Volunteer paramilitary squads against fascism emerged outside official left parties.

Evidence

“Arditis o .” During the First World War, the “arditi ” were volunteer commando squads in the Italian army. The term was adopted by d’Annunzio for his nationalist volunteer “legions”, and was also used by the “arditi del popolo ”, formed to combat the fascist squads in the summer of 1921. This latter organisation emerged outside the left parties, but the mass of its local leaders and members were communist or socialist. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2285

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the Arditi del Popolo and its origin, a concrete historical referent for the term ‘arditi’.
• XREF: Connects to the racialized-selfhood and hegemony toolkit: factional responses to fascism show how Gramsci’s party-politics critique develops.

Related

• Volunteer squads alone could not match fascist violence backed by the state (similarity 0.87)