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be trained to become worthy of the working-class and the toiling masses, and the masses learn correctly to understand the political situation, and to understand the often very complicated and intricate problems that originate from such situations.[1]
- ↑ I have had very little opportunity to acquaint myself with "Left" Communism in Italy. Unquestionably, Comrade Bordiga and his group of "Communist-Boycottists" (Communista abstentionista) are wrong in defending non-participation in Parliament. But it seems to me—from what I can gather from two issues of his paper, Il Soviet (Nos .3 and 4, January 18 and February 1, 1920), from four issues of Comrade Serrati's excellent periodical Communismo (Nos. 1–4, October–November, 1919) and from scattered numbers of Italian bourgeois papers with which I have had the opportunity to acquaint myself—that they are right on one point. Comrade Bordiga and his group are right in their attacks on Turati and his co-thinkers, who remain in a party which has recognized Soviet power and proletarian dictatorship, and who at the same time continue their former detrimental and opportunistic policy as members of parliament. Of course, in suffering this, Serrati and the whole Italian Socialist Party make a mistake which threatens to cause great harm and peril, a peril as great as that in Hungary, where the Hungarian Turatis sabotaged from within both the Party and the Soviet Government. Such a mistaken, inconsistent, or characterless attitude towards the opportunist parliamentarians, on the one hand, creates "Left" Communism, and, on the other, justifies its existence up to a certain point. Comrade Serrati is obviously in the wrong when he accuses Deputy Turati of "inconsistency" (Communismo, No. 3); in point of fact, it is the Italian Socialist Party which is inconsistent, in putting up with such opportunist parliamentarians as Turati and Co.
