Fascism’s 1926 consolidation rested on a repression more thorough than earlier reaction.

Evidence

These uncertainties about how fascism should be defined were accompanied by equal uncertainty about its stability and historical prospects. It was still widely believed by communist leaders that the ruling class might decide that the fascist option was too costly, and switch to a social-democratic alternative. The notion that social-democracy was the “left wing of the bourgeoisie” had been generally accepted, for example, by Italian communists since Zinoviev first put it forward in 1922 (by 1924 this had become “the left wing of fascism”). Moreover, it was true that the fascists had not entirely suppressed bourgeois political institutions; indeed, even communist members still sat in the fascist-dominated parliament. And during the crisis which had followed the fascist assassination of the social-democrat deputy Matteotti in June 1924, the regime had genuinely appeared to totter and its backers to hesitate. But in fact fascist power already had immensely strong foundations. It had inaugurated a system of repression incomparably more thoroughgoing and efficient than any previous form of reaction. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 32

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

Related

• Fascism’s essence was disputed among revolutionaries in 1926 (similarity 0.86)
• For the PCI Left, fascist repression merely confirmed the inevitability of revolution (similarity 0.84)
• Gramsci came to see fascism as unifier of the ruling class, not just terror (similarity 0.83)
• Fascist repression crushed Italian communist party organisation in early 1923 (similarity 0.82)
• Fascism absorbed the bourgeoisie, Vatican, and industrial capital by 1924 (similarity 0.81)
• The early PCI leadership treated fascism as secondary to the social-democratic threat (similarity 0.81)
• The Italian Communist leadership gravely underestimated fascism’s significance for years (similarity 0.80)
• Gramsci’s 1926 theses rejected any stable post-fascist democratic phase (similarity 0.80)
• Fascism represented big capital directly seizing the state apparatus. (similarity 0.79)
• Gramsci believed bourgeois state forces would migrate to the democratic opposition (similarity 0.79)
• The PCI’s founding policy treated fascism as secondary to social democracy within bourgeois rule (similarity 0.79)
• Fascism originated in the petite and rural bourgeoisie then served capitalist class interests (similarity 0.78)
• Gramsci analyzed fascism through its social base rather than abstract class form (similarity 0.78)