International Communist Party

A left communist section, the Sinistra, emerged at the Italian Socialist Party’s (PSI) Congress of Milan in opposition to what they perceived as "reformism" in the leadership of the party and the trade unions. The Sinistra strongly opposed the Italo-Turkish War, in attempting to demonstrate their belief in Proletarian internationalism and organized itself nationally as the Left Communist Faction at the Reggio Emilia Congress of 1912. A similar conflict broke out in the Socialist Youth Federation against alleged "reformists" by Sinistra. The Sinistra asserted that both the communist party and Young Federation were "organs of struggle". Amadeo Bordiga was a large influence on the party ideologically.

At the time of World War I the Sinistra espoused revolutionary defeatism, a Leninist theory.

At the outbreak of the October Revolution, the Sinistra aligned itself with Lenin and his ideology of Leninism, the first sign of what they thought would be an international revolution. “Bolshevism, A Plant for Every Clime”, a piece written by party ideologist Bordiga, favorably spoke of the revolution.

1919 was seen as a "crucial year" by Left Communists due to the german and hungarian revolutions, which they viewed as being part of a trend of world revolution that the great october socialist revolution began. In Italy, a polemic began between the Sinistra and Antonio Gramsci over the role of soviets in italy. Sinistra then started a Abstentionist faction was founded in the PSI, due to Sinistra's left communist views in regards to participation in elections and trade unions.

At the Second Congress of the Third International, the Sinistra opposed the third international's structure, preferring an international party. as well as its requirement of democratic centralism.

After the arrest of Bordiga and many of the party’s leaders in early 1923, Sinistra was voted out by the party. Now led by Gramsci and Togliatti. The new majority within the party successfully opposed Sinistra and purged their remaining members.

With Bordiga under continuous police surveillance and isolated in Naples, the Sinistra voted out of the party, its members largely disappeared as a result of migration to the west and no stable organization keeping them together.

The International Communist Party holds that the doctrine of the party is founded on the principles of the historical materialism of the critical communism set out by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, Capital, and their other fundamental works and which formed the basis of the Communist International constituted in 1919 and of the Italian Communist Party founded at Leghorn in 1921 as a section of the Communist International and was a unitary and invariant body. The class party is accepted as the indispensable organ for the proletarian revolutionary struggle. It has always held that the party must historically get rid, once and for all, of the practice of alliances, even for transitory issues, with the middle class as well as with the pseudo-proletarian and reformist parties.

Holding that the Communist Party consists of the most advanced and resolute part of the proletariat, uniting the efforts of the working masses transforming their struggles for group interests and contingent issues into the general struggle for the revolutionary emancipation of the proletariat; the International Communist Party states that the duties of the party are propagating the revolutionary theory among the masses, organizing the material means of action, leading the working class all along its struggle, by securing the historical continuity and the international unity of the movement.

According to the International Communist Party, the party is not made up of all members of the proletariat or even of its majority. It is the organization of the minority which has, collectively, reached and mastered revolutionary tactics in theory and in practice; in other words, which sees clearly the general objectives of the historic movement of the proletariat in the whole world and for the whole of the historical course which separates the period of its formation from that of its final victory. The party is not formed on the basis of individual consciousness; the International Communist Party emphasizes that it is not possible for each worker to become conscious and still less to master the class doctrine in a cultural way, neither is this possible for each militant nor even for the leaders of the Party as individuals. To them, this consciousness lay in the organic unity of the Party. The Party is the organic tissue whose function inside the working class is to carry out its revolutionary task in all its aspects and in its successive phases.

Stressing the importance of the unity of the proletariat, the International Communist Party states that the party should never set up economic associations which exclude those workers who do not accept its principles and leadership. All forms of closed organizations that separate the working class are rejected. The ICP remains resolutely against the participation in the parliamentary elections, rejecting the idealist and utopian outlook which makes social transformation dependent on a circle of ”elected“ apostles and heroes.

The International Communist Party defines opportunism as a wave of degeneration of proletarian parties. In opposition to opportunism, it rejects the subordination of the party's action to that of political committees of fronts, coalitions or alliances even if this subordination was to restrict itself to public declarations and be compensated by internal instructions to militants or the party and by the subjective intentions of the leaders. It holds that in the West all alliances or proposals of alliances with social democratic or petit-bourgeois parties should be refused at all costs; in other words that there should be no united political front. According to the International Communist Party, what made the parties unable to foresee and face the opportunist danger was a fundamental deviation in principles: the party states that it was neither internal democracy nor free elections which give the Party its nature of being the most conscious fraction of the proletariat and its function of revolutionary guide. It is instead the matter of a deep discrepancy of conceptions about the deterministic organicity of the party as a historical body, living in the reality of the class struggle.

The principal activity today is accepted to be the re-establishment of the theory of Marxist communism by the International Communist Party. The party will bring forward no new theory, but reaffirm the full validity of the fundamental theses of revolutionary Marxism, amply confirmed by facts and falsified and betrayed by opportunism to cover up retreats and defeats. The International Communist Party denounces and defends combating the Stalinists as revisionists and opportunists just as it has always condemned all forms of bourgeois influence on the proletariat. Oral and written propaganda are seen as an important party action. The cult of the individual is rejected as a very dangerous aspect of opportunism which should be fought, while the Party retains complete autonomy from all other political groups, parties, formations and fronts.

It publishes El Comunista in Spanish and Catalan and The Internationalist Proletarian in English, as well as publications in Italian. It is active in Spain, Venezuela and Italy.

• Party Website

Following a major split in 1973, the reorganized International Communist Party, sometimes called Florence section, began publishing their magazine, Il Partito Comunista, soon thereafter. In 1979, it began publication of the theoretical review, Comunismo. Il Partito has sections in Italy, France, England, Spain, Germany and Venezuela, and publishes in several languages. The ICP's English periodicals are The Communist Left and The Communist Party.

• Party Website

Following an important split in 1973, this group continued publishing Il Programma Comunista. The organization underwent crippling splits in 1982. Beside Il Programma Comunista, it now publishes a journal in English (The Internationalist) and a journal in German (Kommunistisches Programm).

• Website

Il Comunista exists in Italy, Switzerland, Spain and France. It publishes newspapers in both Italian and French with other journals in Spanish and English.

• Website

Following a final crippling explosion in 1982, the reorganized Partito Comunista Internazionale began publishing their magazine, Sul Filo Rosso del Tempo. The party is (probably only) located in Italy.

• https://web.archive.org/web/20160304110534/http://www.sinistracomunistainternazionale.it/. Archived from original on March 4, 2016.

Il Bollettino is a group which existed only in Italy and published only in Italian. The organization was founded in 1982 and their magazine was regularly published for some years; it's unknown if this group is still active.

• Issues of Il Bollettino