[Transcript]
The increased strength of the far‐right in Italy and elsewhere in Europe is well known. But this time, something new is happening. The forty‐five‐year‐old Giorgia Meloni is not only to become Italy’s first female prime minister, but is set to form the most right‐wing government of Italy since Benito Mussolini.
She would be the first Italian leader since 1945 whose political party has never clearly renounced its fascist background. Why is fascism still alive in Italy? How come it wasn’t permanently defeated? This video is the first of three which I’ll release leading up to the election on September 25th to answer these questions.
Meloni’s party, Fratelli d’Italia, is directly linked to its fascist past. To understand the political mess in Italy today, we must understand that past. In 1996, Meloni openly praised Mussolini:
“I think that Mussolini was a good politician. Everything that he did, he did for Italy.”
Time and again, FDI parliamentarians , mayors, and party cadres make headlines with the Fascist salute, or with praise of the Duce or sometimes even Hitler. Is the likely win of Meloni gonna bring fascism to Italy? To make a better educated guess about the future of Italy, it is essential to learn about the history of fascism in Italy and why so many revolutionary socialists joined the Fascist movement.
At the outbreak of World War I, Italy remained neutral. The Socialist Party of Italy, or the PSI, was one of the few European, ostensibly socialist parties [which] did not advocate for the participation in the war (unlike the SPD in Germany, for instance). One of the more prominent members of the PSI, who was among those arguing against participation, was a certain Benito Mussolini, though his stance would for only a few months.
By the end of 1914, Mussolini fully supported the intervention of Italy in the war, and would soon lead the Fascist movement. This change in opinion didn’t occur out of nowhere, however. Understanding Mussolini’s seemingly quick shift to the right is important for Marxist struggle against opportunism, and of grasping the rise of Fascism in general.
In earlier years, Mussolini, who had a working‐class background, considered himself a Marxist, saying [in 1908] that Marx is, quote
“the greatest theoretician of socialism”
However, the Marxism that had reached him was a revised Marxism. IT was through people like Arturo Labriola, Enrico Leone, and most prominently, through Georges Sorel, that Mussolini learned about Marxist theory. A great admirer of Marx, Sorel began to ditch key components of Marxist theory one by one, such as the theory of value, a critique of private property, or historical materialism. Quote [from 1903]:
To reform in a bourgeois society is to affirm private property[.] This whole book [Introduction à l’économie moderne] thus presupposes that private property is an unquestionable fact.
Like Labriola and Leone, who sought to combine Marx with marginal utility theory, he defended the importance of market forces, something [that] Marxists want to abolish in the construction of socialism. Followers of Sorel, the so‐called Sorelians, would later embrace nonintervention by the state in the economy to let competition for life and victory flourish, so to speak.
In full agreement with the most extreme principles of the liberal political economy, he sided with German social democrat Eduard Bernstein when he put forth the revision of Marx in German social democracy. (I already did an extensive analysis of this. You can watch that video by clicking on the eye in the top right corner.) Sorel agreed with the need to revise Marx, but in a different direction. Whereas Bernstein wanted to update Marxism towards justifying reformism, Sorel maintained that revolution is the way forward.
But to him, revolution was not something that arises out of the inherent contradictions of capitalism, but out of a conscious, spiritual choice by the proletariat, which needs to be assisted by the “Power of Myth”. He had apparently found the underlying spiritual and irrational truth in Marxism, a truth [that] the orthodox Marxists had not understood according to him. Quote:
“A fully developed class is, according to Marx, a collectivity of families united by traditions, interests, and political opinions”
Now, if you’ve actually read Marx, you would know what a big load of nonsense [that] this is. Sorel would later declare that “Socialism is dead” and would openly seek common grounds with French reactionary Charles Maurras, the hate for “bourgeois degeneration”, and the so‐called bourgeois values remained and united them. But there was no rejection of the capitalist system itself. Now doesn’t that remind you of many self‐proclaimed Marxists today?
What is important to understand here is that the Fascist movement, just like [the neofascist one] today, drew a lot from the anti‐bourgeoisie, anti‐liberal‐democracy, and a general anti‐establishment sentiment of various currents. One such current was revolutionary syndicalism, heavily influenced by Sorel’s ideas, since the general strike was the aspect most centred in Sorel’s thought.
Parts of the revolutionary syndicalist movement, frustrated with the results of the strike wave in the early twentieth century, eventually found common ground with nationalist currents, leading to the nationalist‐syndicalist synthesis, a key moment in the emergence of Fascism. Already interested in Sorel, Mussolini became convinced by the ideas of the revolutionary syndicalist current.
Mussolini was not a distinguished theoretician, but as a journalist he would read a lot about a broad range of tropics. Just like Labriola and Sorel, he became particularly interested by influential Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto. Many people know that name through popular concepts such as the Pareto principle or Pareto efficiency.
During Mussolini’s exile in Lausanne in French‐speaking Switzerland, at the beginning of the twentieth century, he probably visited Pareto’s lecture, who was a professor there at the time. Mussolini was especially interested in Pareto’s “theory of élites”, which states that élites play a dominant rôle revolutions or régime changes, that they are the real source of change. Ordinary people were merely followers of élites, who then replaced the élites of the former system.
This is in contrast to Marxist concept of revolution, which is expressed by the slogan “the masses make history.” A revolutionary communist party and lead and guide the revolution, but only if a critical mass of the working class population are ready to consciously and proactively bring it about.
In 1910, Mussolini seemed to be a committed internationalist, and a militarist, and a proponent of class struggle. He condemned the Italian nationalist movement, or the Italo‐Turkish war of 1912, and he tried to initiate a general strike to protest the war, but it failed, and he was put in prison. Just like Sorel, he began to have doubts about the ability of the working class to fulfill its historic rôle. Already in 1909, he largely accepted Sorel’s revised Marxism, but Mussolini, unlike Sorel, was an influential member of a socialist party, and just when the party embraced Mussolini’s rise to the top, he began his ideological transformation, breaking away from socialist positions, and slowly but surely moving towards Fascism.
Due to the failure of many strikes, many of the revolutionary syndicalists, just like Mussolini, became more and more convinced that it was not the class struggle, but nationalism itself that had to be strengthened in order to solve Italy’s problems. Nationalism and patriotism experienced a rapid rise at the outbreak of the war, and opportunists could score lots of political points by riding that wave.
Mussolini was expelled from the Socialist Party for his support for the war, and in October of 1914, with funding from an Italian armament firm, Mussolini formed the pro‐war paper, Il Popolo d’Italia, and by December he fully broke from any vestiges of Marxism, denouncing class struggle and prioritising the nation. Quote:
The nation has not disappeared . We used to believe that the concept was totally without substance. Instead we see the nation arise as a palpitating reality before us! […] Class cannot destroy the nation. […] The class struggle is a vain formula.
And then in 1932 he reiterated clearly, quote:
“Fascism [is] the complete opposite of […] Marxian Socialism”
You can see how this convergence lead to the Nationalist Socialist [sic] movement in Germany, but more of that in another video.
Mussolini was not the only one of the Italian socialists who broke with Marxism and sid[ed] with nationalism. It was a massive current, of which Mussolini was just a part of. In 1917, he took £100 per week from the British MI5—which is equivalent to over £7,200 today—to spread pro‐war propaganda and undermine anti‐war protests. Mussolini and the other Sorelians denounced the October Revolution of 1917, saying [that] the Bolsheviks were destroying the bourgeois economic system (what a great tragedy).
You can see how they linked the wellbeing of the working class to the wellbeing of the nation, which is in turn linked to the wellbeing of the capitalist mode of production. This narrative now became the backbone of their seemingly pro‐worker rhetoric, which doesn’t differ too much from the usual pro‐capitalist rhetoric.
In 1919, Mussolini created the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, or Italian Fighting Bands in English, and along with it several Fascist fighting squads emerged, with immense funding and support from big landowners and industrialists. They were established in various regions to fight the socialists and striking workers, who had become stronger after World War I.
After the end of the war in 1919 and 1920, in the so‐called Bienno Rosso, or the “Two Red Years”, socialists and left‐syndicalists, inspired by the October Revolution in Russia, sought to take power in Italy. They occupied factories, lands, and organised immense strikes. Party membership rose from 20,000 at the end of the war to almost 90,000 in 1919, and then to almost 200,000 in 1920. Membership of the CGL, one of the bigger Italian trade unions, rose within the same period from 200,000 to 2,000,000. However, just like in Germany, the Italian Socialist leadership, already compromised by reformism, failed to prepare for revolution.
Many revolutionaries would then split from the Socialist Party in 1921 to create the Communist Party of Italy. The Italian establishment feared nonetheless that Italy would turn socialist, and it seemed like only the Fascists were sufficiently determined and capable to undermine the socialist movement. One of the founders of the Communist Party of Italy, Antonio Gramsci, wrote in 1924, quote:
“It became clear after the War that it was impossible for the Italian bourgeoisie to go on ruling with a democratic system.”
The Fasci Italiani di Combattimento was reorganised into the National Fascist Party in 1921, and the Fascist squads became known as the “Blackshirts”, a paramilitary wing of the party. There was a similar development in Germany at the time, when the protofascist Freikorps were propped up to fight the strong communist movement, which was on the verge of taking power. The Nazi Party would then emerge out of the Freikops movement.
The Fascists were also supported through many channels of the state. The police frequently failed to stop the Fascist killings, at times even selling them weapons. Quote:
Due to their trenchant opposition to the socialist movement they obtained the support of the capitalists and the authorities. […] They emerged during the same period when the rural landowners were feeling the need to create a White Guard to tackle the growing workers’ organisations. […] The gangs that were already organised and armed by the big landowners soon adopted the label Fasci for themselves too. With their subsequent development, these gangs would acquire their own distinct character — as a White Guard of capitalism against the class organs of the proletariat.”
Almost exactly one hundred years ago, in October of 1922, the Fascists organised the infamous “March on Rome”, which culminated in the victory of Fascism in Italy, despite them gathering just a small number of votes. But the March on Rome was not a coup against the government that was wholly hostile to them. The Fascists faced little to zero resistance! In fact, liberal politicians had offered Mussolini the prime minister position well before the Blackshirts arrived in the capital. Italy’s leaders never called on the military to stop Mussolini’s insurrection.
The political, military, and business élite agreed that fighting the Fascists would only strengthen the left, and letting them into power would restore order, and defeat, quote,
“Strikes, Bolshevism, and Nationalisation”
The then‐prime minister wanted to order a state of siege to stop the Fascists, but it was futile. King Vittorio Emanuele III refused to sign the military order, and on October 29, the King, supported by the business class and the military leadership, handed power to Mussolini. Just like the Nazis in Germany, the Mussolini government immediately began to centralise state power, ban labour strikes, and then suffocate all left organisations.
Many of the syndicalist leaders became leading members of the leading National Fascist Party. The Fascists implemented corporatism, which involved linking together employer and employé syndicates, with heavy state involvement in the name of national unity. Different class interests, quote,
“are coordinated and harmonized in the unity of the State”
The state would enforce class collaboration, thus killing all attempts at class struggle. Linking all economic activity to the state is not socialism, though. Socialism is famously not when ‘the government does stuff’. The Fascist state upheld private property rights, the existence of a market economy, and a wealthy capitalist class.
Various minorities were persecuted and killed. Mussolini said in a speech in 1921, quote,
“Fascism was born […] out of a profound, perennial need of this our Aryan and Mediterranean race”.
He would say that the Italians are to be seen as the Mediterranean branch of the Aryan race. The racial laws in Fascist Italy enforced segregation and racial discrimination, restricting rights of Jews, banning their books, and excluding them from holding public offices or positions in banking and education. Marriages and sexual relations between Italians, people from Africa, and Jewish people were banned. Romani people were heavily discriminated, and held in designated camps. Thousands of Jews would be deported and killed during the Holocaust in Italy.
Italian nationalism would be expressed in its most reactionary and imperialist form. Italy was identified as the heir to the Roman Empire, and its colonial empire included present‐day Eritrea, Libya, Ethiopia, and Somalia in Africa, holding the Dodecanese Islands and Albania in Europe. Hundreds of thousands of Italian settlers moved to these regions, encouraged by the government in its policy of demographic colonisation.
An FDI chapter in Trieste has caused outrage for including former territories, Dalmatia and Fiume, in its name, reminiscent of Italian irredentism that is associated with the Fascists.
The Roman salute, supposedly inspired by ancient Rome, was adopted by the Fascist government in Italy and made compulsory within the Nazi Party in 1926. The National Fascist Party ruled the Kingdom of Italy from 1922 until 1943, and then the Republic Fascist Party ruled the Nazi puppet state named ‘Italian Social Republic’ from 1943 ’til 1945, until the Allied advancement and the Italian national liberation defeated the Fascists.
On April 27, 1945, Mussolini almost crossed the border to Switzerland before being caught by communist partisans. During the resistance, the Italian Communist Party became immensely popular, as most of the partisans were communists. The Office of Strategic Services, or the OSS, a U.S. intelligence agency stationed in Italy, had requested that Mussolini should be handed over to the U.N. forces immediately. Unfortunately for them, the communists executed Mussolini on April 28.
He was captured once before, and rescued by German paratroops. This time he had no such chance. Partisans tried him, along with his sweetheart, and several henchmen, just as these pictures show the trial previously of other key Fascists and other collaborators. He was brought before a firing a squad, and in this manner he died as tyrants should, and was hung up by his heels, a fitting and glorious end!
Five days before Mussolini’s death, he said, quote,
“History will prove me right […] a young person will rise, a leader who will inevitably agitate the ideas of fascism.”
And is it a coincidence that Meloni would say in July of [2022] in a speech, quote,
“We’ve had three different governments, three different majorities [since the March 2018 general elections]. Have any worked? No. History has proved us right.”
As I hoped to show with the ideological development of Mussolini and the syndicalists, Fascism draws heavily from the anti‐establishment, sometimes even anticapitalist sentiment. When Fascism has historically drawn most of the support from disaffected right‐wingers, some of that support comes also from disaffected left‐wing elements, people fed up with the system and the false promises of liberal democracy.
It is however a right‐wing, procapitalist movement through and through. The formerly left elements fully relinquished their supposed adherence to Marxism and social progress in general. It is thus crucial in undermining the communist movement, directing people away from a movement that seeks to overthrow capitalism, to an ideology that seeks to protect it. Quote:
“In short, “democracy” organized fascism when it felt [that] it could no longer resist the pressure of the working class in conditions even of only formal freedom. Fascism, by shattering the working class, has restored to “democracy” the possibility of existing. In the intentions of the bourgeoisie, the division of labour should operate perfectly: […] the alternation of fascism and democracy should serve to exclude forever any possibility of working‐class resurgence.”
…wrote Antonio Gramsci in 1924.
So why did Mussolini shift to the right? On the ideological level, it was the revised Marxism that reached Mussolini, but it’s not just the ideological revision that is at fault. It is also the conditions that make people susceptible to it. Mussolini could have questioned the missing capitalist critique of the Sorelians, but he became convinced by it. Of course, Marxism needs to develop constantly and adapt to the conditions of a specific country or a time period, but we must scrutinise the direction of those updates: do they serve the struggle for abolishing classes, or do they serve the capitalist class?
This is not dogmatism, because for Marxism to mean anything, it must differentiate itself from the liberal and fascist movement. If key principles of socialism aren’t upheld, why struggle for socialism to begin with?
Not everyone is in the socialist movement for reaching its goals. Some are in it for themselves. IT requires constant struggle within a communist organisation, and within oneself, to be aware of the forces that drag people toward compromising with the current system. Money, glory, and power are especially luring for many people as the movement for a different system grows, and the bourgeoisie knows this, so they frequently offer socialists positions within the political establishment to satisfy their need for institutional power, to make them compromise on their revolutionary principles. Such was the case with the Eberts and Scheidemanns in Germany, for instance.
The road to abolish capitalism is long, hard, and uncertain. Some considered the easy way after this realisation, or after the failure of the strike, for instance. Many among the socialist left realise [that] they can find common ground with reactionaries, and easily grow their social power immediately for seeking unity with them. As this Sorel as when he sought unity with reactionaries like Charles Maurras, or Mussolini when witnessing the rapid rise and strength of the nationalist movement.
Of course, most people who go this route have never truly broken with reactionary ideas [that] they’ve had from the beginning, hence they’ll find it easier to find agreement with the right‐wing. It is often said that people with a petty bourgeois background—small business owners, for instance—are especially susceptible to fascist ideas. Many of them are frustrated with the current establishment ruled by the big capitalists, [who] usually win the competition against smaller capitalists, taking away their market share, and many times even kill[ing] their whole business.
However, many petty bourgeois people still want to keep private property and the capitalist system in general, and thus choose fascism over communism. History has shown that fascism is also a movement of the big capitalists, and that even many people with a working class background, such as Mussolini, became convinced by it. The opportunist right‐wing line is always easier than the revolutionary left line, because the former is institutionally, financially, and ideologically supported by the current class system. Mussolini couldn’t have been successful without support from the bourgeoisie both within and outside Italy. Quote:
The crisis creates situations which are dangerous in the short run, since the various strata of the population are not all capable of orienting themselves equally swiftly[.] The traditional ruling class, which has numerous trained cadres, changes men and programmes, and with grater speed than is achieved by the subordinate classes, reabsorbs the control that was slipping from its grasp
Understanding this is essential in grasping what Fascism is at its core, and hence understanding the politics of today in general. Capitalist will always provide fertile soil for the fascist movement for as long as it exists. Capitalism will always try to coopt the socialist movement, and provide incentives for anti‐establishment people to turn to the right. What is essential to get here is that Fascism was not beaten after Mussolini. Elements of the ruling class once again Mussolini followers in their brutal oppression against communism.
In the next video, we will look at one of the most interesting and bloody periods of recent history in Italy, in which Fascists collaborated through secretive networks, involving Freemasonry, the mafia, the Vatican, the political and business establishment, and the CIA, and we will look at the roots and the forerunner of the Fratelli d’Italia, so make sure [that] you’re subscribed to not miss the next part which will drop soon.
Thank you for watching. You will now be able to better understand what’s happening in Italy, and why many self‐proclaimed Marxists (just like Mussolini) choose to move to the right today as well.