Chapter Twenty-Four the Split in the Italian Socialist Party

Chapter Twenty-Four The Split in the Italian Socialist Party The crisis in the VKPD, the symptoms of which had been accumulating for months, finally exploded on a question that did not directly concern Germany – the split in the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) at its congress in Livorno. On the one hand, there were no ‘national’ problems alien to a Communist Party or an individual Communist. On the other, the battleground was all the more favourable to the adversaries of Levi, in that the representatives of the ECCI understood the Italian crisis better than the German leaders did. The PSI had been the only social-democratic party in Europe to have stood aside in 1914 from the chauvinist current, although the renegade Benito Mussolini was prominent in it. The PSI had helped to organise the Zimmerwald Conference, and it played an important role there. It had been the first mass party to join the Communist International in 1919, even before the ‘Twenty-One Conditions’ were adopted. For that reason, it had retained in its ranks its reformists grouped around Turati. Its principal leader, Serrati, was in fact a left centrist, which had not prevented him from being one of the major figures at the Second Comintern Congress, in the course of which he had agreed with the ‘Twenty-One Conditions’, and had undertaken to apply them in Italy on condition that he would choose the time to proceed to expel Turati and his supporters. 476 • Chapter Twenty-Four However, his resolution seemed to weaken when he returned from Moscow. The defeat of the metalworkers’ militant strike in the North in September 1920, when the workers occupied and ran the factories, for which the ECCI denounced the role of the reformists, could have provided the occasion to expel them. The ECCI demanded this with increasing insistence. But Serrati seemed to fear that a split in the Party, which could be clearly foreseen as the consequence of expelling Turati and his supporters, would be misunderstood by Socialists in Italy, and that it would only exacerbate the demoralisation following the end of the strikes.1 He remained deaf to the injunctions of the ECCI, and argued that it was necessary to wait for a fresh example of the reformists’ treachery, in order to get the best conditions for expelling them.2 Of course, this resistance fed a growing suspicion on the part of the ECCI. It also led to indignant protests from the Left, led partly by Gramsci and his comrades of Ordine Nuovo, but also by Bordiga, who favoured boycotting the parliamentary elections, and by the deputy Bombacci, whose curious personality had given rise to many reservations on the part of delegates to the Second Comintern Congress.3 The affair was not confined to Italy. Serrati complained openly about the way in which the ECCI conceived the task of its representatives as informers on the Communist Parties, as well as the absence of control by the Parties over the information which reached the ECCI by this channel. Serrati went so far as to write: ‘In this way there has been formed in the International a kind of red freemasonry. It operates in silence and mystery, and is all the more dangerous for being irresponsible.’4 On this point he found agreement with Levi, who had been deeply annoyed by discovering in Radek’s office in Moscow reports on the VKPD addressed by Thomas to the ECCI.5 It cannot be discounted that the ECCI imagined that a conspiracy, or at least some concerted action, between Levi and Serrati may have been envisaged. There names always appeared together when the ECCI discussed the ‘rightist’ danger in the International.6 1 See a summary of his arguments in his letter to L’Humanité, 14 October 1920. 2 Especially over a breach of discipline, which had not yet occurred. 3 See Rosmer, op. cit., p. 73. Bombacci was to become a supporter of Mussolini. 4 Comunismo, 15–31 December 1920, cited in Revue communiste, no. 12, February 1921, p. 510. 5 Reich, op. cit., p. 19. 6 C. Geyer, ‘Zur Vorgeschichte des III Weltkongresses’, Sowjet, no. 8–9, August 1921, p. 241..

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