Italy ( 1 ) - PSI joins the Commintern. 21 Condidtions.

[Adam Rose <adam@xxxxxxxx>]

Coming after Bulgaria in importance, but before it chronogically, we have
"The Italian Debacle" , as Duncan Hallas describes it.

In the immediate aftermath of the war and the Russian Revolution, the bulk
of the membership of the 2nd international parties moved massively to the
left. There was a clamour for affiliation to the Commintern.

Basically, Lenin wanted the revolutionary masses but wanted rid of their
centrist leaders. In this context, the famous 21 conditions were errected
as a barrier to these centrist leaders. Some of those centrist leaders fell
at this hurdle - but most simply accepted them verbally but had no intention
whatever of leading socialist revolutions.

Duncan Hallas describes the German and French reaction to these conditions
in detail. The German centrists rejected them , perhaps because there was
already a Sparticist League , and therefore the centrists were bound to lose
their influence. Some of the French rejected them and reformed the SFIO,
but most of the French merely accepted them and formed the French CP, only
to bide their time and go back into the SFIO when the immediate revolutionary
wave receded.

Unfortunately, in Italy, the whole of the PSI came over into the Commintern,
accepting the 21 conditions, without provoking the debate which had occured
in Germany as a result of the centrists' honesty. Essentially this party had
four factions, perhaps in reality only three and one proto faction. First,
the three classic second international factions :

i) the out and out reformists .

They were a minority within the PSI but they controlled the CGL, the union
federation.

ii) The Centrists - Serrati etc.

They called themselves Maximalists.
As Trotsky was to note later, although they themselves had no intention
of leading a revolution, their revolutionary propaganda was taken literally
by the masses in 1919 + 1920.

iii) The ultra lefts - Bordiga + Co.

I think Bordiga's ultra leftism should be distinguished from the instinctive
ultra leftism of the newly radicalised masses ( the NEW recruits from the
centrist USPD in Germany were more ultra left than those who had come
through the Sparticist league ). He was a long term, inflexible dogmatic
ultra left. Strikes were denounced as a waste of time, Participation in
parliament opposed, the land question in the South ignored. Leftward
moving inexperienced comrades can be won to the Leninist tradition.
Bordiga and his successors are a write off, an obstacle to socialist
revolution.

iv) An embryonic "proto Leninist" faction around Gramsci, the paper
"Ordine Nuovo" , and the Turin factory councils. This tendency was the
only one that had any inkling of how to relate to real struggles of
workers without being dragged into reformism.

Adam.



Adam Rose
SWP
Manchester
UK




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