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.