Reformists and Stalinists prepare betrayal¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter argues that the fall of Mussolini in 1943 did not merely mark a military setback for fascism but signalled the eruption of a socialist revolution in Italy, and potentially across Europe. The core narrative thrust is that the Italian working class, despite decades of fascist repression, had immediately and instinctively begun to reconstruct organs of workers’ power—factory committees, workers’ militias, and armed takeovers of police authority in cities such as Milan, Turin, and Brescia. The author seizes on the Stalinist Daily Worker’s reluctant reporting of “citizens’ committees” to insist that these are nothing less than soviets, a term the Stalinists cowardly avoid. The evidence marshalled is drawn from Swiss radio reports and bourgeois press accounts, which are turned against their sources to demonstrate that revolution is underway.
Key claims include the resilience of the proletariat as the only consistently progressive class, the inevitability of peasant land seizures once the meaning of urban events penetrates the countryside, and the crystallisation of all objective conditions for socialist revolution in Italy. The chapter draws heavily on the historical precedent of the Russian Revolution and the failed imperialist intervention that followed, invoking Churchill’s fear of repeating that fiasco to explain the Allies’ preference for a deal with the monarchy and bourgeoisie rather than outright military repression. The theoretical context is classical Trotskyist: the distinction between objective and subjective conditions for revolution is central. The subjective factor is identified as missing—not because the workers lack revolutionary instinct, but because the Stalinists and socialists are already preparing to betray the movement by channelling it into bourgeois “democracy.”
The polemic is sharp and directed at two main targets. The Stalinists are denounced as cowardly and treacherous for refusing to name the soviets as such and for preparing to derail the revolution. The reformist socialists are lumped with them as architects of betrayal. A secondary polemic is aimed at the Allied ruling classes, particularly Churchill, whose talk of avoiding concentration camps and firing squads is exposed as fear of the revolutionary masses, not humanitarian concern. The chapter concludes with a sweeping continental perspective: Mussolini’s fall has already sparked demonstrations in Berlin, strikes in Portugal, and panic in Franco’s Spain and Boris of Bulgaria’s court. The coming revolutionary wave, the author insists, will not spare Stalin’s bureaucracy, which faces political revolution in Russia if the West rises. Only American imperialism is identified as a potentially stable counter-revolutionary base, but even its army would disintegrate in the “red-hot atmosphere of Europe.” The argument is relentlessly internationalist, predicting a multi-year revolutionary epoch.