The following document is an old introduction to the basic history of the Internationalist Communist Party (Battaglia Comunista) which was founded in 1943 and is the oldest continuously existing organisation of the Communist Left. Its history is now part of the history of the current Internationalist Communist Tendency. Further historical information can be found elsewhere on the site.

In December 1917, the Left wing of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) founded its own newspaper, Il Soviet, hailing Red October in Russia as the beginning of the "international social revolution" and supporting all the theses and political arguments of Lenin.

From the Left in 1919 came the Communist Abstentionist fraction (opposed to the parliamentary cretinism and electoral illusions found in the Right and Centre of the PSI) proclaiming Marxism as its theoretical basis in complete agreement with the tactical line and strategic objectives of the Third International, in whose First Congress it participated and collaborated. The only disagreement it had, which it obediently abandoned, involved participation in elections and the parliamentary system, even of the "revolutionary" type, supported by the Bolsheviks, influenced as they were by their experiences in the Tsarist Duma.

In January 1921, at the Congress of Livorno, the Left broke with the old reformist PSI: on the basis of the "21 points" of the Communist International and founded the Communist Party of Italy (PCd'I), Section of the Third International, and assumed its leadership.

By engaging in battles on all fronts - trade union, political, international - the Left openly fought Social-Democratic reformism and the reaction under the relentless pressure of violent Fascist squads. For the Left, Fascism is not a feudal reaction (as Gramsci argued, anticipating the "idealist arguments" for a "historical bloc" in alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie), but a political manifestation of capital (its "armed guard") in an attempt to address the serious economic and social crisis of the postwar period.

Despite the heroic fight the Party and all the militants carried out, with enormous sacrifices of men and material, to stem the violence of capitalism, the objective conditions and power relations were no longer in favor of a revolutionary solution to the crisis. The fighting only covered a painful retreat. The revolutionary leadership of the Party had arrived too late to replace the opportunistic maneuvers of the old PSI and the Confederation of Labour.

The Degeneration of the Communist International

The isolation of the soviet experience within the borders of Russia, however, was by now increasingly obvious. In the International, from the Third Congress on, the slide into more and more opportunistic positions was noticeable. It was the beginning of a series of tricks and elastic tactics which would go from the United Front with other political forces to the ambiguous formula of a workers' government and finally to the counter-revolutionary Stalinist thesis of building socialism in one country.

In the Enlarged Executive Meeting of the Third International (up to its Sixth Congress in 1926), the Italian Left, represented first and foremost by Amadeo Bordiga, was the only voice to denounce the gravity of the situation that arose inside the Bolshevik Party and in the International after the death of Lenin.

In June 1923 the Italian Left had already been removed as the leadership of the Communist Party of Italy, after the arrest of Bordiga and hundreds of other comrades by the Fascist police. The pressures and intimidation, both of the new Party Centre under Gramsci and the International, bore down on members of the Left, leading to the suppression of the magazine Prometeo and the dissolution of sections controlled by the Left itself. The Left replied with the formation of the Committee of Intesa (Alliance) in 1925 as a first warning shot against the the Party’s distortions which were leading to the loss of its class nature. Around this Committee the most experienced and effective members of the traditional Italian Left regrouped in order to defend – still as the current majority – its policy in support of the leadership of the Party and its platform of opposition to the new course imposed by Moscow. It was more than obvious that an attempt was being made to distort the original class nature of the Party, with a return to the policy of alliances and compromises.

The Left still held a majority in the Party as late as May 1924 at the National Conference of Como. It was only at the Congress of Lyon (1926), where the Left was in opposition to the Centrist theses imposed by Gramsci, that the marginalization of the Left became official. The move was only made possible thanks to the intervention of the leadership who assigned to themselves all the votes of delegates who were absent because of Fascist surveillance.

The Italian Left Reorganizes Abroad ...

The Italian Left, which opposed the "Bolshevization" (read: "Stalinization") of the Communist Party of Italy, solidarised with the opposition of Trotsky in the Russian Party.

From this time on Nazism-Fascism and Stalinism unleashed their crackdown on militants of the Left, both Italian and international, forcing the majority of Italian comrades who survived to seek refuge abroad, mainly in France and Belgium.

In 1927 the Italian Left in exile (in Italy the comrades were the guests of the country’s prisons) united in a fraction and in 1928 at Pantin (France) the Left Fraction of Communist Internationalists was born which in 1935 became the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, publishing the magazines Prometeo and Bilan.

... In Italy the Party is Reconstituted

Following this continuous red thread – which accompanied the interpretation and application of revolutionary Marxism as defence against betrayal and opportunism of all kinds – the Italian Left formed the Internationalist Communist Party (PCInt) in 1943. This was possible both through the work of the comrades who stayed in Italy for a long time in Fascist prisons, and the return from the emigration of the comrades of the Fraction abroad.

The return to the path of revolutionary communism was one of the first openly declared purposes of the Internationalist Communist Party, which immediately found itself between two fronts: on the one hand, the Fascist police, on the other the Social-Democratic bullets of Togliatti’s Italian Communist Party (PCI), faithful servant of Stalin and the imperialist interests of the Russian state.

The Internationalist Communist Party thus found itself alone in denouncing the lies, betrayal and the new bully who hid behind the slogans of the war, that it was a war of national liberation, for freedom and democracy. Our uncompromising political denunciation, even during the final years of imperialist war, drew down on the Party and its brave militants the most libellous and slanderous allegations (Gestapo spies, provocateur Trotskyists, etc...). A veritable manhunt against the international communists was unleashed by the members of the Italian Communist Party. In the early days of the "new democracy" (1945) two of our brave comrades, Mario Acquaviva and Fausto Atti, fell to the assassins’ pistols of "patriotic National-Communists" under the orders of the Stalinist leaders. Other comrades were "disappeared" or ended up in prison under absurd accusations, in place of the Fascists who were freed by the amnesty granted to them by the new Minister of Justice, Palmiro Togliatti, leader of the Italian Communist Party.

The positions of the Internationalist Communist Party were clear and uncompromising from the beginning:

• the unmasking of that Anti-Fascism which the bourgeois Liberal-Democratic and Nationalist-Communist PCI saw not as a fight against capitalism but as a national alliance with the forces of capitalism;
• criticism and rejection of the politics of inter-class "popular alliances" and "united fronts" supported by the Stalinist and Social-Democratic parties;
• the rejection of any support to the forces of war and imperialism, both of Washington and Moscow;
• the struggle against the Stalinist counter-revolution and the lie of national roads to socialism.

The Future Belongs to Us

For over half a century, the Party has resisted every attack whether ideological and material, has kept faith with the fundamental principles of the Communist Left and developed the Marxist critique of capitalism and bourgeois society. It has never wavered but still stands firmly in the struggle for the construction of the international party of the proletariat.

Today, when a creeping and uncontrollable economic crisis shakes the very foundations of the imperialist centers of the West and East, communism is now on the agenda of history and calls for the organization of the struggle of the proletarians of the world, towards the conquest of their total liberation from the shackles of capitalism. This can be achieved only through the revolutionary overthrow of bourgeois society and the capitalist mode of production and distribution, which is based on exploitation, oppression, poverty and the reduction of the whole of humanity to barbarism.