Socialism as it is

by William English Walling

The resolution finally adopted by the Congress was drawn up by Turati and others who represented the views of the majority of reformists. While purely negative, it was quite clear, and the fact that it was finally accepted both by Bissolati and by Modigliani is highly significant. It concluded that "the Socialist group in Parliament ought not any longer to support the government systematically with their votes." It did not declare for any systematic opposition to the administration, even at the time when it is waging this war. It did not even forbid occasional support, and it left full discretion in the hands of the same parliamentary group whose policy I have been recording.

As a consequence the Italian Party at this juncture intentionally tolerated two contradictory policies. Turati declared: "We are in opposition unless in some exceptional case, in which some situation of extreme gravity might present itself." Rigola, who was one of the three spokesmen appointed for the less conservative reformists (with Turati and Modigliani) said: "We have been ministerialists for ten years, but little or nothing has been done for the proletariat. Some laws have been approved, but it is doubtful if they are due to us rather than to the exigencies of progress itself." In other words, Turati and Rigola thought there could be occasions for supporting capitalist ministries, though the present was not such an occasion; while the latter practically confessed that the policy had always been a failure in Italy. But in the face of all criticism Bissolati announced that he refused absolutely to pass over to the opposition to the ministry of Giolitti. Turati and his followers, now in control of the Party, might tolerate this position; the large and growing revolutionary minority would not. This could only mean that Socialist group in the Italian Parliament, like that of France, and even of Germany, would divide its votes on many vital matters, or at least that the minority would abstain from voting. Which could only mean that on many questions of the highest importance there was no longer one Socialist Party, but two.[104]

Turati himself wrote of the Modena Congress:—

"Only two tendencies were to be seen in the discussion and the voting; two parties in their bases and principles: the Socialist Party as a party of the working people, a class party, a party of political, economic, and social reorganization, and on the other side a bourgeois radical party as a completion of, and perhaps also as a center of new life force for, the sleeping and half moribund bourgeois democratic radicalism."[105] That is, the "reformist" Turati denied that there is anything Socialistic about Bissolati's "ultra-reformist" faction. To this Bissolati answered that compromise and the political collaboration of the working people with other classes, was not to be reserved, as Turati had said, for accidental and extraordinary cases, but was "the very essence of the reformist method."[106] The revolutionaries, of course, agree with Bissolati that, if the Socialists hold that their prime function is to work for reforms favored by a large part of the capitalists, compromises and the habit of fighting with the capitalists instead of against them are inevitable.

Turati now began to approach the revolutionaries, said that they had given up their dogmatism, immoderation, and justification of violence, and that he only differed from them now on questions of "more or less." The revolutionaries, however, have made no overtures to Turati, and Turati's overtures to the revolutionaries have so far been rejected. Turati's "reformism" seems to be less opportunistic than it was, but as long as he insists, as he does to-day, that it is only conditions that have changed and not his reformist tactics, that the revolutionaries are moving towards the reformists, the relation of the two factions is likely to remain as embittered as ever. Only if the revolutionaries continue to grow more powerful, until Turati is obliged still further to moderate his "reformist" principles and to abandon some of his tactics permanently, instead of saying, as he does now, that he lays them aside only temporarily, will there be any real unity in the Italian Socialist Party.

Within a few weeks after the Modena Congress, Turati had already initiated a movement in this direction when he persuaded the executive committee of the Party, after a bitter conflict, and by a majority of one (12 to 13), to enter definitely into opposition to the government, which in the meanwhile had given a new cause for offense by delaying on a military pretext the convocation of the Chamber of Deputies.[107]

Among the opportunist and ultra "reformists" who were still anxious to take no definite action, were such well-known men as Bissolati, Podrecca, Calda, and Ciotti. Bissolati deplored all agitation in criticism of the war except a demand for the convocation of the Chamber. Turati and others who had at last decided to go over definitely to the opposition, did so on entirely non-Socialist and capitalist grounds such as the expense of the war, the unprofitable nature of Tripoli as a colony, the aid the war gave to clericals and other reactionaries (elements opposed also by progressive capitalists), and the interference it caused with other reforms (favored also by progressive capitalists). Turati, indeed, was frank enough to say that he had Lloyd George's successful opposition to the Boer War as a model, and called the attention of his associates to the fact that Lloyd George became Minister (it will be remembered that Turati is not on the whole opposed to Socialists also becoming ministers—even in a capitalist cabinet). Even now it was only the revolutionary Musatti who pointed out the true Socialist moral of the situation, that failure of the non-Socialist democrats to stand by their principles and to oppose the war, ought to lead the party to separate from them, not only temporarily, but permanently, and to make impossible forever either the participation of the Socialists in any capitalist administration or even the support of such an administration in the Chamber of Deputies.

It was only when Bissolati secured a majority of the Socialist deputies, and this majority decided to compel the minority to accept Bissolati's neutral tactics as to the war and his readiness actively to support the war government at every point where that government was in need of support, that Turati rebelled and demanded that his minority, which announced itself as willing as a unit to obey the decisions of the Party Congress, should be recognized as its official representative in the Chamber. Turati's position was the same as before, but Bissolati's greater popularity among the voters, including non-Socialists, gave the latter control of the Parliamentary group, and forced the former to a declaration of war. The effect was to throw Turati and his followers into the arms of the revolutionaries, where they form a minority.