The Bolshevik revolution and the rise of Italian fascism.

• Author: Gregor, A. James
• Position: POLSCI FOCUS - Report

Introduction

Like all complex and significant historic events, there is no single interpretation of the rise of Fascism that satisfies all specialists. There are many renderings, each competing with others for acceptance. (2) Among those in contention is one that would argue that without the reactive response of Italians to the possibility of a Bolshevik revolution on the peninsula, there would not have been a Fascist revolution, and the history of Europe would have been vastly different. The intention here is to explore just that possibility.

Virtually all political historians are prepared to accept the general proposition that the Bolshevism of V. I. Lenin exercised some sort of influence on political developments on the Italian peninsula. What will be attempted here will be a discussion of the rise of Fascism by (1) focusing on the role played by its doctrinal beliefs as one factor among many, and (2) attempting to trace the specific impact of the Bolshevik revolution on the entire sequence of events. The evidence suggests that the doctrinal convictions of the major protagonists of Fascist revolution in Italy shaped events in accordance with those convictions--and that throughout the course of those events Lenin's Bolshevism was of a significance not often fully appreciated.

The sequence of events considered here took place in a context in which most political historians have been prepared to accept the reality of the major influence of two political belief systems on the history of the twentieth century: the Bolshevism of V. I. Lenin and the Fascism of Benito Mussolini. (3) What has not been generally appreciated is the fact that both found their origins in the nineteenth century doctrine of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. More than that, they shared something of a peculiar set of material circumstances that impacted their development. Each took root in a community languishing in economic backwardness that had been severely damaged by war. In both, entire populations had been displaced and loosed from familiar patterns of behavior. No longer following settled routines of conduct, both Russians and Italians more and more fell under the influence of agents of change.

At the time when revolutionaries in both communities considered themselves Marxists, Marxism as a doctrine was undergoing substantive change. With the death of Engels in 1895, Marxism's entire elaborate structure had come under increasingly critical scrutiny. In Germany, France, and Italy Marxism was interpreted and reinterpreted by intellectuals all convinced that their interpretations were either more faithful to the genius of the founders, or advanced modifications required by changing circumstances. (4) Out of all that, for the purposes of our account, the two variants of classical Marxism--Lenin's Bolshevism and Mussolini's Fascism--took on particular configuration early in the century.

The Significant Variants

By the time of his first maturity, V. I. Lenin was already a dedicated revolutionary--seeking a suitable rationale for his willed commitment. He was immediately attracted to the work of Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov, (5) the founder of the first Russian Marxist revolutionary organization, the Emancipation of Labor. For Lenin, Plekhanov was "among the world's greatest thinkers and publicists"--a contemporary who, in Lenin's judgment, had "the greatest knowledge of Marxist philosophy." (6)

Plekhanov spoke of Marxism as a "teaching" that explained the entire course of human development, with society's economic base the ultimate determinant of its human activity--all of which proceeded independent of the will of participants. Human conduct was seen as a function of "general laws" that governed a shared existence. (7) Plekhanov argued that the individual "serves as an instrument of (...) necessity and cannot help doing so, owing to his social status (...) Since his social status (...) imbued him with this character and no other, he not only serves as an instrument of necessity and cannot help doing so, but he passionately desires, and cannot help desiring, to do so." (8) He felt he had thereby resolved the problem of the role of the individual in what he saw as the inevitable course of history. (9)

These were some of the views Lenin inherited as an intellectual legacy. Like Plekhanov, he held Marxism to be an exquisitely scientific enterprise devoted to the contention that one could demonstrate "by rigid scientific investigation, the necessity of the given order of social relations, and to establish, as fully as possible (...) the necessity of another order which must inevitably grow out of the preceding one regardless of whether men believe in it or not, whether they are conscious of it or not." He went on to conclude that since "the conscious element plays so subordinate a role in the history of civilization," it was "self-evident" that any discussion of society and its development could hardly take "as its basis any form of, or any result of consciousness." (10) Lenin conceived Marxism a repository of intersubjectively observable social laws. (11) He affirmed that, in his judgment, "the special laws that regulate the origin, existence, development, and death of a given social organism" were a function of given "social relations" that rested on a material basis of prevailing "productive relations," which, in turn, were a function of existing "productive forces." (12) Social and productive relations, together with the existing material productive forces constituted the "economic base" of society. Notions of law and morality, religion and philosophy, were "effluxes" of that economic base.

For Lenin, Marxist materialism not only provided a "scientific conception of history (...) it [was] the only scientific conception of it." (13) Having established that, Lenin proceeded to "creatively develop" that scientific conception by arguing that only a minority, a "vanguard" of the proletariat, sufficiently informed of the "truth" of Marxism, could be allowed to assume the responsibilities of instruction and leadership. To ensure the continued correctness of political belief and the consistency of obedience, a vanguard leadership would be required to organize the revolutionary proletariat into a tightly structured and hierarchically arranged militancy--forever under the tutelage of, and purge by, a specially schooled leadership. Masses could only be led by a Marxist elite fully cognizant of the intricacies of the doctrines embedded in the voluminous writings of the founders. In that sense, Lenin's belief system was a variant of traditional Marxism--for neither Marx nor Engels anticipated such circumstances. Leninism conceived Marxism a positive science, with physical science the paradigm --tending to marginalize the role of individual and group psychology as well as the moral and dispositional human properties that attend them.

Such were the notions that directed Lenin's efforts in leading his Bolsheviks to victory against the Romanov dynasty and ultimately shaped his policies in cobbling together the first socialist state of the twentieth century. Given those notions, Lenin was inflexibly opposed to other Marxists whose opinions departed in any way from his own. Lenin dismissed other claimants as "opportunistic" and "heretical" Marxists. Among those he would so identify he included the revolutionary syndicalists--who had made their appearance in France around the turn of the century. (14)

The Revolutionary Syndicalists

The development of revolutionary theory in France, driven more by individual initiatives than organizational imperatives, was characteristically more varied and nuanced than that found in the Germany of the period. Syndicalist thought became increasingly prominent with Georges Sorel serving as a typical, and particularly influential, representative.

Without equivocation, Sorel early had declared himself a Marxist. He was, in fact, a Marxist with a significant difference. He was possessed of specialized notions concerning the nature of science. He understood science to be productive, at best, of probabilistic results intended to address immediate problems. When he came to deal with history, he understood it to be the consequence of an interactive flow of contingencies involving human dispositions--beliefs, preferences, sentiments, recommendations, enjoinments, commandments, and invocations. As early as the first years of the new century, in an essay analyzing the dispute between Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky, we find Sorel insisting that human behavior is a matter of inspired choice and value judgments rather than the deterministic by-product of economic forces as understood by Kautsky. (15) Sorel argued that Kautsky was convinced that Marx and Engels had sought to make of social speculation a precise science--and as a consequence had accepted a great deal of the contemporary positivistic mythology of natural laws somehow governing the behavior of human actors, individually and in concert. Sorel countered that the "laws" Marxists imagined governing human conduct were, in fact, vaguely framed correlations, loosely expressed and dependent on constituent terms that were, at best, ill-defined. (16)

Sorel understood the kind of cognitive activity that occupied the founders of Marxism as essentially heuristic in nature--given to suggesting possible answers to prevailing social issues--but in no meaningful sense science. (17) For him, Marxism was to be seen as a conceptual framework, generous in scope, stimulating in its subject matter, and suggestive as to how its followers were to seek the answers to the most insistent urgencies of the epoch. (18)

Very early in the twentieth century, Sorel's work reached Italy. There, it attracted a group of young Marxists dissatisfied with monistic and unilinear interpretations of their belief system. Gifted theorists such as Roberto Michels, (19) Angelo O. Olivetti, and Sergio...