Filippo Turati

[Noa Rodman]

Let's find out about the founder of the PSI.

A letter of Engels to Turati: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/letters/94_01_26.htm

Writings and discourses in Italian:
https://archive.org/details/trentannidicriti00turauoft

https://archive.org/details/leviemaestredels00turauoft

There is little reference to him, and this isn't just because he wrote in Italian (the same is the case with Morris Hillquit, see the thread I made).

Bordiga mentions him in passing (The Fundamentals for a Marxist Orientation, 1946): "In the second phase, the question is legitimately posed of a parallel action between democratic reformism and the proletarian socialist parties. If history has given reason to answer, No, by the left revolutionary marxists to the revisionist right wing, and the reformists, they cannot be considered conformist before the fatal degeneration of 1914-1918. If in effect they believed the wheels of history turned at a slow rhythm, they still did not attempt to turn the wheels back. It is necessary to render this justice to Bebel, Jaurès and Turati."

There is an index of Critica Sociale ("Weekly review of social, political and literary studies of scientific Socialism") here (subscription required to access the articles themselves): http://www.criticasociale.net/index.php?&function=novecento

Btw, I cannot resist naming some later Kautsky pieces in it:
A guerra scoppiata, che resta da fare ai socialisti? (http://www.criticasociale.net/index.php?&lng=ita&function=novecento&pid=archivio_page&rid=0003433&year=1914) (1914)
Il dolore e la solidariet� di tutti i socialisti (http://www.criticasociale.net/index.php?&lng=ita&function=novecento&pid=archivio_page&rid=0007527&year=1926) (1926)
Federico Engels nel trentesimo anniversario della sua morte (http://www.criticasociale.net/index.php?&lng=ita&function=novecento&pid=archivio_page&rid=0007746&year=1925) (1925)
La socializzazione nell'agricoltura, II. La socializzazione della piccola propriet�: L'industrializzazione dell'agricoltura (http://www.criticasociale.net/index.php?&lng=ita&function=novecento&pid=archivio_page&rid=0007804&year=1925) (1925)

Also one about the death of Turati's beautiful and intelligent wife Anna Kuliscioff.

So there is not much more that I can find for the moment on Filippo Turati.

(it seems he was close to Giuseppe Emanuele Modigliani)

It would be interesting to check out his debates with the syndicalist-wing (Mussollini) before the war, his pacificism during, and then response to revolution, response to defeat and his possible reflections, etc.

Certainly 'before 1914' his articles on various topics belong to classical Marxism. Perhaps we can discuss them here (tho probably difficult if no English articles of his exist).

[Noa Rodman]

I checked some Italian leftcom sites for more info on Turati, who it seems carried the cool nickname "l'on" (which translates I guess as "the one").

The title of one article says that Turati after WW1 is more socialist than the West European CPs after WW2:

Il Turati 1921 avrebbe espulso per arcirevisionismo il Togliatti 1956
(The Turati of 1921 would have dismissed the arch-revisionism of Togliatti 1956)
http://www.international-communist-party.org/Indices/IProgr52.htm

(also a note saying that Turati's marxism is more orthodox than Gramsci's)

There is a republication of an 1912 article in Avanti! http://www.international-communist-party.org/Comunism/Comuni60.htm

Although the Italian leftcoms note that at least Turati still felt compelled to theoretically justify parliamentarism, they make no effort to engage his texts (despite Lenin in LWC writing that Turati caused Bordiga's anti-parliament position to have some ground).

Turati's disciple it seems was Rodolfo Mondolfo (he wrote the introduction to Le vie maestre del socialismo, 1921), but who he is a figure in his own right.

Mondolfo is a forgotten theoretician of Italian Marxism (even active before the war), a great intellectual. What I could find online:

Le matérialisme historique d'après Frédéric Engels (1912) http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006572926

(noted by Gramsci. (http://www.marxists.org/francais/gramsci/works/1933/antiboukh4.htm)Also noted by Grossmann (http://www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/grossmann/1932/xx/fortentwicklung.html)as development of historical materialism, adding Mondolfo's II concetto marxistico della „umwälzende Praxis“ e suoi germi in Bruno e Spinoza, 1932).

Sulle orme di Marx; studi di marxismo e di socialismo
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008908989

Minor article in English (don't judge him on just this tho); Some Causes of Fascism http://www.unz.org/Pub/LivingAge-1922jan07-00053

He was active for almost 8 decades, see this impressive bibliography; https://archive.org/stream/rodolfomondolfo00puccgoog#page/n72/mode/2up

Few examples:
Martoff contro Zinowieff e l'antitesi fra socialismo e bolscevismo (http://www.criticasociale.net/index.php?&lng=ita&function=novecento&pid=archivio_page&rid=0006393&year=1921), 1921
Da Ardigò a Gramsci, 1962
Bolchevismo y capitalismo de estado (http://books.google.com/books?id=g4uDGQAACAAJ&dq=bolchevismo+y+capitalismo+de+estado&hl=en&sa=X&ei=pEvnUpSAGYa00QW6o4GYBQ&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA), 1968

[Noa Rodman]

Also online by Rodolfo Mondolfo:

Zur Soziologie der Geschlechtsmora (http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?q1=mondolfo;id=uc1.%24b473361;view=image;seq=93 6;start=1;size=10;page=search;num=920)l.

The Spanish translation (together with his wife) of and introduction to Hegel's Science of Logic (here's a pdf (http://cepcritico.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/ciencia-de-la-lc3b3gica-hegel.pdf)).

El pensamiento antiguo (http://www.scribd.com/doc/9000894/Rodolfo-Mondolfo-El-pensamiento-antiguo) (on Scribd there are many other of his works on Greek philosophy)

Marx y Marxismo (http://www.scribd.com/doc/29045297/Rodolfo-Mondolfo-Marx-y-Marxismo)

El humanismo de Marx (http://www.scribd.com/doc/23967230/Mondolfo-Rodolfo-El-humanismo-de-Marx-1964)

Perhaps Italian or Spanish comrades can contribute further about Mondolfo, like make a criticism.

[Noa Rodman]

A quote from "Apostles and Agitators: Italy's Marxist Revolutionary Tradition" [Richard Drake]:

In the wake of the debacle in the factories of Turin, the procommunist factions in the Socialist party resolved to create their own independent organization. Bordiga and Gramsci led the breakaway, which took place at the fabled Livorno congress, 15–20 January 1921. Those six days shook the world of Italian socialism, and the left would never be the same again. From the fiery polemics in the densely crowded Goldoni Theater the reformists on the right (Turati), the maximalists in the center (Serrati), and the communists on the left would emerge more divided than ever. These divisions played directly into the hands of Mussolini and became a crucial factor in the triumph of fascism. The congress debates took place in an atmosphere that Spriano describes as “turbulent” and “incandescent.”
The maximalist delegates, representing one hundred thousand party voters, vastly outnumbered the communists with fifty-eight thousand and the reformists with only fifteen thousand. From the beginning of the proceedings, the main issue concerned fidelity or resistance to the Third International.
...
In reply to Terracini, Bordiga, and Serrati, Turati gave a remarkably
prophetic speech that same day. When he rose to speak, the communist delegates shouted “Long live Russia!” Cited by name in Lenin’s Twenty-One Conditions as one of the notorious opportunists in the socialist movement, Turati embodied for the communists everything about reformist socialism of which they were most ashamed. Turati did not respond to the taunts of his communist antagonists. He addressed the assembly, “Comrade friends and comrade adversaries; I do not want to say, I must not say, enemies.” Aware that many of the delegates wanted him to be ousted from the party, Turati dryly observed that it had been his destiny always “to be a defendant before this or that tribunal.” He could not resist a Polonius-to-Laertes tone in his address. Idolatry took many forms, all of them bad, Turati explained. What men wrote and did required criticism, not worship, whether the words and deeds be those of “Turati, Serrati, or even Marx and Lenin.” The communists, utterly abandoned to their worship of Bolshevism, had failed to comprehend the need for a critical approach to politics and thought. They could be acutely perceptive in their critique of capitalism, but on the subject of Lenin they possessed no credibility at all.
Turati condemned Bolshevism as a dangerous idol. Echoing
Kautsky, who in The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1918) and Terrorism and Communism: A Contribution to the Natural History of Revolution (1919) had exposed the terror tactics of the Bolsheviks, Turati declared that the events in Russia since October 1917 made it clear that nothing could come from Leninism but “tyrannical despotism.” With their frightening calls for the eradication of heresy against Bolshevism, Italian communists had shown themselves to be the dangerous fanatics that their mentors in Moscow wanted them to be. A dictatorship of such individuals, all of them obsessed by “violence, the cult of violence, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the persecution of heresy,” just might fall short of the utopia that they believed in with such childlike simplicity and innocence. Turati begged the delegates not to adopt the morally bankrupt and politically unworkable Bolshevik model. If the Socialists were to heed the advice of the communist faction, they would exasperate “the resistance of the opposition and [provoke] reactions and counterrevolution.” The Fascists would be the ultimate beneficiaries of a communist victory at Livorno, he predicted.

Turati made another prediction that he felt absolutely certain would come to pass. Shouts of “Long live Russia” again resounded in his ears as he declared: “Someday . . . when the myth of Bolshevism is no more, when this Bolshevism will have suffered bankruptcy or been transformed by necessity into something else, our victory will come.” He hoped that Italy would not have to pay a frightful price in blood for the folly of the communists, who in wrecking party unity were handing victory to the enemies of the workers. Turning directly to the communists in the audience, Turati affirmed: “Continue with your ‘the worse things are the better things are’ methods of the anarchists. Believe and hope that from growing misery social vindication can be born; [but I say that] the only things born will be the white guards and fascism, misery, ignorance, and ruin. Long live socialism.”

The communist faction, led by Bordiga, serenaded the departing Turati with a lusty rendition of the “International,” and then they sang it again upon leaving the hall to make their way to the Teatro San
Marco, where the founding congress of the Communist party would be held on 21 January 1921. Hundreds of delegates, including a Soviet representative of the Third International, filled the theater. They sang
the “International” yet again, and the work of creating the Italian Communist party (Partito Comunista d’Italia) section of the Communist International proceeded to its conclusion. Bordiga, though not
yet named as secretary, emerged as the dominant figure in the deliberations that followed over the party’s statute. He was far more important than Gramsci at this initial stage of the party’s history.

...

At the fourth congress of the Third International, held in the Soviet Union just as the March on Rome was taking place, Bordiga characterized the Fascist takeover as a “ministerial crisis”
within the Liberal establishment and viewed the collapse of parliament
as a positive development in setting the stage for communist
revolution. He embodied the communists’ “the worse things are the
better things are” mentality that Turati had criticized at Livorno the
previous year.


There is also the following book about Turati:
http://www.spencerdiscala.com/html/dilemmas-of-italian-socialism.html

But of Turati's own speeches and texts there is less translated in English than of Bordiga. I don't find anything at the moment (just the brief "My Escape from Italy (http://www.unz.org/Pub/LivingAge-1927oct01-00642)"). (in English Rodolfo Mondolfo only has a few entries in the Encyclopaedia of the social sciences).

Turati's letters to Kautsky are online in the Kautsky Papers (http://search.socialhistory.org/Record/ARCH00712/Description). Turati was the editor of the Italian translation of the Erfurt program: Il programma socialista - principii fondamentali del socialismo / Carlo Kautsky ; traduzione italiana con correzioni ed aggiunte dell'autore. Milano - Critica sociale, 1908

[Noa Rodman]

Some other things online by Rodolfo Mondolfo:

8 articles on politics (1920s) in La Rivoluzione Liberale (http://www.erasmo.it/liberale/ricerca.asp)

Saggi per la storia della morale utilitaria (http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b2835593;page=root;view=image;size=100;s eq=143;num=139), volume 2 (on Helvetius) And here (http://www.jstor.org/stable/2176462)(c'tnd (http://www.jstor.org/stable/2176463)) is a review in English of volume 1 (on Hobbes).

Some essays in Rivista di filosofia:

Studii sui tipi rapresentativi; (http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?q1=mondolfo;id=njp.32101076474996;view=image;st art=1;size=100;page=root;seq=216;num=38)Ricerche sull'importanza dei movimenti nell'imaginazione, nelle funzioni del linguaggio, nelle pseudoallucinazioni e nella localizzazione delle imagini

Chiarimenti su la dialettica engelsiana (http://www.revleft.com/vb/babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?&num=700&u=1&seq=8&view=image&size=100&id=njp.32101076475050)

La filosofia in Belgio (http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?&num=25&u=1&seq=7&view=image&size=100&id=njp.32101076475043)

Il problema sociale contemporaneo (http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?&num=303&u=1&seq=331&view=image&size=100&id=njp.32101076475084&q1=mondolfo)

---

I found a journal called Revista Socialista. (http://www.revistasocialista.com.ar/node/2) "Entre sus colaboradores argentinos brillaron Nicolás Repetto, Alicia Moreau, Alfredo Palacios, Mario Bravo y Enrique Dickmann, entre los autores extranjeros participaron Karl Kautsky, Emilio Van der Velde, Indalecio Prieto y Emilio Frugoni." But no online archive :crying:

[Noa Rodman]

Filippo Turati, the milanese schism, and the reconquest of the italian socialist party, 1901-1909 / (10 p. article, 1979) by Spencer Di Scala: https://www.mediafire.com/?pd3uurxry0sf298