Communism

Communism in the book is a revolutionary current within the wider Italian socialist movement, shaped by the Communist International’s demands and tested by Italy’s postwar conflicts. Its decisive narrative moment comes at the January 1921 congress in Livorno: the communists leave the Italian Socialist Party and establish the Italian Communist Party. The split gives an institutional form to a deeper crisis. A movement still commanding mass support cannot agree on whether revolution remains an immediate political commitment or a language retained after revolutionary prospects have receded.

Revolutionary Promise and Postwar Rupture

The book places Italian communism amid the upheaval left by war. Millions of returning soldiers confront a political order whose older leaders seem unable to meet the new moment; the narrative describes a society divided between those who belonged to the old world and those who would shape what came next. In that unsettled landscape, revolutionary politics carries both the promise of a new social order and the risk of confrontation between organized political camps.

That confrontation is not reducible to the communist party faction alone. In Bologna, the book describes socialist institutions and rural leagues exercising extensive influence over work and local economic life. In Ferrara, the leagues’ spring mobilization secured changes to wages, hiring, and compulsory employment quotas. The account presents these arrangements as a source of intense conflict between farmworkers and landowners, while also showing how strikes and political organization could provoke counter-mobilization. The rural leagues are part of a broader socialist landscape, not simply another name for communism; their importance is that they reveal the social stakes and organizational reach within which revolutionary claims were made.

The failure of the factory occupations becomes a crucial dividing point. At the Livorno congress, the communist position is described as the only one in the party that still holds to revolution in earnest. The maximalist majority continues to speak in revolutionary terms, but, in the book’s account, no longer shares that conviction. This contrast makes the dispute more than a contest over tactics: it is a conflict over whether revolutionary language still corresponds to a political project.

The Communist International and the Livorno Dispute

The Communist International had set demanding terms for continued membership. Its 21 theses required the Italian party to change its name and reject as counterrevolutionaries comrades who believed in socialism but not revolution. The terms put party unity under direct pressure: remaining within the International meant accepting a sharp boundary between revolutionaries and those who sought to preserve a broader socialist organization.

The congress that opened in Livorno on January 15, 1921, made that division visible. Delegates were arranged by faction in the Teatro Goldoni: communists in the left-side galleries, centrists in the orchestra, and reformists in the right-side galleries. The book supplies the scale behind the staging: the communist faction represented 58,000 electors, against 100,000 centrists and 15,000 reformists. Beyond the hall, the Socialist Party had recently won major electoral success, with a presence in 2,162 municipalities and 156 parliamentarians. Its newspaper, Avanti!, circulated more than 300,000 copies daily. These figures sharpen the paradox: the movement retained substantial reach, even as its delegates struggled to agree on what that strength was for.

A representative of the Communist International delivered an ultimatum: those who supported the maximalists’ unitary motion would face expulsion from the International. The communists applauded; delegates elsewhere in the theater answered with mockery and objections to outside authority. The episode turns an abstract dispute over affiliation into a contest over who could define loyalty, revolutionary purpose, and the boundaries of the party. Debate continued amid competing claims from reformists, revolutionaries, unionists, and secessionists, but the shared auditorium did not produce a shared direction.

The Split Becomes a Party

The rupture acquired a precise form when Amadeo Bordiga ordered the communist delegates to leave the Teatro Goldoni. They walked out singing the Internationale and went to the nearby Teatro San Marco, where they founded the Italian Communist Party. The contrast between the two theaters marks the break materially: the established congress hall gives way to a smaller, damaged venue where the founders have no seats or benches and remain standing for hours in the rain.

Their party cards were certified with the hammer and sickle. That act made the separation more than a symbolic protest: the departing faction gave itself a distinct organization and an emblem of its political identity. The book frames the founding as the culmination of a decision already made through the International’s conditions and the Italian delegates’ disagreements. The communists left with the honor of their past, but also with the responsibility of carrying their movement forward outside the party they had just abandoned.

Discipline, Representation, and Political Contradiction

The Livorno account tests communist claims against behavior as well as doctrine. During the congress, Vincenzo Vacirca challenged the communist faction’s revolutionary rhetoric by presenting it as disconnected from the struggles of workers and peasants. Nicola Bombacci, known as the Lenin of Romagna, rose in anger; a revolver was placed within his reach, and he pointed it toward Vacirca. The moment compresses the book’s criticism into a brief, consequential scene: a debate over revolution and political responsibility turns toward armed intimidation inside a workers’ party congress.

That contradiction does not erase the distinction between communists and their opponents, but it complicates any simple claim that revolutionary commitment guarantees political unity or emancipation. The congress’s factions dispute not only the pace of change but also who may speak for workers, whether dissent can remain inside a common organization, and what means are compatible with the movement’s stated purpose. The split resolves one organizational question by founding a separate party; it does not resolve the wider crisis of revolutionary strategy.

Communism and the Wider Political Contest

Communism also appears as a force against which other political actors define themselves. Before the Livorno split, fascists moved toward a hard line against revolutionary agitation, while the liberal state opened a channel for fascist collaboration in maintaining public order and repressing revolutionary attempts. The arrangement exposes a consequential imbalance: institutions seeking to contain the left could enlist a movement that was itself challenging established political methods.

Later, fascist declarations of national unity and state authority offer a rival answer to the social conflicts that had sustained revolutionary politics. In the narrative, the fascist claim to absorb the masses and make the nation one contrasts with a socialist movement divided over whether revolution remains possible. Communism therefore functions not only as a factional position but as a pressure on the entire political field: it exposes the distance between mass organization and political agreement, while furnishing opponents with a cause around which they can organize. The Livorno foundation gives the communist current a party of its own, even as the surrounding conflict leaves its prospects bound to a fractured left and an increasingly forceful opposition.