in prison when the Internationalist Communist Party was launched, but his alignment with it was well known. In 1945, Togliatti and the PCI, while advocating the freedom of real fascists, petitioned in the CLN to have the leaders of the Internationalist Communist Party condemned to death as saboteurs and with the calumnious label of agents of the Gestapo; they included Damen in their list of its leaders. Togliatti's Italian Communist Party had already assassinated two of their founding members and organizers, Fausto Atti and Mario Acquaviva. In the early 1950s, Bordiga began calling for a return to the positions of the Italian Communist Left as they were in the early 1920s when he was the leader of the Communist Party of Italy. To that end he founded the International Communist Party, which then launched their paper, Il Programma Comunista. The group around Battaglia Comunista (and their theoretical journal Prometeo) disagreed, instead defending the following positions: Rosa Luxemburg and not Lenin was right on the national question. The old Communist Parties (now fully stalinised) were not centrist but bourgeois. There was no hope of conquering the unions and that new strategies towards the daily class struggle would have to be evolved to connect the daily struggle of the class to the longer term struggle for communism. The USSR was neither a communist nor socialist society but state capitalist. There could be no substitution of the party for the class as a whole. In the 1970s, the Internationalist Communist Party around Prometeo and Battaglia Comunista organized the first of the International Conferences of the Communist Left. Out of these conferences. the Internationalist Communist Party and the Communist Workers Organisation together formed the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party around the basis of a common platform (the IBRP became the Internationalist Communist Tendency in 2009 and is still active to this day). Damen died in 1979. References External links The Onorato Damen Internet Archive (EN) The Thirtieth Anniversary of the Death of Onorato Damen (EN) Articles of Damen translated in English (EN) Articles in Battaglia Comunista (IT) Scritti scelti, 1943-78 (IT) Gramsci tra marxismo e idealismo (IT) Amadeo Bordiga - Validità e limiti d'una esperienza (IT) Istituto Onorato Damen Left communists Italian anti-capitalists Italian communists Bordigism 1893 births 1979 deaths People from the Province of Fermo Italian Aventinian secessionists