1970 INTRODUCTION
to
THESES ON TACTICS
OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF ITALY
(Rome, 1922)
Following the foundation of the Communist Party of Italy in January
1921 (Leghorn Congress) on the basis of the 21 points of Moscow and the
programme that would later serve as the introduction to the theses
republished
below, the Left, which led the party until early 1923, embarked on a
vigorous
work of political (and then military) organization, of agitation and
propaganda
: most importantly of all, it participated in the mighty economic
battles
being waged by a proletariat which was still unbowed by the repressive
actions of the democratic state apparatus and the fascist gangs which
thrived
in its shadow ; a proletariat which had managed to resist the insidious
work of political and organizational disarmament which was
being
carried out in its ranks by the reformists. Of all the sections of the
International, it was the Communist Party of Italy (PCd’I) which was
the
first to launch and energetically uphold the proposal of the trade-union
united front: on the one hand it called on the three main workers’
organizations (the CGL, USI,
The PCd’I was (and there is no contradiction) a party on the offensive, as indeed it could hardly fail to be as a party in permanent opposition to the capitalist regime. And it was such, not because – as opportunists keen to cover up their betrayal will always maintain – it refused to retreat when necessary, or, worse still, because it cherished dreams of a coup de main by an audacious minority (something it always openly rejected and disowned as a non-Marxist method) but rather because it knew that History had placed it in the position, highly welcomed rather than deplored, of taking up the enemy’s supreme challenge. The party would never, not even in retreat, lay down its material and ideological arms and invoke Law, Rights and... Democracy.
In this battle to achieve a proper rearmament of the proletariat – unstinting in its day-to-day struggles although constantly abandoned or, worse, betrayed, by "its leaders" – the right and centre social democrats were perceived as the main obstacle. The struggle against social democracy was therefore an essential and integral part of the Party’s struggle against the bourgeoisie, against its central organ (the State), and against the military formations of fascism (which although "illegal" were largely funded by the government and by the industrialists and big landowners – under the table by the government and openly by the other two). Thus, the defeat of opportunism would be not only the premise for, but the consequence of, a substantial increase in the influence of the party: a party which – not because of its verbal proclamations but by force of deed and its consistency of practical as well as doctrinal positions – the proletariat would be able to recognise as its sole leader; a party which, despite having been isolated by the harsh facts of European and World history, hadn’t become disillusioned but had emerged with its resolve strengthened.
Meanwhile, contemporary developments within the Communist international need to be borne in mind if we are to understand the Theses on Tactics; especially considering that they were presented to the 2nd Congress of the Communist Party of Italy (2) as a contribution – with complete discipline to the final decisions of the Comintern Executive remaining undisputed – towards the settlement of complex and fundamental problems that were of concern to the entire communist movement. These developments need to be borne in mind, and we need to underline this, not because the theses have a merely contingent polemical value ; but because within them is condensed a balance sheet of real struggles on a scale not just Italian but above-all European and extra-European, and from this balance sheet they derived not new "discoveries", but a confirmation of old directives. We therefore considered these directives as retaining a permanent and universal validity, and we have all the more reason to hold onto them today as a fixed and permanent acquisition.
* * *
Meeting from June 22nd to July 12th 1921, the 3rd Congress of the Communist International had been critical of the ill-fated "March Action" in Germany, and the policy known as the "tactic of the offensive" which had been advocated – amidst much confusion – by groups on the margins of, rather than from within, the German party. It drew two main conclusions and the Left in Italy had been the first to concur with them; both because it considered them, "in their sound and thorough-going approach, the common heritage of every communist" (3), and because the Left had already been directing the party along the same lines during one of the most difficult, and yet most active, phases of the proletarian struggle in Europe. The conclusions were as follows:
a) It doesn’t suffice to have parties solidly organized according to the principles of revolutionary Marxism, and based on the norms derived from them sanctioned during the founding congresses of the International, i.e., parties composed purely of elements possessing an accurate conception of the necessity for revolutionary struggle which don’t allow themselves to be diverted by the achievement, or hoped for achievement, of partial and temporary objectives. It is also necessary for these parties to strive to unite around themselves the growing battalions of the proletarian army which, in reaction to immediate circumstances, have been drawn into the general struggle against the class enemy and its government apparatus. Formation of genuine communist parties, and conquest of the masses, are two conditions which far from being mutually exclusive are entirely interdependent: the former being unthinkable unless as a function of the latter, and the latter being unrealisable on a class basis unless it relies on the former.
b) More than just proselytism and propaganda are needed in
order
to bring ever wider sections of the proletariat under the political
influence,
and eventually the material leadership, of the party, there is also the
requirement for the party’s active and dynamic participation in
the defensive battles which proletarian groupings join under the
pressure
of contingent material interests; interests and struggles which
it would be naive and, worse still, anti-Marxist, to ignore since in
the
former resides the backdrop to every class conflict, and in the latter
there is expressed the imperious growth of social antagonisms. The
party
must instead help them, "to logically unfold under their own
impetus,
channelling them into a general revolutionary
For us, agreement on these points was unreserved and brooked no
objections:
it was total. But what the "March Action" and its aftermath
would
really
highlight wasn’t so much the danger of a Blanquist coup de main
(and in this specific case, even the 3rd Congress theses deny that one
could refer to it as such) or of false left theorizations on the
fringes
of the movement, particularly in the KAPD, and so infantile as to be
rapidly
eradicated inside the 3rd International parties, but rather the
unstable
and restless oscillation of the young Central European parties
swinging
from passivity before the emergence of elementary movements
(which
would take them entirely by surprise) to verbal extremism
after the
event (such was the case in the Kapp putsch a year earlier, such
was
the case in March) : in a word, the "March Action" highlighted the
danger
of an empiricism and knee-jerk eclecticism which was reflected in the
scant
ideological homogeneity especially of the German party, which although
there from the start, had recently been aggravated by the hurried
merger
with the left independents. And a still greater danger was that this
perpetual
oscillation might eventually find its centre of gravity after a clear
swing
to the right, and such indeed would occur a few months later and
a high price would be paid for it in the Autumn of 1923. A grave
symptom
of it all was the crisis within the Czechoslovakian party (severely
criticized
by the International Executive both before and during the 3rd Congress)
which was as plethoric in its massive 400,000 membership (!) recruited
at the cost of a slackening of programme and principles, as it was
infected
by parliamentarism, and, when faced with the extremely bitter social
struggles
initiated by the Czechoslovakian proletariat, with a shameful
In this context our firm and far from "Byzantine" opposition to the
issuing of generic and ill-defined formulations can also be understood:
we knew what Lenin and Trotsky meant might by the, but precisely
because
of their vagueness in a historic phase which required very precise
directives,
they lent themselves to the most disparate and, unfortunately,
compromise
prone, of interpretations. A typical example is the slogan of the
"winning
over of the majority of the working class" as the sine qua
non
for the seizure of power. «Of course – Lenin would clearly
explain
– we do not give the winning over of the majority a formal
interpretation,
like the knights of philistine ’democracy’ (...) When in July 1921, in
Rome, the entire proletariat – the reformist proletariat of the
trade unions and the centrist proletariat of Serrati’s party –
followed the communists against the fascists, it was a conquest of
the
majority of the working class to our side (...) It was only a
partial,
momentary, and local conquest. But it was a conquest of the
In brief, the general danger which loomed was believing that temporary defeats could be overcome, or the process of revolutionary maturation accelerated, by artificially "building" parties, to a presumed optimum size and capacity, by means of mergers with the flotsam and jetsam left along the way by the collapse of social-democracy or through painful diplomatic pacts on the basis of reciprocal concessions; and thereby effectively abandoning the compact discipline of programme, action and organization which is the one, sure, defining mark of the class party.
That the danger was not a hypothetical one, nor our alarm dictated
by
idealistic apriorisms, is proved by the fact that it was precisely at
this
point that the Comintern in Moscow agreed to discuss the conditions for
a posthumous membership of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI); a party
which
historical events, branded with fire and iron into proletarian flesh,
was
showing itself yet again to be incurably counter-revolutionary (the
first
’pacts of reconciliation’ with the fascists were signed even as the PSI
’pilgrims’ were wending their way to their Mecca of false penitence).
Accepting
the PSI’s ’appeal’ to join meant introducing the worse than equivocal
figure
of the ’sympathiser party’ into the Communist International alongside
the
official party and, on the same level as the latter, linked directly to
Not six months would go by before this second danger, tentatively predicted by a leadership not given to superficial judgments or hasty condemnations (even if known for its frankness) would take explicit shape in the theses on the united front approved by the Executive of the Communist International on 28 December, 1921.
The 3rd Congress had formulated its theses on the organizational
structure
and development of the Communist Parties with the aim of winning over
the
masses; when the perspective still remained – rather over-optimistic
perhaps – that a bid for power was more or less imminent. The view of
the International changes towards the end of 1921 (although we
considered
the phase already underway): it was now the bosses who were considered
to be on the offensive; in all countries proletarians were fighting a
bitter
struggle simply to defend living standards and jobs, and were
instinctively
carried beyond both political divisions, and professional categories,
to
move onto the broadest possible front and towards the greatest possible
unity. How the 3rd International parties perceived this question at the
time was set out in the Theses on the Proletarian United Front,
in terms which fully squared with objectives which the PCd’I had
defended
since its birth at Leghorn: a campaign for a plan of tactical defence
of
the proletariat as a whole, which by using contingent demands and
objectives
to extend and generalise the economic struggles, in step with the
elementary
pressure of the working masses themselves, didn’t stop there
but
got ready (with militants and workers matured in the hard school of the
defence of living standards) to sooner or later graft on to it a counter-offensive
return on to the one true road of revolutionary action; upheld by
communists
and by communists alone. We read in the ECCI-RILU Manifesto on
the
United Front (January 1, 1922) «[Proletarians!]: All right,
you do not yet dare to take up the fight for the new, the struggle for
power, for the dictatorship, with arms in hand; you are not ready to
launch
the great offensive on the citadels of world reaction. But at least
rally
to the fight for bare life, for bread, for peace. Rally for these,
struggle
in one fighting front, rally as the proletarian class against the class
of exploiters and destroyers of the
In that sense, and within those limitations, the proletarian united
front could have ended up like the one first vigourously
proclaimed
and defended by the Left in Italy, the united front we proposed – via
our union network – to the big workers confederations in the certainty
that the general movements of the whole proletariat, when grappling
with
problems of interest not just to particular categories or regions but to
all categories and all regions, would only be able achieve its
objectives
in a communist way, that is, in the way we would have pointed out
to
them if it had been up to us to lead the entire class: in the
certainty,
therefore, that proletarians entering the struggle to achieve
particular
objectives and with methods of action which weren’t incompatible with
affiliation
to this or that political party of working-class origin (therefore
common
also to wage-earners who were social-democratic, anarchist, etc.) would
draw on the experience of the struggle itself, stimulated by our
propaganda
and our example, to learn the lesson that even defending a
basic
standard of living was possible only by being prepared to go on
the offensive with all its revolutionary ramifications, just as we are
resolved to do. But the International’s theses, even if they
strenuously
insisted on this point, and reaffirmed that any return to
organizational
’unity’ was ruled out after the previous splits, didn’t stop there.
They
would also reinstate and endorse some initiatives of the German party –
which as we saw earlier was shifting back and forth in a state of
perpetual
oscillation – and propose a whole series of initiatives ranging from
the sending of the notorious ’open letters’ to other parties right up
to
contracting formal agreements and alliances with them (even if only for
temporary and contingent objectives), and from there even to
parliamentary
support for social-democratic governments by redefining them as
"workers"
governments; as had indeed already occurred in Thuringia and Saxony and
was recommended for Sweden, home of the arch-opportunist
The disagreement between ourselves and the International really started here. Our "United Front" meant joint action by all categories, all local and regional groups of workers, all national proletarian trade-union organizations with a view to an action which, under the weight of its own internal logic and given the right circumstances, would eventually end up as a communist led struggle of the entire proletarian class: it didn’t mean, nor could it mean, a shapeless jumble of diverse political positions, a removal of the barriers between revolutionaries and opportunists, or an obliteration, even temporary, of our specific character as a party of permanent opposition to the State, and to all other political parties.
It is true that the International’s theses would affirm that an indefeasible premise of the political united front was the maintenance of the party’s absolute independence, but "independence" is not a metaphysical category, it is a real fact, and it ceases to exist not only in the extreme case of joint action committees and parliamentary alliances (let alone governmental alliances which would be called for later on), but also in the more moderate case of joint actions proposed in the expectation of their certain rejection, and precisely because rejected, useful in unmasking the class enemy. In the latter case independence also ceases to exist because it clouds the proletarian’s perception of the clear gulf which exists, and which we have always said exists, and whose existence justifies our existence as a party, between the reformist and revolutionary roads, between legalitarian democracy and proletarian dictatorship, in short, between ourselves and everyone else. It would be stupid, and anti-Marxist, to say, ’but it is different for us – we communists have been steeled in the school of hard struggle, are equipped with an immutable programme, and can therefore be allowed to practice such manoeuvres because we know we won’t be affected by them’. And why it is not necessarily the case is because although we are certainly factors of History, we are also its product. We may deploy the instrument of tactics with a steady hand, but we are conditioned by it in its turn, and conditioned negatively if we use it in such a way that we discredit our final objectives. All the more so for our followers and potential followers amongst the masses who accept our leadership precisely because we point out a way antithetic to our false "brothers" and "cousins"; a way which we will need to be seen to be sticking to, and shunning all "shortcuts". It is what we do, and not what we say we’ll do, which will win over proletarian sympathisers who do not yet formally subscribe to our positions. So then, if we were to offer the Olive Branch to parties we had previously denounced in public, and invite them to participate in actions which would inevitably go beyond defending proletarian living standards and raise the question of State power, and of our attitude towards the State and its associated structures, it would be completely disastrous. It would deprive us of that genuine, non-illusory autonomy which we had been at such great pains to create, whilst generating inside and outside our own ranks a level of bewilderment and disruption which would make the passage to the illegal struggle for the conquest of power all the more difficult. There is no contradiction in our tactical formula of proletarian trade-union front alongside an unremitting political opposition toward the government and all the legal parties. Can one possibly say the same thing – all good intentions aside – about the political united front?
It is true: in given conditions the accession to
At this point a problem crops up which we have always stubbornly insisted on raising: the necessary limitations of tactics. These limitations are not fixed by us; History fixes them, and we cannot ignore them without sacrificing the prime subjective condition for revolutionary victory, be it near or far, which is the continuity of the programme, of the practical activity and of the organization, which is just the other aspect of the autonomy of the party. Either it is admitted that there are historical constants which allow accurate predictions to be made about which camp the different parties will choose – "workers" parties included – or Marxism itself collapses in ruins. Either it is admitted that the strength of the communist parties lies precisely in being able to make these predictions – not as something to be embarrassed about but openly proclaimed as something which marks us out, as our raison d’etre – or the entire edifice of the revived International collapses in ruins.
Writing a few days before the Rome Congress and a few days after the
meeting of the 2nd Enlarged Executive (which had confirmed the December
1921 theses on the Proletarian United Front), this is what the Left
would
have to say: «What is indubitably true when considering the present
situation is that the broad masses tend to act in pursuit of immediate
objectives, and fail to see those more distant revolutionary objectives
whose necessity is clearly understood by the communist party. We must
utilize
this tendency of the masses for revolutionary ends, participating in
their
movement in pursuit of day to day objectives». But we would ask:
«Is
this true in an unlimited sense? No. When we place limitations on
our
tactics, in the sense of never renouncing the characteristic communist
Party practice of opposing the bourgeois government and legal parties,
are we just theorising, or are we working correctly on the basis of
A year before we had already given an answer to this question, and
it
wasn’t just a response plucked from our stubborn "theoretical" brains
but
was derived from the experience of the bloody aftermath of the war, and
from the closely related collapse of the 2nd International which
occurred
at the start of the conflict. The balance sheet derived from these
experiences
was International rather than national, historical
rather
than contingent, just as the balance sheet derived by Marx and Engels
from
the class struggles in Germany and France in 1848-49 was international
and historical, including as it did a definitive assessment of
the
stance the radical petty bourgeoisie and its parties would take at
crucial
junctures in the class war. And maybe this balance sheet – the result
of tireless critical and practical action – could have spared, once and
for all, the Western proletariat from, «the necessity of finding
out
for itself – learning at cost of its own blood – the
true historical function of social democracy». This fatal
and
necessary function of social democracy is something we know
about,
and knowing about it prevents us from building organisational and
political
links, even transitory ones, with those we know to be the enemy;
it also prevents us from softening our steadfast and irrevocable
condemnation
of this form of government if it were to be returned to power by the
proletarian
masses still blinded by the reformist mirage, in the expectation that
disappointment
would soon open their eyes. «Such an intermezzo, in the event that
the proletariat was unable to muster its forces to prevent it (We
must
be certain about it and declare it beforehand) neither represents a
necessary condition, nor a useful preparation for the advent of
revolutionary
forms and institutions. It represents instead a desperate attempt by
the
bourgeoisie to minimise and head off the impact of the
proletarian
attack, and to crush it under the blows of reaction should the
working
class still have sufficient energy to attempt the revolt against the
legitimate,
the humanitarian, the respectable government of social-
So, there it is, the limitation! And the fact that it is a very practical
limitation means we can’t bury our heads in agnosticism as though
History
could
undo what it has already done; as though it could bestow on us some
mysterious capacity for manoeuvring, for refined handling of neutral
tactical
instruments without deforming the hand which wields them; as though we
could unpick, and weave again in a better pattern, the frayed weft of
joint
actions, joint committees, "benevolent neutrality" and even support for
governmental combinations postulated as "a step" towards revolution and
its corollary, the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Left was very
conscious
that behind the shield of the "political united front" (especially in
the
West, an area with an entrenched and pestilential democratic tradition,
where the young communist parties were engaged in a process of
programmatic
and organisational demarcation which was much too fast and perfunctory)
there might lurk a yearning for intermediary roads, for backward steps,
and for a revamped unity; in a word, the Left saw the United Front as
nurturing
a nostalgia for solutions which were much less surgically precise than
those which reality had imposed on the Bolsheviks and which the
1918-19 holocaust had rendered that much more imperative in the Europe
of advanced capitalism. Behind the windbreak of the united front
slogan;
within the very party in Italy which, throughout the ’hot’ year of
1921,
had moved as one body in a determined and incessant struggle
against
the capitalist offensive; there would start to emerge, here and there,
regrets about a split which had been made "too far to the left"; about
the refusal to make organic alliances with the "arditi del
And the article concluded with words which today seem prophetic: «Reality prescribes the limits of tactics, not theory, and this is true to the extent that, without wishing to be birds of ill-omen, we predict that if we continue relying on this method of unlimited tactical oscillations, and contingent alliances between opposed political parties, we will destroy, bit by bit, all the positive results derived from the bloody experience of class struggle, and end up not with brilliant successes, but with a depletion of the proletariat’s revolutionary energy, and thus run the risk that opportunism may once again hold its saturnalias to celebrate the defeat of the revolution; whose forces it already depicts as hesitant and fluctuating and heading down the road to Damascus» ("Our party’s task" from Il Comunista, March 21, 1922).
Exactly that, unfortunately, would happen – providing further proof that the means will adversely affect the ends unless shaped by, and strictly related to, the ends.
In its Theses on Tactics, the Left (and through it, the majority of the party) made an accurate evaluation of all the factors highlighted by the history of the living class struggle, and used this evaluation to trace a way forward which was both clear and precise. Standing in sharp contrast to those, today, who are happy just to parrot yesterday’s polemics, the Left was careful not to ignore the changing prospects of revolutionary struggle. On the contrary, it tried to anticipate them and examine their possible repercussions on the party (worrying much more about their inevitable effect during periods when the struggle was in sharp recession that when at the high water mark) and also to link all these vicissitudes of the struggle to the final objective – an objective which doesn’t only inspire our ’thinking’, is not just something to aspire to at the end of a long struggle, but which permeates the less promising present, and makes the present an inseparable link in the chain that connects the past to the future, and contingent battles to the final battle. The Left would never use periods when the class struggle is on the decline as a convenient excuse to throw overboard, like so much cumbersome ballast, that very faithfulness to principles which is the condition for a better future.
Casting aside the anchor of programmatic integrity, continuity of
action,
and the corresponding soundness of organizational structure would mean
the International falling headlong into the abyss of "socialism in one
country" and the Stalinist counter-revolution. By holding on to it
firmly,
the left would ensure that the red thread of doctrine, however narrow
it
might be, was safeguarded, and ready to be used for the difficult,
exasperating
– but secure –
-------------------------------------------------------------
1. CGL: General Confederation of Labour; USI: Italian Syndicalist Union; SF: Railway-workers Union.
2. The Theses were first published in Rassegna Comunista, no. 17, January 30th, 1922; they were presented at the Party congress in Rome on March 20-24th, 1922 – whence the name Rome Theses.
3. From the series of articles on La Tattica dell’Internazionale Comunista, which appeared in the party’s daily L’Ordine Nuovo on January 12, 17, 19, 24 and 31st 1922. They are particularly important for an understanding of our stance on tactical matters.
4. Ibid. For further information on the party’s union activity in 1921-22 consult Il Programma Comunista, issues nos. 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18 in 1967. The action it took against fascism is described in issues nos. 16,17,18,21 and 22 in 1967, and 1, 2 and 3 in 1968, (Il Programma Comunista was our party organ at the time).
5. Speaking on behalf not just of the Communist Party of Italy but also of the German and Austrian parties, Terracini made the mistake of not developing these points in a rigorously dialectical way. Whence the severe reprimand from Lenin, who, incidentally, in his habitually frank manner would eventually recognise that in reaction to badly digested "leftisms" he had had "to ally with the right" more than, as the events following June-July 1921 would prove, the actual problems of the international movement merited. (see especially Notes of a Publicist, March 1922, which violently criticises the likes of Levi and Serrati).
6. LENIN, A Letter to the German Communists, 14 August, 1921, in Collected Works, Lawrence & Wishart.
7. Even Trotsky, at the Enlarged Executive of February-March 1922, amongst many, powerful reaffirmations of our shared principles, would be induced to specify in percentage terms (3/4!) the necessary level of influence required to launch a bid for power: there was no lingering over such laboratory experiments during the glorious days of Red October on either his or Lenin’s part: indeed, had not even the arithmetical majority-minority relation within the Central Committee been turned upside down?
8. As is known, this figure of the ’sympathiser party’ would be institutionalised at the 5th Congress in 1924: where even the party of the hangman Chiang-Kai-Shek could be found "sympathising".
9. From The Communist International - Documents edited by Anne Degras.
10. Jumping ahead of ourselves slightly, we recall that the contemporaneous Theses on the Reparations Question already allude to the possibility of communist participation in a "workers government", «the question whether or not the communists in Germany should enter a worker’s government isn’t a matter of principle but of opportunity (!!!). Making the decision depends on the degree of strength the working class possesses at the moment when it takes power, and on the possibilities that arise for immediately augmenting that strength». The Autumn of 1923 was already casting long shadows.
11. From then on we would insist on the absurdity of describing a social-democratic government as a workers’ government (that is how the Macdonald government would be described soon afterwards!!!). «A party which voluntarily is closed within the confines of legality, or conceives of no other political action than that which can be carried out without use of civil violence within the institutions of the bourgeois democratic constitution, isn’t a proletarian party, but a bourgeois party», (from La Tattica dell’internazionale Comunista - see note 1).
12. From Our Party’s Task in Il Comunista, March 21, 1922.
13. From The Function of Social-democracy in Il Comunista, February 6, 1921. Article reproduced in Comunismo, no. 4, (June-September,1980).
14. An anti-fascist military organisation which claimed to be "above parties" (see on this subject Programme Communiste, no. 46, p.51)
15. We have stressed those aspects of the Rome Theses which directly bear on the history of the International and the entire communist movement in order to underline how the theses came about in response to real proletarian struggles, and actual physical confrontations, with the class enemy. They did not arise as the inspired lucubrations of "Great Brains". The organic nature of the party, relations with the class, relations with other political parties: these were the burning questions of a glorious, although shadowy, epoch. We have omitted the "Italian" part (which will be dealt with in future volumes of Storia della Sinistra), in order to place still greater stress on the international nature and relevance of the Theses, of which the "Italian" part was only a corollary, or if you prefer, the application, related to a specific analysis of the relations of force in a given country, as was also the case for the theses on the agrarian question and the trade-union movement.