The PSI’s abstentionist wartime policy opened the social space later filled by fascism.

Evidence

In the course of the war years, a reformist Right, based primarily on the parliamentary deputies and the trade unions and led by Turati, Treves and d’Aragona, emerged as a coherent entity. Its main characterising feature, especially after the catastrophic defeat of the Italian army at Caporetto in 1917, was its readiness to accept patriotic slogans. … Though positive as far as it went, this had some extremely negative consequences for the future. For the leadership had a “left” enough position to prevent the emergence of any effective organised Left until well after the war, while it was in no genuine sense revolutionary in its practice; at the same time, it profoundly alienated the petit-bourgeois strata-susceptible to patriotic slogans -who were to provide the social basis for fascism. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 63

Categorization

• XREF: This is a concrete geneaology of how a reformist-left vacuum enabled fascism’s petit-bourgeois base — a mechanism that later Islamophobia readings on fascism’s class dynamics can build on.