Policies of the working-class parties¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter delivers a polemical indictment of the entire spectrum of working-class parties in Italy and Britain for their failure to provide a revolutionary lead during the crisis of Italian fascism in 1943. The core argument is that the Italian Socialist Party, the Stalinist Communist Party, the British Labour Party, and even the Independent Labour Party (ILP) are all, to varying degrees, treacherous or confused, and that only the programme of the Fourth International offers a correct path.
The chapter opens by attacking the Italian Socialist Party’s Manifesto. While it correctly calls for a general strike to overthrow Badoglio and the king, it fatally appeals to the Allies for peace negotiations based on the Atlantic Charter. The text argues this is a catastrophic error, as the Allies (Wall Street and the City of London) are not democrats but capitalist rivals who backed Mussolini until their own interests clashed. The demand for “unconditional surrender” to the Allies is denounced as a recipe for a military dictatorship that would bleed Italy for both Italian and Allied capital. The Socialists are thus accused of preparing a new debacle for the Italian masses by failing to differentiate between “Tweedledum and Tweedledee” – Allied and Italian capitalists.
The attack on Stalinism is more vitriolic. The chapter cites the Daily Worker to show that the Italian Communist Party has abandoned class analysis for a nationalist appeal, fighting “in the interests of the nation” and agreeing to a “left bourgeois” government. This is presented as a repeat of the catastrophic “people’s front” strategy that led to defeat in France and Spain. The CP is accused of ignoring the real culprits of fascism—big capitalists, landowners, and generals—and of preparing the way for a new tyranny by portraying the Allies as “liberators.” The British Labour leaders and British Stalinists are condemned as even worse, screeching for “unconditional surrender” with no defence of socialist interests.
The chapter reserves its most nuanced critique for the ILP and Fenner Brockway. While acknowledging that the ILP correctly exposes Allied imperialism and calls for socialist revolution, it argues that Brockway fatally confuses the issue by advocating unity with the reformist Italian Socialists. The text points out that Brockway’s article in the New Leader contains no warning against the counter-revolutionary role of Social Democracy and Stalinism, despite the tragic experience of the POUM in Spain. It draws a direct historical parallel: had Lenin followed such a policy of collaboration with reformists in Russia, there would have been no Russian Revolution. The ILP is therefore characterised not as revolutionary but as a “centrist, half-reformist party,” whose policy would lead to the Italian workers having “their necks broken by the counterrevolution.”
The chapter concludes by asserting that only the Fourth International’s programme stands the test. It demands no support for Allied imperialism, the expropriation of the capitalists and landowners who financed fascism, and the creation of independent workers’ militias and soviets. The Italian workers’ instinctive revolt is hailed as a “dress rehearsal” for the European socialist revolution, but the warning is stark: without a revolutionary policy, it will be strangled by imperialists from without and traitors from within.