The Fourth Comintern Congress: The rise of fascism in Italy.

Making the working class pay for the post-war crisis

One of the main resolutions agreed at the Fourth Congress was that on the "Versailles Treaty", the treaty that had been enforced on defeated Germany by what the resolution describes as the "four great bandit states ... left as victors on the battlefield: the United States, Britain, France, and Japan". The resolution explained how this treaty, along with similar ones imposed on the other defeated nations "represent an attempt to consolidate, politically and economically, the world domination of these four victorious powers, by subjecting the rest of the world to their colonial exploitation."

However, the resolution explained that, four years on from the 1919 treaty, the imperialist powers had failed to construct the stable capitalist equilibrium that they had hoped for. Their attempts to crush the young workers' state in Soviet Russia had been repulsed. The different powers were divided amongst themselves, with the United States seeking to impose its worldwide dominance. The resolution went through the crises facing France, Britain and Germany in particular, and pointed out how, already, "the great powers, along with the vassal states, are arming for a new war".

But, it concluded, one thing still united the contending capitalist classes - the determination that the working class should pay the price. This was the background against which the Communist International needed to intervene in the developing struggles of the working class and the oppressed masses.

In Italy, however, the failure to intervene with the correct revolutionary program and strategy had already cost the working-class dearly.

Factory Occupation, Turin, September 1920

Mussolini comes to power in Italy

In October 1922, Benito Mussolini had been appointed as the Italian Prime Minister, continuing the rise of reaction that was to culminate in fascist rule in Italy. Looking back at the history of the Comintern in 1936, the Fourth International explained that this “defeat of the Italian proletariat in 1922 was not a defeat of the strategical and tactical methods of the Leninist Comintern, but of those of Italian Maximalism (Serrati) against which the Comintern since the Second World Congress had been continuously carrying on a hard struggle, without, however, being able to avert the catastrophe".

At that Second World Congress, in the summer of 1920, the political weaknesses of the new Italian affiliate of the Communist International, the Socialist Party of Italy (PSI), were already apparent. Bordiga, one of the PSI delegates had argued for an ultra-left position, opposing Communist Parties being involved in parliamentary activity. Lenin had taken up this false position, explaining that “a part of the proletarian petty bourgeoisie, the backward workers and small peasants, all these elements really think that their interests are represented in parliament, and one must combat that through work in parliament and teach the masses the truth through facts. The backward masses cannot be taught by theory, they need experiences”. Serrati, however, had spoken in the debate to say that he supported the agreed Comintern policy on ‘revolutionary parliamentarianism’ but, tellingly, added the rider that in applying the policy in Italy, the “given conditions must be taken into account”. In reality, that was a get-out clause for failing to follow a genuinely revolutionary policy.

Bordiga’s ultra-left stance was a reaction to the ‘minimalist’ right-wing of the PSI, led by Turati and Treves, who – as explained in this longer Socialism Today article on ‘Italy 1920’ – were tied to electoral activity and reformism. As it says, “Gramsci explained that the whole of the PSI had joined the Communist Third International but without really understanding what it was doing”. Apart from the group around Bordiga, the majority of the PSI leadership were in its ‘maximalist’ wing, led by Serrati, so called because they stood for the ‘maximum programme’ of socialist revolution. However, in reality, they were a ‘centrist’ trend, revolutionary in words, but not in actions.

When, at the 1921 PSI Congress, Serrati and the PSI leadership refused to fully endorse the ‘twenty-one conditions’ for Comintern membership set down at the Second Congress, the left split away to form the Italian Communist Party. Gramsci had the clearest programme and ideas but had not fought to build an organised current in support of his ideas so was left isolated, and Bordiga’s ultra-left tendency dominated.

Going back to the events that preceded that split, the Socialism Today article explains how, in the 1919 elections, the PSI had become the largest party in the Italian parliament, receiving a third of the popular vote. By 1920, it had over 200,000 members. Then, in September 1920, a mass movement of factory occupations broke out in Italy. In Turin, factory councils were creating organs of dual power, mirroring the soviets of the Russian revolution.  This was the high point of the ‘Biennio Rosso’ – the two ‘red years’ of workers’ struggle. The PSI issued slogans but gave no clear direction to the struggle, no concrete plans to form an alternative workers’ government nor to organise an insurrection to take power from the capitalists. The opportunity was lost and the movement defeated.

Trotsky, looking back at events in Italy at a speech given in Moscow in the lead up to the Fourth Congress, explained how “among the Italian workers, as workers of a country that had suffered most cruelly from the war, and as a young proletariat without the superiorities of an older proletariat but also without the latter’s negative features – conservatism, old traditions, etc. – within this proletariat the ideas and methods of the Russian Revolution met with the most powerful response. The Socialist Party of Italy, however, did not clearly take into account the full content of these concepts and these slogans.”

Trotsky continued: “In September 1920, the working class of Italy had, in effect, gained control of the state, of society, of factories, plants and enterprises… In essence the working class had already conquered or virtually conquered". But the crucial element, revolutionary leadership, had been lacking: “a party was lacking, which would, resting upon the insurrectionary working class, have engaged in an open struggle with the bourgeoisie for those remnants of material forces still in the latter’s hands, destroying these forces, seizing power and thus consummating the victory of the working class … and so the working class found itself hurled back. The party split into segments, the proletariat was smashed; and since then, throughout 1921 and 1922 we have been witnessing the most frightful political retreat of the working class in Italy under the blows of consolidated bourgeois and petty-bourgeois gangs, known as the Fascists”.Trotsky adds that “fascism is the revenge, the vengeance exacted by the bourgeoisie for the dread it had experienced during the 1920 September days” but also that the defeat in Italy acts as a warning as to the necessity of workers building a party that is ready and able to guide its class to victory..

At the Fourth Congress itself, a resolution was passed in line with the points made by Trotsky above. Its key points were:

“The occupation of the factories by the Italian workers in the autumn of 1920 was a decisive moment in the course of the class struggle in Italy. The Italian workers were pressing instinctively toward resolving the crisis in a revolutionary fashion. The absence of a revolutionary workers’ party, however, determined the fate of the working class, sealed its defeat in this moment, and prepared the ground for fascism’s present victory. ...

Nowhere has the historical role of the Communist party for world revolution been more graphically portrayed than in Italy, where the lack of such a party changed the course of history to the benefit of the bourgeoisie. ...

Three sad but instructive lessons of the Italian developments must be taken to heart by all class-conscious workers around the world: (1) Reformism is the enemy. (2) The vacillation and hesitation of the centrists is a mortal danger to the workers’ party. (3) The presence of a united and self-confident Communist party is the first precondition for victory in proletarian struggle”.

The rise of fascism had now become a grave danger. Indeed, a German edition of Fourth Congress resolutions contained an additional paragraph that spelt out that: “It would be extremely dangerous to cherish any illusions regarding the character of fascism and its possible development. We must reckon with the possibility that the revolutionary workers’ movement in Italy will lose for a time the possibility of functioning legally. Times may be approaching that will bring a trial by fire for every revolutionary workers’ organisation and every individual revolutionary”.

Bordiga’s ultra-leftism had meant that he opposed the ‘united front’ tactic that was so essential to resist the fascist threat. But the agreed Fourth Congress resolution called (particularly now that the Socialist Party had belatedly expelled its reformist wing and declared for affiliation to the Communist International) for “the immediate unification of the Communist Party with the Socialist Party of Italy [as the] ‘United Communist Party of Italy’ on the basis that “the Twenty-One Conditions will be applied”.

Revolution Delayed

Trotsky gave a report on the Fourth Congress to a meeting of party delegates to the Soviet Congress at the end of December 1922.

Firstly, he warned that the capitalists support for Mussolini showed just how quickly the bourgeois were prepared to do away with ‘democracy’ when under threat: “when the proletariat frightened the bourgeoisie to death but proved unable, owing to the treachery of its own party, to deal it the death blow, the bourgeoisie set in motion all of its most active elements, headed by Mussolini, a renegade from socialism and the proletariat. A private party army was mobilized and it was equipped from one end of the country to the other with funds allegedly drawn from mysterious sources but which come principally from governmental resources, partly from the secret Italian funds, and to a considerable measure from French subsidies to Mussolini.

Under the aegis of democracy the storm-troop organisation of the counter-revolution was organized and in the course of two years it conducted assaults upon workers’ districts and threw a ring of its troops around Rome. The bourgeoisie hesitated because it was not sure that Mussolini was capable of coping with the situation. But when Mussolini proved his ability, they all bowed before him”.

But Trotsky also warned the Party members that “the European revolution will not perhaps strike tomorrow. Weeks and months will pass, maybe several years, and we shall still remain the only workers’-peasants’ state in the world. In Italy Mussolini has triumphed. Are we guaranteed against the victory of German Mussolinis in Germany? Not at all. And it is wholly possible that a much more reactionary ministry than Poincaré’s will come to power in France … This will be the prologue to the European revolution, provided we are able to maintain ourselves, provided the soviet state remains standing, and, consequently, provided above all that our party is able to maintain itself to the end ….

Therefore, we must draw closer to our mass reserves. More youth around our party and within it … with the transfer of experience from the old to the new generation … we shall stand firm in our knowledge that the soviet frontier is the trench beyond which the counter-revolution cannot pass. This trench is manned by us, by the vanguard of soviet Russia, by the Communist Party, and we shall preserve this trench inviolate and impregnable until that day when the European revolution arrives, and over the whole of Europe there shall wave the banner of the soviet republic of the United States of Europe, the threshold to the World Socialist Republic”.

But while Trotsky was seeking to regenerate the Party through a new generation of young cadres, the bureaucracy was seeking to take it over for its own interests ….