Before the second half of the nineteenth century, there was no Socialist movement in Italy, for the conditions that would enhance its development had yet to come into being. Socialist concerns for justice and equality were not lacking in the writings of reformers and patriots of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but they remained, with few exceptions, universal ideals largely untested in concrete, historical arenas of struggle. It was not until the Risorgimento had borne the fruits of Italian unity, providing the stimulus and the basis for the development of capitalism on a national scale, that the Socialist movement could find its channels of political development and ideological growth.

The Italian Socialist Party was formed at the time of the Second Congress of the Italian Workers’Party, held in Genoa in August 1892.The principal decisions taken included the definitive separation between Anarchists and Marxists, and the constitution of a party with a distinctly proletarian base and committed to Marxist principles. The programme voted in 1892 would remain the party’s official platform until 1919. It proclaimed as its end ‘the socialization of the means of work [. . .] and [the] collective control of production’ which could only be achieved by the ‘action of all the proletariat organized in a “class party”.