Onorato Damen

Onorato Damen (4 December 1893 – 14 October 1979) was an Italian politician, communist revolutionary and internationalist.

He is remembered as one of the most notable representatives of left communism and proletarian internationalism in Europe. He began his political career in the Italian Socialist Party, and later joined the Communist Party of Italy following the split that led to its formation. After being expelled in 1929, he worked with the organized Italian left, becoming one of the leaders and founders of the Internationalist Communist Party (PCInt), formally founded in 1943.

The PCInt went on to become the numerically largest left communist organization in the post-World War II period, until in 1952 Amadeo Bordiga, who had come out of retirement, split the party to form the International Communist Party (ICP). A majority followed Damen, whose group maintained the original name, the original theoretical journal Prometeo, and the paper Battaglia Comunista. Damen remained politically active for the duration of his entire adult life, authoring works such as Bordiga Beyond the Myth and Gramsci: Between Marxism and Idealism.

Biography Onorato Damen was born on 4 December 1893 in Monte San Pietrangeli, in the Italian province of Fermo. In his youth, he joined the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), wherein he staunchly opposed the revisionist politics of such figures as Filippo Turati, Claudio Treves and Giuseppe Emanuele Modigliani. Just over twenty years old at the beginning of the First World War, he was conscripted to the Italian Army and sent to the front as a Sergeant. By the time hostilities ended, he had been demoted to the rank of Private, and was then subsequently condemned by a military tribunal to two years in a military prison for "endangering public institutions", due to his support of revolutionary defeatism, which he expressed by inciting desertion and denouncing the imperialistic character of the war. Released in 1919, he returned to his position in the PSI, collaborating on the socialist periodical of Fermo, La Lotta (The Struggle).

During the Biennio Rosso (1920–21), a period of heightened social and political tensions in Italy, Damen worked first in Bologna with the local Trade Union Council and then with the Casa del Popolo ("People's House") of Granarolo dell'Emilia as the secretary of the Community Legal Committee. 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 leading figure in the struggle against the Comintern-imposed party leadership.

During the session of the Chamber of Deputies held on 9 March 1925, Damen addressed the Fascist-majority parliament concerning the Communists' opposition to the Fascist vote to commemorate the death of Friedrich Ebert, President of the Weimar Republic from 1919 until his death in 1925. Two days later, Damen would present a scathing criticism of Fascism to the chamber, defining the Fascist movement as the "guard dog of property" and making a forensic and statistical refutation of the idea that the Fascist program benefited the working class by demonstrating that the cost of living had risen and real wages had declined ever since Fascists had taken power in Italy.

In November 1926, Damen was briefly confined on the island of Ustica, where he would be joined soon after by Gramsci and Bordiga. He would then be released, only to be arrested again in December of the same year and sent to the Murate complex in Florence after being implicated at the trial of a group of Florentine communists accused of plotting against the state. He was condemned by a special tribunal to twelve years of imprisonment; he would serve only seven, in the prisons of Saluzzo, Pallanza, Civitavecchia (where he led a prison revolt) and Pianosa, before being released under amnesty at the end of 1933 and sent to Milan, where he remained under surveillance for 5 years. After his release, the head of the prison in Pianosa communicated to the that the punishment he had suffered during his imprisonment had had "no moral effect" on him, describing him as an "unshakeable communist". Arrested again at the outbreak of the Second World War, he was confined for most of the conflict, before being released in 1943 by the Badoglio government.

In an era of global imperialism, the working class can no longer gain anything from supporting national liberation struggles and bourgeois revolutions. It is no longer possible to gain influence amongst the working class by gaining influence amongst trade unions, which have become too integrated into the capitalist state. The Party is not the working class in and of itself, but only a part of it, which should act in unison with its interests, struggles and historical objectives. The USSR is not a "neither-nor" society (neither fully capitalist nor fully communist), but in fact state capitalist. Marxism is not an "invariant" doctrine, and in certain aspects has evolved from the original 1848 views of Marx and Engels.

Throughout the 50s and 60s, the ICP, along with most other socialist and communist movements in Europe, began to decline due to the post-war economic boom. With the 1970s recession, however, it saw a resurgence, and in 1977 it organized the first of the International Conferences of the Communist Left. As a result of these conferences, which ended in 1980, the ICP and the Communist Workers' Organisation together formed the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP) around the basis of a common platform. The IBRP would go on to become the Internationalist Communist Tendency (ICT) in 2009, which is still active to this day.

Onorato Damen died on 14 October 1979, at the age of 85.

Works

The Russia we Love and Defend (1943) Bourgeois Violence and Proletarian Defence (1946) Centralised Party, Yes – Centralism over the Party, No! (1951) Five Letters and an Outline of the Disagreement (1952) Points of Disagreement with the 1952 “Platform” Drafted by Bordiga (1952) Crisis of Bordigism? Maybe, But Not a Crisis of the Italian Left (1953) Bologna 1919: A Page From History (1966) We Defend the Italian Left (1966) Amadeo Bordiga – Beyond the Myth and the Rhetoric (1970) The Irrational in the World of the Superstructure (1972) You Can’t Build the Party Playing with Paradoxes (1972) Axioms of Revolutionary Theory and Practice (1974) The “Absolutes” of Neo-Idealism (1975)