XVII Congress of the Italian Socialist Party

Communist International The PSI had joined the Communist International at its XVI Congress in Bologna in October 1919. However in July-August 1920, the 2nd World Congress of the Communist International then went on to adopt 21 new conditions for all of its member parties. One of these was the requirement that parties remove all reformists, who were considered counter-revolutionaries. The Italian Socialist Party faced the additional criticism that thanks to what the International defined as the "sabotage" by the General Confederation of Labour, the party had not been able to seize the revolutionary opportunity during the Biennio Rosso. The PSI had left the initiative to the union, However the leadership of the PSI were not keen to adopt the International’s 21 points. Giacinto Menotti Serrati, leader of the majority maximalist grouping in the PSI, feared that the expulsion of figures such as Filippo Turati, Claudio Treves and Ludovico D'Aragona would alienate a large number of workers. Serrati also considered the removal of the right wing of the party unjust, because it had neither participated in bourgeois governments nor supported intervention in the First World War, unlike the French socialists and German Social Democrats. At the end of three days of heated discussions, the majority in the Directorate agreed to adopt an agenda put forward by Umberto Terracini which implemented the 21 points in full. The agenda was voted for by Terracini himself as well as Egidio Gennari, Ivan Regent, Giuseppe Tuntar, Casimiro Casucci, Tito Marziali and Ambrogio Belloni. A minority of five - Serrati, Adelchi Baratono, Emilio Zannerini, Giovanni Bacci and Gino Giacomini supported an alternative agenda that insisted on party unity and claimed autonomy in the application of international directives. The unitary maximalist motion was proposed by Serrati, Baratono, Bacci, Momigliano, Frola, Vella and Alessandri. It underlined the need to "preserve the unity of the Party in order to better and more quickly achieve the conquest of all political power", to be pursued by any means compatible with "absolute class intransigence", including both legal and extra-legal means. It too reaffirmed membership of the International, but also sought the possibility of applying the 21 points according to the conditions of the individual countries and to temporarily keep the name "socialist" rather than immediately adopting the “communist” name. Nevertheless Serrati, feeling that "evolved" Italy was with him and that consensus around his position was growing, summarized the reasons for his dissent from the Comintern line in the Avanti! of 16 December, in a long article in which he defended himself against the accusation of opportunism and claimed the need to preserve unity in order to preserve "the Party, the Proletariat and the Revolution from an insane mania for destruction and demolition". Jules Humbert-Droz would later write that Serrati by this stage had become the only opponent of the Third International in the West, and his articles were echoed by all the enemies of communism and the Russian Revolution in Switzerland, France, Germany and elsewhere. Given his leading role in the world socialist movement, also sanctioned by having presided over the II Congress of the Comintern, his defense of the Italian reformists could not in fact be read only as a matter of local tactics, but became the defense of international reformism against the Comintern itself: «Serrati had involuntarily become an international counter-revolutionary force». ==Congressional Debates==

15 January On the eve of the congress, the leadership’s report on the period since the Bologna Congress was distributed. It highlighted the substantial growth achieved: the PSI, which in 1919 had 1,891 sections with 81,464 members, now had 4,367 sections and 216,327 members. This increase was also seen in terms of deputies elected to parliamentary (from 47 to 156) and local government (350 municipalities and 8 provinces at the time of the XVI Congress, 2,500 municipalities and 25 provinces in January 1921). After the final meetings of the fractions were held on the morning of January 15, the congress was opened at 14:00 by the provisional president Giovanni Bacci, who recalled the anniversary of the Spartacist insurrection of 1919. according to the Kabakchiev, this split between revolutionary and non-revolutionary forces, which had already occurred in many countries, was also necessary in Italy so that the whole European continent was ready for the final upheaval which would have led to peace and the solution of the problems of unemployment and misery caused by bourgeois policies. Nicola Bombacci spoke of a painful but necessary separation, in the light of the revolutionary period the country was going through and the need for clarity within the socialist movement and its “two schools”. Anselmo Marabini then intervened, from the "circular" fraction, explaining that his own group would vote for "the motion that will be recognized by the representatives of the third international", accusing the unitaries of dividing the party in the name of unity. It was evident that any hope of avoiding the rupture had by now waned, as Graziadei and Paul Levi had become aware. Up until the day before they had tried to mediate with Serrati to obtain the expulsion of the reformists and the unity of the rest of the party, however they were stopped by the delegates of the Comintern: Rákosi would later report that he had telegraphed to Moscow to request new directives on the matter, obtaining in response the authorization to continue along the path of forcing the split. 20 January Then came the sixth day of the congress, during which the voting was scheduled. First, however, there was room for other interventions, such as that of Jules Humbert-Droz who, as Rosa Bloch had previously done, spoke of the imminent split of the communists from the Swiss Socialist Party and hoped that the Italian Socialist Party, who had been an example during and after the war, did not turn its back on the Third International; and that of Costantino Lazzari, who declared that he was withdrawing his motion to adhere to the unitary one. Then Kabakchiev spoke and was peremptory in affirming that the factions that did not vote for the expulsion of the reformists would in turn be expelled from the International. After half an hour of controversy and incidents, Misiano read a joint statement by Kabakchiev and Rákosi, according to which the only acceptable motion was the communist one. The exit of the Communists Following the withdrawal of the motions from the circular and intransigent fractions, voting proceeded on three motions: the unitary or "Florence" one (signed by Baratono and Serrati), the communist or "Imola" one (Bordiga-Terracini) and the concentrationist or "Reggio Emilia" one (Baldesi-D'Aragona). President Bacci gave an account of the results on the morning of 21 January: out of 172 487 valid votes, 98,028 went to the Unitarians, 58,783 to the Communists and 14,695 to the concentrationists, with 981 abstentions. The announcement of the vote was followed by an intervention from Polano (the Youth Federation "resolves to follow the decisions that the communist fraction will take") and by Bordiga's announcement that the majority of the congress had placed itself outside the Third International, and therefore the delegates supporting the communist motion would leave the hall. Soon after the communists walked out of the Teatro Goldoni singing The Internationale and gathered at the :it:Teatro San Marco. There, they held the I Congress of the Communist Party of Italy and ratified the birth of the new party, into which a few days later, as announced, the youth organization also merged. Other business The remaining majority delegates in the PSI congress continued their work. A motion signed by Paolo Bentivoglio was unanimously approved in which the PSI's adhesion to the Communist International was reiterated «accepting its principles and method without reserve», and protesting against the declaration of exclusion issued by the representative of the Executive Committee. The hope was that at the next congress of the Comintern the dispute could be resolved by blaming Kabakchiev for having gone beyond the limits of his mandate. A speech by Adelchi Baratono followed, highlighting the differences between the unitary motion and the concentrationist one, and urging the right wing to accept the revolutionary program of the party and the principles of the International. Turati then intervened, urging a common effort for "the Party to become the class and become the great union of the national and international proletariat"... His words did not reassure everyone, and there were those who judged them "elastic" and "such as not to be relied upon", to which Serrati replied that he would be vigilant "on our comrades of the right wing" and that, if they behaved in a way harmful for the party «one cannot have mercy on them». In the course of the morning the new committee of the PSI was also elected, which turned out to be composed exclusively of unitaries. Two parliamentary deputies were on the list of candidates drawn up by the majority fraction: Gaetano Pilati, as representative of the proletarian League of the maimed and war veterans, and Giovanni Bacci, as chairman of Avanti! who resided in Rome, where he could easily work in the headquarters. The proposal was opposed by Giuseppe Romita, who maintained that being a member of the Directorate was incompatible with being a holder of public office, but nevertheless the assembly approved the list by a large majority. In addition to Pilati and Bacci, the new committee comprised Serrati (who was also confirmed as chairman of Avanti!), Baratono, Sebastiano Bonfiglio, Franco Clerici, Domenico Fioritto, Giuseppe Mantica, Giuseppe Parpagnoli, Giuseppe Passigli, Alojz Štolfa, Emilio Zannerini, Raffaele Montanari and Eugenio Mortara. The work of the congress closed at 13:00, after President Bacci had exhorted his comrades to resume work immediately "in the Sections, in the Party, in the country, in the International" and after the delegates who had praised the Russian Revolution and sung The Internationale and the Bandiera Rossa. ==Reactions and consequences==

In Italy '', 30 January 1921. The upper part of the cartoon reads: “LENIN: I have finally won! The Italian Socialist Party split...”; the lower part: “GIOLITTI”: The greatest success of my policy! The Italian Socialist Party split..." The outcome of the congress was greeted favorably by the bourgeois press, which underlined how the exit of the Communists must be a cause for satisfaction: La Stampa of 22 January 1921 spoke of the «victory of what is logical, natural and normal" and underlined how "the fever" had been driven out of the PSI, preventing the "extreme current" and "anarchoid revolutionism" from being able to poison "the life of the nation". The favourable view expressed in the mainstream press was not matched by any reduction in the physical attacks that Italian socialists were subjected to, by squadristi and others. In Livorno the fascist presence was such that Francesco Misiano, threatened with death, had to go and return from congress meetings with a bodyguard. In the aftermath of the split, the spread of right-wing subversion forced the organised working class to defend itself against attacks on the Labour chambers, cooperatives, peasant women’s leagues, workers' newspapers, and individual activists. The May 1921 Italian general election saw the fascists elected to parliament for the first time as part of the National Block. In August 1922, an anti-fascist general strike was organized throughout the country by the socialists. Mussolini declared that the Fascists would suppress the strike themselves if the government did not immediately intervene to stop it, which enabled him to position the Fascist Party as a defender of law and order. On August 2, at Ancona, Fascist squads moved in from the countryside and razed all buildings occupied by socialists. In the Italian socialist movement Within the reduced PSI, the question of whether reformists should be expelled continued even after the Communists left to form their own party. The PSI’s XVIII Congress was held in Milan in October 1921, and here again a left-wing faction urged the expulsion of the right. Serrati’s line of adherence to the Comintern line while refusing to expel those who rejected it continued to prevail. The XVIII Congress also rejected a right-wing motion from Turati that would have allowed socialist parliamentarians to collaborate in a government with bourgeois parties. Socialist Pietro Nenni, in 1926, wrote that in Livorno ‘the tragedy of the Italian proletariat began’. Serrati himself, three years later, said that not adhering to the motion of the Communists was the biggest mistake of his life. In 1924 he led the left wing of the PSI into the Communist Party and was elected to its central committee. In 1923 Antonio Gramsci reflected that during the period leading up to the Livorno Congress, the communist fraction, had failed to lead the majority of the proletariat towards the positions of the International, and that this had paved the way for the advent of fascism. Relations with Comintern The Comintern expelled the PSI, calling on it to expel its own right wing and then unify with the new Italian Communist Party. However the unleashing of violent reaction in Italy, together with the failure of the revolutionary attempt in Germany known as the "March Action", internal political difficulties in the USSR and the halting of the advance of the Red Army in the Polish–Soviet War during the spring of 1921 were among the factors that led to the adoption of a less radical line by the Comintern in the months following the Livorno Congress. Disagreeing with this new line, Umberto Terracini contested the need to wait until the majority if the working class had been won over before starting the struggle for power, and was harshly reproached for this view by Lenin. Thus began a phase of profound dissent between the Comintern and the Communist Party of Italy (CPI), which achieved "an international reputation for extremism which undermined its policy right from the start". Although the CPI was disciplined in its acceptance of Comintern directives, it never worked for an effective and rigorous application of the united front in Italy. ==References==