I will confine my reply to Italian fascism, which was the topic of discussion of Zetkin report and resolution presented in June 1923. I insist that Mussolini’s fascism was not a mass movement, at least until 1924, and was enforced and enabled by the industrial and agrarian capitalists, as matter of fact most of the Italian ruling class of that time, king included.

About the large masses. The “Fasci di combattimento”, founded by Mussolini in March 1919 in Piazza San Sepolcro, Milan, were a scant group (300 people ) constituted of fasci d’azione rivoluzionaria, left-wing revolutionary unionists whom in 1915 were interventionists; nazionalisti, typical write-wing middle class nationalists; and arditi, army officials or anyway former members of special assault forces, most of whom at that time were actually following the much more heroic figure of the poet-worrier Gabriele D’Annunzio. Their original program was very anarchist–like. To be clear Mussolini was not even interested in a political platform, he was for the action. “Action is all!” used to say the man. That is what he liked to say in public. Who knew him well, knew that Mussolini’s real program was Mussolini’s self-accomplishment.

There are at least two clear episodes, in which Mussolini was “dumped” by the movement because he was deleterious or no longer representative of the interests he represented. During the general elections of 1919 the ex-combattenti did not want to be associated with his name because he was still hated by the masses, but more importantly, after the general elections of 1921, when Mussolini signed il patto di pacificazione (pacification pact) with the socialists, the fascists will violently contest him, bringing him to resign. As Angelo Tasca carefully assesses “Therefore, Mussolini finds against himself, his own movement, the upper industrial and agrarian bourgeoisie, the nationalists…”. Only thanks to the decision of the fascists movement to become a Party and the need of a charismatic leader will give the opportunity to Mussolini to repurpose himself.

What made the fortune of Mussolini’s fascists, then?
Certainly not the pursue of “large masses to search for a radical solution”!
To give credit to the critic, the deep socio-economic crisis produced by the Great War, and as consequence the destabilization of the army, as captured in D’Annunzio’s Arditi’s movement, and the terror for the Bolsheviks, induced Nitti and Giolitti’s governments to tolerate and, even favor, the emerging of fascist punitive squadrons. The terrorist bombing of socialists celebrating the electoral victory in 1919, for which Mussolini was found guilty, and the burning of the “Avanti” headquarters in Milan a few months earlier (organ of the Socialist Party), still openly claimed by Mussolini’s fascists, are just the first two acts of terror, when, let’s get this straight, fascism was not a mass movement, that the police forces did not prosecute. This gave the green light to the fascists to openly start their violent repression of the working class. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to forget the “great” repressive work of the Regia Guardia (Royal Guard) already mentioned in my previous article.
Even when marching on Rome in 1922, the fascist movement was very little in number (25,000 men, around 0.2% of the registered voters of that time) not a mass movement at all. It could have been flashed away by the government police forces. This is evident when looking at the Sarzana episode, July 1921, when 11 carabinieri opened fire on 500 fascisti, whom wanted to occupy the town, as they were doing on the regular basis all over the north of Italy. This 11 killed 18 fascists scaring the rest away. But this was just an isolated episode. On the contrary, thanks to an “ambiguous” decree released under Bonomi’s administration, the state felt legitimized to direct the demobilized army officials to the newly formed local fascists groups. That’s also how you make a mass movement. Isn’t it?

As mentioned earlier, when the fascist occupied Rome “the king did not enforce the state of siege ordered by the then Prime Minister” allowing Mussolini to take power. Mussolini still in Milan, was ready to flee to Switzerland, he knew that the march on Rome was a gamble. But, as we have seen earlier, he was not in full control of the more reactionary falange of “his” movement, which disposed him off in July-August 1921. Mussolini was interested only in the survival of Mussolini-self. Later on, in 1924, after the Matteotti assassination he will finally stand by his armed falange and thus, he will establish the regime.

When can we talk about a fascist mass movement then? Well let’s take the election of 1924 the first “real”, or better to say forced, electoral victory of the Fascists, where they gained the 65% of the registered voters. As in all cases of elections in authoritarian regimes, the results would show an unrealistic absolute majority. This cannot be used as an unbiased evidence of the masses ‘appeal towards fascism.

One last point on the function of fascism and how to fight against it. I understand the point made that the fight against fascism is the “fight to defend our political rights”. Thus, the working class should have struggled against the Bolshevik regime too, which limited their political rights as not even the Czar dared to do, as well as against the German social-democracy employer of the freikorps even before of the invention of the fascists squadrons. But am I or am I not singling out the main actors of the United Front?

I want to close with a consideration of Carla Zetkin “justice’s fascism and terror for example clearly show that the bourgeoisie in its struggle against the advancing proletariat destroys the juridical grounds of its own social order”

This shows that Zetkin after all understood that fascism was an authoritarian expression of capitalism. Let us struggle against capitalism in any form and shape!
Cesco

The necessary condition is a deep crisis of the capitalist system, which pushes large masses to search for radical solutions to the crises.

And the sufficient condition for the rise of a mass fascist movement is that the working class appears as incapable to organize this necessary radical way out of the capitalist crisis. This is what happened in Italy, in Germany, and in Spain (I am not well informed about Portugal). In Italy the trade union leadership called the workers “who occupied factories and fields in the turmoil following WWI” to end the occupation.

Fascism’s central task (for the bourgeoisie) is the total destruction of the working class organisations, so that no three workers can freely talk among themselves how to defend the worker’s class interests against the capitalists. This begins already before fascism takes over the government, and Italy this seems to have taken more time than in Germany.

So fight against fascism is primarily the fight to defend our political rights, the right to speak out what we think and have seen, to write it up and distribute it, to assemble and to organize. For those fundamental freedoms of which Frederick Engels wrote that without them “no working class movement is possible”.

This is not a “moral question”, and not the same as “a fight against any other form of representation of capital’s interest”.

This struggle requires efforts to unite the whole working class and other exploited layers for this struggle in what is called the strategy and tactics of the United Front.

And this defensive struggle can transform itself in an offensive and create the conditions for the working class to take power out of the hands of the propertied class and to set up a workers government.

This newly published review from the latest edition of the Socialist Standard (print & online) is likely to be of interest…

Misreading fascism

‘Fighting Fascism’. By Carla Zetkin, (edited by Mike Taber and John Riddell. Haymarket, £10.99)

This booklet reproduces two main writings of Zetkin on fascism: her report and resolution presented at the Third Enlarged Plenum of the Communist International’s Executive Committee in June 1923, and her speech to the German Reichstag in 1932.

Carla Zetkin was an iconic left-wing German Marxist and close friend of Rosa Luxemburg who opted for the political line taken by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, becoming a champion of the Third International. She stayed on the side of the Third International although not without some regrets, even during the rise and ‘splendour’ of Stalinism.

In order to appreciate the historical and political relevance of Zetkin’s analysis, the reader should consider that this came less than one year after the report (Rapporto sul Fascismo) presented by the then leader of the Communist Party of Italy (PCd’I) Amadeo Bordiga. His report at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International came a few days after Mussolini had come to power. The fascists’ Marcia su Roma had taken placed while the Italian delegates were away at that congress. This is not a negligible detail if we consider that eight days after Bordiga’s Report on Fascism the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party sent a letter to the Italian delegation, signed by Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek and Bukharin to impose the fusion between the PCd’I and the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), from which the PCd’I had split only a little less than two years earlier. Bordiga was a tenacious opponent of the reunification imposed by the International in the name of the ‘united front’. This tactic and the interpretation and attitude toward fascism were very much interlinked. So in June 1923, while Bordiga was in jail, and the change of guard at the leadership of the Italian Party – its Bolshevisation – was coming about, an adjusted interpretation of fascism would strengthen and justify the new direction. This re-interpretation was in fact Zetkin’s report and resolution.

To be fair, Zetkin’s interpretation of fascism, and Italian fascism in particular, is in many respects truthful and in line with Bordiga’s report. However, her version is studded with assumptions and convictions that served the political plan of discrediting Bordiga’s ‘infantile’ position (e.g. of no compromises with social-democrats and Massimalists), and winning the new leadership under Antonio Gramsci over to the united front story. For Zetkin ‘Fascism arrives … as punishment because the proletariat has not carried and driven forward the revolution’ and that ‘Fascism [is] an expression of decay and disintegration of the capitalist economy… bourgeois state’s dissolution’. ‘The weaknesses of the Communist Party [of Italy] also played a role here… policy error in viewing fascism solely as a military phenomenon and overlooking its ideological and political side’. According to Zetkin’s view, the violent struggle against fascism would allow the proletariat to ‘grow conscious, stronger, and more purposeful’. Thus, ‘To the masses! … but maintaining Communist Ideology… Meet violence with violence’.

Fascism did not arrive as a punishment because the workers and their leaders shied away from revolution. As already pointed out by Bordiga in his report, fascism was adopted by the industrial and agrarian bourgeoisie to violently physically repress the workers who occupied factories and fields in the turmoil following WWI. Looking a bit closer, one can see that fascism was in fact generated by the bourgeoisie itself. Money for Mussolini’s journal and the creation of his pseudo-anti-parliamentary-pro-worker patriotic movement (Fasci Italiani di Combattimento) came mainly from the Italian bourgeoisie.

Nor was fascism an expression of capitalist economic disintegration. Italy was thrown into the First World War completely unprepared, by a secret pact involving the king, Vittorio Emanuele III, the Minister of Foreign Affairs Sidney Sonnino and Prime Minister Antonio Salandra, representing the interest of industrial bourgeoisie hoping for easy spoils. By 1922 the country had already covered 79 billion lira of war costs without borrowing anything from other countries.

When reading Bordiga’s report it is also clear that the Italian Party did not see fascism as a mere military phenomenon.

1919 was in fact a bad year for fascism still stuck with patriotic demagogy. At the end of the war the liberals had some difficulty in keeping control over the army generals. This was evident when the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, from whom Mussolini later stole completely his style and propaganda, managed to get several generals on his side to occupy the Italian-speaking city of Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia), which according to the secret negotiations between Sonnino and the Entente was to go to Yugoslavia.

The old fox Giovanni Giolitti also thought he could use Mussolini’s fascists to get rid of the D’Annunzio movement, which was destabilising the army’s hierarchy, and to reduce the spread of working class organisations in particular in rural areas. He was looking for a political entity to go into coalition with. At the end of 1920, with government backing, the fascist ‘punitive expeditions’ started to terrorise the rural north of Italy. At the election of 1921 the fascists finally entered into parliament. They were not enough to serve Giolitti’s plans, who now had PSI and Popolari (Catholics) against him.

Thus, Mussolini’s fascists gained strength when the agrarian bourgeoisie, mainly of Emilia, Lombardy and Tuscany first, and the industrial bourgeoisie of big industrial cities such as Turin and Milan, saw in the fascists’ aversion towards working class organisations a viable anti-working-class weapon, even more effective than the Guardia Regia that up to then had violently repressed any insurrection. The advantage of using para-military fascist squadrons was that they could physically eliminate the leaders of the working class institutions, like the Mafia was doing in Sicily. The demobilisation of the army helped the fascists to recruit veterans who no longer fitted into society. Nevertheless, as we just mentioned, the fascist violence in the country as well as in the urban areas had always been tolerated if not facilitated by the police forces.

When Mussolini took power in 1922, against Giolitti’s calculations, the king did not enforce the state of siege ordered by the then Prime Minister, and permitted this. Hardly a coup d’etat when the Head of State gives his blessing.

Contrary to Zetkin’s, Zinoviev’s and other Third Internationalists’ expectations, Italy was not ready to conduct a successful working class revolution, ‘like in Russia’. This was acknowledged in Bordiga’s report. Instead of being an ‘expression of decay and disintegration of the capitalist economy’ fascism was an authoritarian adaptation of the political representation of capital’s interests.

The risk in adopting Zetkin’s view is to accept the false notion that fighting exclusively against fascism would automatically result in an emancipation of the working class. The danger today is that the ‘fight against fascism’ becomes a fight only against Trumpism, just because his bombastic ego may resemble Mussolini’s. Or that the victory against ISIS (a typical paramilitary ideological movement) is seen as a liberation of the working class in the Middle East from capitalism. The fight against fascism must not become a ‘moral question’. It is a class struggle question just as much as a fight against any other form of representation of capital’s interest is a class struggle question.
CESCO