THE BATTLE IS NOT BETWEEN DEMOCRACY AND FASCISM BUT BETWEEN REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION
November 25, 2025, marked the 100th anniversary of the publication of José Carlos Mariátegui's book, "The Contemporary Scene," by the founder of the Communist Party of Peru. To commemorate this anniversary, we are publishing three parts of Chapter I, "The Biology of Fascism." We recommend studying it, as it remains highly relevant despite the passage of time.
This publication is also a tribute to the proletariat and people of Italy, who, under the leadership of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), achieved a great victory for the world revolution 81 years ago: the execution of Benito Mussolini, the Duce of Fascism, by Italian communist guerrillas (April 27, 1945).
OUR INTRODUCTION:
When Mariátegui wrote *La Escena Contemporánea* (The Contemporary Scene), he had already begun studying fascism from its beginnings in 1919, as shown in his articles collected in *Cartas de Italia: algo sobre fascismo: ¿Qué es, qué Quiere, qué se Propone de hacer?* (Letters from Italy: Something about Fascism: What is it, what does it want, what does it propose to do?) (El Tiempo, Lima, June 29, 1921) and *La paz interna y el "fascismo"* (Internal Peace and "Fascism") (Rome, August 1921; published in El Tiempo, Lima, November 12, 1921). That is to say, when the fascist phenomenon was a new problem for the Communist International; despite this, he was able to grasp the nature of fascism starting from the crisis of bourgeois democracy, which he defined as a crisis of parliament, and he masterfully outlined its different dimensions: ideological, political, and economic.
Mariátegui was able to analyze the fascist phenomenon by applying what Marx and Lenin had established about the path that the bourgeois State follows in its process of reactionization: concentrating Power in the Executive to the detriment of Parliament, sustained by its two fundamental pillars the army (armed forces) and the bureaucracy to defend the capitalist system.
Marx: Development of the Bourgeois System and the Strengthening of the Executive.
In the bourgeois state, the bureaucracy and the army grow, while the power of parliament declines. Marx pointed out that, faced with popular struggle, the bourgeois state increasingly appeals to the constitution, which grants a right and simultaneously denies it. It should be noted that states of exception are invoked more frequently, suspending rights and empowering the executive branch. Faced with popular struggles, the bourgeois state orders the military to repress them, and the military understands that it is better to retain power. When analyzing "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis XIV," he shows how Louis Bonaparte introduced the method of winning over the lumpenproletariat and turning them into a repressive force to use against the people.
Lenin: With imperialism, the armed forces are greatly strengthened, the entire economy becomes militarized, the bureaucracy grows immensely, and the state apparatus becomes increasingly repressive. However, Lenin did not have the opportunity to witness fascism.
The bourgeois state entered a serious crisis after World War I.
This crisis of the bourgeois state, which for Mariátegui is a crisis of parliamentarism, led to the emergence of fascism as a necessity for the bourgeois state to suppress the revolution. Why didn't it arise in Russia? The revolution in Russia preceded the rise of fascism, but it appeared as the revolution advanced in Europe. Fascism waged a struggle against parliament until it crushed it.
In Italy, the liberal-democratic bourgeoisie, as we will see in the article "New Aspects of the Fascist Battle," "The Retreat from the Aventine Hill," was ignored, and Mussolini crushed them while in power.
In the case of Germany, the October Revolution had repercussions, leading to the 1919 revolution, which was ultimately aborted. Social democracy seized power under the auspices of Hindenburg, the National Chief Marshal, and Juncker, provoking the revolutionaries only to then crush them. At that time, there was no sufficiently formed Communist Party, nor leaders with enough experience. Its leaders (Rosa Luxemburg) were arrested, but the revolution ignited on the 23rd. They lacked a mature party, even though the revolutionary situation was unfolding and France was pressuring Germany (payment of war reparations, the Treaty of Versailles). The party rose up, but it was crushed, and the few leaders of that time were annihilated, even in the Bavarian region. It was under these conditions that National Socialism developed.
The communists always tried to unite with other political positions, but the social democrats never wanted to because they served the established order and were the old revisionists, always resorting to an opposing force, the army, to maintain order. Hitler emerged and gained greater influence, supported by the international financial bourgeoisie, including that of the United States (Rockefeller). The Nazis wanted to contain communism and be a spearhead against the Soviet Union.
From 1929 to 1933, there was a major global crisis that impacted Germany. The Germans failed to seize power, and the Social Democrats supported the reactionary forces. This led to Hitler winning the elections and becoming Prime Minister. He entered parliament in 1929, but only consolidated power in 1933 (four years of fierce struggle). Fascism faced the necessity of making deals with the army, just as Mussolini had.
Hitler had to purge and eliminate part of his own party (the Night of the Long Knives). In a single night, those who wanted to carry out a National Socialist revolution against the wealthy were annihilated. After this purge, he turned on everyone, including the Social Democrats themselves.
In Spain, the situation was different. There, a revolution was already underway, and it was the Armed Forces that had to uphold and promote fascism. There was the fascist precedent of Primo de Rivera (the coup of the 1920s; see Mariátegui's perspective on this). In the early 1930s, the Spanish Revolution advanced, giving rise to fascism. José Antonio Primo de Rivera emerged, proposing the Falange and the need to develop trade unions, understood as the union of producers in the name of an eternal, Catholic Spain with immutable traditions. The Asturian miners' uprising in 1934 sent shockwaves through the reactionary forces, and the army rose up, led by Sanjurjo, whom Franco would later succeed as head of the army. There was no parliamentary struggle to bring about fascism, as the movements were so large that they had no other option but to use force, and the revolutionaries killed Primo de Rivera.
In Mexico, General Díaz had been president for about 30 years, and in 1910 the Mexican Revolution began. Madero, a liberal democrat, emerged, sparking a peasant uprising, and there was no party capable of leading the revolution. Madero was assassinated upon assuming power, and anarchy ensued. Approximately 10 years of revolution, marked by peasant struggles and successive presidents.
This entire process culminated with Obregón and led to the 1917 Constitution, which remains the current constitution with subsequent reforms, particularly from the 1990s onward (the Washington Consensus). With the 1917 Constitution, the process began to solidify. The movement's sole purpose was to restrict feudal property ownership, but it did not abolish it. The Mexican state resembles the Italian state like two peas in a pod (Mariátegui). In the 1920s, the PRI emerged and never lost an election until the 1990s.
The political landscape is polarized between revolution and counter-revolution, and bourgeois-democratic forms and liberal-democratic ideologies are insufficient to contain the revolution. Hence the need for fascism, one of the two forms that the reactionary process of the bourgeois state takes; the other is the absolute centralization of power in the executive branch, presidential absolutism (for example, the USA).
The 7th Congress of the Communist International will be held on the 35th.
Dimitrov, analyzing the problem of fascism, will argue that fascism is the state expression of the financial bourgeoisie, the financial oligarchy, which employs the most blatant terror. This definition thus focuses on terror. However, before this Congress, Dimitrov, like Clara Zetkin, analyzed fascism, and his argument is that one must see the negation of bourgeois freedoms inherent in fascism.
Fascism and terror: At the 7th Congress, Dimitrov will propose the possibility of unity among liberal democrats against fascism. This reveals that it wasn't all terror; he understood fascism as the negation of liberal democracy. Dimitrov considers fascism to be a state that represents and defends the interests of the financial bourgeoisie (big bourgeoisie), rejecting liberal democratic criteria and principles, and introducing fascist criteria that negate those principles. It rejects the parliamentary bourgeois-democratic order in favor of corporatism and employs terror, soft power, and hard power. Terror, in fascism's view, is a means of developing more violence as a paralyzing and dominating instrument to achieve its fascist objectives and the corporatist order (political objective).
The reactionary nature of the bourgeois state—first, it must be reiterated that in our case it is a landowning-bureaucratic state, that is, a joint dictatorship of the big bourgeoisie and landowners in the service of imperialism, directed by the big bourgeoisie—is the source of the class character of governments, whether bourgeois-democratic or fascist. It is not, as the revisionist and capitulationist LOD tries to claim, a "capitalist state."
The reactionary nature of the state can manifest as absolute centralization in the executive branch (absolute presidentialism), a bourgeois-democratic regime with increasing restrictions on rights and freedoms, or it can take the form of the negation of the bourgeois-democratic regime: fascism. This distinction must be made in each specific process.
But, in general, in the process of the bourgeois state, the bourgeois-democratic system is compelled to take further measures to restrict and suppress struggles. It's not that liberal democrats leap into fascism, but with the restrictive laws they enact, they pave the way.
Therefore, Dimitrov will analyze how fascism is not the same everywhere; it takes specific forms depending on the conditions in which it develops and the stage of the revolution, and it can coexist with parliament for a time. But it has common, general characteristics: it sweeps away everything bourgeois-democratic, promotes nationalism, uses social demagoguery (fighting against the rich), and targets banks—a clear expression of wealth, even in their buildings. They make grand promises to the masses: jobs for the unemployed, land for the peasants, education for young people, and opportunities for intellectuals to develop their talents. They are cynical and rely on the most blatant lies.
Chairman Gonzalo and the PCP say that an anti-fascist front is not appropriate for us; the situations are different. However, they say we must utilize the contradictions between the two reactionary factions, the bourgeois-democratic and the fascist, without aligning ourselves with either of them. Herein lies the problem of objective convergences. They argue that an anti-fascist front is not appropriate; what is needed is the united front of the democratic revolution, which varies according to the development of fundamental contradictions and the stages of the people's war. And, in imperialist countries, what is needed is the front of the socialist revolution. In both cases, this means that the only way to be prepared and confront any circumstance of the national and international class struggle is to develop, through people's war, the revolution in one's own country as part of and in service to the World Revolution.
To conclude this presentation, paraphrasing Mariátegui (see the last paragraph of the second article published below), we say: the final battle is not between fascism and democracy, but between revolution and counter-revolution.
José Carlos Mariátegui
The Contemporary Scene
(*) Appeared approximately November 25, 1925
I. BIOLOGY OF FASCISM
MUSSOLINI AND FASCISM
Fascism and Mussolini are two co-constitutive, mutually-supporting words. Mussolini is fascism’s champion, its leader, its great duce. Fascism is Mussolini’s platform, tribune, and chariot. To understand better a piece of this stage of the European crisis, let us quickly go over the history of the fascists and their great leader.
Mussolini, as it is known, is a politician of socialist origin. As a socialist, his position was neither centrist, nor reserved, but fiery and extremist. He held a role consonant with his temperament, because he is, in body and soul, an extremist. His place is on the extreme left, or on the extreme right. From 1910 to 1911 he was one of the leaders of the socialist left. In 1912 he led the expulsion of four collaborationist representatives from the socialist party: Bonomi, Bissolati, Cabrini and Podrecca, and then took the helm at Avanti. Then came 1914 and the war. Italian socialists demanded Italian neutrality, but Mussolini, as always restive and belligerent, rebelled against the pacifism of his brethren and advocated Italy’s intervention in the war. He gave, initially, a revolutionary point of view to his interventionism. He maintained that extending and exasperating the war would hasten European revolution. However, in reality, within his interventionism pulsed his warrior psyche, which could not reconcile itself to a passive and Tolstoyian neutrality. Mussolini abandoned leadership of Avanti and founded in Milan Il Popolo d’Italia to sing praise of the attack on Austria. Italy joined the Entente, and Mussolini, protagonist of the intervention, became one of its soldiers as well.
Then came victory, armistice, and demobilization, and along with them, an idle period for the interventionists. D’Annunzio, longing for heroic feats, lead the Fiume adventure. Mussolini created the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, the fasces of combat. But in Italy, it was a revolutionary, socialist moment. For Italy, the war had been a bad deal. The Entente had offered it meager scraps of the spoils of war and haggled stubbornly over the ownership of Fiume. All in all, Italy had left the war with feelings of discontent and disenchantment. It was under this influence that elections took place. The socialists won 155 seats in parliament. Mussolini, candidate for Milan, was pummeled by socialist votes.
But these feelings of disappointment and national depression were ripe for a violent nationalist reaction, and were the roots of fascism. The middle class is peculiarly vulnerable to the loftiest patriotic myths. And the Italian middle class, furthermore, felt distant from, and adversarial to, the socialist proletariat. The middle class did not forgive socialist neutrality. They did not forgive the high salaries, the state subsidies, the social laws which the socialists had wrung from them during and after the war under fear of revolution. The middle class chafed and suffered at the fact that the neutral, and even defeatist, proletariat should turn a profit from a war it did not even want, and whose results it undermined, shrunk and disdained. This middle class angst found a home in fascism. Mussolini in this way attracted the middle class to his fasci di combatimento.
Some socialist and syndicalist dissidents joined the fascists, bringing with them their skills in organizing and capturing the masses. Fascism was not yet a programmatic or consciously reactionary and conservative sect. Fascism, rather, believed itself to be revolutionary. Its propaganda contained subversive and demagogic aspects. Fascism, for example, excoriated the nouveaux riches. Its principles—tendentially republican and anticlerical—were infused with the mental uncertainty of the middle class which, instinctively dissatisfied and disgusted with the bourgeoisie, is vaguely hostile to the proletariat. The Italian socialists committed the error of failing to employ clever political methods to shift the spiritual attitude of the middle class. Quite the opposite, they exacerbated the enmity between the proletariat and the petite bourgeoisie, disdainfully treated and slandered by some of the stone-faced theoreticians of the revolutionary orthodoxy.
Italy entered a period of civil war. Frightened by the odds of revolution, the bourgeoisie armed, supplied and fanned the flames of fascism, and pushed it towards the grisly persecution of socialism, the destruction of the unions and revolutionary cooperatives, to the breaking of strikes and uprisings. Fascism thus became a numerous and battle-hardened militia. It ended up stronger than the state itself. That is when it claimed power. The fascist brigades conquered Rome. Mussolini, in “blackshirt” uniform, took office, compelled the obedience of the majority of parliament, and inaugurated a fascist regime and a fascist era.
About Mussolini, much has been written, mostly fiction, little fact. Due to his political belligerence, it is nearly impossible to neatly and objectively define his personality and figure. Some descriptions are panegyric and deferential; others, rancorous and propagandizing. Mussolini is known episodically, through anecdotes and snapshots. It is said, for example, that Mussolini is the architect of fascism, it is believed that Mussolini “created” fascism. It is quite true that Mussolini is a seasoned agitator, an expert organizer, a dizzyingly energetic character. His activity, his dynamism, his tension, all hugely influenced the fascist phenomenon. During the fascist campaign, Mussolini would, in a single day, speak in three or four cities. He would hop by airplane from Rome to Pisa, from Pisa to Bologna, from Bologna to Milan. Mussolini is a volatile, man, dynamic, verbose, italianissimo, singularly gifted at exciting crowds and agitating the masses. He is fascism’s organizer, champion, and great duce. But he was not its creator, he was not its architect. He extracted a political movement from a state of mind, but he did not mold this movement in his image and likeness. Mussolini did not give fascism a spirit or a program. On the contrary, fascism gave its spirit to Mussolini. His consubstantiation, his ideological identification with the fascists, obligated Mussolini to rid himself, to purge himself, of the last traces of his socialism. Mussolini needed to assimilate, to absorb, anti-socialism, middle-class chauvinism, to herd and organize the middle class into the ranks of his fasci di combattimento, and he had to define his politics as reactionary, anti-socialist and anti-revolutionary. In this way, the case of Mussolini is unique from those of Bonomi, of Briand, and other ex-socialists.
Bonomi and Briand have not been forced to break explicitly with their socialist origin. That said, they have claimed a minimal socialism, a homeopathic socialism. Mussolini, on the other hand, has gone so far as to claim he blushes at his socialist past like a grown man blushes at his teenage love letters, and has lept from the extremest socialism to the extremest conservatism. He has not attenuated, has not curbed his socialism; he has abandoned it wholly and entirely. His economic proposals, for example, are totally averse to interventionism, statism or fiscalism. They do not accept the transactional type of capitalist and entrepreneurial state: they tend to restore the classic type of tax-and-police state. His points of view are today diametrically opposed to those he held yesterday. Mussolini was a believer yesterday just as he is a believer today. Through what mechanism has he undergone this conversion from one doctrine to another? It is not an intellectual, but an irrational phenomenon. The engine powering this ideological change was not intellectual, it was sentimental. Mussolini has not freed himself of his socialism, either intellectually or conceptually. Socialism was in his mind not a concept but a feeling, in the same way that fascism is not for him a concept but a feeling as well. Let us note this psychological and physiognomical fact: Mussolini has never been an intellectual man, but a sentimental one. In politics, in the press, he has been neither a theoretician nor a philosopher, but a rhetorician and conductor. His language has not been programmatic, principled, or scientific, but passionate and sentimental.
The weakest of Mussolini’s speeches have been those in which he has attempted to define the parentage, the ideology of fascism. Fascism’s program is confused, contradictory, heterogeneous: it contains, mixed helter-skelter, liberal concepts alongside syndicalist concepts. That is to say, Mussolini has not offered to fascism a true program; he has offered a plan of action.
Mussolini has gone from socialism to fascism, from revolution to reaction, by way of emotion, not concept. All historical apostasies have been, most likely, a spiritual phenomenon. Mussolini, revolutionary extremist yesterday, reactionary extremist today, is no Julian. Like that emperor, a character of Ibsen and Merezkovskij, Mussolini is a restless man, theatrical, deluded, superstitious and mysterious, who feels chosen by Fate to order the persecution of the new god and return to their altarpiece the moribund gods of yesterday.
The Theory of Fascism
The crisis of the fascist regime, brought about by the Matteotti affair, has clarified and defined fascism’s physiognomy and content. Before the March on Rome, the fascist party was nebulous and undefined. For a long time, it did not wish to qualify itself or function as a party. Fascism, according to many “blackshirts” from the early days, was not a faction, but a movement. It wished to be, more than a political phenomenon, a spiritual one, and to represent, above all, a reaction of the victorious Italy of Vittorio Veneto against the policy of disparaging that victory and its consequences. The composition and structure of the fasci explained their ideological confusion. The fasci conscripted devotees from the most disparate social sectors: in their ranks, students and officials mingled with literati, employees, nobles, peasants, and even laborers. Fascism’s topThe fascists draped a national flag over all their illicit undertakings and all their doctrinaire and programmatic stumbles brass could hardly be a more motley crew. It is composed of socialist defectors like Mussolini and Farinacci; ex-combatants loaded with medals like Igliori and De Vecchi; futurist literati like Filippo Marinetti and Emilio Settimelli; recently-converted ex-anarchists like Massimo Rocca; syndicalists like Cesare Rossi and Michele Bianchi; Mazzinian republicans like Casalini; Fiumanists like Giunta and Giuriati; and orthodox monarchists from the Savoy dynasty-addicted nobility. Republican, anticlerical, and iconoclastic in its origins, fascism declared itself more or less agnostic toward the regime and the Church when it became a party.
The fascists draped a national flag over all their illicit undertakings and all their doctrinaire and programmatic stumbles. They claimed exclusive representation of Italianness and aspired toward a monopoly on patriotism. They fought to hoard for themselves the soldiers and maimed veterans of war. Mussolini and his lieutenants’ demagogy and opportunism were amply rewarded, in this respect, by the socialists’ political bumbling, whose foolish and inopportune anti-militarist bellowing had made them enemies of most soldiers.
The taking of Rome and power aggravated the fascist error. They found themselves flanked by liberal, democratic, and catholic elements, which exerted upon their mentality and spirit a constant and irritating influence. Furthermore, fascism saw its ranks swell with those people seduced solely by success. The composition of fascism became increasingly unorthodox, both socially and spiritually. For this reason, Mussolini could not carry the coup d’etat through to its fullest extent. He arrived at power through insurrection; but he immediately searched for the support of the parliamentary majority, inaugurating a policy of compromises and deal-making. He tried to legalize his dictatorship, vacillated between dictatorship and parliamentarism, and declared that fascism should enter into legality as soon as possible. But this fluctuating policy could not eliminate the contradictions that undermined fascist unity. They did not hesitate to manifest within fascism two antithetical mentalities. An extremist fraction advocated for the integration of the fascist revolution into the Statute of the Kingdom of Italy. The liberal-democratic state should, by their judgment, be replaced by a fascist state. A revisionist fraction demanded, on the other hand, a more or less extensive rectification of the party’s politics. They condemned the arbitrary violence of the provincial ras. These ras, as the regional bosses and condottieri of the fascist party are labeled, in reference to the Abyssinian headmen, exert over the provinces a medieval and despotic power. Revisionist fascists rebelled against racism and the squadre d’azione, the militias dedicated to combating worker militancy. The most categorical and authoritative revisionist leader, Massimo Rocca, sustained arduous polemics from the extremist leaders, which held vast repercussions. He wished to define and set, between the two lines, fascism’s function and ideology. Until then, fascism had been pure action, but began to feel the need for theory as well. Curzio Suckert assigned to fascism a Catholic, medieval, anti-liberal and anti-Renaissance spirit. The spirit of the Renaissance, of Protestantism and liberalism, was labeled as adulterating and nihilist, spiritually contrary to Italy’s essence. The fascists failed to notice that, since their earliest outings, they had designated themselves, above all, as proponents of the idea of the nation, an idea of clear Renaissance origins. The fact seemed not to hinder them particularly. Mario Pantaleoni and Michele Bianchi spoke, on the one hand, of the projected fascist state as a syndical one, while the revisionists, on the other hand, appeared tinged with a vague liberalism. Massimo Rocca’s theses provoked the outrage of all the extremists, until the fascist sect officially excommunicated him as a dangerous heretic. Mussolini did not get involved in these debates. Missing from the polemic, he occupied a centrist position in absentia, and was careful to not compromise himself with too precise an answer when grilled on the matter. “After all, what does the theoretical content of a party matter? What gives it strength and life is its tonality, its will, the spirit of those who constitute it.”
It was once the work of defining fascism had arrived at this point that Matteotti was suddenly assassinated. At first, Mussolini announced his intention to purify the fascist ranks. Under the pressure of the storm unleashed by the crime, he sketched out a normalization plan in a speech in the Senate. In that instant, Mussolini was urged to appease the liberal elements that sustained his government. But all his efforts to wrangle public opinion failed. Fascism began losing sympathizers and allies. The defections of the liberal and democratic elements that had flanked and supported fascism in the beginning for fear of the socialist revolution gradually isolated Mussolini’s government from all non-fascist opinion. This isolation pushed fascism to a more belligerent position by the day. An extremist mentality prevailed within the party. Mussolini still tended, at times, to use a conciliatory language in the hopes of breaking or mitigating the combative spirit of the opposition; but in reality, fascism returned to its warlike strategy. In the following national assembly, it was the extremist tendency that dominated the fascist party, with Farinacci serving as its archetypal condottiere. The revisionists, led by Bottai, capitulated all along the line. Then, Mussolini named a commission for the reform of the Italian Statute. In the fascist press, there reappeared the thesis that the demo-liberal state had to make way for the fascist-unitary state. This state of mind in the fascist party saw its most emphatic and aggressive manifestation in the rejection of deputy Giunta’s resignation from his position as Vice President of the Chamber of Deputies. Giunta resigned once the King’s procurator sued for authorization to process him as responsible for the aggression against the dissident fascist Cesare Farol, while the majority of fascists wished to protect him with a thunderous and explicit declaration of solidarity. Such an attitude could not be maintained, though the fascist majority, compelled by a flurry of protests, reluctantly rescinded their support in a later vote. Mussolini needed to muster his full authority to force the fascist deputies’ retreat. He failed, however, to stop Michele Bianchi and Farinacci from declaring their discontent at this opportunistic maneuver, a maneuver based on considerations over parliamentary tactics.
Super-fascism, ultra-fascism, whatever we wish to call it; it contains more than just one aspect. It runs from the racist and squadrista fascism of Farinacci to the integralist fascism of Michele Bianchi and Curzio Suckert. Farinacci embodies the spirit of the squadrista blackshirts who, after their gruesome training in the punitive raids against the unions and socialist cooperatives, marched on Rome and ushered in the fascist dictatorship. Farinacci is a tempestuous and fiery man, a man interested not in theory but in action, the most genuine type of fascist ras. He has in the palm of his hand the whole province of Cremona, where he directs the New Cremona newspaper that habitually threatens opposition groups and politicians with a second fascist “wave.” The first “wave” was the one he led to the conquest of Rome, and the second, according to Farinacci’s own staunch verbiage, would sweep away all the enemies of the fascist regime in a new St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. A former rail worker and socialist, Farinacci has the mind of an organizer and condottiere. The opposition press often remarks on his tendency to barrel through his articles and speeches with little regard for grammar, which, in his ferocious hate, he jumbles up with democracy and socialism. He wants to be, in every instant, a true blackshirt. More intellectual, if no less apocalyptic, than Farinacci, are the fascists of Rome’s deliriously imperialist L’Impero newspaper, directed by two initially futurist writers, Mario Carli and Emilio Settimelli, who invite fascism to definitively liquidate the parliamentarian regime. Fascist Italy, armed with the magistrate’s fasces, has, according to L’Impero, a lofty mission in the present chapter in world history. The newspaper also praises this second fascist wave. Michele Bianchi and Curzio Suckert are the theorists of integral fascism. Bianchi sketches out the technique of the fascist state and conceives of it as a sort of vertical trust of syndicates or corporations, while Suckert, director of La Conquista dello Stato, busies himself with philosophical contrivances.
In the fascist party, there coexists with this tendency a moderate, conservative faction, which rejects neither liberalism nor the Renaissance, and which works for the normalization of fascism and strives to put the Mussolini government on track within bureaucratic legality. They form the nucleus of the moderate tendency of the former nationalists of L’Idea Nazionale absorbed by fascism immediately following the coup d’etat. The ideology of these nationalists is more or less the same as the old liberal right. Timid monarchists, they oppose the fascist coup compromising even slightly the bases of the monarchy and the Statute. Federzoni and Paolucci represent this tepid wing of fascism.
But, for their temperament and fascist antecedents in the style of Federzoni and Paolucci, they embody less than anyone true fascism, but are rather prudent and measured conservatives. No exorbitant romanticism, no desperate medieval nostalgia, can rile them up. They lack the condottiere mindset. Farinacci, on the other hand, is an authentic exemplar of fascism. He is the man of the cudgel, provincial, fanatical, catastrophic and belligerent, in whom fascism is not a concept, not a theory, but a mere passion an impulse, a cry, an “alala!”
New Aspects of the Fascist Battle
Fascism is — as almost everybody knows, or believes to know — reactionary. However, the complex reality of the fascist phenomenon does not permit itself to be wholly encapsulated within simplistic and schematic definitions. Primo de Rivera’s Directory in Spain is reactionary, and yet, one cannot study reaction within the Directory as one studies fascist reaction. This is not simply because of disdain for Primo de Rivera and his goons’ epaulets and blowhard stupidity, nor simply because of the conviction that these boastful bit-players are too trivial and insignificant to influence the course of history. Rather, we must evaluate and analyze reaction, above all, where it manifests itself in its full potentiality, where it signals the decay of a formerly-vigorous democracy, where it constitutes the antithesis and effect of an extensive and profound revolutionary phenomenon.
In Italy, reaction offers us the pinnacle of its spectacle, its highest experiment. Italian fascism represents, in its fullest expression, anti-revolution, or, as it is more popularly called, counterrevolution. The fascist offensive is explained and achieved in Italy as a consequence of a retreat or defeat of revolution. The fascist regime has not been incubated in salons or social clubs; it has been molded in the hearts of a generation and fed on the passions and blood of a thick social stratum. It has had, as its spokesperson, its duce, a man of the people, intuitive, shrill, vibrant, well-versed in domineering, in giving orders, in the seduction of the masses, born for polemic and combat, and who, excluded from the socialist ranks, has wished to become the rancorous and implacable condottiere of anti-socialism, and has marched at the head of the anti-revolution with the same warlike exaltation with which he enjoyed marching at the head of the revolution. The fascist regime has come to substitute itself for a much more effective and developed parliamentary and democratic regime than the rather embryonic and fictitious one liquidated, or simply interrupted, by Primo de Rivera in Spain. In sum, in the history of fascism, one can feel beating the dense, active, and belligerent totality of the historical factors and romantic, material and spiritual premises of an anti-revolution. Fascism was formed in an environment of immanent revolution, in an atmosphere of agitation, of violence, of demagogy and delirium created physically and morally by the war, nourished by the postbellum crisis, and whipped-up by the Russian Revolution. In this tempestuous environment, charged with electricity and tragedy, reaction tempered their nerves and sharpened their swords, and fascism received its strength, exaltation and spirit. Fascism, born at the confluence of these various elements, is a movement, a current, a sermon.
The fascist experiment, whatever its duration and development will be, appears inevitably destined to exasperate the current crisis, to undermine the bases of bourgeois society and maintain the postwar disquiet. Democracy employs its weapons of criticism, rationalism and skepticism against the proletarian revolution, it mobilizes the intelligentsia and invokes culture against it. Fascism, on the other hand, opposes revolutionary mysticism with reactionary and nationalistic mysticism. While the liberal critics of the Russian Revolution condemn the cult of violence in the name of civilization, the captains of fascism proclaim this cult as their own. The fascist theoreticians deny and oppose the historicist and evolutionist conceptions that, before the war, unsettled both the prosperity and digestion of the bourgeoisie who, since the end of the war, have tried to remake themselves, to be reborn in Democracy and in the New Freedom of Wilson and other less puritan evangelists.
Reactionary and nationalist mysticism, once in power, cannot content itself with the modest charge of preserving the capitalist order. The capitalist order is demo-liberal, parliamentary, reformist or transformist. It is, in the economic or financial realm, more or less internationalist. It is, above all, of the same essence as the old politics. And what reactionary or nationalist mysticism can come together without a bit of hate or detraction for the old parliamentary and democratic politics, accused of abdication or weakness before “socialist demagoguery” and the “communist threat?” Is not this, perhaps, one of the most monotonous refrains of the French right, the German right, of all the rights? In consequence, reaction, risen to power, does not limit itself to preservation; it aims to remake. Given that it rejects the present, it can neither preserve nor perpetuate it: it has to attempt to remake the past, which is condensed to a few norms: the principle of authority, government of a state religious hierarchy, etc. That is, the norms that the bourgeois revolution tore up and destroyed, because they obstructed the development of the capitalist economy. It occurs, then, as a result, that as long as reaction limits itself to shunning freedom and repressing revolution, the bourgeoisie applauds it; but then, when reaction begins to attack the foundations of the bourgeoisie’s power and riches, the bourgeoisie feels the urgent necessity to give license to its bizarre defenders.
The Italian experience is extraordinarily instructive in this respect. In Italy, the bourgeoisie hailed fascism as a savior. The Terza Italia swapped Garibaldi’s Red Shirt for Mussolini’s Black Shirt. Industrial and agricultural capital financed and armed the fascist brigades. The fascist coup d’etat obtained the consensus of the majority of the Chamber. Liberalism bowed before the principle of authority. Few liberals, few democrats, refused to enlist in the Duce’s entourage. Among the parliamentarians, Nitti, Amendola and Albertini. Among the writers, Guglielmo Ferrero, Mario Missiroli, a few others.The classic leaders of liberalism — Salandra, Orlando, Giolitti — with greater or lesser intensity, granted their confidence to the dictatorship. The adherence and confidence of these people soon resulted in an embarrassment for fascism; it imposed upon fascism the task of absorbing them, a task beyond its strength and possibilities. The fascist spirit could not act freely if it did not first command and absorb the liberal spirit. Faced with the impossibility of elaborating its own ideology, fascism ran the risk of adopting, more or less subtly, the liberal ideology that surrounded it.
The political storm unleashed by the assassination of Matteotti brought with it a solution to this problem. Liberalism broke with fascism. Giolitti, Orlando, Salandra, Il Giornale d’Italia, etc., assumed an oppositional attitude, but did not follow the opposition bloc in their retreat to the Aventine Hill. They remained in the Chamber. As organic parliamentarians, they did not deign to do otherwise. Fascism was left isolated. At its flanks there remained only some libero-nationalists and some Catholic nationalists, that is, the most nationalist and conservative elements of the old parties.
The opposition forces hoped in this way to force fascism out of power. They thought that, given the vacancies surrounding it, fascism would fall as a matter of course. The communists fought against this illusion. They proposed their constitution to the Aventine opposition in a popular assembly. An antifascist parliament should have been held there on the Aventine Hill, across from the fascist parliament in the Palazzo Montecitorio. It should have boycotted the Chamber and faced their ultimate political and historical consequences. But this was, frankly put, the revolutionary path, and the Aventine bloc is not revolutionary. It feels itself to be, and announces itself as, normalizing. The communists’ invitation was not, therefore, acceptable. The Aventine bloc contented itself with posing the famous moral question, and refused to return to the chamber while the fascists wielded power; these men, shielded by the vote of their majority, upon whom weighed the responsibility of Matteotti’s assassination, responsibility which, under a fascist government, justice found itself forced to clarify and examine.
Mussolini responded to this declaration of intransigence with a political maneuver. He introduced an electoral law bill to the Chamber. In the practice of Italian politics this procedure precedes and announces the convocation of political elections. Would the Aventine parties also abstain from participating in the elections? The bloc ratified it in its intransigence. It insisted in its moral challenge. The opposition press published a piece by Cessare Rossi, which he wrote before his arrest, in which the supposed ringleader behind Matteotti’s murder accuses Mussolini. The challenge was documented, but the dialectic of the opposition lay in an error. The moral question could not take precedence over the political question. It should, rather, have played out in the reverse. The moral question was impotent in expelling fascism from government.
Mussolini reminded the opposition of this in his scathing speech in the Chamber on January 3. Article 47 of the Statute of Italy served as the preamble of his speech, which grants the Chamber of Deputies the right to accuse the King’s Ministers and to have them tried by the high Court of Justice. “I formally ask whether in this Chamber or outside it there is anyone who wishes to make use of Article 47.” Later, with dramatic flair, he claimed for himself all the responsibilities of fascism. “If fascism has been anything less than Castor Oil and bludgeon, sober passion of the greatest Italian youth, let the blame fall on me! If fascism is a gang of lawbreakers, well, I am this gang’s boss! If all the violence has been the result of a certain historical, political and moral climate, well, the responsibility is mine, because this historical, political and moral climate has been of my making!” He announced, at once, that in 48 hours, the situation would become clear. How has he maintained his word? In a manner as simple as it is notorious: suffocating almost entirely the freedom of the press. The opposition, virtually denied the platform of the press, was thus peremptorily and brusquely invited to return to the platform of the parliament. They are presently preparing for a return to the Chamber from atop the Aventine Hill.
In a recent article in Gerarchia magazine titled “Elegy to the Gregarious,” Mussolini martially reviews the mishaps of the battle. He contends with the opposition, and exalts the discipline of his troops. “The discipline of fascism,” he writes “truly has religious aspects.” He recognizes in this discipline “the spirit of the people who have learned in the trenches to conjugate, in all its moods and tenses, the sacred verb of all religions: obey,” and “the sign of the new Italy, which strips herself once and for all of the old anarchic mentality with the intuition that only in the silent coordination of all forces to their orders can she be victorious.”
Isolated, hemmed in, boycotted, fascism is becoming more belligerent, combative, and intransigent. The liberal and democratic opposition has returned fascism to its origins. The reactionary experiment, freed of the ballast that once obstructed and frustrated it from within, can now come to complete fruition. This explains the interest that the fascist battle, as an historical experience, has for its contemporaries.
For two years, fascism has mostly contented itself playing the role of capitalism’s gendarme in power, but today wishes to substantially reform the Statute of Italy. According to its leaders and press, fascism presumes to create a fascist state, to write the fascist revolution into the Italian Constitution. A commission of eighteen fascist legislators, presided by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, is preparing this constitutional reform. Farinacci, leader of fascism’s extremist wing and called to the general secretaryship of the party during the crisis, declares that fascism “has lost two and a half years in power.” Now, freed from the alliance with the liberals which weighed it down, having purged the remnants of the old politics, it is proposing to make up lost time. The heads of fascism are employing a more exalted and mystic language than ever. Fascism wants to be a religion. In an essay about the “religious characteristics of the present political battle,” Giovanni Gentile observes that “in Italy today, because of fascism, what yesterday seemed the most durable personal links of friendship and family are being broken.” The philosopher of idealism does not take pains over this war. He has been, for some time now, the philosopher of violence. He remembers, in his essay, the words of Jesus: “Non veni pacem mittere, sed gladium. Ignem veni mittere in terram. (I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. I came to unleash fire upon the Earth).” He remarks, with regards to the moral question, that “this religious tonality of the fascist mindset has generated the same tonality in the antifascist mindset.”
Giovanni Gentile, possessed by the fascist fever, surely exaggerates. On the Aventine Hill, the religious flame has yet to spark. Less still has it sparked, nor can it, in Giolitti. Giolitti and the Aventine Hill represent the demo-liberal culture and spirit, with all its skepticism, with all its rationalism, with all its criticism. The present battle will return to the liberal spirit a taste of its former combative force, but it will not achieve its rebirth as a faith, a passion, a religion. The program of the Aventine and Giolitti is normalization, and for its mediocrity, such a program cannot shake the masses, cannot exalt them, cannot lead them against the fascist regime. The religious characteristics that Gentile uncovers in the reactionary mysticism of the fascists is only to be found in the revolutionary mysticism of the communists. The final battle will not, therefore, be waged between fascism and democracy.