FASCISM AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION -1 CHAPTER V
Palme Dutt
HOW FASCISM CAME IN ITALY
IN the light of this general understanding of the character and role of Fascism, and of the conditions of its development, it is now possible to examine more closely the concrete historical manifestations of Fascism, and, in particular, its development in Italy and Germany.
For this purpose it is necessary first to review the conditions of the Πtransition to Fascism in these countries. It is then necessary to examine more closely the programme and practice of Fascism, especially as demonstrated in these two leading countries.
I. The Priority of Italian Fascism.
Why did Fascism, the outstanding development of modern capitalist policy, develop its first distinctive and complete form in Italy, a secondary capitalist country?
The question bears a certain analogy to the question often asked why the world proletarian revolution should have conquered first, not in the most advanced capitalist country, but in the relatively less-developed Russia.
In both cases a general world development of the imperialist epoch first reached its specific form, not at the main centres of world imperialism, but at that point where the complex of conditions, of extreme contradictions, made its appearance first possible, and only more slowly spread beyond the original country.
The reasons for the opening of the world socialist revolution in Russia have long been cleared. Russia was the weakest link of world imperialism: it represented the combination, on the one side, of the weakest bourgeoisie and of the greatest corruption and collapse of the old regime; and on the other side, of the most politically developed proletariat, of the highest proportion of the proletariat in large-scale industry and of the most conscious and highly trained revolutionary party of the proletariat in established leadership of the majority of the workers.
The case of Italy and Fascism is more complex. In fact, embryonic forms of Fascism already developed in other countries before Italy, notably in Finland, Hungary, Poland and Germany. But it was in Italy that Fascism was first elaborated into a complete system and became during the succeeding decade the recognised principal model. Why was this? We have seen that Fascism develops where the proletarian revolution draws visibly close, but is held in by reformist leadership. This was certainly the case in Italy after the war. But in the immediate post-war period did not the proletarian revolution far more closely threaten in Germany than in Italy? Why then the difference, and the very much later development of Fascism in Germany?
The answer lies, not only in the very much greater strength and long- drawn resistance of the German proletariat, but in the basic difference of conditions of the revolutionary movement in the two countries. In ΠGermany a mass-revolution took place; but the Social Democracy was able to retain control of the main body of the working-class movement, and to rob the revolution of its fruits. In Italy, on the other band, there was only the menace of a revolution; but the old Social Democratic leadership lost effective control of the mass movement. In consequence, the methods of the bourgeoisie in the two countries necessarily differed.
In Germany the proletarian revolution actually overthrew the old regime in 1918; but the workers were robbed of the fruits of their victory by the Social Democratic leadership. The task of the bourgeoisie in the first stage became to limit the successful revolution, whose victory could not for the moment be questioned. For this purpose the direct governmental leadership of Social Democracy was essential to the bourgeoisie as the sole salvation. Only later, as the influence of Social Democracy weakened, and the menace of the proletarian revolution grew, in spite of and against Social Democracy, did the German bourgeoisie require to bring into play the additional weapon of Fascism against the working class.
In Italy, on the other hand, no revolution took place after the war, but only a mass revolutionary wave of great power the highest mass revolutionary wave of those countries (the victor countries) where the war was not followed by revolution. There was no question of strangling an already victorious mass revolution by setting Social Democracy in power as the supposed leadership and voice of the triumphant revolution. The government remained throughout directly in the hands of the bourgeoisie. But the old Social Democratic leadership lost control of the mass movement, which was rapidly advancing to revolution. The task for the bourgeoisie became to prevent the menacing proletarian revolution. For this purpose Social Democracy could serve as the brake to disorganise the workers' forces. But to smash the workers' forces Fascism was necessary. In contrast to Britain and France, the mass revolutionary wave after the war in Italy was so high as to make the bourgeois democratic forms inadequate; extraordinary forms had to be brought into play. But it was not so high as to reach to open insurrection and overthrow of the government, and to the necessity of the bourgeoisie making a show of surrendering power. The bourgeoisie only required to change the forms and methods of its power. For this reason Italy, despite the lower level of revolutionary development than Germany, gave the first example of the new Fascist dictatorship, to which Germany only reached later. Italian Fascism revealed Fascism as a species of preventive count Πrevolution.
2. Socialism in Italy.
The relatively backward economic development of Italy meant that the industrial proletariat, especially in large industry, was proportionately much weaker than in the leading industrial countries, such as Germany, Britain and the United States. Of the 16.8 million occupied persons recorded in the 191 1 census, 9 millions, or 54 per cent., were recorded as engaged in agriculture and fisheries; 243,000 industrial establishments were recorded as employing 2.3 million workers. The 1927 Census of Industries reported 2.9 million industrial workers in manufacturing production; but 1 -5 millions of these were employed in establishments of less than 10 workers; only 695 factories bad over 500 workers, with a total of 692,000 workers.
Nevertheless, the dominant numerical strength of the industrial and agricultural proletariat combined, especially together with the poor peasantry, should not be under-estimated. On the basis of the 1911 census statistics it was calculated that of the 16.8 million occupied persons the agricultural proletariat numbered 6.2 millions, and the proletariat in industry and transport 4 millions, or a total of over To millions or over 60 per cent.
Further, Socialism, on the basis of a revolutionary programme, reached an overwhelming mass support after the war. The Italian Socialist Party, previously weak and dominated by reformism and collaborationist policies until 1910, began to move to the left in the fight against the Tripoli war in 19 11 ; in 19 12 it strengthened itself by expelling the chauvinist reformists, under Bonomi and Bissolati, at the Reggio Emilia Congress; thereafter the membership, previously dwindling from 36,000 in 1906 to 24,000 in 1910, shot up from 27,000 in 1912 to 48,000 in 19114. Thus strengthened, and with the added advantage of a delayed entry of Italy into the war only after a protracted dispute which divided also the bourgeoisie, the Italian Socialist Party was not swept in the wake of the war, but took the Zimmerwald line; it emerged from the war with an increased membership Of 70,000 and high popularity and prestige.
The revolutionary wave after the war reached very great heights in Italy, affecting all strata, the industrial workers, the demobilised soldiers, the agricultural proletariat and the poor peasantry. A widespread strike movement developed, both economic and political, land seizures by the peasantry, etc. The Socialist Party affiliated to the ΠCommunist International in March 1919, by executive decision, which was confirmed by an overwhelming majority at the Bologna Congress in October. On this basis the Party went to the elections in November 1919, on a Communist programme of dictatorship of the proletariat and soviets, and for this programme won over one-third of the total vote of the whole population, emerging as the strongest party with 156 seats Out Of 508-at the same time as Mussolini and his Fascists were unable to win a single seat. The membership of the Party rose to 200,000, and of the Confederation of Labour, which was allied to the Party, to two millions. At the municipal elections in 1920 the Party won control of over 2,000 Communes, or one-third of the total. At the height of the revolutionary wave the Government was powerless to act, as shown in its passivity during the occupation of the factories in 1920, since it could not count on the support of the military forces. The expectation of the social revolution was general.
Nevertheless, no revolution took place, because there was no decisive revolutionary leadership. As the Executive Committe of the Communist International wrote in October 1920:
The P.S.I. (Italian Socialist Party) acts with too much hesitation. It is not the Party which leads the masses, but the masses which push the Party. . . . In Italy there exist all the necessary conditions for a victorious revolution except one-a good working-class organisation.
The truth of this was abundantly shown in 1919-20. No Communist Party existed until 192 1, when the main revolutionary wave had passed. Anarchist and syndicalist tendencies and confusions on the one side, reformism in control of the principal mass organisations on the other, and a passive, hesitating centrist leadership between- this constituted the main picture of the leadership of the Italian working class during the revolutionary wave. Although the Italian Socialist Party had affiliated to the Communist International in 1919, it retained at the very heart of the leadership, in control of the most strategic points, convinced enemies of Communism, the old reformist leadership under Turati and D'Aragona, who had dominated the party until 1910. These bad no longer more than a small following among the workers, as Congress votes showed; but they were strong at the certre, dominating the parliamentary group and controlling the official machinery of the Confederation of Labour. They remained in the party, despite the adoption of the Communist programme, openly in order to defeat the revolutionary line. As one of their leaders, Prampolini, explained at the Conference of the reformist wing in September 1922: ΠBy remaining in the Party we were able to fulfil our duty as Socialists. It would have been quite impossible for us to have accomplished outside the Party the task we accomplished inside.
It was manifest that if the party were to achieve its task of revolutionary leadership, the first necessity was to remove the enemies of the revolution from the strategic leading positions and replace them by revolutionaries. On this demand the Executive Committee of the Communist International, under the leadership of Lenin, conscious of the impending danger in Italy if this were not carried out, exerted the whole of its pressure and authority. The Executive long urged, and finally by the summer of 1920, when the matter was too serious for further parleying, demanded in the name of the whole international movement, the expulsion of Turati and the reformist leadership. But the centrist leadership under Serrati refused, and the fate of the Italian revolution was sealed for many years to come. The issue came to a head at the Second Congress of the Communist International in August 1920; Serrati set himself in opposition to Lenin and to the whole international leadership, preferring unity with Turati and the reformists to unity with International Communism; and the bulk of the party under his leadership passed out of the International. The break followed at the Livorno Congress in January 192 1; Serrati and the centrists had a following of 98,000, Turati and the reformists 14,ooo, and the Communists 58,000, who thereon formed the Italian Communist Party. Serrati and his wing, who styled themselves "unity Communists," were appealed to by the Communists to unite with them in a single Communist Party, which would have thus constituted go per cent. of the old party, freed from reformism; but they preferred unity with the 14,000 reformists to unity with 58,000 Communists. Thus the workers' ranks were broken.
Two years later, on the very eve of Mussolini's coming to power, Serrati was compelled to recognise his fatal error; at the Rome Congress of the now weakened and dwindled Socialist Party in the beginning of October 1922, the Serrati leadership finally carried through the expulsion of Turati and the reformists, now grown to nearly half the membership, and applied for re-admission to the Communist International. "Our fault," declared Serrati at this Congress, "is that we never sufficiently prepared ourselves for the events that have overtaken us. . . . To-day we believe it essential to abandon the democratic illusion, and to create a combative, active and audacious Party." But it was then too late; the irreparable harm had been done; within four weeks Mussolini was in power. As the message of the Communist ΠInternational to the Rome Congress declared:
He cannot be called a leader of the proletarian masses who with great effort and after the lapse of several years comes to a correct conclusion, but rather he who can detect a tendency at its birth and can warn the workers in time of the peril that menaces them.
3. Was Revolution Possible in Italy?
This understanding of the inner situation of Italian Socialism during the critical years 1919-1922 is essential for the understanding of the failure of the Italian revolution during those years, despite the favourable conditions and the readiness and self-sacrifice of the masses, and the resulting advance and victory of Fascism.
The revolutionary wave of 19 19-2 0 spent itself in a conf usion of unorganised partial struggles and demonstrations without decisive leadership or concentrated aim. The Socialist Party leadership gave out the watchword: "The Revolution is not made. The Revolution comes." Under cover of this fatal nonMarxist conception the responsibility of leadership was in fact abandoned. The energy and self-sacrifice of the masses went to waste in fruitless unco-ordinated actions.
The final climax of the revolutionary wave was reached with the occupation of the factories in Northern Italy in September 1920. This action of the workers was undertaken in response to a lock-out begun by the employers and threatening to be made general. Beginning from the metallurgical industry in Milan at the end of August, it spread to all industries until by September 3 half a million workers were in unchallenged occupation of the factories, establishing their own workers' committees and armed guards. The government and employers were powerless. The troops could not be counted on to act against the workers. The classic conditions of revolution were present. The Prime Minister, Giolitti, temporised. The extra-legal Fascist formations were then only an impotent handful, and found it more prudent to applaud the workers' movement from a distance, proclaiming noisily their "sympathy" for the occupation in which they had no part, and which Mussolini declared in his journal to be "a great revolution" (Popolo d'Italia, September 2 8, 19 2 0).
The bourgeoisie in this situation could only count on the reformist leadership to save them. But the reformist leadership did not fail them. It was obvious that the occupation of the factories, if it remained a passive economic movement, with political power remaining in the hands of the bourgeoisie, could only end in stultification and failure. The condition of victory was that the movement begun by the Πoccupation of the factories should be extended to the conquest of political power by the workers, which the bourgeoisie was then powerless to resist. just this the reformists resisted, insisting on confining the movement as "purely an economic movement" (the same tactics as in the British General Strike in 1926), and negotiating with the Government for a settlement. The critical decision was taken on September II at a combined conference of the Socialist Party and the Confederation of Labour; by a vote of 591,245 to 409,569 control was placed in the hands of the Confederation of Labour, that is, of the reformist leadership. The reformist leadership entered into immediate negotiations with Giolitti; and on September 19 a settlement was reached, by which evacuation of the factories was conceded in return for a 20 per cent. wage increase and a promise of a share of "workers' control" in industry (the promise went the way of all such promises; the subsequent joint commission established to work out the details of the scheme broke down; finally, the Government in 192 1 introduced an emasculated Bill of Labour Control, similar to the German Works Councils Act). The essence of the settlement was the evacuation of the factories. The reformist leaders ordered the workers to leave the factories. What neither the employers, nor the Government, nor the police, nor the armed forces could effect, this was effected by the reformist leadership-to get the workers out of the factories and hand them back to capitalism.
Was the victory of the working-class revolution in Italy possible in the situation of September 1920? Of this there can be no doubt in the united evidence of all parties. The liberal anti-fascist historian, Salvemini, who is mainly concerned for the purposes of his argument to minimise the revolutionary issues of the situation in Italy before Fascism in order to deny this bourgeois "justification" of Fascism, nevertheless writes of this period:
Had the leaders of the General Confederation of Labour and of the Socialist Party wished to strike a decisive blow, here was the opportunity. . . . The bankers, the big industrialists and big landlords waited for the social revolution as sheep wait to be led to the slaughter. If a Communist revolution could be brought about by bewilderment and cowardice on the part of the ruling classes, the Italian people in September, 1920, could have made as many Communist revolutions as they wished.
(G. Salvemini, The Fascist Dictatorship, 1928, Vol. 1, P. 41.)
WAS REVOLUTION POSSIBLE IN ITALY? 119
The leading Italian journal, the Corriere della Sera, wrote at the time in its issue of September 29, 1920:
Italy has been in peril of collapse. There has been no revolution, not because there was anyone to bar its way, but because the General Confederation of Labour has not wished it.
The reformist leadership themselves boasted of having averted revolution by their action, and thereafter, in exactly the same way as the German reformists later, complained bitterly of the ingratitude of the bourgeoisie in repaying their services by the blows of Fascism:
"But after we bad the honour," stated the Secretary of the General Confederation of Labour in a speech delivered two years after the occupation of the factories, "of preventing a revolutionary catastrophe- Fascism arrived." (Daily Herald, April 12, 1928.)
Thus in the agreed testimony of the bourgeoisie and of the reformists alike, the Communist revolution was fully possible in Italy in September 1920, and was only prevented by the reformist leadership. Fascism played no part in this.
It was only after the revolution was already defeated, after the working-class ranks were disorganised and disillusioned by the reformist betrayal, after this had begun to show itself in a rapid collapse of membership and organisation, that then Fascism stepped forward to show its prowess in beating the already defeated workers.
The surrender of the factories took place in September 1920. From that point the Italian working-class movement went downwards. "After the occupation of the factories in September 1920, the idea spread among the people that the revolution had failed, and they grew discouraged" (Salvemini, op. Cit., P. 43). The membership of the party and of the trade unions began rapidly to fall (the party membership fell from 216,000 in 1920 to 170,000 in January 1921).
In November 1020, the first Fascist terrorist action of blood and fire against the workers was launched at Bologna.
The sequence of dates is obvious. The Fascist jackal strikes only the already wounded proletarian lion. Fascism was not the weapon of defence of the bourgeoisie against the advancing proletarian offensive, but the vengeance of the bourgeoisie against the retreating proletariat, after reformism had broken the workers' ranks, to follow up the victory by smashing the working-class organisations.
4. The Growth and Victory of Fascism.
Fascism had existed in germ in Italy since the beginning of 1919-in fact since the hired interventionist campaign of 1915. The former Socialist Party agitator, Mussolini, who had throughout his career performed a doubtful role of advocacy of bomb attentats, Herveist extravagance, etc., changed his coat with the usual celerity of social chauvinists, and passed within a few weeks from editing the Socialist anti-war Avanti, wherein he had denounced the "bourgeois war" during August and September, to founding, with French Government funds, the interventionist Popolo d'Italia in November. The Fasci di Azione Interventista, which he founded at Milan in 1915, were the nucleus of future Fascism. After the war Mussolini and his followers, their previous campaigning basis gone with the end of the war, sought for a new one, and founded the first Fascio di Combattimento at Milan in March 1919, on a confused chauvinist, republican and revolutionary- sounding programme. This was the official starting-point of Fascism. The Fasci were constituted a political party in December 11920.
During 1919 and up to the autumn of 1920, that is, during the revolutionary wave, Fascism had no strength or popular support. The official authorities encouraged it; the Popolo d'Italia was distributed by the Army authorities free among the troops in 1919 and 192o. But Fascism could win no support. At the elections in November 1919, Fascism could not win a seat; Mussolini received 4,795 votes in Milan against the Socialist 180,000. The total membership throughout the country was small. Fascism had to swim with the revolutionary stream. Its programme called for the abolition of the monarchy and nobility, confiscation of war profits, international disarmament, abolition of the stock exchanges, the land for the peasants, workers' control of industry, etc. Its propaganda glorified strikes, food riots, calling for the hanging of speculators, the seizure of land by the peasantry, occupations of factories by the workers (Dalmine), and denounced the State as the enemy-"Down with the State in all its forms!" (Popolo d'Italia, April 6, 1920).
During this period Fascism was still in preparation and had no important place among the weapons of the bourgeoisie to meet the proletarian offensive. In the face of the strength of the revolutionary wave the bourgeoisie had to use other methods. So far as an attempt was made to build up an alternative new party to counter and outbid the Socialist Party, this attempt was concentrated on the Catholic "Popular Party," which was constituted in 1919 with a demagogic programme, and was utilised to split the rural proletariat and peasantry, winning 100 seats in 1919 against the Socialist 156. But the main method of the bourgeoisie was the method of liberalism and concessions, so long as their forces were unprepared, the granting of shorter hours, wage increases, the Labour Control Bill and similar legislation. This was the line of the successive governments of Nitti, Giolitti, Bonomi and Facta. They calculated on the reformist socialist leadership to break the revolutionary offensive. Meanwhile, under cover of this policy of seeming "weakness" and retreat, they were preparing the armed counter-revolution. The gendarmerie, or Carabinieri, were increased from 28,000 at the end of the war to 60,000\ by the summer of 192o. A new special force, the Royal Guard, was created, 2 5,000 strong. At the same time the Fascist hooligan bands were being equipped and armed by the authorities.
Thus the transfer from the policy of a Giolitti to the policy of a Mussolini was no sudden volte-face of the Italian bourgeoisie. They were the two halves of a single policy; Mussolini was the foster-child and creation of Giolitti, just as Hitler was the foster-child of Bruning. The task of Giolitti and the "liberal" "democratic" governments was to fool the proletariat with sham concessions, so long as the proletarian forces were too strong to be defeated, and assist the reformist leadership to break them up from within. Meanwhile these "liberal" "democratic" governments were secretly equipping and arming Fascism. When this first stage was completed, and the proletarian forces had been disorganised by reformism, the violent counter- revolution was let loose. The violent offensive of Fascism was carried forward under the benevolent protection of Giolitti and his successors. This second stage continued from the autumn of 1920 to the autumn of 1922. Reformism continued to retreat and trust in parliamentarism for defence. When the second stage had done its work, and the proletarian forces had been smashed and beaten up, the final transference to open Fascism was accomplished, Giolitti and his successors peaceably made way for Mussolini. The cycle was complete. The continuity of policy runs in practice right through.
This mechanism of the transition to Fascism, exactly repeated in Germany, is the essential key to the correct understanding of the real relationship of bourgeois democracy and Fascism.
Fascism grew up and grew strong after the autumn of 1920, and was able to exercise its wholesale violence, only under the direct protection and assistance of the bourgeois democratic governments, of the military authorities, of the police, of the magistracy and of the big bourgeoisie. From the autumn of 1920 the big landlords and the big industrialists poured support to the Fascist bands to exercise terrorism against the peasantry and the proletariat. The membership shot up, according to Mussolini, from 20,000 in 192OtO 248,000 in 1921. The army authorities supplied arms. Professional officers trained the bands and directed operations. The General Staff issued a circular (October 20,1920) instructing Divisional Commanders to support the Fascist organisations. The workers and peasants were rigorously disarmed; the Fascists carried arms with impunity. The police and gendarmerie either directly assisted the Fascists or remained passive. The magistracy habitually subjected to savage sentences workers who attempted to defend themselves, while releasing Fascists.
The conscious policy of Giolitti and Bonomi in permitting and supporting Fascist violence has been already noted (p. I 0 I ). The semi- official spokesman of Fascism, Luigi Villari, in his Awakening of Italy (p. 123) notes that Giolitti "refused to interfere with the repressive actions of the Fascists, illegal though they were." The pro-Fascist A. Zerboglio, in his standard 11 Fascismo, 19 2 2, wrote:
The Government more or less openly made use of Fascism.
The Socialist Press are piling up proofs of Government tolerance towards the Fascists, and it cannot honestly be disputed that some of this evidence appears convincing.
The leading American journalist, Mowrer, recorded:
In the presence of murder, violence and arson, the police remained "neutral." . . . When armed bands compelled the Socialists to resign from office under pain of death, or regularly tried, and condemned their enemies to blows, banishment or execution, the functionaries merely shrugged their shoulders. . . . Sometimes Carabineers and Royal Guards openly made common cause with the Fascists, and paralysed the resistance of the peasants. Against the Fascists alone the latter might have held their own. Against the Fascists and the police together they were helpless, and their complaints merely caused the authorities to arrest them as guilty of attempting to defend themselves. Socialists were condemned for alleged crimes committed months, years before. Fascists taken redbanded were released for want of evidence." Π(E. A. Mowrer, Immortal Italy, p. 361.)
And again:
From the army the Fascists received sympathy, assistance and war material. Officers in uniform took part in the punitive expeditions. The Fascists were allowed to turn national barracks into their private arsenals.- (Ibid., p. 144.)
Similarly the notorious advocate of Fascism, Odon Por, notes in his Fascism (p. III) that "the Fascists had been equipped largely on the quiet, from the regular army." Another American journalist who was in Italy in 192 1, J. Carter, reports:
The Fascisti had carte blanche to beat up their opponents throughout Italy, while the Government pretended to be neutral.
(J. Carter, New York Times Book Review, June 12, 1927.)
One of the standard writers on Fascism, generally sympathetic, G. Prezzolini, in his Le Fascisme, 192 5, writes (p. 97):
They could organise themselves in armed corps and kill right and left, with the certainty of impunity and with the complicity of the police. It is thus no overstatement to recognise that the Fascists fought with 99 chances out of 100 of gaining the victory.
The Fascist offensive of terrorism, destruction and murder, which was launched at Bologna in November 1920, with the overthrow of the newly elected Socialist Town Council and sacking of the Chamber of Labour, was thereafter systematically developed and extended, with the manifest planning of a military campaign, through the industrial region, and with wholesale sporadic violence in the agricultural areas. Socialist, trade union and co-operative buildings, painfully erected by millions of sacrifices of a generation of workers, were burned and sacked; workers' newspapers and printing presses were destroyed; socialist municipal councils were expelled from office; militant workers and peasants were beaten up or murdered. All this went forward with the connivance of the civil authorities, who normally followed up each Fascist coup expelling a duly elected socialist municipal council by appointing a Special Commissioner in its place. The normal procedure when a workers' building was threatened by the Fascists would be for a special force of armed police or Royal Guards to appear first to "protect" it; these would search for and remove any arms, disarm the workers in it, Πand prevent any workers' demonstration approaching it; the Fascists would then arrive with full arms, and machine-guns; the police forces would then declare resistance impossible and retire; and the Fascists would be left free to work their will on the defenceless building and disarmed workers.
Between January and May 192 1, according to figures published by the Italian Socialist Party at the time, the Fascists destroyed 120 labour headquarters, attacked 243 socialist centres and other buildings, killed 202 workers (in addition to 44 killed by the police and gendarmerie), and wounded 1,144. During this period 2,240 workers were arrested by the police; 162 Fascists were arrested. During 1192 1 -2, up to the Fascist dictatorship, 500 labour halls and co-operative stores were burned, and goo socialist municipalities were dissolved.
How did Reformism and Centrism, in control of the majority of the working class, meet this offensive of the bourgeoisie? They preached to the workers to put their trust in legal and pacific methods and the use of the ballot. In May 1921, Giolitti held a general election, hoping that the reign of violence would have already broken the workers' forces. The total Socialist and Communist vote, nevertheless, actually exceeded the 1919 total, reaching 1,861,000, against 1,840,000 in 1919; 122 Socialists and 16 Communists were returned, totalling 138, as against only 35 Fascists. The workers were endeavouring to use the ballot in their defence. The Socialist organ, Avanti, in illusory triumph, proclaimed: "The Italian proletariat has submerged the Fascist reaction under an avalanche of red votes." The reality was otherwise. The "avalanche of red votes" made no difference to a situation of civil war. The violence, in place of being diminished, was increased.
The next step of the reformist leadership was to spread even more disastrous illusions as to the real character of the struggle. They endeavoured to enter into a formal treaty of peace with Fascism. On August 3, 19 2 1, the Fascist-Socialist Treaty was signed, proclaiming an end to all acts of violence. This was signed by Mussolini and his colleagues on the one side; on the other by the Executive of the Socialist Party, of the Socialist Parliamentary Group and of the General Confederation of Labour. The Communist Party refused to take part in this criminal comedy. The agreement was not worth the paper it was written on. The Fascist violence went forward; and Mussolini explained the violation of his pledge by declaring that he had been "overridden" by his supporters.
The final step of the reformist leadership was to endeavour to enter into a parliamentary ministerial combination. After the resignation of ΠFacta in July 1922, Turati as the Socialist parliamentary leader saw the King. When the attempt to secure agreed terms for a ministerial coalition was unsuccessful, the Reformist leadership conceived the idea of calling a general strike at this late stage as a weapon of extra- parliamentary pressure to bring about the formation of a coalition government. The general strike was called on August I, wholly without preparation, and was explained by Turati to be a strike "in defence of the State." Under these conditions the general strike was inevitably a failure, reaching only a section of the membership of the Confederation of Labour, and winning no general response, because of the utter lack of serious preparation or fighting lead. The effect was only to play into the hands of the Fascists, who intensified their attack.
The conditions were now complete for the final step of the open transmission of power by the bourgeoisie into the hands of the Fascists. This took place in October. The transmission was carried through by the combined action of the King, the army chiefs and the Facta Cabinet. A theatrical "March on Rome" of Fascists was organised for October 28. This march was in fact organised under six army generals; and the Commander-in-Chief of the Army addressed an enthusiastic Fascist gathering on the evening of October 27. The Facta Cabinet went through the form of proclaiming martial law; this only had the effect that the civil authorities handed over their powers to the military throughout the country, who promptly allowed the Fascists to occupy the public offices, railways, postal and telegraphic offices, etc. After this bad been successfully achieved, the King announced on the morning of October 28 that he refused to sign the decree of martial law; martial law was accordingly withdrawn; it was in consequence declared impossible to "defend" Rome against the Fascists. The Facta Cabinet, which had already been in negotiation with the FASCISTS resigned. Mussolini was invited to form a Ministry, and arrived at Rome on October 30 in a sleeping-car. Such was the so-called Fascist "revolution," which was in fact carried through from start to finish by the bourgeois dictatorship from above. The full forms of the Fascist dictatorship were not immediately decided and carried through, as in Germany eleven years later, because the methods were still being experimentally discovered. At first, a show of parliamentary forms and permission of opposition parties and Press was maintained, alongside wholesale governmentally maintained violence and terrorism in practice. It was not until 1926 that the completed Fascist dictatorship was finally established, with complete suppression of all other parties, organisations and Press, the workers' trade unions being officially incorporated in the Fascist syndicates, and the principal Reformist Πtrade union leaders, including D'Aragona, passing over to Fascism. The Italian example provides the classic demonstration of the transition to Fascism. The lines of development, the roles of the different elements, the successive stages of this tragedy of the working class stand out clear and sharp for all to learn. What are the principal conclusions that stand out?
First, the revolutionary wave in Italy was broken, not by the bourgeoisie, not by Fascism, but by its own inner weakness and lack of revolutionary leadership, by Reformism. Second, Fascism only came to the front after the proletarian advance was already broken from within and disillusionment had been spread. Fascism appeared on the scene after the battle in order to play the hero (under police and military protection) in harassing and slaughtering an army already in retreat. Third, the transition to open Fascist dictatorship was no sudden abrupt break and reversal of bourgeois policy, but a continuation of bourgeois policy into new forms. Fascism was prepared and fostered within the conditions of bourgeois democracy (alongside a show of "liberalism" and concessions, so long as the bourgeois forces were unprepared), to be placed in power when the conditions were ripe. All these lessons were demonstrated in the classic example of Italian Fascism. Nevertheless, they were not yet learnt by the international working class. They were to be demonstrated anew on a yet wider scale in the next decade in Germany.
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