On January 21, we celebrated the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the Communist Party of Italy (Partito Comunista d’Italia) in 1921. The party was formed at the initiative of the communist left, called the Sinistra Comunista in Italian, who had previously made up the Abstentionist Faction of the Italian Socialist Party. Its platform, written at the founding congress at Livorno, was proudly revolutionary, proletarian, and internationalist (its press never failed to remind readers that it was a section of the Communist International).

Under the direction of the left faction, the Communist Party of Italy waged numerous struggles. First and foremost was its struggle against capitalism and the parliamentary system that is its instrument. This went hand in hand with the fight against the false left, the so-called Maximal-ists, in the Italian Socialist Party, who waved red flags but were too gutless to join the world revolution. At the same time, the party struggled against the fascists, who had already shown their willingness to resort to any form of depravity to stop the proletarian revolution. In subsequent years, the communist left waged a militant struggle against the centrists, and later the Stalinists, who sought to wage a counter-revolution from within the party.

The Communist Party of Italy was banned by the fascist government in 1926. Its most prominent members were imprisoned, first on remote islands and then under house-arrest. Some managed to flee the country and continue their political activities, while others endured the long years of fascism in obscurity.

In the meantime, the Stalinist gangsters in Moscow and their Italian henchmen took advantage of the fascist repression to fight their real enemy: the left. With the leading left communists sitting in Mussolini’s prisons (the left was a majority, so its representatives were more likely to be imprisoned), the Stalinists gutted the Communist Party of Italy of its Marxist platform. Upon their release from prison, the most dedicated revolutionaries of 1921 found themselves expelled from the party they had created. The Stalinists finally buried the Communist Party of Italy in 1943, replacing it with a bourgeois parliamentary format-ion named the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano).

In the aftermath of World War II, the fascist period, and the degeneration of the world communist movement, the Sinistra came together to rebuild the party of the communist left. They determined that world revolution required a world party. The result was the birth of the International Communist Party. Our party continues the work laid out at Livorno a hundred years ago.

"Against all the resistance of the bourgeois social system, against all the tricks of the false friends of the proletariat, against all weakness and defeatism, go forward to revolutionary victory at the flank of the communists of the whole world.

"Long live the Communist Third International!

"Long live the world communist revolution!"

 

Manifesto to the Workers of Italy. Il Soviet had been the newspaper of the left wing of the Italian Socialist Party. After Livorno it became a newspaper of the Communist Party of Italy. This issue from February 6, 1921 announces the foundation of the party.