Onorato Damen
Onorato Damen | |
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Communist Party of Italy Internationalist Communist Party | |
Onorato Damen (4 December 1893 – 14 October 1979), was an Italian
The Internationalist Communist Party, formally founded in 1943, was numerically the largest left communist organization in the post-World War II period. In 1952, Amadeo Bordiga, who had by then fully come out of retirement, split the party to found the International Communist Party, known by its paper Programma Comunista. A majority followed Damen,[1] whose group maintained the original name Internationalist Communist Party, the original theoretical journal Prometeo, as well as the paper Battaglia Communista. Onorato Damen was politically active his entire adult life. He was the author of books Bordiga Beyond the Myth[2] and Gramsci: Between Marxism and Idealism.[3]
Biography
Damen was born in
In the
During this period, Damen supported
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Already in February 1921 he was denounced by the judiciary for certain violence of language used during a rally in the
Rejecting these proposals, he was held in Dumini throughout the general strike; a protest erupted into violence in Pistoia on his release. Renewing contacts with the party and overcoming the reserve of the comrades, he decided to return to Pistoia where he remained in order to continue the task of agitation. On the return trip, made by car under the escort of a certain number of armed comrades, he encountered a squadron of fascists on the road from Pioppo to Caiano. This encounter resulted in the death of a fascist and the wounding of two others. Damen was sentenced to three years confinement in the Murate in Florence.
Given what took place en route from
Meanwhile, within the PCdI, the rupture between the direction imposed by Moscow and the left continued to delineate itself more clearly. Bordiga, who enjoyed widespread support within the party, initiated his "Aventine" cession (named from a famous plebeian revolt in ancient Rome 4th century BC). He attended the meeting of the central committee but did not intervene in the debate, thus not obstructing the change in political direction that was supported by Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti.
Damen was a supporter of Communist Left, not the new party direction. Togliatti attended a meeting of the central committee of the Florentine Federation of the CPI to discuss the position of Damen – although Damen himself was not invited. The meeting was unguarded and so the police were able to disrupt it – ultimately, it ended in a flight following a false alarm.
In 1925, Damen, along with Luigi Repossi and Bruno Fortichiari, formed the "Intesa" committee with the aim of defending the work of the left in the party. The Platform of the Committee of Intesa was hailed by Leon Trotsky as a seminal work of the International Left Opposition referring to it in his writings as the Platform of the Left.
In November 1926, Damen was imprisoned in Ustica, while in December of the same year he was arrested and sent again to the Murate in Florence for participating in the action of Florentine communists in plotting against the state. Condemned by a special tribunal to 12 years of seclusion, he spent years in prisons in Saluzzo, Pallanza, Civitavecchia (where he led a prison revolt) and in Pianosa. Released under amnesty at the end of 1933, he was sent to Milan under watch for 5 years, while the head of the prison in Pianosa communicated to the Casellaria Centrale that "the punishment he has suffered has had no moral effect" and described him as an "unshakeable communist".
He was again arrested at the end of 1935, and in 1937 for spreading communist propaganda about the Spanish Civil War, denouncing the stalinists. At the time, police sources testified, he "did not participate in the propaganda turn of the clandestine reorganisation of the Italian Communist Party" because, remaining faithful to his Left-Communist orientation, Damen diffused the propaganda of the international opposition against the politics of the Comintern and against Stalinism in Spain".
Arrested again at the outbreak of the Second World War, he was confined for the entire period of the war. He was finally released by the Marshal Badoglio regime at the end of the war.
Damen was in prison when the Internationalist Communist Party was launched, but his alignment with it was well known. In 1945, Togliatti and the PCI, while advocating the freedom of real fascists, petitioned in the CLN to have the leaders of the Internationalist Communist Party condemned to death as saboteurs and with the calumnious label of agents of the Gestapo; they included Damen in their list of its leaders. Togliatti's Italian Communist Party had already assassinated two of their founding members and organizers, Fausto Atti and Mario Acquaviva.
In the early 1950s, Bordiga began calling for a return to the positions of the Italian Communist Left as they were in the early 1920s when he was the leader of the Communist Party of Italy. To that end he founded the International Communist Party, which then launched their paper, Il Programma Comunista. The group around Battaglia Comunista (and their theoretical journal Prometeo) disagreed, instead defending the following positions:[4]
- Leninwas right on the national question.
- The old Communist Parties (now fully stalinised) were not centrist but bourgeois.
- There was no hope of conquering the unions and that new strategies towards the daily class struggle would have to be evolved to connect the daily struggle of the class to the longer term struggle for communism.
- The USSR was neither a communist nor socialist society but state capitalist.
- There could be no substitution of the party for the class as a whole.
In the 1970s, the Internationalist Communist Party around Prometeo and Battaglia Comunista organized the first of the International Conferences of the Communist Left. Out of these conferences. the Internationalist Communist Party and the
References
- ^ Philippe Bourrinet (2000). The "Bordigist" Current (1912-1952). p. 331.
- ^ Bordiga Beyond the Myth
- ^ Gramsci between Marxism and Idealism
- ^ The Italian Communist Left - A Brief Internationalist History
- ^ "The International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party becomes the Internationalist Communist Tendency".
External links
- The Onorato Damen Internet Archive (EN)
- The Thirtieth Anniversary of the Death of Onorato Damen (EN)
- Articles of Damen translated in English (EN)
- Articles in Battaglia Comunista (IT)
- Scritti scelti, 1943-78 (IT)
- Gramsci tra marxismo e idealismo (IT)
- Amadeo Bordiga - Validità e limiti d'una esperienza (IT)
- Istituto Onorato Damen