Week 41

 

This week we are covering the follow up to events discussed on the previous one. So it might be better if you check that one as well.

On October 21^st 1914 Mussolini had announced his resignation from the direction of the official socialist newspaper, the Avanti! - a step he had prepared for, in the likely eventuality that his challenge to the official party line of “absolute neutrality” was met with resistance. In a month, on the 24^th of November he found himself out of the Socialist Party entirely; a shocking turn of events for a man who just a few weeks before had still looked like one of the most promising leaders of the party - but a not entirely unexpected one according to well informed observers.

Mussolini had broken with the Party on the 18^th of October, with his opinion piece “from absolute neutrality to active working neutrality” but his attitude during the following weeks remained ambiguous. R. De Felice has called his decision to resign from the Avanti! while remaining within the Party “one of the worst mistakes in Mussolini's political career” [there is a fairly subtle argument ongoing here, that would warrant its own discussion, since De Felice's reading of the official socialist position follows a common criticism of what would develop into the maximalistic position of the 1918-20: that the crisis of the socialist movement was at least in part a consequence of its vehement refusal to relate to those national values that would become commonplace identifiers of the middle and lower classes, thus contributing to those classes “besieged” feeling of the immediate post war – an extreme antagonism that, far from evolving into an extreme but concrete political platform, remained a matter of words, yet resulted in turning those classes that suffered from the conflict and might have been open to a platform of social reforms into enemies, while having nothing to gain from it, as A. Gramsci later observed]. If Mussolini wanted the Party (or the fraction of it that looked for a revision on the position on war and interventionism) to follow him, he shouldn't have kept standing out of the door – it's both true that Mussolini's intentions were not independent from the reaction to his choice. Something perhaps he needed time to gauge. Therefore, while he might have overestimated his hold onto the “interventionist socialism still within the Party” and the very consistence of that vocal current (men that, one must remember and with a few exceptions, were often doubtful and unsure in their own minds), it should not be overlooked that Mussolini was, even more now that he was a free man, moving within a political scene that did not involve the socialists alone. His outlook and perspective had to embrace a wider horizon than before – to begin moving somewhat outside of his previous political collocation was not an immediate step, even for a growing political creature.

The last week of October was marked by a deluge of praise for Mussolini's choice in the various interventionist press outlets – it was for the most part, and those which at the time were likely to pique Mussolini's interest more, the left interventionist field – including that of Gaetano Salvemini. Overall, in the matter of his resignation, Mussolini seemed to be able to leave not only on his own conditions but riding on higher moral ground. And in fairness the need for a genuine debate – not the one staged on the Avanti! one month before – on the matter of neutrality was apparent from the reactions coming from the whole socialist front.

On October 31^st Antonio Gramsci commented positively, offering his reading of Mussolini's position [“active working neutrality” in Il grido del popolo]

We Italian socialists must pose the problem: “What has to be the function of the Italian Socialist Party (Italian that is, and not proletarian or socialist in general) in the present circumstances of Italian life?” Because the socialist party we offer our energies to is among other things Italian, which is to mean that section of the Socialist International that took upon itself to conquer to socialism the Italian nation. Such an immediate task, at any moment actual gives it a character, which is specific and national, forcing it to assume within the Italian life a specific function of its own, a peculiar responsibility. […] The formula of “absolute neutrality” was very useful in the first stage of the crisis […] Now that […] everyone is called to their own responsibilities, it is of some use only for those reformers who claim they don't want to gamble […] and wished the proletarians to sit out the events as if impartial onlookers, awaiting for the events to bear them their time, while around them their adversaries build their own and create their platform for class fight. But for the revolutionaries who conceive history as a formation of their own spirit, made through a continuous sequence of pushes against the other active and passive forces of society, thus preparing the optimal conditions for the decisive push (the revolution) it is not possible to settle for the temporary formula of “absolute neutrality” but [they] need to turn it into the other one of “active working neutrality”. Which means to restore the life of the nation to its true and genuine character of class struggle, in so far as the working class, by forcing the ruling class to accept its own responsibilities [also forces] it to admit its complete failure, by leading the nation […] to a dead end. […] What Mussolini wants therefore is not a universal embrace, not the fusion of all parties into a national unity; by which his position would in fact be anti-socialist. Rather he wants the proletariat […] once realized for the time being its immaturity to gain control of the state […] to let those forces that it deems stronger to operate their historical function […] Nor does Mussolini's position exclude (and rather assumes as a precondition) that proletariat may abandon its antagonistic role and, after a failure or a proven inability of the ruling class, get rid of the latter and take charge of the public thing.

One should not stick to the letter of Gramsci's judgment – one that he would soon revise after all – but understand that Mussolini's position at the time was clearly not defined unambiguously as alternative to socialism, nor understood that way by his contemporaries. And while a certain later narrative has created the idea of Mussolini going from neutralist to interventionist in parallel with his transition from socialist to nationalist, the two transitions, albeit clearly related, were not simultaneous; for the very reason that the original point made by Mussolini – that “in 1914 it was possible to be socialist and interventionist” – appeared to be held true at the time and in fact long enough to become an ideological element of those ten months from August 1914 to May 1915, and later perhaps until the reality of the conflict somehow caused the myth of the Great War as “revolutionary war” to fade away.

 

But was Mussolini waiting to see if the whole party was willing to follow him? A party where the reformer current wasn't indeed the majority and the revolutionary fractions were still significant albeit peripheral. There had been various manifestations of solidarity, but the Party Direction, as well as the Avanti!, had kept its rigid position of opposition to the intervention. Meanwhile, as we saw, in the first week of October a fraction of the revolutionary trade unionists had created a Fascio rivoluzionario d'azione internazionalista - an interventionist group whose efforts were for the most part based in the city of Milan (that was for both practical reasons – Milan was a major industrial city and with Genoa and Turin the backbone of the socialist movement in the North as well as a good place to open a new political initiative – and because many trade unionist leaders were at the time living there). Mussolini's break up with the official socialists was a great opportunity for them to add a prominent political figure to their formation – more so, Mussolini too had remained in Milan for the time being. On October 27^th a direction committee of the Fascio rivoluzionario met to discuss their strategy in light of the recent developments.

We know that during the same days Arturo Oliviero Olivetti and Ottavio Dinale met with Mussolini with an offer to create together a newspaper promoting the intervention among the working classes. A proposal – that of a shared newspaper supported by the Fascio – which Mussolini appears to have declined or at least did not follow up to.