Originally published: Prometeo, no. 8, January-June 1966.
English translation: in Bordiga Beyond the Myth, 2016, pp. 132-135.
Transcription/Markup: Micah Muer, 2019.
Today it is possible – we would say almost a duty – to make a retrospective, albeit one-sided, examination of the Bologna Congress (1919). We have to ask ourselves whether this Congress or part of it, certainly the most combative part, bears a huge responsibility for having delayed the formation of the party, an error which we believe still weighs on the proletarian movement.
A delay of only a few years (but which included unexpected and decisive turning points) meant that the Communist Party was formed at a time when the objective conditions for going on the revolutionary offensive had passed. The urgent need now was for a tactical commitment to defend the conquests of the proletariat from attacks by the forces of fascist reaction. This argument will be deepened when we examine the post-Livorno situation which was a time of mounting reaction. In the meantime, we will critically examine the problem of abstentionism which was the focus of debate at the Bologna Congress.
The debate on this issue is still open. Either you accept absolute abstentionism – which regards what came to be defined as the ‘democratic’ tradition of adjusting state or party policies according to the majority response, i.e. based on counting votes – as anachronistic, thus adhering to the principle of a priori abstentionism, an abstraction characteristic of anarchism and all those currents that see the world around them in idealist terms, or else you have to rely on the traditional positions of tactical abstention defended by Lenin and found in the programmatic theses of the Second Congress of the Third International.
The revolutionary party goes over to sabotaging elections when the proletariat is on the offensive and the prospect of the immediate conquest of power beckons. In this phase there is no place for the tactical use of the electoral system, and to act on such a terrain would eventually lead to the dispersal of the movement, always a dangerous thing and could lead to “constitutional” compromises such as those that divided the Bolshevik Party in Russia over the problem of power, and which in Germany resulted in the disastrous experience of the governments of Thuringia and Saxony.[01]
In a different phase of workers' struggle, when the objective conditions for the revolutionary conquest of power do not exist, Lenin and the International proposed parliamentary tactics as a secondary but inevitable expedient for the strategy of the workers' movement. 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. The abstentionists' mistake in Bologna was that instead of stressing the need for a split and forming the party, they focussed on abstention. This was the real error: the authentic militants of the fraction were fixated on the completely theoretical postulate of abstentionism, in itself useless as the basis for focussing on the goal of forming the class party.
Even so, there was no shortage of people who intended to make the abstentionist fraction the prime nucleus of the class party by objectively posing the problem of a split. Verdaro[02], well-versed in the problems of the workers' movement and a supporter of abstentionism, wrote in the preamble to the Theses for the Congress of Livorno:
The abstentionist fraction of the Italian Socialist Party therefore proposes to follow the process of its transformation into a party by implementing the split in the Socialist Party and founding the Italian Section of the Communist International.
This statement was particularly significant because it clearly attributed to the fraction the following extremely pressing tasks: the cadres of the abstentionist fraction were to be the pole of the new party and bring about the split. These tasks had come about from the conviction that the Socialist Party could in no way be turned into a revolutionary party.
If the abstentionist fraction had really acted like this and presented itself as the centre of convergence and guide for revolutionaries during those very tumultuous years when the need to unite revolutionary forces was not always clear, the course of Italian history would have taken a quite different direction.
Given that the situation was incandescent, and on the edge of revolution, this tactic would have resulted in an infinitely more concrete and fruitful development than any participation in elections. However, an exaggerated loyalty to the fraction prevented a clear evaluation of the role of the revolutionary party, which gave their opponents the polemical pretext of comparing the abstentionist fraction to the Dutch “Tribunist” movement of Pannekoek and Gorter.[03]
Before and after Bologna it was impossible to be anything other than abstentionist and so you had to be oriented towards an authentically revolutionary policy. But who was going to carry out such a policy? What was the best way so long as the struggle was a function of the existence and preservation of the Socialist Party, a party dominated by the parliamentary group and torn inside by the irremediable conflict between the forces of reform and those of revolution?
If the abstentionist fraction had acted according to Verdaro’s postulates, which at the time were shared by the entire fraction (i.e. first split and then the fraction goes on to form the nucleus of the new party) we can assume that this initiative would have taken place. Inevitably it would have led to the significant strengthing of the left, with non-abstentionists from Gramsci’s “ordinovisti” together with those from the more general “maximalist” left!
The fact that such a glaring criticism can be made highlights the severity of the error. Bordiga, whose fault it was, himself also acknowledged this in one of his writings when he weakly comes up with the excuse that they were forced to compromise. This does not diminish but deepens his responsibility for the error, which is that had he proposed to the maximalists that they abandon their damaging abstentionism it would have resulted in the total castration of the fraction in exchange for the mess of pottage of the “excision” of the opportunist right (Il Soviet, 30.3.1919). The perspective was therefore to achieve a party without reformists rather than a new party built on the basis of the abstentionist fraction.
Why did the leaders of the abstentionist fraction fail in the tasks they had set themselves?
Who amongst the abstentionists has ever acknowledged that the perspective presented as the immediate goal was wrong, a perspective to which the entire fraction was theoretically committed? Apparently no-one. None of the members has ever addressed this problem; and from the thoroughly uncritical Bordigist publications themselves there is not much to learn in this regard.
Yet the objective situation posed the urgent need for a revolutionary leadership, and was particularly conducive to such an initiative. Potentially there were also significant numbers from the Socialist Party who were ready to join the undertaking. But no one dared to and, in the light of subsequent experience, it is possible to identify the reasons why they did not dare.
The basic error is always the same: namely, to see the problem above all from the standpoint of quantity. This is what led them to underestimate the role of the fraction from the point of view of its effectiveness and ability as an organisation; to minimise its influence amongst the masses and at the same time to exaggerate the consequences of electoral and parliamentary intoxication. In a word, the fear of failure, even if the masses were deeply motivated by the October Revolution, and the personalities of Lenin and Trotsky. Above all, there was a widespread belief that no serious revolutionary conquest could be made legally and by using the democratic parliament. All of this can be attributed to human frailty, to certain deficiencies of insight and revolutionary daring, but it does not explain everything.
The real reason, however, is to be found in the policy of the leading bodies of the Third International which, when confronted with the job of selection, of splits and regroupment, had adopted the tactical criteria of the maximum quantitative result and the least political discrimination, favouring, when not imposing, a split as far to the right as possible.
We know that in the face of such a political directive it was necessary either to passively accept or boldly break and leave the responsibility to others by going over to open opposition. In the specific case of the abstentionist fraction it would have meant breaking with the Socialist Party, cleverly emptied of its politically healthy elements, and promptly present the International with a fait accompli in order to force it to choose between the fraction, raised to the function of the party, as the only guarantee of the revolutionary struggle in our country, and the Socialist Party which would have completely failed in this historic task.
And when you do not act on this plan with the necessary decisiveness and speed, when you don’t start to construct the party at the historical moment when it is most needed, or, when the party is formed – as in Livorno – it is too late, then it will have to lead a proletariat, not in an assault on power, but in full retreat.
[01]. Damen is referring to the disastrous consequences of the KPD’s (Communist Party of Germany) decision to apply the united front formula of joining a “workers' government” in Thuringia and Saxony in 1923. The policy of attempting to form “workers' governments” (later “workers' and peasants' governments”) was approved at the IV Congress of the Communist International (1922) as part of the wider United Front policy aimed at maintaining Communist Party links with “the masses”. In 1923, the French occupation of the Ruhr and the infamous “great inflation” provoked massive social strife. In a confused political framework (where “National Bolshevism” appeared to rival early Nazism), tens of thousands of workers went on strike against French requisitioning of food and other supplies. At Mulheim for example, workers took over the town hall and tried to form a workers' council and their own militia. In August, the Cuno government was forced to resign. As the situation became more polarised many workers turned away from the Social Democrats and looked to the KPD to give a political lead. The KPD leadership, however, typically swayed from one expedient to another. Having judged the situation unfavourable for workers to go on the offensive, the KPD leadership under Brandler followed Russian advice and adopted a plan to join the left Social Democratic governments of Saxony and Thuringia. This, they knew, would provoke the national government, (headed by Ebert and the Social Democrats), to send in the army to which they planned to respond by calling a national general strike as the launch pad for a revolutionary insurrection. Of course the local Social Democrats reneged on the plan and the SPD as a whole refused to support a general strike. The central government duly sent in troops and the KPD leadership called off the action. News of this came too late for Hamburg where the local KPD attempted to launch the insurrection and fought on for three days against impossible odds. Thus ended the so-called ‘German October’, which signalled the eclipse of revolutionary hopes in Germany and therefore much of the hope for the international proletariat.
[02]. Virgilio Verdaro (1885-1960). He joined the PSI in 1901. During the First World War he was accused of defeatism and sent into internal exile in Calabria. After the war, he contributed to Il Soviet and was an abstentionist delegate to the 1919 Bologna Congress. He was present at the birth of the Communist Party of Italy at Livorno in January 1921. He was exiled to Russia in 1924 where his love of cats gave him the nickname ‘Gatto Mammone’. He used this pseudonym in Belgium after he had fled from Russia in 1928, having been accused of Trotskyism. Part of the communist left fraction, he was a key contributor to Bilan and Prometeo. His wife was pregnant and therefore was obliged to remain in Russia until just before the Second World War. Expelled from the Communist Party and sacked from her job, she existed in extreme poverty and her child died from starvation. At the outbreak of war Verdaro left Belgium and he and his wife went to Switzerland, his place of birth. He ended up joining the Socialist Party of Switzerland in 1943.
[03]. Herman Gorter (1864-1927). In 1897 he joined the Social Democratic Workers Party (Netherlands). In 1909, he was part of the Marxist left current associated with the newspaper De Tribune, which was expelled over their criticism of the corruption and opportunism of social democracy. Gorter joined those who went on to form the Social Democratic Party (SDP) which in the same year published Gorter’s “Marxism and Revisionism”. Unlike some of the SDP leaders, Gorter argued that workers had no interest in supporting either side in the world war and in “Imperialism, Social Democracy and World War” he argued workers must oppose war by the fight for socialism. After the Russian Revolution (1918), the SDP changed its name to the Communist Party of Holland. Gorter himself joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) before becoming part of the minority who were expelled for opposition to participation in parliament and the unions. They went on to form the Communist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD) and Gorter became its most famous theorist with the publication in 1920 of his “Open Letter to Comrade Lenin” in response to Lenin’s “‘Left-wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder”. After the Third Congress of the Comintern, the KAPD split with Gorter adhering to those who attempted to form a new International in the shape of the KAI (Communist Workers' International).
Anton Pannekoek (1873-1960). Like Gorter, he was a leading figure in the anti-revisionist battle in the Netherlands before the First World War; and he was editor of De Tribune from which the German-Dutch Left were known as the Tribunists. He opposed the war on a class basis and shared the political trajectory of Gorter, although he was an even more prolific writer. He was famous for his elaboration of the ideas of council communism. However, it must be said that Pannekoek also argued that “the Party is the historically determined form of organisation which groups the more aware and prepared proletarians in struggle…. The communist party must have a well developed programmatic base, and must be organised and disciplined in its entirety from below, as a unified will”. In his opposition to Stalinism, Pannekoek also recognised the Russian economic system as state capitalism.