The PCI’s founding policy treated fascism as secondary to social democracy within bourgeois rule

Evidence

In the perspective of Bordiga’s theses on tactics, the main danger was seen as a social democratic resolution of the crisis of the Italian State. The phenomenon of fascism (the March on Rome was to occur within six months, and the fascist squads had been active for almost two years) was seen as an organic development of the bourgeois parliamentary regime; it was necessary to combat it, but only with the minimum of means necessary to contain it it was not to be made the main enemy. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2229

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s toolkit on hegemony — the Left’s initial misreading of fascism as mere bourgeois organicism is the historical backdrop Gramsci later corrects with his fuller theory of passive revolution and hegemony.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing how this early Bordiga position that underestimated fascism as its own threat compares with Gramsci’s later analysis of fascism as transformed capitalist state form.