Ercoli

....As regards the official leaders of the Italian party, I had an opportunity to observe them only in the ECCI in the person of Ercoli. A man with a rather flexible mind and a loosly hinged tongue, Ercoli is in the best possible way adapted to deliver the prosecutor's or defense attorney's speeches on a given theme, and in general to carry out instructions.

The barren casuistry of his speeches is always directed in the last analysis to the defense of opportunism, representing the diametric opposite to the living, muscular, and full-blooded revolutionary thought of Amadeo Bordiga. Wasn't it Ercoli, by the way, who tried to adapt to Italy the idea of the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry" in the form of a slogan for an Italian Republican Assembly, resting on "workers' and peasants' committees"?

On the questions of the USSR, the Chinese revolution, the general strike in England, the overturn in Poland, or the struggle against Italian fascism, Ercoli, like the other leaders of the bureaucratic formation, invariably held an opportunist position, in order later, when the occasion offered, to correct it by means of ultraleft adventures. At present, apparently, the season has again come for the latter.

Having on the one flank centrists of the Ercoli type and on the other ultraleft confusionists, you comrades are thus called upon to defend, under the harshest conditions of fascist dictatorship, the historical interests of the Italian and international proletariat. I wish you success with all my heart.

LETTER TO THE ITALIAN LEFT COMMUNISTS

Followers of Comrade Amadeo Bordiga September 25, 1929

Writings of Leon Trotsky 1929

by Leon Trotsky