A Century of "Italian" Communist Left (1915 – 2015) Biographical Dictionary of an Internationalist Movement
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Philippe Bourrinet A Century of "Italian" Communist Left (1915 – 2015) Biographical Dictionary of an Internationalist Movement An Organizational Domino: Splits, Expulsions and Schism in Italian "Programmism" (1960-1974) To write the history of "programmism" often leaves the impression that it could be summed up in its splits. We shall confine ourselves to mentioning the most important ones, those which reflect a real activist orientation, sometimes combined with ultra-dogmatic academicism, to which the "programmist" mother organisation would eventually succumb (see below). "Rivoluzione comunista" (1964) This group, originally purely Milanese, was the creation of a single man, the fiery Calogero Lanzafame, barely 27 years old at the time of the split. This Sicilian volcano had joined "Programma comunista" in the early 1960s; he quickly became the rising star in Milan. Disagreeing with dogmatic immobilism, he is the driving force behind the Milanese split which is dragging its majority into positions of activist intervention. From this split in November 1964, the group "Rivoluzione comunista" was born. Its leader had been expelled manu militari, in the presence of Bordiga, during a tumultuous meeting in Florence. Rivoluzione comunista became the organ of the Internationalist Communist Party, totally focused on "a practical activity of intervention". The "programmists" were fast to change their label and henceforth called themselves "International Communist Party". The group programs its return to Bolshevism, that of What Is To Be Done? and Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism by Lenin and The ABC of Communism by Bukharin. Few in number (about thirty activists), the group created by Calogero Lanzafame embarked on an all-out activism until the early 1980s, spreading agitating leaflets: Lotte operaie (1968 - 1977), within the trade unions; Donna proletaria (1973 - 1984), towards proletarian women; and Agitatore comunista (1968 - 1979), organ of the students belonging to the "Party". From 1977 to 1985, the group even launched a specific edition of Rivoluzione comunista for Mezzogiorno. Despite this activism which exhausted entire generations of activists1, especially at the level of para-union agitation, the group did not leave with a purely Italian cadre. Ideologically Leninist, its practice, on a more modest scale, can be compared to that of the British activist organization SWP (Socialist Workers' Party) which publishes International socialism. The Florentine schism of October 1973: "Il Partito Comunista", "programmist" duplication The Tuscan "programmist" group, led by Giuliano Bianchini, had been since the 1960s at the head of the PCInt Central Trade Union Office ("Programma comunista") whose slogan was the "reconquest of the class union" (CGIL) in order to transform it into an authentic "red union": an uchronia of the history of Profintern2. It was in Florence that the party's "union agitation" paper was printed: Il sindacato rosso, from July 1968 to October 1973. 1 In an e-mail dated 18 February to the author, Dino Erba gives a precise idea of the numbers of the Lanzafame group, around 1975: "15 to 20 workers, 7 or 8 students, 3 or 4 others. At public events (street demonstrations), maximum 100. Today, there are 10 of them, no workers, no young people". He specifies that its "activism is inversely proportional to the number of militants", unlike the activism of the French "programmist" group which had seen its membership quadruple between 1969 and 1976. 2 Red Trade Union International (ISR) or Rote Gewerkschafts-Internationale (RGI) founded in Moscow in July 1921. The three secretaries were: the Russians Solomon Losovsky and Michail Tomski, the Catalan Andreu Nin, future leader of the POUM in 1936, kidnapped and murdered in June 1937 by order of Stalin. After Bordiga's death in 1970, Giuliano Bianchini clashed head-on with Bruno Maffi, considered himself one of Alfa's possible "dauphins", although Bordiga in 1964 explicitly chose Maffi as his successor. Bianchini is nevertheless part of the "organic duo" that watched over the so-called "purity" of the heritage of the "Sinistra comunista". He fought violently against the influence of the anti-unionist positions of the KAPD3, of which the Scandinavian section (Carsten Juhl and Gustav Bunzel) had just completed its study. At the general meeting in Marseilles on 4 and 5 September 1971 he represented with Maffi the "Centre" which fought the "KAPDist" theses defended at this meeting by Carsten Juhl, Danish member of the Party. He is the main architect of the Tuscan split which gave birth in September 1974 to a small organization grouped around the newspaper Il Partito comunista and the theoretical journal Comunismo. The rift between the two enemy brothers of Milan and Florence had only widened on the occasion of the referendum of 12 May 1974 on the repeal of the law on divorce. Maffi's organization called for a vote against it. Bianchini's tendency saw tangible proof of the "degeneration of the old party" there. No opposition of principle existed in fact between the two microparties, except the choice of the "pope" (the "single commissioner") of the "Party". For the first time, the ICP was affected not by a split or a heresy caused by an interpretation of Dogma, but by a schism, on the sole question of the choice of the primus inter pares. An article in an encyclopedia (critical!) of theology makes a clear distinction between schism and heresy: "Conceptually, schism can be distinguished from heresy or apostasy in that it does not imply in principle a dogmatic error or any deliberate break with faith. But, in practice, one can hardly trace a separation between schism and heresy, the primacy of the pope being considered in the Catholic Church as a dogmatic principle." All things considered, the 1973 schism, which put an end to the two-headed "single commission", could be compared to the division of 1054 between the Church of Rome and the Church of Byzantium, in which each of the two parties proclaimed its infallible authority in the interpretation of the primitive dogma. The Bianchini group decided, without any real justification, to label itself the "International Communist Party", from the first issue of its organ Il Partito Comunista. The second ICP could moreover refer to the letter of Bordiga who had elevated schism to the rank of cardinal virtue: "Schisms were born from respect for the Doctrine on the one hand, and from a revolutionary rupture with the latter on the other... The way of new humanity lies in revolution. Schism gives birth to revolution"4. The Renaissance of the Bordigist Current in France (1951-1968). The 1966 Split: Fil du Temps and Invariance Before the majority of the French Fraction of the Communist Left formally joined Socialisme ou Barbarie, there was a year of group to group colloquia. Suzanne Voute, who represented the French Bordigist organization in these discussions, met with Chaulieu himself up until the summer of 1950 to 3 In the midst of a class struggle in Italy (of the "Hot Autumn", 1969, to 1977), where the workers clashed with the employer/union front, the ICP ingeniously confessed: "...in 'forms' of organisation, it is the... trade union that we would give preference to". Breaking with the unions, for the Bordigists, was "a weakness" ["Gorter, Lenin and the Left", Programme Communiste No. 53 - 54, Oct. 1971 - March 1972, p. 78]. 4 "Tempo di abiuraturi di schismi", Il programma comunista n° 22, 20 Dec. 1965, p. 1. Bordiga's position was taken on the occasion of the completion of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council. initiate a merger process5. But the bets had already been made. Gutted by the passage of the majority of its militants to the group "Socialisme ou Barbarie", the organization re-emerged only in 1951. Modestly, the former "French Fraction" reduced its name to "the French group of the International Communist Left". Yielding to the bluff, it sometimes signed "Bureau politique de la GCF" (Communist Left of France). In September 1951 the group published an internal Bulletin of the French group of the International Communist Left, which later took the name of Travail de groupe. In an article written with the help of Lucien Laugier6, Suzanne Voute considered that the group "Socialisme ou Barbarie" was a "circle of 'Marxist' intellectuals and not a political group". In another text, she stressed that 'barbarisme' "had some merit in rethinking certain problems of the theorising of socialism", as in Castoriadis-Chaulieu's article "Les rapports de production en Russie". Nevertheless, the criticism of Chaulieu's positions based on the "leader-led" dyad was the starting point for the group in its attempt to acquire a theoretical framework by reappropriating Marx's writings. From 1954 onwards, the French Fraction invested itself in the publication of brochures which reflected the internal discussions on the revolutions in Russia, China and Hungary in 1956 under the name of Travail de Groupe. It was in fact after the events of October 1956 in Hungary that the group began to develop, as did "Socialisme ou Barbarie". But unlike the latter, the Bordigist group spoke not of revolution but of proletarian revolt by the weapon of the general strike, without mentioning once the formation of workers councils. It also insisted (rightly) on the weaknesses: "the Hungarian workers' struggle has become obscured by non-proletarian demands and a national-democratic ideology", that of the "oppressed nations". Nevertheless, the Bordigists, with a very Sorelian tone, exalted the insurrectional general strike: "The facts are screaming. For if the Hungarian movement was well started and developed as a REBELLION AGAINST THE USSR, if it was thus a political movement not PROLETARIAN, but INTERCLASSIST, 'national', it is however the general strike, a specifically proletarian weapon, that it drew and draws its principal force of shock from". And engaged in a literary prosopopoeia of insurgent workers, whose "great voice" is a glorious call to violence: "In the West, you fight imperialism with words! We fight by general strike, insurrection, VIOLENCE".