Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism: Chapters in the Intellectual History of Radicalism - PDFDrive.com by Gregor A. James

Author:Gregor, A. James
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2011-07-31T00:00:00+00:00

material and moral issues animated Italians and signaled momentous decisions to be addressed in the not-too-distant future.

All the elements that together made up the syndicalism of the first years of the century reappeared in the “proletarian nationalism” Michels identified in 1913.

He made a case for a revolutionary nationalism that would inspire an historic people to restore an ancient grandeur by infusing them with an ethic of labor and sacrifice, calculated to sustain a program of rapid industrialization and economic growth. The moral imperatives would be “proletarian” because Italy, as a nation, suffered all the disabilities Marx had identified with all those who labor. Italy, in its entirety, was “proletarian.” Its opponents were “plutocratic.”

By the time of the Italo-Turkish War of 1911, the most radical of Italian syndicalists had put together all the components of a revolutionary ideology, rooted in Marxism, but transformed by the thought of Sorel and all those Italians he had swept up in his vision. For all its prefigurations found in the work of intellectuals like Michels and Olivetti, how comprehensive the ideology of revolutionary syndicalism had become only became apparent with the coming of the Great War.

FILIPPO CORRIDONI, THE ARCHANGEL OF

SYNDICALISM

There is perhaps no better manner with which to illustrate the doctrinal developments among Italian revolutionary syndicalists in the period between the War in Tripoli and the First World War than to trace them in the thought of the young Filippo Corridoni. He was called, by those who admired him, the

“tribune” and the “apostle” of labor, and after his death, the “archangel of syndicalism.” In the years following the Great War, it was his name the first Fascists invoked in order to signal something of the character of the revolution they sought.

Born on the nineteenth of August in 1887, in the town of Pausola, in the province of Macerata, he was the son of a foundry worker, from whom he inherited the sentiments that made him a Marxist at the age of seventeen,52 and a revolutionary syndicalist at twenty. A voracious reader and an ardent orator, he very quickly rose in the ranks of the revolutionary labor movement, to provoke the abiding concern of the authorities. After his first arrest in 1907, he spent the next eight years in and out of Italian prisons and in episodic exile.

His publications throughout this period are distinguished only insofar as they reflected standard syndicalist argument. His Riflessioni sul sabotaggio was a

rationale for the employment of sabotage in the defense of the interests of the urban proletariat53—the publication and distribution of which cost him a period of confinement for the advocacy of violence against persons, property, and the state.

There is nothing in these essays that would distinguish Corridoni’s thought from that of any number of other revolutionary syndicalists.54 Only in the months of Italy’s indecision, after the outbreak of the Great War, and before Rome’s commitment to the Triple Entente in May 1915, did Corridoni give expression to those doctrinal statements that were to render him the herald of Fascism.

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