Togliatti analyzes Italian fascism’s character writing after Mussolini dropped all pretense of democracy and developed a fully-fledged dictatorship buttressed by extreme violence.

‘The Social Basis of Fascism in Italy’ by Ercoli (Palmiro Togliatti) from Communist International. Vol. 3 No. 21. June, 1926.

I WOULD like to make one preliminary observation. It has become a fashion to employ the term “Fascism” in quite a general manner and sometimes to use it for very varied forms of bourgeois reactionary movements.

This may be useful for agitational objects, but there is no doubt whatsoever that it is harmful for the clear and precise understanding of facts. Amongst the movements which have been labelled “Fascist” in various countries it is undoubtedly possible to find certain points of similarity, and in order to depict the present world situation it is useful to try to throw light on these points of similarity. But in my opinion an analysis directed at discovering in each of these movements the particular factor distinguishing it from all the others is much more important. In any case such analysis should certainly precede all generalisations. For example, errors have been made in the tactics of our Party through our having attributed to the term “Fascism” a too general and too abstract meaning, and through our not having made an effort at political and social analysis to determine what really is, in a given country and in a given situation, the movement to which this name is to be attributed.

Fascism is an extra-parliamentary form of bourgeois reaction. Fascism is a form of defence of the capitalist order against the menace of the proletarian revolution. On these points there is no difference of opinion. But what form of defence, what kind of reaction? Here one cannot argue schematically and be content with generalities. It is necessary to make a careful analysis of the facts, without pretending that the way they are presented in the given country should serve as an absolute model for all times and all places, but with the sole intention of establishing certain fundamental points and above all of showing that a similar investigation should be conducted for every country if we want to arrive at any valuable results in general.

1.

It is impossible to define Italian Fascism from the social standpoint by referring to one single class. For instance the affirmation with which many are satisfied, that Fascism is a movement of the petty bourgeoisie, is quite inadequate. The petty bourgeoisie is not a homogeneous class. It is composed of strata widely differing from one another but with one thing in common, the fact that they occupy an intermediary position between the industrial bourgeoisie and big landowners on the one hand and the proletariat on the other. Certain consequences arise from this common feature which are at the same time common to all petty bourgeois strata, and the tendency of the petty bourgeoisie to vacillate between the two fundamental classes into which capitalist society is divided is essentially connected with this fact. The origin of the Fascist movement in Italy, its development up to the conquest of power, and the subsequent consolidation of the Fascist regime cannot be examined and understood except in relation to this vacillation.

An examination of Fascism from the outside brings one face to face with contradictions which seem very difficult to explain. In the programme approved by the first Fascist Congress, for example, one can find statements and demands that are definitely anti-capitalist. There was talk in this programme of a tax on capital aimed at expropriating large-scale property. Subsequently, in 1920, Fascism made a gesture of sympathy towards the movement for the occupation of the factories by the workers. To-day, on the contrary, the Fascist regime is a regime that assures the dictatorship of big finance capital over the whole of Italian society. These manifest contradictions cannot be reconciled except as phases in a developing process which is determined on the one hand by a series of vacillations of the petty bourgeois strata, and on the other hand by a manoeuvre of the big bourgeoisie and the large landowners to profit by these vacillations in order to conduct an irreconcilable struggle against the Labour movement.

The essential thing, therefore, in order to understand how Fascism came into power in Italy and became consolidated, is to understand these vacillations and these manoeuvres.

2.

In chronological order, but not in order of importance, the first element that must be taken into consideration is the ex-soldiers’ movement which came into being immediately after the war, with the petty bourgeois outlook common to the various discharged soldiers’ associations formed at that time. This ex-servicemen’s movement developed chiefly in the towns and was the rallying point of an urban petty bourgeoisie, which was a new class partly formed during the economic development preceding the war, but mainly dating from the years of the war and immediately after it.

The most prominent factor in this new intermediary class consisted of the younger men, who had acquired during the war the conviction that they had the right to occupy a higher position than hitherto in society and civil life. The old ruling classes had to resort to these elements when the masses were mobilised in the army; mobilisation provoked a profound change in the traditional structure of the Italian army. Before the war the higher ranks of the army had been constituted from a very narrow circle of officials, representing the old agrarian and semi-feudal rural classes but devoid of any prestige as leaders. The subaltern ranks were completely bureaucratised, and were also unable to impose discipline upon the masses of backward peasants who had to be mobilised for the war.

The whole army had to be reorganised in the middle of the war by the elimination of a large section of the upper ranks and the formation of an intermediary stratum of new subalterns. The first contact between the new urban petty bourgeoisie and the peasants was made in this manner. It was a contact between those who were in command and those who had to obey blindly. This fact played no small role in the subsequent development of Fascism.

When the war ended what was the desire of these people, who had now acquired the habit of commanding? Nothing less than to continue to command. On the basis of this very simple programme it was easy to rally large numbers of discharged officers and non-commissioned officers, discontented people unsuited for productive labour but convinced that they had special rights from the fact that they “had done their bit during the war.”

The difficulty which all these people encountered in fitting themselves in the framework of the old traditional ruling classes made the problem more acute. The new urban petty bourgeoisie became an element of great social disharmony because it was the rallying centre of elements that are perturbed, desperate, greedy for power and pleasure, devoid of any political and moral training, a prey to all the passions which are let loose during a great social upheaval. It is quite easy to understand how a White Guard can be recruited amongst such elements. But equally comprehensible is the fact that for a certain period of time this intermediary class follows, if not with sympathy, at least with curiosity and at times benevolent expectation, the development of the proletarian offensive against bourgeois society.

In reality a marked “anti-capitalist” spirit was fairly widespread in its ranks. It was quite a peculiar form of anti-capitalism, but evident traces of it are to be found in the whole policy of urban Fascism in the early days and even in the actions and slogans of Mussolini.

The new petty bourgeoisie is anti-capitalist in the sense that it desires to combat certain forms of capitalism that it considers parasitical. But at the same time it exalts the capitalist economic system, i.e., the regime of “economic freedom,” of private initiative and competition, because it maintains that this regime leads to a maximum development of individual energy, of the spirit of initiative and individuality.

The idea that this petty bourgeoisie has of capitalism is essentially a romantic one. The ideal of the petty bourgeois is to be a “captain of industry,” a creator of wealth by personal effort, and, in the field of the technique and organisation of production, a conqueror of new worlds for humanity. It is evident that there is at least an anachronism here! There is no longer any room for economic romanticism in the period of imperialism. Finance capital has killed the “captain of industry.” The figure of the entrepreneur who contributes to the success of the economic enterprises by his spirit of individual initiative, and by his technical and organisational capacity, gives way before the anonymous investor of capital and the stock exchanger manipulator. It is interesting to observe how this return to a mentality peculiar to “nascent capitalism” becomes manifest in the urban petty bourgeoisie just at the time when capitalism, in order to overcome the post-war crisis, has to resort in Italy as everywhere to the maximum concentration of its forces, and when finance capital is establishing its sovereignty.

While the development of Fascism proceeded along the lines of its original programme and of the mentality of its first town nuclei, a conflict between Fascism and the economic groups fighting to concentrate in their hands control of the whole industry of the country was inevitable. It was necessary for the new urban petty bourgeoisie to incline definitely towards the ruling classes—big industry, finance and landed property—so that Fascism could find its way. Another factor intervened to provoke this tendency—the reaction of the agrarian classes against the trade union movement of the agricultural labourers, led by the Socialist organisations.

3.

The reaction of the big agrarian proprietors against the agricultural workers’ movement had a decisive significance in determining the development of Fascism. This was the factor which first and foremost contributed to make Fascism become a movement of armed direct action against the organisations and gains of the workers.

It should be mentioned, however, that the reaction of the agrarians was to a large extent evoked by the very methods with which the struggle against the landowners, above all in the valley of the river Po, was led by the class organisations of the agricultural workers. These organisations pursued rather peculiar tactics. Their leaders operated on the Right Wing of the Labour movement and of the Socialist Party. They sharply rejected any revolutionary programme, or revolutionary tactics whatsoever. They were in favour of gradualness. Many of them were even in favour of collaborating in a bourgeois parliamentary government. But they led the activity of the agricultural masses in such a way that practically speaking it amounted to the employment of violence against the possessing classes. It was not a question of revolutionary violence that could be considered as a point of departure for the struggle for power, but simply of “trade union” violence. The economic demands of the agricultural proletariat were conceived in a Maximalist spirit. It was therefore a question of demands which in practice amounted to seriously jeopardising not only the integrity of the landowners’ profits, but the very right to own property, on which ever stricter limits were being placed. The owners were deprived of their freedom to choose the labour power they would employ. Some owners had the amount of labour that they had to engage imposed on them; they were compelled to use a certain number of machines, and use only machines owned by definite organisations of farm labourers, and so forth. All this was enforced under penalty of various “taxes,” boycotts, etc. These sanctions were fixed by the actual agreements that the proprietors had to sign under pressure of violent and stormy strikes.

Finally, a perfect organisation, which started with the farm labourers and in some places extended to the intermediate categories of semi-farmers and tenant farmers, gave the organisation the appearance and force of a new power in formation; the State and the proprietors were in no way disposed to support this power which was endeavouring to legalise by contracts the incursions it had made into the sphere of private property.

It is obvious that such a situation could not last for long. A modification or even a considerable limitation of property relations could not be obtained in this manner. Not “contract and trade union violence,” but the violence of the revolution and the force of the workers’ State are necessary to make such changes possible and guarantee them. Because the leaders of the agrarian trade union movement did not want to hear any talk of revolution or of the struggle for the conquest of power, the situation was bound to go to the other extreme, i.e., sharp, violent, non-legal reaction of the landowners for the defence of their property rights. This is how the first centres of an anti-proletarian terroristic organisation sprung up in some agrarian districts of the Po valley, where the agricultural labourers’ organisations were most highly developed and where the inherent contradictions in their leaders’ methods were therefore also developed to the maximum degree. The first Fascist legions were formed, the first punitive expeditions were sent out. On the initiative of the landowners’ organisations of Emilia a centre of armed reaction was created which subsequently was to spread throughout the whole of Italy.

But the offensive of the landowners also enjoyed special conditions which favoured the development of local organisations of combat, side by side with the large-scale Fascist legions organised by the landowners’ associations. After the war there was a phenomenon in many rural centres analogous to that which was to be seen in the towns, i.e., the formation of a new petty bourgeoisie. The rise in prices of agricultural products permitted an accumulation of savings in the hands of the intermediate categories of “colonists,” tenant and semi-farmers, etc.

In this manner a tumultuous movement for the acquisition of land was created, an aspiration which came up against the policy conducted in the countryside by the class organisations of the landworkers led by the Socialists. Instead of conducting a policy of alliance with this new agrarian middle class in formation, making its land hunger a weapon in the struggle against the big proprietors, the Socialist leaders of the landworkers’ unions strongly opposed the idea of creating a new class of petty proprietors.

“The land should be socialised, and not divided up,” said these people. “To fight against the big proprietors you should not endeavour to become proprietors on your own, but should become assimilated to the proletariat and have demands and a basic programme of Socialisation in common with the workers.”

In the districts where the Socialist organisations were not strong, the transfer of land took place all the same; many holdings were sold, thus forming a new strata of rural petty bourgeoisie.

Where the Socialist organisations were strong and dominant great discontent was created, which was destined to explode at the first opportunity and made the rural petty bourgeoisie an ally of the agrarians in the struggle against the proletariat. Fascism—as the reformists themselves now acknowledge—in these places represented a real outburst of the oppressed middle classes.

4.

However, the collaboration of the various elements indicated in a reactionary offensive against the Labour movement was not obtained easily. The Fascist movement had to pass through various crises before assuming a definite physiognomy. In 1921 for instance, a lively and widespread discussion developed within the Fascist movement which took the form of a rebellion of the urban middle classes against the “specifically reactionary form that the movement was beginning to assume under pressure of the agrarian Fascist aggression. During this discussion one could even read articles by Fascist leaders in which it was maintained that Fascism, in forming itself into a party, should become “a middle party at an equal distance from the Socialists and Populists and from the plutocracy and big capitalists.” A split between the urban and the rural elements seemed imminent several times, and the ability of the Fascist chief, Mussolini, was shown in his manoeuvring to prevent the split, making concessions first to one side and then to the other, agitating with demagogic slogans (such as that of the struggle against the monarchy) in order to appease the urban nuclei, but never declaring himself against the rural armed-force: movement which aimed simply at subjecting the agricultural masses to a regime of White Terror in order to restore unlimited rights of ownership. As a result of this policy this second element was in reality of predominant importance in determining the development of the entire Fascist movement.

This state of affairs was also helped by the pressure brought to bear on the urban nuclei by a section of industrial capitalists who urged them to extend to the towns, against the workers, the same terroristic tactics that had been employed so successfully in the countryside.

There was an immediate reflection of these social contradictions in the years 1919 and 1920 in the very manner in which the Fascist movement was organised. In the countryside the armed-force policy held sway uncontested. The leaders of the terrorist detachments were at the same time leaders of the local Fascio. There did not exist, side by side with the fighting detachments, any Fascist assemblies in which the masses could participate to discuss problems and elect their leaders. The whole organisation was formed on a strictly military basis. The mass elements which adhered to the movement, either voluntarily or under constraint were enrolled like soldiers and submitted to discipline but had no influence in the choice of leaders or the director of the movement. The leaders and the leadership were established in reality by the headquarters of the reactionary proprietors’ organisations.

In the towns, however, the matter was more complicated. A military nucleus existed around which were rallied the elements which had decided on an armed struggle against the workers. These elements constituted the “Desperate” detachments. But side by side with these detachments there were also the associate members’ assemblies in which the petty bourgeoisie often prevailed over the representatives of the openly reactionary classes. Sometimes conflicts arose, but these were nearly always settled by the victory of the “Desperates.” The amalgamation of the agrarian terrorist elements and the “Desperate” detachments of the towns was then completed and became the decisive political factor.

Another symptom of the complexity of the situation in this early period of the history of Fascism is seen in the fact that when Fascism had scarcely developed, a group of deputies was nevertheless formed in parliament, representing the interest of the big landowners. This meant that the old rural ruling classes, while making use of the new weapon of terrorist pressure, did not lose their autonomy, but kept their freedom in political manoeuvring.

How Fascism, starting from such a heterogeneous and complicated social basis, arrived at the conquest and consolidation of power, cannot be understood except in relation to another element of the situation, i.e., the forms assumed in the years 1919 and 1922 by the crisis in the Italian State.

5.

The crisis that the Italian State went through from 1919 to 1922 was probably much more profound than the crises undergone by any other European State. It was a crisis which, arising from an economic system ruined by the war and incapable of satisfying the needs of the population, shook the whole political superstructure until its collapse was inevitable and imminent. I think it will suffice to indicate two main factors:

1. Commencement of the realisation of an effective alliance between the working class and the peasantry.

2. The bankruptcy of the old ruling classes.

In a country like Italy, where the majority of the toiling population consists of agricultural workers and peasants, it is evident that an alliance could not be realised between the workers and peasants without an immediate revolutionary situation arising. And vice versa, every time that one of the two classes begins to move and openly takes the field against the State, the other will also be set in motion, and the ruling classes will immediately have to try to prevent the ties between the workers and peasants acquiring a permanent, stable “and secure nature. One might say that the whole history of the Italian Labour movement has proved the truth of this assertion. The moulding of the class consciousness of the industrial proletariat and of a will to rebel against the State amongst the poor and middle peasants, proceed along two parallel lines. All radical progress of the workers is followed or accompanied by a move to the Left on the part of the peasants. And this happens to a certain degree even without the unification of the two movements under the leadership of an organised and conscious revolutionary vanguard.

Before the war, for example, the first stirring of the tide of the Labour movement, which swept over Northern Italy in the last decade of the XIX century, was contemporary with the insurrection of the Sicilian peasants against the State. After the war, with the masses of the peasantry awakened to political life by the war itself, the unification began to assume general forms. Corresponding with the wave of unemployment that swept over the industrial districts, there was a mass movement in the countryside for the occupation of the land by the poor peasants. It is true that the peasants who participated in this movement were not clearly conscious of the aims they wanted to arrive at. They saw the land and the proprietors, but did not perceive the State that defended these. They invaded the land, carrying portraits of the king, the national banner, and crucifixes at the head of their processions. But it is no less true that objectively this was a revolutionary factor of first importance, against which the ruling classes had to concentrate their forces if they were to preserve power.

What was the policy of the Italian ruling classes in the past? It was a policy of compromise and conciliation conducted with the object of maintaining the domination of a reactionary oligarchy. First of all compromise was arrived at between the industrialists and the agrarians. In other countries these two groups, in the early periods of capitalist development, have carried on serious conflicts amongst themselves, and the proletariat has profited by this struggle to win political liberty. In our country this struggle was nonexistent, and therefore the winning of political liberty was also mainly an illusion.

In exchange for the support given to the industrialists, the agrarians obtained the right to submit the peasants to a regime of semi-feudal exploitation and oppression, which attained humiliating and incredible forms of ferocity. Not long before the war, in certain districts of Venetia, the poor peasants were compelled to conduct grape-picking with a muzzle on, so that they could not eat the signor’s harvest. The peasant attempts at revolt were systematically suppressed by the armed force of the police.

A complete tactic of compromise, negotiation and corruption was also adopted by the ruling classes in respect of the Labour movement. They tried to make it deviate from the line of the class struggle by satisfying the sectional aspirations of certain more advanced categories from the reformist petty bourgeoisie who had taken the lead in the Labour movement. This tactic was considered by the petty bourgeoisie to be a “Left” tactic. But in reality it was nothing more than a rather clever tactic of class preservation. On the one hand it hindered the linking up of the Labour movement with a peasant insurrection, while on the other it tended gradually to lead the Labour movement towards becoming incorporated in the framework of the bourgeois State.

But after the war when new millions of workers entered the arena these tactics, which had been useful when manoeuvring with small groups, were also destined to fail.

The failure of these tactics led to the disintegration of the ruling classes, who found it quite impossible to hold up the development of the two great mass parties, the Socialist Party (workers, agricultural labourers, urban petty-bourgeoisie) and the Popular Party (artisans, middle peasants, rural bourgeoisie) which in the post-war period found conditions favouring a rapid development. The collaboration of the Popular Party in the Government only accentuated the problem of satisfying the masses of peasants, whose class appetites and interests had been awakened but not assuaged. The attempt to draw the Socialists into collaboration also failed because of the very manner in which it was conceived, i.e., as an attempt to bring the “whole” of the Socialist Party into the Government, in order to make prisoners of the masses adhering to it. After the revolutionary experiences in 1919 and 1920 of hundreds of thousands of workers it would be absurd to think of the realisation of such a plan. First the Leghorn split (1921), then the split at Rome (1922) proved that a few leaders might have been taken into the Government but that the masses would not have allowed themselves to become captives of the bourgeois State by following these leaders.

This failure of the old ruling classes became most clearly manifest in 1921 and 1922 during a series of insoluble parliamentary crises. And it is in this year that Fascism began to take a definite shape. The direct tie uniting it with the reactionary landowners made it the most appropriate weapon for dealing a decisive blow to prevent the realisation of the workers’ and peasants’ alliance. The bankruptcy of the old ruling classes at the same time confronted it with another definite aim: that of realising a new unity of the bourgeois forces, and, at their head, to enforce a programme of defence and preservation of the threatened capitalist order.

That explains on the one hand the fact that all representatives of the old ruling classes looked with favour on the development of the Fascist movement, supplying it with arms and placing the whole State apparatus at its disposal, while at the same time it explains how Fascism was able to conceive its programme of conquering the State in spite of the ruling classes that had nourished. and protected it.

The ECCI published the magazine ‘Communist International’ edited by Zinoviev and Karl Radek from 1919 until 1926 irregularly in German, French, Russian, and English. Restarting in 1927 until 1934. Unlike, Inprecorr, CI contained long-form articles by the leading figures of the International as well as proceedings, statements, and notices of the Comintern. No complete run of Communist International is available in English. Both were largely published outside of Soviet territory, with Communist International printed in London, to facilitate distribution and both were major contributors to the Communist press in the U.S. Communist International and Inprecorr are an invaluable English-language source on the history of the Communist International and its sections.

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