Onorato Damen (4 December 1893 – 14 October 1979), was an Italian left communist revolutionary who was first active in the Italian Socialist Party and then the Communist Party of Italy. After being expelled, he worked with the organized Italian left, became one of the leaders of the Internationalist Communist Party, commonly known by their paper Battaglia Comunista. The Internationalist Communist Party, formally founded in 1943, was numerically the largest left communist organization in the post-World War II period. In 1952, Amadeo Bordiga, who had by then fully come out of retirement, split the party to found the International Communist Party, known by its paper Programma Comunista. A majority followed Damen, whose group maintained the original name Internationalist Communist Party, the original theoretical journal Prometeo, as well as the paper Battaglia Communista. Onorato Damen was politically active his entire adult life. He was the author of books Bordiga Beyond the Myth and Gramsci: Between Marxism and Idealism. Biography Damen was born in Monte San Pietrangeli (Fermo). In his youth, he joined the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), within which he opposed the politics of Turati, Treves and Modigliani. A little more than twenty years old at the start of the First World War, he was drafted as a Sergeant. At the end of the hostilities he was demoted to the rank of private and subsequently condemned to two years of military prison by a military tribunal for "endangering public institutions"; this was essentially for his support of revolutionary defeatism, motivated by "incitement to desertion" and for denouncing the "imperialistic character of the war". Set free in 1919, he returned to his position in the party collaborating on the socialist periodical of Fermo La Lotta (The Struggle). In the two biennio rosso of 1920–21, the richest period of political and social tensions, Damen worked first in Bologna with the local Trade Union Council and then with the Casa del Popolo ("House of the People") of Granarolo as the secretary of the Community Legal Committee. During this period, Damen supported Amadeo Bordiga, and thus joined the Communist Party of Italy. In the months immediately preceding the split of Livorno he worked as secretary of the Trade Union Council in Pistoia and as the chief editor of the periodical L'avvenire. He remained in Pistoia up to his arrest in the months of the electoral campaign of 1921 for the action from Poggio a Caiano.