Antonio Gramsci, the leader of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) between 1924 and his arrest in 1926, vividly described Benito Mussolini as:
"the concentrated essence of the Italian petty bourgeois, that touches the ferocious sediment compounded of all the centuries of rubbish deposited on our soil by foreign domination and the rule of priests. He could not be the leader of the proletariat so he became a bourgeois dictator. The bourgeoisie likes ferocious faces when it needs to put the clock back, and hopes to see the working class trembling with the same terror it once felt itself at the sight of the rolling eyes and that perpetually raised menacing fist."
This is a rather more eloquent version of Leon Trotsky's dismissal of fascism as 'human dust'.
Mussolini came very much from that sort of petty bourgeois background, as was also the case with other fascist leaders, notably Adolf Hitler. Nevertheless there were very big political and cultural differences between Italian and German fascism.
Briefly on the cultural side, we should note that Filippo Tomaso Marinetti was a leading Italian artist, a member of the Futurist school - and a fascist. Futurism in Italy was a big cultural movement, just as it was in Russia. But in Russia the Futurists supported the Bolsheviks: in Italy they rallied behind Mussolini and fascism.
While Hitler's view on art was that, with the possible exception of Wagner, nothing of any interest had happened since the eighteenth century, Mussolini was much more interested in twentieth century cultural issues, and the avant-garde. A wonderful example of Italian architectural development under Mussolini is the Great Hall of Milan's
railway station. On this level there were big differences between Italian and German fascism.
A much more fundamental difference was in the political backgrounds of Hitler and Mussolini. In Gramsci's maiden (and, as it happens, final) speech in the Italian parliament in May 1925 he referred to Mussolini as "Somebody in the fascist movement who still guards a nebulous recollection of the teaching of his former masters at the time when he too was a revolutionary and a socialist."
Mussolini may have been a petty bourgeois in his origins, but he had also been a leading light in the Italian Socialist Party from 1911 to 1913/14. In 1911 the Italian army invaded Libya. The labour movement protested about this, although the leadership of the Socialist Party had an ambivalent attitude and failed to support those opposing the invasion. There was a huge faction fight inside the party, which resulted in Mussolini, as part of the victorious left wing of the party, becoming editor of its newspaper Avanti in December 1912.
Two years later, of course, Mussolini was to do an about-turn and argue for Italy to enter the first World War. He launched his own paper, Il Popolo D'Italia, with backing from sections of French capital, and was subsequently expelled from the Socialist Party. So his background as a revolutionary was very different from Hitler. That is why Mussolini referred to fascism as a revolutionary movement and the 'fascist revolution'.
So why did fascism develop in Italy in the period after the first World War?
The war had a disastrous impact on the Italian economy. The lira lost 80 percent of its value between 1914 and 1920. The budget deficit rose from 214 million lira in 1914/15 to 23 billion by 1918/19. Wheat production fell dramatically, and 40 percent of the balance of payments went on importing food.
There was a 40 percent drop in engineering production, 20 percent in chemicals, and a reduction in mining. Coal prices were sixteen times higher in 1920 than in 1913.
The main tax burden for paying for this fell disproportionately on the middle class. On the other hand the average rate of profit in industry went up from 4.6 percent to 7.75 percent during the war, with even more dramatic increases in heavy industry. In steel profitability rose from 6.3 percent to 16.55 percent: in car manufacturing it rocketed
from 8.2 percent to 30.5 percent. The production of iron and steel increased five-fold during the war. Fiat increased its capital ten-fold. So on the one hand there was a heavy impact on the petty bourgeoisie, on agriculture and on small firms, while huge profits rolled in for heavy industry, which provided an important social base on which Mussolini could organise.
The fall of the lira in 1919/20 fell hardest on those on fixed incomes such as pensioners, war veterans, small shareholders and other. The living standards of the urban middles class went down dramatically, in contrast to those of the working class who were very well organised in unions and political parties, and were by and large able to defend their living standards. But there were wholesale bankruptcies of small businesses and artisans.
At first the middle classes looked to the workers' movement and not towards Mussolini to solve their problems. But the leaders of the workers' movement were not interested. In Mussolini's words, "They did not know how to profit from a revolutionary situation such as history does not repeat."
There were enormous political errors committed by the workers' parties. The Socialist Party failed, by and large, to support the struggles of the peasantry, who were a big part of the population. Italy was overwhelmingly a rural society at this time, and there was an enormous division between the industrialised north and the essentially rural, peasant south. Even today this division has not been overcome. So the question of the peasantry was a decisive one for any revolutionary strategy in Italy.
However the Socialist Party (PSI) saw themselves as being more revolutionary than the Bolsheviks, because they opposed the division of land. They refused to support the sharing out of land between small peasants. Instead they told the peasants that when the PSI came to power they would take from the peasants the small bits of land they already had. Not surprisingly, the peasantry in may areas responded to this by turning to the peasant-based Partito Popolare, founded by a Sicilian priest Don Sturzo. This later became one of the components of the Christian Democratic Party. In other areas peasants turned towards Mussolini, partly because he recognised the potential of the issue, and struck a deal with some of his supporters among the big landowners to share out some of their land. It may only have been the poorest land, but Mussolini did actually manage to distribute some land to the peasants while the PSI denounced the very notion of redistribution as reactionary, called for the complete socialisation of the land, and failed to mount any serious fight against the big landowners.
Another layer which Mussolini was able to mobilise was the war veterans. In 1920 alone some 160,000 officers were retired from the army. But many ex-soldiers were unable to find jobs. Many were ex-students who were unable to return to their studies. Many more were completely disorientated in civilian life, and were prey to the nationalist ideology which had led them to enlist in the first place. Another important layer was the youth. While it is true that youth can be drawn towards revolutionary socialism, it is also true that in a crisis situation youth will gravitate towards what appears to be a decisive solution. Mussolini understood the issue of youth much better than the PSI or the trade union leaders. He recognised that Futurism was having a big impact not simply amongst middle class youth but that it, and other developments in the arts, had an important impact amongst working class youth as well. Italian working class youth clearly have very different cultural conceptions from their British counterparts. They have much more interest in what would be seen as esoteric issues in Britain. Mussolini developed an entire cult of youth. Some of Marinetti's writings take up these issues. Youth were seen as the vanguard; people over thirty were past it, and the future lay with the youth. This theme is very strong in Italian fascism. Finally, in terms of important layers of support, Mussolini turned to a layer of the Italian working class. There was a strong tradition of revolutionary syndicalism inside the labour movement, influenced by the French writer Georges Sorel. His writings were marked by an absolute contempt for democracy. Layers of the Italian syndicalist movement went over to Mussolini, whose programme seemed very much like the one the syndicalists themselves had advanced. In addition there were a number of newly proletarianised layers, peasants who had come to the cities, the unemployed, traditional scabs, the lumpen proletariat, and so on. All of these layers merged into the fascist movement.
To achieve this Mussolini had to carry out a programme which included many radical and anti-capitalist demands: but these demands were directed not against his big business backers, but against the banks and finance capital. The programme of the fascist movement included the suppression of military service (eventually junked); the call for a republic (also junked); and other elements challenging the monarchy and the Church.
But Mussolini was later to make his peace with big business, the King and the Church. As late as 1921 Gorgolini, one of the trade unionists who had come over to fascism, denounced "the magnates of big industry, who have starved Italy". He made frequent references to workers' control, which can also be found in the speeches and pro-
grammes of Mussolini, usually with impossible conditions attached to them.
The fascist party, despite drawing its main supporters from the middle classes, the youth and the dispossessed, drew most of its financial support from big business. Why did Italian bosses back Mussolini?
In the economic conditions, Italy was reliant upon imports of coal and iron ore. Industry could only survive through massive orders from the government, through state protection, through tariff protection and by subjugating all other branches of industry to the needs of big capital. This brought a continual conflict between different wings of the bourgeoisie from 1918 until Mussolini came to power in 1922. The massive profits which big business had become used to during the war were beginning to decline because of the conditions that had been imposed on Italy at the end of WW1. Italy was very much a junior partner in European imperialism, and had been enticed into the war with all sorts of promises about being given big chunks of what is now Slovenia and Croatia. All the promises were broken. Italy had been promised access to world markets by British and French imperialism: none of this was delivered. Italian heavy industry found itself facing an enormous crisis. Its share of the world market was declining quite dramatically: it had not just failed to gain new markets, but lost some it had previously.
In 1920 the main bosses' organisation, the Confindustria, was reorganised, as was the agricultural federation, bringing together the big landowners. As the bourgeoisie started to organise in defence of its interests, Mussolini offered his services to the Confindustria. In May of the same year, Gramsci prophetically warned that fascism threatened to "smash the working class and its instruments of political struggle, the PSI, and to incorporate its institutions of economic resistance, unions and cooperatives, into the machinery of the bourgeois state." He also warned that fascism would inevitably lead to war. In December 1920, to ingratiate himself still further with big business, Mussolini ran a campaign in Il Popolo D'Italia promoting 'a foreign policy of expansion'
The Italian state collaborated with Mussolini's fascist bands. The police encouraged criminals to enrol with the Fasci, and they encouraged attacks on the labour movement and buildings, which were already beginning to take place in 1919/20 - such as the attack on the Milan office of Avanti in 1919. The courts handed down minimal sentences to fascists, and maximum jail terms to anti-fascists. In 1921 the Minister of Justice asked the courts to forget about cases involving fascists. Marshal Badoglio of the Italian army instructed demobilised
officers to be sent to join the Fasci. Guns were supplied to Mussolini by the military and the police.
The police and army also collaborated with the Fasci in strikebreaking. Army General Gandolfi trained squadrons of Fasci into effective units. Other Fasci were organised by army officers.
What was the response of the Italian labour movement?
In Turin in August 1917 there was a spontaneous uprising provoked by the lack of bread. Thousands of workers took to the streets and set up barricades. There was no organisation of the movement; insofar as any organisation existed it came from the anarchists. Both wings of the PSI were completely impotent.
For four days the workers of Turin held out in the face of machine guns and tanks. Fifty workers were killed and over a thousand imprisoned or sent to fight on the front.
After the war ended, the militancy continued. In 1919 there were 1663 strikes involving over a million workers. 18 million working days were lost - and that was only in industry. In 1920 the figures went up to 1881 strikes involving 1.26 million workers, with over 16 million days lost.
In agriculture there were 208 strikes in 1919, involving half a million workers and costing almost 3.5 million days lost. By 1920 there were slightly fewer strikes (189), but these involved over a million workers and cost over 14 million days lost. These struggles won for peasants and landless labourers the right to remain on the land they had occupied for four years - as long as they formed it into cooperatives (the Visocci Decree of September 1919).
The factory struggles from 1919, especially in Turin, brought the development of factory committees which began challenging the right of the bourgeoisie to run the factories. There were mass occupations, taking over control from the bosses. Agnelli, the head of Fiat, even offered to give up his factories to his employees because he felt the game Septep be 1920. ful as a sta id-oh, was oc opaupied factories in. rounded by 50,000 troops.
The stark political choice facing the working class was summed up by Ludovico D'Aragona, the 'right wing' secretary of the Italian Confederation of Labour:
"The Socialist Party directorate thinks the time is right for revolutionary action, for the conquest of political power. For the installation of the communist society and for the dictatorship of the proletariat. We
do not believe that the time is ripe. We cannot accede to your ideas, we can not accept your evaluation of the situation. You think that this is a time to begin a revolutionary action. Well then you assume the responsibility. ... We retire and submit our resignations. We feel that at this time the sacrifice of ourselves is necessary. You take the leadership of the entire movement, since you will thus be more sure of finding the CGL action completely in accord with your thinking and the assurance that the organisation that should lead the proletariat has the same conceptions and same objectives as you do. We will not assume the responsibility of carrying the entire proletariat to the piazza to have them massacred."
Therein lay the dilemma. The Socialist Party said that they agreed, and that the 1907 conference of the Second International in Stuttgart had said that unions are responsible for strikes while the PSI was responsible for politics. They allowed D'Aragona to carry on - only later to denounce him for selling out in a revolutionary situation! However the PSI leaders made no attempt to translate the revolutionary situation which certainly existed in the minds of the labour movement and in the minds of the bourgeoisie into a revolutionary insurrection. Even Palmiro Togliatti, later to become an extremely right wing leader of the Italian Communist Party, but at that time working closely with Gramsci on Ordine Nuovo in Turin, also refused to call for an insurrection on the grounds that the workers would be isolated, surrounded by 50,000 troops.
The occupations were ended by the intervention of Prime Minister Giolitti, who forced the employers to agree measures for workers' control, and also began investigating their enormous war profits. This 1920 victory of the workers would in any other situation have been absolutely enormous: but in this particular situation it was a disaster. An opportunity had been lost; and while the labour movement was organising, so was capital.
It was a revolutionary situation, and things began to move very rapidly. In 1919, Mussolini received 5,000 out of 350,000 votes in the general election in Milan. Three years later he was head of the government. The Fasci Di Combatimento, the fighting forces of fascism, were first organised in March 1919. This was followed quite soon by the formation of the fascist party.
In the 1921 elections, running as part of Giolitti's National Bloc, Mussolini won 35 seats in parliament. He used this to begin to organise on a much wider scale. The socialist vote fell in the elections, though by this time there had been a split in the PSI, leading to the formation of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). If the PCI votes are included,
then the left votes did not fall substantially, though they did lose seats. But there was also a rise in votes for the Partito Popolare. At the end of 1919 there were just 35 branches of the Fascist Party. By 1921 there were 800 branches, with over 100,000 members. By November that year they had 320,000 members. Between January and May 1921 there was a massive upsurge in fascist terror. Over 200 people were killed, more than 1100 wounded. In 1921/22 over 600 were killed. Ravenna was completely looted by Fascist forces in 1922. The bourgeoisie was turning to fascism not as a desperate last chance to head off a proletarian revolution, but to take revenge for the setbacks it had suffered and the failure of the PSI to exploit the possibilities of September 1920. They decided they could not run the risk of further possible insurrections, and more serious economic crisis. In 1921 two of the biggest trusts went bust, along with their bankers, the Banca Di Sconto. The whole of Italian capitalism was on the verge of a new crisis. They did not want to risk the possibility that the workers might rise again with a new and more determined leadership. The decision was made that the organisations of the working class had to be destroyed. The clock had to be turned back. By 1922 the whole Italian bourgeoisie had turned to Mussolini to crush the labour movement. A meeting in October 1922 between the head of the Banca Commerciale and the Confindustria agreed to finance Mussolini's March on Rome. The Confindustria and the Agricultural Employers called for a Mussolini government.
How did the PCI and PSI respond? Avanti, the PSI paper, described the 1921 results, in which Mussolini gained 35 seats, in ludicrous terms:
"The Italian proletariat has buried the fascist reaction under an avalanche of red posters."
In the spring of 1921 sections of the labour movement, worried by the rise of fascism, formed self-defence organisations to defend the labour movement and its buildings from attack. Amadeo Bordiga, by then leader of the PCI, banned PCI members from participating in these self-defence organisations. The PSI, equally, banned its members from participating. The result was that there was essentially no military defence of the labour movement from the fascist bands. In August 1922 a general strike was called against the rising fascist threat. It was called by the Alliance of Labour, which comprised the PSI's trade union wing (the CGL), and various syndicalist organisations. The strike lasted all of 24 hours. The workers came out on strike,
but were driven back by the army and the fascist bands because they had no faith in the PSI or the PCI to struggle for power. The Italian working class had grown tired of the revolutionary rhetoric that had come from the leaders of the PSI and from the PCI without ever being turned into action. The revolution was always about to take place, but was always held back.
The PCI did not understand the nature of fascism. For Bordiga, fascism was no more than a change of administration. As he put it as late as 1924:
"Fascism has introduced no novel elements into traditional bourgeois politics or ideology."
Umberto Terracini, by no means one of the worst of the PCI leaders, described the March on Rome as 'a rather acute ministerial crisis'. Even on October 28, the day before Mussolini took power, the PCI was arguing that 'the March on Rome will never take place. They completely failed to understand the nature of fascism. But the essential weakness of the PCI was its ultra-leftism and its sectarianism to the other organisations of the labour movement. They refused to make any common cause with the PSI, despite the fact that the PSI had suffered another split which had completely isolated the most right wing elements, while the bulk of the party was seeking to affiliate to the Communist International.
On the contrary, the PCI, sadly prefiguring similar sectarian errors in Germany, insisted that:
"The grim tyrant against which all living forces of the people must rise up has only one face but three names. He is called Turati (PSI), Don Sturzo (Partito Popolare) and Mussolini at the same time." Of course there is a grain of truth in this. Bourgeois rule is propped Party raplao ones rigo, farous and cose vinine elem is like democracy. But having said that, the key question must be asked and answered: what tactic do you apply in order to win over the mass of workers who still support social democracy? The positions adopted by the PCI, with disastrous consequences, were to refuse any united struggle -despite the instructions of the Communist International that they should carry out united actions with the PSI.
Eleven years later, these same crazy, ultra-left and sectarian policies, implemented this time at the behest of the Comintern by the much bigger German Communist Party, were also to pave the way to the defeat of the most powerful working class in Europe, as Hitler rode to power.