Onorato Damen | |
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| Personal details | |
| Born | 4 December 1893 Monte San Pietrangeli, Italy |
| Died | 14 October 1979(1979-10-14) (aged 85) Milan, Italy |
| Party | Italian Socialist Party Communist Party of Italy Internationalist Communist Party |
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Onorato Damen (4 December 1893 – 14 October 1979) was an Italianleft communist revolutionary who was first active in theItalian Socialist Party and then theCommunist Party of Italy. After being expelled, he worked with the organized Italian left, became one of the leaders of theInternationalist Communist Party, commonly known by their paperBattaglia Comunista.
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 theInternational Communist Party, known by its paperProgramma Comunista. A majority followed Damen,[1] whose group maintained the original name Internationalist Communist Party, the original theoretical journalPrometeo, as well as the paperBattaglia Communista. Onorato Damen was politically active his entire adult life. He was the author of booksBordiga Beyond the Myth[2] andGramsci: Between Marxism and Idealism.[3]
Damen was born inMonte San Pietrangeli (Fermo). In his youth, he joined theItalian Socialist Party (PSI), within which he opposed the politics ofTurati,Treves and Modigliani. A little more than twenty years old at the start of theFirst World War, he was drafted as aSergeant. At the end of the hostilities he was demoted to the rank of private and subsequently condemned to two years ofmilitary prison by amilitary tribunal for "endangering public institutions"; this was essentially for his support ofrevolutionary defeatism, motivated by "incitement todesertion" and for denouncing the "imperialistic character of the war".[4] Set free in 1919, he returned to his position in the party collaborating on the socialist periodical of FermoLa Lotta (The Struggle).
In theBiennio Rosso of 1920–21, the richest period of political and social tensions, Damen worked first inBologna with the localTrade Union Council and then with theCasa del Popolo ("House of the People") ofGranarolo as the secretary of the Community Legal Committee.
During this period, Damen supportedAmadeo Bordiga, and thus joined theCommunist Party of Italy. In the months immediately preceding the split ofLivorno he worked as secretary of the Trade Union Council inPistoia and as the chief editor of the periodicalL'avvenire. He remained in Pistoia up to his arrest in the months of the electoral campaign of 1921 for the action fromPoggio a Caiano.
Already in February 1921 he was denounced by the judiciary for certain violence of language used during a rally in thePiazza Garibaldi inPistoia. On the basis of his frenetic activity and, above the events atEmpoli, he became one of the principal targets of the nascentfascist reaction inTuscany, where he had been organising during those months. On May 10 while returning from a rally held on behalf of the candidate of the Communist Party of Italy in the elections in the village ofCorbezzi, he was detained by the fascists who took him to their offices in the city. Here they tried to beat him into renouncing his "Bolshevik" ideas. Failing in their first objective, he was transferred to their headquarters atPiazza Ottaviani inFlorence. He was sent toDumini with the proposal: "You should disappear for the entire period of the electoral campaign or hide yourself in a villa in Fiesole or remain in Florence under continual surveillance."
Rejecting these proposals, he was held in Dumini throughout thegeneral 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 fromPioppo toCaiano and the subsequent incarceration, the leadership of the party decided to send him toFrance as a part of their "political bureau" to represent the party and to preside over the organisation of groups of exiled comrades, coordinating their political activity as the director of the weeklyL'humanité inItalian. Later, upon his clandestine re-entry in the country in 1924, the party presented him as a candidate in the elections and in spite of the strong opposition of the fascists was elected as a deputy on the city council of Florence.
Meanwhile, within the PCd'I, 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 byAntonio Gramsci andPalmiro 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. However, under threat of expulsion from the Communist International and criticism of the committee as "factionalist", the Intesa Left would dissolve by order of the Gramsci-Togliatti leadership.[5] This directive was accepted by Amadeo Bordiga under the guise of party discipline, much to the dismay of the party's Left majority who regarded him as a leader against ComIntern's United Front policy.[6]
In the Session of the Chamber of Deputies on 9 March 1925, Damen addressed the Fascist-majority parliament concerning the Communists opposition to the Fascist vote to commemorate the death ofFriedrich Ebert, the Social Democratic President of theWeimar Republic from 1919 until his death in 1925.[7][8] Two days later, Damen would present to the chamber the agenda that the Fascist government was the "guard dog of property" and showed a forensic statistical analysis of the Italian economy to prove a rising cost of living and decline in real wages since the Fascists took power.[9][10]
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 inSaluzzo,Pallanza,Civitavecchia (where he led a prison revolt) and inPianosa. Released under amnesty at the end of 1933, he was sent toMilan under watch for 5 years, while the head of the prison in Pianosa communicated to theCasellaria 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 Communistpropaganda about theSpanish 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.[11]
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 theCLN 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 andMario 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 theInternational Communist Party, which then launched their paper,Il Programma Comunista. The group aroundBattaglia Comunista (and their theoretical journalPrometeo) disagreed, instead defending the following positions:[12]
In the 1970s, the Internationalist Communist Party aroundPrometeo andBattaglia Comunista organized the first of the International Conferences of the Communist Left. Out of these conferences. the Internationalist Communist Party and theCommunist Workers' Organisation together formed the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party around the basis of a common platform (the IBRP became the Internationalist Communist Tendency in 2009 and is still active to this day).[13] Damen died in 1979.
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