On the Comintern and Italian fascism, please see:
https://johnriddell.com/2014/06/01/fumble-and-late-recovery-the-comintern-response-to-italian-fascism/

Thanks, Katheryne. Socialist Voice was inspired by the legacy of Pat Schulz’s activism back into the 1950s. John

Unfortunately, I was very disappointed with Klara Zetkin’s speeches and resolutions on fascism which to me while including some excellent formulations were more examples of revolutionary diplomacy than an honest reckoning with what had gone wrong in Italy. Klara knew only too well what went wrong in Italy but seeing how her spartacist co-leadership of the German Communist Party were removed because of the Italian debacle, she was clearly unwilling to even mention the disastrous Communist split in Livorno and the disaster that flowed from it.

In particular, Clara failed to properly deal with the key years 1920-1922 when it would have been possible to defeat Mussolini. Sadly, in this failure she joins almost all of the leninist movement (trotskyist and stalinist) who find what happened to be highly embarrassing to write about. Especially on how the Communist International spent its time and resources in splitting the Socialist Party and creating a new ultraleft Communist Party that adopted a third period approach towards fascism and opened the way to Mussolini’s capture of power.

The unwillingness of the communist left to properly examine how Mussolini had been able to defeat the strong Italian socialist and union movement in the 1920s meant that few lessons were learnt in order to prevent Hiler’s ascent to power ten years or so later. Thus, Stalin’s famous telegram to the German Communist Party leadership minimising the scale of the Nazi defeat and assuring them that their turn would be next, was almost a copy of the positions adopted by Lenin and Trotsky in 1922. If my memory serves me well, the Communist International also sent a telegram under Lenin and Trostsky’s name reassuring the new PCI leadership and predicting that their time would be next.

To try to correct the record, I am attaching a case study on how the Communist International’s policy in Italy in 1920-22 helped Mussolini to come to power. I think it can stimulate a long overdue debate on the tragedy of what happened in Italy.

Warm regards,

Pat Byrne

P.S. This case Study is part of a longer document briefly comparing the different approaches of socialists towards the mass workers parties: from Marx and Engels; to Lenin before the Russian Revolution; and then onto the Comintern.