When Onorato Damen rose to speak in the Italian Chamber of Deputies in March 1925, parliamentary democracy, such as it existed in the Kingdom of Italy, was in its dying days.⁽¹⁾ Three years earlier, Benito Mussolini had been installed as Prime Minister by King Victor Emmanuel after the “March on Rome”, despite the Fascists having only 35 seats in the Chamber of Deputies.⁽²⁾ This was a reward for Fascist violence against striking workers, and offices and members of workers' organisations, which was being unleashed on the streets of Italy since the Biennio Rosso (the Two Red Years, 1919-20). However, it would take a few more years before the Fascists could complete the imposition of their dictatorship.

Mussolini had been compelled to manoeuvre warily amongst the institutions of the Italian monarchy, much to the chagrin of his more violent followers. However, it was an act of violence ordered by Mussolini himself that accelerated the process of establishing the dictatorship. This was the murder of the reformist socialist, Giacomo Matteotti.⁽³⁾

The April 1924 election in Italy was fought under the Acerbo Law (passed November 1923) which gave two thirds of the seats to the majority party provided it won 25% of the votes. It was happily agreed to by many of the Italian Liberal (we would say “conservative”) Party which represented the bulk of the Italian capitalist class. In a wave of violent intimidation and posing as the National List (which included many former Liberal deputies) the Fascists won 60% of the vote and got 355 seats. The Communist Party of Italy (PCd’I) obtained 4 more seats to add to its 15 in the previous parliament. Amongst these were Onorato Damen and Antonio Gramsci (both recently returned to Italy⁽⁴⁾ and enjoying, for now, immunity from arrest as Deputies in the Chamber).

In May 1924, when the new parliamentary session opened, Matteotti rose to denounce the blatant fraud and violence of the 1924 elections, calling for them to be annulled. He finished by predicting that the Fascists would kill him. And so they did. On his way to the Chamber of Deputies, a fortnight later he was kidnapped by Amerigo Dumini’s Fascist thugs. His body was discovered with a file through his chest in August.⁽⁵⁾

The discovery of the body opened a period of acute crisis for Mussolini which lasted until January 1925. As we showed in our article on Matteotti’s murder in Revolutionary Perspectives 24, Damen’s view of the official response of the PCd’I to this crisis was scathing. Instead of taking the fight to the streets, at a time when strikes were taking place the length and breadth of Italy, the PCd’I, now headed by Gramsci, joined in the parliamentary games of the bourgeois parties. This was after all the era of the Communist International’s “united front” although, in joining the so-called “Aventine Secession”, Gramsci was not just cooperating with the various socialist parties, but went further in aligning with the diminishing band of Liberals who were not yet ready to cooperate with Fascism.⁽⁶⁾ With the collapse of the “Aventine Secession”, Gramsci’s failure to put the PCd’I at the head of the class movement gave a momentarily-paralysed Mussolini even more breathing space to survive through the crisis of 1924.

It was only on 3 January 1925 that Mussolini was forced to declare his hand. He announced that “if fascism was a criminal conspiracy” he “alone” was responsible for “all that has happened”, meaning the previous Fascist violence (although he did not mention Matteotti).⁽⁷⁾ He then challenged his opponents to indict him, knowing full well that, after the Biennio Rosso, most of the capitalist class, and all the institutions of their bourgeois state, were already prepared to accept Fascism as a movement which could tame the working class. The Fascist dictatorship could now begin in earnest. In the overwhelmingly Fascist Chamber of Deputies the voice of opposition would have found it difficult enough to make itself heard. However, even more courage was now required to oppose the Fascist regime, when thousands of squadristi ringed the Montecitorio Palace intimidating Deputies as they arrived. Damen’s speeches were thus making use of one of the last tribunes from which to address the crimes that had happened, were happening and were about to happen.

The two extracts which follow are from the stenographic record of the sessions of the Italian Chamber of Deputies of 9 and 11 March 1925 and have been translated into English for the first time. Damen had been a member of the Communist Abstentionist Fraction of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) which became the founding force of the PCd’I, “Section of the Third International”, in 1921. In 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, he would become one of the main founders of the Internationalist Communist Party (PCInt) from which our Internationalist Communist Tendency (ICT) takes its main inspiration today.

As can be seen from the transcripts, Damen’s speeches were not received kindly by the Fascist majority. Not only was he interrupted repeatedly, but when, in the second speech, he denounced the Fascists’ fraudulent claim to offer anything to the working class, their Deputies leapt from their seats and threateningly flooded the aisles of the Chamber.

However, this was not the only challenge faced by Damen and his comrades, the original founders of the PCd’I. They were fighting not only against the Fascists, but also inside the PCd’I against the Comintern-imposed leadership of Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti. The majority of the membership still supported the original leadership of the Party now designated as “the Left”. Some of its members, including Damen, were at that very time in the process of forming a Committee of Intesa (“understanding” or “alliance”) inside the Party, which rejected the opportunist and self-defeating tactic of the “united front”.⁽⁸⁾ This Committee was ordered to dissolve by the new Central Committee, and, to the dismay of the other members who regarded him as their leader, Bordiga accepted this Party discipline, just as he had accepted the Comintern’s imposition of the Gramsci-Togliatti leadership in his place in 1923, despite still retaining a majority in the Party. And this was a Party which was still growing in support within the working class. It was these workers, whose strikes Damen had addressed in the streets,⁽⁹⁾ that he was now aiming to reach from the tribune of the Chamber.

This internal struggle in the PCd’I gives added significance to the first speech which is a denunciation of the role played by German Social Democracy, and particularly Friedrich Ebert, in crushing the workers’ movement in Germany which had brought about the end of the First World War with their revolt in November 1918. Ebert had been the personification of the counter-revolutionary nature of the reformism that Social Democracy was locked into.⁽¹⁰⁾ Long abandoning Marx’s nostrum that “workers have no country”, parties of the Second International first betrayed working class internationalism in 1914, and then became “national” socialists before anyone had ever heard of Adolf Hitler. In opposing the Fascist government’s proposal of official condolences to the German state on Ebert’s death, Damen was also, by implication, criticising the Comintern’s “united front” strategy, and Gramsci’s idea that Fascism could only be opposed in alliance with the very reformist Socialists who the Italian Communists had broken with just 4 years earlier.

The second speech is a forensic statistical refutation of what the reality of Fascist rule meant for the working class.⁽¹¹⁾ Using what data was available, Damen revealed declining living standards of workers in the previous three years of Fascist rule. Their fake ideology of the reconciliation of classes in their corporations supposedly representing workers and employers was revealed by the fall in real wages. Unable to answer Damen’s figures, the Fascist thug, Roberto Farinacci⁽¹²⁾ was reduced to argumentum ad hominem, by repeating the false accusation against Damen of forging a leave of absence document at his Army trial six years earlier. He was not actually found guilty of this but sentenced to two and half years of imprisonment for promoting revolutionary defeatism in the Army. As can be seen in the transcript, Damen had the last word in this debate but Fascist accusations that he was a “criminal” would carry over into others that followed.

Abstentionism Then and Now

For some comrades today it may seem strange at this distance of time that a member of the Communist Abstentionist Fraction of the PSI, a supporter of the Theses on Abstentionism presented by Bordiga to the Second Comintern Congress (1920),⁽¹³⁾ and still at loggerheads with the imposed PCd’I leadership over the “united front”, should find himself in a parliament at all.

So let’s make some points of clarification. In the first place the theses of the Abstentionist Communist Fraction received less support than the official theses (drafted by Bukharin) which were accepted as policy by the above-mentioned Congress. It also has to be remembered there was no disagreement in all the budding Communist parties that Parliament was not a road to power. Trotsky introduced the debate on the Theses on Parliamentarism at the Second Comintern Congress by noting that “from the epoch of the First International, the attitude of the socialist parties to parliamentarism was that bourgeois parliaments should be used for agitational purposes. Participation in parliament was considered as a means of developing class consciousness.”

However, with the expansion of capitalism and parliamentary democracy, “the struggle for reforms within the framework of capitalism became increasingly significant” for the socialist parties of the Second International and the result was that “careerism and corruption flourished and the vital interests of the working class were secretly, and sometimes openly betrayed”. Added to this, the role of parliament had also changed with the “new epoch”. “In the modern conditions of unbridled imperialism parliament has become a weapon of falsehood, deception and violence, a place of enervating chatter. In the face of the devastation, embezzlement, robbery and destruction committed by imperialism, parliamentary reforms … lose all practical significance for the working masses.” Trotsky concluded that “at the present time parliament cannot be used by the Communists as an arena in which to struggle for reforms and improvements in working-class living standards as was the case at certain times during the past period.” For all those adhering to the Communist International the aim was not to win power through parliament but by “breaking and destroying it and replacing it with new organs of proletarian power”.⁽¹⁴⁾

All the communists at the Second Congress could agree on this as it was the basis of their common break with Social Democracy. Bordiga himself also made it clear in the debate that the difference was a tactical one. The Italians, scarred by the experience of the PSI’s reformist wing headed by Claudio Treves and Filippo Turati, feared that any participation in the electoral process would divert the party back on to the reformist road at the expense of the revolutionary work inside the working class.

Damen later realised that the Italian Communists had made a mistake in posing the split with the PSI around the tactical question of abstentionism. All it did was delay the formation of a communist party until January 1921 at Livorno. In his view the PCd’I could have been formed at the height of the Biennio Rosso by splitting from the PSI at its Bologna Conference in 1919 if it had put the goal of communism before the tactical issue of abstentionism.⁽¹⁵⁾ By 1921 it was already too late. The revolutionary wave was already ebbing and the bourgeoisie was already prepared to dispose of the facade of parliamentary democracy in favour of Fascism. And as it was at Livorno the new party took the internationalist title “Section of the Third International”. The significance of this was that they expected the Third Communist International to act on its proclaimed strategic goal of spreading the world revolution. This was why Bordiga could accept membership of the Communist International even at the cost of abandoning the abstentionist tactic. As a result the new Italian “Section” put up candidates in the elections of 1921 and 1924. Damen himself also explained when parliamentary tactics could be used, and when they could not.

The revolutionary party goes over to sabotaging elections when the proletariat is on the offensive and the immediate prospect of power beckons. In this phase there is no place for the tactical use of the electoral system and to act on this terrain would lead to the dispersal of the movement, always a dangerous thing … thus the abstentionist tactic against any electoral participation and for boycotting parliament is valid in the crucial phase of class conflict, when the entire party organisation must not be diverted from the enormous offensive to conquer power. In all other cases, when faced with an electoral battle we have to assess whether or not to use the electoral system on a case by case basis.⁽¹⁶⁾

The Matteotti crisis only underlined his conviction here, especially as by this time the Fourth Comintern Congress in 1922 had adopted the “united front”, and the tactic of a “workers’ government” with the very Socialists the Italian comrades had split from only the year before. The founding leadership of the PCd’I came to see the new policy as an opportunist move by the Russian Party in a bid to save the Russian Revolution at the expense of the world revolution. It was one thing for Communist militants to cooperate in the class war with rank and file Socialists in the factories and communities (“a united front from below”) but quite another to think they could enter government with the Socialists (like Ebert) who had done so much to save capitalism in the post-war world. In opposing revolution everywhere the Socialist parties had already made their choice. They were for capitalism, and it was equally ridiculous for them enter into alliance with the Communists. The policy thus collapsed under the weight of this absurdity, but not before it humiliated the cause of communism. After the fiasco of its failure in Germany in 1923, Bordiga was already demanding that the slogans of the “united front” and “workers’ government” should be buried.

However, by this time the balance of power had shifted against the working class everywhere, meanwhile the possibilities for legal opposition in Italy were much diminished. With its leaders under threat of arrest the parliamentary faction of the PCd’I’s immunity from prosecution made them the last voice of resistance to the Fascist regime. It was thus in the overwhelmingly Fascist-dominated Chamber of Deputies that Damen could find the only “tribune”, the only platform, on which to fight back. It was a last gesture of defiance. Within a few months most of the PCd’I leaders, including Damen and Gramsci, were arrested. Gramsci would die in captivity in 1937, whilst Damen would spend the next two decades, either in Fascism’s prisons and concentration camps, or in confino (internal exile).

In the last of these, in Cantú (Lombardy), he would encounter Luciano Stefanini, a representative of the Italian Communist Left in exile. He had clandestinely re-entered Italy in late 1942, and the political basis for the formation of a new internationalist party against all sides (including the USSR) in the imperialist war was agreed. In 1943 strikes broke out across the North of Fascist Italy and this gave the impetus for the clandestine formation of the PCInt. Its militants were deeply involved in those strikes but its opposition to both Stalinism and Fascism would cost the lives of several members before the war ended, murdered both by the Gestapo, and the Italian Communist Party (PCI), now headed by Togliatti.⁽¹⁷⁾

In 1945, with the Allied victory and the final defeat of Fascism, the Italian bourgeoisie could change tack once again. After removing the monarchy (a handy scapegoat for the capitalist class for its role in accepting Fascism), the new Italian Republic called the first real elections for two decades. This created a dilemma for the young PCInt. In 1946 they participated in local elections with the traditional purpose of making propaganda but in 1948 the first general election posed a bigger question. Some comrades wanted to abstain and denounce the entire electoral process, others to use the opportunity to once more make propaganda for the growing Party. Those who wanted to participate argued that the election would give the young Party a public platform in opposition to the Stalinists (who had the help of Soviet finance) in front of the working class. The deciding factor for participation was the legal fact that parties which put up candidates got the right to speak in the hustings, or public meetings, held in every town or district square in Italy. At a time when mass media was still in its infancy, these open air meetings had much greater significance than today. This tipped the argument in favour of formally putting up candidates. However, it was agreed that this participation would be based on the abstentionist call not to vote for anyone. The main leaflet issued during the campaign was entitled “Don’t Vote for Any Party”. As it openly explained:

We internationalists entered this electoral battle not to ask for votes, but only because it allows us to say with more effectiveness and sense of reality to the masses, who still believe in the mystification of elections, that the proletariat will revive, will find itself and the way to overcome the forces of war, only on the day that it acquires the consciousness and the power to sweep away all the rotten ballot papers and parliament.⁽¹⁸⁾

As Damen later wrote, it was “probably the last time” that such an opportunity would present itself, and in the pre-internet (and indeed pre-television) era the odds were not so heavily stacked against the tactic of using the electoral process to make revolutionary propaganda. Today any such participation is more likely to strengthen the ideological power of capital considering the financial resources given by the capitalists to the parties inside the system.

Amongst these are the parties of the xenophobic Right spearheaded by Trump but which can be found across Europe and elsewhere. Ironically this new Right, in criticising the previous capitalist policy of globalisation, claims to speak for the workers who have lost jobs whilst being themselves financed by plutocrats. This is not unlike the Fascists who Damen was attacking a hundred years ago, posing as being the movement for all classes in the interests of the one great nation. In their world-view, workers are not exploited by capital but are just the victims of “rip-offs” by “foreigners”. According to them, it was not the fault of the capitalists that they stopped investing in jobs at home in the 1980s, but the fault of countries like China who “stole” those jobs by paying their workers less, and migrants who “steal” jobs by moving to countries with better wages and conditions.

The similarities with a century ago end there. Damen was speaking as the post-war revolutionary impetus of the working class across the world was ending. Today the global system is in deep crisis and has been for half a century. It has survived on one expedient after another but has manifestly now reached a new turning point. If Dr Samuel Johnson once said patriotism was “the last resort of a scoundrel”, today nationalism is the last resort of a system that offers only a future of declining living standards, generalised war and a climate emergency. We are rapidly approaching a historical settling of accounts both on the imperialist and on the class war fronts. The only possible force which can halt the decline into barbarism is the world working class.

However, for the last half century the working class has been on the retreat. As a consequence of the global crisis, living conditions in the leading capitalist countries (and beyond) have declined, whilst the increased capacity for conditioning and control that the bourgeoisie and its state apparatus can exercise over the proletariat, has increased. The new forces of the xenophobic Right are an expression that the old expedients (for example, globalisation) have failed to revive the process of accumulation of capital. Instead new “scapegoats” have to be found in those migrants fleeing the disasters the global capitalism system has already created in their homelands. The basic function of the reactionary movements, when capitalism “struggles” under the weight of its insoluble contradictions, when traditional capitalist parties have been unable to resolve the crisis of accumulation for decades, is to come up with a quick and simple fix. Their narrow national solutions are as dangerous as they are bogus, and will only channel the mass of the population to the road towards supporting inter-imperialist conflict.

Like Fascism in the past, the xenophobic nationalist agenda can, and must, be effectively fought but not by trying to defend or revive bourgeois parliamentarism, in the name of the defence of “democracy”, but only by overthrowing the entire political power of the bourgeoisie and its institutions (of which they are just the latest expression), alongside the economic regime of exploitation that is at the basis of its existence.⁽¹⁹⁾ This is what we are fighting for today just as Damen and his comrades did a century ago when the stakes for the world working class were just as high.

Notes to the Introduction:

(1) It would require a book to describe the machinations of the Italian bourgeoisie in establishing a parliament. Italy was basically formed in 1861 after the conquest of the peninsula by the Kingdom of Sardinia (of which Piedmont was the seat of power). It was a confection “from above”. At that time only 1 in 4 of the population were literate and the new state lacked means of communication (in every sense). In Piedmont, the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Sardinia, Cavour, had made a mockery of even the limited vote in his connubio (marriage) with Rattazzi, the leader of what then posed as the Left in Piedmont, to keep out the extremes of both the Right and the Left. In the new Italy the practice was carried on by Depretis and was known as trasformismo which became almost a synonym for corruption. In the underdeveloped South or Mezzogiorno (and beyond) “clientelism” or caciquismo decided elections. The whole system depended on the apathy and exclusion of the majority of the population. Universal manhood suffrage only arrived in 1912 and only one election was held under it. In anyone’s terms it was “a regime which best be described as a limited and artificial democracy” (Adrian Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy 1919-29, Weidenfeld and Nicholson 1973, p.7). And when the working class started to arrive on the stage in political terms it is easy to understand amidst this general political cynicism how Italian capitalists readily turned to Fascism.

(2) There is no clearer indication of the bourgeoisie’s indifference to parliamentary democracy (which they claim legitimises them) than the fact that the Fascists had failed miserably in elections in 1919, but in 1921 were gifted 35 seats on the Liberal list by its leader Giovanni Giolitti. It was a reward for the Fascist violence against striking workers during the Biennio Rosso. Even then the Fascists still had to work to get the Pope to force the resignation of the leader of the Catholic Peoples’ Party, Don Sturzo, and win over many Liberals to vote in the new law. In the end the institutions of the Italian monarchy, including the Army leaders and King Victor Emmanuel III himself, all acquiesced in the violence of the Fascist squadristi and the takeover of the state.

(3) See leftcom.org As the articles in Revolutionary Perspectives make clear (although it was not known at the time) Mussolini had his own personal reasons for getting rid of Matteotti who had been in London investigating a corrupt deal of the Duce’s family with a US oil company and was ready to expose him.

(4) Damen was sent to France by the PCd’I after an armed attack on him by Fascists led to the death of a Fascist in 1921. Gramsci, who had not been present at the founding of the PCd’I in 1921, was sent to Moscow as its representative. While there he agreed to implement the Comintern’s “united front” on his return to Italy and, using Bordiga’s 1923 arrest as an excuse, he was made head of the PCd’I. Damen was elected for Florence, and Gramsci in the Veneto.

(5) Damen himself was kidnapped by a Fascist gang in 1921 who tortured him first, in a failed attempt to make him renounce his “bolshevism”. He was then passed on to Dumini (leader of Matteotti’s murderers) who failed to prevent him standing in the election as a deputy for Florence city council but kept him locked up throughout the general strike of that year.

(6) Mentioned in Damen’s second speech was the editor of Il Mondo, Giovanni Amendola. Amendola actually provoked Mussolini into his speech of 3 January 1925 by publishing the Rossi Memorandum revealing Mussolini’s criminal actions (which included a beating of Amendola himself). For this the 15 Fascists with manganelli (clubs) again set upon him in July 1925. Like many other opponents of Fascism, Amendola left the country but never recovered from the beating and died in Cannes in April 1926. en.wikipedia.org

(7) See Lyttelton, p.265.

(8) For a more detailed discussion of this, including Damen’s own views on Gramsci’s failure, see the introduction to our pamphlet Platform of the Committee of Intesa 1925. Damen’s more extended critique of Gramsci can be found in his book Gramsci between Marxism and Idealism now in English as a book or PDF.

(9) Amongst these, Damen (who was a noted public speaker) addressed the striking tobacco workers in the Papal factory in Trastevere, Rome. The Gramsci leadership realised at this point that the PCd’I deputies had immunity from arrest so they belatedly began to send them out to address workers (but without preparing their defence amongst the workers) so it only meant they were target for beatings by Fascist squadristi.

(10) Friedrich Ebert was leader of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), head of the provisional German government in the aftermath of the November Revolution of 1918, and the architect of the counter-revolution (after his famous telephone conversation with General Groener which unleashed the Freikorps on revolutionary workers). He was thus the executioner-in-chief of the revolutionary working class, along with its most famous defenders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. For his part in saving German (and perhaps, world) capitalism he was elected President of the Weimar Republic. Founded in 1919, after the dissolution of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils, the German bourgeoisie were still so scared of “Red Berlin” that they established their parliamentary system in the university town of Weimar from which the Republic took its name.

(11) It has already been published by the comrades of the Circolo Internazionalista “Coalizione operaia” - Prospettiva Marxista (Internationalist Circle “Workers Coalition” Marxist Perspective), whom we thank for having recovered it and making available in Italian. See: coalizioneoperaia.com

(12) Roberto Farinacci was the main Fascist ras (local leader – the name came from Ethiopia as in “ras Tafari” as Haile Selassie was formally entitled) in Cremona where he was noted for his violent attacks on opponents (his nickname was “the castor oil man” as the Fascists poured this down victims’ throats to induce severe diarrhoea). He was later sidelined by Mussolini for his continuous violence, but in 1925 he was at the height of his power as the Secretary of the National Fascist Party. A noted pro-German anti-semite, he was shot by a partisan firing squad in 1945 as he fled towards Germany.

(13) See: leftcom.org

(14) All the Trotsky quotes in this passage taken from Theses, Manifestoes and Resolutions of the First Four Congresses of the Third International (Ink Links, 1982) pp. 97-8. The full theses drafted by Bukharin and accepted as the position of the Communist International in 1920 can be found on the pages which follow.

(15) Damen, Bologna 1919: The Congress that was afraid to say no to the International’s policy of getting in as many as possible (Prometeo No 8, January-June 1966). It can also be found in the collection of articles by Damen published in the book Bordiga Beyond the Myth available from the CWO (£5 plus postage) or as a free PDF.

(16) See: leftcom.org for the full argument.

(17) For details see: leftcom.org and leftcom.org

(18) See leftcom.org

(19) A message that can also be found in the leaflet our comrades of the Internationalist Communist Party (PCInt) published on the eightieth anniversary of Italy’s “liberation day” on 25 April. See: leftcom.org

Session of the Chamber of Deputies (9 March 1925)
Communists Oppose the Fascist Vote to Honour Ebert⁽²⁰⁾

PRESIDENT.⁽²¹⁾ The Honourable Damen has asked to speak. He has the floor:

DAMEN. The Communist parliamentary group has asked me to speak about the commemoration, not as an act of solidarity, but to recall here how too many murdered workers shed a sinister light on the figure of the late President of the German Republic. (Loud noises — Protests).

PRESIDENT. Honourable Damen!...

DAMEN. It may be a rather effective argument for you, in your commemorative rhetoric, that a humble saddle-maker rose to the pinnacle of the highest and most honourable office in the German state (unfortunately miracles of this kind also occur in our house); (Laughter — Interruptions — Noises) but for us Communists the greatest and best statement about Ebert’s life was offered by Ebert himself when he declared before the Magdeburg juries that he had joined the war strike committee in order to sabotage the strike itself.⁽²²⁾

Everything about Ebert, everything about German Social Democracy, is expressed in this sincere sentence! Ebert did not betray the interests of German capitalism. He defended them. Ebert betrayed only the German proletariat. (Interruptions — Noises — Calls from the President)

FEDERZONI [Minister of the Interior]. We cannot allow people to talk like this, and to say these things in here! He was the head of a friendly state... (Loud approval)

DAMEN. The German people, who are currently subjected to the most shameful economic and political tyranny, say so. The murdered Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg confirm it. The workers shot in the streets of Hamburg reveal it. (Loud noises — Interruptions)

Voices. The German Socialists wanted the war, and the Communists too!

DAMEN. Therefore the Communist parliamentary group is not in solidarity with the commemoration of Ebert, the murderer of the German proletariat. (Applause from the far left — Loud noise and protests on the other benches)

PRESIDENT. Honourable Damen, we must be more dignified about a funeral! (Approving noises)

The Honourable Minister of the Interior has asked to speak. He has the floor.

FEDERZONI. The Government, confident of interpreting the feelings of all Italian citizens and of the great majority of the Chamber, strongly protests against the inappropriate words uttered in this Chamber by the Honourable Damen. (Loud applause — Comments from the far left)

PRESIDENT. On behalf of the Chamber, I support the noble words uttered by the Minister of the Interior.

The universal mourning for the death of the eminent Head of the German Republic is due not only to the singular virtues of the man, by which he could rise from humble origins to the highest offices of the State (Comments on the extreme left), but also to the political wisdom he demonstrated in seven years of difficult government, (thus) contributing to world peace. (Loud approval)

I agree with the proposal of the Government representative to send to the President of the Reichstag expressions of condolence from all of Italy.

A voice on the extreme left. Not all of the people! (Very loud noises — Protests)

PRESIDENT. Silence!

Whoever approves of these proposals, please stand up. (They are approved)

Session of the Chamber of Deputies (11 March 1925)
Fascism as the Guard Dog of Property⁽²³⁾

PRESIDENT. […] The floor is now open to the Honourable Damen who has presented the following agenda:

The Chamber recognises that the driving down of the industrial and agricultural proletariat back into a condition of hunger and slavery is entirely due to Government policy.

DAMEN. When the Communist parliamentary group questioned the Prime Minister and the members of the Government over the problem of the high cost of living, they already knew that the response would be … silence.

So now we are entering the debate on the domestic budget. However, we do understand that, even with an elegant piece of parliamentary dialectics, the Government cannot surmount the not very cheerful overall economic reality of our country. So we are not aiming to push the Government into another economic policy, one capable of solving the serious problem of the high cost of living in 24 hours (the Mussolini system). That would be the same as asking the Fascist head of the Italian bourgeois government for the solution to the problem of squaring the circle ...

Instead, we communists use the rather serious expedient of parliamentary activity to deepen — with serious, cold, objective analysis — the study of the phenomena that arise from the development of the capitalist system and to frankly tell the country all our thoughts, which are the sum of our own experience: the experience of the Italian proletariat.

For example, the bourgeois parties — anti-Fascist because they are failed Fascists — in order to conduct a political struggle against Mussolini’s government, they use the crisis caused by the high cost of living to shout about incompetence, to mock anyone who focuses on politics and economics and simply trace the crisis back, or trace it back only, to the trampling over statutory liberties. We will demonstrate how this is all demagogy and how Fascists and bourgeois anti-Fascists share responsibility, thus nailing them to the same condemnation.

To the parties of Social Democracy, both unitary and maximalist⁽²⁴⁾, who are accustomed to beg for compromise and who, like disappointed beggars, attribute the diminished daily bread in already meagre proletarian meals entirely to the ill will of certain men who today are wearing black shirts, we deny them the right to go on speaking in the name of the proletariat.

Italian Social Democracy is not, nor can it be, different from the international one. It cannot understand; it is incapable of examining phenomena of the economic crisis such as the high cost of living, too accustomed by now to smoothing over and cushioning the harsh, inevitable shocks that occur in class conflicts.

We know, we have known, many foolish servants in life. However, it is difficult to find more foolish servants in international political life than the Social Democrats, reduced as they are by capitalism to a precise historical function, which is that of weighing like a dead body that is tightly gripped to the joints of the international proletariat.

We have many things to say to the governing party, and many open accounts to settle with it. (Interruptions – Noise)

First of all, under the scrutiny of communist criticism, there does not exist a Fascist party which acted autonomously in the struggle to establish itself and conquer power. Nothing was predetermined or desired beforehand by some sort of expansion process that first worked itself out in the economic sphere and then, in a certain period of upheaval, leapt into the political superstructure of our country as a new, original, politically empowered form, truly felt in extent and depth by the majority of the Italian people. (Noise) We communists deny all this to the Fascist movement, and even before we did – truly – the history of these recent years has denied it.

When the economic clashes between the most industrially rich countries violently opened the classical period of imperialism, characterised by the urgent, immediate need to conquer new and larger international markets, we saw our own bourgeoisie waving the flag of revolutionary war in the streets and making use of the betrayal of many leading subversives of the time: the same ones who today figure as exponents of the governing party.

A voice. For you it is a question of profession!

DAMEN. It’s really a profession for many of you! (Noise)

From 1914 to 1919, from 1919 to 1922, we can observe in Italy not the formation of a new political party, not the elaboration of a new political doctrinal creed, but the logical and relentless development of an action directed and conducted by the ruling class for its own defence, for its self-preservation.

This is why today we can state that in the Fascist party, in the Fascist government, we recognise the political victory of the most aggressive and most violently strong-willed elements of the capitalist system. Given this, it is infinitely easy to explain how and to what extent Fascism has managed to disengage itself from its lofty historical function as the guard dog of property. (Noise)

The fight apparently conducted against the democratic State has served to hide more or less skilfully the methodical, progressive and ferociously violent destruction of organisations defending the interests of the workers. The hunt for the subversive, the unpatriotic, is always accompanied by the crushing of a resistance league or by taking possession of a People’s House (Casa del popolo) or a Chamber of Labour or a Consumer or Production Cooperative. (Noises – Interruptions)

Honourable Panunzio⁽²⁵⁾, all the former subversives are the most ferocious against us!

Having silenced the working class parties once and for all, having reduced them to living the shady and ever-wary life of a sect, having put the worker in the position of no longer being able to defend his wages through the class union and his moral conquests from thirty years of innumerable sacrifices and struggles torn away day by day, fascism — we recognise — has the merit, its greatest merit in the face of capitalism, of having made the producer a slave, and the masters — already venerable and astute knights of industry, a modern, well-equipped and insatiable association of slave traders! (Noise)

A voice in the centre. Don’t talk nonsense!

Another voice. Yes! Uncle Tom’s cabin!

DAMEN. A bourgeois economist from France, Mr. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu⁽²⁶⁾ (Comments), has written about the development of joint-stock companies that control 350 billion in France, that is to say half of the national wealth. He wrote as follows:

Those who, in other times, in the Middle Ages, were the great companies of adventurers and brigands who robbed merchants and plundered the countryside, are today joint-stock companies! They are astute and methodical organisations for plunder!

SANSANELLI.⁽²⁷⁾ Pass this page on to the Honourable Graziadei!

DAMEN. They are your economists! I am briefly and roughly summarising what has happened in recent years, to the detriment, of course, of the working classes.

But don’t wait, don’t wait for us to come and beg for mercy for the vanquished! (Comments)

The Communist Party leaves the task of formulating the ethical questions of class collaboration to the Social Democratic parties! (Interruptions – Comments)

The Communist Party knows how to defeat the enemies of the proletariat, and is thus working hard to shift the current balance of power between the two hostile classes. For us it is now obvious that, as the capitalist economy develops, it emphatically overpowers and eliminates any opposition that bases its class resistance around a question of sentiment and conciliation.

In fact, in order to defeat the proletariat — which became more combative in the post-war period, and had even been an autonomous factor at the beginning of capitalism’s war crisis, something which led inevitably to a new war: its civil war — a strong State was necessary, a reactionary Government: yours! One that would break away the means of defence from the hands of the producer, specifically in the shape of the union. And the political crushing of the proletariat also means certain starvation of the subject class… (Interruptions) First, let’s all look at the real economic situation of capitalism. [Here’s an] Excerpt from Mortara’s Economic Perspectives⁽²⁸⁾ [with] some statements that are very precious for their objectivity and authority. Mining production continues to progress slowly. Instead, there is growing rapidly … (Interruptions)

It seems to me….

A voice. That we are adversaries.

DAMEN. … that there is such political ignorance on your part, which is truly worthy of the Italian Chamber. (Loud noises – Protests)

PRESIDENT. Honourable Damen! And they should be silent, I beg you, honourable deputies.

DAMEN. So Mortara, one of your economists, writes …

Voices. No, no!

DAMEN. … of democracy, of the bourgeoisie therefore. (Interruptions)

I repeat, Mortara writes:

Mining production continues to progress slowly. On the other hand, production from quarries is increasing rapidly due to the lively spur from urban construction. The industries that transform raw materials are all in good condition. The rapid and general rise in the share prices of industrial companies from the autumn of 1923 to the autumn of 1924 is a symptom of the favourable development of business. The machine tool industries, through the progress of their technical and commercial organisation, make for further development of production and increase the variety … (Interruptions – Talking)
They are also extending their sales to foreign markets. Here it is enough to recall the increase from 9,395 automobiles exported in the first months of 1923 to 15,037 in the corresponding period of 1924… (Interruptions)
The brick industry is recovering due to the now general and spontaneous extension of building activity. The same factor promotes the progress of other industries, or those accessory to those of construction. The economic organism”, Mortara summarises, “is healthy and resilient, and will be able to overcome without damage the period of domestic political convulsions, as 1924 dies and 1925 is born.

I take from the Political and Economic Review that according to directors Scialoja, Olivetti, Fontana:

In the second half of 1924 the inflow of new capital into ordinary joint-stock companies was far greater than that of all the previous half-years starting from the second half of 1920. Capital increases were more numerous and more conspicuous than those of the second half of 1923. (Interruptions – Noise)

PRESIDENT. Honourable colleagues, take your seats, and let the speaker speak.

DAMEN. Overall, total investment in the second half of last year was approximately 3 billion and 153 million lire while that of the half-year of 1923 had been 1 billion and 744 million. Disinvestments, on the other hand, were more numerous in the period under examination, but less conspicuous. A total of 547 million lire of disinvestments in the second half of last year against almost 629 in the corresponding period of the previous year.

Thus, the increase in Italian share capital, which in the second half of 1923 had been one billion and 1156 million, reached the conspicuous sum of 2 billion and 606.8 million lire in the same half of 1924. (Interruptions)

A comment is then added that the achievement of this brilliant result was mainly due to the good general performance of the Italian economy, in particular the commercial and industrial recovery, and the good dividends that were distributed at the end of 1923.

A group of companies that comprises a very strong investment is the textile industry. (Approximately 1286 million lire).

Worthy of mention is the increase achieved by the Italian company Viscosa-Roma which enhanced its capital from 60 to 100 million lire. (Interruptions)

That of the company La Soie de Châtilon, Milan (from 75 to 150 million). The Cotonificio Veneziano (from 30 to 50 million). The Società Seta artificiali, Varedo-Milano (from 10 to 40 million). Of the artificial silk, Cremona (from 50 thousand to 15 million). (Interruptions) The southern cotton factories (from 80 to 100 million).

The chemical industries showed a very conspicuous movement. Among the companies that increased their capital, we note: Orogna, a company for the manufacture of synthetic ammonia, Milan (from 10 to 30 million lire). Mira Lanza-Milano (from 1 to 40 million). The Italian Electrochemical Society, Rome (from 21 to 42 million). The Italian factories of Bonelli colourants, Milan (from 15 to 40 million). The Italian Gas Company, Turin (from 20 to 80 million). The Italian Ausonia Company, Milan (from 100 thousand to 50 million). Car manufacturing and related industries also show a strong net investment due to the very strong increase in capital from 200 to 400 million lire of Fiat of Turin. The agricultural and food industries have had, in the period under examination, a capital increase of almost 192 and a half million and that means they alone absorbed about 8% of the overall increase that occurred in all joint stock companies in that period.

Finally, if what has been stated so far were not enough, here is the 1924 balance sheet of Snia-Viscosa published in almost all the newspapers last February, showing the increase in capital from 600 million to one billion lire. Listen:

Gentlemen shareholders. We present for your approval the individual items of the balance of 31 December last which we believe do not require particular clarification. They correspond to those of the previous financial year and attest to the growing development of the Company. ...
The profit and loss account closes with a profit balance of 60,075,562.33.
Dividend 10% to shareholders. Total dividend 41,250,000.

As for the workforce, it states:

We have not been able to devote all the care we should have to wages, harassed as we are by countless other requirements, perpetually hindered by having to hire new inexperienced personnel who are therefore incapable of good performance. But we feel that the future of our country lies in the moral elevation of the workers, in the increase of wages in line with growing productivity. When the plants are completed and the workforce has assumed a stable base we will tenaciously pursue the aim of improving the moral situation of the workers and increasing their compensation by involving them in production.

No comment! (Interruptions — Noise)

Now let’s contrast the situation of the capitalists with that of the workers:

The advent of the fascist regime has marked the de facto cancellation of every existing labour agreement.

The destruction of class unions by the fascists, as well as the non-recognition of the rights of organisations, (Interruptions) have deliberately allowed the capitalists to reduce workers’ wages to starvation levels and to cancel every moral conquest.

The worsening conditions of workers do not depend on the worsening conditions of industry, but on the political situation determined by the fascist regime.

The cost of living, like unemployment, weighs fatally on fascism because they are inherent to the bourgeois system.

If economists like Minister De Stefani deny it, economic experience — or rather the experience of the ‘New Era’ of these last few years — demonstrates how the arc of capitalism’s development is also the history of the progressive accentuation of the impoverishment of workers...

DE STEFANI [Finance Minister]. What you are saying is entirely false! In Italy, individual consumption increased in 1923 relative to 1922 and in 1924 relative to 1923. (Approving noises and comments)

GENNARI.⁽²⁹⁾ On the contrary, wages are falling. Your statistics are false. (Interruptions – Noises)

DAMEN. After these theoretical premises, the figures.

Since there are no labour agreements, and since the wages currently in practice vary from region to region, the data I am listing are either the result of my own investigation, or are taken from the rare, very rare, statistics that do exist.

I am taking this from a letter from FIOT⁽³⁰⁾ to industrialists employing flax and hemp workers. Here, in a few figures, are the workers’ conditions: According to the agreement of 22 November 1920, the average daily wage for women: ten lire and eighty-seven cents, men: seventeen and a half lire, average after the reduction of 3 October 1921: women: 9.57, men: 15.95.

Voice from the centre. And piecework?

DAMEN. Average after the concordat of December 12, 1921: women: 10.17; men: 17.15 lire.

On the other hand, the cost of living indices…

A voice. But these are the FIOT agreements, not ours which are very different!

DAMEN. On the other hand, the cost of living indices, compared on the basis of the new series on the three dates that mark the above-mentioned movement of wages were: up to October 1920 109.51 points. Up to September 1921, 118.77; end of November 1924, 126.24; at the end of January 1925, then, the index was still at 129.32 so the jump in the cost of living, from the moment the peak of wages was reached, was 19.81 points.

A voice. But the calculation doesn’t add up in this way! (Comments – Laughs)

DAMEN. Still on textiles. In Verona in the Festi and Rasini factories the average daily wage was a minimum of eight lire up to a maximum of eleven lire. In Schio, a very important wool centre, in 1921-22 the Veneto Wool Concordat established the average wage for men at 22-23 lire; for women 15-16 lire; in 1923-24 the proforma agreement established, stipulated by the Italian Textile Union (Catholic) establishes – always assuming the agreement is followed – an average wage of 70-75 lire per week. In the Southern Cotton Industries in Naples, the Preziosi pact of 1922, which has not even been carried out, has implemented a 25% decrease in the wages established by the 1921 national agreement of the FIOT. (Interruptions – Noises)

The current average wages of chemical workers in Veneto, Emilia, and Tuscany are as follows: for men, 12 to 14 lire a day; for women, 5 to 6 lire a day, with an average of nine hours of work per day. (Interruptions – Noises)

In the valleys of Comacchio: daily wages are 10 lire. The workers, for having asked for a raise, saw their wages reduced to 6.50 lire. (Comments) In Ferrara, those who work with shovels on the Mantua-Ferrara line earn an hourly wage of 1.20 lire. (Interruptions – Noises)

Voices from the right. Stop making these statements. Go and tell them these things at rallies!

DAMEN. In the Cremonese area, as I said, the fiefdom of the Honorable Farinacci, agricultural labourers earned 135 lire net in the winter. (Interruptions – Noises – Insults aimed at the speaker – Many Members are blocking the aisles of the Chamber)

PRESIDENT. Quiet! I ask the honourable police commissioners to have the hall cleared.

FARINACCI. The farmers of Cremona have had a 13 million increase in socialist wages! You are an impostor! (Applause – Protests from the far left)

PRESIDENT. Do not interrupt, honourable colleagues! And take your seats. Honourable Damen, try to conclude. As you know, the Rules of Procedure do not allow reading for more than a quarter of an hour.

DAMEN. I have finished. In the South, wages vary from five to ten lire at most. (Interruptions) The wages of approximately 30 thousand women who work in tobacco handling in Salento (Lecce) range from 3.50 to 6.50 at most. This maximum is paid to a few female workers; the common average is 4.50. (Interruptions – Noises) It can be said, because it is proven, that wages decrease at the same time that the cost of living continues to increase.

Another bourgeois economist, Achille Loria⁽³¹⁾ (Noises) writes that…

in the years 1920-21 the monetary wages achieved by the various professional categories barely manage to meet the increased cost of living. Later in 1922-23, due to the ever more accentuated reduction of nominal wages on the one hand and the progressive continuous increase in the cost of living on the other, real wages are placed at a level considerably lower than that of the pre-war period.

Taking the average wage of 1913 as a basis as equal to 100, Tremelloni⁽³²⁾ calculates in the following figures the decline to 1924:

Year	Wage index
1921	96.4
1922	94
1923	91
1924	90

It should be noted that the index corresponding to 1924 calculated by Tremelloni is much lower because he published his results at the end of the year, when the notable and widespread increases in the cost of living in the final part of last year had not yet occurred.

Moving on to the wages of land workers (farmhands, day labourers, construction workers, etc.), it can be asserted with absolute certainty, although there are no statistics, that the conditions of agricultural workers are far inferior to those before the war… (Interruptions – Noises)

In Abruzzo and Puglia and in other regions of Southern Italy, agricultural workers receive wages ranging from 6 to 8 lire for men and from 4 to 5 lire for women. (Interruptions – Noises)

FARINACCI. Convicted criminal! Imposter!

DAMEN. The figures are subversive…

FARINACCI. Convicted criminal! Forger! Honourable President, the Rules of Procedure allow for no more than a quarter of an hour of reading, while the Honourable Damen has been reading for an hour!

DAMEN. So, to sum up, we can definitively state that the increased working hours, like the wages that have been halved, are complemented by the cost of living that has now reached a level six times higher than that of the immediate pre-war period. What should Italian workers do in these conditions?

Voices. Revolution! Revolution!

DAMEN. Thus a serious, threatening political question is posed… (Interruptions)

By putting an end to, I don’t know if stupidity has surpassed ferocity here, by putting an end to, as I was saying, the Honourable Matteotti, you have unwittingly given impetus to that renewed combativeness of the working class that no longer stops, not even in the face of threats, such as in the speech of 3 January.⁽³³⁾

We were once again hit by police measures but they do not weaken us; they hit us as parties and the trade unions we lead, whatever Amendola’s Il Mondo ⁽³⁴⁾ and that embittered counter-revolutionary who answers to the name of Gino Baldesi⁽³⁵⁾ might say!… You can order the closure of the offices of the FILIL⁽³⁶⁾, which is one of the few national federations directed by communists … you can dissolve the sections of the FIOT, in Trieste, Gorizia, Bari, directed by communists.

The prefect of Foggia can close the Chamber of Labour there and keep the keys with him; you can do that, perhaps more and even worse, but you Fascists will never be capable of stopping the precise and inflexible will of the Italian proletariat, determined to win back its lost positions. It’s a question of strength! (Interruptions – Noise)

TERUZZI.⁽³⁷⁾ Make up your mind!

DAMEN. It is a question of strength, but it is also a question of life! The numerous economic upheavals underway do not tell you anything!

They simply tell us that it is the class struggle, which you believed suppressed. It is the new influx of workers into the ranks of class unions; it is the collapse into ridicule of that mammoth forced domicile that are the Fascist corporations. (Noise)

Your unionism has three names that burn you: San Giovanni Valdarno, Carrara, Brescia!⁽³⁸⁾ The sacrifice of thousands of workers… (Comments – Noise)

Yesterday I reserved for you the most atrocious mockery, worthy in truth of the little men of the political decadence of our country.

Today, however, the mockery has the flavour of tragedy. So be it!

A historical memory. when, in October 1922, you elevated to the level of theory the need for armed insurrection to overthrow the democratic State and this because you felt the paths of legal conquest were too arduous, if not completely precluded, you did nothing but clarify with the sound of the truncheon in the minds of the Italian worker, these statements of ours which also have the value of a great historical truth: against force, a greater and better force! Against weapons, weapons! (Interruptions – Noise)

Only the revolutionary conquest of political power by the workers and peasants will be able to solve the problems of bread and freedom for the proletariat. (Applause from the far left – Prolonged noise)

PRESIDENT. The Honorable Farinacci has asked to speak on a personal matter. He has the floor.

FARINACCI. Since the Communist speaker just now, speaking of the province of Cremona, mentioned the wages of the labourers, which according to him, are about 135 lire per month, or rather per season, I must answer, both to establish the truth and to demonstrate what the adversaries’ weapons are, that in the province of Cremona the labourers are paid two and twenty lire per hour, which multiplied by eight hours makes 17.60 lire per day. Now this figure multiplied by the number of working days gives much more than the 135 lire that the Honourable Damen mentioned in his speech.

For this reason I would like to say only this, for the seriousness of the discussion: when you want to quote data, you must at least ask for them precisely from your own trustees in that province!

But it is not permissible to insult a trade union movement like the one in Cremona! The speaker knows very well that the farmers have recently had a 13 million increase in one day’s socialist wages, not only that, but that all (and the Honourable Barbiellini said it a moment ago), all the municipal employees and all the other categories of workers have had improvements!

This has been our work in our province with the triumph of class collaboration.

And we can still say that it is not right that a man like the Honourable Damen, who has an unclean criminal record... (Shouts of approval – Applause) comes to talk to us about morality!

FERRARI. This is an infamy!

TERUZZI. That’s right! It’s on record! (Noise from the far left)

DAMEN. I ask to speak on a personal matter.

PRESIDENT. Silence! Honourable Damen, indicate your personal matter.

DAMEN. The data that the Honourable Farinacci wanted to cite in contrast to those provided by me...

Voice in the centre. But you’re talking about the criminal record, not the data!

DAMEN. …they show how deep the gap is. However, since our two assessments can be true or false, the proletariat of Cremona will have the opportunity to judge between me and you, Honourable Farinacci!

As for the forgery...

TERUZZI. At least you should have waited for it to be validated!

DAMEN. As for the forgery, Honourable Farinacci and the Honourable President Casertano know the value of this forgery!

A voice. There is a sentence! Forgery of a deportation order!

DAMEN. The sentence refers to a trial undergone during military service for the following crimes: 1) public insults against military institutions; 2) forgery. Do you know what the forgery was?

Voices. Forgery of a deportation order!

DAMEN. During the house search carried out at the time of my arrest, the military authorities found, among the various papers, an old document, a military deportation order, not used but simply filled out. This is the truth!

FARINACCI. It is signed! It is false. (Protests from the far left)

DAMEN. If Farinacci has not actually seen it, go read the verdict. And if he has run out of candles, he can go to bed in the dark! (Noise – Comments)

PRESIDENT. The incident is over.

The continuation of this discussion is postponed to tomorrow.⁽³⁹⁾

Notes:

(20) Found in: Atti del Parlamento Italiano - Discussioni della Camera dei Deputati, XXVII Legislatura - Sessione 1924 - 1925 (03/01/1925 - 30/03/1925), Volume (III), p.2329 (p.5 in the PDF: storia.camera.it)

(21) The President (or Speaker) of the Chamber of Deputies (appointed 5 January 1925) was a former Social Democrat, Antonio Casertano. After the Fascist March on Rome in 1922, he had frequent contacts with the Fascist Government and, as president of the Internal Affairs Committee of the Chamber, assured Mussolini of his support for the Acerbo Law, which reached the Chamber on 9 June 1923. At the same time he tried to organise a large coalition of deputies from the South in favour of the Mussolini Government. A “national” socialist in every respect.

(22) In December 1924, Ebert (who had been President of the Weimar Republic for 5 years by then) was accused by the editor of a monarchist journal of being a traitor for supporting a wartime munitions workers’ strike in January 1918 that was alleged to have contributed to Germany’s defeat. Ebert sued. His defence was that he had joined the strike committee only to limit the scope of the strike and bring it to a speedy end. It is to this that Damen refers directly here but the rest of his denunciation is based on the more well-known of Ebert’s (and the SPD’s) contribution to saving German capitalism from working class revolution at the end of the First World War. In a bizarre judgement, the Magdeburg judge gaoled the monarchist and ordered him to pay all costs, but then added that Ebert’s defence was no excuse and he had been a traitor! See: time.com

(23) Found in: Atti del Parlamento Italiano - Discussioni della Camera dei Deputati, XXVII Legislatura - Sessione 1924 - 1925 (03/01/1925 - 30/03/1925), Volume (III), pp.2446-2452 (pp.34-40 in the PDF: storia.camera.it)

(24) The reformist Unitary Socialist Party, led by Filippo Turati and Matteotti was expelled from the PSI by Serrati’s “maximalists” in 1922. It ceased to exist by 1930.

(25) Sergio Pannunzio (1886-1944) began as a syndicalist (in the Sorelian tradition) but became a major theoretician of the movement of many syndicalists into the corporatism of Fascism.

(26) The original typescript has “Leroy-Reaulieu” but this is the economist who is regarded as a precursor of the Austrian school of Von Mises and Hayek, who reject the need for the state to correct the imperfections of capitalism and thus are godfathers of today’s “neo-liberalism”.

(27) Nicola Sansanelli (1891-1968) soldier and founder (with Aurelio Padovano) of the Naples Fascist organisation; held various official posts but practiced as a lawyer in Naples where he tried to prevent the arrest of Jewish lawyers. Remaining in Naples when the Allies invaded in 1943, he was arrested and sentenced to ten years in gaol but later amnestied and became a monarchist, and even Mayor of Naples for a brief time. The “Honourable Graziadei” he mentions in his sarcastic comment is Antonio Graziadei (1872-1953), another of the PCd’I deputies and then still Professor of Economics at the University of Rome. He was not one of Gramsci’s Ordinovisti followers but had shared a room in the Hotel Lux with him in Moscow so he too entered the Central Committee of the PCd’I, after Bordiga’s arrest in 1923 and the removal of his followers from the leadership. He was not arrested in 1926 like most of the other deputies but left Italy for France in 1928 (the year he was expelled from the PCd’I over his questioning of the basis of Marxist economics in the labour theory of value). He was readmitted to the new PCI of Togliatti in 1945.

(28) Giorgio Mortara (1885-1967) is regarded as one of the founders of Italian economic statistics, and Damen is citing his famous 1921 work Prospettive Economiche. Although he accepted the Fascist Party card in 1933 he emigrated to Brazil in 1938 where he continued his work on economic statistics until his death in Rio de Janeiro.

(29) Egidio Gennari (1876-1942) was General Secretary of the PSI but left it to become a founding member of the PCd’I at Livorno in 1921. A supporter of Gramsci, the Comintern Executive Committee assigned him as well as Gramsci, Scoccimarro, Togliatti, Tasca and Terracini to replace the Left leadership when Bordiga was arrested in 1923. Gennari was, like Damen and Gramsci, elected as a deputy in 1924. He fled to the USSR when the arrest of PCd’I deputies began in 1926 and died in Gorky.

(30) FIOT (Federazione Italiana Operai Tessili), the textile workers’ union, was formed in 1901 and took the name Italian Federation of Textile Workers in 1910. It agreed not to support strikes in 1917 (!) in return for being allowed to bargain with employers. Affiliated to the General Confederation of Labour (CGdL) it was about to lose the right to speak for workers in 1925 and would be banned in 1934.

(31) Achille Loria (1857-1943) was an early critic of Marx and considered that all problems of economics stemmed from a lack of land. He was a member of the Italian Senate from 1919. Gramsci was even then naming him as a fake Marxist (like Mussolini) in his critique of the idea that Italy was a “proletarian nation” so the class struggle became the national struggle. See marxists.org

(32) Roberto Tremelloni (1900-87), Unitary Socialist, like Matteotti and Turati, he was an economist who later emigrated to Switzerland to become professor at the University of Geneva. He would hold various academic and government posts after the fall of Fascism.

(33) Reference to Musollini’s speech, mentioned in the introduction, in which he took responsibility for the violence associated with the Fascist movement.

(34) See footnote 6 above.

(35) Gino Baldesi (1879-1934), member of the PSI before 1914, he was pro-intervention in the First World War and a Unitary Socialist after it. After Mussolini came to power, attempted to join his government but, after the murder of his colleague Matteotti, became a leader of the Aventine Secession before once again trying to work with the Fascists, who rejected his proposal for a revival of the unions. Retired from political activity in 1926.

(36) FILIL (Federazione Italiano di Lavoratori de Legno) was the wood workers’ union – another union suppressed by Fascism.

(37) Attilio Teruzzi (1882-1950) “Teruzzi’s cursus honorum, achieved through violence, abuses of power, moral double standards and an unquestioning loyalty to Mussolini, comprises positions as vice-secretary of the Fascist National Party, Member of Parliament, Governor of Cyrenaica, National Commander of the Blackshirts (including during the Spanish Civil War), Undersecretary to the Minister of Colonies, and Minister of “Italian Africa”. After Mussolini fell in 1943, Teruzzi joined the Republic of Salò. At the end of the war, he was sentenced to thirty years and incarcerated on the island of Procida, off the coast of Naples; amnestied and freed in 1950, he died soon afterwards.” Gigliola Sulis in the-tls.com

(38) Regions where the Fascist trade unions organised a series of strikes in response to the rising cost of living.

(39) Damen was not in the Chamber on 12 March so Farinacci took the opportunity to once again slander him over the alleged forgery for which he had been acquitted. Damen again refuted this in a further exchange on 13 March. See storia.camera.it