I – The Birth of the Communist Party of Italy (1921)

On January 21, 1921, in the S.Marco theatre in Livorno, the Communist Party of Italy (Pcd’I) was born, the Italian section of the Third International. The place that would give birth to what would later become the largest and most important communist party in Western Europe had been used as a warehouse during the recently concluded war and was, as Terracini[2] recalled, a cramped, unlit place, without chairs or benches, with unglazed windows and a broken roof. Those who constituted the PCI were a minority of the delegates of the XVII Congress of the PSI, which was held in those days in Livorno in another theatre, the Goldoni.

The Socialist Congress had just refused, with only a quarter of the votes against, as stipulated in the 21 conditions for joining the Communist International, to expel the members of the Party's reformist current. The minority, which represented 58,783 members out of 216,337, and which abandoned the Goldoni to meet at the S.Marco, consisted of the "abstentionist" group led by Bordiga, the future first leader of the new Party, the Ordine Nuovo[3] group of Gramsci, Togliatti, Terracini, and Tasca, the maximalist current of Marabini and Graziadei, and the vast majority of the Socialist Youth Federation (FGS)[4]. These groups, in addition to declaring the birth of the new party, also elected a first Central Committee[5], in which the internal balance of power was clearly visible.

The causes that led to the split of the PSI must be sought primarily beyond Italian borders. In fact, the pressures from the new global center of communist politics, the Third International, which was born in Moscow in 1919 and, certain of the possibility of exporting its winning model across Europe, with the 21 conditions it set for joining, demanded, besides the purge of reformist currents, the adoption of the communist name instead of the socialist one. But if it is undeniable that the October Revolution acted as a catalyst, in all countries, for the more revolutionary sectors of the workers' parties, at the same time the peculiarities of the PSI cannot be forgotten, as it had already distinguished itself by its autonomous stance during World War I, when, unlike the other European socialist parties that supported their respective bourgeoisies, it launched the slogan "neither adhere nor sabotage."

Within the Party, political divisions among the three main currents had sharpened, partly due to the post-war situation: the reformist and social-democratic right of Turati, the maximalists of Serrati, who were the true majority of the Party, and the component of Bordiga and Gramsci. But as Agosti recalls, the theoretical analysis was always rather lacking among the socialists of that period[6], who loved to speak of revolution, without ever, and in this the difference with the Bolsheviks was clear, worrying about discussing what to do to achieve it, perhaps relying on its inevitability. These peculiarities of Italian socialism led to the birth of a revolutionary communist party much later than in other European countries, and without sufficient ideological debate, such as the one that had occurred in German social democracy, for example. For these reasons, the paradox was reached that the PCI, which was the party that was supposed to be born to make the revolution, was formed precisely at the moment when the conditions for revolution faded, which were certainly more mature in the two years of 1919-20.

[1] The Pcd’I changed its name to Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) following the dissolution of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1943. For simplification, we will always use the abbreviation PCI.

[2] Cf. La storia del futuro Livorno 1921–2001, special issue published by the National Directorate of the PRC on the eightieth anniversary of the PCI’s founding.

[3] Ordine Nuovo was a magazine directed by Gramsci and first published on 1 May 1919. The magazine soon became the organ of the Factory Councils. Cf. Mordenti, Introduzione a Gramsci, Datanews Editrice.

[4] The FGS, with 90% of the votes, transformed at its last Congress into the Italian Communist Youth Federation (FGCI). Its first national secretaries were Giuseppe Berti and, after 1923, Giuseppe Dozza, future historic Mayor of Bologna. The FGCI later played an important role, particularly during the Liberation War, with the creation of two parallel organizations: the Youth Front in the North and, after 8 September 1943, the MGC in central and southern Italy.

[5] The 15 members of the Central Committee were, in alphabetical order: Belloni, Bombacci, Bordiga, Fortichiari, Gennai, Gramsci, Grieco, Marabini, Misiano, Parodi, Polano, Repossi, Sessa, Tarsia, Terracini. Of these, eight were Bordighists, five maximalists, and two from Ordine Nuovo. Cf. Togliatti, Gramsci, Editori Riuniti.

[6] Cf. Agosti, Storia del PCI, Editori Laterza.