Bolshevisation was contested inside the PCI along left-centre factional lines

Evidence

The Lyons Congress saw the last major challenge by the Left inside the P.C.I. The main issues of the pre-congress discussion were bolshevisation and relations with the International. The platform of the Left turned on opposition to bolshevisation, especially to reorganisation on the basis of factory cells which it saw as creating a basis for a new corporativism, and on a condemnation of what it claimed was the “tacticism” of the Centre leadership; it laid the responsibility for the emergence of fractionism at the door of the leadership and of the Comintern. Gramsci and the Centre, on the other hand, violently attack the Left’s “fractionism”, and argued that bolshevisation should be seen as the construction of a real world communist party and that opposition to it was the result of provincial residues. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 208

Categorization

• XREF: The Centre-versus-Left factional split and accusations of ‘fractionism’ prefigure later debate about how Leninist organization discipline works or fails.