“He raised the Italian people from Bolshevism into which
they might have sunk in 1919 to a position in Europe such as Italy had never
held before”,
Winston Churchill.
“The fascist movement in Italy was a spontaneous movement of
large masses, with new leaders from the rank and file. It is a plebian movement
in origin, directed and financed by big capitalist powers. It issued forth from
the petty bourgeoisie, the slum proletariat, and even to a certain extent from
the proletarian masses; Mussolini, a former socialist, is a
"self-made" man arising from this movement.
— Leon Trotsky
Source: Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It (1944), Ch. 1
Donald Sassoon's Mussolini and the Rise of Fascism is
written by a historian aligned with the British academic left. While it
provides valuable empirical details on Mussolini's rise, however, the most
thorough and politically impactful analysis of Italian fascism comes from
Marxist perspectives, most notably those of Leon Trotsky, who viewed fascism as
an urgent political threat requiring a class-conscious response.
It is uncertain whether the author intentionally wrote the
book to confront a harmful trend in poorly written works. These works attempt
to promote a revisionist history that seeks to rehabilitate Benito Mussolini
and hide the origins of Italian fascism. For Sassoon, examining Italian fascism
is more than an academic exercise; it provides vital lessons for current
politics. To counter the resurgence of right-wing and fascist groups in Italy
and worldwide, a truthful and unbiased study of history is essential.
The Class Character
of Fascism
Trotsky's definition remains the key starting point. In
1931, he described fascism as more than just an authoritarian regime imposed by
a military leader. Instead, he saw it as a mass movement driven by the petty
bourgeoisie, including small shopkeepers, impoverished peasants, disillusioned
veterans, and middle-class individuals who had fallen out of society, all of
whom were supported and funded by large capital interests. Mussolini,
originally a socialist, shifted toward fierce nationalism during World War I,
illustrating the social unrest inherent in petty-bourgeois radicalism.
Trotsky described fascism's unique role as forcing the
desperate petty bourgeoisie to become a weapon against the working class and
democratic institutions. It's essential to recognise that fascism rises not
from "the people" in general but from the bourgeoisie, which shifts
to fascist violence when traditional parliamentary tools, police, courts, and
parties fail to manage the class conflict.
Peter Schwarz's 2022 article marking the centenary of the
March on Rome provides a significant Marxist viewpoint. During 1919–1920, Italy
faced intense revolutionary unrest known as the biennio rosso (two red years),
when half a million workers seized factories and shipyards, flying red and
anarchist flags and removing management. The socialist revolution was seriously
considered, and the ruling class was very anxious. Yet the revolution did not
occur, primarily due to a lack of revolutionary leadership. The leading
Socialist Party, led by the Serrati Maximalists, gave powerful speeches about
empowering workers but refused to challenge the reformist trade union
bureaucracy. They lacked a clear plan to seize state power and ultimately
allowed unions to block factory occupations by offering only superficial
concessions. The media praised: "Reformism has saved civilisation!"
Following the defeat of the revolutionary wave and the demoralisation
of the workers, fascism launched an aggressive push. Supported by
industrialists and landowners and protected by the police, Mussolini's
blackshirt squads systematically murdered approximately 3,000 socialists and
trade unionists during 1921–22. His movement expanded rapidly, growing from
20,000 to 180,000 members within just five months. As Ignazio Silone, one of
the founders of the Communist Party, later remarked: "At the head of the
Italian working class had been missing the Italian Lenins and Trotskys."
The March on Rome in October 1922 was essentially a modest
event: approximately 5,000 poorly armed fascists encumbered by mud and rain
outside Rome, while Mussolini was attending the opera in Milan, contemplating
flight to Switzerland. The Italian military could have readily dispersed them
within a few hours. Nevertheless, King Vittorio Emanuele III opted not to
declare a state of emergency and instead invited Mussolini to form a
government. This decision exemplifies how the capitalist state preferred fascism
over the working class, particularly when the stakes were significant.
Donald Sassoon specialises in European social democracy,
often analysing political issues through the lens of ideological and
parliamentary rivalry rather than class struggle. Ultimately, fascism should
not be seen as just an ideological or cultural phenomenon; it was the armed
expression of bourgeois class dominance. Sassoon seems to overlook the betrayal
by the official left. Mussolini's rise is directly linked to the failure of the
Socialist Party and trade union bureaucracy to steer the revolutionary wave of
1919–20.
Any interpretation that views the working class as passive
and focuses solely on Mussolini's character or the fascists' strategies is
politically evasive. He also doesn't characterise fascism as an isolated
anomaly or a systemic possibility. The liberal academic stance tends to portray
fascism as a historical accident—a monstrous deviation caused by WWI traumas,
Italian nationalism, and Mussolini's personal ambitions. Conversely, the
Marxist perspective sees fascism as a potential inherent in capitalism itself,
triggered whenever the ruling class confronts a revolutionary threat it can't
manage through standard parliamentary channels. This makes the 1922 study
especially relevant today.
The most significant political trend has been the push to
restore the reputation of Mussolini and the fascist party. Berlusconi, Italy’s
ex-Prime Minister, frequently praised Benito Mussolini, claiming he had
"done a great deal of good." He downplayed Italy’s involvement in the
Holocaust, stating it was “not comparable to that of Germany," and
repeated the false assertion that Hitler pressured Mussolini. A particularly
troubling result of Berlusconi’s revisionism was Apple's launch of an app
featuring Mussolini’s speeches. This was widely criticised by Jewish groups,
who correctly highlighted Mussolini’s direct role in sending thousands of Jews
to their deaths in the Holocaust. Apple later removed the app.
This political whitewashing of Mussolini and the fascists is
mirrored in publishing circles by a growing number of poorly written books. At
the moment, it is hard to gauge whether this revisionist whitewash is a
minority or if they have started to gain a foothold in academic circles. So many of these books have appeared that one
writer sees it as “a noir publishing niche”.
It would take a historian considerable time to sift through
more than 100 current biographies of Mussolini to determine whether this
revisionist trend has had any impact on academia. According to the historian
R.J.B. Bosworth, “It is true that much revisionism of the Berlusconi years is
hard to take seriously. The slew of biographies and memoirs devoted to praising
'good Fascists' mostly fall well below an acceptable academic standard. In
devoting himself without reserve to the idea in which he believed. But the
quality of the research base of such works, and the decisions about which facts
to include and which to exclude, are too blatantly slanted to make much impact
on scholarship.[1]
Peter Schwarz's centenary article highlights that studying
Mussolini's rise is more than just an academic exercise. Currently, Mussolini's
modern political successors—Giorgia Meloni's Fratelli d'Italia, which has roots
in the post-war fascist MSI—are in power in Italy and are warmly supported by
the EU, Macron, and Scholz. Throughout Europe and the U.S., ruling elites are
turning to far-right and openly authoritarian groups, not because of
ideological affinity but due to shared structural crises—such as economic
stagnation, the collapse of reformist parties, and a disgruntled working
class—that historically pushed the Italian bourgeoisie toward Mussolini a
century ago.
Trotsky's lesson remains clear: fascism cannot be defeated
through alliances with "democratic" bourgeois parties. Historically,
these parties collaborated with Mussolini, and today, their modern equivalents
support Meloni. This political sanitisation of Mussolini and fascism is
reflected in an increasing number of poorly written books within publishing
circles. Currently, it is difficult to determine whether this revisionist
whitewashing is limited to a small group or if it is beginning to take hold in
academic circles. The proliferation of such books has led one author to
describe it as “a noir publishing niche.”
One notable book by Nicholas Farrell attempts to challenge
decades of historiography, suggesting Mussolini was not as evil as
traditionally believed and that his alliance with Hitler misled him. Farrell
describes Mussolini as having "charisma" and being a
"phenomenal" personality. His views often seem to align with those of
Berlusconi.
It is not that difficult to challenge these falsehoods. A
more objective and truthful examination of the facts would also lead us to a
different picture. Mussolini’s prime goal was to create a new “Roman Empire”
around the Mediterranean Sea. To achieve this goal, the Italian fascists
invaded and occupied North Africa and areas of Yugoslavia. To justify the
slaughter of Jews, Africans and Slavs, the fascists classified them as
“subhuman.” This discrimination was done in defence of a “pure Italian race.”
According to historian Carlo Moos, Italian racial laws were very similar to the
Nazi’s and belonged to “a long-existing, general-fascist racial concept” [2]
Another book, Liberal Fascism, is “less a work of neutral
scholarship or unbiased journalism than thinly veiled historical revisionism.”
Jonah Goldberg’s argument is simplistic, to say the least. It is the idea that
fascism came from liberalism. A position is not dissimilar to some of the
“pseudo-left” writers from the Frankfurt school who put forward the perspective
that fascism can be traced back to the Enlightenment. However, it must be said
that it was difficult to take this writer seriously when he described former
presidents of the United States as fascists.
It is worth quoting the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, who
offers a counterargument to the revisionist apologists for Italian fascism: “At
the moment that the 'normal' police and military resources of the bourgeois
dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to
hold society in a state of equilibrium -- the turn of the fascist regime
arrives. Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of
the crazed petty bourgeoisie and the bands of declassed and demoralised
lumpenproletariat -- all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself
has brought to desperation and frenzy”.[3]
The book has two main weaknesses. First, Sassoon shows
complacency regarding the Italian Communist Party’s role in the rise of
fascism. Although the party was only two years old when Mussolini took power,
it played a key part in enabling the fascists to solidify their control.
Trotsky pointed out, “One must admit, however, that the German Communist Party
has also learned little from the Italian experience.
The Italian Communist Party emerged almost simultaneously
with fascism's rise. But the same revolutionary decline that propelled the
fascists to power also hindered the Communist Party's growth. It failed to
grasp the extent of the fascist threat fully, lulled itself with revolutionary
illusions, rejected the united front policy, and was plagued by all the typical
infantile diseases.”
The book's second significant political shortcoming is its clear underestimation of the working class's revolutionary potential. The Italian bourgeoisie recognised the threat of a socialist revolution and increasingly leaned towards fascism as a solution. This approach involved cooperation between social democracy and Stalinism. Despite these flaws, I recommend this book to those starting to study this important international event. I also advise students and history enthusiasts to explore Leon Trotsky’s writings on the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy.
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