Forever young
Pietro Tresso: Revolutionary, internationalist
* revolutionary history The Fourth International's 1997 European youth camp took place near the forest where, in 1943, four Trotskyists were assassinated by French resistance fighters, on orders from the Communist party. Livio Maitan presenteded one of the four, Pietro Tresso. "Why dedicate a meeting to someone most of you have never heard of, born 105 years ago? Because he and other comrades were killed not far from here, and because our memories of revolutionary internationalists like Pietro Tresso illuminate the most dramatic moments of this century.
Pietro Tresso was born in 1893, near Venice. When he was nine, he had to leave school and become an apprentice tailor. This early entry into the labour market stimulated a precocious social and political consciousness. At 14 he joined the Young Socialists. Just before the outbreak of World War I, he was arrested for anti-militarist activities, and assigned to a disciplinary battalion. Later, as an officer, he experienced 33 months of inhuman trench warfare.
Classified as an invalid after contracting tuberculosis, Tresso returned to civilian life. He rejoined the labour movement in that critical period between the October 1917 Russian revolution, and the split in the Italian Socialist Party in 1921, and the founding of the Communist Party. Tresso was one of the most active figures on the Socialist Party left, in the fraction led by Amadeo Bordiga. After the split, he had several key responsibilities. In 1922, two weeks before the fascists took power, he participated in the Italian delegation to the 4th Congress of the Communist International. Assigned to work in Moscow with the Red International of Labour Unions, he collaborated with Antonio Gramsci. In 1926 he was elected as an alternate member of the Central Committee of the Italian CP Party, when a Gramsci-inspired majority defeated a "Bordigist" minority.
With party leaders gradually arrested in the fascist repression, he was soon promoted to full member of the Central Committee, and then to the Political Bureau. He had responsibilities both in the (underground) Interior Organising Centre and in the Exterior Centre. based in exile.
The years 1929 and 1930 had deep, consequences for the Communist International. Its leadership bodies, now openly subordinate to the interests of the Stalinist group leading the USSR, imposed an analysis of the Social Democratic parties. Despite their failures, these parties nevertheless represented a majority of the labour movement, with which it was essential that the Communists 32 International Viewpoint #293 find unity in the face of the fascist threat.
A debate on this analysis, and its orientations developed in very sharp terms within the leadership of the Italian party. Four members of the Political Bureau, including the leader of the youth organisation, supported the positions adopted by the Communist International in July 1929. Tresso and two others disagreed. Thev argued that one could not predict any revolutionary crisis in Italy in the short term. It was therefore wrong to hedge everything on a impending conflict between the dominant classes and the proletariat.
Subsequent developments confirmed Tresso's analysis. But at the time, the three dissidents were the victims of vicious attacks, culminating in their expulsion in 1930.
Tresso quickly discovered the arguments of Leon Trotsky and the left opposition, with which there was substantial convergence with his own ideas. For Tresso, the arguments of the left opposition explained the regressive trajectory of the Soviet regime, and the contradictions of the Italian CP.
Now living in France, Tresso remained extremely active. In 1938, Tresso participated in the founding congress of the Fourth International, joining its Executive Committee.
Despite the extreme difficulty of political activity in the émigré milieu, he continued to be active in the General Council of Italy's Socialist Maximalist Party. In January 1935 he participated in a fascinating, threeevening debate in which the different tendencies of the Italian workers movement discussed whether organisational unity was possible. The participants included the best-known Socialist leader. Pietro Nenni. and Guiseppe Di Vittorio, future leader of the CGIL trade union confederation.
The war, the German occupation of France, and the Petain regime marked the third, final phase of Tresso's life and struggle. With the Gestapo at his heels, Tresso began underground work in France. Arrested in Marseilles on June 1, 1942, he was tortured, in the presence of his companion Barbara. On October 2, a Vichy tribunal condemned him to 10 years hard labour.
One year later, he was freed, along with other prisoners, from Puy-en-Velay prison, after a courageous attack by a Resistance group. But his liberators, members or sympathisers of the French CP, know who he was. Twenty days later, Tresso and three other revolutionary Marxist escapees disappeared,
Decades later, the first information has been released about the technical details of their execution by the partisans, although of course there was never any doubt about those responsible. The order came from individuals and leaders acting within the exterminist logic of Stalinism.
Fifty years later, we see that the most dramatic moments of Tresso's life coincide with the key moments of the first half of the century. In his youth, he saw the miserable conditions which were the lot not only of Italians, but of most of Europe's peasants. He suffered personally in the nameless catastrophe of World War I. He contracted a sickness that was the plague of his age, and from which very few people recovered. He lived underground under the fascist regime that imposed 20 years of repression and obscurantism on Italy. And he was swept away by the tempest of World War II, an even more murderous conflagration than the first world war. Pursued by the Gestapo, he was condemned by the puppet Vichy regime, and spent his last year in its prisons.
The final, tragic paradox, is his murder by those who had liberated him, or by their comrades. People from "the same side of the barricades," who, cynically or naively continued to consider themselves Communists
But Tresso's life was also marked by other, very different events. He lived life to the fullest. As a young man he built the Socialist Party. He threw himself into international solidarity with the Russian revolution. He was in the front line of the battle to create the Italian CP. He experienced the glorious moments of the 1936 strike wave in France, and the Spanish revolution. Throughout his life, he was comforted by the knowledge that he had been consistent and faithful in the struggle that had become his raison d'être.
"It is precisely because we have remained young that we find ourselves virtually outside the various 'churches,'" he wrote from prison in 1942. "The same moral aspiration that pushed us, in our youth, to join' a party, pushed us out of it as soon as these aspirations were contradicted by what they call "practical necessities.'
"If we had grown older, we would have listened to the voice of experience. We would have become 'wise.' We would have adapted, like so many others, to the street, the lie, the obsequious smiles of the various 'sons of the people.
"For us, this was impossible. Why? Because we stayed young. Young, and therefore dissatisfied with what is, and always aspiring to something better. In reality, those who have not remained young have become cynical. For them, people, humanity, are just instruments to serve their own particular needs. For us, people, are the only real, existent truths."
Tresso's words carry existential suggestions to all those who refuse to accept the world as it is, struggle to change it, and are not ready to sell their internationalist revolutionary commitment for a plate of beans.
I hope you understand why we wanted to pay homage to the memory of Pietro Tresso, and that you will do your best to never grow old, and to stay forever young!" *