Different local conditions produced rival revolutionary strategies in early Italian communism

Evidence

Whereas the young Turin socialists, in their reaction against the class collaborationism and passivity of the old socialist leaders, were influenced above all by Crocean idealism and Sorelian voluntarism, by Salvemini’s Southernism, and by the experience of the mass proletarian struggles of Italy’s most advanced industrial city, Bordiga’s reaction took a different course. He fought for a return to Marxist orthodoxy, principled, intransigent, but also already showing the inflexibility and indeed dogmatism which were to characterise his political career. He also fought, however, for a national perspective for revolutionary strategy, at a time when Gramsci was still thinking in local terms; it was this factor above all, together with his early understanding of the role of the revolutionary party, which ensured his dominance in the P.C.I. at its foundation. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 67

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Local township militancy arose indigenously before the ANC organized it — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 607