Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder/Appendix 3
APPENDIX III.
TURATI & CO. IN ITALY.
The copies of the Italian newspaper Il Soviet, referred to above, fully confirm all that I have said in my brochure regarding the error of the Italian Socialist Party, which suffers in its ranks such members and groups as Parliamentarians. It is still better confirmed by a layman, in the person of the Rome correspondent of the British bourgeois Liberal newspaper, the Manchester Guardian, whose interview with Turati is published in that paper on March 12, 1920.
Signor Turati, writes this correspondent, is of opinion that the revolutionary peril is not such as to cause undue anxiety in Italy. The Maximalists are fanning the flame of Soviet theories only to keep the masses awake and excited. These theories are, however, merely legendary notions, unripe programs, incapable of being put to practical use. They are useful only to maintain the working class in a state of expectation. The very men who employ them as a lure to dazzle proletarian eyes find themselves frequently compelled to fight a daily battle for the extortion of some trifling economic advantages, so as to delay the moment when the working class will lose their illusions and faith in their favorite myths. Hence a long string of strikes of all sizes and with all pretexts, up to the very latest ones in the mail and railway services—which make the already hard conditions of the country still worse. The country is irritated owing to the difficulties connected with its Adriatic problem, it is weighed down by its foreign debt and by its inflated paper circulation, and yet it is far from realizing the necessity of adopting that discipline of work which alone can restore order and prosperity.
It is as clear as daylight that the English correspondent has let slip the truth—which in all probability is partly concealed and improved upon by Turati himself, his bourgeois defenders, assistants, and inspirers in Italy. The truth in question is to the effect that the ideas and the political activity of such men as Turati, Treves, Modigliani, Dugoni and Co. is actually and precisely such as that described by the British correspondent. It is social-treachery, pure and simple. It is so symptomatic, this defence of "order and discipline" for workers who are wage slaves, for workers who toil to enrich the capitalists. And how well we Russians are acquainted with all these Menshevik speeches! How valuable this recognition that the masses are in favor of the Soviet form of government! This inability to conceive the revolutionary importance of the strike wave, growing irrepressibly, how stupid and how meanly middle-class it is! Yes, yes, the British correspondent of the bourgeois Liberal paper has rendered an ill service to Messrs. Turati and Co., and has well confirmed the just demands of Comrade Bordiga and his friends of Il Soviet, who are insisting that the Italian Socialist Party, if its intention to go with the Third International be real, should expel from its ranks with all the ignominy they deserve Messrs Turati and Co., and should become a Communist Party not only in word but in deed.