Fascism’s essence was disputed among revolutionaries in 1926

Evidence

By the autumn of 1926, the world’s first fascist regime had been in power for four years in Italy. Its character was still very much a matter of dispute, not least within the Italian Communist Party and the Third International. Was it a specific, national phenomenon or the precursor of an international trend? Was it a novel socio-political formation or one that was basically just the Italian equivalent of other, more traditional forms of reaction-such as the Russian Black Hundreds after 1905 or the anti-labour repression which ravaged American socialism in the early years of this century or the Freikorps which underpinned the social-democratic government of Noske and Scheidemann in Germany after 1918? Did its essence lie in its social base in the urban petty bourgeoisie and the rural bourgeoisie, or in its role as the new, more brutal instrument of big capital’s dominion? — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 31

Categorization

• XREF: Sets up the analytic question of whether fascism is novel or traditional reaction — the same question the Islamophobia field asks about anti-Muslim rhetoric as novel vs. old racism. — connects to: Institute members split over whether fascism was capitalism’s political form — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 509