Italian Socialist Party and the Comintern: ideological dispute leading to a split

The relationship between the Italian Socialist Party and the Communist International turned on a conflict over who could belong to a socialist party and what revolutionary commitment required. At the Italian Socialist Party’s January 1921 congress in Livorno, pressure from Moscow to expel reformists and adopt a stricter revolutionary program collided with the party’s divided membership and leadership. The refusal to comply ended in a walkout and the foundation of the Italian Communist Party, a rupture the book presents as a decisive fracture in Italian proletarian politics.

A growing breach

The split developed against a background of substantial socialist strength and sharp disagreement about how that strength should be used. In the November elections preceding the congress, the Italian Socialist Party won a majority in 2,162 municipalities and returned 156 members of parliament. Its membership had grown to 216,000, organized in 4,300 sections, while its daily newspaper, Avanti!, had a circulation exceeding 300,000. Yet the Communist International’s demands exposed a question that those organizational gains could not settle: whether the party should seek to preserve unity among socialists or exclude those who did not accept revolution as an immediate political commitment.

The disagreement had acquired its programmatic form at the Communist International’s previous July congress. Its 21 theses made continued membership in the International conditional on changing the party’s name and rejecting as counterrevolutionaries those comrades who supported socialism but not revolution. This requirement put the Italian party’s leaders under pressure to draw a boundary within their own movement. The book emphasizes the widening distance between that demand and the Italian political situation: after the failed occupation of the factories, Nicola Bombacci and his followers were among the few who still believed revolution was imminent, while most of Giacinto Menotti Serrati’s maximalist majority no longer shared that conviction, despite continuing to use revolutionary language.

Livorno: disagreement made visible

The Italian Socialist Party’s seventeenth congress opened in Livorno on January 15, 1921. Its seating arrangement rendered the divisions visible: communist delegates sat in the left-hand tiers, centrist delegates occupied the orchestra, and reformists sat in the right-hand tiers. The groupings represented different strengths among the congress’s electors: 58,000 for the communist faction, 100,000 for the centrists, and 15,000 for the reformists. The Communist International’s address, read in Italian by secretary Francesco Frola, sharply attacked the reformists and those who would not expel them. Nicola Bombacci listened from the communist section, where the International’s position met with support.

On January 16, the International’s delegate Christo Kabakciev reinforced the demand. He argued that the situation was revolutionary and warned that those who sided with reformists against the communist line would be treated as traitors. The Communist International, he announced, would expel those who voted for the maximalists’ proposal to preserve party unity. This ultimatum drew hostile responses from other parts of the hall, where delegates objected to what they regarded as Moscow’s attempt to dictate the party’s decision. The dispute was therefore not simply over terminology: it concerned whether an international organization could determine the conditions of membership and override the judgment of the Italian party’s majority.

The exchanges also revealed that opposition to the International’s directives did not necessarily mean opposition to socialism. During the turbulent debate, the Sicilian trade unionist Vincenzo Vacirca defended freedom of thought and unity of action while criticizing Moscow’s instructions. He argued that communism and socialism were, in his view, aligned in the struggle against large landed estates, and blamed advocates of violence for provoking a reaction that swept through workers’ and peasants’ organizations. His intervention offered a different account of political responsibility from the one advanced by the communist faction: the danger, as he described it, lay not in the refusal to follow Moscow’s demands but in rhetoric that invited repression and divided the movement.

Walkout and a new party

On January 19, while Giacomo Matteotti faced hostility in Ferrara, communist leader Amadeo Bordiga went to the rostrum at the congress and ordered the communist delegates to leave. They walked out singing the Internationale and arranged to meet at the nearby Teatro San Marco. There, they founded the Italian Communist Party. The setting sharply contrasted with the formal congress they had abandoned: the founders stood for hours on an uneven floor, beneath a damaged roof through which rain poured, with neither seats nor benches available. They certified their party cards with the hammer and sickle. Their departure converted an ideological dispute into an organizational split.

Bordiga’s statement at the congress framed the departure as a break made in the name of an inherited political honor. The seceding communists, he said, would carry with them the honor of the comrades who had shaped their early political formation. The appeal to a shared past sat beside the act of separation: those leaving claimed continuity with earlier socialist comrades even as they rejected the unity of the existing party. The International’s insistence on exclusion had thus produced a new organization, but the departure also made the cost of the demand plain: the party’s internal disagreement could no longer be contained within a common structure.

Meaning and aftermath

The book links the Livorno split to a broader crisis in Italian socialism, but the evidence does not reduce that crisis to the party division alone. In rural Emilia, socialist organizations and peasant leagues held substantial local influence; the book describes their control over hiring, work schedules, threshing, seed supplies, and crop planting. It also depicts growing hostility between landowners, farmworkers, and other groups, while episodes of violence and the organization of countervailing forces intensified the struggle. These circumstances help explain the stakes of the congress: the debate over revolution and party discipline unfolded while mass organizations remained powerful and political conflict was increasingly coercive. They do not, by themselves, establish that the split caused the later defeats of the socialist movement.

Antonio Gramsci looked back on the secession in 1924 as part of a wider dissolution of Italian society. He recalled that those involved had been swept along by events and had taken some consolation in believing they had predicted the coming catastrophe. Pietro Nenni likewise identified Livorno as the beginning of the Italian proletariat’s tragedy. These later judgments give the congress a significance beyond the creation of a new party: it became a point at which the movement’s competing strategies, and its difficulty holding together different currents of socialist politics, were made unmistakable. The relationship between the Italian Socialist Party and the Communist International therefore culminated not in an agreed program, but in a demand that forced a choice—and in a division whose consequences remained a subject of retrospective judgment.