Automatically translated by AI.

This year, April 25 marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Italy from Nazi-fascism. After all this time, the political situation in which our country finds itself obliges us to say that the memory of that great popular act of rebellion against Nazi-fascist oppression and the economic and social regime that had promoted and permitted it, is by no means appeased. On the contrary, the need for rebellion against the regime that was finally established after the Resistance is of burning relevance.

By: Partito Comunista dei Lavoratori

The Resistance fought hard for three years to defeat Nazi-fascism. But the regime that emerged, the bourgeois-democratic regime, was the one that took charge of restoring the shattered capitalism and returning the factories to the bosses. Precisely those bosses who had favored the rise of fascism and the establishment of its regime, to break the combativity of the northern working class after the Red Biennium (1919-1920), with a wave of strikes and factory occupations led by the workers’ councils and defended by the Red Guard, and the strength of the workers’ leagues capable of openly confronting the landowners in the countryside of the Po valley and central Italy.

Thus, the fascist capitalist regime was followed by the still capitalist democratic regime, the continuity of which was also manifested in the administrative and judicial institutions, where the personnel remained largely the same.

FROM 1943 TO 1945 AND BEYOND: THE POSSIBILITY OF THE ITALIAN REVOLUTION

The great strikes of March 1943, in which more than 100,000 Turin factory workers participated without the Fascist squads being able to prevent them, heralded the end of the Fascist regime.

The end of July saw the fall of Mussolini. On September 8, the Italian government led by General Pietro Badoglio signed the armistice with the Allied forces.

In the following days, King Victor Emmanuel III, the military leadership and the head of government, Pietro Badoglio, fled. The Italian State was thus left without leadership and in a state of disintegration. The military commanders were left without orders at the mercy of the German forces that occupied most of central and northern Italy.

The day after the proclamation of the armistice, the Committee of National Liberation (CLN), the governing body of the Resistance, was formed to oppose the German forces and the fascist militias of the newly formed Salo

The CLN was made up of parties referring to the working class, such as the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity (PSIUP), and bourgeois parties such as the Partito d’azione, the Christian Democratic Party, the Democrazia e Lavoro party and representatives of the liberal party. In short, it was a popular front body.

This body was to direct the military actions of the partisans (members of the resistance) in all areas occupied by the Germans. But its political task was also to control that the partisan movement, which was reinforced by the influx of young workers, peasants and students, as well as ex-servicemen, remained firmly within the framework of “democratic” compatibility and did not pose a threat to the bourgeois order to be restored.

This was all the more necessary given the predominant composition of the partisan brigades. In fact, the most numerous brigades, the Garibaldi Brigades and the Patriotic Action Groups (GAP), were composed mostly of workers and peasants in whom still shone the spirit of justice and revenge incubated for 20 years, not only against the fascists, but also against those who had financed them, the industrial and agricultural bosses.

It is evident that a revolutionary leadership would have been able to count on the strength of the majority of the partisans and the consensus they had among the popular masses of the country. In this way it could have unleashed a revolutionary process all the more facilitated by the fact that, as we have seen, the bourgeois state was completely disarticulated and at the mercy of events.

Unfortunately, this leadership did not exist due to the betrayal of the main party of the Italian working class: the Italian Communist Party (PCI).

THE PCI’S BETRAYAL OF TOGLIATTI

The PCI completely betrayed the revolutionary spirit of the partisans. Togliatti, its top leader, had received precise instructions from Stalin, for whom it was necessary to exclude any revolutionary possibility in Italy and instead call on workers and peasants to collaborate, with their sacrifice, in the reconstruction of the Borghese State.

Togliatti’s class collaboration led him to join the executive of the war criminal Pietro Badoglio, who ruled the Southern Kingdom in 1944, then the Bonomi government and finally as Minister of Grace and Justice in the post-liberation governments.

As minister, he worked with such pro-bourgeois zeal that he promoted amnesty for the fascists and allowed the partisans to be tried by the same tribunals, authentic torturers, in the service of the old regime. Finally, he pronounced himself in favor of the Lateran Pacts which established the relations between the State and the Catholic Church during the Fascist regime and which would even be included in the Constitution. In this field, too, the continuity of the privileged relationship between Church and State was sanctioned, pleasing the most reactionary sectors.

Contrary to many interested reconstructions, mainly by historians close to the Communist Party, the action of Togliatti and the entire leadership of the PCI, including the self-styled left wing, consisting in the policy of rapprochement and union with the bourgeoisie in government, was not an act of autonomy with respect to Stalinism and Soviet policy. On the contrary, it represented the faithful observance of Stalin’s policy, since the latter had agreed at the Jalta conference with the victorious imperialist powers that Italy should fall under American influence.

Despite the promises of a better future for workers and peasants, after the reconstruction of the capitalist and imperialist state, the result of this policy was the abandonment of their aspirations and the condemnation to a new season of exploitation.

The last desperate partisan fires extinguished after 1945, abandoned to their fate and to bourgeois repression, could not reverse the restorationist dynamic endorsed by the working class parties.

While the bosses’ domination in the factory and in the countryside, the intensification of work, low wages and severe punishments for those who rebelled then constituted the living conditions of the workers in the years following the Liberation, the PCI developed ever more deeply its own governmentalist propensity which characterized its entire history. The ambition to one day return to government, to the government of an imperialist power, was the compass of its later policy, but also the fertile ground for what was to become the transformism of its leadership. After the fall of the Soviet Union, it was natural to liquidate the old PCI and arrive at a totally bourgeois party as is today the Partito Democratico, candidate as effective representative of the interests of Italian capitalism and imperialism.

THE CURRENT CONTEXT

The betrayal of the Italian revolution, the failure to purge the fascists from the organs of the State (courts, police headquarters) and its administrative apparatus, and the judicial persecution of the partisans constituted the necessary condition for the continuity of Italian fascism even under the aegis of the bourgeois republic and its “anti-fascist” constitution.

In this context the formation of the Italian Social Movement (MSI) was possible, which was inspired by the fascist Social Republic of Salò, an accomplice of the Nazis in the persecution of the partisans and in an endless series of crimes and horrors against the civilian population throughout northern Italy.

The MSI represented the continuity of Italian fascism to the point of ceding this “heritage”, although revised to make it compatible with the current political system, first to Alleanza Nazionale and then, after ups and downs, to the current Fratelli d’Italia party, whose top leader, Giorgia Meloni, has headed the Italian government for over two years.

It is the most reactionary government of the post-war period and can rightly be called a post-fascist government. The clash with the values of resistance and the sacrifice of the partisans could not be sharper.

To overcompensate, this government, seeking the consensus of the police to which it would like to delegate completely the muscular management of the street mobilizations, and those of the most reactionary part of its electorate, promotes today an anti-democratic repression against social movements, workers’ and students’ mobilizations, against immigrants and against all civil rights movements. The condensation of these intentions is represented by the Security Decree approved by the Council of Ministers. In other words, the government is charting the course towards a police state. Its target today is the large mobilizations in support of Palestine and against the genocide in Gaza.

The question of resistance is as pertinent as ever. Today it is reflected in the support for the Palestinian resistance fighters who, like the partisans, have every right to take up arms to liberate their country from the Zionist occupier. Unfortunately, but very significantly, just as it happened with the Nazis against the partisans, the Palestinian partisans are called terrorists, both by the Zionist state and by Western imperialisms, in order to inflict torture and murder on them, in defiance of all the laws of war.

The ascent of Giorgia Meloni and the great consensus in Fratelli d’Italia, supports a foot in the most reactionary bourgeois and petty bourgeois sector, which aspires to see its fiscal burden lightened and vomits all its rancor against immigrants. In a good approximation, this is the part of the population that is the daughter of the fascist substratum that was poured into the post-war republic.

However, this does not explain the support for Meloni from the working and popular classes. Here, in fact, rests the other support for the post-fascist vote.

The policy of class collaboration carried out for decades by the so-called radical left has disoriented the working class by progressively depriving it of an independent political reference point, has plunged the working class into resignation with the consequence of a massive electoral abstention, and has allowed the reactionary racist miasmas against immigrants, the war among the poor and the fascination for a strong leader to penetrate deeply into its ranks.

In the last decades, the radical left has repeatedly supported center-left governments, led mainly by the Democratic Party. The Communist Refoundation Party, born after the liquidation of the PCI, and the formations derived from it have shared the policies of these governments made of austerity, cuts and disinvestment in the welfare state, of continuous and progressive increases in military spending, of promotion of laws to make labor precarious, of repressive regulations against immigrants, of massive defiscalizations for the benefit of the capitalists while wages plummeted.

These radical left-wing options, but in reality only reformist, have paved the way for all kinds of reactionary populism, from the Grillism of the 5 Star Movement, to the Salvationism of the League and finally that of Meloni and Fratelli d’Italia.

Thus was consummated the “miracle” of a self-styled anti-fascist republic governed by the heirs of fascism.

The material constitution of the country, with stagnant wages for decades, the precariousness of labor, the dismantling of public health, the increase in military spending, the rise of absolute poverty and the reappearance of low-paid work, belies in the most emphatic way the promises contained in the Constitution. A Constitution that far from being born of resistance meant instead its collapse in the name of a compromise between the parties of the working class, the PCI and the PSI, and the political forces of the bourgeoisie starting with the Christian Democrats, so that Piero Calamandrei, founder of the Partito D’azione (anti-fascist party halfway between liberalism and socialism), member of the Constituent Assembly of 1946, dared to say that the Italian Constitution was rather “a revolution promised in exchange for a revolution lost” and that “The drama of the Resistance and of our country was this: That the Resistance, after having triumphed in the war, as a partisan epic, was stifled and banished by the old conservative forces as soon as it appeared in the political life of peacetime, where it was called to give life to a new political class that would fill the vacuum left by the catastrophe.” An epigraph of the Resistance betrayed.

WHAT TO DO

The Resistance, with the revolutionary impulses it embodied, has been betrayed. Our task is at the same time to renew its memory, especially that of its proletarian component, not by chance the most neglected by postwar historiography, and to pick up the broken thread of its tension towards a revolutionary overthrow not only of the fascist regime but also and above all of that social regime which had prepared the way for fascism, the regime dominated by the bosses.

Even in the context of the disenchantment of the masses by a social upheaval in our country today, when we have our eyes clean of the deceptions of Stalinism, as unfortunately was not the case of the partisans, and we have seen social democracy rule in the name of the interests of big capital, we can resort to the truest teaching of the Resistance. To make this teaching live in the social and civil struggles and above all in the construction of the united front of the working class, in the radicality of its forms of struggle, in its possible conquests and with the perspective of an alternative society. An alternative society and conquests that can only be guaranteed by a completely different type of government: the government of the workers based on their organized strength.

But this teaching goes beyond that and speaks to us of the need to give these struggles a revolutionary outlet.

Precisely because the Resistance lacked a revolutionary leadership equal to the historical tasks it faced, today it is necessary to build the revolutionary party in Italy, the only one capable of solving the problem of the leadership of the workers’ movement, the only one that, in short, can be the necessary instrument of the Italian revolution and that, included in the construction of the revolutionary international, can contribute to the world revolution.

For more than 18 years, the PCL has been deploying every day all its forces to this end, both nationally and internationally, thus embodying, in the best possible way, the best legacy of the Resistance eighty years after April 25, 1945.