Luigi Fabbri's moving account and analysis of the rise of fascism in Italy.

Foreword

In spite of all the good intentions to the contrary which I brought to this essay, I have in fact failed, in examining the dark issue of fascism, to stand “above the fray”.

Many a time I have tried to suppress the pain and outrage that stirred my hand, but immediately thereafter wounded feelings surged back to offer me counsel in tune with a disturbed and aggravated state of mind. The fact is that I do not really stand above the fray. If only for personal reasons, as a matter of temperament and custom and, to a slight extent – confined to the climate in which I live – out of a professional obligation, I stand slightly apart from the active, militant movement, which is to say that my involvement in the bitter social struggle is all too slight and almost exclusively confined to my writing, even though I too am in this fight with all of my heart and mind.

For around thirty years now I have been an anarchist and revolutionary and I regard myself as another obscure soldier in the proletarian army fighting the old world: and whereas this was something in which I took pride, when fortune was smiling upon us and the working class looked, after victory upon victory, to be on the verge of the ultimate victory, I was all the more proud to feel that I was one of its own come the grey and yellow hour of disappointment and defeat. And I cherished the hope of fairly imminent revenge, since, whilst troops easily enthused about the prospect of imminent excitement were disappointed, I stood firm in my belief in the inevitable victory of an egalitarian, libertarian justice for all.

Maybe we needed this harsh lesson from reality. For some time past too much detritus had been building up along the way, too many thoughtless things had been said and done and unduly easy successes had attracted to our side insincere and self-seeking persons out to turn our ideal into a cloak or a kiosk. And upstarts eager to use it for self-advancement. Maybe it was good luck that made many of them less kindly and less fair, or overly complacent and indulgent of the onset of the sort of degeneration that always besets movements that look to be the strongest and on the verge of success. And, when the storm struck, and the gale swept away the detritus and all the trivia, it also swept away the insincere self-seekers. We may well lament the fact that the lightning also struck the old sturdy, fruitful tree that had borne good crops, but on the other hand, the soil will have become more fertile under the plough of pain and the whirlwind will have left the air purer and fresher.

However, whilst it is true that it is an ill wind that blows no good, evil is always evil and as such, must be resisted. To resist it we need to look it in the face and take the measure of it. And the modest pages that follow may prove of service to that end. They make no claim to the prize of impartiality and the most Olympian serenity, for I too am parti pris, committed to the ranks in which I march and I identify profoundly with all the oppressed, whatever their particular political background, against those who beat, murder, torch and destroy in such cavalier fashion and with such impunity today. But, however much passion may have prompted me to speak thus, I hope that I have not done any injury to the truth.

What I have written here is not a history of fascism; I have merely made the occasional reference to certain specific facts, more in support of my thesis than with any real narrative intent. So lots of my assertions may appear unduly absolute and axiomatic. However, not one of those assertions does not have precise corresponding facts, many specific facts with which the newspapers have been replete for the past year or so; and I do not mean just the subversive press. One can draw up the harshest and most violent indictment of fascism on foot of documentation drawn from the conservative papers most well-disposed towards fascism and from the fascist press proper.

Moreover, the fascist phenomenon is not peculiar to Italy. It has surfaced in even more serious form in Spain and has raised its head in Germany, Hungary, the Americas and elsewhere. Nor were persecution and unlawful reaction mounted by private citizens unknown prior to the World War. In certain respects, they had precedents in the pogroms in Russia and the lynchings in the United States. What is more, the United States has always had a sort of private police in the service of the capitalists, acting in cahoots with the official police, but independently of government, in troubled times and during strikes.

Italian fascism has its own characteristics, motley origins, positions, etc. In some instances it is an improvement upon its brothers or precursors beyond the mountains or across the seas, and in some cases worse than these. But it is not entirely a novelty. From a detailed reading of Italian history from 1795 and 1860, we might well be able to trace its historical ancestry. Take, for example, the Sanfedisti: in the context of the secret societies, these seem to have begun as a patriotic, reform-minded sect, albeit sui generis; but later they turned reactionary and pro-Austrian establishment against the “red” conspirators from the Carbonari and Young Italy.

Especially in the Papal States, in Faenza, Ravenna, etc., the Sanfedisti warred with the Carbonari: but the government heaped all the blame exclusively upon the Carbonari. De Castro (Mondo Secreto, Vol. VIII) recounts: “An armed, bloodthirsty rabble wrought havoc and looted throughout the city and countryside of Frosinone in the name of defending the throne and hunted down liberals: and the government dispatched the liberals to the gallows and acquitted the brigands.”

There is nothing really new under the sun, or so it seems! And if, in the past, the most violent conspiracies against freedom and against the people proved unable to fend off new ideas, prevent the downfall of old institutions and the emergence of new ones, then today too, they will not succeed and they will not succeed in the future.

The living step into the shoes of the dead,

Hope follows mourning,

The army is unleashed and goes marching

Blithely lashing out at the vanquished.

Bologna, 15 October 1921

P.S. –More than two months have elapsed since I completed this essay: but lots of new events have come to pass which would require a fuller treatment of my subject, discussion of new developments, etc. Since that was not feasible, I have restricted myself to adding, as I reviewed the by then published text, a few lines here and there (in the case of the more significant matters) and some short footnotes. (December 1921)

THE PREVENTIVE COUNTER-REVOLUTION

Studying historical happenings from too close a quarter or, worse still, while they are in progress, is harder than one might imagine. Furthermore, there is the danger of falling into serious error, both because passing emotions wield too great a sway upon us and because things seen from too close a quarter are almost as hard to distinguish as they would be from too great a distance.

Yet just such a monograph relating to contemporary developments is material of use to the future historian who will have access, not just to the dry catalogue of events in the newspapers, but the view of these taken by someone who was an onlooker and was more or less personally implicated in them and he can therefore arrive at a clearer idea of the events themselves, seeing them more completely and in the round and thereby arriving at a reconstruction of the historical picture of an entire period that comes as close as possible to the truth.

But for such source materials to be truly useful, those who supply them must strive on the one hand to remain as level-headed and objective as possible in their relation of events, and, on the other, offer comment on the events and set out their own thoughts and feelings with complete honesty, so that the outside reader may appreciate not only the skeletal material event but also the climate of opinion in which it occurred or which was inspired by it in a variety of contexts.

Despite my best efforts, I cannot say whether I will succeed in being objective and level-headed enough in my treatment of a subject that moves me deeply. I am certain, though, that I will set out my thinking honestly and holding nothing back, confident as I am that in so doing I will be doing the only thing I can on behalf of an Idea that I cherish and which in my view represents the very cause of justice.

I

Fascism is the most natural and legitimate product of the war; I will go further and say that it represents the continuation at national level of the world war begun in July 1914 and not yet finished in spite of all the partial or overall peace treaties.

The war of 1914-1918 was fought not just on the borders but also on the inside of every nation. On every side the so-called “sacred union” against the enemy without was a lie agreed upon, a lie that everybody formally embraced even in the knowledge that it was a fiction. State and military coercion precluded the eruption of hostilities at home and thus prevented the fear of worse damage to follow in the event of foreign invasion; but the class conflict and factional strife and animosity was all the greater because it was unable to find a suitable outlet. In reality, inside every country everybody had something that he despised more profoundly than the enemy without.

That conflict and those hostilities found a thousand ways of expressing themselves, on the most varied occasions and most varied circumstances even while the war was on. But, once the armistice had put paid to the war and the military coercion and threat of invasion ceased, internal conflicts and hostilities quickly showed themselves as they truly were and in all their intensity.

And the war between the nations has not ended: the terms and forms, etc. may have changed, but on the borders of Germany and Russia in the Balkans, in Asia Minor, etc., the war carries on. Albeit on a different scale. Whereas, prior to 1918, the war on the borders predominated and the civil strife within each country remained latent or was pursued at a subtle level, storing up resentments for the future, the opposite is the case today. It is civil war that makes the greatest fuss and claims the most attention, in Italy at any rate: whereas the other sort of war, dormant, erupting barely perceptibly here and there, more or less sustained and dragged out by official congresses and diplomatic vanities where the pretexts, rationales and causes of future wars stack up.

Fascism, guerrilla warfare between fascists and socialists – or, to be more accurate, between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat – is nothing but the natural unleashing and material consequence of the class hostilities honed during the war and aggravated by a number of secondary circumstances and factors which only appear – and then only briefly – to have distorted its character, which triumphs and comes to the fore when least expected.

Fascism is a response to the defensive needs of modern society’s ruling classes. As such, it need not be unduly equated with the official, numbered, monitored and card-carrying members of the “Fasci di combattimento”. The latter may have provided the phenomenon with a name and blazed a trail for it and furnished its organised central core, woven its rallying colours and offered or tried to offer a idealistic motive for the fight: which is to say they have done a lot for it – but they have not done everything. In reality they are not the whole and all of fascism: and occasionally it happens that fascism reneges, in fact and cruelly if not in words, a number of the presumed ideals and agendas that the first fascists brandished like a flag.

With the war, there emerged the greatest proletarian unanimity against the ruling class and this led to an extraordinary deepening of the gulf between the classes, with the one regarding the other as its declared enemy. And in particular, the ruling class, seeing its power threatened, lost its head. What disturbed it most, perhaps, was the feeling that it could not defend itself except through recourse to violence and civil war, which, in theory and through its laws, it had always condemned: it was undermining the very foundations and principles upon which the bourgeoisie had been constructing its institutions for upwards of a century.

The proletarian menace welded the ruling class, of which fascism today constitutes a sort of militia and rallying point, into a bloc. And the ruling class is not comprised solely of the bourgeoisie proper: it comprises and is made up also of the most backward-looking strata, all of the castes that eke out a parasitic existence under the aegis of the state or who man its ramifications; those who supply the government and the protected industries, the police (grown to mammoth proportions these days), the upper bureaucracy and judiciary and are – all of them – more or less fascistic in outlook. Add to these the landowning bourgeoisie, which is backward-looking by nature and tradition, and always has its back to the wall of peasant demands, which in the long run it could not withstand except by renouncing all profit, which is to say the very privilege that property confers.

Around the ruling class proper there also cluster classes or sub-classes and categories for whom the existing state of affairs actually holds out no inviting prospect but which, due to their wrong-headed mind-set delude themselves that they live, or might yet, better than the workers thanks to the bounty of the state and the favours of others: the petite bourgeoisie, many employees and teachers, certain professions and so on. The line-up is swollen further by all the would-be politicians and journalistic hacks, the flotsam and jetsam left behind by the disappearance of semi-democratic and radical parties and the like, annoyed with the working class that wants nothing to do with them and their quack panaceas.

Naturally, the old parties which are conservative by definition and tradition profit from this state of affairs and this spontaneously generated out and out conservative bloc and are coming back with a vengeance. Fascism is pretty much the standard-bearer to them all and is well received and courted everywhere: in the barracks and in the university, at police headquarters and at the court-house, in the plants of heavy industries and the landowners’ counting-houses. Nor is there any shortage of more or less cautious and covert tributes emanating from the mainstays of several parties such as the republican party or the clerical party, even though they may in principle be competitors in that it has its mass following.

The fascists proper, the ones with the badges on their lapels, are relatively few in number but derive their strength from the closed ranks, direct and indirect aid and poorly concealed complicity of all of the various conservative forces in society.

***

It is primarily as the organisation and agent of the violent armed defence of the ruling class against the proletariat, which, to their mind, has become unduly demanding, united and intrusive, that fascism represents a continuation of the war.

It would be too simplistic to say that the world war was a sort of international war on the proletariat and against revolution. There were other equally important factors and motives behind the war; but it is a fact that one of the things that triggered the conflict in Europe, one of the factors why no ruling class in any country – not in France, not in Germany, not in Russia, not in Austria, not in England, not in Italy – did what might have been necessary and what it might have done to avert war – was precisely the hope that each of them had of being spared revolution, decapitating a working class that had become overly strong, defusing popular resistance through blood-letting on a vast scale, consolidating crowned heads and especially the rule of the banking and industrial plutocracy.

Many have, as the saying goes, paid the price of this: once the floodgates were opened, the surging currents have swept away many of the crowned heads of Germany, Russia, Austria, etc., but everybody played his hand in the hope of emerging as the winner: which is to say, of defeating not just the enemy on the other side of the border, but also the enemy within, the organised proletariat, socialism and revolution.

And I do not believe that I am exaggerating here. As long ago as 1912, Prof. G.A. Laisant from the Polytechnique in Paris was denouncing the plutocrats’ war-mongering, reporting confidential remarks by a leading Parisian financier who had explained to him why, during the Balkan war that year, France’s high financial circles had funded all of the various warring factions simultaneously. It was known that the flames would spread – as indeed they did – from the Balkans to the whole of Europe and this was a conflagration that was sought.

“We” (the informant stated) “wish to become the sovereign arbiters of the situation. Inevitably, war in Europe is going to be the upshot of events: because we wish that and there is no way that we can be resisted. We seek war and need it for a variety of reasons. The chief one being the gathering energy of the organised working class, especially in France and in Germany … If the advances in labour organisation continue, nothing will be able to stop it: and we shall be confronted with certain revolutionary catastrophe, irreversible universal ruination… The war will be a huge blood-bath, it is true … But the great interests which we represent cannot be defended with humanitarian sentimentality. We shall rebuild upon the ruins. Labour organisation, the source of economic disorder, will be shattered the world over … Anyway, we cannot be choosy about our methods: using the ultimate weapon of a European war we have the benefit of certain victory. We care not who the losers or the winners may be, for, in the final analysis, our enemy is the proletariat, which is going to be defeated: and we shall emerge as the real winners.”

Laisant may well have over-egged the pudding somewhat, but the essential idea remains: the war was needed in order to halt the advances being made by the proletariat at the expense of capitalism. And, let me say it again, capitalism got its sums wrong: the blow struck more than its target and not every ruling class in every nation has reason to celebrate the success of the war. But as a general international fact, the proletariat looks as if it has been defeated everywhere – although there are a few lingering hopes for it and there may yet be a chance of is fortunes being revived.

As we have said, we are watching developments from rather too close quarters: and perhaps what looks like a defeat to us is merely a set-back, the prelude to a proletarian victory to follow. But it is pointless to play at prophecy. As things stand today, it has to be acknowledged that right now things are going rather badly for the proletariat everywhere.

All of the democratic, liberal and egalitarian ideas trumpeted during the war have been banned. In France as in England, in the United States as in distant Japan, it is the reaction that has emerged triumphant in political as well as in economic terms. Governments and the capitalists are stronger than before: and, in terms of its well-being and freedom, the proletariat is rather worse off than in 1914. The same holds true for the Yugoslav countries, Spain, etc.

It would appear that, in political terms, the countries which were defeated militarily – Germany, Austria, Hungary, Turkey and Russia – represent an exception. Of Hungary and Turkey, bedraggled and at the mercy of the victors and of worsening domestic militarism and with the threat of further wars hovering over them, we shall say nothing. Germany, Austria and Russia nominally do enjoy free regimes: but Austria is hemmed in on all sides and now has no life of her own: and Germany which was able hold enemy armies at bay, had to smother a revolution of her own and reduce it to a token affair. In none of these nations, no matter how it might appear, can it be said that the proletariat is today more free and emancipated than prior to the war in Europe: instead, it is indirectly enslaved by foreign capitalism.

It would seem that Russia is an exception to all this. But as time goes by the more disappointments that revolution seems to hold in store for us. True, the Russian revolution was on the verge of undoing and wrecking all of international capitalism’s hegemonic schemes; and it appeared that there was still the threat of rescue from that quarter. But the likelihood of a Russian revolutionary swoop on Europe diminishes with every day that passes. A self-styled socialist and proletarian party holds power there, that is true; but the worker and peasant proletariat have thus far earned only a change of yoke, the replacement of private capitalism by state capitalism and of tsarism by a harsher military dictatorship.

***

Up until last year, the most revolutionary country in Europe, after Russia, seemed to be Italy: and whilst the state and capitalist backlash was gaining the upper hand everywhere by the end of 1920, Italy was looking like an exception.

In fact, Italy was best placed for revolution by the end of the war. On the one hand, she emerged from the war not just militarily undefeated and with no enemy armies on her soil, but also lost no territory and had no war reparations to pay and no foreign threats to prevent her from suiting herself at home. But on the other hand, due to the ineptitude of her rulers and the cynical bullying of the other victorious Allies, capitalising upon Italy’s scarce natural resources to place her in the noose of the worst usury, Italy has been treated almost as one of the vanquished in the comity of nations: and her ruling class emerged from the war spent and downcast in the face of a proletariat asserting its rights.

Whereas the other victorious states emerged from the war strengthened, the Italian state emerged weakened. And with the state, of course, capitalism’s power with regard to the workers was undermined and would have collapsed but for support from an armed force of gendarmes and soldiers. With every passing day the power of the employer class seemed to be diminishing.

Hence the upsurge by the workers’ movement and all the revolutionary parties, their ranks swollen by the backlash against war, which in Italy had been fought in absolute defiance of the wishes of the popular masses. Those masses, however, ought to have been broken by the war waged against their wishes. They should have learnt once and for all that being in the majority is no guarantee of success and of not having someone else’s wishes foisted upon them. Instead, the illusion that in order to overcome any problems one needed only to have strength of numbers persisted.

From the beginning of 1919 onwards, there was a real intoxication. Hundreds of thousands took to every public square in Italy: the socialist and revolutionary press was snapped up: subscriptions to subversive newspapers reached figures that had previously been regarded as fabulous. The proletarian parties, especially the socialist party, and the trades unions were becoming huge, massive. Revolution was on everybody’s lips: and in fact revolution had the support of the majority and its adversaries were girding up for it. The November 1919 elections, fought on an extremist programme, quadrupled the number of socialist deputies and saw the rout of the war parties, carried this intoxication to rapturous heights.

But the revolution did not come and was not made. There were only popular rallies, lots of rallies; and along with them, demonstrations, marches and countless choreographed parades. It was as if the Italian proletariat was expecting a re-enactment of the miracle of Jericho: expecting the bourgeois stronghold and the capitalist state to collapse and come tumbling down at the mere sound of revolutionary anthems and the waving of red flags. In principle, the spectacle was splendid and impressive: even the privileged, the powerful and the wealthy were taken with it and expected a collapse. But that collapse never came. As was only natural, since nobody actually set about it.

Moreover, the intoxication lasted too long, at nearly two years: and the other side, the ones who daily faced the threat of being ousted from their thrones and stripped of all privilege, began to wake up to the situation, to their own strength and the enemy’s weaknesses. There had been no shortage of openings for the oft threatened revolution. Why had they not been seized? Was it because of bad faith, ineptitude, weakness, or fear?

On three particular occasions among so many, the institutions of the monarchy came within an ace of being overthrown. And were not, simply because their adversaries were lacking in ardour. The first occasion was in the spring of 1919, during the cost-of-living riots that spread like wildfire across the whole of Italy, abetted in certain locations by military personnel. The Royal Guards had not yet been set up, the militias were weary from being held under arms and the state had no serious forces to deploy against a quite vast uprising. The second occasion came in late June 1920 during the military revolt in Ancona that threw the government into disarray: one daring push would have been enough to have a republic proclaimed and at the time a segment of the bourgeoisie was well disposed towards a republic. The third occasion was during the factory occupations in August-September 1920, which, had it spread to every other trade and secured the support of proletarian parties and organisations, might have sparked one of the most radical and least bloody revolutions imaginable.

In this last occasion, the working class was full of enthusiasm and well armed. The government, no less, later admitted that it had not had at the time sufficient resources to capture the many strongholds which the factories in which the workers had dug in had become.

But nothing was ever done!

And the responsibility for that is shared by pretty much everybody, especially the socialists who represented the strongest Italian revolutionary party. In June 1919 there was no will to act, lest it prejudice a pro-Russian demonstration scheduled by the socialists for the coming 20-21 July, which, in the event, proved a damp squib. During the Ancona revolt in 1920 the communists in charge of the socialist party rejected any suggestion of a republican uprising because that would have resulted in a moderate social democratic republic, whereas they wanted a communist dictatorship: all or nothing. They got nothing! We know how the factory occupations ended: with Giolitti’s trick promise of factory controls! And on that occasion, there was particular opposition to the continuation and extension of the revolt from the reformists of the Confederazione del Lavoro afraid that, in order to win, the government might resort to savage repression which, they argued, would have put paid to any labour and socialist movement. Alas! It was plucked out worse and more violently – as we shall see – precisely because the courage to act was lacking at the time!

The greatest responsibility for this “sweet inactivity” let me say again, belongs to the socialists. But some of the responsibility – minor, of course, in accordance with their lesser presence – must also be laid at the door of anarchists, who had recently acquired a remarkable sway over the masses but did not know what to do with it. Having said it a thousand times before and having reiterated it at their congress in Bologna in July 1920, they knew what needed doing. The government and judiciary indeed believed that the anarchists had put in the spadework for which they had lobbied so hard . Later, when the backlash came, and Malatesta, Borghi and others had been arrested, an attempt was made to bring indictments in respect of the spadework that had supposedly been done: the whole of Italy was scoured for evidence and hundreds of searches and interrogations were carried out. Not a thing could they find: and the examining magistrate, no less, had to concede that all that the anarchists had done was … hold rallies and print newspapers!

I am talking, clearly, in broad terms, of the movement as a whole. Which does not rule out the possibility that, locality by locality, in a variety of ways, unsolicited, revolutionaries of various stripes had acted, made preparations and struck. But there was no concerted effort, no concrete agreement, no preparations on a wider scale that might seize the revolutionary initiative, in spite of the bad faith and passive opposition from more moderate socialists.

The abandonment of the factories in the wake of the CGL-Giolitti agreements was like the beating of the retreat by an army that up to that point had been marching forwards. Immediately a feeling of depression ran through the workers’ ranks, whereas the government, conversely began to become sensible of its own strength. Here and there searches began to be mounted and then came the arrests. Barely a month after the factories were abandoned and the reaction’s first blow was struck, to the detriment of the smaller revolutionary faction, the anarchists.

Between 10 and 20 October, on laughable pretexts , they arrested Borghi, several of the editors of administrators of Umanità Nova (the Milan-based anarchist daily), Malatesta and other anarchists in a variety of localities – something that would not have been feasible three months before. There was the odd protest, the odd local token strike in Carrara, the Valdarno and the Tuscan Romagna, but from the leadership came the order not to move and, generally speaking, the worker masses made no move. The socialists assembled in Florence and told someone who approached them looking for advice and assistance that there was nothing that could be done. The anarchists were left to their own devices.

The conservative backlash now had a free hand and it pressed ahead, slowly at first but then at an accelerating rate.

***

But the classical backlash in the shape of states of siege, emergency laws, mass arrests and banning of associations was no longer feasible. The police crackdown might well be enough to deal with the anarchist and ultra-revolutionary minorities: but it was powerless and inadequate and might prove counter-productive where the great masses of the proletariat were concerned. It was too much and yet not enough.

But the ruling class needed to capitalise upon the momentary pause in the proletarian onslaught in order to target the proletariat in an onslaught of its own.

The delusions, depression and disarray in workers’ ranks might be short-lived and those masses could spring back to life and recapture lost ground and press forward again. What is more, the status quo had become untenable: workers’ pay was too high if the bosses were to be left the desired margin of profit: and the employers’ position as such was untenable in the face of the workers, given that the latter’s disrespectful and insubordinate attitude was increasingly limiting and diminishing the former’s authority and, together with their authority, their prestige and their profits.

And, in view of the crisis, the workers’ other gains were becoming a burden beyond the ability of the employer class to bear, a hindrance, an eating away of its property rights that could be likened to a slow strangulation. The eight hour day, the shop steward commissions in the factories, the partial or general strikes, the placement bureaux, compulsory shift work, limits set on piece-work, the ban on war production, the fines imposed for breaches of agreements, etc., etc., and, along with them all, the government’s levies, the ceiling set on food prices and rents, finally gave the employers the impression that they were bosses no longer.

All of which was even more true in the countryside where the well nigh comprehensive organisation of all the farm labourers, abetted by the take-over of common lands and a whole, dense network of production and consumer cooperatives, placement bureaux, etc., so circumscribed the landlords that they were denied all control and made them afraid lest they might die from suffocation. Hence the landlords’ wrath and their complaints that they were being ruined. And in actual fact it could well have spelled the end for them, as landlords: not, let us be clear, the ruination of productivity – which was given a tremendous boost now that every labourer had an interest in squeezing as much profit as possible from his labours. Let it be said in passing that this was not, however, (as lots of socialists deluded themselves it was) a stride towards collective ownership. More than anything else it was a slow transfer of ownership and the formation of a whole new propertied class which in time would have become a force for conservatism.

But in the mean time the injured interests were screaming, incorrigibly, that what was happening was socialism or anti-socialism. And all of these interests coalesced, biding their time before making their move against the proletariat and pushing it as far back as they could manage – in order to wrest back as many of the gains and rights it had thus far achieved. This effort of the part of the ruling class, begun a year ago, is still in progress and does not look like finishing just yet. In this ruling class onslaught, fascism plays the part of the outrider, performing what used to be described in military terms as the commando function in assault battalions. In a way, the fascists could be described as the bersaglieri of social conservatism, the counter-revolution’s freebooters.

The solid strength of fascism is the sort of strength that corresponds to a broad coalescence of interests – all the interests, ambitions and powers under threat from revolution, socialism and the proletariat. In a sense it was just what the conservatives needed precisely because (as was stated earlier) the classic forms of reaction were inadequate or damaging. On the one hand, the state had to be allowed to keep up the appearances of legality and liberalism, but at the same time, it had to be paralysed: so that, outside the state, there would be a free hand to attack the proletariat on every front, even the most lawful and moderate, by any means necessary, including the most violent, heedless of democratic, legal or sentimental concerns or prejudices. In terms of conservatism, fascism – further abetted (and this has perhaps been its greatest stroke of luck), not merely by circumstances but by the very mistakes of the workers’ and socialistic parties and organisations – has provided an outstanding answer to this need on the part of the bourgeoisie.

***

Lots of sectors, and not merely bourgeois ones, had become hostile to the socialist-minded proletariat on a range of counts, great and small, which ultimately came to surround the workers’ movement with an irritated climate, a seething, weary public opinion. The barbed remarks, innuendo, insults and vague threats made by working men and women on the streets or on the trams and directed at those who looked like – but often were not – a gentleman or a gentle-woman; the bossy, watchful and vigilant air adopted by workers in their performance of certain duties in socialist public administrations; the mocking of beliefs ands symbols other than or opposed to socialist ones; the blatant hostility displayed towards strata already known to have supported the war, strata such as students, officers, etc. – all of these things alienated broad swathes of public opinion.

With only a few exceptions, when the law intervened, such actions, behaviours or displays did not go beyond the mere tokenism and did not amount to violence against person or property. Let me say again that there may have been a few exceptions, especially in moments of mob hysteria; but it was not these exceptions that caused the greatest annoyance, but, rather, the drip, drip of vague, impersonal, nebulous, unfathomable hostilities that could not be squared with one another – every single incident was avoidable – given lack of education in masses who were beyond the control even of their own leaders and labour organisers. Nonetheless, it was the build-up of these that added to the feeling of malaise in all who were not formally part of the socialist ranks or did not appear to be so.

Next came the most serious causes, especially the very frequent public service strikes of which very many workers eventually tired. My own view is that public services workers too have the right to strike, be it economic or political, for the simple reason that the first freedom is freedom of the individual to do what he will with his labour power, to deploy it or not to deploy it as he sees fit. But from the vantage point of class interest and the interest of the revolution – for the sake of which we should try to build as broad a consensus as possible, reducing the number of persons hostile to it – the workers themselves should impose a limit upon the use of this double-edged sword, which can be highly effective at certain times and in certain circumstances, but by its very nature, tends to alienate public opinion and limit support for the movement, not just among the ruling classes, but in every class.

That the working class of a city should down tools by way of a protest, over some grave trespass against public freedoms, over some unjustified outrage, over some serious trespass against the right of organisation, etc., was perfectly reasonable and understandable. Thus, for the railway workers to bring services to a halt, in order to prevent shipment of war materials for use by the Entente against Russia, or to hinder the bringing in of police or troop reinforcements to a city in revolt was wholly understandable from the viewpoint of the workers and the revolution. I appreciate the disruption that such measures may have caused and the outrage felt by adversaries and conservatives and the rigours of the law which protect privilege and the status quo; but a revolutionary, a socialist, an anarchist could scarcely disapprove and any honest, enlightened opponent must have appreciated the logic behind these things.

The most irritating thing, though, and it created upset among workers themselves, was certain general strikes declared on various, trivial pretexts, simply for the purpose of making everybody sensible of the power of a single party. The wearisome thing was the unexpected stoppage of the most important public services, for the sake of petty sectional interests or on other, even more ridiculous pretexts, in order to hold a rally, some commemorative event … or because someone had trodden on the toes of some leading organiser! I am not exaggerating! Certain tram disputes, stoppages in the local posts and telegraphs services, etc. were utterly unjustified. Sometimes trains were halted because they were carrying insignificant cargoes of war materials, which were being carried away from the border, or because there were, at most, eight or ten carabinieri simply on the move from one place to another for no particular purpose. I will not second guess the excessive zeal of these tram-workers or railwaymen, who were certainly prompted by the noblest intentions. But this was akin to setting the hay loft ablaze just to get a light for one’s pipe! There was no proportionality between cause and effect: and this lack of proportionality gave an incalculable boost to hostility towards the labour movement .

Something else that eventually wore many people out was the rash of public rallies. After the war-time constraints and restrictions, a certain proliferation was to be expected: this was one way for the toiling masses to breathe free, manifest their own feelings and aspirations, get together and gauge their strength. But, after a few months had gone by, it should have petered out or at least eased off and given way to good husbandry and laying the groundwork for efficacious action. As I have already said, this was not the case: instead, the more time passed, the more rallies were held; and the more rallies were held, the more inconclusive they became, even as they fuelled the irritation of the opposition and especially drove the security forces (carabinieri, Royal Guards and Public Security agents) into an irrepressible fury, the latter being constantly on duty, day and night, without a break, deployed hither and thither and continually targeted by the mobs for their contempt and insult, to boot.

This latter fact is a logical consequence of the unpalatable role performed by the security forces in political upheavals. Especially when such upheavals display the features of revolution, the security forces are there to repress them and can scarcely expect kisses and smiles from the mob against which they are deployed. Furthermore, nine tenths of clashes between the mob and the security forces are due to the latter’s excesses and because they struck the first blows. That said, we should not make any bones about the fact that in the post-war period revolutionaries lacked any of the requisite sense of understanding where such clashes were concerned.

In particular, two things should be kept in mind: that many of the carabinieri were carabinieri because of the war and have not all as yet acquired a typically praetorian esprit de corps and that the recently established Royal Guards, made up largely of proletarians, were not yet wholly and entirely reliable as far as the ruling classes were concerned.

And that the workers assaulted, clubbed or shot by the security forces, tried to defend themselves. Understandably. Rational thought is out of the question in the heat of the conflict, when one is being beaten up or hurt. But, besides these exceptional instances, that a systematic if futile effort should be mounted by word of mouth, in writing, by offensive or insulting behaviour, to provoke the lower ranks of the security forces which at least have the excuse that they do not know what they are doing and are acting under orders, while civilised and even overly polite and courteous discussions are reserved for the inspectors, police chiefs, prefects and ministers who are very different and much more terrifyingly responsible for the security forces’ displays and misconduct, that – from the revolutionary point of view – was insanely unreasonable.

Such conduct on the part of revolutionaries partly explains why the security forces today stand four square alongside and collude with the fascists, even to the extent of being dismissive of orders from police chiefs and ministerial circulars: “The fascists are our friends and stand by us and shake our hands (I was told by one group of Royal Guards in whose company I happened to find myself after I was arrested for a few hours) and you would have us turn on them, for the sake of you who call us royal brutes and so mistreat us by word and deed? You must be crazy! We are ready to do anything against you and our superiors can go to hell if they tell us to turn on the fascists!” These were their actual words, to which I could only respond with vague remarks. Yet, in my heart of hearts, I could not find fault with them.

Which explains how the excessive number of rallies held often closed with bloody skirmishes with the security forces, to no effect other than to produce a long series of proletarian corpses. Between April 1919 and September 1920, Italy saw upwards of 140 deadly clashes, large and small, with a toll of more than 320 dead on the workers’ side. And every killing was greeted by a fleeting eruption of outrage on the part of the masses; but in every instance this was followed by increased disappointment, a growing sense of malaise and weariness, greater hesitancy and increased lack of confidence in their own strength. So that, coming after the retreat represented by the abandonment of the factories, the toiling masses lost the will to fight at the first sign of increased resistance from the government.

Now the very facts that helped demoralised and weary the labouring masses, had irritated, bolstered, stiffened and closed the ranks of their enemy. Moreover, a segment of the masses had lost something of its fighting spirit after securing comparative well-being: content with this, which made it desirous of calm. Not realising that that very degree of well-being had been attained by dint of earlier exertions and that that well-being was fated to be whittled away and to vanish just as soon as the exertions through it had been achieved might end!

II

The much preached and yearned for revolution had failed to arrive, in spite of all the favourable openings: and in a sense it could be argued that it was not wanted. But the fact that it had hovered like a threat for nearly two years was enough to trigger counter-revolution. Thus there was a counter-revolution without there ever having been a revolution, a real preventive counter-revolution proper, of which fascism has been the most active and impressive factor.

The struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, a struggle that was one of the determining factors in the world war and one facet of it, and which might have had consequences favourable to the proletariat in Italy, instead carried over the aftermath of the war itself to the detriment of the working class. The bourgeoisie which had not managed to weaken the proletariat through the indirect weapon of war – and had instead achieved the opposite effect, due to peculiarities of the Italian situation – renewed its pledge to succeed this time through the three-pronged concerted activity of illegal fascist violence, lawful government repression and economic pressures deriving from unemployment, partly inevitable but also in part deliberately contrived as a means of tightening the noose on the workers.

Before all of the reactionary factors which I have mentioned helped afford it scope to expand and a favourable atmosphere, fascism was a wretched, dismal thing; tiny scattered groups here and there around the peninsula, with no following of any consequence and in bad odour with the ruling class itself. The newspaper which had raised, helped and organised them no longer enjoyed the sort of circulation it had during its war-mongering days and had not yet achieved the circulation that it would through its expansion in the wake of fascist successes. At that point, fascist personnel were drawn mostly from students and ex-army officers, a few professionals and that segment of the so-called “interventionist” element from 1914 on which, having unduly distinguished itself for its enthusiasm for militarism and the government while the war was on or having become too hostile to the older parties from which it had parted company over the war – the socialists, syndicalists, anarchists and republicans – was left as a displaced person in public life, from which it refused to withdraw at any price.

This latter element, a tiny minority within a minority, was fascism’s real author and organiser: and the best equipped to be such. Nearly all of its members had been journalists, organisers, public speakers and influential members of the various proletarian bodies and organisations; they were conversant with the techniques of organisation, the rhetorical language that stirs the imagination and rouses resentments, crowd psychology and rabble-rousing, as well as the shortcomings and weaknesses of erstwhile comrades who had since become adversaries. And furthermore they were driven by hatred for the latter, a hatred fed by four years of contempt and mortification; and this hatred invested their efforts with the sort of fire and ardour needed for the fray, and which other people draw from belief in a higher ideal.

In spite of their aversion towards the socialist masses which seemed to have won or been on the brink of victory, all these folk were malcontents with grudges against the establishment and the bourgeoisie, of whom they readily spoke ill. Not only did former subversives import into fascism habitual old attitudes and old mind-sets, but all the others too, with more or less honesty, looked askance at a government that was enthroned, victorious yet indifferent, upon the successful outcome of a long war, without lifting a finger to profit from it and indeed frittering it away at home and abroad with its inept and slavish policy; and at the same time they had nothing but contempt and envy for the recent war profiteers who had made their fortunes from the war without contributing or risking anything and who were now running scared from the spectre of Bolshevism looming menacingly in the East.

This discontent, though, did not bring them closer to the workers because theirs was a discontent with a different root, one that was essentially bourgeois and petit bourgeois and, in a few instances, aristocratic and, in every instance anti-socialist. Anti-socialism was proclaimed as a patriotic necessity if the authority of the state was to be restored, the state being regarded as the living embodiment of the nation. Many sincere fascists were in reality merely nationalists. They had no sense of freedom; and that is why fascism’s initial quasi-republican veneer rather quickly faded and wore off, once it had served as a bully and virtual redeemer for the pusillanimous government when, on parliamentary grounds, the latter seemed to want to hamper certain unlawful methods of rescuing capitalism.

But up a point fascism seemed relatively independent, as long as the fascists were few in number and the socialists powerful and on the rise. It had its central and strongest nucleus in Milan, with ramifications petty much everywhere, but nowhere was it preponderant – and this was very far from the case in Bologna, where, after a while, it grew strong, so much so that it was from there that it began to spread throughout Italy as a violent coercive force. I cannot recall who the fascist was who wrote, in a polemical argument, that whereas it is true that fascism was born in Milan its cradle has been Bologna, but he got that right.

***

Fascism became strong in Bologna before anywhere else, both because it was there that circumstances and the mistakes of socialists helped it most, and because the Bologna fascists were the first, in spite of the unrestrained and pseudo-subversive language of their newspaper, to establish a relationship of collaboration and aid with that conservative force par excellence – the police – effectively ruling out any notion of political opposition. In those early months from October [1920] onwards, fascism found the Bologna police to be its most visible ally, official ally at that, and enjoyed open protection from the chief of police and the barely disguised protection of the prefect . Public Security inspectors would stroll along the Corso arm in arm with fascist leaders, Royal Guards and fascists would patrol together and at police headquarters the fascists found a home from home and police officers and Royal Guards stood guard outside the Fascio headquarters. I have been assured that on more than one occasion also the fascists used police and army trucks to replenish and transport their weapons.

Of the military authorities proper I will say nothing. They, of course, are rather more cautious; but it is known that nearly every officer is a fascist and that the Army General Staff itself is no stranger to fascism. Many newspapers have spoken of the responsibility of minister Bonomi, during his time as minister of War, in organising and arming the fascists. It was on his instructions that in 1920 Colonel A.R. roamed backwards and forwards through Italy laying the groundwork for the anti-socialist backlash. In his report, which was published, the colonel argued for the establishment of a militia of idealists made up of the most proficient, courageous, strongest and most aggressive persons which could, along with the police and army, mount joint resistance and political operations . To wit, the militia of fascist irregulars.

In some places, military cooperation with the fascists became, as it did in Trieste, as blatant as could be, until the fascists were being issued in broad daylight with arms and bombs for use in their punitive expeditions . And in the provinces of Modena and Grosseto, there were even instances of joint fascist-carabinieri expeditions commanded by a Public Security inspector. Remember how the socialist deputy Ventavoli was forced to leap from the window as a joint force of fascists and carabinieri burst angrily into his room!

But, to return to Bologna as the cradle of fascism. Let me say that none of these factors would have been enough to undermine socialist positions and build up fascist might, but for a few fortuitous circumstances and, above all, certain more serious mistakes on the part of socialists. The skirmishes in the square in Bologna on 20 September 1920 and the bloody clashes on 14 October when a mob mounted a demonstration outside the prison in solidarity with political victims next to the Royal Guard barracks failed to undermine the socialists’ preponderance. That began to crumble on the night of 4 November, when, after a few fascists turned up at the door and hallway of the Camera Confederale del Lavoro behaving in an aggressive and threatening manner, its then secretary, the parlamentarian Bucco, though surrounded by a number of armed youths, could not think of anything better than making a call to the pro-fascist police headquarters asking for assistance! The police arrived in some strength, only to arrest the socialists and make deputy Bucco an even greater laughing-stock … Whereupon the fortress had fallen: in a sense the fascists gained unimpeded access to it.

Had the socialists been a little more prudent that evening – I am told that at almost midnight the doors of the Camera del Lavoro was still open, for no good reason, almost inviting the enemy to barge in – and at the same time, if actually attacked, had vigorously defended themselves with their resources, not excluding punches, then perhaps the Bologna Camera del Lavoro might have been invaded at that point rather than three months later, but it would probably have been the first and last time in Italy. It would have been overrun, not by fascists, but by the security forces; which, having seized the initiative, would have stripped the government of the mask of non-existent neutrality, the disgraceful ensuing farce rendered impossible and fascism stripped of its leading role in anti-socialist operations. Had the backlash come, it would have been state-run; and the struggle would have retained its traditional character as a clash between subjects and government, without any deviation in the direction of the senseless, savage and pointless factional guerrilla war that followed.

But there is no point in speculating on the basis of hindsight. The fact remains that that painful yet laughable episode alerted the political authorities and the fascists that the whole much trumpeted revolutionary preparations, of which Bucco and others were fond of bragging about, was only a bluff and that the socialist army, already beating a retreat on the economic and political scenes, had not just deferred its onslaught but had failed even to exploit its numerical advantage, which was indisputable, to defend itself through its own direct action. Had it resisted the first fascist attacks promptly with the requisite vigour and violence and the necessary commitment, fascism would have been still-born. Instead, once the proletarian opted instead to appeal passively to the law, even that weak trench was demolished by the enemy from many sides, since – given that the socialists proved to be the weaker – the police and security forces no longer had any scruples about showing themselves allied with the fascists in the light of day; and the concerted onslaught by illegal and lawful forces, to which the judiciary would shortly be added, began.

Nor was success in the administrative elections in late October and early November 1920, in which the socialists triumphed, capturing control of nearly 3,000 townships enough to stop it. That too was yet another spur to the ruling classes to encourage the fascists along the back roads of illegality. Initially reluctant, capitalism and the government – those in government, by which is meant, if not this or that minister personally then definitely the higher civil service, the prefects, the chiefs of police, etc. – realised that fascism was a useful weapon and soon ensured that it was given every assistance in terms of funding and arms, turning a blind eye to its breaches of the law and, where necessary, covering its back through intervention by armed forces which, on the pretext of restoring order, would rush to the aid of the fascists wherever the latter were beginning to take a beatings instead of doling one out.

***

Events in Bologna on 21 November 1920 accelerated this process of backlash.

There was a palpable feeling in the air that something serious was in the offing. Even during election rallies, it was realised that the extremist socialists’ dogged commitment to formality and elections would secure them victory, but to no avail. The programme set out in Bologna was extravagant and impracticable, given that the climate and atmosphere throughout Italy had altered greatly: it was a real house of cards. Furthermore, the Bologna bourgeoisie, no longer fearful of the socialists and the workers, would give no more ground. For upwards of a month there had been no strikes and the odd attempt at one had seemed strained and ineffectual. During the election campaign, one radical speaker (who later became a fascist) assured me that at one rally he had bluntly declared that if the Bolsheviks were to capture the city council, their administration would be prevented from working.

In the wake of their success in the elections which had given a whopping majority to the extremist socialists, the latter were rather preoccupied with the investiture ceremony. Doing without it, doing without the display of their red flag at the victory rally would seem the easy option today; back then it would have looked like cowardice and in everybody’s eyes would have been the first retreat from the bombastic programme on the basis of which they had won. But that was precisely what the fascists wanted; they were eager to drive the crowd of workers from the squares and have that red flag dip in a signal of surrender. What was the solution to this dilemma?

Some socialists who were in charge at the time descended to unseemly negotiations with the police authorities, and may well have promised more than their followers would have delivered; but by the eve of 21 November, the day when the inauguration was due to take place, it was looking as if things might pass off smoothly, when a printed notice was spotted at police headquarters and on street corners; in it the fascists predicted a big fight the following day, cautioning women and children to keep well clear of the city centre and off the main thoroughfares. By that time there was no way that the socialists could withdraw honourably and of course the more hot-headed of them (who might well have been the most reckless ones as well, judging by the results at any rate) thought of improvising some sort of defences against the threatened potential attacks. Now only a miracle could have averted tragedy.

But no miracle was forthcoming: quite the opposite! The next day, after the ceremony had begun peaceably in the city hall, no sooner had the newly appointed mayor and some red flags appeared on the balcony overlooking the square that the first revolver shots were fired in their direction. Tragedy followed immediately. Anybody who was armed, including the security forces, began to shoot madly; some bombs were thrown and inside the City Hall, amid the bullets flying in through the windows and shattering the glass and pictures, there was screaming and the most frightful confusion. Some people lost their heads entirely (it seems unlikely that this was premeditated, that being acceptable only in an act of private and personal vengeance) as tragedy followed upon tragedy. Shots were fired at the minority benches, hitting those whose physical condition prevented them from moving as quickly as the rest and from taking cover, throwing themselves to the floor and looking to their defences. Whoever fired just then at the lawyer Giordani not merely left one man dead but plunged a family into desolation; he inflicted an irreparable, cruel, disastrous loss upon the Socialist Party.

I shall not dwell upon this incident, which can be reconstructed only the basis of various newspaper reports and regarding which the court authorities have yet to complete their inquiries . True, leaving their origins to one side, events could not have gone worse for the socialists; even blind fate allied itself against them and with the fascists. But, independently of the individual personal responsibilities for the minor episodes referred to, anyone wanting to deliver a verdict on the overall general responsibility for what happened on 21 November cannot but chalk it up to the fascists and the police authorities, their essential accomplice. If in fact fascism had not stepped in that day with their armed disruption of a lawful socialist demonstration and announced that intervention with detailed and provocative threats, no tragedy would have occurred.

But in politics, the winner is in the right, even if he is wrong: and whoever leaves the field comes off worse. The socialists were not strong enough to defend themselves nor to cling to their incontrovertible motives for resisting; a succession of such circumstances sapped their spirits. By which point it was no longer a case of striking a blow against them; that blow had been struck much, much earlier. The fact is that 21 November was a fascist victory; the fact that the fascists were responsible for those events does not diminish their victory at all. Indeed, it enhances it. In the real world, being wrong but winning is tantamount to a double success. Maybe it was that that gave the public a greater impression of fascist strength and socialist weakness.

What came next was natural and what always happens in such cases. Fascism, a negligible force before September, swollen somewhat after the first weaknesses of socialism, turned into a giant in the wake of 21 November. Its ranks grew at an indescribable rate. All of the cowards who up until the day before had courted the socialists and sought to join them, suddenly became their adversaries and switched sympathies to the fascists . The very people who earlier had been calling for socialist cooperation and criticising the socialists for their lack of daring and for not wanting to take power, etc., screamed “liberation from the red tyranny”. In particular, certain rubber-spined sectors, white collar workers, journalists and minor professionals made a cynical and brazen volte-face.

This of course led to an unleashing of every sort of personal resentment, old and new, professional and commercial rivalries and jealousies. Furthermore, all of the interests damaged by long-time city administration which could accommodate many interests but not all of them, came to the surface again. The shortcomings, injustices and bias of the socialist administration, the pretty much brazen bullying that cannot be separated from any exercise of power came home to roost and fed the anti-socialist tide. The struggle against one party turned into a witch hunt designed to demolish its standing and snatch away its hold on public office, in the courts, in the hospital administrations and in education. By then the torrent was running out of control, beyond the wildest hopes of organised fascism.

In Bologna where socialism was almost entirely synonymous with the labour movement, the defeat of socialism represented a defeat for the working class; and this had national implications, precisely because it was happening in the heart of the Emilia where the proletariat is better and more solidly organised in the towns and, even more so, in the countryside. No sooner had the anti-proletarian backlash spread to the provinces, focusing on Ferrara, Modena, Reggio Emilia, etc., than the example was aped elsewhere – especially in Tuscany, the Veneto and Puglia, etc. – and by then the rout of socialism and the workers really was no longer an Emilian phenomenon, but an Italian one.

***

As I was saying, in the wake of the aforesaid events in Bologna, fascism’s ranks expanded tremendously within just a few days. A number of people defected to it who had previously had reservations about it and the odd workers’ organisation unexpectedly defected; professionals, especially lawyers who in the past had courted the socialists but who now sensed the chance of better political fortunes with fascism also crossed over.

Especially after the tragic end of D’Annunzio’s venture in Fiume, when his legionaries were left by the fascists to face the government on their own, or offered the cold comfort of just a few cheers and some platonic resolution – resulting in a complete rift and ill-disguised hostility between the two factions ; once it became known that the fascists had no desire to cause the government serious embarrassment and were dropping any vestige of their old anti-monarchism, the conservatives simply flooded into the fascist ranks. Despite the republican leanings still professed by the odd fascist leader, fascism increasingly became a force supportive not only of capitalism’s economic and military institutions and of nationalism, but also of the monarchy as an institution.

It was in Trieste that fascism served especially as an instrument of the monarchist government rather than as a class instrument, operating as an out and out occupying force manning enemy territory. The talk was of the liberation of Trieste whereas really it was just a conquest. We know that in economic terms this “liberation” spelled ruination for Trieste; but it is true that, in political terms, nobody in Trieste would have wanted to stay under Austrian rule, aside from the professional pro-Austrians. Who could deny, though, that now, with the war at an end, politically too, Trieste might be a little better off in a federation with republican Austria, offering economic advantages she now lacks, and relishing her economically privileged position as the only outlet to he sea of a huge territory?

Notwithstanding that, Trieste asked nothing better than to be left in peace to live as best she could in the new kingdom. A genuinely fraternal policy might have prevented the emergence of any separatist notions, in which even the local Slavs (nearly all of them workers) had no direct interest. Instead, Trieste was ground down for two years and more under a military government rather reliant upon the old stalwarts of the House of Austria; and the “liberated territories” endured the double damage from the old Austrian repressive laws and the Italian government’s arbitrary practices. Above all, an attempt was made to falsify and gerrymander the situation for electoral purposes. There was a fear that the first ever elections for deputies from Trieste might return to the Chamber mostly socialist representatives in the city and Slavs in the countryside (given the proletarian majority and the results of earlier elections), which would certainly have been the case under a comparatively free system.

An effort was made to forestall this at all costs. And since government action alone would not be enough, and since, if the intention was to proceed with elections that looked free, all semblance of military occupation had to be removed, fascism was encouraged in Trieste as a real instrument of government. Needless to say most of these fascists were drafted in from outside or had flooded in during the occupation: once upon a time they would have been described as “camp-followers”.

And in Trieste fascism has done what it could, just as it has elsewhere, torching the Camera del Lavoro several times along with the editorial and printing offices of the socialist daily newspaper, cooperatives and bookshops; doling out bearings, shootings and enforcing terror. Just as it did in Pola and in Monfalcone, etc. Then, out in the countryside and with the blatant connivance of the army, it has mounted real “beats”, hunting down Slavs, destroying entire villages, forcing the inhabitants to flee into the hills or end up behind bars.

And so, just as Rome wanted, the “wishes of the area” emerged from the elections: and Trieste managed to return a majority made up of patriotic-fascist deputies!

***

The landowners of Emilia were quick to realise, from that October or November, that fascism could be of service to them as a catapult deployed against the solid walls of the peasant organisation that was strangling them; this in spite of the verbal hostilities expressed towards them in some fascist newspapers. Within a few months it was almost universally the case that the fascist chapters in the country districts of the Emilia, the Veneto and Puglia were made up of lackeys of the Agrarian League. Fascism’s make-up had by then changed remarkably from what it had been prior to October; and student personnel no longer accounted for the greater part of the membership. And, here and there, positions of leadership among the fascists were changing hands too.

In the cities too, the membership had ceased to be what it had been some time earlier. As far as the most disinterested majority of the latter is concerned, they despised the socialists partly out of class instinct, partly out of resentment of the workers whom they saw as having overtaken them, and partly out of ignorance (the fact is that hardly any of them knew what socialists were or what they wanted and they drew no distinction between socialism and anarchism, reformism and bolshevism, trade unionism and communism, crediting them with the most extravagant notions and far-fetched aims): but they were all motivated by that no doubt half-understood, vague but sincerely held patriotic outlook. Over time, however, these became a minority as new elements flooded in, recruits attracted by success, real eleventh hour converts to fascism; and this certainly was not likely to do anything for the enthusiasm of the former. More than one of them lost his fire and a number of others dropped out.

As fascism’s prospects brightened, it also attracted more unscrupulous elements who were out for the main chance. In the big cities, especially in Tuscany, the dregs, the rootless and the prejudiced turned to fascism; the cruelty and savagery of certain punitive expeditions mounted in that region can be credited to these. Often fascists felt the need to distance themselves from responsibility for unduly compromising acts and to disown men and deeds more or less arbitrarily passing themselves off as fascist. But as I have said before, fascism by then meant a whole system, a whole movement that transcended and overspilled the parameters of card-carrying, registered fascists. And the ruling class, of which it is the lackey, makes no distinction between the two and bestows its indulgence and aid most cynically upon them all.

One need only read the press, not the admittedly fascist press, for which this would be only natural, but the other newspapers most of which, the big best-sellers and most widely distributed ones that purport to be independent of the parties, perhaps because they want to be free to serve whichever one suits them best at any given moment. There is scarcely any bragging in the editorials – with their often hypocritical sham calls for calm and condemnations of violence – about class or caste solidarity with fascism, but in their polemical pieces and above all their reportage, where every fascist outrage is described in apologetic and tendentious terms, provoking and inciting further strife, any care for truthfulness and conception of fairness is eschewed, again to the benefit of the fascists and to the detriment of the socialists and the workers.

The same can be said for the partisanship of the courts. No act of violence, whether truthful or phoney, serious or slight has ever been charged against socialists or subversives in general but numerous arrests were made and the accused still languish in prison, regardless of guilt or innocence. No one bothers about their trials, the preparation of which never ends; what matters is that the alleged offenders should remain in jail. But in the case of the fascists, the scene on the Gran Via is re-enacted: those arrested almost always have the charges dropped prior to trial, especially where the crimes are most serious – arson or homicide. In recent times fascists have been arrested more often; but in its dealings with them the inquiry is universally solicitous and well-intentioned. In very rare and exceptional instances, no one is ever convicted of fascist crimes carrying serious sentences ; only where the charges are minor are arrests made and trials held.

So, in exceptional instances, when the real culprits are sent for trial, they are always triumphantly acquitted. Take the typical case of those who killed Inversetti in Milan. The fascists had burst in upon a socialist club in March 1921, shooting and killing one of those present. Some arrests were made; they were brought to trial and acquitted to a man. One suspect who had gone on the run was sentenced to a few years in prison. After a short while, the fugitive was detained, re-tried and … he too was acquitted! And in Turin fascists who mistakenly killed an industrialist, having mistaken him for a subversive, were acquitted. And there has been a whole, endless succession of such acquittals. To my knowledge, none of them has ever been convicted.

I place all of this on record without regret or lamentation. I am not a believer in the fairness of the “justice system”, nor in the efficacy of the penalties prescribed under the law. Deep down, I find everything set out above to be very natural; and if I have highlighted it, it was merely the better to register the loving relationship between fascism and the ruling classes; to show that fascism is not a separate phenomenon discreet from all the other injustices in society, but is a direct consequence and emanation of these; that in fact it is the current political and economic system that really bears the responsibility for the civil war launched by fascism.

In point of fact, the latter’s responsibility is rather greater than that of the fascists, considered on their own; and this responsibility of the system is all the more grave and criminal in that the fascist guerrilla war, whilst it harms people because of its tool of bloodshed, pain and devastation, sharpening the class struggle and injects added hatred into it, is entirely useless for the purposes of social conservation and national recovery that some of the blindest reactionaries hold out as a promise.

Fascism is not so much useless as harmful, just as a cause is harmed by any disproportionate means the costs of which outweigh the benefits. But it would be naivety itself for revolutionaries to ask capitalism and the state to target fascism with repressive measures that might otherwise produce further harmful effects. Moreover, any repression that goes beyond legitimate self-defence, any government backlash based upon jails and handcuffs, always has a criminal impact of its own. And revolutionaries cannot and should not be calling for arrests and convictions, handcuffs and jail terms.

In reality, revolutionaries, socialists, workers will see an end of government and capitalist connivance with fascism only once they summon up their own capacity for resistance, not sporadically and fitfully, not pretty much as individuals or groups or in any unduly localised way, but across the board. When it comes to demanding a right, there is only one thing that the workers could ask for: that they be given equal treatment, and be left free to defend themselves every time that they are attacked; and defend themselves using the same resources as the fascists, to wit, their own organisations, their own meetings, their own flags, their own beliefs, their own lives. They would be entitled to ask that the police and the courts not reduce them to the condition of somebody whose arms are tied whilst others give him a savage beating. Or let the capitalist state cast aside all hypocrisy and stop playing two parts in the farce and take direct responsibility for the repression of workers.

But these are pointless demands, unless backed by real force, both moral and material; and can only be pressed by way of a token demonstration of one’s rights and for propaganda purposes. In point of fact, Italian jails are filled with workers and the heaviest sentences rain down on workers who made the mistake in clashes of using violence to defend themselves from the fascists. Moreover, we have already seen the government’s stance as soon as the spontaneous initiative of the people came up with the idea of forming proletarian defence units which were dubbed the “Arditi del Popolo”. Outside of Rome where, for contextual reasons, repression is a more difficult undertaking and where, for domestic and foreign policy reasons, the government needs to keep up appearances and therefore prevent fascism’s resorting to the violent methods employed in the Emilia, the Veneto and Tuscany, the mere idea of setting up “Arditi del Popolo” chapters has been pre-emptively stamped out in the most vigorous fashion – through bans, threats, raids and arrests.

***

To tell the truth, only in Rome [at the time of writing] was there a real, proper regular unit of the “Arditi del Popolo”, albeit that there have been reports of several attempts (thus far attempts only) to set chapters up elsewhere in Italy. But it looks like it might be a good idea to form them pretty much everywhere. The fascists themselves, somewhat hampered in the activities which they have never abandoned in the wake of the laughable “peace compact” in Rome – they have carried on with the beatings and the destruction – came up with the alibi that they were not doing this to socialists but rather only to communists and to the “Arditi del Popolo” who were not parties to the peace compact . Of course, everybody, whether they fit the bill or not, becomes such – even the most reformist of socialists most inimical to violence, as well as the least partisan cooperatives and leisure clubs! But we shall let that rest …

The government’s endeavours in this sense deserve a special mention. Every so often, even in the most far flung villages, there are reports of mass arrests of supposed “Arditi del Popolo”. In fact, under that pretext, they indulge in the arrest of gatherings, plain get-togethers of the usual social, anarchist or merely labour circles; and charges are preferred of plotting against the security of the state. Then, after a few months have passed, the charges melt away; but the months that innocent people have served in jail cannot be so easily wiped away and in the meantime, in a number of towns, the authorities have used this pretext to successfully thwart any opposition to the government, no matter how law-abiding. This procedure is doubly illegal, unfair and iniquitous: 1, because in fact the charge of Arditi activity is in almost every instance a complete concoction and 2, because if there was any truth to it, it would not amount to an offence, in that there is no law forbidding people from banding together to defend themselves against attacks from any quarter. The name by which an association is known is not enough to render it illegal; it must in fact take the road of illegality through specific actions and methods.

Some may protest that the arditi association is along military lines; no more so, we reply than the ex-service associations, the young pioneers and lots of gymnastic, target shooting and sports societies. As long as we have done nothing illegal, as long as they do not go armed through the streets, these remain within the boundaries of the law and are entitled to the same freedom of association as every other citizen. If they were outside the law, then obviously no such association, no matter how well organised, would have been tolerated in the very capital of the Kingdom. And I shall refrain from making any comparison with the “Fasci di combattimento”, which are out and out military units with their own cadres and officers, tramping through the cities in military order, very often with weapons across their backs, marshalled and drawn up for all to see, in trucks or on foot, prior to setting off on their punitive expeditions to beat, destroy, torch and murder .

According to the police and the courts these fascist organisations are perfectly legal! Remember the incident whereby the Camera Confederale del Lavoro in Bologna was torched in January 1921, out of the blue, without any provocation given by the socialists, at a time when the city was perfectly calm. Twice the fascists, in military array, armed with revolvers, hand grenades or incendiaries and cans of petrol or benzine, attacked the confederal building, broke down the doors, burned and smashed everything they could and ferried everything they wanted away by truck. These fascists had set off from the fascio premises and returned there after their exertions along with the socialist deputy Grossi whom they had discovered at the Camera el Lavoro: and had forcibly carried him away in order to … Subject him to questioning. There were judicial investigations and complaints made, etc., but the upshot was that no one was ever brought to book for all these trifles.

Yet the deeds I have set out above were plainly reported, indeed with details and excuses aplenty, in the local monarchist and pro-fascist newspapers: and they happened under the very eyes of huge police, carabinieri, Royal Guard and constabulary forces who would, after some initial sham opposition, let things proceed and made way for the fascist procession with its “war trophies” or, so to speak, stolen goods, on the punitive expedition’s return. And the association that orchestrated this feat and other rather worse feats, is perfectly legal! Instead, chapters of the “Arditi del Popolo” are broken up and its members arrested for offences against the security of the state – or is the state fascism, perhaps? – merely for their intention to offer other than passive resistance to fascist violence .

Given the situation and the police’s class function, a police crackdown where, as happened in Viterbo and Sarzana, some violence (albeit in self-defence) was mounted by the Arditi del Popolo or alleged Arditi del Popolo might just be understandable – even though it would be unfair and partisan. But no! there was worse to follow: no critical events have occurred, nor are these Arditi for real. Free citizens were quite simply arrested just because, on account of their political beliefs, it is suspected that they may be gathering with the intention of establishing “Arditi del Popolo” . And, needless to say, the arrests are endorsed by the bench!

All of which is simply further proof of the complicity, indeed major responsibility of the existing political system for the perpetuation of the civil guerrilla warfare, which is undoubtedly damaging to the targeted proletarian classes but no less harmful to the ruling classes themselves and generally to economic and political conditions in Italy as a whole. A householder setting his own home alight I order to get his own back on or rid himself of bothersome tenants could scarcely be any more unreasonable and hare-brained!

***

True, the spontaneous formation of the “Arditi del Popolo” outside of the parties and perhaps outside of the subversive parties themselves has been looked at askance – many socialists opposing it for opportunistic reasons and the communists out of sectarian rivalry – is a reassuring sign that the spirit of resistance is taking shape in the labouring masses. But too much of the good moral impact of Arditismo is neutralised by a contrary and more recent phenomenon not detected during the early days of fascism; the switch to the fascists made by more and more workers, albeit few in number compared with the masses as a whole.

The reasons why the fascists are starting to make headway among the workers are several. We are not referring, of course, to those who were taken on as mercenaries at so much per day simply because the pay was good and the work slight. They do not matter: they are the same poor witless and inferior creatures who yesterday served as strike-breakers and from whose ranks the ruling class draws its henchmen and hired goons. Basically, they are superfluous ciphers and nothing more. On the fringes of the proletariat there is always this sector, the most wretched one, which the government and the bourgeoisie are able to wield as the blind instrument of their rule. I do not believe, either, that fascism has much use for these elements; they owe it no loyalty, will desert it at the first opportunity, at the first bend in the road, the first set-back.

But fascism has also drawn other workers who are not merely open to the highest bidder and for sale. To be sure, the growth in unemployment is one factor in this; and there are those who thought to find work, and often did, on the basis of being fascists or members of fascism’s so-called autonomous leagues which, like the red leagues, hold out the promise of job placements, wage protection., etc. Some industrialists and employers have come to an arrangement with the Fascio to give preference to workers recommended by the latter: which goes a long way towards explaining how the new style placement bureaux can still attract some of their clientele from among the ever swelling ranks of the unemployed.

In trade union terms, it does not do to overstate the importance of these so-called autonomous labour unions which are in fact hitched to fascism. Volunteer members are still in the minority, a minority that on its own could never constitute an effective collective force. Most of the membership is recruited forcibly, by means of threats, arson, beatings, bullying by the bosses and a thousand other coercive measures . Yet the fact that even a few workers have switched to the fascists of their own volition is deserving of some scrutiny.

Painful though it may be to admit, in some workers class consciousness and a sense of dignity are so under-developed that they cannot understand the humiliation in the bosses giving preferential treatment to the members of fascist unions or people recommended by them, or, if they do understand that, lack the strength to turn down work offered on those grounds and in those conditions. But this is not their fault. The fault lies with the mischievous education accorded the labouring masses, especially in certain districts where socialist is synonymous with unionist and socialism consists entirely of organising in order to get better wages, to work in better conditions and to cast one’s vote for the parliamentarian that speaks up for the union’s rights or for the town council that hands out more work to the trades cooperative. Not that that is not an advance on the lack of consciousness in the slavish, starving disorganised of sixty years back. Accustomed to looking no farther than this, it is only natural that workers should not care unduly about what colour the union or the employment bureau might display just as long as the benefits they promise are the same. And we may be thankful that this is a comparatively tiny phenomenon.

The overwhelmingly materialistic and all too un-idealistic education that socialism has offered the proletariat, especially over the past thirty years, has been yet another factor in the collapse of the Socialist International in 1914 and of the (we can only hope transient) defeat of the Italian proletariat in 1921 (hopefully it will have its revenge). There we find the root causes of the meagre working class resistance to the capitalist onslaught, and of the readiness on the part of some workers to accept work and seek employment through agencies that they know, deep down, are their enemies. Overly used to the notion of securing immediate gains with minimal effort, they lacked that spirit of sacrifice and love of danger without which it is hard to emerge victorious from the toughest battles. In this regard the oldest workers whose training in socialism dates from before 1900, when there was still some lingering vestige of the Mazzinian spirit in socialist preaching, or, failing that, at a time when government harassment and the lack of success had a salutary, character-building and educational impact, such workers, in spite of their years, are still the best troopers, no matter which socialist school or faction they may follow.

The utilitarian practice of trades organisation, bureaucracy and the fact that propaganda and recruitment have also become stocks-in-trade (and trades that are not as easy and undemanding as those who have never plied them may imagine!) – all of this has drawn into socialism and into the trade union movement a number of hacks who have brought discredit upon their function and the ideas they profess in the eyes of the masses. Finding this to their advantage, the masses accepted union leaders but was not always fond of them. And whilst there are some who were a real boon to the well-being and education of the proletariat, there was also no shortage, especially in the countryside, of the other sort who pretty much looked after their own interests, feathered their own nest like real new-style parish priests, throwing the weight of their authority about in such a way as to create a lot of resentment, simmering grudges and a sense of ill-defined intolerance that in normal times went unremarked and mattered little, but which, come the first storm clouds, piled up and tilted the scales.

Among other things, the system of fines imposed on those derelict of their obligations to the organisation, who abandoned it and were then forced to rejoin, etc., generates a lot of grudges which linger in the mind even after it looks as if everything has moved on. Then, when doubts later appeared regarding where the money ended up, things took a more serious turn. In the Emilia especially, this cropped up in relation to the so-called “levies” whereby lots of league members were arrested, with the odd one retaliating by moving on from jail to Montecitorio and a parliamentary seat. The bourgeois press’s campaign surrounding this has been as nonsensical as it has sensational. Workers’ rights to set an entrance fee for admission to their associations and a fine for those who breach their undertakings, cannot be queried, legally or morally; much less their entitlement to require, in agreements between workers and employers, that the latter pay certain damages for failing to honour their commitments or breaching signed agreements.

But whereas all of this is legally valid and cannot be dismissed as immoral, like any affair in which money is at stake, it can become ticklish and dangerous because it can easily lead to abuses, personal vendettas, explosions of resentment and unscrupulous conduct – and therefore to discord, petty wrangling and squabbling. In most instances fines or “levies” are allocated for public purposes, donated to good works, homes, scholarships, shelters for paupers, etc., and sometimes this is done through the good offices of public officials, inspectors or prefects. But it takes only one or two cases where things are handled differently and where legitimate interests are wrongly infringed, in which there has been some dishonest dealing, where somebody pockets such donations (it cannot be ruled out that this has happened, because there is always some chance of its happening); and lo and behold every other instance is overshadowed by doubt and discredit, and then fresh grounds are created for discontent and discord in the workers’ ranks. And a climate, an atmosphere is created where the proletariat’s enemies reap the benefits.

Another degenerative factor is the anti-libertarian arrangement whereby organisation is made mandatory, and often it is a case of one organisation handling all of the work in a given sector to the exclusion of all other organisations, whereby one has to belong or go without work, suffer a boycott or sometimes worse. In many places this has given rise to the uncompromising slogans that he who is not organised is a blackleg! Anarchists have always strenuously opposed this phoney and dangerous understanding of organisation. Strictly speaking, “blackleg” refers only to someone who reports for work during a strike and dispute and, by extension, to somebody who works at less than the rate and in breach of agreements signed between the workers and the employers. But organisation cannot be other than free; its whole efficacy derives from its being voluntary, its being an exercise in and demonstration of individual wills banding together to form one collective will. The moment organisation ceases to be voluntary and becomes compulsory it loses three quarters of the advantages it offers and acquires a host of shortcomings and seeds of degeneration.

In lots of places fascist violence has been the litmus paper exposing the harm done by compulsory organisation, but for which certain worker elements would never have defected to the fascists. Left to their own devices, they would either have joined the organisation later of their own volition and through conviction, or remained unmoved; no way would they have turned into enemies. Conversely, those who used to be unmoved may today be driven by fascism into organisation and into the arms of subversives, as indeed has thus far been happening with those hitherto unmoved by socialist propaganda. Events have shown just how correct were the declarations made at the July 1920 Anarchist Congress in Bologna which, on the basis that everyone has the right to work and that organisations should be the arm of the growing consciousness of the workers rather than imposed by force, took exception to the system of mandatory organisation, a trespass against freedom which only redounds to the detriment of the organisations themselves, in that it divests them of any idealistic content and spirit of struggle and represents the seed of destruction in their very heart.

“The inevitable has come to pass” – Errico Malatesta reiterated , noting that for some workers fascism was, at first sight, a liberation, even though they soon found themselves worse off – “because mandatory recruitment into an organisation is not only a trespass against a sacrosanct principle of freedom, but introduced into the organisation the seeds of dissolution and death, because the organisations filled with hostile persons, potential traitors and, on the other hand, when members can be recruited by force, organisers’ incentive to mount propaganda and to attempt to persuade disappeared.”

In short, the prevalence of the authoritarian mind-set turned the leagues, the federations, the central bureaux, etc., into so many mini-governments, large and small, with all of the concomitant defects, and abolished others’ incentive to oppose and rebel against them. Which, in certain labour circles, paved the way for the spread of fascism.

III

I want no misunderstandings. The mistakes made by workers and socialists explain why fascism was able to expand even into certain areas which by their very nature ought to have been unwelcoming. They are not, quite, a justification of fascism per se; fascism remains a disease of the social system, because the latter’s weakness smoothed its passage, because human error and party miscalculations prevented the most battered sectors from being able to mount serious resistance to it and from stamping it out.

By the same token, TB remains a grievous blight upon human society which needs to treat it and to try to overcome, rescuing as many victims as possible, through the work of the hygienist who, by researching the reasons for its spread, denounces its pernicious practices, unsanitary habits, questionable behaviour and harmful surroundings that predispose organisms to harbour the disease and spread it through their neighbours. No question about it; it takes a change in the surroundings, a change in social conditions, a change in harmful practices, behaviour and habits to prevent and fight the disease at source; but, once the disease has begun to spread, it also needs to be re-examined and combated with every therapeutic and often surgical resource wheresoever it manifests itself.

Fascism is effectively a disease, a fever coursing through the body of society and one that we must try to cure. I have highlighted a few of the factors that have helped it spread, but it should not be forgotten that we are dealing here with a general pathological effect, the origins of which can be traced to the war. Without that, the mistakes and shortcomings of the proletarian and social movement would have had damaging consequences of a different sort, but assuredly not fascism. Given the war, given that the only real preventive remedy against it – revolution – was not forthcoming, fascism or something of the sort was inevitable. The fascists, and those of their leaders who honestly believe that they are in charge of the movement, are in fact merely agents of a phenomenon that is stronger than them and by which they are dragged along.

This was realised this when an attempt was made to adjust the ship’s tiller and muster the wherewithal to set a different course. A waste of time!

I said earlier that fascism is a conscious manifestation of the ruling class’s interests; but let me amend that. It is partly that, especially for certain personnel who hold the reins of fascism and try to control it, steer it, drive it beyond or keep it within certain boundaries, as the interests, political conveniences and opportunities of the moment, etc. may recommend. But whilst holds true, in part at least, where the leaders are concerned, it no longer applies to the fascist masses.

Ever since fascism emerged triumphant in the autumn of 1920 from its first battles in the Emilia and the wide spectrum of forces and interests whose practice it is to side with the strongest rushed to swell its ranks or stand alongside it, fascism has overcome the masses’ weakness for acting on impulse and increasingly acts off its own bat and at the instigation of obscure elements and unspeakable interests who always devise some way of taking cover behind large numbers. Which is to say that fascism has lost the advantage of small groups of being able to operate freely and actually do only what these want and pursue their own aims. Now there are lots of things prescribed and desired by the fascist leadership which the fascist masses do not care for, do not want and will not do; indeed, on occasion, they do the very opposite.

What will come to pass should fascism continue through sheer inertia and its lapse into ever greater violence accelerate, un