Edward Conze and Ellen Wilkinson 1935
The declarations of war in 1914 split the Socialist organisations of Europe into three sections. There were the enthusiasts, who went all out for the war, and for the imperialist expansion of their own country; the moderates who were willing to back the war for certain limited aims, but who hoped that the imperialist side of it would be subordinated to general humanitarian considerations; and those who, for a variety of reasons, opposed the war. Included among this last were the conscientious objectors to any war, and those scientific Socialists, a small group in any country, who, like Lenin, analysed this particular war as a stage in imperialist development and denounced it accordingly.
The attitude of the majority of the Socialists in each country tended to reflect the attitude of the ruling class. In England, France and Germany, where the labour and Social-Democratic parties backed the war officially, it was thus possible for the war-enthusiasts and the moderates to remain together in the same party. The most ardent supporter of the war could find no reason to criticise such an attitude as that expressed by the Social-Democratic paper, the Frankfurter Volkstimme of 18 August 1914: ‘If, in 1866, people said that the advance of the Prussian troops was a victory of the schoolmaster, this time we shall be able to speak of the victory of the trade-union official.’
But in Italy the ruling classes themselves were divided. The metal and ship-building industries connected with the Comité des Forges and British heavy industry, together with the big farming interests represented by Premier Salandra, were for the war. The rest of the industrialists, who were controlled by the Banca Commerciale, a largely German bank, were against it. They were led by ex-Premier Giolitti. In these circumstances it was possible for the Italian Socialist Party to be against the war.
The Italian Socialists had put up a strong fight against Italian imperialism in Africa. No one had opposed the Giolitti expedition to Tripoli more strongly than the young editor of the official Socialist paper Avanti, Benito Mussolini, though by then he was one of Cesare Battisti’s converts to ‘irredentism’ – the liberation of the Italians in the Trentino from the brutal rule of the Austrians and Croatia. The war, it seemed to him, offered the best chance of getting back the Trentino. ‘There can be no international order before the people have attained their national frontiers’, he declared. When, therefore, the Italian Socialist Party conducted a campaign against Italy’s entrance into the war, it was not possible for the imperialist wing to remain in the same ranks. Mussolini led them out of the party in October 1914. With French and British support he founded a new paper, the Popolo d'Italia, advocating the entry of Italy into the war on the side of the Allies.
In the ferment of that first winter, when to go into the war or keep out of it was the dominating argument in Italian politics, the students and young middle-class men were attracted by Mussolini’s passionate advocacy and united with his secessionist Socialists in January 1915 to form Fasci d'Azione, literally, ‘bundles of action’. In a month they had 9000 members. Their motto was ‘Against Austria, the priests, and the Socialists’. When Italy entered the war in May 1915, Mussolini went to the front as a soldier, and was wounded in 1917.
The war left Italy with each of the classic conditions present which have been laid down as necessary for a successful Socialist revolution. The soldiery were discontented. If they had not actually suffered final defeat, they were smarting under the Caporetto disaster and the appalling revelations of mismanagement and corruption in high places which had followed it. The working class was rendered desperate by the mass unemployment consequent on the sudden stoppage of the inflated war demand. The situation was aggravated by the stoppage of emigration to the USA. Previous to the war about 600,000 Italian workers had emigrated annually, which relieved the pressure at home. In addition the cost of living was rising rapidly, [1] and the workers were aggravated by the luxury flaunted by the war profiteers.
The third condition, a disorganised and divided ruling class, was provided by the effete Liberal administrations utterly unable to prevent the disruption of society. With these conditions went a well-organised Socialist Party, its prestige increased by its consistent opposition to a war which had brought such misery. Mussolini’s pro-war Fascist Party was small and discredited. No one could have predicted in the years 1919 to 1920 that he would win the rubber. The cards seemed stacked for the Socialists.
The immediate result of these conditions was a series of great strikes. In 1919 one and a half million workers were involved. In 1920 a million more. These strikes extended to the countryside. In the Strike of the Cows the agricultural workers refused to milk the cows and the cows perished in thousands. There was a political strike in 1919 in support of the Soviet governments in Russia, Bavaria and Hungary.
In the summer of 1920 the metalworkers struck and the peasants rose in the south of Italy. This wave of strikes ended in August 1920 in the occupation of the factories. It coincided with the Soviet Russian offensive in Poland and the great strikes in Germany, and thus was a piece of international collaboration of the working class as well as an answer to the lockout of the metalworkers by the capitalists. This was perhaps the highest point reached by the revolutionary wave after the war in Europe. Ignazio Silone, the best historian of Italian Fascism, writes about this event:
About 500,000 metalworkers participated in this occupation. Nowhere the activity of the factories stopped. The movement had been driven forward by four great trade unions which acted independently of each other. The Socialistic, the Anarchistic, the Republican and the Catholic. But the occupation of the factories wiped away all differences between the workers who were united by the greatest enthusiasm. Under the technical and disciplinary direction of workers’ councils, production increased in numerous factories. Weapons were produced in case of an attack by the police; the symbolic gesture was made to produce coins with the emblem of hammer and sickle; in the workers’ quarters the small tradesmen delivered goods into the factories and allowed themselves to be paid by bonds of the workers’ organisations.
The occupation of the factories ended with the defeat of the workers. In October 1920, the factories were given back to the owners in return for a 20 per cent increase in wages and some concessions in working conditions. The wage advance barely compensated for the increase in the cost of living. This result cannot be explained only by the unwillingness of foreign capitalists to continue the supply of coal and other raw materials. The cause of it lay in the working-class movement itself. It was obviously impossible for the seizure of a number of factories even by half a million workers, large proportion though that was of the industrial workmen in Italy, to be more than a demonstration unless they accepted the consequence of this action and proceeded to the organisation of the whole economic life of the country and the seizure of the power of the state.
They could, and did, despite all assertions to the contrary, run quite well the factories they had taken over. They even organised a currency which was accepted by the local shopkeepers. But all the time a fierce struggle went on among the leaders about what was to be done next. The Maximalists, who since 1919 controlled the Socialist Party, were now largely Bolshevik in aspiration. They demanded a Socialist republic and a proletarian dictatorship. Most of the trade-union leaders only wanted concessions in wages and participation as a minority in a coalition government with the capitalist parties.
The conflict was decided by the National Council of Trade Unions in which the trade-union reformist policy gained a majority of 600,000 against 400,000. The representatives of the metalworkers, with half a million votes, though the most deeply interested of all in the question, decided surprisingly that this was a good reason for not voting. This vote, it must be emphasised, was not taken at a congress of workers’ representatives, but was a decision of the representatives of national executives. But it was accepted by the Socialist Party. There was, therefore, no one to begin the struggle with the 400,000 workers whose representatives had voted against, and the half-million metalworkers who had abstained.
The trade-union leaders secured promises of a share in the control of the factories through trade-union representatives, and in the state through Socialist ministers. But when they gave back the factories, in return for these promises, they gave up the only reason which the employers had for granting them, and the only power which could insist on the bargain being kept. The trade-union leaders were able to adopt this attitude only because the Maximalist Party liked to talk about a revolution, but took no steps to organise one.
There is a curious resemblance between the general attitude of the idealist Socialist politicians of the postwar period in Italy, Germany and England which must, of itself, be a reflection of the working-class psychology of the time. The Socialists talked about revolution. Their speeches were Messianic in fervour and attracted great audiences in the unrest and bewilderment of the time. But these idealists never got down to the practical discussion of the details of what a revolution would mean, and what had to be done first, and what steps towards Socialist reconstruction would have to follow immediately. It would have cramped the oratorical style to get the workers to discuss Socialism as a concrete reality.
When, as in Munich, in the Eisner revolution, the idealists unexpectedly found power in their hands, their sole concern was that no one should be hurt. Ernst Toller tells in his autobiography of how in the worst of the struggle in Munich he went into the streets saying to himself: ‘I did not realise a revolution would be like this.’ Personally brave, filled with love to all men, they could not understand why it was not possible to convince the capitalists, whose property they had some idea of expropriating, that in the long run all would be for the best, all mankind would be brothers, ‘with flame of freedom in their hearts, and light of knowledge in their eyes’.
While not taking any steps to realise the Socialism they preached, the idealists were very concerned to keep that Socialism ‘pure’. The Maximalists decided to take no part in the revolt against the merchants at the time of greatest profiteering in the Italy of 1919, because after debating for a week they came to the conclusion that the movement was not purely Socialist in origin and aims.
The idiosyncrasies of these idealists as individuals have not mattered in England where, like the Liberal Party whose mental attitude they so much share, they have been ground to pieces by the hard realities of politics, without doing much harm to anything but their own organisations. But the Maximalists in Italy and the Independents in Germany were faced with the desperate necessities of a revolutionary situation. To talk revolution to the masses outside, to give them the thrills of disorder as an alternative to the dullness of the workaday world, was to incur a grave responsibility for the workers they misled.
The Communists who call them traitors had a concrete programme and had some idea of what a revolution meant. Why then did they fail to attract the masses? It is true that in Italy the Communists only existed at that time in numbers just sufficient to prove that they were right, after the event. But where, as in Germany, the workers had the chance to transfer to a more realistic leadership, the fact that the majority did not do so shows that on the whole the temperamental emotionalism of the idealists did roughly mirror the attitude of the workers at that time.
The Fascist Moment: The workers, bewildered enough by all the sudden changes that the war had brought, listened to the great speeches of the Socialist leaders with enthusiasm, but when nothing was done to translate the speeches into action, they simply kept solidly behind the unimaginative and conservative trade-union leaders, believing that if these men could do nothing else, they might perhaps save for the workers who had them, their jobs in the factories. When the capitalists also realised that the Socialists did not mean to back their words by action, the moment was ripe for Fascism.
After the breakdown of the Socialist attack on the factories, after the Socialists had defeated themselves, the chance for the Fascists in Italy had come. As C Curcio, a Fascist historian, wrote in 1924:
Fascism became what it is only after the Socialist debacle. It developed only after the Socialist disappointment. It began to attack after the enemy had stopped from lack of means to advance. Before, it could not have done it.
Mussolini had founded the Fascio di Combattimento in March 1918. He cleverly managed to win the confidence of some of the workers by backing the strikers, while at the same time fiercely attacking the Socialist parties and trade unions for faults of leadership that were only too obvious. It is clear, both from Mussolini’s own speeches and those of his colleagues, that the Fascists at this time still regarded themselves more as the rivals than the enemies of the Socialist organisations.
Like the Nazis, the Italian Fascists began as a left-wing party whose demands were not so very different from those of the Socialist workers’ parties in the revolutionary period, but who made a special appeal to, and relied largely on, the ex-soldiers. Even the occupation of the factories was defended by the Fascists, but the utter failure of the Socialist leadership to follow that action to its logical conclusion and take over the power of the state, gave the Fascists their chance.
Mussolini saw that power would be given to that movement which could end the struggle that, because it remained undecided, had come to a deadlock which was ruining the country. An Italian right-wing Socialist wrote at that time: ‘In the name of revolution which was always announced and never begun, the workers refused to collaborate in the capitalistic reconstruction.’
The moral is clear. If a revolutionary movement leads to a prolonged disorganisation of society, as it did in Italy, and if this movement has shown for years, as did the Italian Socialist Party, that it is neither capable of reorganising the economic life of the country under its own leadership, nor willing to allow the capitalists to do it, then society must be pulled together by someone.
At such a moment, a Fascist movement, based largely on the middle classes, is able to represent itself as standing for the interests of the nation as a whole, against the sectional interests of both capitalists and organised workers, each of which appear too weak to do the job themselves. Such a claim is bound to secure considerable support among the workers, who are suffering most by the deadlock, because in the circumstances the claim has a certain basis in reality. This was the situation which the Italian Fascists were able to exploit after 1920. The Fascist fighting groups were organised as a political party in November 1921.
Could the Liberals Have Done It? Why did the Liberal and Democratic government not carry through the task of pulling society together? The Liberal emigrants have written many books to prove that they were quite equal to this duty, but unfortunately were not allowed by the Fascists to undertake the work. They overlook the fact that in Italy the maintenance of democracy had become incompatible with capitalist profit.
The reformists had been steadily increasing the level of wages, [2] the powerful cooperatives had kept down prices and thus threatened the profits of the distributive trade. The Socialist municipalities, 4000 out of 9000, were going ahead with social services. The deliberate and violent destruction of just those organisations of the workers which were flourishing best in the soil of democracy, could obviously not be undertaken by a Liberal capitalist government, even though it might tolerate their suppression. Some terroristic force was needed for that, and this the Fascists supplied.
It has now been proved, by the Italy of 1921, by the Germany of 1933, and the Vienna of 1934, that if the workers use the advantage which numbers give them in a democracy seriously to menace the capitalist profits, no democratic forms will prevent the capitalists from keeping their privileges by any means they can use. But the reformist democratic tradition is so soaked into the mass of the West European workers that in all these countries they believed that they could win by democratic and legal forms concessions even beyond the limit at which the capitalists as a whole feel that the profit-system is menaced.
In the countries which have not experienced the counter-attack, they still believe it. Yet when the attack comes, the workers show themselves willing to sacrifice all they have won, and even democracy itself, in order to keep themselves within the forms of democracy.
There was, in 1921, a period of which it can actually be said that the Italian Fascists acted as the terroristic organisation of the capitalists against the trade unions and cooperatives. They received capitalist subsidies, and were backed by the soldiers of d'Annunzio. At the same time they were able to get their claim accepted by many workers that they stood for a united nation, workers included, against disorder and ruinous national disunity.
When the deadlock between the capitalists and the Socialists had to be resolved, the decision was taken by the middle classes. The Socialist attack had been not only against Big Business, but also against the middle classes. They either turned Fascist or were organised in the great Roman Catholic Popolari Party. This party in 1919-21 became the mass party of those who feared the ‘Red Menace’. But the Popolari Party could not undertake the muzzling of the workers’ organisations, because it was not a terroristic but an essentially democratic party.
The Pope had in fact tried to canalise the reformist movement among the workers into church channels and had met with some success. When he tried to do the same with the rising forces of Fascism, he found strong resistance. Anti-clericalism was strong among the powerful elements in Italy. Fascism could secure a much wider social basis than the Popolari Party.
The Socialists Estrange the Peasants: The events in the countryside were especially important. Italy was and is a predominantly agrarian country. [3] The Socialist movement in the countryside was exclusively one of agricultural workers. They gained a higher standard of living by their fight. They aimed at the collective ownership of the land by everybody who worked on it: a demand which annoyed the smaller peasants as much as it angered the big landowners. The whole attitude of the Socialists naturally was that the peasants would be better off as agricultural workers in socialised or cooperative agriculture than as individual small owners.
This fight against individual property in land could only be carried on in the teeth of the resistance of the peasants – and even the small tenant farmers would not back the Socialists, because they wanted to become small landowners themselves, and were hit by the rise in the labourers’ wages. These people naturally became the advanced guard of the Fascists, especially as no attempt was made by the Socialist Party, dominated by town workers, to understand the peasant point of view. ‘On the contrary, they supported a spiteful fight against these peasants which later on drove them into the arms of Fascism.’ [4]
The Socialists were much more successful with the labourers, but the Strike of the Cows and the deserting of the harvest at Bologna in 1920, methods understandable to the town proletariat, made a bad impression on the countryside. There would have probably been less feeling if the labourers had taken the harvest and used it for themselves, instead of leaving it to rot.
In 1921 the Fascists concluded their pact with the landed proprietors of the valley of the Po, and became the recognised champions of landowners and peasants against socialisation and the demands of the agricultural labourers. Thus it was in the country that the punitive expeditions of the Fascists began just as it was in the countryside that Hitler had the absolute majority. It was in the countryside that Dollfuss secured the necessary support against Vienna.
Hostility of Middle Classes: At the same time the small traders became hostile to the Socialist workers. The riots about the increase in prices were directed chiefly against the small traders. The rapid development of the cooperatives took much custom from them. By the middle of 1920 wholesale prices had decreased considerably. Retail prices might have remained stable if the cooperatives had not existed. Happy prospects of considerable profiteering were thus taken away from the small traders. They were the elements in the Fascist movement who, wherever they could, destroyed cooperative property with such ferocity and enthusiasm.
The intellectual middle classes, the professional men and the students, went the same way. They had fought with conviction as officers in the war. They were received with hatred when they came back. The Socialists declared that the professional middle classes were less important than the manual workers and they must keep their place. Not unnaturally, the middle classes were hotly resentful of the new attitude. They had their own difficulties. The depreciation of the lira affected their fixed incomes. A hundred lire were worth 19.3 dollars in 1913, 11.4 dollars in 1919, and by 1921 this had fallen to three dollars.
By their organised struggle through their trade unions, the workers had managed to keep their real wages fairly high. According to Mottara, real wages in 1920 were at their highest. In spite of the defeat in 1920, they were still above the prewar level in 1921. But the incomes of the middle class remained practically stable. It was a similar situation to that which led to the Hitler Putsch in 1923.
Nor was it only a question of money. It is a big mistake, as the Social-Democrats in Germany were to find out, to humiliate state officials and still leave them in a position to do harm. Every bureaucrat, every official from prefect to policeman who had been humiliated by the Socialist attack, was ready to get his own back.
The middle classes as a whole could see no other reason for the decay of the country, for the growing poverty and the budget deficit [5] than the continual strikes, the lack of discipline, the disorganisation of transport, and the wasting of corn and cattle. The workers’ movement either takes the full power at once or it is beaten. It is impossible to frighten an enemy for several years without taking over his function of organising production.
After the spectacular defeat of the workers in 1920, the coming together of the capitalists and the mobilised middle class undermined the confidence of the workers in their own strength. As in Germany some years later, sections of the working class split off and went to the Fascists. The Fascist trade unions gained ground. The federation of the Socialist agricultural workers decreased in 1921 from 800,000 to 300,000 members. In many parts of the countryside it was the more active and fighting elements among the agricultural workers who went over to the Fascists.
The declared aim of the Fascist trade unions was ‘to unite employers, white-collar workers and manual workers in the interest of production’. The workers in the ports and in those shipping enterprises which were subsidised by the state went Fascist. It is interesting to note that these were the categories of workers who actually gained most from the subsequent development of Italian imperialism. The membership of the Socialist trade unions fell catastrophically. [6] All Italian Socialist writers agree that the terror only partly accounts for this. The more deep-seated reason was the inner bankruptcy in the reformist policy.
The loyalty of the workers in heavy industry to their industrial organisations and Socialist ideals held longest. The workers of the mechanical and chemical industries, in textiles, in building and printing, the railway and the tram workers, held together till the last. Even three years after the march on Rome, the elections for the factory councils in 1925 showed how strong this resistance was. [7] Later figures were not available, for some months later the factory councils were abolished.
The ‘liquidation’ of the Socialist movement proceeded rapidly. An attempt was made to call a general strike in August 1922, but as its only aim was to force some very moderate Socialist ministers into the government, it could not arouse sufficient enthusiasm to stop the disintegration in the Socialist ranks. It failed partly because of terroristic attacks, but largely because, as in Austria, it was only half-heartedly prepared and not really wanted by the men who called it. The weapon of the general strike, as was to be demonstrated in Germany and again in Austria, proves powerless in a crisis too long delayed, because in each case the Fascists have had time to secure the adherence of enough workers to make success impossible. Violent quarrels broke out among the Socialists.
In 1922, 80,000 out of 300,000 Blackshirts marched to Rome. Mussolini, who had remained at Turin near the French frontier, when his forces met with no resistance, took a sleeping-car and joined them. He became Premier of a coalition government of Fascists, Nationalists, Roman Catholics and Liberals. By 1926, despite opposition from his own lower ranks, and the serious crisis caused by the murder of the Socialist leader Matteotti, Mussolini had suppressed all vestiges of democracy in Italy and concentrated power into his own hands. What he did with that power is dealt with in Part II.
1. Cost of living in Italy:
1914 100 July 1918 197 1919 205 1920 313 1921 387 1922 429 1923 487
2. The real wages of the Italian workers were according to the Bureau International de Travail:
1914 1919 1920 1921 Building 100 135 126 173 Textile 100 125 111 162 Chemistry 100 – 125 112 Livre 100 84 126 154
3. Gainfully employed population in 1921:
Agriculture 10.2 million 55.7% Industry, etc 4.5 million 24.7% Trade, Traffic 1.9 million 10.3% Remainder 1.6 million >9.3%
4. Silone, Der Faschismus: seine Entstehung und seine Entwicklung (Zürich, 1934), p 72.
5. State income and expenditure:
Income Expenditure 1920/21 23.1 37.7 1921/22 17.5 21.8
6. Trade union membership (thousands)
Soc TU PSI PCI Chr'n TU Fascist TU Fascist Party 1919 1159 200 1920 2200 216 1250 20 1921 Jan 170 1921 1128 113 70 992 20 248 1922 Jun 443 1922 Aug 597 800 1922 Oct 800 1922 Dec 400 1000 1923 200 12 10 445 770 1924 200 414 2000 1925 200 180 1928 2700
7. Elections for the factory councils in 1925
Fiat works 4740 Communists
4463 Socialists
760 Fascists
390 CatholicsMotor cars 374 Socialists
137 War veteransOfficine di Sarigliano 526 Socialists
1 Fascist
35 Spoiled votesBanchiero in Vondove 745 Socialists
41 Fascists