action in different countries that he congratulated the decision made by the Bologna Congress to participate in the general elections of the bourgeois parliament, a resolution, however, fought against by a committed minority to better interpret the thought of the great politician of socialist Russia.

This minority having defended and amply discussed the thesis of non-participation in legislative elections in this journal even before showing it to the Bologna Congress, some light must be shed on this inaccurate assertion by Comrade Graziadei.

The communist abstentionist tendency has never, no matter what they say, pretended to be the most faithful interpreter of Lenin’s thought. It has always maintained that Russian Bolshevism has nothing new from a theoretical point of view, like Lenin himself has recognized; Bolshevism is in fact nothing other than the return of Marxism at its most rigid and severe: in all his declarations and his polemics, it is to the rest of it that Lenin constantly appeals.

The frequent coincidence between our directives and those of Lenin demonstrate that the two currents stem from the same trunk and develop in the same direction.

If we have supported and continue to support the P.S.I.’s non-participation in parliament and other organs of the bourgeois State, it is because we judge that the current historical period is revolutionary, that in such a period, the specific function of the party is to demolish the bourgeois State, and it must fulfill that task.

Our view coincides exactly with one of the conclusions from Lenin’s report to the Congress of Third International in Moscow.

We put a much greater value on non-participation than did Lenin, for we consider that non-participation is all the more necessary and imperative now that the western countries have been plunged much longer in the delights of the precious democratic civilisation of Turati and his ilk, and its roots are particularly difficult to tear out.

We believe that the evident contradiction between the conclusions of the report and the two letters by the very same Lenin results from the small significance that he attributed to democratic institutions, which in Russia only had a brief and precarious life and, not being familiar with the masses, had not been able to exercise as great an influence on them as it did with us, where it was further reinforced by left parties and in particular by the P.S.I. who for years have worked assiduously to valorize these institutions.

As for autonomy of tactics in diverse nations, we are resolutely against it. For some time, on the contrary, we insist that the representatives of the parties of the Third International reconvene in congress, precisely to reach an agreement on tactics and unity.

The absence of a rigorous uniformity in tactics was one of the causes of the great feebleness of the pre-war International and it has had the most painful and miserable consequences.

To repeat the same error in the Third International would mean exposure to new surprises and cruel disillusionments.

Uniformity of tactics has for us a capital importance. Among questions of tactics, the one of participation or not in bourgeois elections has primary importance, for it marks the clear separation from the partisans of social-democracy and the partisans for the dictatorship of the proletariat: it is on these two profoundly antithetical conceptions that socialists must polarise; any transaction between them is equivocal and engenders confusion. Subsequent connivance of these two groups in the same party is a cause of weakness for both, but it is certainly noxious for the communist tendency that, appearing most recently, must isolate itself and have its own physiognomy, if it wants to make its own place.

All of the comrades of our tendency are thoroughly studying this delicate moment of its life and its development, and they weigh the dangers and, if there are any, advantages of participation in elections to be able to judge the issue seriously.

Over feelings and habits, there are the great duties of the hour, that allow no weaknesses, no tergiversations, no accommodations, but require firm, frank, rectilinear resolutions, exclusively inspired by the supreme interests of the proletarian cause.

‘The revolutionary epoch demands that the proletariat use methods of struggle capable of focusing its militancy – namely, methods of mass struggle which lead logically to direct confrontation and open battle with the bourgeois state machine. All other methods, including the revolutionary utilisation of the bourgeois parliament, must be subordinated to this aim’.

Platform of the Communist International, adopted at the First Congress of the CI, 1919.

‘Our abstentionism stems from the great importance we attach to the political task which, in the present historical period, falls to the Communist Parties: the insurrectionary conquest of political power, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the soviet system. Since the greatest obstacle to this struggle are the traditions and political parties of bourgeois democracy and the offshoots that, through Second International style socialism, bind it to the working masses, we affirm that it is essential to sever all ties between the revolutionary movement and the bourgeois representative bodies: isolation from the rotting carcass of parliamentary democracy’.

The Trends in the Third International, in Il Soviet, 23 May 1920.

The Second Congress of the Communist International had been convened for objectives that went far beyond the question of whether or not to participate in parliament in an anti-parliamentary capacity, recognised by the Bolsheviks as being of secondary importance in comparison with the great tasks facing the revolutionary proletariat as a result of the First Imperialist War and the period of violent social upheaval that it had ushered in.

It was a matter of giving a secure and uniform direction to the parties that had either already joined the International in the year since its foundation, or were preparing to join under the influence of the great Russian revolutionary experience and the irresistible pressure of the masses everywhere entering into a struggle against a capitalism that had demanded the sacrifice of their lives on the battlefields and now rewarded them with misery, unemployment, and violence.

As stated in the preamble to the ‘conditions of admission’, the danger for the young world organisation of the proletariat was not that it would be unable to be a pole of attraction for the revolutionary masses, who everywhere looked to it and to Moscow with enthusiasm and hope, but that it would ‘[t]o a certain extent (...) [become] fashionable’, attracting to its ranks parties and organisations which a long parliamentary, reformist, democratic tradition made resistant to the aims and means sculpturally summarised in the preamble to its Statutes: ‘The Communist International sets itself the aim of fighting with all means, also with arms in hand, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and the creation of an international soviet republic as a transition to the complete abolition of the state (...) considers the dictatorship of the proletariat an essential means for the liberation of humanity from the horrors of capitalism; and regards the Soviet form of government as the historically necessary form of this dictatorship’; it draws from the imperialist war renewed confirmation that ‘the emancipation of labour is neither a local nor a national problem, but one of a social and international character (...) breaks once and for all with the traditions of the Second International which, in reality, only recognised the white race’, setting itself the task, through its organisational mechanism, of ‘securing for the workers of every country the possibility, at any given moment, of obtaining the maximum of aid from the organised workers of the other countries’.

At the moment when Longuet and Dittmann, Macdonald and Serrati were paying verbal homage to these luminous objectives, showing in practice, through their stubborn refusal to break with the right, that they regarded them as a book sealed with seven seals (nor could one suppose, moreover, that, like Paul on the road to Damascus, they had suddenly converted and, dressed as penitents eager to redeem themselves, were now knocking at the doors of the Communist International), it was urgent to raise an insurmountable barrier both against the infiltration of opportunism into the ranks of an army that had taken to the field to destroy it, and against its possible return in strength, in less ardent situations, for not having drawn, from the outset, with sufficient clarity the insurmountable boundary, carved out by history within the workers’ movement, between gradualism and communism, between reform and revolution, between democracy and class dictatorship. In short, it was urgent to re-establish the cornerstones of integral Marxist doctrine, breaking through the treacherous right and the insidious centre and, a task a thousand times easier, hammering these fundamental principles, these indispensable weapons of revolutionary victory, into the young and healthy proletarian forces which, in reaction to them, harboured serious prejudices on the question of power, the party, and dictatorship.

All the theses of the Second Congress were aimed at this work of clearing the ground of the weeds of reformism and, at the same time, of the diseases generated in the opposite direction – anarcho-syndicalism, workerism, anti-partyism – from its long devastating action on the role of the communist party in the proletarian revolution. Like the Statutes and the famous 21 Points, they were focused on parliamentarism, the national and colonial question, work in the economic organisations of the proletariat, the conditions for the creation of Soviets, and the fundamental tasks of the C.I. It is well known that the communist abstentionist fraction not only gave it enthusiastic support, but also made a significant contribution, fighting (largely successfully) so that the conditions for admission were not merely attenuated – as it seemed at times that was the intention – but made much more binding and categorical. It was able to do so because, as documented in the texts published in volumes I and I bis of our History of the Left, it had made those key principles its banner not only since 1920, and the theses it adopted in May in Florence reaffirmed them without any possibility of misunderstanding, in a parallelism that no international current could yet boast with the fundamental theses delivered to history in those years – to mention but a few – in Lenin’s State and Revolution and The Renegade Kautsky, and in Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism.

Disagreement persisted, and continued to persist, over the question of ‘revolutionary parliamentarism’, but no one – least of all the super-opportunist shopkeepers [of the PCI] who claim to be communists – has the right to transform this tactical disagreement into an antithesis of principle, or – which is the height of impudence – to set themselves up as champions of Leninist orthodoxy by hiding behind a false loyalty to the directives advocated by Lenin in the parliamentary field. A parallel reading of the two theses – revolutionary-parliamentarist and Marxist abstentionist – is enough to ascertain that the judgement on the counter-revolutionary function of the parliamentary institution is identical, the rejection of it as a way to reach socialism and as a form of class dictatorship is identical, and the objective is identical: to overthrow it. The disagreement concerns whether or not to use the electoral and parliamentary platform – nothing more than a platform! – as a subsidiary tool of agitation and propaganda for its destruction.

The negative judgement of the Marxist abstentionist Left, supported by arguments that have nothing in common with those of anarchism, syndicalism, or workerism, is based on the non-academic and non-metaphysical assessment of long decades of proletarian struggles in the advanced West, where the parliamentary and democratic disease has deeper roots and the proletarian revolution gestating in the bowels of the capitalist economy and society no longer has to graft itself, as in Russia, onto the trunk of a belated bourgeois revolution; where, therefore, an even more direct tactic than the very rigid one used by the Bolsheviks in preparation for the conquest of power is required. The lesson of the Russian communists had been that, marvellous, of the integral application of the Marxist programme in a situation that, isolated from its global context, would have justified – according to the pedantry of Kautsky or Plekhanov in 1917 – a less ‘harshness’, a less radical use of the anti-democratic and anti-parliamentary broom. In the West – the Left reasoned – the festering disease required more drastic remedies, and one of these, the refusal to ‘use’ the electoral and parliamentary mechanism for any purpose, even if openly subversive, would have the additional merit of promoting a rapid and perhaps immediate selection of communists from the many variants of crypto-reformism.

It is not irreverence on the part of those of us who defend Lenin – that is, Marxism – tooth and nail against the countless falsifications of the collitorti shamelessly invoking his name, to say that Marxist abstentionists did not receive a response to this crucial argument at the time, either from him or, even less so, from Bukharin, as can be clearly seen from the speeches we reproduce below. These are marred by the concern – in itself sacrosanct – that from correct premises (the phrase is Lenin’s) incorrect conclusions may be drawn in the sense of anarchist, syndicalist, and workerist infantilism, and, while they recognise that such an accusation cannot be levelled at the starting point of the Marxist abstentionists’ theses, they avoid entering into the heart of the fundamental question of tactical deductions in the Western world, in order to break yet another, very justified lance against arguments that are not ours, but others’.

The polemic against the infantile abstractism of those who preach the rejection of ‘any compromise’ on principle is sacrosanct, but the reproach did not strike us. Commemorating Lenin in February 1924, the Left itself will say (Lenin on the Path of Revolution, speech reproduced in No. 3, 1924, of Prometeo): ‘What is Lenin’s essential criticism of the “left” errors? He condemns every tactical evaluation which, instead of referring to the positive realism of our historical dialectic and the effective value of tactical attitudes and expedients, becomes a prisoner of naive, abstract, moralistic, mystical, aesthetic formulas, from which suddenly spring results that are completely foreign to our method. The whole rebuke to the pseudo-revolutionary phraseology which often arbitrarily takes the place of the real Marxist arguments is not only just, but is perfectly in tune with the whole framework of the grandiose work of restoring revolutionary values “in earnest”, due to Lenin, and which we here vaguely try to trace in its synthetic outline. All tactical arguments based on the phobia of certain words, of certain gestures, of certain contacts, on a pretended purity and uncontaminability of communists in action, are laughable stuff, and constitute the foolish infantilism against which Lenin fights, the child of bourgeois theoretical prejudices with an anti-materialist flavour. To substitute a moral doctrine for Marxist tactics is balderdash’.

Anxious that we – recognised as identifiable with the anti-parliamentarians of anarchist background – should fall into their idealistic unrealism, the speakers used polemical arguments which we knew to be just that, but which risked recreating darkness where light had just been shed.

The battle against ‘trade union abstentionism’ is sacrosanct, but invoking the vital necessity for communists to be present and active in workers’ unions, even if led by reformists and tending to integrate themselves into the bourgeois state mechanism, as an argument in favour of revolutionary participation in parliament, meant – or rather could make one believe – against the very intentions of those who used this polemical weapon – that it was legitimate to place on the same level an organisation of pure proletarians and an institution of bourgeois government, the latter, among other things, to be destroyed in order to raise the proletarian dictatorship upon it, the former destined to remain, albeit with a different function, after the conquest of power. And it meant equating the action of agitation and propaganda carried out within the trade union, i.e. within the ranks of one’s own class and on the terrain where the first fundamental impulses of the conflict between capital and labour arise – the terrain of economic interests and material determinations – with the action to be carried out within a bourgeois political organisation, and in an interclassist environment and structure, organically designed to nourish among proletarians the illusion that there is common ground between the classes, and that ‘popular sovereignty’ is not a myth.

The polemic against those who only recognise the formula ‘either revolution or nothing’ is sacrosanct, but it does not touch the current that will lead the party in 1921-22 and which, in the Rome Theses of 1922 and Lyon 1926, will seek to give organic systematisation to all the problems of international communist tactics, including and above all to those relating to non-revolutionary situations. The rebuke to the windbag extremism of those who were ‘building’ Soviets on paper (and against whom we had long been fighting) was more than justified, but it was dangerous – not because of the conclusions that we knew very well Lenin would not draw, but because of those that the false miniature Lenins of 1932 would be ready to draw – to say that the Soviets are not always within reach, parliament, for the moment, is; as if the former were not organs of struggle and proletarian power and the latter an organ of bourgeois rule, and as if, by that token, the opportunists could not invoke (as the representative of the communist abstentionist fraction observed with astonishment and concern) the possibility of going, one fine day, into government under a bourgeois regime.

As for the doubt that our abstentionism expressed an infantile and, from the revolutionary point of view, criminal fear of responsibility, let the pages that follow (part IV) serve to dispel it – if necessary – and from which – if Bukharin had ever revisited his critical assessment of the parliamentary activity of the communist parties in later years – he would have had to conclude that the only ones who had shown serious and consistent application of revolutionary parliamentarism were... the abstentionists, because they were the only ones who did not bring with them into the electoral campaigns or into the Chamber (when they went there out of discipline, without renouncing anything of their own point of view) the ballast of democratic nostalgias, because they were the only ones ready, there as in the direct clash between the classes, to fight openly.

History has tragically proven that our bitter forebodings about the possibility that from questionable tactical conclusions (which, for us and for Lenin, were not such as to justify a split) and from a polemical audacity in Lenin never separated from the most ‘sectarian’ and ‘dogmatic’ fidelity to principles, incorrect premises and conclusions could be drawn and finally all Marxism might be lost, theory and practice. We cried out during six years of struggle within the International that Lenin’s ‘realism’ should not serve as a pretext for the progressive abandonment of principles.

We also said in the aforementioned speech of 1924: ‘We refuse to have Lenin’s Marxist realism translated into the formula that any tactical expedient is good for our purposes. Tactics in turn affect those who employ them, and it cannot be said that a true communist, with the mandate of the true International and the true communist party, can go anywhere with confidence that he will not fail (...) Doesn’t “stretching” the extent of tactical projects beyond all limits come up against our own theoretical and programmatic conclusions, the culmination of a true realistic examination controlled by continuous and extensive experience? We consider illusory and contrary to our principles a tactic which dreams that it can substitute the overthrow and demolition of the bourgeois state machine, a cornerstone so vigorously demonstrated by Lenin, with the penetration of who knows what Trojan horse into the machine itself, the illusion – truly pseudo-revolutionary and petty-bourgeois – of blowing it up with the traditional stone. The situation, which has ended in ridicule, of the Saxon communist ministers [1923] shows this: that one cannot take the capitalist state fortress with stratagems that spare the revolutionary masses a frontal assault. It is a grave mistake to make the proletariat believe that one possesses such expedients to ease the hard way, to “economise” on its effort and sacrifice (...) In Lenin, we affirm, the tactical evaluation, even daring if you want in the sense that he less than anyone else allowed himself to be guided by extemporaneous sentimental suggestions and formalistic stubbornness, never abandoned the revolutionary platform: that is to say, its co-ordination to the supreme and integral aim of the universal revolution’.

The Communist International certainly did not degenerate because Lenin believed in 1920 in the favourable possibility of revolutionary parliamentarism in the ‘democratic’ countries of Western Europe; but, in the course of the long degeneration in which men, parties, and programmes had to undergo the relentless test of counter-revolution, history has irrevocably judged this distant tactical controversy to be nothing but confusion on the part of the renegades of communism.

The attitude of the socialist parties towards parliamentarism was in the beginning, in the period of the First International, that of using bourgeois parliaments for the purpose of agitation. Participation in parliament was considered from the point of view of the development of class consciousness, i.e. of awakening the class hostility of the proletariat to the ruling class.

This relationship was transformed, not through the influence of theory, but through the influence of political development. Through the uninterrupted increase of the productive forces and the extension of the area of capitalist exploitation, capitalism, and with it the parliamentary state, gained continually increasing stability. Hence there arose: The adaptation of the parliamentary tactics of the socialist parties to the ‘organic’ legislative work of the bourgeois parliament and the ever greater importance of the struggle for reforms in the framework of capitalism, the domination of the so-called minimum programme of social democracy, the transformation of the maximum programme into a debating formula for an exceedingly distant ‘final goal’. On this basis then developed the phenomena of parliamentary careerism, of corruption and of the open or concealed betrayal of the most elementary interests of the working class.

The attitude of the Communist International towards parliamentarism is determined, not by a new doctrine, but by the change in the role of parliament itself. In the previous epoch parliament performed to a certain degree a historically progressive task as a tool of developing capitalism. Under the present conditions of unbridled imperialism, however, parliament has been transformed into a tool for lies, deception, violence and enervating chatter. In the face of imperialist devastation, plundering, rape, banditry and destruction, parliamentary reforms, robbed of any system, permanence and method, lose any practical significance for the toiling masses. Like the whole of bourgeois society, parliamentarism too is losing its stability. The sudden transition from the organic epoch to the critical creates the basis for a new tactic of the proletariat in the field of parliamentarism. Thus the Russian Labour Party (the Bolsheviks) had already worked out the nature of revolutionary parliamentarism in the previous period because since 1905 Russia had been shaken from its political and social equilibrium and had entered the period of storms and shocks.

To the extent that some socialists, who tend towards communism, point out that the moment for the revolution has not yet come in their countries, and refuse to split from parliamentary opportunists, they proceed, in the essence of the matter, from the conscious assessment of the coming epoch as an epoch of the relative stability of imperialist society, and assume that on this basis a coalition with the Turatis and the Longuets can bring practical results in the struggle for reforms.

Theoretically clear communism, on the other hand, will correctly estimate the character of the present epoch: highest stage of capitalism; imperialist self-negation and self-destruction; uninterrupted growth of civil war, etc. The forms of political relations and groupings can be different in different countries. The essence however remains everywhere one and the same; what is at stake for us is the immediate political and technical preparations for the insurrection of the proletariat, the destruction of bourgeois power and the establishment of the new proletarian power.

At present, parliament, for communists, can in no way become the arena for the struggle for reforms, for the amelioration of the position of the working class, as was the case at certain times in the previous period. The centre of gravity of political life has at present been removed finally and completely beyond the bounds of parliament. On the other hand the bourgeoisie is forced, not only by reason of its relations to the toiling masses, but also by reason of the complex mutual relations within the bourgeois class, to carry out part of its measures one way or another in parliament, where the various cliques haggle for power, reveal their strong sides, betray their weak sides expose themselves, etc.

Therefore it is the historical task of the working class to wrest this apparatus from the hands of the ruling class, to smash it, to destroy it, and replace it with new proletarian organs of power. At the same time, however, the revolutionary general staff of the class has a strong interest in having its scouts in the parliamentary institutions of the bourgeoisie in order to make this task of destruction easier. Thus is demonstrated quite clearly the basic difference between the tactic of the communist, who enters parliament with revolutionary aims, and the tactics of the socialist parliamentarian. The latter proceeds from the assumption of the relative stability and the indeterminate duration of the existing rule. He makes it his task to achieve reform by every means, and he is interested in seeing to it that every achievement is suitably assessed by the masses as a merit of parliamentary socialism. (Turati, Longuet and Co.).

In the place of the old adaptation to parliamentarism the new parliamentarism emerges as a tool for the annihilation of parliamentarism in general. The disgusting traditions of the old parliamentary tactics have, however, repelled a few revolutionary elements into the camp of the opponents of parliamentarism on principle (IWW) and of the revolutionary syndicalists (KAPD). The Second Congress therefore adopts the following Theses.

1. Parliamentarism as a state system has become a ‘democratic’ form of the rule of the bourgeoisie, which at a certain stage of development requires the fiction of popular representation which outwardly appears to be an organisation of a ‘popular will’ that stands outside the classes, but in essence is a machine for oppression and subjugation in the hands of ruling capital.

2. Parliament is a definite form of state order; therefore it cannot at all be the form of communist society, which knows neither classes nor class struggle nor any state power.

3. Nor can parliamentarism be a form of proletarian state administration in the period of transition from the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie to the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the moment of sharpened class struggle, in the civil war, the proletariat must inevitably build up its state organisation as a fighting organisation, into which the representatives of the previous ruling classes are not permitted. In this stage any fiction of the ‘popular will’ is directly harmful to the working class. The proletariat does not need any parliamentary sharing of power, it is harmful to it. The form of the proletarian dictatorship is the soviet republic.

4. The bourgeois parliaments, one of the most important apparatuses of the bourgeois state machine, cannot as such in the long run be taken over, just as the proletariat cannot at all take over the proletarian state. The task of the proletariat consists in breaking up the bourgeois state machine, destroying it, and with it the parliamentary institutions, be they republican or a constitutional monarchy.

5. It is no different with the local government institutions of the bourgeoisie, which it is theoretically incorrect to counterpose to the state organs. In reality they are similar apparatuses of the state machine of the bourgeoisie, which must be destroyed by the revolutionary proletariat and replaced by local soviets of workers’ deputies.

6. Consequently communism denies parliamentarism as a form of the society of the future. It denies it as a form of the class dictatorship of the proletariat. It denies the possibility of taking over parliament in the long run; it sets itself the aim of destroying parliamentarism. Therefore there can only be a question of utilising the bourgeois state institutions for the purpose of their destruction. The question can be posed in this, and only in this, way.

7. Every class struggle is a political struggle, for in the final analysis it is a struggle for power. Any strike at all that spreads over the whole country becomes a threat to the bourgeois state and thus takes on a political character. Every attempt to overthrow the bourgeoisie and to destroy its state means carrying out a political fight. Creating a proletarian state apparatus for administration and for the oppression of the resisting bourgeoisie, of whatever type that apparatus will be, means conquering political power.

8. Consequently the question of political power is not at all identical with the question of the attitude towards parliamentarism. The former is a general question of the proletarian class struggle, which is characterised by the intensification of small and partial struggles to the general struggle for the overthrow of the capitalist order as a whole.

9. The most important method of struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, i.e. against its state power, is above all mass action. Mass actions are organised and led by the revolutionary mass organisations (trades unions, parties, soviets) of the proletariat under the general leadership of a unified, disciplined, centralised Communist Party. Civil war is war. In this war the proletariat must have its bold officer corps and its strong general staff, who direct all operations in all theatres of the struggle.

10. The mass struggle is a whole system of developing actions sharpening in their form and logically leading to the insurrection against the capitalist state. In this mass struggle, which develops into civil war, the leading party of the proletariat must as a rule consolidate all its legal positions by making them into auxiliary bases of its revolutionary activity and subordinating these positions to the plan of the main campaign, the campaign of the mass struggle.

11. The rostrum of the bourgeois parliament is such an auxiliary base. The argument that parliament is a bourgeois state institution cannot at all be used against participation in the parliamentary struggle. The Communist Party does not enter these institutions in order to carry out organic work there, but in order to help the masses from inside parliament to break up the state machine and parliament itself through action (for example the activity of Liebknecht in Germany, of the Bolsheviks in the Tsarist Duma, in the ‘Democratic Conference’, in Kerensky’s ‘Pre-Parliament’, in the ‘Constituent Assembly’ and in the town Dumas, and finally the activity of the Bulgarian Communists).

12. This activity in parliament, which consists mainly in revolutionary agitation from the parliamentary rostrum, in unmasking opponents, in the ideological unification of the masses who still, particularly in backward areas, are captivated by democratic ideas, look towards the parliamentary rostrum, etc., should be totally and completely subordinated to the aims and tasks of the mass struggle outside parliament.

Participation in election campaigns and revolutionary propaganda from the parliamentary rostrum is of particular importance for winning over those layers of the workers who previously, like, say, the rural toiling masses, stood far away from political life.

13. Should the communists have the majority in local government institutions, they should a) carry out revolutionary opposition to the bourgeois central power; b) do everything to be of service to the poorer population (economic measures, introduction or attempted introduction of an armed workers’ militia, etc.); c) at every opportunity show the limitations placed on really big changes by the bourgeois state power; d) on this basis develop the sharpest revolutionary propaganda without fearing the conflict with the power of the state; e) under certain circumstances replace the local administration by local workers’ councils. The whole activity of the Communists in the local administration must therefore be part of the general work of disrupting the capitalist system.

14. Election campaigns should not be carried out in the spirit of the hunt for the maximum number of parliamentary seats, but in the spirit of the revolutionary mobilisation of the masses for the slogans of the proletarian revolution. Election campaigns should be carried out by the whole mass of the Party members and not only by an elite of the Party. It is necessary to utilise all mass actions (strikes, demonstrations, ferment among the soldiers and sailors, etc.) that are taking place at the time, and to come into close touch with them. It is necessary to draw all the proletarian mass organisations into active work.

15. In observing all these conditions, as well as those in a special instruction, parliamentary activity is the direct opposite of that petty politicking done by the social democratic parties of every country, who go into parliament in order to support this ‘democratic’ institution. or at best to ‘take it over’. The Communist Party can only be exclusively in favour of the revolutionary utilisation of parliament in the spirit of Karl Liebknecht and of the Bolsheviks.

16. ‘Anti-parliamentarism’ on principle, in the sense of absolute and categorical rejection of participation in elections and revolutionary parliamentary activity, is therefore a naive, childish doctrine below any criticism, a doctrine which occasionally has a basis in healthy nausea at politicking parliamentarians, but which does not see at the same time the possibility of a revolutionary parliamentarism. Moreover, this doctrine is often linked with a completely incorrect conception of the role of the party, which sees in the Communist Party not the centralised shock troops of the workers, but a decentralised system of loosely allied groups.

17. On the other hand an absolute recognition of the necessity of actual elections and of actual participation in parliamentary sessions under all circumstances by no means flows from the recognition in principle of parliamentary activity. That is dependent upon a whole series of specific conditions. Withdrawal from parliament can be necessary given a specific combination of these conditions. This is what the Bolsheviks did when they withdrew from the Pre-parliament in order to break it up, to rob it of any strength and boldly to counterpose to it the St. Petersburg Soviet on the eve of the insurrection. They did the same in the Constituent Assembly on the day of its dissolution, raising the Third Congress of Soviets to the high point of political events. According to circumstances, a boycott of the elections and the immediate violent removal of not only the whole bourgeois state apparatus but also the bourgeois parliamentary clique, or on the other hand participation in the elections while parliament itself is boycotted, etc., can be necessary.

18. In this way the Communist Party, which recognises the necessity of participating in the elections not only to the central parliament, but also to the organs of local self-government and work in these institutions as a general role, must resolve this problem concretely, starting from the specific peculiarities of any given moment. A boycott of elections or of parliament and withdrawal from the latter is mainly permissible when the preconditions for the immediate transition to the armed struggle and the seizure of power are already present.

19. In the process, one should always bear in mind the relative unimportance of this question. Since the centre of gravity lies in the struggle for state power carried out outside parliament, it goes without saying that the question of the proletarian dictatorship and the mass struggle for it cannot be placed on the same level as the particular question of the utilisation of parliament.

20. The Communist International therefore emphasises decisively that it holds every split or attempted split within the Communist Parties in this direction and only for this reason to be a serious error. The Congress calls on all elements who base themselves on the recognition of the mass struggle for the proletarian dictatorship under the leadership of the centralised party of the revolutionary proletariat exerting its influence on all the mass organisations of the workers, to strive for the complete unity of the communist elements despite possible differences of opinion over the question of the utilisation of bourgeois parliaments.

(From Manifestes, Thèses et Résolutions des quatre premiers Congrès Mondiaux de l’Internazionale Communiste, Paris, 1934).

Comrades!

First of all I ask your forgiveness for my German. It will not be the German language at all, but a substitute language. We have shared the work in the following way: First of all I shall report on the principal questions raised and the appropriate solution of these questions: secondly Comrade Wolfstein will report on the work of our Commission, and then comes the report by Comrade Bordiga, who believes that in this epoch of the destruction of the world capitalist system in general we cannot take part in any parliaments at all.

And now to the matter in hand. We must, whenever we pose any problem, always start from the concrete epoch. And here we have a principal difference between the previous epoch of peaceful development and the present one, which is the epoch of the collapse of the capitalist system, the epoch of the class war, civil war and the proletarian dictatorship.

The ‘peaceful’ epoch – and even this epoch, it must be said, was not peaceful if we take the colonies into account – can be characterised as the epoch of a certain community of interest between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. This community of interest rested, particularly with the proletariat of the highly developed capitalist countries, on the fact that the big capitalist countries followed terrible imperialist policies. For that reason the capitalist classes of the countries in question were in a position to make super-profits and from these super-profits to pay out higher wages to the proletariat of their own countries. What in his day Kautsky said, that imperialist policies were of no advantage at all to the working class, is in principle incorrect. If we were to regard the matter from the standpoint of the temporary interests of the working class, one could claim that imperialist policies brought a certain advantage, and that was the higher wages of the workers which could be paid out of the capitalists’ super-profits.

If we can regard this epoch as the epoch of a certain community of interest between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, then we are thus given a second characteristic of this epoch, that is to say that it was also the epoch of the growing over of the workers’ organisations into the bourgeois state apparatus. What the reformists described as the growth of socialism was the growing over of the working class and also of the workers’ organisations into the bourgeois state apparatus. This phenomenon emerged particularly blatantly in the period of state capitalism, when in fact practically all the workers’ organisations and quite large workers’ organisations – appeared as components of the state-capitalist state apparatus. If we consider the great political parties of the working class, the yellow social democracy and the trades unions during the war, we can find that all these mass organisations at that time became components of the capitalist state. They were nationalised in a bourgeois way. The starting point of this development lay already in the period before the war. It was implicit in the process of growing over into capitalism just as before the war almost all the organisations of the working class were in this process of growing over. Thus we can also claim that the parliamentary representatives of the working class and the factions of the workers’ parties grew over into the bourgeois parliament. Instead of being something that was directed against the system as a whole in general and against the bourgeois parliament, they became a component of the parliamentary apparatus as such. That was the earlier epoch of peaceful capitalism. We also see such phenomena at the beginning of the war.

Then came the new epoch of the collapse of capitalism and the civil war. As far as the working class as a class is concerned it has, in this process, lost its earlier, rather imperialist ideology. This ideology, which reached its highest point in the slogan of ‘national defence’, collapsed and all the phenomena consequent upon it collapsed with it. Instead of being components of the capitalist system, the workers’ organisations gradually became instruments of the class struggle. Thus, from being tools upon which the capitalist system rested, they became instruments of its destruction. Parallel with this occurred the transformation of the parliamentary factions which, from being a component of the whole parliamentary apparatus, became instruments of its destruction. And thus the new parliamentarism arose, whose supporters we Communists can and must be.

Comrades, I shall not by any means comment on all the paragraphs of our Theses, which are very detailed. I shall select a few main points and speak about them. And then we can solve the disputed questions.

If we have before us these two epochs of completely different character, then we can already say a priori that the process of transition from one epoch to the other, from the old parliamentarism to the new, must be regarded as a process which will bring with it at every concrete moment various remnants of earlier conceptions among the working class. The more this process develops, the more these remnants will disappear. But now we can see these left-overs of earlier conceptions in many parties very clearly, even in those that are already to be found in the Communist International. In general, opportunism and the vacillating parties are still present in the working class, the ideology of collaboration with the bourgeoisie still exists in part, and that is reflected in the presence of the earlier parliamentarism.

Let us consider first the whole picture of the parliamentary activity of the working class. Let us take the composition of the various parliamentary factions, and we will gain a peculiar picture. For example the USPD: This party now has 82 members in parliament. But if, in the framework of this party, which of itself is already rather moderate and opportunist, we were to consider the composition of its parliamentary faction, we would obtain more or less the following figures: of these 82 members of the parliamentary faction 20 belong more or less directly to the right, about 40 to the ‘swamp’, and more or less 20 to the left USPD. Let us take the Italian Party and its parliamentary faction. This party belongs to us and is in the Communist International: If we were to divide the members of this parliamentary faction into three, that is to say into the supporters of Turati and Lazzari, those of Serrati, and the so-called Bombaccists, then we would have the following figures: 30 per cent of the whole faction belong to the Turati tendency, 55 per cent to the centre and 15 per cent to the left. Comrade Serrati has given me a few other figures. In his opinion the reformists count 41 seats. That is an official figure given by Comrade Serrati and represents a very big percentage within the Communist Party. If we consider the French Party we have the following figures: 68 parliamentarians, among them 40 explicit reformists within a party which is already opportunist, and 26 in the centre – not in our sense of the word, here the word means the centre of the French Party, which means the centre to the power 4! As for the Communists, they have perhaps two seats. In the Norwegian Party, which is quite a good party, the parliamentary faction has 19 members. Of these, approximately 11 are right wingers, 6 centrists and 2 are Communists. The Swedish parliamentary faction has quite a few comrades who cannot be called Communists in any sense. To sum up then, a rather sad picture. The composition of the parliamentary factions is below any criticism. And if we consider the cause of this phenomenon, then it is given in the fact that these parties even as parties are not sufficiently clearly communist, because quite a large number of opportunists are to be found within them.

I shall now proceed from the composition of the parties to the politics, that is to say their parliamentary policies, and here we can justifiably claim that these policies ‘are as far from revolutionary parliamentarism as heaven is from earth. I shall take the USPD as a model. During the war, when the thing to do was to call on the peoples to subdue the war, they appealed to the government. I remember a conversation with Comrade Haase. He wanted to prove to us, when we were in Berlin, that he was carrying out a really revolutionary parliamentarism. As the best proof of this he quoted one of his speeches in which he claimed that the German government had committed an abuse in sending German troops to Finland. These troops could be misused. Thus, if these troops are sent to the French front that is not an abuse, only sending them to Finland is an abuse. That is a proof not of revolutionary but of opportunist parliamentarism.

Let us take everything that has been written and said in the German parliament about the question of nationalisation. It is laughable. If we look at these speeches we see no trace of a revolutionary point of view. And as late as 1920, as I know, Comrade Däumig represented this opportunist way of posing the question in writing on the plans for nationalisation. Or, for example, the speech on the Constitution by Oscar Cohn, the USPD representative. This speech is rather long, but it contains not a trace of the revolutionary way of posing the question. Here we hear that the Constitution is sick. Not a word on Noske. That is the method of Kautsky. For when he discusses the question of bourgeois democracy he talks about apes and wild men. The speech by Comrade Oscar Cohn is just the same. Here our principled point of view could be developed in quite a revolutionary way. Let us take for example the story of the Commission of Inquiry into those who were responsible for the war. The Independents want to investigate the question of guilt in a parliamentary way through this pure farce, which was carried out on the basis of the material supplied by the German Foreign Office. In this, however, there is not the slightest trace of any sort of revolutionary activity at all.

Let us take Comrade Oscar Cohns’s motion in the German parliament on the abolition of the law of protective custody. This law applied only to political prisoners. We have everything possible here except the revolutionary standpoint of the revolutionary Communist. Let us take what we have heard here in this room from the comrades of the USPD. When they were excusing themselves for not having sent us an answer in time, Comrade Dittmann, or another representative, if I am not mistaken, said: ‘We had elections at the time, and because we had such a big thing as the elections, we could not immediately compose an answer’. That is a crying example that kills the comrades who quote it. If they have the elections on the one hand and the cause of the whole International on the other, then it is clear to every revolutionary that he must fight the elections under the watchword of the International. To set up a contradiction between the International and the elections is anything you like but nothing that has anything to do with membership of the Communist International. We can follow through the whole parliamentary activity of the USPD comrades without ever finding clear, conscious activity in the sense that we mean. If we look at the French Socialist Party or other parties we will find the same sad picture. I shall not draw your attention to this since it suffices to quote one example in order to reconstruct the whole position. In all these phenomena, not only in the composition of the parliamentary factions but also in their tactics, remnants of the earlier parliamentarism show themselves which we must literally root out, for as long as we have this practice and these methods and such a composition of the parliamentary factions, we will not be able to develop revolutionary activity. To go into revolutionary struggle with such rubbish is absolutely out of the question.

Now we come to another question, that is to say the question of anti-parliamentarism in principle. This anti-parliamentarism is the legitimate child of the opportunism described above and the earlier parliamentary activity with all its sins. We much prefer this anti-parliamentarism on principle to opportunist parliamentarism. We can, I think, distinguish two main groups among the supporters of anti-parliamentarism: One group which really denies any participation in parliamentary activity, and the second group, which is against parliamentarism because of a special and specific assessment of the possibilities of parliamentary activity. In our epoch we can characterise the American IWW as the representatives of the first tendency. Comrade Bordiga will speak here today as the representative of the second tendency.

As far as anti-parliamentarism on principle is concerned, it can be claimed of the first group that these theories or these tactics, if they are followed theoretically, are based on a complete confusion of the basic concepts of political life. The IWW for example has no clear concept at all of what the political struggle really is. They do not think that to have a general strike of an economic nature, which in fact is directed against the bourgeois state, is a political struggle, if it is not led by the political party but by the trades unions. Thus they absolutely do not understand what political struggle really means. They confuse the political struggle with parliamentary activity. They think that by the political struggle can be understood only parliamentary activity or the activity of parliamentary parties. It is quite clear that this negative attitude towards parliamentarism rests on various errors of a principled nature, above all on the false concept of what political struggle really is. Looked at historically, American parliamentarism displays so much vileness and corruption that many honest elements pass over to the camp of anti-parliamentarism in principle. The worker does not think abstractly at all, he is a rather crude empiricist, and if it cannot be proved to him empirically that revolutionary parliamentarism is possible, he simply rejects the whole thing. Such elements who have only seen the vileness go over to the camp of anti-parliamentarism on principle on a very large scale.

I come now to the second group, which is represented here in this room by Bordiga. He tells us that his standpoint is on no account to be confused with the standpoint of anti-parliamentarism on principle and I must say that, looked at formally, his standpoint has all the theoretical starting-points, but that’s all. Comrade Bordiga claims that precisely from the standpoint of the present epoch of the mass struggles of the proletariat, from the standpoint of the assessment of this epoch as an epoch of civil wars, only from this specific historical standpoint, one cannot enter parliament. That is what he thinks. But I think that there is a bridge in principle between the tactics of Comrade Bordiga and the tactics of those who are against it in principle.

Comrade Bordiga has worked out his own Theses, and in them we read for example: ‘It is necessary to shatter the bourgeois lie according to which every clash between opposing political parties, every struggle for power, must necessarily take place within the framework of the democratic mechanism, that is through elections and parliamentary debates. We cannot succeed in destroying that lie without breaking with the traditional method of calling the workers to vote in elections side by side with members of the bourgeoisie, and without putting an end to the spectacle where the delegates of the proletariat act on the same parliamentary ground as the delegates of its exploiters’. Here Comrade Bordiga says that if the delegate of the working class is to be found physically in the same room as a bourgeois, he is, ipso facto, working side by side with the bourgeois class. That is a naive idea that is typical of the IWW.

At the end of the 9th Thesis we read: ‘For that reason the Communist Parties will never obtain great success in propagandizing the revolutionary Marxist method if the severing of all contacts with the machinery of bourgeois democracy is not put at the basis of their work for the dictatorship of the proletariat and the workers’ councils’. So physical contact in a room is in itself original sin, and then the whole thing goes wrong. I think, however, that this mistake will become even bigger because we do not always have the workers’ councils. Comrade Bordiga agrees with us that we cannot organise the workers’ councils straight away in every country. The councils are fighting organisations of the proletariat. If no conditions exist to carry out this direct struggle there is no sense in setting up these councils. Then they are transformed into cultural appendages of other institutions which become absolutely reformist, and the great danger exists that the workers’ councils will then so to speak be organised after the French pattern, where a couple of people come together and a humanitarian-pacifist organisation is formed.

And none of these organisations yet exists at all, they are not yet given realities. But the bourgeois parliament is a given reality. We say in our Theses that we must have our revolutionary agents here in these institutions, here our proletarian scouts must work side by side with the bourgeois class. Here a completely negative notion is given which is not logically worked out, but which is comprehensible from the emotional point of view. From the standpoint of revolutionary logic and expediency the decisive factor in the whole question is that we Communists claim that there is a possibility of going into the bourgeois parliaments to try to blow them up from inside. Earlier, when the parliamentary factions grew over into parliamentary institutions, they became parts of the system as such. We, however, want to develop our activity in such a way that an ever-sharper contradiction arises between the parliamentary system and our faction. We do not need to say that what is primary for us is that our parliamentary activity must be co-ordinated with the masses of the working class.

Let us follow Comrade Bordiga’s Theses further. First of all a small comment. I claim that anti-parliamentarism on principle exists in some comrades because they are afraid to emerge as revolutionary parliamentarians, as this ground is too dangerous for their liking and because they try in every possible way to run away from this most difficult revolutionary task. Big parties are quoted in order to prove that this activity is completely impossible. I do not say this of Comrade Bordiga; but in his faction there are such elements and when he comes to us and says in his 12th Thesis: ‘The very nature of the debates which have parliament and other democratic organs for their theatre excludes every possibility of passing from a criticism of the policy of the opposing parties, to a propaganda against the very principle of parliamentarism, and to an action which would overstep parliamentary rules’.

Comrade Bordiga says that it is technically impossible to exploit parliament; but that has to be proved. Nobody would say that we had better conditions under Tsarism in our Duma than today in the Italian Chamber of Deputies. Nobody has tried to talk like that, as you know. Why have you already claimed a priori that it is impossible? Try it first; have a few scandals; get yourselves arrested; have a political trial in the grand style. You have done none of this. This tactic must be developed to an increasing degree. And I claim that this is possible. French comrades, for example Comrade Lefebvre, claim that it is impossible to say a sharp word against Clémenceau in the French Chamber. Nobody has tried it, nobody has made the attempt. I think there is simple fear here. People say: yes, that is too dangerous. We can only carry out purely legal work in propaganda. You have unmasked yourselves here. Because this ground is too dangerous you want to run away from this difficult task.

Comrade Bordiga, in paragraph 10, as an argument against parliamentary election, says the following: ‘[T]he very great importance which is attached in practice to the electoral campaign and its results, and the fact that for a long period the party has to devote to that cause all its means and all its resources in men, in the press, and even in money, helps to strengthen the feeling that this is the true central activity to achieve the aims of communism; on the other hand, it leads to complete cessation of the work of revolutionary organization and preparation. It gives to the party organization a technical character quite in opposition to the requirements of revolutionary work, legal as well as illegal’. Perhaps something like that exists in Italy, but you must prove to us why that is logically necessary. If you adopt Comrade Dittmann’s point of view and say: ‘The election campaign is an opposite to the question of the International’, then you are right.

But our standpoint consists in developing the whole election campaign from the revolutionary point of view. Then there can be no such opposite. It is not a logical contradiction when we say that we must develop the whole election campaign under the sharpest revolutionary slogans in order to go to the villages and to work where there is no political interest and in order to weld the people together as a mass organisation, to keep all these campaigns of various kinds in contact. ‘Yes’, you say, ‘that is precisely to kill off revolutionary work’. Comrade Bordiga wrote that because he has seen very little of really revolutionary election campaigning, just as the comrades of the IWW have never seen revolutionary parliamentarism. That is why Comrade Bordiga raises such claims, but he at least ought to substantiate them.

Nevertheless, I think that there are many empirical proofs of revolutionary parliamentarism. I shall repeat them, the names are known to us. There was the activity of Liebknecht, the activity of Höglund, then there were the Bulgarian comrades and ourselves. We had revolutionary parliamentarism under the most varied historical conditions, for example during the second Duma, during Kerensky’s Pre-parliament and during the Constituent Assembly. We were not afraid to put ourselves alongside the bourgeoisie, the Socialist Revolutionaries or the Cadets because we had a firm revolutionary tactic and completely clear tactical lines. For that reason this whole question, that is to say the question of the Party, is now the cardinal question. If you have a really Communist Party then you need not be afraid of sending one of your people into the bourgeois parliament, for he will act as a revolutionary must act. But if you have in the Party ‘a mish-mash where 40 per cent are pure opportunists’, then of course precisely these gentlemen will sneak into the parliamentary faction, to the places that suit them best. That is why they are almost all members of the parliamentary factions. Then they cannot carry out their parliamentary duties as revolutionary communists. That is a Party question.

I repeat, if we have among the parties of the Communist International really Communist Parties that do not shelter any opportunists or reformists in their bosoms, if we have already carried out this purge, then we have the guarantee that we will not have the old parliamentarism but a really revolutionary parliamentarism and a reliable method of destroying the bourgeoisie, the whole bourgeois state apparatus and the bourgeois system.

Comrades!

Is this a discussion of principle? Certainly not. In principle, we are all anti-parliamentarian, since we renounce parliamentarism as a means of emancipating the proletariat and as a political form of the proletarian State. The anarchists are anti-parliamentarian on principle, since they declare themselves against any delegation of power from one individual to another; the same applies to the syndicalists, who are opposed to political action of the party and have a completely different conception of the process of proletarian emancipation.

As for us, our anti-parliamentarism is linked back to the Marxist critique of bourgeois democracy.

I will not repeat here the arguments of critical communism, which exposes the bourgeois lie of political equality, placed above economic inequality and class struggle.

This conception leads to the idea of a historical process in which the class struggle ends with the liberation of the proletariat after a sustained violent struggle for the proletarian dictatorship.

This theoretical conception, set out in the Communist Manifesto, found its first historical realisation in the Russian Revolution.

A long period has elapsed between these two events, and the development of the capitalist world during this period has been very complex.

The Marxist movement has degenerated into a social democratic movement and has created a common field of action for the petty corporative interests of certain worker groups and bourgeois democracy. This degeneration manifested itself simultaneously in the trade unions and socialist parties.

The Marxist task of the class party, which should have spoken on behalf of the working class as a whole and recall its historical revolutionary task, was almost completely forgotten; an entirely different ideology was created, which rejected violence and abandoned the dictatorship of the proletariat, replacing it with the illusion of a peaceful and democratic social transformation.

The Russian Revolution clearly confirmed Marxist theory, demonstrating the necessity of employing the method of violent struggle and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat.

But the historical conditions in which the Russian Revolution developed do not resemble the conditions in which the proletarian revolution will develop in the democratic countries of Western Europe and America. The Russian situation is more reminiscent of that of Germany in 1848, since two revolutions took place there, one after the other: the democratic revolution and the proletarian revolution.

The tactical experience of the Russian Revolution cannot be transferred in its entirety to other countries, where bourgeois democracy has long been established and where the revolutionary crisis will be nothing but the direct transition from this political regime to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The Marxist significance of the Russian Revolution is that its final phase (dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and seizure of power by the Soviets) could be understood and defended only on the basis of Marxism, and gave rise to the development of a new international movement: that of the Communist International, which definitively broke with social democracy, which had shamefully failed during the war.

For Western Europe, the revolutionary problem first requires breaking out of the confines of bourgeois democracy, demonstrating that the bourgeois assertion: that all political struggle must take place within the parliamentary mechanism is false, and that the struggle must be taken onto a new terrain: that of direct, revolutionary action, for the conquest of power.

A new technical organisation of the party is needed, that is, a historically new organisation. This new historical organisation is realised by the Communist Party, which, as specified in the Executive Committee’s theses on the question of the party's tasks, is born from the era of direct struggles aimed at the dictatorship of the proletariat (Thesis 4).

Now, the first bourgeois machine that must be destroyed, before moving on to the economic construction of communism, even before building the new mechanism of the Proletarian State that must replace the government apparatus, is Parliament.

Bourgeois democracy acts among the masses as a means of indirect defence, while the executive apparatus of the State is ready to use violent and direct means as soon as the last attempts to draw the proletariat onto democratic ground have failed.

It is therefore of paramount importance to expose this trick of the bourgeoisie, to show the masses all the duplicity of bourgeois parliamentarism.

Even before the World War, the practices of traditional socialist parties had already provoked an anti-parliamentary reaction among the ranks of the proletariat: the anarchist syndicalist reaction, which denied any value to political action in order to concentrate the activity of the proletariat in the field of economic organisations, spreading the false idea that there can be no political action outside electoral and parliamentary activity. It is necessary to react against this illusion, no less than against the social-democratic illusion; this conception is far removed from the true revolutionary method and leads the proletariat down a false path in its struggle for emancipation.

The utmost clarity is indispensable in propaganda: the masses must be given simple and effective slogans.

Starting from Marxist principles, we therefore propose that agitation for the proletarian dictatorship, in countries where the democratic regime has long been developed, be based on the boycott of elections and bourgeois democratic organs.

The great importance that is given to electoral action in practice entails a twofold danger: on one hand, it gives the impression that this is the essential action, and on the other, it absorbs all the party’s resources and leads to the almost complete abandonment of preparatory action in other areas of the movement. The social democrats are not alone in attaching great importance to elections: the theses proposed by the [Executive] Committee itself tell us that it is useful to use all means of agitation in election campaigns (Thesis 15). The organisation of the party that carries out electoral activity has a very particular technical character, which contrasts sharply with the character of an organisation that responds to the needs of revolutionary action, legal and illegal.

The Party becomes (or remains) a cogwheel of the electoral committees, responsible solely for the preparation and mobilisation of voters.

When an old social democratic party switches to the communist movement, there is a great danger in continuing to pursue parliamentary action as it was practised before. There are numerous examples of this situation.

* * *

With regard to the theses presented and defended by the speakers, I would note that they are preceded by a historical introduction, with the first part of which I agree almost entirely.

It is said there that the First International used parliamentarism for the purposes of agitation, propaganda, and criticism. Later, in the Second International, parliamentarism had a corrupting influence, leading to reformism and class collaboration.

The introduction draws the conclusion that the Third International must return to the parliamentary tactics of the First, with the aim of destroying parliamentarism itself from within.

But the Third International, on the contrary, if it accepts the same doctrine as the First, must, given the great diversity of historical conditions, must use entirely different tactics and not participate in bourgeois democracy.

Thus, in the following theses, there is a first part that is not at all contradictory to the ideas I support.

It is only when we talk about using the election campaign and the parliamentary platform for mass action that the difference begins. We do not renounce parliamentarism because it is a legal means. Its use cannot be proposed in the same way as the press, freedom of assembly, etc.

Here we are talking about means of action, there about a bourgeois institution that must be replaced by the proletarian institutions of the Workers’ Councils. We do not at think that after the revolution we will not make use of the press, propaganda, etc., but we do intend to break up the parliamentary apparatus and replace it with the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Nor do we subscribe to the usual argument about the ‘leaders’ of the movement. Leaders are indispensable. We know very well, and we have always said this to anarchists since before the war, that it is not enough to renounce parliamentarism in order to do without ‘leaders’. There will always be a need for propagandists, journalists, etc.

Certainly, the revolution needs a centralised party to direct the proletarian action. Evidently, this party needs leaders, but the function of these leaders has a completely different value from traditional social democratic practice. The party directs proletarian action in the sense that it takes on all the most dangerous work and demands the greatest sacrifices. The leaders of the party are not only the leaders of the victorious revolution. They will be the ones who, in the event of defeat, will fall first under the blows of the enemy. Their situation is completely different from that of parliamentary leaders, who take the most advantageous positions in bourgeois society.

It is said: propaganda can be spread from the parliamentary tribune. To this, I will respond with a... completely childish argument: what is said from the parliamentary tribune is repeated by the press. If it is the bourgeois press, everything is falsified; if it is our press, then there is no point in going to the tribune only to have what has been said printed.

The examples given by the speaker do not affect our argument.

Liebknecht acted in the Reichstag at a time when we recognised the possibility of parliamentary action, especially since it was not a question of sanctioning parliamentarism, but of criticising bourgeois power.

If, on the other hand, one were to weigh up Liebknecht, Hoeglund, and the other few cases of revolutionary action in Parliament against the long series of betrayals by the social democrats, the balance would be very unfavourable to ‘revolutionary parliamentarism’.

The question of the Bolsheviks in the Duma, in Kerensky’s Parliament, in the Constituent Assembly, does not arise at all in the conditions in which we propose abandoning parliamentary tactics, and I will not return to the difference between the development of the Russian Revolution and the development that revolutions in other bourgeois countries will take.

Nor do I accept the idea of electoral conquest of bourgeois municipal institutions. There is a very important problem here that should not be ignored.

I intend to take advantage of electoral campaigns to agitate and propagate the communist revolution, but this agitation will be all the more effective if we support the boycott of bourgeois elections before the masses.

Moreover, it is impossible to define exactly what destructive work the communist deputies could carry out in Parliament will be. In this regard, the rapporteur presents us with a draft regulation concerning communist action in the bourgeois Parliament. This is, if I may say so, pure utopianism. It will never be possible to organise parliamentary action that opposes the very principles of parliamentarism, that goes ‘beyond the limits of parliamentary rules’.

* * *

And now a few words on the arguments put forward by comrade Lenin in his pamphlet on Left-Wing Communism.

I believe that our anti-parliamentary tactic cannot be judged in the same way as those advocating withdrawal from the Trade Unions.

The Trade Union, even when it is corrupt, is always a workers’ centre. Leaving the social democratic Trade Union corresponds to the conception of certain syndicalists who would like to set up organs of revolutionary struggle of a non-political but syndical type.

From a Marxist point of view, this is an error that has nothing in common with the arguments on which our anti-parliamentarism is based.

The rapporteur’s theses state, moreover, that the parliamentary question is secondary for the communist movement; the same cannot be said for the Trade Unions.

I believe that opposition to parliamentary action should not lead us to make a definitive judgement on comrades or communist parties. comrade Lenin, in his interesting work, sets out communist tactics, advocating a very agile approach that corresponds very well to a careful analysis of the bourgeois world, and he proposes applying the data of the experience of the Russian Revolution to this analysis in capitalist countries.

He also maintains the necessity of taking into account to the highest degree the differences between countries.

I will not discuss this method here.

I will merely observe that a Marxist movement in Western democratic countries requires a tactic much more direct than that which was necessary for the Russian Revolution.

Comrade Lenin accuses us of wanting to dismiss the issue of communist action in parliament because the solution appears too difficult, and of advocating the anti-parliamentary tactic because it implies a smaller effort.

We are perfectly in agreement on this point: that the tasks of the proletarian revolution are very complex and very arduous. We are perfectly convinced that, after resolving, as proposed, the problem of parliamentary action, the other much more important problems will remain on our shoulders and their solution will certainly not be so simple.

But it is precisely for this reason that we believe in bringing the majority of the communist movement’s efforts onto a field of action much more important than that of Parliament.

And this is not because difficulties frighten us. We merely observe that opportunist parliamentarians, who adopt a tactic more convenient to apply, are no less completely absorbed in their work by parliamentary activity.

We conclude that, in order to resolve the problem of communist parliamentarism according to the rapporteur’s theses (assuming this solution is acceptable), tenfold efforts will be required and fewer resources and energies will remain for the movement for truly revolutionary action.

* * *

In the evolution of the bourgeois world, the stages that must necessarily be observed even after the revolution, in the economic transformation from capitalism to communism, are not carried over onto the political terrain.

The transfer of power from the exploiters to the exploited brings with it the instantaneous change in the representative apparatus. Bourgeois parliamentarism must be replaced by the system of workers’ councils.

This old mask that tends to conceal the class struggle must therefore be torn off, so that we can move on to direct revolutionary action.

This is how we summarise our view of parliamentarism, a view that is entirely consistent with the Marxist revolutionary method.

I can conclude with a consideration that we share with comrade Bukharin. This question cannot and must not give rise to a split in the communist movement.

If the Communist International decides to take upon itself the creation of communist parliamentarism, we will submit ourselves to its resolution. We do not believe that it will succeed, but we declare that we will do nothing to cause this endeavour to fail.

And I hope that the next Congress of the Communist International will not have to discuss the results of parliamentary action, but rather record the victories of the Communist Revolution in a large number of countries.

If this is not possible, I hope that comrade Bukharin will be able to present us with a less gloomy assessment of communist parliamentarism than the one with which he had to begin his report today.

Comrade Bordiga supposedly wanted to defend the point of view of the Italian Marxists here; but he has nevertheless not answered any of the arguments advanced here by other Marxists in favour of parliamentary action.

Comrade Bordiga has admitted that historical experiences do not arise in an artificial way. He simply tells us that the struggle must be transferred to a different field. Does he then not know that every revolutionary crisis has been accompanied by a parliamentary crisis? [The stenographic records of the congress are often sketchy or incomplete. The representative of the communist abstentionist fraction in Moscow in 1920 recalls that this question was followed in Lenin’s speech by a sentence along these lines: ‘We must not abandon an observatory that will allow us to predict in advance the moment when the proletarian class, led by our party, will be able to unleash the struggle for power, no longer with the legal methods desired by the enemy’s constitutions, but with our own method of insurrection and armed violence’].

He has, it is true, mentioned the fact that the struggle should be transferred to a different field, for example the soviets. But Comrade Bordiga has himself admitted that one cannot set up soviets artificially. The example of Russia proves that soviets can only be set up either during the revolution or immediately before it. Even in Kerensky’s days the soviets were composed in such a way (that is to say, Menshevik) that they could not form themselves into a proletarian power.

Parliament is a product of historical development which one cannot abolish from the world until one is strong enough to scatter the bourgeois parliament. Only if one is a member of parliament can one combat bourgeois society and parliamentarism from the given historical standpoint. The same means that is applied by the bourgeoisie in smuggle must also be applied by the proletariat, naturally with quite different ends. You can surely not deny that it is so, and if you deny it, then you cross out the experience of all the revolutionary events in the world.

You have said that the trades unions too are opportunist, that they too represent a danger. On the other hand, however, you have said that one should make an exception for the trades unions because they represent a workers’ organisation. But that is only true to a certain degree. In the trades unions too there are very backward elements. A part of the proletarian petty bourgeoisie, the backward workers and small peasants, all these elements really think that their interests are represented in parliament, and one must combat that through work in parliament and teach the masses the truth through facts. The backward masses cannot be taught by theory, they need experiences.

That has been seen in Russia, too. Even after the victory of the proletariat we were forced to call the Constituent Assembly in order to prove to the backward proletariat that it can achieve nothing that way. The soviets had to be contrasted concretely to parliament for the comparison of one experience against the other, and the soviets had to be presented to it as the only weapon.

Comrade Souchy, the revolutionary syndicalist, defended the same theory; but logic is not on his side. He said he was not a Marxist, so that is understandable. But when you, Comrade Bordiga, say you are a Marxist, we must demand more logic of you. You must know how parliament can be smashed. If you can do it by an armed insurrection in every country, then that is very good. You know that in Russia we showed our determination to destroy. the bourgeois parliament not only in theory but also in practice. But you have lost sight of the fact that that is impossible without quite lengthy preparations, and that in most countries it is not yet possible to smash parliament at a single blow. We are forced to use the parliamentary struggle for the smashing of parliament. You are substituting your revolutionary determination for the conditions that determine the political line followed by every class of modern society. Therefore you forget that, in order to destroy the bourgeois parliament in Russia, we first had to call the Constituent Assembly, and that even after our victory.

You have said: ‘It is true that the Russian revolution is an example that cannot be applied to conditions in Western Europe’. But you have not advanced a single watertight argument to prove that to us. We went through the period of bourgeois democracy. We went through it quickly at a time when we were forced to call for elections to the Constituent Assembly. And even later, when the proletarian class was able to seize power, the peasants still believed that the bourgeois parliament was necessary. Taking account of these backward masses we had to call the elections and show the masses, by example and by facts, that this Constituent Assembly, which was elected at a time of the greatest general need, did not express the aspirations and demands of the exploited classes. Thus the conflict between soviet power and bourgeois power became completely clear, and that not just for us, for the vanguard of the working class, but also for the overwhelming majority of the peasant class, for the petty clerks, the petty bourgeoisie, etc. In every capitalist country there are backward elements of the working class who are convinced that parliament is the true representative of the people, and do not see that dirty methods are used here. It is, you say, the instrument with which the bourgeoisie deceives the masses. But this should be turned against you and it does turn against your Theses. How will you reveal the true nature of parliament to the really backward masses deceived by the bourgeoisie if you do not enter it? How will you expose this or that parliamentary manoeuvre, the attitude of this or that party, if you are not in parliament? If you are Marxists you must recognise that the relation between the classes in a bourgeois society and the relationship between the parties are closely connected. I repeat, how will you show all that if you are not members of parliament, if you reject parliamentary action? The history of the Russian revolution has clearly proved that the great masses of the working class, of the peasant class and of the petty clerks would not have been convinced by any arguments if they had not made their own experiences.

It has been said here that much time is wasted by participating in parliamentary struggles. Can one think of any other institution in which all classes participate to the same extent that they do in parliament? That cannot be created artificially. If all classes are drawn to participate in the parliamentary struggle, then it is because class interests and conflicts have their reflection in parliament. If it were possible everywhere to stage, let us say, immediately decisive general strikes to make a clean sweep all at one go, then the revolution would already have taken place in various countries. One must, however, take account of the facts, and parliament represents the arena of the class struggle.

Comrade Bordiga and those that adopt his standpoint should tell the masses the truth. Germany is the best proof of the fact that a Communist faction is possible in parliament and therefore you should tell the masses openly: ‘We are too weak to create a party with a rigid organisation’. That would be the truth, which you should speak openly. But if you were to admit this weakness to the masses, they would not become your supporters, but your opponents, supporters of parliamentarism. If you said: ‘Comrades, workers, we are so weak that we cannot create such a disciplined party that forces its members of parliament to obey it’, then the workers would desert you, they would say to themselves: ‘How shall we set up the dictatorship of the proletariat with such weak people?’

If you believe that on the day of the victory of the proletariat the intellectuals, the middle class and the petty bourgeoisie will become communist, then you are very naive. If you do not have this illusion, then starting today you must prepare the working class to impose its will. There is not a single exception to this rule in any field of state work. The day after the revolution we find everywhere opportunist lawyers who call themselves communists, petty bourgeois who recognise the discipline neither of the Communist Party nor of the proletarian state. If you do not prepare the workers to found a really disciplined Party that will force all its members to subordinate themselves to its discipline, then you will never prepare the dictatorship of the proletariat. I think that that is why you do not admit that it is the weakness of very many new Communist Parties that forces them to deny parliamentary action. I am convinced that the great majority of really revolutionary workers will follow us and speak out against your anti-parliamentarian Theses.

Comrade Lenin’s objections to the theses I have presented and to my arguments raise questions of great interest, which I do not intend here to even touch upon and which are linked to the general problem of Marxist tactics.

Undoubtedly, parliamentary events and ministerial crises are closely linked to the development of the revolution and the crisis of the bourgeois order. But, to determine by what means proletarian political action can influence events, we must refer to methodological considerations of the kind that, even before the war, led the Marxist left of the international socialist movement to rule out ministerial participation and parliamentary support for bourgeois ministries, even though these are undoubtedly means of intervening in the development of events.

It is the very necessity of the unification of the revolutionary forces of the proletariat and their organisation with the ultimate goal of communism in mind that dictates a tactic based on certain general rules of action, even if they appear too simple and too inflexible.

I believe that our current historical mission dictates to us a new tactic, that of refusing to participate in parliaments – which is, without doubt, a means of direct intervention in political situations, but which, in the development of the class struggle, has become devoid of revolutionary efficacy.

The argument that the practical problem of communist parliamentary action and party discipline must be resolved because, in the post-revolutionary period, it will be necessary to know and be able to organise institutions of all kinds with human material drawn from bourgeois and semi-bourgeois environments, could be invoked for the same reason to support the usefulness of having socialist ministers under a regime of bourgeois domination.

But this is not the time to explore this issue further, and I limit myself to declaring that I stand by my views on the matter at hand. I am more convinced than ever that the Communist International will not succeed in concretising an action that is both parliamentary and truly revolutionary.

Finally, since it has been recognised that the theses I presented rest on purely Marxist principles and have nothing in common with anarchist and syndicalist arguments against parliamentarism, I hope that they will be voted for only by anti-parliamentarian comrades who accept them as a whole and in their spirit, sharing the Marxist considerations that form their basis.

After the decision of the Second Congress of the Communist International in favour of the theses advocating the use of electoral campaigns and parliament for the purposes of propaganda and revolutionary action, the Left, which led the Communist Party of Italy from its foundation until 1923, scrupulously adhered in its practical action to the letter and spirit of the Lenin-Bukharin-Trotsky theses: indeed, it can be said without fear of contradiction that it was the only one to provide, in the phase of retreat following the post-war wave, the examples of revolutionary parliamentarism that Lenin had hoped for and that Liebknecht had embodied in the ascendant phase of the German revolution. Characteristic in this regard is the action of the Party in the 1921 electoral campaign, which, as its ‘Manifesto’ shows, the Left knew how to turn into a great movement of propaganda and political mobilisation of the working class in the face of the pressing fascist offensive.

In the same circumstances, the article ‘Elections’ defended the need to participate in the electoral campaign, despite the deep abstentionist convictions of many proletarians, with arguments that assume a particular importance. The article first recalls how the situation in 1921, in which there were fewer ballot papers than clubs, was one of those that best corresponded to the Leninist tactical scheme of revolutionary parliamentarism and was instead less suited to the abstentionist tactic of the Left, hostile to participation, especially in countries and phases of bourgeois democracy and ‘constitutional freedoms’. The examination of the 1921 situation is not, however, a decisive argument in favour of the tactics of the International.

Still convinced that the parliamentary theses of the Second Congress had to be revised, the Left nevertheless energetically declared itself for international discipline and centralism: as a Marxist Left, it was first and foremost centralist and only then abstentionist. Precisely because our tactical conception was fully integrated into the theory and principles of communism, the Left never resorted to backroom deals, ‘special situations’ or, worse still, those ‘national paths’ that served as a pretext for renegades to smuggle in the most conformist parliamentarism. In the history of the world Communist Party, abstentionism was not to enter through the back door, least of all through side doors, antithetical to our doctrine.

The article ‘Abstentionist Nostalgias’ (1924) and the excerpt reproduced here from the ‘Lyon Theses’ (1926) contain our denunciation of democratic anti-fascism, which from 1924 onwards tended to compromise – and ultimately completely disfigure – the line of the Party, no longer directed (by decree of the International) by the Left. In order to properly assess its significance, it is worth briefly recalling the historical context and, in particular, the situation in 1924, of which the article ‘Abstentionist Nostalgias’ is, in a certain sense, the prognosis and the ‘Lyon Theses’ represent the political assessment.

In the first months of 1924, the P.C.d’I, now directed by the Centre and loyal to the ‘flexible’ directives of the Comintern, stood for election as the ‘Proletarian Unity Bloc’, in the illusion of crystallising around itself a vast movement not so much and not only proletarian, but ‘popular’, failing to unite under that confused banner even the small group of ‘third-internationalists’. Now, as can be seen from the article of 28 February, the elections, destined to legitimise the fascist regime, provoked an initial outcry in favour of abstention – an outcry stemming not from our reasons of strict Marxist orthodoxy, but from bourgeois constitutional prejudices, from ‘indignation’ at the ‘illegality’, the ‘fraud’, the ‘rigging’ and the violence that characterised the electoral campaign, a foretaste of the uproar that would erupt thirty years later over the ‘scam law’.

It fell to the Left to defend participation in the elections, not only in the name of discipline towards the International, but also to react to the first signs of democratic, constitutional, and legalitarian nostalgias creeping through our ranks. Once the criterion of revolutionary parliamentarism had been internationally sanctioned, it had to be practised thoroughly and on its true foundations, not entrenched behind the ‘unconstitutionality’ or the risks of a particular campaign in order to desert it, justifying itself moreover with an abstentionism dictated by ‘moral’ reactions or by scruples of... democratic correctness.

The alarm was more than justified. When, in June, the Matteotti crisis erupted, the centrist leadership of the P.C.d’I. followed the bourgeois democratic opposition (socialists included) in turning the sordid affair into a ‘moral issue’, left parliament, mistook Aventinism for the ‘cornerstone of the popular anti-fascist movement’ and, even after the failed attempt at a general strike and a united front with the socialists, insisted on the offer of common action to the Aventine parties and groups, pushing it as far as the proposal – of a distinctly democratic nature – to form an ‘anti-parliament’. Far from ‘destroying parliament from the outside’! Another, more ‘honest’, ‘more legal’ and ‘better’ Montecitorio would have been christened... In short, it went from the extreme of pro-democratic parliamentary abstentionism to the opposite extreme of an excess of parliamentary zeal of ultra-democratic inspiration.

Once again, it was the Left that reacted vigorously: if ever there was a situation in which revolutionary parliamentarism made sense, that is, the tactic of using the parliamentary tribune to denounce both parliamentarism and the fascism-democracy collaboration in defending the foundations of bourgeois society, it was precisely that one. Had they gone into parliament? They had to stay there, at the risk of being beaten with truncheons, exposing both the ‘government of murderers’ and its cowardly last-minute ‘opponents’. Had they wanted to adopt the tactic of revolutionary parliamentarism? Then they should at least practise it courageously, instead of falling back into a new and cowardly version of reformist parliamentarism. They should have followed their independent path to the end, mobilising the masses around revolutionary slogans, more than ever ready to fight in the cities and countryside, and to this end not letting slip away the unique, albeit subsidiary, opportunity to use the megaphones of the parliamentary tribune, deserted by all, to reassert the idea that the real solution to the crisis was to be found not there, but in the streets.

Only the categorical refusal of the ‘opposition’ to adhere to the, albeit democratising, initiatives of the P.C.d’I. convinced the Gramscian leadership to accept the Left’s thesis by re-entering Montecitorio, and it is no coincidence that it was precisely a representative of the Left, a member of the old Executive Committee deposed in 1923: Luigi Repossi, who delivered the bold ‘return’ speech in the Chamber on 12 November 1924, amid threatening shouts and raised fists, just as it is no coincidence that the first speech in the new legislature was delivered on behalf of the Party on 14 January 1925 by another ‘abstentionist’ (not yet capitulated to Moscow), Ruggero Greco, not so much to carry out a critique of the new electoral law as to reaffirm the communist principles of class struggle, the violent conquest of power, and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The assessment of the Aventine period made by the Left is finally found summarised in the paragraph of the ‘Lyon Theses’ with which this chapter concludes.

The last battle of the Marxist Left on the parliamentary question was not only an extreme example of revolutionary parliamentarism as understood advocated by Lenin. By defending revolutionary parliamentarism against a relapse into parliamentarism tout court, the Left then was able to defend its typical abstentionism against the ‘contingent abstentionism’ of the anti-fascist democrats, ready to shuttle back and forth between parliament and ‘anti-parliament’ for the sole purpose of preserving the bourgeois order.

After the trial of popular fronts and partisan resistance blocs, in which anti-fascism then succeeded in dragging the proletariat along, destroying the very foundations of the communist programme, it is a complete and definitive abstentionism that the Left passes on to future revolutionary generations.

We too hoped, and understandably so, that they would not take place. But we must now abandon all hope. The elections will go ahead. What will the Communist Party do?

Apart from all the procedures that the competent bodies may establish, according to some comrades, the question should be asked: Should the C.P. participate in the elections or not? In my opinion, this problem has no reason to exist. For clear reasons of international tactical discipline, the C.P. must intervene, and will intervene, in the elections.

I do not mean to say that the problem of electoral tactics within the Communist International has been definitively resolved by the decisions of the Second Congress. On the contrary, I believe that the number of us abstentionists has increased in many Western Communist Parties, and it cannot be ruled out that the question will return at the next Third Congress. If this happened, I would be for the same theses that I presented and that were rejected at last year’s Congress: for the better conduct of communist propaganda and revolutionary preparation in the ‘democratic’ Western countries, in the current period of universal revolutionary crisis, communists should NOT participate in elections. But as long as the opposing theses of Bukharin and Lenin are in force, for participation in elections and parliaments with anti-democratic and anti-social-democratic directives and aims, we must participate without discussion, and endeavour to adhere to these tactical norms. The result of this action will provide new elements for judging whether we abstentionists were right or wrong.

There are some abstentionist comrades – and also some electionists – who say: But can’t we find in the Moscow theses a pretext to abstain from the elections without incurring indiscipline? To this I reply, first of all, that the abstentionism we are trying to make pass through the door must not come in through the window, by means of pretexts and subterfuge. And then all the circumstances in which we find ourselves in this electoral campaign contribute to making the application of the Moscow theses clearer, in spirit and in letter, in the sense of participation.

Let the comrades reread all of Lenin and Bukharin’s arguments and they will see that they correspond better to circumstances of reaction and suppression of the party’s freedom of movement. Let them reread brought by me, and they will see that they refer above all to situations of ‘democracy’ and freedom, without, let us be clear, my thinking that they are outdated in the current circumstances. When Lenin said, ‘We participated in the most reactionary Duma’, I replied that the real danger lies in the most liberal parliaments. Lenin is convinced that a truly communist party can and must participate, but he agrees with me on the counter-revolutionary value of participation in the conditions of 1919, with a non-communist party.

The two theses that speak of the possibility that communist parties will boycott parliament and elections refer to circumstances in which ‘it may be necessary to move to immediate struggle to seize power’. I wish this were the case, but it is not so today: it cannot be ruled out that tomorrow the situation will be reversed; it would then take very little to destroy, along with the parliamentary shack, the electoral committees that our party will have set up.

In Moscow, if I had accepted the suggestions of some comrades, I might perhaps have obtained an ‘extension’ of those exceptions, and today one could, perhaps, apply them – although, I repeat, we are in the specific conditions envisaged by Lenin for useful participation. But instead, I preferred to present clearly opposite conclusions. This has led to the benefit of having clear and certain directives and not feeling ‘boxed in’ by the tedious argument of ‘special conditions’. Centralisation is the cornerstone of our theoretical and practical method: as a Marxist, first I am centralist, and then abstentionist.

For other theses this was not the case. Some points were patched up to satisfy minor opposition (but greater than our little group of abstentionists coûte que coûte). I do not consider the conclusion in the application of these theses, which have somewhat lost a precise theoretical directive, to be favourable for the effectiveness and security of revolutionary action.

We abstentionists were the only ones who opposed the theses put forward by men whose authority was and is rightly formidable with precise conclusions to the contrary. (Meanwhile, many critics of the twentieth day remained silent, unable to oppose conclusions to which they later rebelled). We abstentionists must also be the ones to set an example of discipline, without sophisticating or prevaricating.

The Communist Party, therefore, has no reason to discuss whether or not it will go to the elections. It must go. How it will do so will be decided in due course. The Moscow theses state its objective, and it is summed up in a few words: break the parliamentary prejudice and therefore accept that instead of votes, it will be blows and worse that will be counted. Break the social democratic prejudice and then turn the batteries, with unyielding intransigence, against the social democratic party.

The abstentionists are in their place.

For us today, there is no electionist or anti-electionist question. It may come up again for discussion at the 3rd Congress of the Communist International. But today, the Italian Section of the 3rd International obeys, in a disciplined and united manner, the rules laid down in Moscow last year. The Party’s Executive Committee, meeting to deliberate on the upcoming electoral struggle, did not hesitate even for a moment to examine whether the Party could, given its special organisational conditions, still only at their beginning, abstain from participating in the May elections.

And it immediately moved on to setting the rules for participation, voting on the following agenda:

‘The Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Italy, discussing the general elections and faced with the urgent need to issue directives even before convening the C.C., which will address a manifesto-programme to the proletariat, declares that, in accordance with the resolutions of the International, the Communist Party will participate in the elections with the specific aims and criteria contained in the theses approved by the Second World Congress in Moscow and resolves:

‘that the Communist Party should, in principle, contest all constituencies with absolute intransigence, with closed lists, adopting as its symbol on the ballot papers the emblem of the Soviet Republic, namely the hammer and sickle in a crown of ears of corn;

‘that in each constituency a meeting of representatives of the provincial federations concerned be convened immediately – no more than two delegates for each – in order to organise the campaign, designating a shortlist of candidates which must include a number of names greater than half the number of deputies to be elected in the constituency, communicating this to the Executive Committee by the 14th of this month so that it can compile the final list;

‘all full members of the Party who have been members since its foundation are eligible to stand as candidates.

‘in all constituencies, the collection of the three hundred signatures with notarial authentication required for the subsequent submission of the lists will begin immediately’.

There is no point in repeating what we already wrote in anticipation of the upcoming electoral rallies. These come at a very critical moment for our party. We will have to overcome all sorts of difficulties, given that not all provinces have held their federal constituent congresses and that the federations’ coffers are empty. Nor will the E.C. be able to contribute, even minimally, to the electoral expenses. Since we are unprejudiced on this matter, we will not rush into electoral preparations. We will keep our strength intact for greater and more decisive battles. But this does not mean that we should lose interest in the struggle, which would mean not participating, suffering a colossal defeat without even the honour of having fought, sabotaging party discipline under the guise of respecting it.

Naturally, our elections will be conducted economically. We have always maintained that they do not even remotely reflect the true majority opinion in the country, since the democratic regime, which controls the State, the banks, and the press, prevents workers from freely expressing their political views. Tens of thousands of revolutionary workers are in prison and ‘will not be released until after the elections’, hundreds of thousands of names of workers presumed to be subversive voters have been removed from the electoral rolls by the bourgeois municipalities; and where the municipalities were socialist, due to their cowardice and the actions of the royal and white guards, royal or prefectural commissioners took over preparing the electoral rolls. Thousands of workers will not be able to cast their ballots on election day because they are on duty on the railways, trams, in the ports, on the oceans, in the army and navy.

Those who participate in the elections are the same ones who we see every day dressed up to carry out punitive expeditions, the white guard, that is, the royal guard in plain clothes, and the idlers of all industries, of the most ignoble trade, of the bloodthirsty Agraria, of the most insulant and filthy press.

But workers and communists must not miss any opponent’s rally. They must speak their word, which is that of the whole Party, to the scoundrels of the bourgeoisie, and to the timid Italian socialists who have accepted the principle of ‘passive resistance’. We will spread propaganda, as far as the pretence of democracy allows us.

Our thinking and our activities go beyond petty electoral competition.

We pause to express our thoughts on this matter, because we do not want to miss an opportunity to propagate communist principles.

Nor should we be too surprised if democracy, by granting ‘universal suffrage’, prevents workers from exercising their right to vote. The democratic state exercises its dictatorship. This is Marxistically logical.

And it justifies the proletarian dictatorship, which – moreover – by excluding the bourgeoisie and all those who do not perform productive work for the community (material or spiritual) from the Soviet elections, does not lie, through a tendentiously classist formula, about its profound conception of class.

The Executive Committee of the C.P. of Italy

To the Italian proletariat

Proletarians!

The Communist Party of Italy steps onto the electoral field to reaffirm, amid the great masses of working people, the slogan, more historically relevant and powerful than ever before, of the Communist International and world revolution.

A great task must be accomplished by the proletarian vanguard, by the most loyal and devoted militants of the working class, the task of reorganising the revolutionary ranks, rebuilding faith and will, readjusting the forces necessary for defence and attack.

The Communist Party, drawing inspiration from the teachings of the history of modern proletarian revolutions and the body of doctrines elaborated by the Second World Congress of the Communist International, is convinced of the necessity and usefulness of using the electoral period to achieve these ends, and calls upon the best elements of the proletariat and the peasantry so that they rally around its banners all those who have preserved, in the chaos and anguish of the present moment, a firm character and the tenacious determination to fight unceasingly for the ideals of the oppressed and exploited classes, so that they may hearten the despondent and the scattered, so that out of this immense decomposition of the Italian revolutionary armies new armies of the counter-offensive may be created, and to the Caporetto of demagogic and armchair maximalism may be followed by the proletarian Vittorio Veneto. This great task must be accomplished and will be accomplished courageously, with a spirit of sacrifice and discipline, without infatuation for immediate successes, without discouragement over the difficulties to be faced with the serenity and perseverance that must be characteristic of the communist revolutionary, who assesses the historical moment to be overcome, recognises the necessity of the specific work to be done, shapes and forges a new link in the historical chain that leads to the emancipation of his class and to the liberation of humanity.

Comrade workers!

These elections must reveal with accuracy and precision the degree of political awareness and spiritual clarity achieved by the great Italian popular masses. The 1919 elections were the trial of the ruling class of Italian society, of the bourgeois political personnel who in 1915 held the fate of the people in their hands and ruined it, who had demanded all kinds of sacrifices from the people, promising prosperity and freedom, and kept their promise by accumulating disasters and shame, misery and tyranny. The 1921 elections must be the trial of the Socialist Party, of the political personnel whom the popular classes, after the disillusionment suffered in the war, had chosen in the Socialist Party to represent them in Parliament, to administer the trade union, cooperative, and municipal institutions.

The promises made by the bourgeoisie during the war correspond to the promises made by the Socialist Party after the armistice: one failure corresponds to another failure. The great popular masses had entrusted their fate to the new leadership personnel, had formed an immense army in the field for the supreme struggle, were prepared to face all dangers and sufferings in order to exit from the hell of capitalist exploitation and to begin, protected by a strong proletarian State, the work of elaborating and building a new civilisation on communist foundations. The uncertainties, hesitations, and fears of the Socialist Party have led to the collapse of the proletarian army. The Socialist Party has revealed itself, especially after the communist minority left its ranks, to be nothing more than a petty-bourgeois party, devoid of internationalist spirit, without faith in the revolutionary energies of the proletariat, imbued with a great admiration for bourgeois democracy and for the technical and political ability of capitalism and its henchmen, incapable of organising the masses not only for supreme revolutionary victories, but also for the defence and preservation of the gains already made and of the class institutions. Every worker conscious of the historical process of proletarian revolutions must now be convinced that his class will not be able to go any further in Italy unless it passes over the corpse of the Socialist Party, must now be convinced that it is not possible to defeat the bourgeoisie unless he first clears the field of struggle of this rotting corpse, which weakens and often destroys proletarian energies, delaying the awakening and organisation of the great popular masses.

The Communist Party, without hesitation, without sentimental bitterness, confident that it is thus fulfilling a not negligible part of its historic mission, sets out its propaganda for the electoral period, opening fire on two fronts: against capitalist imperialism, now capable of satisfying the vital needs of the proletarian masses only with lead and with the iron club of the white guards – and against the Socialist Party, which has renounced the Communist International in order to exempt itself from the bitter duty of preparing the revolution, which, because it has refused systematically to prepare the working class for revolution, is today incapable of curbing any reactionary attack and must look on, paralysed by astonishment and panic, at the burning and destruction of proletarian buildings and the systematic massacre of revolutionary militants.

Communist proletarians!

The enlightening propaganda of the valiant theorists of international communism had prepared your minds for the events that are now unfolding in our country. That is why you are not intimidated, nor have you ever thought of amending or correcting your approach and your programmes. The very events now under way are the best proof of how the economic and social conditions for the advent of the workers’ State continue to exist relentlessly and indeed become generalised and deepen. If the parliamentary State can no longer guarantee fundamental freedoms to any citizen; if arbitrariness and abuse are rampant; if any private individual can with impunity replace the legal authority in arresting, judging, and condemning; if populations are tortured and terrorised; if the death penalty is re-established de facto against worker militants; all this means that control of the productive forces now completely escapes the old ruling groups, that the established social hierarchies are breaking down irreparably, and that the day is not far off when an irresistible, immense uprising will break out from the deepest strata of the people against a regime that exists only as an infected excrescence of society. It is now clear that capitalism cannot reorganise itself and rebuild its essential foundations other than by bringing about the death and brutalisation of the great popular masses.

It is also clear how further development of proletarian organisation within the old trade union, cooperative, and municipal structures has now become impossible. The peasant leagues, scattered over a very vast territory, cannot withstand the systematic assault of armed gangs. The large industrial workers’ unions are falling apart, as lockouts and unemployment break up the old workforces, and layoffs drive the best proletarian elements away from the factories and cities, depriving the organisations of their agents and their living connective links. In the municipalities, one sees revealed with striking clarity one of the fundamental theses of the Communist International: when the class struggle reaches its most acute stage, any oratorical duel between the oppressed and the oppressors in elected assemblies becomes useless and ridiculous, and the rule of a single class, either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat, becomes unavoidable.

In Italy, the bourgeoisie, with weapons in hand, drives out the workers’ representatives from the municipalities, forces the socialist administrations to resign, and asserts its will to monopolise local power through violence. The bourgeoisie itself therefore teaches the masses the path to follow in order to maintain the level of organisation they have achieved and to create the conditions for a further development until total emancipation: the conquest of all state power, class dictatorship, the use of proletarian armed force to crush bourgeois terrorism and to impose on the bourgeoisie, in the throes of dissolution and disorder, respect for the laws and the law of productive labour.

Comrade workers!

The economic and social conditions for the proletarian revolution and the establishment of the workers’ State exist. What is still lacking are the spiritual conditions: a precise political orientation of the great masses, a concrete direction of action, the recognition by the great masses of a central political organisation which is capable of issuing slogans that resonate in the universal proletarian consciousness as the unavoidable commands of history. You must, comrades, work actively, in this period of agitation of ideas and programmes, to make the Communist Party known, to make it alive and active in the proletarian consciousness, to dispel the legends and slanders that the paid press cunningly spreads about it. you must work so that the Communist Party the greatest power in Italy, just as the Communist International has already become the greatest power in the world. Comrades, you must, with pride and dignity, support your party and its programmes; you must instil in the masses your conviction and your absolute confidence that only by implementing these programmes can the salvation of the working people from barbarism and physical and moral degeneration be achieved.

Yes, only in the revolutionary proletariat can we find today the principle of order that can reorganise the productive forces scattered and squandered by capitalist imperialism; only in the soviet systems, characteristic of proletarian civilisation, can the atrocious war that is tearing society apart be brought to an end; only in the Communist International, become the world government of the productive forces and the working masses of the whole world, can humanity resume its unified development towards ever higher forms of coexistence and culture. Comrades, with unshakeable faith in the destiny of your class and in the energy of the proletarian vanguard to achieve it, which you will spread in this period among the demoralised and disoriented masses, you must reconstitute the Italian armies of the world revolution and of the Communist International; it is a revolutionary task to which the Communist Party calls you, it is a task that must be accomplished and that you will accomplish, mobilising all your energies, concentrating all the passion and will of which the faithful and devoted soldiers of a great idea are capable.

Italian workers!

The Communist International, which demands your enthusiasm, is the movement for your revival and for your emancipation. The Communist Party must become, through your efforts, the only political party of the Italian working class.

Long live the Italian proletariat, forever liberated from opportunists and renegades!
Long live the Communist International!
Long live the world revolution!

The Central Committee

DEAR COMRADES!

A decree issued by your government has dissolved Parliament and called new elections. The Giolitti government, which the whole world calls the last government of the King of Italy, is attempting to stage a new parliamentary comedy, in order to better oppose the revolutionary proletariat with a united front of the bourgeoisie, organised and strengthened by the support of the hired gangs of fascist terrorism.

COMRADE WORKERS!

The conditions under which you will go to the polls this time are no longer the same as last time. Now the bourgeoisie has regained its audacity.

Since the armistice, Italy has been in the throes of an acute revolutionary crisis. All the bourgeois ministries that have come to power have demonstrated their inability to save the country from economic chaos. Italy, among all the victorious countries, is the one that has felt the results of victory most painfully. All the manoeuvres and fine promises made to you by Nitti and Giolitti served only to gain time, making concessions on paper but taking away with the right hand what they gave with the left. In reality, the measures taken seriously by the Italian rulers were those aimed at strengthening the armed defence of bourgeois privilege: the ever-renewed increase given to the development of the Royal Guard and the Carabinieri was offset by the increase in the price of bread and the fabulous increase in taxes. The monetary crisis is becoming increasingly severe and unemployment is reaching catastrophic levels. The Italian bourgeoisie senses the approach of its final hour: and with desperate, savage fury, resorts to provocation and terrorism through its mercenary gangs.

Officers without jobs, sons of landowners, bourgeois students attack workers, burn down cooperatives and labour offices, destroy proletarian newspapers. Civil war is now a reality in Italy; the offensive of the bourgeoisie precedes that of the proletariat.

And it is thanks to the old Socialist Party, composed of heterogeneous elements, that favourable opportunities – which presented themselves several times – to engage the proletariat in a decisive revolutionary struggle were not exploited. The reformists of Italy, since this is their function, have played and continue to play the game of the bourgeoisie, helping it to prop up the dilapidated economic edifice of capitalism.

COMRADE WORKERS!

Since the armistice, you have been stunned with talk about the need to ‘produce more and consume less’: and these speeches are made both by the bourgeoisie and by the social reformists who remained in the old Socialist Party, within which they are intensifying their propaganda in favour of collaboration with the bourgeoisie.

The history of these last years has taught these gentlemen nothing; on the contrary, it has taught the proletariat a great deal, who today know how to distinguish their friends from their enemies. Your reformists lament every time fascist gangs soak the streets of towns and villages in proletarian blood; the reformists call for calm and disarmament... What is the meaning of the reformists’ attitude? The capitulation and disarmament of the working class before a bourgeoisie armed to the teeth. It is not with speeches that the bourgeois reaction can be curbed, but with violence exercised in common by the entire oppressed class. In response to bourgeois violence, the Italian proletarian class must continuously and energetically put into practice its motto: ‘disarm the enemy, arm the proletariat’.

COMRADE WORKERS!

For the first time, the young Communist Party of Italy takes part in an electoral campaign.

All of you, certainly, know that the Communist Party of Italy was founded at the Livorno Congress, from a split with the Socialist Party, in which – as a result of the stance taken by the Serrati faction – the reformists remained. Subsequent events in Italian political life and in the Socialist Party have shown that the unionists have favoured and continue to favour the pernicious and destructive influence of the opportunists: and this, in the final analysis, is to the advantage of the bourgeoisie. This is precisely what the old fox of the bourgeoisie – Giolitti – is counting on. He knows that the reformist elements in the old Socialist Party are very strong (strong in Parliament, in the Confederation of Labour, in the Cooperatives) who do not conceal their desire to enter the government and collaborate with the bourgeoisie ‘in order – they say – to carry out reconstruction work’.

We believe – and hope – that the Communist Party, despite its recent establishment, has won the sympathy of the entire Italian proletariat through its unlimited devotion to the cause of the workers. Only the Communist Party has shown solidarity with the workers who fought and were defeated in Florence and in the Apulias and who continue still to fight everywhere. It alone openly and frankly declares its revolutionary communist programme. It alone is preparing to organise armed insurrection. It alone does not hide its motto: ‘bourgeois violence must be answered with the organised violence of the proletariat’.

COMRADE WORKERS!

The deputies and the confederal bureaucracy of the old Socialist Party will not fail, as always, to make all kinds of amazing promises at election time. But only the Communist Party, section of the Communist International, having on its banner the emblem of the Soviet Republic, declares unequivocally that it is entering Parliament not to begin rebuilding what is destined to ruin, but to propagate communist ideas, to use the parliamentary platform for the purposes of increasing the cohesion and consciousness of the proletariat as it prepares for the final revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie.

COMRADES!

Do not forget your duty of brotherhood towards Russia, which for four years, repelling all the attachés of the world bourgeoisie, strives in the peaceful work of reconstruction, beneficial not only to the working masses and peasants of Russia, but also to the proletariat of the whole world.

You can once again demonstrate your solidarity with the Russian proletariat and the Federation of Russian Soviet, sending into Parliament, the bourgeois citadel, as many communists as you can. They will use all the means indicated by communist tactics to prevent the bourgeoisie from deceiving the proletariat; and, with the support of the great masses, they will be able to hasten the day of the complete victory of the proletariat and the triumph of communism in Italy.

Therefore, vote only for the candidates of the Communist Party of Italy.
Vote for the Communist International and for its Italian section.
Vote for Soviet Russia and for the party bound to it by fraternal ties: the Communist Party of Italy.
Long live the Italian proletariat and its sole representative: the Communist Party of Italy!

The Executive Committee of the Communist International

Italian proletarians!

On the eve of the conclusion of the electoral campaign, the Communist Party, which is presenting its lists for your votes, wishes and must address you once more.

Our steadfast commitment to the truth of our doctrines and to the honour of our banner, even and especially amid the adversities of the present period, was reaffirmed in the manifestos launched by our Party at the beginning of the electoral campaign and on May Day, and the Communist International, of which our Party is an integral part, has also addressed its appeal to you on both occasions.

You know, therefore, that we are entering the fray, that we are also facing this episode of class struggle, that the elections constitute, with the entire unchanged baggage of our revolutionary programme, our faith in the advent of communism.

We ask you to cast your communist ballot to reaffirm that in Italy a huge number of exploited people, of rebels, are in solidarity with the ideas and work of the world communist revolution, whose flag is victoriously planted in Moscow, whose phalanxes are fighting in all countries of the world against the same enemy: capitalism.

We affirm, with the Third International, and put into practice, the need for the voice of communist propaganda and revolutionary incitement to be brought into electoral rallies and bourgeois parliaments by representatives of the proletariat, chosen and strictly disciplined by its class Party, the Communist Party.

At the same time, we affirm that neither the ballot nor action in Parliament will ever give you economic, political, and moral emancipation from the bourgeois yoke, nor victory against the reactionary counter-offensive that the ruling class has unleashed against you today, nor the lessening of the storm of violence that strikes down upon your class institutions. We affirm that, by casting the communist ballot, you will not have wielded a decisive weapon that can defeat the adversary, but only affirmed and cemented, in the moral strength of a concerted collective affirmation of the proletarian multitude, the intention to follow in revolutionary action on the same ground, with the same weapons, those that are otherwise offensive, which the adversary wields against you.

Neither electoral action nor parliamentary action will give you the means to change the conditions of exploitation in which the bourgeois regime keeps you, nor to begin in any way a work of reconstruction among the ruins it has scattered throughout the world. The struggle against bourgeois reaction, the work of reconstructing economic life, can only be undertaken on the basis of the organisation of proletarian power with the aim of overthrowing the power of the capitalist class, first defeating its regular and irregular armed forces, then breaking the very apparatus of mendacious parliamentary democracy in order to establish the dictatorship of the proletarian Councils. Voting for the communists means joining the phalanxes of the revolutionary army that tomorrow will mobilise its forces for this holy war of proletarian emancipation.

Workers!

Those who call you to the polls with other intentions, presenting your participation in them as the means to definitively escape the harshness of the situation, are deceiving you; and the deception is all the more culpable if it comes not from the bourgeois parties, but from the Socialist Party, which claims to represent the interests of your class.

The electoralism of the Socialist Party serves only to lull the revolutionary drive in you to sleep, and will ultimately benefit the bourgeoisie, that is, betray your cause.

Participation in the elections by the Communist Party aims to awaken the Italian revolutionary masses, inciting them to the imminent battle, in which they will take up the challenge and repel the enemy’s provocation; it is the sound of a reveille telling the class enemy how foolish is its illusion of having defeated the working class, of being able to extinguish the flame of revolutionary will within it.

After the elections, in Parliament, but especially outside Parliament, the communists will continue the class struggle without pause, in close contact with the proletarian phalanxes.

Workers and peasants of Italy!

On 15 May, demonstrate that they are still standing, that every day the ranks of the army of the revolution are growing in number and faith. Rush to the polls, and let your cry be:

Down with bourgeois parliamentarianism!
Down with the arrogance of the reaction!
Long live the dictatorship of the proletariat and the Italian Council Republic!

We have only fragmentary knowledge of the election results. Let us not worry about this.

The Communist Party, alone among all the parties and pseudo-parties, has not uttered a single word aimed at securing votes for its list or merely winning sympathy, while old men and old ideas fight for the conquest of coveted little medals. It has rigidly waved its banner with a steady hand, ignoring contradictions and retreats.

Firmly bound to the discipline of the Third International, it faithfully interpreted its electoral tactics, exploiting the election to spread the revolutionary word among the proletarian masses, denying any positive value to the parliamentary institution, a genuine expression of the bourgeois dictatorship disguised as democracy.

The bourgeois newspapers hasten, commenting on the election results, to document our party’s failure with accurate statistics. These amusing boasts will be a source of good humour for us. If we were to propose – as the party we belonged to until yesterday did – the conquest of power through the parliamentary institution, then we alone would have reason to be sad, but instead we have written on our banner: ‘We are also going to parliament to fight against parliament, against all bourgeois institutions’.

Nor will we waste time protesting, railing with empty words against the violence used by the bourgeoisie to forge for itself – among other ends – a parliament containing only its defenders or its tamed opponents. Instead, we say: it is right that this should be so; indeed, it is necessary that this should be so. If the bourgeoisie, with all its weapons, did not defend itself, this would be a sign of our weakness, but the bourgeoisie defends itself – and to defend itself, it has deemed it necessary to attack first – this demonstrates our strength.

We know that even the proletarians who did not cast their ballots for us today – and we do not reproach them for this – tomorrow will be with us and only with us, when, compelled by the inflexible dialectic of necessity, they will leap over all the junk of bourgeois-democratic lies and, through overwhelming violence, will seize power for themselves during the great days of insurrection.

Animated by this unshakeable faith – which traces its origins back to Marxist doctrine, increasingly victoriously affirmed by the proof of facts – we can only comment on the outcome of today’s contest of exhibitionism and invertebrate contortions with our unchanging cry: Long live the revolution!

We write while the outcome of the elections is still unknown. In these hours of waiting, we are absolutely certain that, among those involved in the struggle, we are the only ones immune to the agonising anxieties of the final wait, that we are infinitely above the repugnant game of the lowest resources and the most vile tricks that, once again, the ignoble mechanism of the bourgeois democratic system has forced us to witness.

The fantastic whirlwind of figures standing out in the opposing camps, who are, for the most part, the same ones who once, with the same actions, the same spirit, and under the fire of our same contempt, danced their careerist sarabande in other groupings and other combinations, makes us smile with compassion, but looking into this abyssal vortex of political degeneration does not make us dizzy, because we are too firmly planted on unshakeable ground, because we are too sure of our sense of direction towards the goal we are striving for, because we feel too proudly, amidst the despicable contortions of these people, that we are still and always on the same path and under the same banner.

The magnetic storm that dazzles and intoxicates them all in the sadistic eve of their basest appetites as groups and individuals cannot drive our compass mad or cause us to lose our course.

What do we have that all these restless people do not? What distinguishes us from them? One small thing, on which everyone has repeatedly rained down their sophistry and irony without managing to discredit us: our consistency with a doctrine and a faith.

We have repeated and continue to repeat, amid the many contingencies and vicissitudes of political life, which today’s daily news reports are rushing to turn into history, what our critics today and a thousand times before have dismissed as a sterile formula outdated by the bizarre ideas that each of them boasts of being the repository of: consistency, discipline, intransigence of thought and action.

We believed and continue to believe in a historical trajectory – oh, simplistic, schematic, abstract, gentlemen interpreters of reality! – along which an incessant struggle separates the opposing classes, at the end of which lies the overthrow of this hated regime amid the flames of revolution. We followed and continue to follow this path with the same conviction and with the same faith that this is the goal, with the same determination to fight for it and for it alone.

From the other shores, did they see us go and call us madmen or criminals? From our ranks, on a hundred occasions, for a hundred reasons, with a hundred arguments, hundreds and hundreds broke away, persuading us or insulting us, saying we were foolish not to realise that the path had to change, that it was not the great track of history but one of the many blind alleys of illusion and theorisation; that not leaving it meant not knowing how to go beyond the terminal wall against which our useless obstinacy would have ridiculously crashed.

Well then, it is interesting to take a look at all of them at a time when the erotic fervour of the electoral contest makes them abandon all restraint and all memory of past commitments – is it not because of their intelligent and superior political practice, so much more enlightened and skilful than our flat monotony, the first rule of what was done and said? – in which they abandon themselves most obscenely to their instinctive poses, revealing their true selves.

As they departed, everyone boasted of ‘surpassing us’, of removing themselves from our path so as not to share in our shipwreck and to reach shores we could not see, some pitied us, others reviled us, all had something to teach us that it was our fault for not understanding.

Is it worth the trouble reviewing the different groups, the different ‘types’ of deserters, separately? The different ‘discoveries’ of our errors that they made and the different formulations of new truths that they displayed before our astonished eyes, looking down on us from on high, turning our disciplinary sanctions, in whose effectiveness we had and still have the naivety to believe, the halo of martyrdom? Should we take a tour of the thousand heresies that we, tireless red priests, ruthless and hardened custodians of dogma, have condemned, remembering the thousand forms of violation of our intransigence that in so many circumstances were perpetrated by consorting with elements of the opposing class, taking to the pulpit to explain to us that true socialism was not that [illegible word] and wizened form in which we had crystallised, but that which, with refined criticism and tactics, adapted itself to colonial or national war, to Masonic practices and bloc-style electoral concoctions, and to a thousand other more or less glorious undertakings...

To resume the polemic with all these degenerative deviations, to reduce them to the response of subsequent events that we have awaited in the same critical position and frame in a victorious ascertainment of the correctness of our views, but others lived from time to time under different visual angles in their sublime excursions among the various schools of social doctrine and the very different colours of political alignments, this is not the task of this article, but rather the assessment of our entire party battle, which consists of study, criticism, and preparation for action.

But it should be noted that all of them, starting from very different attitudes and positions, as mentioned above, end up taking a monotonous, flatly common direction, trading that virtue in which they pleased themselves by changing our heavy rule of continuity into a doctrine and a discipline of originality, of novelty, and mutability towards new and previously unknown things.

They all said wonderful things to us as they left, and with the same complacency, the bourgeois audience felt its decadent sensibilities tickled by the new and peregrine intellectual ideas of those opposed to our constant and uniform asininity. Some left for new discoveries in economics, in which old Marx was a beginner; others declared that our historical materialism stank of rancidity in the face of the brilliant ideas of modern thought and fashionable philosophers; others mocked our messianic historical expectations of a revolutionary development which a more sagacious study of reality showed to be relegated to the realm of illusions, each one abandoned our platform with the air of stepping onto a higher rung. And instead, they have all descended, in the same way, into the most lubricious depths of petty politicking! And the story of one is the story of all, and today they all hate and fight us from the same front and with the same weapons with which they already offended us when they were among us.

Some, gifted with culture and intellectual brilliance, argued that the theories, to which we clung like oysters to rocks are rafts to cross an obstacle that blocks our path, but having arrived on the other side, it is necessary to abandon them. Others who happened to be with us against these and similar heresies, discovered later with confidence equal to their flippancy, and preach with just as much superiority on our faded insistence on the usual theorems, that ‘by surpassing, and whoever has nothing to surpass should come forward!, our old conceptions of party relations, on the left and the right, it is claimed that the truly modern, innovative movement, burier of our idealist carcasses, is the one that makes betrayal and desertion an honour and a source of pride and, by destroying the manifestations of communism with all forms of violence, fights not against our mirages of a new civilisation, but against the dark barbarism plotted by us...

Everyone has their own self-styled original formulation of the same faithless devotion. War, in the extreme decomposition of all the manifestations of an epoch, has refined this morbid ability to chisel out the very old and well-known shame of substance in the pimpings of form.

Look at them, these intellectuals of political hyper-revolutions in electoral turmoil. See how terribly similar they are, how they practise the same traditional compromises, how they follow, not each their own bitter and particular path towards the future, but the same path, jostling each other, elbowing their way towards the same goals and the same conquest, which, when it is the ultimate and final conquest, is a livery.

It was not really necessary to understand the complicated and varied development of these champions of ultra-modern politics, to follow their rise, to an apprenticeship done among us in the audacity of revolutionary ideas, to claim the highest spheres of research, knowledge, and activity... they are much less incomprehensible, and in their spiritual complications one finds a vulgar simplicity, a very old and well-known monotony. They despised our unaesthetic, monotonous function as guardians of an idea and a method for colourful fashions, in order to go for a uniformity that is the most horrid; they lost the merit of coherence and seriousness but did not gain that of originality and novelty... the multicoloured costume of Harlequin appears dull and fetid in his capers, if the colours of the spectrum are recomposed in the monochromatic light of black and white.

To understand these extremely difficult people, it is useless to revisit the subtleties of their politics against us. They are much, much lower than that! We will not resort to elements of an ultra-modern critique to decipher them. Their image is well known, it has been drawn and traced for a long time, it is the most stereotyped that tradition has consecrated. It is that of the politician who treads the witty scenes of Greek comedy in the fifth century BC, who reappeared as the object of literary satire in all eras, up to Rabagas and the excellence of modern dramas and operettas, which delight today’s audiences in sensational and entertaining revues.

It is the whirlwind of vulgar careerism, played out on its universal stage, the filthy scaffolding of bourgeois parliamentarism. But the boards are rotten and the abyss yawns beneath the feet of the obscene characters in the human comedy, in the tragedy of this agony of a regime.

Far from them, we continue on our own sure path. It is not only the ardour of a faith or the tension of a will that builds our constancy and tenacious certainty. It is the continuous testing of an incessant trial, a work that transcends personal attitudes and activities, and which, in the fate of every adverse movement, school, or sub-school, reconfirms to us the certainty that comes from our doctrine, from its incessant elaboration in the crucible of reality by the multitudes who, stirring themselves, consecrate in it the formidable unity of their efforts and go, on that same path, to the final clash to which nothing will resist.

We interpret what has happened by trying to steer clear of the clichés of parliamentary interpretation, since for us parliamentarism is not the only arena for parties and political forces to meet and face-off; on the contrary, it is the most ambiguous and deceptive arena.

The current Italian situation is all the more interesting to study in that it is [one illegible line] and legal, and the elections are merely one aspect of the ongoing political process, never the conclusion or even the basis for a definitive judgement on the nature of that process.

* * *

Summarising the above, as presented in our consistent interpretation, and which we wish to extend to the explanation of the most recent phase, to see if it continues to shed light on the facts without being contradicted or corrected, the post-war elections were an outlet for the discontent of the proletarian classes against the damages and consequences of the war waged by the ruling class. The class party should have had the task of clarifying and organising this negative tendency into a positive programme and course of action. But the Italian proletarian party, the Socialist Party, was not up to such a task due to the incomplete formation of its structure and its training. It adopted a revolutionary programme, but more out of the need to formulate the negatively revolutionary pressure of the masses in some way, and for the convenience of finding it attractive and well formulated in the events of the Russian Revolution, which were moreover poorly understood, than for having intrinsically been capable of deducing it as a mature consciousness and experience of its past work, from which it had only been able to draw formulas whose value in resolving the radical post-war problems was zero, such as aversion to war and formal intransigence.

The programme served the party to win the trust of the masses, not to give them something that would increase and define their real power of intervention in the social-political conflict. Thrown into the elections, the party embraced in a frightening way its programmatic preparations and did not develop any other way to translate it into tactical action other than waving it as an electoral flag.

The ‘avalanche’ of proletarian votes for the Socialist Party reflected the instinctive impatience of the masses with their traditional activity of participation in the social-democratic mechanism during normal periods. Therefore, determined by the terrible crisis underway, the 1919 elections served above all to immobilise the expectation and the very need for struggle of the masses in the electoral experiment with unusual results – 160 deputies! – and to relieve the party of the further trouble of translating into facts and deeds the theoretical promises adopted under the real pressure of the situation and to test and temper them [two illegible lines].

All this, while balancing the crisis of the bourgeois world, brought crisis into the party, forcing it to split. The split occurred as a detachment of that part which had understood how different the path and task of the revolutionary party had to be through the development of the class struggle in Italy.

The Communist Party resumed, indeed continued, its work as the extreme minority of the old party, in giving to the revolutionary ideal and tactical preparation a solid foundation [one illegible line] consequences of this disastrous counter-revolutionary process – counter-revolutionary not because it traded away the sure card of revolution, but because it squandered its best cards in the game of class struggle, losing the most useful periods for revolutionary preparation; counter-revolutionary all the more because it better concealed the defeatist reflections of its work under the trappings of its programmatic declarations.

Meanwhile, the situation was rapidly deteriorating. We had the fascist reaction, which we have discussed at length in order to establish its characteristics. At a certain point, the ruling class feels that the proletariat is no longer a peacefully manageable force, a docile instrument of social activity. At a certain point, the working masses, even if still unable to achieve their own appropriate balance of power, demonstrate in a thousand ways that they are no longer compatible with functioning as the central engine of the present social machine. The time lost in organising the revolutionary offensive, a specific task of the class political party, which must therefore possess, having been formed through past struggles and errors, clarity of historical vision, disciplined capacity for action, does not postpone the violent struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie, which is the inevitable consequence of a state of affairs that cannot be suppressed or changed by the bourgeoisie, even if revolutionary pressure is not pressing closely upon it. The bourgeoisie launches its offensives. This offensive has had among us fascism as its protagonist.

Let it be said again. It would be a gross error to believe that this offensive has as its aim a change of current institutional political relations, a curtailment of democratic forms. This is the mistake made by social democrats, stemming from their belief that democratic forms guarantee freedom of movement and subsequent gains for the working mass, whereas for Marxist communists it is a fundamental truth that they only guarantee bourgeois rule, and that at a certain point, if the working class wants to breathe, it must confront and break them.

Anticipating the struggle, the bourgeoisie does not change its goal of defending the democratic regime against the proletariat’s efforts to violently go beyond its frameworks and realise its dictatorship, the only possible terrain, in the current situation, for its conquests. Just as in the proletarian offensives in Russia and Germany, history has demonstrated our fundamental theorem that bourgeois reaction and the democratic regime are concomitant, allying with the white forces those same socialists who believe in democracy, against the communists who want to destroy it, so in the offensive aspects of this struggle from the bourgeois point of view, the term of the dispute is the same: bourgeois democracy against proletarian dictatorship.

The bourgeoisie is not troubled by the ‘free’ representation of the working class in Parliament, but only by the fact that this may be the expression of forces ready to attack the system itself from outside the parliamentary system.

The bourgeoisie needs to turn the political forces still relevant to the proletariat to its defence, forces that will sign a promissory note to observe democratic and parliamentary methods of struggle.

Bourgeois fascism in Italy had therefore attacked in order to prevent the revolutionary anti-parliamentary offensive, in order not to suppress the role of the social democrats within the proletariat, but to disarm them of any revolutionary intent, even verbal.

The fact that fascism was, in principle, very willing to carry the struggle onto the bloodless parliamentary terrain, is demonstrated by the manner with which it welcomed the dissolution of the Chamber, enthusiastically accepting the electoral battle.

* * *

After the split, the Socialist Party did not formally renounce the revolutionary programme it had adopted, nor did it openly declare that it would renounce the use of violent methods to overthrow the current political and social regime. However, in the face of the fascist offensive, it gave the order not to accept the challenge and to fight on ‘legal’ ground. The renunciation was implicit, in that no transitional reasons or temporary power relations were invoked, but rather the principled repugnance of socialism towards violent methods. Once the general elections took shape, the Socialist Party prepared for them as a means to repel the violent offensive of the bourgeoisie and give the proletariat the opportunity to resume an upward path, on which it was no longer said that forms of social change would be found. The party has neither said, nor been able to say, anything more precise about the path that electoral action would have opened up for the masses. In 1919, this preluded, at least in noisy declarations, extra-legal revolutionary action. Initiated by the bourgeoisie, the struggle was rejected in order to fall back onto the parliamentary terrain. To do what? To demonstrate that the fascist offensive did not deprive the party of the electoral strength to hold those positions. But the fascist offensive aimed to prevent them from serving as a point of departure for a revolutionary preparation. To resume them without this value means to have lost them, for the purposes of the development of action that was then being presented to the masses.

It is a terrible vicious circle that today [one line illegible] at the point where it fatally closes in on itself. Fascism does not want to suppress the electoral system. If it did, if it truly prevented the democratic mechanism from functioning, this would only render the tactical line adopted by the Socialist Party even more absurd: to respond with the ballot. If the ballot cannot be used, one must either retreat with their tail between their legs or accept the battle with quite different weapons; in either case, the socialist tactical formula is ridiculously destroyed.

But the Socialist Party was not prevented from using the electoral machine. It did not find itself completely in a position where it had to declare that it was giving up the fight without attempting to respond with violence to the enemy’s oppression. It was enough for it to threaten this passive withdrawal for its enemies, who are not only supporters of the parliamentary system but have also come to understand that the truly bourgeois application of it lies in the participation of the proletariat in its mechanisms, to give up systematically preventing the exercise of the vote and to resort only, with particular emphasis in certain areas, that obstructionism based on violence, corruption, and fraud which, apart from its extent, is an inevitable feature of the electoral system.

The Socialist Party has given the order to go to the polls, promising that the disciplined execution of this order by the proletarian masses would be the best response to fascism.

Today we have our answer, now that the Socialist Party, aided by the detachment of the communist extremist elements, who showed unusual electoral discipline, not with the formula of grabbing votes but with rules with an opposite effect – and they found themselves in comforting numbers, considering all the circumstances – and remembering that electoral lotteries are disastrous misfortunes from a proletarian and revolutionary point of view – today that, in any case, that number of elected representatives or votes, which according to the latest sensational official socialist preaching constitutes a real force, a decisive coefficient of political action, is assured, to the great satisfaction of our former comrades, they must say what they want to do with it.

Since, unfortunately but predictably, a large number of workers’ votes were concentrated on the socialist lists, this question must be raised among those voters.

There are two possibilities. Either the Socialist Party retains the vision of a revolutionary class action in accordance with the Bologna programme, in which case it was waiting for electoral success solely to raise the morale of the masses, to restore in the proletariat that offensive capacity it had in recent years and that seemed lost, and then the momentum of victory would have to be immediately turned into a counter-offensive against fascism.

On 15 May, this had already become clear. In many places, proletarians, communists at the forefront, have fought fierce battles with the whites, the outcome of which was unfavourable, perhaps for the first time, to the latter. The wave of proletarian awakening was about to overwhelm them. Perhaps a similar application of the boost in morale produced by the election statistics seemed possible. Government, bourgeoisie, and fascism hesitated for a moment. They had to be struck. Groups of communists did so in many places, but the decision lay with the party around which the most votes had been polarised. Now the facts have already shown that this was not the directive of the P.S.I. Once again, its word is to disarm. Once again, it can be said that it is betraying the masses by holding them back. The document is in the latest proclamation from the Leadership, in all its manifestos urging proletarian voters to refrain from acts of violence, from overly conspicuous demonstrations, to ‘contain their joy’.

And so the directive must be different. The Socialist Party must propose the use of electoral force on another level. Which one? It is the other possibility. This possibility has only one name: collaboration.

The socialists may well deny it formally. If they do not tend toward collaboration, what further development of action should their electoral success, to which they attributed miraculous virtues, lead to? Are votes, parliamentary mandates perhaps ends in themselves? And if so, is this not another deception played on the masses?

The socialists might say that they will work towards... the next elections. In that case, they confirm once again their social-democratic policy. But in that case, the facts confirm once again that this policy is a dead end. The great electoral success already existed in 1919. Fascism revealed its inconsistency, demonstrating in broad daylight that one hundred fifty deputies are not even a sufficient defence for the proletariat’s achievements in the face of white violence. The proletariat responded by re-electing almost as many, be that as it may. But what for? Nothing! The Socialist Party answers! The situation had become so poisoned from a revolutionary point of view that this further turn in the vicious circle was necessary. Soon the workers will realise where social-democratic electoral success will lead [some words illegible] one cannot go round in circles forever, the socialists will take the big step towards bourgeois collaboration.

The Communist Party is in place. Ready to fulfil its mission. Despite the boasts of the vote-grabbers, the facts work in its favour.

The votes obtained by the Socialist Party were far greater than those obtained by the Communist Party, representative of the Third International. We have already said that we do not lament this fact (naturally, we lament even less the fact that the bourgeois parties have overtaken us), but this does not mean that the causes of this fact should not be examined and discussed in order to draw useful conclusions for the class tactics of the proletariat.

Our own party, in its manifestos and electoral appeals, had attributed the value of an index to the election results, saying that on 15 May, the workers who are in favour of communism, through the dictatorship of the proletariat and the Soviet republic, would be counted on the basis of the programme of the Moscow International. But in speaking of this consultation, we did not give to it a majoritarian meaning, as the social democrats do. Just as the communists organised in the ranks of the party will never be more than a minority of workers, so communist voters cannot be a majority as long as the bourgeois regime exists: this is such an obvious observation that it, together with the theoretical and historical arguments well known to readers of our press, forms the basis of our criticism of the social-democratic method, of the social-democratic illusion. So long as elections remain within the framework of bourgeois democracy, even the ranks of proletarians who make the political statement of voting for the Communist Party, that is, against the bourgeois democratic system itself, can only be a vanguard formation.

Precisely because we do not consider this consultation to be a positive action that summarises the entire contribution that the masses must bring to the political struggle, but rather an indirect indication of the extent of the forces ready to act tomorrow on another terrain; we will never attempt in our electoral tactic to increase the number of voters at the expense of their quality, that is, their awareness of having embraced the communist programme, in its predominantly extra-electoral part. For the same reasons that the membership of the Communist Party, which pays much more attention to the quality of its members than the social democratic and labour parties, will always be inferior to those of these other parties; the number of communist voters is unlikely to exceed that of social democratic voters. Indeed, it must be assumed that the number of sympathisers not organised in the party is proportionally much lower for communists than for social democrats: hence a double reason for decline.

So while the number of communist voters, as well as those of party members, undoubtedly indicates an increase in the revolutionary strength of the party, provided that this increase is not achieved through opportunistic concessions and compromises, when the question is posed as a comparison between communist and social democratic votes, more comprehensive considerations must be made, taking into account that the number of communists registered with the party, and the broader field of communist voters, at the moment of non-parliamentary, but directly revolutionary, actions, will see most of the immature masses who allow themselves to be regimented by the social democrats in the electoral arena rallying around them.

Given these general considerations, let us see what degree of revolutionary development among the Italian masses can be inferred from the fact that, in the political struggle in general, a predominant part of them allows itself to be led by the Socialist Party.

* * *

1 – There is a tendency to make this data appear discouraging for communism, starting from a comparison with the 1919 elections and evaluating the enormous harvest of votes then reaped by the Socialist Party, not yet split and still a member of the Third International. We do not need to repeat the reasons that demonstrate how only in appearance was that struggle based on a maximalist programme; how the party had become communist only in name, comprising a significant current openly opposed to communism and a majority that understood communism insufficiently to show that it was destined to close that brief demagogic parenthesis and reveal itself, as it has done today, to be intimately social democratic.

The struggle involved a large number of reformist and pseudo-maximalist deputies; a large part of it was the reformist Confederation of Labour, the party worked with all the traditional social-democratic methods and resources, without demanding that propaganda be based on a precise and consistent programme; above all, it focused the struggle on the question of war, exploiting its past opposition to it, even among elements that were not only non-maximalist but even non-proletarian. The Socialist Party then skilfully managed to [grab] the votes of the proletarians, tendentially revolutionary – but whose tendency deserved to be seriously cultivated rather than bastardised in that orgy of demagogy – along with those of all the undecided elements of the intermediate classes, logically tending towards social-democratic politics. Subsequent events, the same ones that have condemned the party’s action as non-revolutionary, have given an idea of the significance of the 1919 elections and have proven that they, and the socialist triumph within them, were a way of salvation for the Italian bourgeoisie; far from being accepted not only as a revolutionary assault, but even as an indication of revolutionary forces in the process of preparing for greater and more decisive struggles.

2 – In the 1919 elections and throughout its activities, the Socialist Party paralysed the formation of a communist consciousness among the masses, influencing them with the democratic concept of the ‘majority’ – overshadowing all the requirements of preparation as individual and collective values of theoretical and practical nourishment in the face of the need to ‘be many’; many in the party, in the ‘proletarian strongholds’, in the elections, with the formula of unity at any cost, which was not union in order to achieve a common goal through truly concerted efforts. The elections themselves, with their results and the subsequent bitter disappointments of the proletariat, should have discredited this ‘majority’ concept; but these processes among the masses take place slowly: and therefore, the social-democratic movement is everywhere the most effective counter-revolutionary expedient. The 156 deputies, and then municipalities and provinces galore, brought cooling and recoil instead of revolutionary acceleration. What a lesson from history! But if the party, if the ardent maximalists of Bologna did not understand this in their minority, it was absurd to expect that, before other intrinsic upheavals and repercussions on the real situation of the masses, vast strata of the proletariat could understand it.

The fascist phenomenon, properly understood, is nothing more than clear confirmation of the illusionism contained in that concept of ‘majority’ or, if you will forgive the term, ‘numeritary’. Suffice it to say that it has raged most fiercely where there have been the most numeritary laurels (count the deputies, the provincial councillors, the socialist municipalities in the Ferrara area!) and retreats where, as in the south, it believed itself to be the master without any effort. But instead, the Italian Socialist Party’s appeal to defeat fascism by blows of ballots, of numbers, has still been successful after the Livorno split. Logically, if the party had done nothing to seriously eradicate the traditional legalistic mirage from its followers, and if its extremist declamations had not even affected the breeding of the parliamentary microbe that is its essential function, it has been able, without losing all its followers, to make this astonishing conversion in its outward attitudes (which in substance have not changed at all), moving from a false and ill-digested anti-democratic preaching to the exaltation of legal methods of action.

Undoubtedly, the Italian proletariat still believed that the number of votes and deputies was a safeguard and a class weapon against the overbearing power of the adversary. Communist propaganda has had neither the time nor the opportunity to discredit this ignominious and idiotic concept: too much has been allowed for the opportunism of vote-chasing maximalism to poison consciences and squander situations, before openly shouting at those who deserve the epithet: traitors! And so it is understandable why many proletarians, having to choose between the effectiveness of their vote for the communists and that of their vote for the social democrats, reasoned as follows: on the one hand, they are asked to vote but are denied any intrinsic value; on the other, they are attributed, in large numbers, a decisive value; and they are on the way to accumulating many more: let us vote for the latter, for the socialists.

Certainly, these proletarians are not communists, and it is not a bad thing that they have not voted for us. If we had achieved a certain ‘numerical’ strength in the obvious and palpable forecasts (which happened in some places), the avalanche would have rained down on our lists, competing with the instinctively revolutionary conviction of the voter, the ‘numerical’ mania of counting themselves as many, of beating ‘the bourgeoisie’ on the harmless terrain of minutes and tallies. Let us hope that this misfortune never befalls us. All these proletarian voters have thus wanted to experiment with a method that sufficient evidence has already debunked. It may be regrettable that another test was needed, but that is how it is. What anti-democratic conviction loses in readiness, it will gain in depth and power. The writer has never believed that the thousand buffoons who shout in the Bolognese congress and in so many other gatherings, their amusing formulas of an anarchic and disorderly revolutionism, had in their pockets, instead of a little medal, the ‘bogeyman’ of the revolution in fifteen days.

3 – It is necessary to recall the reasons why the Communist Party has been unable to mobilise all its forces against this mirage. First of all, this critical propaganda work is not done during the electoral campaign. During the electoral campaign, votes are stolen, and nothing good or useful is done unless there is solid prior preparation by the party in the field of propaganda and the disciplining of its own forces. It is a huge achievement to have gone through the elections, taking the votes that could and should have been taken, without having compromised the entire apparatus of the work in progress and the clarity of our theoretical and tactical orientations, without making ourselves prisoners of illogical situations.

Let us just remember that we had a party in the making, made up of abstentionists who were as convinced as they were disciplined, and of electionists... who were beginning to regret having disciplined the former. The party’s organisation of the masses is a formidable task, which is carried out in many fields, from trade union action to street clashes, which can be seen in elections but does not develop. Above all, we are sure, given the esteem we have for the party, that it does not see its future task in the easy prospect of a rise in electoral statistics, but hopes to be allowed to carry out its arduous and difficult preparatory work before a new election comes along and risks diverting all its energies. If this were to happen, we would still do our duty and leave the morbid ‘numeritary’ itch alone, without any pressure...

4 – The detailed communications that the Executive will make will show how the outcome of the struggle corresponded to predictions, taking into account various circumstances that influenced it. The number of communist deputies is roughly the same as before. The number of party members as it stood at the Livorno congress – compared with the Socialist Party – cannot be taken as a basis in terms of the number of those elected. We had the votes of one third of the party; while our deputies were, according to an old rule that always gives fewer deputies to left-wing tendencies, one seventh (18 against 132) of the unitary ones, a proportion that the elections have preserved almost exactly. And it is logical that the Socialist Party has a larger group of sympathisers, for the reasons mentioned. Furthermore, as many unitarians openly acknowledge (see Canalini’s interview in Ordine Nuovo), the communist secession has made the Socialist Party gain many votes on the right. If we take into account the abstention of a great many revolutionary workers, we can see that the ratio of proletarian votes, and especially proletarian votes, between us and the social democrats cannot be deduced from the election figures, even for this reason.

It should be added that our policy has been not to seek the votes of the syndicalist and anarchist working masses, many of whom, through shrewd manoeuvring, have been attracted to the social democrats. For them, the vote of a bourgeois who expects Turati to save Italy is as good as that of an anarchist worker whose abstentionism collapses before the petty-bourgeois mirage of the protest-candidacy. We have sought and obtained the votes of those who are firmly committed to the communist programme.

5 – The skilful resources of the social democrats have had no small influence. Their hypocritical conduct has already been denounced by us: all our party newspapers publish repugnant details of it. Instead of fighting fairly in debates on ideas and methods, the socialist gentlemen have pretended not to want fratricidal struggle in order to look good in front of the masses and increasingly conceal the terms of their defection from revolutionary directives; but behind the scenes they have spread the most blatantly false and defamatory rumours, spreading false news of the withdrawal of the communist lists at the last minute: they have influenced the unsuspecting masses by telling them that by voting for the communists ‘their vote would be wasted’, etc., etc. For our part, we responded with much healthier methods, albeit less suited to immediate popularity, with direct and open attacks, even violent ones, but with our visors raised.

This is the light in which the enormous difference in votes between socialists and communists should be judged. It is an investigation that concerns us only because we are keen to follow the development of the political consciousness of the proletariat towards communism, not because of silly recriminations or regret at not having had greater electoral success.

On the contrary, our goal remains to compete with the social democrats on other grounds, and we are quite certain that the situations that are developing will completely detach the revolutionary masses from them, despite all their deceitful resources and all the speculations about the past with which they try to obscure the clear formulation of today’s problems. The large number of votes obtained by the Italian Socialist Party is, for us, in line with Marxist critique, a new indication that proves how dangerous an anti-revolutionary apparatus it is. If the communists believe that our numerical defeat is something for which consolation is required; and if, to console themselves, they take pleasure in the large votes obtained by the socialists, then – after observing that there is little point in taking pleasure or sorrow in facts, which must be understood in order to be used in further action – we offer them our heartfelt condolences.

But we have reason to believe that they are very few.

A practical attitude toward electoral abstention could not even be conceived by members of the Communist Party. It is not merely a question of party discipline: it suffices to reflect that the opinions expressed by various comrades in 1919 and 1920 in favour of the abstentionist tactic made sense only as a proposal put forward to the International, whose applicability was understandable only on the basis of precise resolutions for the various countries of the International itself. None of us questioned in 1921 that the Communist Party, founded on the basis of the decisions of the Second Congress of the Communist International, should intervene in the electoral struggle of that time.

There is no need to reopen the debate on whether the abstentionist theses of that time are still theoretically valid. What is certain is that those theses, supported by a group of comrades, insisted on a double premise: an international situation preluding an offensive by the proletariat, and the regime of broad democracy prevailing in an important group of countries: everyone knows that, both internationally and in the Italian political arena, those conditions, if not reversed, have certainly changed in the opposite direction to that which gave rise to our well-known conditions.

Our abstentionist thesis did not have purely contingent value, but Comrade Grieco has rightly pointed out how the dangers faced by abstentionists in 1919 no longer exist today, when Nitti averted the gathering revolutionary storm thanks to the electoral diversion flung open before the Socialist Party. Today the situation is completely different, and everyone knows why. We are not threatened by the disaster of one hundred and fifty honourable proletarian deputies or self-styled such.

I will not dwell on all the problems of the current electoral campaign: suffice it to say that the grave dangers of that time have been completely averted.

I am only concerned, through the demonstrations of some comrades in favour of a contingent thesis of abstention – certainly not because of a practical attitude of abstentionism from the party struggle – the fact that these nostalgias, rather than referring back to the revolutionary reasons we once put forward for the abstentionist thesis, clearly refers to assessments, to states of mind, to ideological premises that have little to do with communism; and this would be no less a drawback than formal indiscipline.

Anyone who wants to be honest must admit that the reasoning behind the conclusion that we would have done better to abstain, can only be this: we are not going to the polls because the elections are not being held in complete freedom, their results will not reflect the legitimate will of the voters, they will not give us the satisfaction of achieving encouraging numbers of votes and elected representatives; and also: if we were to abstain, we would spite fascism by devaluing it abroad.

Why do all these reasons lack a classist and communist character? It is not communist to suggest that, under a regime of democracy and freedom, elections reflect the actual will of the masses. Our entire doctrine stands against this colossal bourgeois lie, our entire struggle is against its proponents, the deniers of the revolutionary method of proletarian action. The liberal mechanism of elections is designed solely to provide a necessary and constant answer: bourgeois regime, bourgeois regime...

What must be denounced in electoral degeneration is the fundamentally ‘sporting’ method of achieving high numerical results, which grips all participants and sometimes even us. Today’s abstentionist nostalgias seem to me to stem precisely from the morbidity of electionism for electionism’s sake.

We, on the other hand, are going – the International demands it, and it is not the abstentionists who should find this task most difficult – not as if it were an exercise in parliamentary cretinism, so reminiscent of the craze for Spalla or Girardengo, but as a moment and an episode in the incessant class struggle. The degeneration of electionism into class collaboration is today less difficult to avoid. The instinctive revolutionary antipathy towards ballot-paper contests now has every reason to be silenced.

I am not saying, mind you, that we must accept the elections as a challenge to be taken up on the terrain of violence: the opportunity to accept provocations of such nature is decided by very different political strategy factors, which today certainly rule it out. But, since we cannot speak of the transformation of the electoral campaign into class warfare, we must at least be on our guard against political attitudes that cause the masses to lose sight of the necessity of the revolutionary solution to come, as would happen with abstention – and especially with that ultra-cretinous form of it that could associate us with the reformist mourners weeping over lost freedom, as over the lost opportunity to have, instead of fascism, the merit of cutting the hamstrings of the proletariat.

And is the argument based on the alleged damage that widespread abstention would cause to the reputation of fascism abroad perhaps classist in nature? Never again. This would only mean deluding ourselves that the foreign bourgeoisie could help us free ourselves from fascism, while a good communist knows that the foreign bourgeoisie can only rejoice at the works of fascism in Italy, and if it does not find it good to imitate it at home, it is only for its own interests and certainly not because it is scandalised by the violations of pure democracy. Perhaps we want to learn the methods of revolutionary struggle from the Corriere della Sera or from Nitti’s newspapers? Such abstentionism would reek of boycottism, that is, the purulent form of electoral syphilis.

Every good communist today has no other duty than to combat, with these class arguments, the tendency of many proletarians to abstain, a mistaken consequence of their aversion to fascism. In doing so, we will carry out magnificent propaganda and help the formation of a consciousness firmly revolutionary, which will serve, when the time comes, marked by real situations and not by our desires alone, to boycott and overthrow it, the obscene circus of bourgeois parliament.

Repossi. I am referring to the minutes of the session of 13 June. Whether my statements, or rather those of the Communist Group, are deemed to refer to the current situation depends on whether today’s situation is merely a development of that which already existed on 13 June. If I had been present at that session, I would have had to point out to Deputies Rocco, Soleri, and Delcroix that a Chamber of fascists and supporters of fascism, a Chamber elected by Cesare Rossi and Marinelli, cannot commemorate Giacomo Matteotti without committing a shameful desecration.

President. Honourable Repossi, I call you to order!

Repossi. I must repeat these things to you today. This is not a question of the political responsibility of the regime, which today has no support except for the squadristi who shout, ‘Long live Dumini’; nor is it merely a question of the moral responsibility of those who daily consider legitimate the bloody violence perpetrated against workers. In this case, it is a matter of direct personal responsibility, which cannot be evaded by forcing the resignation of an undersecretary or by the monstrous contradiction of renouncing the Ministry of the Interior.

President. I cannot allow you to continue in this manner!

Repossi. Since the dawn of time, murderers and their accomplices have never been allowed to commemorate their victims. This assembly bears the burden of complicity.

President. I call you to order for the second time.

Repossi. We return here today solely to repeat our indictment against you, and nothing will prevent us from returning whenever we deem it necessary to use this platform to show the workers and peasants of Italy the path to liberation from the regime of capitalist reaction that you represent. If we had been present on 13 June, we would have had to and would have wanted to say that the Matteotti crime appeared to be the determining factor in a situation precisely because it was in fact its gruesome indicator.

President. Hon. Repossi, you are not speaking on the record…

Repossi. The Matteotti crime has been the spasmodic sign of the failure of fascism.

Greco. We can’t go on like this!

Repossi. Even then, it was clear that a proletarian organisation could be weakened for a moment, but that the proletariat could not be weakened for long, because that would mean reducing the entire country to slavery.

Capanni (jumps up and shouts). I won’t touch you because you disgust me!

Repossi. Even then we could tell you, and today we repeat, that the proletariat does not forget even the responsibilities of those who prepared and supported fascism, of anyone who favoured its rise to power, of anyone: even the invoked ‘anyone’ of the Quirinale. Even then, we predicted that by restricting the anti-fascist struggle to the search for a parliamentary compromise, which leaves intact the reactionary essence of the regime under which millions of workers and peasants throughout Italy suffer and against which they rail, no positive outcome could be achieved. On the contrary, it helped fascism. We are not waiting for a bourgeois compromise for which the bourgeoisie today calls for the intervention of the king, for which reformist and maximalist social democracy sacrifices the class struggle and hopes for a ‘superior administration alien to the interests of any party’, that is, a military dictatorship that would prevent the inexorable advent of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The centre of our action lies outside this chamber, among the working masses who are increasingly convinced that the shameful situation in which you, your pro-fascist supporters and your democratic and liberal allies and supporters have kept the country will only be brought to an end by returning to the field of battle and ensuring that their organised force prevails over you. From this platform, we also point out to the workers the path they must follow: it is the path of resistance and physical defence against your violence, of unceasing struggle for trade union conquests, of organised intervention against the rising cost of living and the worsening economic crisis; it is the path of the establishment of Workers’ and Peasants’ Committees. All those who want to fight against you with adequate weapons must gather around the Workers’ and Peasants’ Committees. The only slogans that contain a radical solution to the present situation must come from the Workers’ and Peasants’ Committees: Down with the government of murderers and starvers of the people. Disarmament of the Blackshirts. Arming of the proletariat. Establishment of a government of workers and peasants. The Workers’ and Peasants’ Committees will be the basis of this government and of the dictatorship of the working class.

And now, by all means, commemorate Giacomo Matteotti, but remember that the cry uttered by the Martyr’s mother has also become the cry of millions of workers: ‘Murderers! Murderers!’

(...) Participating in the 1924 elections was a very fortunate political act, but one cannot say the same about the proposal for joint action with the socialist parties nor of the way it was labelled ‘proletarian unity’. Just as deplorable was the excessive tolerance shown towards some of the ‘Terzini’s’ electoral manoeuvres. But the most serious problems are posed apropos the open crisis that followed Matteotti’s assassination.

The leadership’s policies were based on the absurd view that the weakening of fascism would propel the middle classes into action first, and then the proletariat. This implied on the one hand a lack of faith in the capacity of the proletariat to act as a class, despite its continued alertness under the suffocating strictures of fascism, and on the other, an over-estimation of the initiative of the middle-class. In fact, even without referring to the clear marxist theoretical positions on this matter, the central lesson to draw from the Italian experience has been that the intermediary layers will passively tail along behind the strongest and may therefore back either side. Thus in 1919-1920 they backed the proletariat, then between 1921-22-23 they went behind fascism, and now, after a significant period of major upheaval in 1924-25, they are backing fascism again.

The leadership were mistaken in abandoning parliament and participating in the first meetings of the Aventine when they should have remained in Parliament, launched a political attack on the government, and immediately taken up a position opposed to the moral and constitutional prejudices of the Aventine, which would determine the outcome of the crisis in fascism’s favour. This wouldn’t have prevented the communists from making the decision to abandon parliament, and would have allowed them to do so whilst keeping their specific identity intact, and allowed them to leave at the only appropriate time, i.e. when the situation was ripe to call on the masses to take direct action. It was one of those crucial moments which affect how future situations will turn out; the error was therefore a fundamental one, a decisive test of the leadership’s capabilities, and it led to a highly unfavourable utilisation by the working class both of the weakening of fascism and the resounding failure of the Aventine.

The Return to Parliament in November 1924 and the statement issued by Repossi were beneficial, as the wave of proletarian consensus showed, but they came too late. The leadership wavered for a long time, and only finally made a decision under pressure from the party and the Left. The preparation of the Party was made on the basis of dreary directives and a fantastically erroneous assessment of the situation’s latent possibilities (report by Gramsci to the Central Committee, August 1924). The preparation of the masses, which leant towards supporting the Aventine rather than wishing for its collapse, was in any case made worse when the party proposed to the opposition parties that they set up their own Anti-Parliament. This tactic in any case conflicted with the decisions of the International, which never envisaged proposals being made to parties which were clearly bourgeois; worse still, it lay totally outside the domain of communist principles and tactics, and outside the marxist conception of history. Any possible explanation that the leadership might have had for this tactic aside – an explanation which was doomed to have very limited repercussions anyway – there is no doubt that it presented the masses with an illusory Anti-State, opposed to and warring against the traditional State apparatus, whilst in the historical perspective of our programme, there is no basis for an Anti-State other than the representation of the one productive class, namely, the Soviet.

To call for an Anti-Parliament, relying in the country on the support of the workers’ and peasants’ committees, meant entrusting the leadership of the proletariat to representatives of groups that are socially capitalist, like Amendola, Agnelli, Albertini, etc.

Besides the certainty that such a situation won’t arise, a situation which could only be described as a betrayal anyway, just putting it forward in the first place as a point of view derived from a communist proposal involves a betrayal of principles and a weakening of the revolutionary preparation of the proletariat (...)

‘The capitalist State taking on a constantly more evident form of class dictatorship which Marxism has denounced since the beginning, parliamentarism loses necessarily all importance. The elected organs and the parliament of the old bourgeois tradition are no more than survivals. They have no content any longer, only the democratic phraseology subsists and this cannot hide the fact that at the moment of social crises, the State dictatorship is the ultimate resource for capitalism, and that the proletarian revolutionary violence must be directed against this State’.

Characteristic Theses of the Party, 1952, Part IV. 12

If in 1926, shortly after the Lyon Congress, at the Enlarged Executive Committee of the Communist International in February-March, Bukharin, then busy firing all his guns at ‘Bordigism’ while waiting to turn them on ‘Trotskyism’, had been able to take stock, in the spirit of the Second Congress, of five years of ‘revolutionary parliamentarism’ in the major Western communist parties, the picture would have been no less bleak than the one he painted in 1920 in reference to parties still harbouring reformist wings within their ranks.

The German Party had indeed achieved great electoral successes, but, to the same extent, it had lost its fighting spirit and bite on the terrain of class struggle – the only criterion of judgement in 1920: it would continue to reap votes even on the eve of Hitler’s bloodless rise to power! As for its parliamentary activity, not only could it boast no example of ‘exploiting’ the Reichstag tribune for propaganda and revolutionary battle, but it had fully justified the Left’s alarm at the Second Congress by entering into government with the Social Democrats in Saxony and Thuringia in 1923 (with the Executive of the International acting as matchmaker) and, after Hindenburg’s election to the presidency of the Reich, launching proposals for... an electoral and parliamentary united front not only with Social Democracy but also with the bourgeois ‘left’.

The C.P. of France, at every new meeting in Moscow, drew the wrath of the International for its chronic, recurrent parliamentarism, for its lack or insufficient ‘use of parliament’ during the occupation of the Ruhr and, worse still, during the colonial war in the Rif, while in local elections it returned to its old love of supporting ‘left-wing cartels’ (Clichy tactic), and even in 1927 it scandalised none other than Palmiro Togliatti for its incurable ‘parliamentary cretinism’.

The Italian Party had risked throwing itself body and soul into the arms of Aventinism in 1924, and in 1936 – having freed itself from the inconvenient Left – it matured the evolution that, in the name of the ‘freedom’ to be saved, was to lead it to the vanguard of revisionism.

Chased out the door in 1920, parliamentarism was coming back in, albeit still timidly, through the window. This was what we had warned against, but no one listened. Beyond the initial failures of a tactical method, we can now see how the failure to adopt Marxist abstentionism in 1920 weighed heavily – and this is much more serious – on the development of the revolutionary workers’ movement in the years 1925-1927, when the fate of Lenin’s International was decided.

At the Second Congress, the Left had emphasised how insisting on parliamentary practice during the delicate period of formation of the Communist Parties, especially in countries with mature capitalism, threatened to delay or weaken the necessary process of selecting healthy communist and proletarian forces from the rotten democratism and reformism of the right and centre. The refusal to immediately apply to the nascent parties what was for us a healthy reagent, a lock a thousand times more effective than any condition of admission to repel the reformist assault on the young parties of the International, was paid for dearly in those dramatic years, when the courageous, albeit belated, battle of the Russian Opposition against rampant Stalinism, the sister parties of the West did not give the Left the support it had urgently requested. It could not come, because they were almost all born plethoric, swollen with reformists hiding behind the facade of only formal acceptance of the 21 points of Moscow, and of substantial adherence to the only point that ensured them a chance of returning to parliament in any case. They were full of disguised parliamentarians, temporarily silent but ready to return to the forefront – as indeed happened in 1925-27 – as the star of ‘socialism in one country’, i.e. the brand new opportunist, revisionist, counter-revolutionary wave, rose on the horizon. The warning had been given in 1920: 1926, unfortunately, showed how realistic it had been. It was too late.

That, after then, nothing remained of the 1920 construction of ‘revolutionary parliamentarism’ in the parties that still call themselves communist, does not even need to be demonstrated: in parliament they are and remain – and they do not hide it – not to destroy it, but to keep it standing in case it collapses. ‘Parliamentary cretinism’ has taken its revenge: our warning in 1920 about the tenacity of this disease in countries that had completed the bourgeois democratic revolution a hundred years ago or more might have seemed dictated by ‘pure theoretical considerations’; today, it is the flesh and blood of history.

But something more has happened, and this constitutes another victory for us, theoretical once again, but precisely for this reason extraordinarily practical. To the same extent that the parties of the former Communist International soaked themselves in parliamentarism to a degree unknown to Turati and Kautsky – still respectable, compared to today’s disciples – the democratic bourgeoisie was shedding its last fig leaf, leaving it to exist only as a soporific drug to be administered to proletarians. Victorious in the war against fascism, democracy survives today solely by virtue of a fascist method not only integrally adopted but increased a hundredfold, which is then the other face of the totalitarian domination of the great imperialist powers on a world scale. This is acknowledged by the very ‘ideologists’ of the ruling class, those who are the first to moan – moaning is their function, while history follows its inexorable course – about the divorce between the ‘real country’ and the ‘legal country’, about the overwhelming pre-eminence of the executive, about the suffocating ‘dictatorship’ of the ‘political class’ and its parties, about the reduction of the many honourable deputies and senators to salaried bureaucrats, to managers of state-owned companies, to shadows – laboriously revived on television screens – of what is presumed to be their ‘historic’ function. In this context, the parliamentary ‘tribune’ is no longer anything, not even a microphone, and the ‘chamber’ has long since ceased to be the theatre of great battles, not to say of principles, but even merely oratorical ones: it is the realm of ordinary administration, and all that remains to restore its pale lustre – a futile effort – are the columns of any Unità...

‘The corpse still walks’, yes, but only as a decoy for the proletarian larks. If these, by absurd hypothesis, vanished from the stormy sky of bourgeois society, it too would disappear without anyone noticing its disappearance, because the state machine runs on its own account and the maintenance costs of Montecitorio and Palazzo Madama enter its budget only as faux frais of social conservation. Its ‘socialist’ and ‘communist’ props no longer even have the justification that over there ‘one speaks to the masses’: the voice, in there, dies out before it even leaves the lips (delicate lips, for that matter) of whoever articulates it. The circus has the sole task of making an appearance: its function is reduced to ‘being there’, a corpse cluttering the path of the proletarian class’s resurgence.

Stalin said – it was the need to preserve the regime that made him say it – that it was up to the communist parties to raise again the flags that had been mocked and trampled on by the bourgeoisie. The ruling class assigns no other task to traitors; it is the only job for which it pays them, handsomely.

The class party, the Marxist revolutionary party, has no choice but to take note of this. We did so, as can be seen in the article that follows, on the eve of the general elections called for May 1952 – not for a year in the second half of the century, but for the entire span of time separating us from the revolution. In 1920, we said that the adoption of ‘revolutionary parliamentarism’, especially in advanced capitalist countries, was dangerous. Today, the balance sheet of many decades allows us to say that, regardless of good intentions, to try again would be defeatist: it would be tantamount, consciously or not, to giving a semblance of life back to what history itself, to our great joy, has killed; it would mean giving oxygen back to what the bourgeoisie – contradicting itself and proving us right – has shown to be nothing but a ghost.

May the proletariat turn its back forever on the ignoble theatre of puppets, and seek the oxygen of great battles past and future – in Trotsky’s words – where it is only possible to breathe it: outside those walls, in the streets!

It is not to sacrifice ourselves to the ignoble events of this May, which is coming to an end and takes its worthy place among its various predecessors devoted to the bygones of the ‘hard virago’ Liberty, now reduced to an old trotting horse, that we will once again concern ourselves with the theme: proletariat and electoralism.

Without giving any importance to the prediction or examination of the results’ statistics, which for over thirty years we also contested this last claimed utility as a quantitative indicator of social forces, and without therefore attempting a cold sketch or admiring a pale photograph in numbers of today and of the Italian country, we will briefly outline the positions of a historical period whose immense lessons are, at present, largely unused by the masses who flock – but with visible large ebbs of mistrust and disgust – to the usual ballot boxes.

In 1892, at the Genoa Congress, the Italian Socialist Party is formed with the separation of the Marxists from the anarchists. The controversy and split reflect what had long since ended the First International between Marx and Bakunin, and as it was said, between authoritarians and libertarians. On the surface, the situation is as follows: the Marxists are, in the circumstances of the time, in favour of participating in elections for public administrative and political bodies, the libertarians are against it. But the real background to the issue is different (see the writings of Marx and Engels on Spain at the time, etc.). It is a matter of defeating the individualist revolutionary conception that one must not vote in order to ‘not recognise’ the Bourgeois State with that act, with the historical and dialectical conception that the class State is a real fact and not a dogma that can be more or less idly erased from one’s own ‘consciousness’ and will only be historically destroyed by the revolution. This (have you, said Engels, ever seen one?) is par excellence a fact of force and not of persuasion (much less of a count of opinions), of authority and not of liberty, which will not be so naive as to release autonomous individuals as if from a cage of pigeons, but will build the power and strength of a new State.

Thus, in this dispute between those who wanted to enter Parliament and those who wanted to stay out (but as a corollary to the far more serious errors of inciting proletarians to reject the class State, the class political party, and even the trade union organisation), it was the Marxist socialists, not the anti-electoral and anti-organisational anarchists, who rejected the bourgeois fable of liberty, the basis of the deception of elective democracy.

The correct programmatic position was to demand not so much the formal ‘conquest of public power’ as the revolutionary future ‘conquest of political power’, and the possibilist and reformist right wing vainly attempted to cover up the formula given by Marx in 1848: dictatorship of the working class!

* * *

The European bourgeoisie, with its advances in the field of social reform and seductive invitations to collaboration to union and parliamentary leaders of the workers, enters into the explosive circle of imperialism, and in 1914 the First World War breaks out. A wave of dismay assails the socialists and workers who, on the eve of the war, had nevertheless proclaimed in Stuttgart and Basel that social revolution would oppose the war. The traitors begin to measure the catastrophic situation that sweeps away decades of rosy illusions, not with the yardstick of proletarian Marxism, but with that of bourgeois Liberty, whose loudest cries rise every time the cause and strength of our Revolution are brought to their knees.

The existence of parliaments and ballot right is invoked as a heritage guaranteed to the proletariat, which must defend it by allowing itself to be regimented and armed in the national army: and so German workers will be persuaded to let themselves be killed to ward off the Tsarist spectre, the Western ones to do so against the Kaiserist spectre.

The Italian Socialist Party had the advantage of a lapse of time to decide before joining the national union: it firmly rejected the idea that the Italian state should follow Germany in forming a political alliance, and took refuge in a policy of neutrality (insufficient, as declared by the revolutionary wing even before the glorious May of 1915) and it then managed to resist opposition when the bourgeoisie descended into ‘the field of freedom’, attacking Austria.

* * *

In 1919, the war ends with national victory and the liberation of the ‘unredeemed’ cities, but after immense bloodshed and the inevitable aftermath of economic and social upheaval: inflation, production crises, crisis of the war industry. Two powerful historical results are acquired and evident before the masses and their party. Domestically, the antithesis between the postulates of democracy and nation, identified with war and massacre, and those of class and socialists became clear: the interventionists of all colours, from the nationalists (later fascists) to the demo-Masons and republicans, whether or not they fought in the war, eager to roll themselves up in the orgy of victory, soon cooled by the lashes of the imperialist allies, are rightly hated and despised by the workers who sweep them away from the streets where they descend determined to fight. In the international arena, the Bolshevik Revolution has provided the factual extremes for the theory of revolution opposed to the demo-bourgeois and anarchists: meanwhile victory is possible, provided we radically free ourselves from the errors, illusions, and scruples of democracy and liberty.

And so the crossroads open up before the great party defeated by the interventionists in May 1915. It is easy to have a powerful numerical comeback by the democratic path. Much harder is the other path, which involves founding a revolutionary party, eliminating our social democrats such as Turati, Modigliani and Treves, albeit sparing them the shame of social patriotism, organising the insurrectional seizure of power, which in the meantime is hoped to be possible throughout central Europe, in the territories of the defeated empires.

In the situation of 1892, there was no contradiction between the revolutionary path and that of electoral activity, the former having no historical basis other than a clear party programme, not a manoeuvre of action.

An advanced group of Italian socialists at the Bologna Congress argued that in 1919 the contradiction was open. Taking the path of elections meant closing the path of revolution. The perplexity of the bourgeoisie was evident: the majority at that time did not want to prevent civil war with forceful initiatives, and with Giolitti and Nitti they invited the workers to enter the defenceless factories and the one hundred and fifty honourable members to pour into Montecitorio: let Bandiera Rossa be sung in both places too!

It was impossible to curb enthusiasm for the electoral campaign and to assert the historically confirmed prediction that its effect, especially insofar as it was successful, would cause all the gains made by the vigorous campaign to discredit the ‘democratic war’ to be lost, with the enthusiasm with which Italian workers, strongly aligned alone on the class front, had welcomed the seizure of power by the Russian Soviets and the dispersal of the stillborn democratic Assembly.

Mussolini, who had betrayed us in 1914 by going over to the opposing side with the proponents of democratic and irredentist intervention, advocate – if only he had succeeded earlier! – of an initiative of force by the national bourgeoisie to stifle the proletarian organs – was ridiculed in the elections, and intoxication subsequently took its irresistible course.

In 1920, while laying the foundations of the Communist Party in Italy, separated from the social democrats, the Moscow International believed that there was no contradiction between elections and insurrection, in the sense that communist parties firmly established beyond the dividing line between the two Internationals could nevertheless find it useful to take action in Parliament in order to blow up Parliament itself and thereby bury parliamentarism. The question posed in too general terms was difficult, and all Italian communists deferred to the decision of the Second Moscow Congress (June 1920), the solution being clear: in principle, everyone against parliamentarism; in tactics, neither participation always and everywhere nor boycott always and everywhere should be established.

The opinions of the majorities are of little weight before the refutations of history. Such a decision, and its general acceptance in Italy, do not detract from the aforementioned contradiction of 1919: elections with a hybrid party of revolutionaries, mostly slowly finding their way, and determined social democrats – that is, the break-up of the party (October 1919, it was time; in January 1921 it was too late) and preparation for the conquest of revolutionary power.

It is indisputable that Lenin did little to reconcile the position of the anti-war socialists in Italy in the post-war period, in a state that had long been democratic and victorious, with that of the Bolsheviks in Russia in the Tsarist Dumas during the lost wars. But no less indisputable is that Lenin saw in time the historical contradiction posited by us at the time and confirmed by the future.

In the famous pamphlet on ‘“Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder’ – in which the tendency to the left is not despised as childish, but considered an element of growth for communism, against rightism and centrism, elements of senility and decay, which, against Lenin’s desperate struggle and after breaking his brain, were to triumph – in that text so exploited by the maniacs of the electoral method, Lenin expressed himself on the struggle in the Italian party thus; these are the only passages:

Note dated 27 April 1920: ‘I have had too little opportunity to acquaint myself with “Left-wing” communism in Italy. Comrade Bordiga and his faction of Abstentionist Communists (Comunista astensionista) are certainly wrong in advocating non-participation in parliament. But on one point, it seems to me, Comrade Bordiga is right – as far as can be judged from two issues of his paper, Il Soviet (Nos. 3 and 4, January 18 and February 1, 1920) (…) in attacking Turati and his partisans, who remain in a party which has recognised Soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat, and yet continue their former pernicious and opportunist policy as members of parliament. Of course, in tolerating this, Comrade Serrati and the entire Italian Socialist Party are making a mistake which threatens to do as much harm and give rise to the same dangers as it did in Hungary, where the Hungarian Turatis sabotaged both the party and the Soviet government from within. Such a mistaken, inconsistent, or spineless attitude towards the opportunist parliamentarians gives rise to “Left-wing” communism, on the one hand, and to a certain extent justifies its existence, on the other. Comrade Serrati is obviously wrong when he accuses Deputy Turati of being “inconsistent”, for it is the Italian Socialist Party itself that is inconsistent in tolerating such opportunist parliamentarians as Turati and Co.’.

Then there is the ‘Appendix’, dated 12 May 1920. ‘The issues of the Italian newspaper “Il Soviet” referred to above fully confirm what I have said in the pamphlet about the Italian Socialist Party’. This is followed by a quote from an interview with Turati in the ‘Manchester Guardian’, calling for discipline at work, order and prosperity for Italy. ‘Indeed, the correspondent of the British bourgeois-liberal newspaper has rendered Turati and Co. a disservice and has excellently confirmed the correctness of the demand by Comrade Bordiga and his friends on “Il Soviet”, who are insisting that the Italian Socialist Party, if it really wants to be for the Third International, should drum Turati and Co. out of its ranks and become a Communist Party both in name and in deed’.

It is clear therefore that the main problem is the elimination of social pacifists from the proletarian party, a secondary question is whether the party should participate in elections, according to Lenin’s thinking at the time and in the subsequent debates and theses on parliamentarism at the Second Congress, which took place shortly afterwards.

But today it is also clear to us what we argued then: that the only way to achieve the transfer of forces onto the revolutionary terrain was an enormous effort to liquidate, immediately after the end of the war, the tremendous democratic and electoral allure that too many Saturnalian feasts had already celebrated.

The tactic desired by Moscow was followed disciplinedly, even rigorously, by the Livorno party. Unfortunately, however, the subordination of the revolution to the corrupting demands of democracy was already underway both internationally and locally, and the Leninist meeting point between the two problems, as well as their relative weight, proved unsustainable. Parliamentarism is like a cogwheel that, if you grab hold of it, will inevitably crush you. Its use in ‘reactionary’ times, as supported by Lenin, was justifiable; in times of possible revolutionary attack, it is a manoeuvre in which the bourgeois counter-revolution too easily wins the game. In different situations and under a thousand circumstances, history has proven that there is no better diversion from revolution than electoralism.

* * *

From concessions to parliamentary tactics with entirely destructive application, there was a gradual slide towards positions reminiscent of those of the social democrats. Alliances were proposed to them, which would have led to a possible majority of seats, and since it made no sense to use this numerical weight only to form a platonic opposition and bring down ministries, the other ill-fated formula of the ‘workers’ government’ arose.

It was clear that there was a return to the conception of Parliament as a way to establish the political power of the working class. Events proved that, to the extent that this historical illusion resurfaced, there was a regression from all previously conquered positions. From the destruction of Parliament, along with all the other mechanisms of the State, by means of insurrection, there was a shift to the use of Parliament to accelerate the insurrection. There was a relapse into the use of Parliament as a means to achieve class power through a majority. The fourth step, as clearly established in the theses the Left put forward in Moscow in 1920, 1922, 1924,1926, was to move from Parliament as a means to Parliament as an end. All parliamentary majorities are right and sacred and inviolable, even if they are against the proletariat.

Turati himself would never have said it, but today’s ‘communists’ say it all the time and instil it deeply in the minds of the masses who follow them.

If we recall these stages once again, it is in order to establish the tight link between every assertion of electoralism, parliamentarism, democracy, freedom, and a defeat, a step backwards for the potential of the proletarian class.

The race backwards came to its unmasked conclusion when, in a reversal of roles, the power of capital took the initiative in the civil war against the proletarian organisations. The situation was reversed in large part due to the work of the liberal bourgeoisie and the democratic socialists, of the same right wing nestled in our ranks, as Lenin said of Hungary. In Germany, they were those police-like parties and executioners of the revolutionary communists; in Italy, they not only favoured the false retreats in style of Nitti and Giolitti but also gave a hand to the preparation of the open fascist forces, using the judiciary, police, army (Bonomi) to counterattack every time the illegal communist forces (alone, and in full compliance with the ‘pacification pact’ signed by those parties) achieved tactical successes (Empoli, Prato, Sarzana, Foiano, Bari, Ancona, Parma, Trieste, etc.). That in these cases the fascists, unable to do so on their own, with the help of the forces of the constitutional and parliamentary State massacred workers and our comrades, burned newspapers and red headquarters, was not the greatest scandal: this erupted when they took it out on Parliament and killed, now post festum, the deputy Matteotti.

The cycle was complete. No longer Parliament for the cause of the proletariat, but the proletariat for the cause of Parliament. A general front of all non-fascist parties was called for and proclaimed, above and beyond different ideologies and class bases, with the sole aim of uniting all forces to overthrow fascism, restore democracy and reopen parliament.

We have repeatedly recounted the historical stages: the Aventine, in which the leadership of our party participated in 1924, but from which it had to withdraw at the behest of the party itself, which had only obeyed the directives prevailing in Moscow out of discipline, but still retained intact its precious horror, born of a thousand struggles, towards any interclass alliance; then came the long pause and further slide into emigration, until the policy of national liberation and partisan war, as we have explained many times, that the use of armed and insurrectionary means took away nothing from the character of opportunism and betrayal of such a policy. We will not follow the entire narrative here.

* * *

Even before Italian fascism and the Second World War, we had enough reason to argue that in Western Europe the proletarian party should never engage in parallel political actions with the ‘left-wing’ or popular bourgeoisie, which since then has taken on the most unimaginable forms: once anticlerical Freemasons, then Catholic Christian Democrats and convent friars, republicans and monarchists, protectionists and free traders, centralists and federalists, and so on.

In contrast to our method, which considers every movement ‘to the right’ of the bourgeoisie, in the sense of throwing off the mask of ostentatious guarantees and concessions, as a verified prediction, a ‘theoretical victory’ (Marx, Engels) and therefore a useful revolutionary opportunity, which a properly organised party must welcome not with mourning but with joy, there is the opposite method whereby each of these turns leads to the demobilisation of the class front and a rush to rescue, as a prejudicial treasure, what the bourgeoisie has dismantled and despised: democracy, liberty, constitution, parliament.

Let us therefore leave aside doctrinal controversy, justifiable only with regard to the declared anti-Marxists, and see where that method rejected by us has led, given that, through the combined efforts of many forces and many accomplices, the European and Italian proletariat has been dragged along and nailed down.

National resistance, war between the Eastern and Western states on the democratic front, halting of the Germans at Stalingrad, landing in France, fall of Mussolini and his hanging by his feet, fall of Hitler. The stakes of the immense struggle, to which proletarians have denied nothing: blood, flesh, the class fabric of their troubled century-long movement, are saved! Thanks above all to the armies of America, it is saved forever: Freedom, Democracy, elective constitution! Everything has been risked and given for you, Parliament, temple of modern civilisation, and, having closed the doors of the temple of Janus, we have the joy of reopening yours!

A little breathless, human civilisation resumes its generous and tolerant path, commits itself to hanging people only by the neck, reconsecrates the human person who, by necessity, had been suitable material for making an omelette with the liberating bombs: if historically all these apologists were right, the danger of the Dictatorship is over, and from now until the end of time we will not see the thing, terrible to think, of being without deputies, of doing without parliamentary Chambers. From Yalta to Potsdam, from Washington to Moscow, from London to Berlin, and to Rome, all this was in May – always a May! – 1945, completely sunny and secure.

* * *

Let us therefore look at what the same individuals, and the broadcasters of the same centres, were saying in this May 1953, not so long ago, but ‘quantum mutatus ab illo!’ Everything was safe then, by mutual agreement. Now, listening to each of them, everything is about to be lost again, everything has to be done all over again.

Let us at least admit, therefore, that between 1922 and 1945 we were dragged into an idiotic and foul method!

Let’s limit our demonstration to the Italian electoral landscape, after putting on our gas masks.

Essentially, there are three groups fighting, if we put aside the timid reappearance of the fascists, who had every right to be considered a historical fact as valid as any other, but who, with ballot papers in hand instead of truncheons, make themselves look like the most democratic of all. And indeed, the most democratic person of all time is the one who plays the role of the victim of State persecution and police reprisals. Free apology for the truncheon, to be obtained, alas, with paper and pen.

There are therefore three groups into which the anti-fascist front and the bloc – and first government after salvation – of national liberation have split. Three groups that united in the mutual certainty – and gave each other mutual endorsement – that they were equal in the holy war, in the global crusade against dictatorships. Now, let us listen to the logorrhoea of the loudspeakers and newspapers, even if only for three or four sentences, as it is impossible to endure any more. Each of the three sectors is asking for votes with only one argument: the other two represent a ‘danger of dictatorship’.

According to the monarchist faction, which rejects the label ‘right-wing’ and claims to be democratic and constitutional, based on the glorious traditions of the Giolitti era, and which does not hesitate to make anti-Vatican gestures such as the breach of Porta Pia, it is clear that if the communists win, they will lead the country to a red dictatorship and will therefore send parliament to hell. But they are no less virulent in asserting that Christian democracy, with its minor allies, is a reactionary police force that is leading Italy back under the despotism of clerics in Phrygian caps. So they too see in De Gasperi a threat to parliament, which he will replace with a council of bishops, replacing elections with communion in the streets.

According to the communist left, it goes without saying that not only are the monarchists preparing nothing less than a new fascism and absolutism, but the Christian Democrat centre is an agent of American dictatorship and Scelba’s riot police are worse than Benito’s militia. This, insofar as it is true, was only possible thanks to the anti-fascist bloc and national liberation policy that welcomed the ‘military police’ and national police with open arms, and with the immediate disarmament, on the orders of the ‘generals’ from the corridors of the workers’ ‘brigades’, just after the fascists and republican militiamen were eliminated.

The Christian Democrats and their allies, heavily bombarded from both sides as sure harbingers of tomorrow’s totalitarianism and a new twenty-year period, and above all overwhelmed by accusation of traitors to democracy with the huge hoax of the campaign against the ‘scam law’, claim to be nothing less than the saviours of a free Italy threatened by two opposing, and converging with clenched teeth, ferocious totalitarianisms: the neo-fascist on one side, the communist on the other, the former portrayed with the traits of the Hitlerism and Mussolinism of the past, the latter with the present connotations of the ultra-statist and ultra-despotic Sovietism of Russia.

The cycle has therefore unfolded as follows. Starting point: loyal alliance between three groups of equally fervent friends of Liberty to destroy Dictatorship and the possibility of any Dictatorship. Killing of the Black Dictatorship. End point: choice between three paths, each leading to a new Dictatorship more ferocious than the others. The voter who votes is simply choosing between the Red Dictatorship, the White, and the Blue.

Two methods have historically gone bankrupt here, from every point of view, but especially from that of the proletarian class that concerns us. The first method is that of employing legal means, the constitution, and parliamentarism with a broad political bloc in order to avoid the Dictatorship. The second is to wage the same crusade and form the same bloc on the terrain of armed struggle, when the dictatorship is in place, with the sole democratic aim.

Today’s historical problems are not solved by legality but by force. Force can only be overcome by a greater force. Dictatorship can only be destroyed by a more solid dictatorship.

It is an understatement to say that this filthy institution of Parliament is of no use to us. It is of no use to anyone anymore.

* * *

All the alternatives touted and made to be feared by the three sides have no substance. If either of the right-wing or left-wing forces were to prevail, it would immediately split, and a large part of its elected representatives would move to the Atlantic and American bourgeois centre. The monarchists make no secret of this. The self-styled communists say it less openly, but it would be the inevitable outcome of their eventual success in gaining a majority, which seems impossible.

Little will change in the number of those who will sit down to ‘another five-year banquet’ from which voters will not even get the crumbs.

At the time of the Matteotti crisis, we said that it was a trade union movement of professional deputies who saw their privileges and income threatened and resorted to strike action. The same must be said of the ‘historic battle’ against the ‘scam law’. The election is not only a scam in itself, but it is all the more so because it claims to give equal weight to every individual vote. The whole mess in Italy is made by a few thousand cooks, sous-chefs, and kitchen hands, who herd the twenty million voters into lots ‘by arm’.

If Parliament served to technically administer something and not just to make fools of the citizens, it would not devote one year out of five years of maximum life to elections and another to discussing the law to establish itself! If you count up all the hours spent ranting and raving, it’s more than two-fifths. This limp association is an end in itself: and the people who let themselves be killed in order to set it up again have been cheated out of more than twenty per cent of their little particle of sovereignty! Now they’re voting in the next world.

If the parliamentarians of all bourgeois factions don’t give a damn about the democratic principle, the false communists laugh at them just as much. This is not because they have returned in any way to class positions and to dictatorship after the bankruptcy of the bloccardism for freedom. And in fact, they are not following the same path, concealing all party connotations, and are rebuilding a bloc of the healthy Italian people, of the enlightened, of the honest, not only with the foolish Nenni alternative, which in the end promises what we have said: give us access to parliament and we will govern with you and like you; but they are stirring up a whole host of senile supporters, whom only inexorable decrepitude and arteriosclerosis has prevented from associating themselves with the most bourgeois names in politics: Bonomi, Croce, Orlando, Nitti, De Nicola, Labriola and the like...

And they are so far removed from even thinking about climbing back up the slope that not only are they the most ardent in invoking legality and constitutionality, when they claim against De Gasperi, whom they claim ‘to be Austrian’ (the Austrian bourgeoisie can teach the Italian bourgeoisie how to govern without stealing), the tradition of May 1915, of the war for democracy and Trieste, but they rant and rave nationalistically and jingoistically more than anyone else.

It is not only the consistent and respectable Turati who could return with his head held high, but above all Mussolini in 1914, the master of these people for having known how to betray the proletariat for democracy, and democracy for dictatorship.

* * *

A correspondent for a London newspaper has described a scene he swears to have witnessed with his own mortal eyes, fully sane of mind and free from drug fumes, in a valley in mysterious Tibet.

In the lunar night, the ritual gathers, perhaps thousands, monks dressed in white, who move slowly, impassive, rigid, amid long chants, pauses, and repeated prayers. When they form a large circle, something can be seen in the centre of the clearing: it is the body of one of their brothers lying supine on the ground. He is not enchanted or unconscious, he is dead, not only because of the absolute immobility that the moonlight reveals, but because the stench of decomposing flesh, carried by the wind, reaches the nostrils of the astonished European.

After much turning and singing, and after other incomprehensible prayers, one of the priests leaves the circle and approaches the corpse. While the singing continues unabated, he bends over the dead man, lies down on top of him, clinging to his whole body, and places his living mouth on the decaying one.

The intense and vibrant prayer continues and the priest lifts the corpse under its armpits, slowly raising it and holding it upright in front of him. The ritual and the chant do not cease: the two bodies begin a long turn, like a slow dance step, and the living looks at the dead and makes him walk opposite him. The foreign spectator watches with wide eyes: it is the great experiment of revivification of the occult Asian doctrine that is taking place. The two walk continuously in the circle of the praying. Suddenly, there is no doubt: in one of the curves described by the couple, the moonbeam passes between the two walking bodies: that of the living has released his arms and the other, alone, stands and moves. Under the force of collective magnetism, the vital force of the healthy mouth has penetrated into the decaying body and the ritual is at its climax: for moments or hours, the corpse stands upright and walks by its own strength.

Thus sinisterly, once again, the young, generous mouth of the mighty and vital proletariat applies itself against that rotten and stinking mouth of capitalism, and in its tight inhuman embrace has given another breath of life back to it.