Italian Socialist Party (Maximalist)
이탈리아 사회당(최대주의)
The party of the autonomist maximalists who remained after Pietro Nenni's fusionist faction split from the exiled Italian Socialist Party on the eve of the Grenoble convention of March 1930. Led by Angelica Balabanoff as political secretary, it refused fusion with the reformist socialists while staying critical of Stalin's Soviet Union. It was dismantled after the Second World War.
In depth
After the fascist regime closed the headquarters of the anti-fascist parties in November 1926, the leadership of the Italian Socialist Party moved abroad. Within the exiled party conflict grew over fusion with the reformist socialists, and in February 1928 the direction elected Balabanoff as political secretary. On 16 March 1930 two separate meetings were held in Grenoble: the fusionists of Nenni and Ugo Coccia elected their own direction and merged with the reformists at a Paris congress that July, while Balabanoff's autonomist maximalists confirmed her as political secretary.
The two factions fought over the party's name and newspaper. When Nenni renamed his paper Avanti!, a court annulled the renaming and awarded the rights to the maximalists, who published Avanti! until 1 May 1940. The party held to the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat while condemning the despotism of the Soviet bureaucracy, and it belonged to the London Bureau, outside both the Second and Third Internationals. Palmiro Togliatti called it a 'Trotskyist-POUMist sect of provocateurs'.
When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936 the party backed the Republic, and about thirty of its members joined its Spanish counterpart, the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM). After Balabanoff left for the United States, Dino Mariani became the effective secretary. The party kept up its activity beyond 1940 but was dismantled after the Second World War, joining the Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity (PSIUP), while some members went to the Italian Communist Party.