The Italian Communist leadership gravely underestimated fascism’s significance for years

Evidence

It would be unjust to claim that the P.C.I. leadership was responsible for the fascist secure of power—as both Tasca and Radek were at different times to suggest—but it certainly gravely underestimated its significance, and continued to do so until ig26. Even Gramsci did not prior to his arrest arrive at a consistent and adequate appreciation of the specificity of the new type of regime, and as for Bordiga, his declaration in 1924 that “the bourgois counter-revolution for us is the proof of the inevitability of the revolution” eloquently sums up his determined rejection of the idea that the fascist seizure of power was anything to worry about at all. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 134

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Bordiga’s refusal to recognize fascism as a new regime type connects to Gramsci’s later concept of the state and the distinction between domination and hegemony, and to theories of misrecognition in critical theory.

Related

• The early PCI leadership treated fascism as secondary to the social-democratic threat (similarity 0.88)
• The PCI’s founding policy treated fascism as secondary to social democracy within bourgeois rule (similarity 0.85)
• Fascism’s essence was disputed among revolutionaries in 1926 (similarity 0.83)
• Early communist analysts divided on whether fascism was novel or a bourgeois unity (similarity 0.83)
• For the PCI Left, fascist repression merely confirmed the inevitability of revolution (similarity 0.82)
• Gramsci came to see fascism as unifier of the ruling class, not just terror (similarity 0.81)
• Fascism’s 1926 consolidation rested on a repression more thorough than earlier reaction. (similarity 0.80)
• Communists feared accepting reformist leadership would liquidate revolutionary perspective. (similarity 0.79)
• Gramsci’s leadership combined anti-sectarian party norms with mass responsiveness (similarity 0.79)
• Gramsci judged the PCI’s failure to win socialist workers a reactionary triumph (similarity 0.79)
• Gramsci believed bourgeois state forces would migrate to the democratic opposition (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• The early PCI leadership treated fascism as secondary to the social-democratic threat #expands (0.95) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2229