Left Communism - Italian Left Communism 1926–1939

Italian Left Communism 1926–1939

After 1926, Italian left communism took shape in exile and without the participation of Bordiga. Contacts between the Italians and the Germans had been made and were developed in France, but the Italian left saw the KAPD's stress on factory organisation as being similar to the ideas of Gramsci's L'Ordine Nuovo and therefore rejected closer contact. Attempts to work with the group around Karl Korsch also failed. The left faction of the PCd'I was formally established in July 1927 by a number of young militants. This new group had members in France, Belgium and the USA and published a review entitled Prometeo. It was estimated in 1928 that it had at most 200 militants, but it would seem that while it never had more than 100 militants active at any one time its influence was actually far greater. The control of the PCd'I apparatus by the Stalinists, however, meant that attempts to reach other exiles was almost impossible and they were driven back into small circle work.

The Italian left faction was for the rest of the 1930s led by Ottorino Perrone (also known with the pseudonym Vercesi), although it was fiercely opposed to the cult of the personality which was developing in the Comintern around Stalin in these years and resisted similar pressures in its own organisation. The faction had members in France, Belgium and the USA; how many in Italy looked to it cannot be ascertained (since all communist activities there had been driven underground by the fascist government). The main activity of the faction through these years was the publishing of its press, which consisted of the paper Prometeo and the journal Bilan. With its establishment as a group, the Fraction also looked for international co-thinkers. Seeing the International Left Opposition, led by Leon Trotsky, as central to the non-Stalinist Communist movement, they sought contact with it. These contacts were to be severed when agreement on basic principles proved impossible.

The political distance between the faction and other communist currents would deepen throughout the 1930s as the faction declared itself opposed to the tactics adopted by the Left Opposition to broaden its support (i.e. the faction affirmed its opposition to fusion with centrist groups, opposition to entryism, etc.) Always opposed to the United Front tactic of the Comintern, the Fraction now declared itself firmly opposed to the Popular Front after 1933 . Like the Trotskyists, it saw the failure of the Communist Party of Germany in the face of fascism as its historic failure and ceased to consider itself a fraction of the Communist Party from the date of its 1935 Congress, held in Brussels.

Isolated, the Left Fraction sought to discover allies within the milieu of groups to the left of the Trotskyist movement. Typically these discussions came to nothing, but they were able to recruit from the disintegrating Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes (LCI) in Belgium, a group which had broken from Trotskyism. A loose liaison was also maintained with the Council Communist groups in the Netherlands and in particular with the GIK. However, these discussions were pushed into the background as the attempted fascist coup in Spain led to revolution and civil war.

Immediately after the civil war began, a minority emerged within the Left Fraction whose members sought to participate in the events in Spain. This minority, including longtime members of the fraction, numbered some 26 militants mainly belonging to the Parisian federation of the Fraction. They traveled to Barcelona to enlist in the workers militias and after a fruitless meeting in September with a delegation from the Fraction back home, they were expelled. The problem for the Fraction was that the military support given to the Republican forces by this minority was accompanied by political support (in that the minority wished to halt strikes among loyalist workers in the name of military victory against fascism). According to the Fraction, no support could be given to a bourgeois state, even in a struggle against fascism.

The question of Spain forced the Belgian LCI to clarify its positions and a split ensued as a result of debate within its ranks. At its February 1937 conference a minority of the LCI led by Mitchell defended the positions of the Italian Left and were expelled. Although less than ten in number, they formed a Belgian Fraction of the Communist Left. It was at this point that the Italian Left learned of a group called the Grupo de Trabajadores in Mexico with very similar positions to their own. It was led by Paul Kirchhoff and had left the Mexican Trotskyist movement. Kirchoff had formerly been a member of the KAPD in Germany, then a Trotskyist in the USA but his tiny group would seem to have disappeared at the outbreak of war in 1939. In early 1938 the Italian and Belgian Fractions formed an International Bureau of the Left Fractions which published a review called Octobre.

During this period the Italian Left also reviewed a number of positions which it thought had become outdated. They rejected the idea of national self-determination and began to develop their views on the war economy and capitalist decadence. Much of this was carried out by Vercesi, but Mitchell from the Belgian Fraction was also a leading figure in the work. Perhaps most dramatically they also reviewed their understanding of the Russian Revolution and the state that had emerged from it. Eventually they came to argue that the Russian state was by the late 1930s state capitalist and was not to be defended. In short, they believed there was need for a new revolution.