Week 46

 

The first delegates to the XV Congress of the Italian Socialist Party had begun arriving in Rome during the last days of August. The Avanti! of August 30^th had felt the need to remind the Party sections that they had to provide for a replacement of those delegates “that had been jailed, subject to forced residence or called to arms” (since the Congress had been in the works for over a year, some designations had been made already in 1917 and there was a comprehensible difficulty in finding a replacement on the fly – one should take into account that the majority within a section might have changed since the last designation, creating understandable internal friction over a new designation). There was nonetheless a significant attention towards the congress works – favored by the recent positive turn of the conflict and the relative inactivity of the Italian front – with very few to no sections delegating the party direction for the purpose of their representation. It was after all four years after the last congress and many delegates felt – despite the limitations to the railroad transportation and the severe police restrictions – that there were good reasons to make the trip to Rome.

An assembly of the “intransigent revolutionary current” - the majority current led by N. Bombacci – had been summoned for the 31^st in Rome, in preparation for the congress. Meanwhile the local currents continued to hold their internal debate from the pages of the official newspaper of the Party. Two days after the Roman section had asked for the expulsion of Filippo Turati, reformer and leader of the Parliamentary Group – a motion that more than a few felt was inspired directly by Bombacci that had taken charge of the Party Direction (first as Lazzari's Vice, then in substance alone) and moved to Rome since the Summer of 1917 - as well as for the dissolution of the Group itself. A proposition that had received apparent support from the Milanese (intransigent) majority, despite Milan being Turati's traditional holding – the minority fraction of the Milanese section replied from the first page of the Avanti!, protesting “against the content and intention” of the majority motion. Those who “spoke with such poor consideration, with such acrimony of their comrades – matters not if they were in disagreement - […] did not have the right to claim for themselves the patent of wardens of the Party. To sour the relations between comrades, to arise or spread infamous and dishonest voices, to turn a conflict of ideas into a slanderous fight might have been something that agreed […] with the political vision of those who placed the expulsion of Turati and the dissolution of the Parliamentary Group as the raison d'etre of the upcoming congress. But certainly did no good for the strength and respectability of the party.”

As for their point of view, the Milanese reformers “chose to re-affirm […] that their ultimate purpose was to safeguard the unity of the Party, along the lines established and the principles […] shared and accepted since the Congress of Genoa 1892.” They hoped “that within the Congress the harshness of the political conflict would be attenuated.” For this purpose they had fought for the Congress to take place as soon as possible. But they rejected the accusation of being “on a free hunt for proxies from the province sections” [that is, going to the sections and pushing for them to delegate a member of the Milanese section instead of one of their own; traveling to Rome was at the time rather expensive, let alone inconvenient] - a practice that, they claimed, had actually been started by the “intransigent revolutionaries” themselves.

Meanwhile the Turin section had approved their own “intransigent revolutionary” motion, that remarked the “character of intransigent autonomy and separation of the socialist movement from any other current of the bourgeois fractions within the parliament”. More so, after four years of war “the intransigent-revolutionary action of the Party could no longer remain limited to the ground of pure doctrinaire affirmations, but had to aim for the realization of the maximum postulates of the socialist doctrine”. That said the Turin section did not ask for Turati's expulsion, not for the dissolution of the Parliamentary Group, but only for the latter to follow “with stronger discipline […] the directives of the party”.

Here again though, the minority expressed its dissent with a letter to the Avanti! accusing the motion approved – this one introduced personally by Bombacci – of being “generic” and “not solving any of the issues that had risen during the previous three years”.

The sections of Novara and Florence approved an intransigent motion as well – with that of Florence including the explicit appointing of two delegates for the majority (including acting Vice Secretary Egidio Gennari) and one for the minority. A surprising exception was the section of Livorno which put forward a “long debated” motion encouraging to “postpone the solution of theoretical issues that were not of immediate necessity for the party action” until after the war, since the climate of “incensed passions and restrictions imposed by the war regime” was not optimal for such a debate. More so it stressed the need to preserve “the unity of the Party” - especially in light of the fact that the socialist movement as a whole “had remained faithful to the internationalist class directives [and had followed the] line established already in Bologna in the immediate aftermath of the war declaration”.

The section of Codogno (an industrial center not far from Milan) shared the moderate-intransigent approach of admonishing the Parliamentary Group “to a most rigorous respect of its disciplinary obligations” towards the Party Direction.

Incidentally the Avanti! found room to report briefly on the frontier battle of Nogales. A signal that interest over the American affairs had re-ignited with the American intervention and the growing presence of American organizations within Italy. For similar reasons the socialist newspaper was reporting on the trial revision for Tom Mooney, publishing a long letter from John Spargo in the issue of August 31^st .