Unification and Trasformismo

Italy failed to produce a national state of its own until the mid-nineteenth century. Prior to this the country remained divided among different political regimes. After the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 seven main states existed. Piedmont in the Northwest corner of the peninsula was an autonomous principality ruled by the Savoyard monarchy. To the East Lombardy-Venetia was an Austrian province. Tuscany and Modena were Austrian archduchies and Parma was given to Napoleon's second wife Marie-Louise. The church directly ruled the Papal States in the center of the country (Lazio, Umbria, the Marches, and Romagna). South of Rome the largest political unit on the peninsula was the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies that united Sicily with most of the southern peninsula (Holt Reference Holt1970: 38–42). The native population controlled none of these political units except for Piedmont. Broadly speaking, Austrians controlled the north and the Spanish Bourbons the south. Nineteenth-century Italy then was a geographical zone in which political divisions followed dynastic lines.

The presence of multiple foreign powers on Italian soil meant that diplomatic and military factors shaped unification. The process began from Piedmont, a small but autonomous kingdom that originally stretched from northern Italy to southern France. Given its small size, the Piedmontese could unify the peninsula only by maintaining adequate relations with the French, and discouraging Austrian intervention. These two diplomatic priorities were incompatible with radical social transformation. The conflict between them became clear with the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi's expedition to the south in 1860. Garibaldi threatened both to arouse the rural masses, and to unseat the papacy, outcomes unacceptable both to the French and the Austrians. In part to avoid foreign intervention, the main conservative architect of unification, Count Camillo Benso di Cavour, acted to check this project by marching Piedmontese troops to the northern border of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, thereby blocking Garibaldi's advance to the North. Southern Italy was subsequently attached to the Italian kingdom through a plebiscite. A bloody civil war (1861–1865) fought against an alliance of ex-Bourbon retainers and the southern peasantry followed formal political unification (Seton-Watson Reference Seton-Watson1967: 26). A military and diplomatic process in which one small state rapidly extended its institutions to the peninsula as a whole substituted for either popular or elite mobilization from below (Banti Reference Banti1996: 52–53; Ragionieri Reference Ragionieri1972: 44–53, 70; Seton-Watson Reference Seton-Watson1967: 49). As a consequence a large sector of the population especially in the south experienced unification as occupation.

After unification local control shifted to a group of powerful and unaccountable royally appointed prefects who were mostly Piedmontese (Ragionieri Reference Ragionieri1972: 26–27). Alongside this despotic local regime, parliament functioned as a deal-making forum for elite interests. No political parties existed to aggregate these at a national level, and only a narrow stratum could vote until 1912 when suffrage increased from about 7 percent of the population to about 20 percent (Farneti Reference Farneti1971: 228). The post-unification state, like colonial regimes, based its rule on repression and elite cooptation.

The main technique of cooptation was called trasformismo, in which great parliamentary leaders formed governments in parliament by striking agreements with various electoral cliques. Giovanni Giolitti, its most notorious practitioner, ruled indiscriminately with the support of the left or right, but lacked his own party organization (Carocci Reference Carocci1971). This system of control worked well through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was capable of effectively managing the competing regional interests and conflicts between agricultural and industry (Banti Reference Banti1996: 168), and was relatively successful at incorporating politically some of the more privileged sectors of the northern industrial working class (Carocci Reference Carocci1971: 84–85; De Cecco and Pedone Reference De Cecco, Pedone and Raffaele1995: 260; Roberts Reference Roberts1979: 50–51).

Despite its fragile political foundations, the post-unification state presided over rather successful economic development from 1895–1913 (Federico Reference Federico1996: 765, 768, 774; Zamagni Reference Zamagni1993: 93–95, 121, 147). This benefited many agrarian and urban workers. Zamagni (Reference Zamagni1984: 198) shows a 44 percent increase in industrial workers' wages over the years 1898 to 1913, and rapidly rising incomes from 1913 to 1919 among agricultural day laborers (braccianti) (Zamagni Reference Zamagni1979–1980: 22). The last decade-and-a-half of liberal Italy was, then, a period of steady social progress and lessening inequality.

Thus unification had mixed results. Although the new state achieved impressive economic growth, especially after the turn of the century, it had little structured support among the population. The social elite lacked peninsula-wide political organizations. As both the domestic and international environments became more threatening in the period after 1911, the relations between liberal representatives and those whom they represented (primarily the agrarian and industrial elite) grew strained. As became clear with the rise of fascism, they would carry out a modernization project against the state.

The Post-War Period and the Rise of Fascism

The political crisis following World War I, called “the red two years,” or biennio rosso (1919–1920), revealed the weakness of the Italian state. In the immediate post-war period the prospects for social peace seemed rather promising since in early 1919 the Confederazione generale del lavoro (CGL) and the Confederazione Generale dell'Industria (Confindustria) reached a wide-ranging agreement covering hours, wages, and rights of representation within the factory (Maione 1970: 827). Yet this accord unraveled in a series of wildcat strikes throughout the summer and fall of that year. The underlying cause was probably steep rises in the cost of living due to wartime price inflation (Cammett Reference Cammett1967: 65).

The war had also produced a large population of returning recruits who had difficulty finding employment, and mostly gravitated to the left. The largest veteran's organization, with 550,000 members, was linked to the Catholic democratic popular party (Gentile Reference Gentile1989: 515). Further, the safety valve of immigration had closed off after 1913 when the United States and other countries placed new restrictions on migrants. The Italian Socialist Party (PSI) adopted the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat as an immediate goal, and won 32 percent of the vote in the November 1919 elections. In 1919 and 1920 massive strikes broke out among telegraph and railroad workers, metallurgy workers, and automobile manufactures in the city of Turin, and among agricultural laborers in areas of north central Italy (Tasca Reference Tasca1950: 26–27). Table 1 shows the increase in working class and peasant insurgency during this period.

Table 1

Strikes in War-Time and Post-War Italy

Source: Ministero dell'economia nazionale. Direzione generale della statistica. 1925. Annuario

Statistico Italiano: Anni 1919–1921. Rome Provveditorato generale dello stato, 395, 398.

The table shows a drop in strike activity during the war years and a very sharp rise in the immediate post-war period. From a low of 303 strikes in 1918, the number of strikes in industry spiked in 1919 to 1,663. A similar surge is evident in agriculture where the evidence records only 10 strikes for 1918, but 208 for 1919. This wave of industrial disputes had a strong political charge. In industry, many of the strikes were in part struggles over workers' control. In agriculture they were closely linked to socialism and land seizures. The high point of the red two years occurred in the winter and early spring of 1920 during the occupation of the factories and the general strike of April of that year.

The factory occupations began as a technique of labor protest in response to owners' lockouts. Instead of a conventional walk-out or sit-down strike, workers organized production (Tasca Reference Tasca1950: 117). The occupations were planned in part to demonstrate that the working class could organize production by itself, and that therefore private ownership had become technically superfluous. Further they were often accompanied by the demand that the company in question “be entrusted to the management of the collectivity of workers belonging to the company” (Maione Reference Maione1972: 254). The technique began among workers in the Federazione Impiegati Operai Metallurgici (Fiom) at Genova, Piedmont, and Milan, and some factories in smaller towns in north central Italy (Cammett Reference Cammett1967: 112–13; De Felice Reference De Felice1995a [1965]: 503). Thus, a very threatening form of labor insurgency swept across the most industrially developed zone of Italy in the period immediately following the war.

Large landed proprietors faced an even more serious threat. Proprietors suffered from unfavorable prices (industrial inputs were relatively much more expensive than agricultural outputs), increased taxes, and excess labor costs imposed by socialist leagues often in alliance with socialist dominated municipal governments. The leagues forced owners to both pay workers more, and to hire unemployed braccianti and small holders (Corner Reference Corner1975: 89; Zamagni Reference Zamagni1979–1980: 24). During February and March of 1920 in the countryside around Turin peasants undertook a “systematic invasion of the lands of the large proprietors” (Maione Reference Maione1972: 265), formed a red-guard organization, and set houses on fire. In Tuscany 500,000 sharecroppers went on strike during the summer (Snowden Reference Snowden and Davis1979: 163). Agrarian socialism in Italy promised a thorough alternation of rural class relations, either through the redistribution of land or the establishment of collectively run farms.

Working class, peasant, and day laborer insurgency took place in the context of an increasingly weak state. As the head of Confindustria put the point, “Our political parties are vile in the infamy” (quoted in Maione Reference Maione1972: 279). Giolitti, who had returned to power in 1920, refused to deploy troops against the factory occupations. A natural result of biennio rosso, especially as a consequence of the absence of state action against workers and peasants, was an intensive wave of self-organization both among the industrialists and the agrarians. In the period from 1917 to 1920, locally based elites organized strikebreaking, the provisioning of public services, and policing throughout north and central Italy (Gentile Reference Gentile1989: 70). This was also the period when the major national organizations of industry and agriculture were founded. These were highly sensitive to the threat posed by mass agrarian socialism and the factory occupations. By 1920 they were seeking alternatives. Biennio rosso produced a climate of fear among Italian industrialists and agrarians. Already weakly committed to the Italian liberal state, by 1920 these groups were seeking a new form of political organization.

This political organization emerged, quite paradoxically, as a consequence of processes internal to the Italian far left. By the outbreak of World War I a distinct national revolutionary group had consolidated on the fringes of the socialist party. These men became increasingly critical of socialism, not because it threatened their class interests but because it had repeatedly failed to show itself as a truly revolutionary force (Nello Reference Nello1982: 1014). The formation of this group occurred in two main stages: in the struggle over entry into the war, and in the aftermath of the defeat of the post-war revolutionary wave described above.

Some renegade socialists had begun to embrace nationalism during Italy's invasion of Libya in 1912. In part this was due to the view that the industrial working class had been effectively co-opted by parliamentary trasformismo. Thus the socialists could be presented as part of a parasitic alliance of northern classes against southern Italy that appeared as a semi-colonial dependency (Roberts Reference Roberts1979: 66, 107). But the mainstream of the party remained immune to nationalism up until World War I. The war, however, set off a debate between “interventionists” (those pushing for Italian participation) and “neutralists” (those who argued that Italy had nothing to gain from involving itself in the European conflict) that deeply affected the party's leadership.

Since 1887 Italy had formed part of the triple alliance linking it with Austria and Germany, against France. But Italian neutrality broke this connection and lay the foundations for a new political position on the war. Interventionism now could be linked to support for the democratic powers of France and Britain. Thus Italy's initial neutrality opened a space for “left” or “democratic” interventionism that presented the conflict as a struggle between democratic powers and reactionary empires (Austria and Germany) (Gentile Reference Gentile1982: 126; De Felice Reference De Felice1995a: 223; Milza Reference Milza2000: 184–90). To the extent that the mainstream of the socialist party supported neutrality, the socialists themselves could be presented as supporters of the reactionary side in World War I. This created a crisis of representation within the party as many of its key leaders, and probably a significant portion of its membership, moved to the position of left interventionism.

Mussolini, who had been the key political leader of the socialist far left, was the most dramatic representative of this political migration, but it was much broader. De Felice (Reference De Felice1995a: 283) states that the membership of the socialist party declined from 41,974 persons in 1914 to 29,426 in 1915, suggesting that much of this represented a defection to the position of left interventionism (Gentile Reference Gentile1975: 36; Roberts Reference Roberts1979: 117–19). The crisis of interventionism also touched Italy's most famous Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci and its most famous post-war Italian Communist politician, Palmiro Togliatti. In the struggles over interventionism both defended Mussolini from the attacks of more conventional socialists such as Angelo Tasca. Gramsci, in particular, argued that an entente victory would be much more favorable for socialists than a victory of the central powers (Agosti Reference Agosti2003: 13). Thus Italian neutrality produced a nationalist left, a position that had not existed to any significant extent before World War I (Gentile Reference Gentile1975: 113).

The main program of the nationalist left was to form a cross-class alliance between organized workers and industrialists to carry out a national democratic revolution. The high tide of this political tendency was the Republic of Fiume: an illegal border state created by the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio where many of the techniques that would be characteristic of fascism were first developed. This political entity, which the nationalist right had initially supported, moved sharply to the left in 1920. Alceste d'Ambris, a radical revolutionary syndicalist, drew up the Fiumean constitution called the Carta del Quarnaro, or “Charter of Carnaro,” which established a form of corporative representation (De Felice Reference De Felice1995a: 553; Gentile Reference Gentile1975: 181; Roberts Reference Roberts1979: 180). There were even schemes to launch a leftist insurrection using Fiume as a basis of operations, and d'Ambris worked hard to established links to the left. Early fascism (the movement was founded in March of 1919) was very much part of this milieu. Thus the biennio rosso in Italy appeared to be a period of growing left-wing nationalist strength. By 1920, however, the leftist tide began to recede. D'Annunzio was driven out of Fiume and the factory occupations ceased. The post-war social revolutionary situation had ceased to exist.

Left nationalism in Italy was a political failure. The elections of November 1919 underlined this fact by delivering a crushing defeat to the nascent fascist movement, and by revealing a generally fragmented left nationalist milieu. In contrast, the socialist party appeared politically strong and disciplined (Gentile Reference Gentile1989: 61). By early 1920 the ex-socialist political entrepreneurs who had attempted to formulate a left nationalist alternative were facing what appeared to be a dead end. During the same period both agrarians and industrialists began to feel “betrayed” by the Italian liberal state, as labor costs rose, workers seized factories, and a pro-Soviet socialist party demonstrated its electoral strength. Evidently, the program of the nationalist left had little hold over either peasants or workers in post-war Italy. This would leave the Italian agrarians and industrialists increasingly politically isolated, with important consequences for the specific form that passive revolution took. As we show in the next section, this was a major difference between the Italian and Indian paths.

Under these conditions it is perhaps unsurprising that elements of the original left nationalist coalition, who had unsuccessfully sought to win the working class to their cause, turned to the self-organizing industrialists and agrarians in their search for a more congenial audience. Since many of these men had experience in parties of the left, this constituted an injection of revolutionary political techniques into reactionary politics.

The interventionist left brought a new style to the politics of bourgeois and agrarian self-organization. The various self-defense organizations that had emerged in the period from 1917 to 1920 were generally defensive. Their main function was to take over the operation of public services during a general strike (Gentile Reference Gentile1989: 76). This began to change with the emergence of fascist squads from the winter of 1920. These organizations were offensive rather than defensive formations. Their basic activity was the “punitive expedition,” trips in which a group of men from the city would drive into the countryside or small rural town on trucks and destroy the local socialist organizations (ibid.: 159; Tasca Reference Tasca1950: 165–67). Most scholars have identified two overlapping sources of this political technique: the futurists, and the special assault squads (or arditi) that developed during World War I to make daring incursions behind enemy lines. The two groups were closely related because futurists often organized associations of arditi, and their conceptions of politics thus entered into fascist paramilitary organization (Milza Reference Milza2000: 260–61).

The most distinctive feature of futurism was that it was both an aesthetic and a political movement. In Gentile's words, the Futurists sought “to establish a cult of progress, speed, sport, physical force and courage, to modernize the Italian way of life” (1982: 144). Although politically protean, the futurists shared the idea that their aesthetic conceptions should be connected with practice in seeking to overcome the separation between “life” and “art.” More than a specific set of programs, the futurists brought a form of vanguardist politics to the post-war political struggle. This futurist conception of politics was crucial to the emergence of squadrism as a political tactic: a process that occurred in Milan (the futurist city par excellence) between January and April of 1919. Its birth can be identified with two main events: the first was the protest against the right wing socialist Leonida Bissolati at the La Scala opera house in January of 1919, and the second was the burning of the socialist newspaper Avanti in April of 1919 (De Felice Reference De Felice1995a: 480).

The squadrist technique spread rapidly in the years prior to the fascist seizure of power in 1922, as fascism moved to the right and solidified an alliance with big landholders (Elezar Reference Elazar1993; Tasca Reference Tasca1950: 163). During the first six months of 1921, the fascist organizations formed alliances, and sometimes fused with many of the bourgeois self-defense organizations described above. By 1921, then, the militia side of the party-militia had developed. The migration of the left-wing nationalists to the right, a consequence of the failure of the left nationalist alternative, was key to the development of fascist paramilitary political tactics.

This was not, however, the only resource that the left brought to fascism. Squadrism was an intrinsically anarchic form of political tactic because it was based on small bands of armed men. It is, then, unsurprising that early fascism faced centrifugal tendencies (Gentile Reference Gentile1989: 252). At various points in the movement's early history this threatened to tear it apart. Mussolini's response was to transform the militia movement into a true party organization, a policy that met with stiff resistance among the provincial leaders who thought they were involved in an anti-party movement (De Felice Reference De Felice1995b: 198; Gentile Reference Gentile1989: 253–54). A serious struggle took place within fascism that was in part one between the Milanese urban wing and the rural agrarian wing of the movement, but was also a struggle about the nature of the political movement itself (that is, whether it would be a party or a federation of local paramilitaries).

The adoption of the party-form was central to fascism's success. It allowed the inchoate movement to impose discipline on its various factions, it began the process of the development of something like an ideology, and it gave the fascists a decisive strategic advantage in relation to the liberal state, which had to tolerate the paramilitary militias as long as they were affiliated with the party organization. The driving force behind developing the movement as a party was the group of ex-socialists in Milan in their struggle against the agrarian wing of fascism (Gentile Reference Gentile1984: 253). This is quite unsurprising since many of the men who made up this Milanese group had a socialist past. Thus the “party-form” of fascism came from socialism, although in these early years the agrarians constituted a key part of its social base.

We have tried to show how fascism emerged as a revolutionary organization that pursued substantially conservative goals. This combination of conservative and revolutionary elements was characteristic of the movement. The great doyen of Italian contemporary history, Renzo De Felice (Reference De Felice1995a: 661), eloquently underlines the importance of it when he writes, “only fascism with its undeniably ideal charge and its revolutionary appearance, could ensure a truly reactionary force, could guarantee an ideological and moral appearance to reaction.” For De Felice, fascism's “revolutionary form” was an essential part of its successful “reactionary content.” But fascism was a passive revolution not only in its origins, but also as a regime.

The Passive Revolution in Power

The fascist seizure of power emerged from a social revolutionary situation, but as we have argued, it did not issue in a social revolution. It led neither to a rapid alteration of the class structure nor a rapid alteration in the state. The fascist party instead carved out some areas of control (such as the union organizations, and the corporative bureaucracy), while pre-fascist elites maintained their dominance in most areas.

Under the fascist regime many of the gains of the Giolittian period, and particularly of the biennio rosso, were reversed. First, braccianti incomes ceased to grow rapidly. According to Zamagni, real incomes in these jobs in 1938 were lower than had been in 1919 (1979–1980: 23). Fascism also pursued an extremely successful policy of wage compression in industry. As De Grazia puts it, “Italy was the only industrialized country in which wages fell continuously from the start of the 1920s through the outbreak of World War II” (1992: 9). Of course, some have suggested that fascism constituted a social revolution of the middle classes, and particularly state employees. Yet surprisingly little evidence supports this view. State employment in Italy grew rather slowly over the regime. Zamagni shows that state employees did do relatively well especially compared to industrial workers during the first half of the nineteen thirties, but then their incomes began to drop (1979–1980: 39). The real story of income distribution under fascism lay elsewhere. Dividends on stock ownership remained high, even through the darkest period of the depression. Wages, in contrast, were easy to shift downward. Thus, as Zamagni puts it, “after a egalitarian push in the immediate post-war period, [the income distribution] became progressively more unequal, with the rich becoming ever richer and the poor ever poorer” (ibid.: 41). In terms of the basic distribution of income between social classes, it seems clear that the consequences were to reverse the trend toward greater social equality during the Giolittian period and particularly in the immediate post-war period.

The Italian class structure, it must be emphasized, did not remain unaltered during the regime. For example, the fascists successfully reduced the number of braccianti through their agrarian policy. Further, women entered the labor market in higher numbers than in the liberal period. Yet despite these reforms, fascism was not a social revolutionary regime. It did not threaten private property and much of the pre-existing bureaucracy was maintained.

Still, the regime did carry out important changes in the area of economic and social policy. After a period of orthodox economic policy aimed at strengthening the lira, and cutting state expenditures, in the early 1930s Mussolini's regime transformed itself into a dictatorship of a new type. From late 1931 fascist organizations (particularly the unions and the party) expanded rapidly. Recent historiography, in partial revision of an earlier tradition, has stressed the centrality of the party not only to the seizure of power, but also to the regime that emerged after 1926 (Gentile Reference Gentile1989; Pombeni Reference Pombeni1984: 459; Reference Pombeni and Raffaele1995: 109). The party established a ramified network of organizations for youth, workers, women, and myriad professional groups. Membership in party organizations tended to expand throughout the regime, until about 10 percent of the entire population enrolled in one of its organizations (ibid.: 478). This kind of organization was unprecedented in Italian history. No political force, not even the socialists and Catholics, had a permanent national presence like the fascist party (Togliatti Reference Togliatti1970: 171). The same expansion can be traced in the union organizations, the after-work organizations (dopolavoro), and the women's organizations (De Grazia Reference De Grazia1981: 16).

Aside from party and union developments, the fascist government developed an extremely interventionist policy of state ownership and state financing. Indeed, De Felice argues that by 1934 Italy had the highest level of state ownership of any European state outside of the Soviet Union (1996 [1974]: 179). By the 1930s a group of key institutions engaged in “massive doses of institutional engineering planed in Rome” (De Cecco and Pedone Reference De Cecco, Pedone and Raffaele1995: 262–63). Much of this apparatus developed as a direct result of Italian participation in the war, but it was justified ideologically in terms of the concept of a “corporative economy,” representing a third way between “liberalism” and “socialism.”

Ex-leftists were prominent in many of these organizational efforts. Edmondo Rossoni, head of the fascist syndicates until 1928, was an ex-revolutionary syndicalist who had organized workers at Modena and also dockworkers in New York (Roberts Reference Roberts1979: 14). Leftist ideas seem to have been quite widespread throughout the leadership. According to an old union organizer, the fascist syndicalists in their negotiations with the bosses “unsheathed a barricade-like language that would make not only Corridoni or Alceste De Ambris envious, but even the old anarchist Errico Malatesta” (Sarti Reference Sarti1972: 761). Bruno Buozzi, a reformist union organizer who went into exile in 1926 also noted the presence of “ex-revolutionaries” among the ranks of the fascist syndicalists (1988: 111).

Leftists were also prominent in the fascist women's organizations. Regina Teruzzi, an ex-socialist who gravitated toward fascism during the war, was a major force in organizing the rural housewives organizations (Massaie rurali) that aimed to prevent rural-to-urban migration by improving material conditions in the agricultural population (De Grazia Reference De Grazia1992: 99). As De Grazia argues, “The Mussolinian old guard ... like the Duce himself brought to the organization of the dictatorship important skills acquired in the socialist movement” (ibid.: 32). Thus Italy's passive revolution was accomplished by revolutionary political techniques that had been brought into the fascist regime in part by ex-socialists.

India's Passive Revolution

In India the main organizational force of a passive revolution was the anti-colonial Congress Party. As in Italy, this organization emerged following a period of mass insurgency. In India this occurred primarily from the mid- to late 1930s. But despite this similarity Congress was a very different type of organization from Italian fascism. This was an anti-colonial mass democratic party, not a party militia (as we discuss below, under Gandhi's leadership it rejected the use of violence). Further, Congress enjoyed significant popular support in a way that the fascist party never did. The main reason for this difference was the simultaneity of the struggle for independence and the struggle against the left. As a result, Congress could rely both on the British imperial administration to repress the left, and present national unification as the precondition for all subsequent political projects, including socialism, thereby incorporating radical elements. Many convinced socialists thus supported the Congress Party not because they discovered the social elite as an alternative revolutionary agent, as occurred in Italy, but because they understood national unification as the precondition for social transformation. This did not involve, as in Italy, a dramatic turn to the right, but rather a postponing of radical ends (Haithcox Reference Haitchox1971: 240–44).

Like the fascists, the Congress Party was a nationalist organization that aimed at creating a sense of political belonging that cut across localism and regionalism. In the various non-cooperation campaigns of the 1920s the party sought to instill a sense of national identity. As Chandra Bose writes, “Uniform slogans were repeated everywhere, and a uniform policy and ideology gained currency from one end of India to the other” (1964: 70). Italian fascism was indeed an important model for some leaders of the Indian nationalist movement. There were several high-level contacts between Indian nationalist leaders and Italian fascists during the 1930s. Gandhi made an official visit to Italy in 1931, and was popular with a segment of the fascist elite around the notorious squadrist leader Roberto Farinacci (De Felice Reference De Felice1987: 1314). The Italians also quickly translated the Mahatma's autobiography into Italian and furnished it with an introduction by the official regime philosopher Giovanni Gentile (ibid.).

Gandhi's reflections on his Italian trip are striking. Of Mussolini, he wrote to the French pacifist Romain Rolland, “his attention for the poor, his opposition to super-urbanization, his attempt to realize an accord between capital and labor, seem to me to demand special attention.” Gandhi downplayed the significance of fascist violence as not specifically fascist, and attributable to “Western society” (quoted in De Felice Reference De Felice1987: 1317). Other Indian nationalists were more directly influenced by Italian fascism. Perhaps the most important of these contacts was with Subhas Chandra Bose, who was officially received by the secretary of the Fascist party Achille Starace in Rome in 1934 (ibid.: 1324). Bose argued for a synthesis between “fascism and communism” which would be realized by the Indian Nationalist movement (1964: 313–14).

The Origins of the Indian National Congress

The formation of the Indian National Congress (INC) (later referred to as the Congress Party) in 1885 was the first institutional step towards shaping modern Indian democracy. Early nationalists in the INC were largely professionals who sought a share of political power from the British, and attempted to gain this by petitioning the colonial administrators. On the British side, the Act of 1883 allowed Indians to become eligible for administrative posts if they were “sufficiently qualified.” Sympathetic British officials like Allan Octavian Hume, who wanted some political representation for Indians, pressed for this measure. Conditions during the late nineteenth century, including famines, had brought about increasing peasant unrest, and growing resentment of a host of state repressive measures had “brought India under Lord Lytton within measurable distance of a revolutionary outbreak,” as one commentator put it (Sitaramayya Reference Sitaramayya1935: 16). Hume conceived of the INC as a “safety valve” for this unrest.

When the INC formed in 1885, it was a gathering of less than a hundred English-speaking lawyers and other professionals. For another three decades the Congress Party retained a largely urban outlook, distanced from the masses of rural people and their living conditions. The crucial break with this elitist orientation came with Gandhi's intervention. He broke with the leadership's largely urban tactics of petitions and meetings. In part, Gandhi and his followers did this by using a popular idiom, in part by extending Congress organization to far-reaching villages and districts. The Congress Party opened itself up to mass membership, and anyone who could pay a membership fee of four annas (5 cents) could become a “primary member.”Footnote ² The Congress was the only party to develop a mass character at the time, with branches in every district of India and a strong rural presence. This made it one of the strongest and earliest mass party formations in the world (Huntington Reference Huntington1968: 84). Aside from district-level Congress committees, state- and provincial-level committees were set up. The All India Congress Committee (AICC) formed an umbrella organization.

Central to Gandhi's program was non-violence as a tactic. The Congress Party under his leadership, for example, tended to encourage picketing and boycotts of British goods, and later, civil disobedience and passive resistance, rather than insurgency. Perhaps the most salient and famous example of Gandhi's disdain for rebellion was his reaction after tenants of the village of Chauri Chaura in the United Provinces in 1921 rioted, burned down a police station, and killed several policemen. Gandhi saw this as a political wrong, immoral, and an “infection” caused by the failure of Congress organization. Significantly, he called off the civil disobedience movement after the incident, claiming that Chauri Chaura showed how imperfect the Congress organization was (Amin Reference Amin1995: 50). This led to a serious split within the congress organization and the rise of distinct nationalist left wing opposing Gandhi (Bose Reference Bose1964: 72–83). Although the later 1920s was a period of growing left nationalist strength, and many contacts were established between communists and nationalists, Gandhi's control over the movement was too entrenched to break at this point (Haithcox Reference Haitchox1971: 88).

The strategy of mass mobilization adopted by the Congress Party leadership was a fine balance between restraint and radicalism following a ‘compromise-struggle-compromise’ strategy (Chandra Reference Chandra1986), whereby the party alternated round-table negotiations with phases of mass civil disobedience and street protest. After two large civil disobedience movements during the 1920s, the Congress-led nationalist movement began to dissipate and membership declined as the British imprisoned the leadership. In 1930, with a large number of leaders in jail, Gandhi attempted to de-politicize the Congress Party and transform it into an organization of individual protest and social uplift (Tomlinson Reference Tomlinson1976: 36). Gandhi's discomfiture with mass, spontaneous unrest is well known but poorly understood. His deep concern for poverty was combined with a resolute disinterest in politicizing it in class terms, which won him the wrath of many socialists and communists.

As historian Sumit Sarkar observes, “The range, and the radicalism of popular actions was remarkable—but so was the irresistible tendency to keep on seeking shelter behind the Mahatma's banner” (1983a: 41). Spontaneous rebellions never quite challenged the Congress Party's organizational strength and monopoly over political expression during the 1920s. Until the advent of mass, radical parties of the left, there was no significant rhetorical or real challenge to Gandhi's particular direction of the nationalist movement.

Worker and Peasant Mobilization

Until the 1930s there was no clear or unified radical threat to the Congress Party, either internal or external. The Communist Party of India (CPI) was formed in 1924, but it maintained a strong line of insurrection and revolution, and more crucially, political isolationism. Until 1935, when the party adopted a United Front policy of joining forces with “progressive” elements within the Congress Party (the Congress Socialist Party or CSP), they were in no position to challenge Congress' dominance of the nationalist movement. During the 1930s this situation began to change as the Gandhian leadership of Congress came under increasing pressure from the left. As Sarkar puts it, “By late 1930 or early 1931, a process of simultaneous decline and radicalization had set in: a weakening of forms of struggle associated with business groups or peasant upper strata … accompanied by sporadic but fairly widespread tendencies towards less manageable forms” (1983a: 47–48). From mid-1930s, after the Great Depression, mass unemployment, hunger, and declining wages produced popular unrest. Even while attempting to stake a claim to being the sole representative party of the masses, Congress leaders were ambivalent toward these protests and growing radicalization because mobilization threatened to spill out of the boundaries of the nationalist movement, partly through tactical expansion that included political strikes, and no-rent movements that the Congress leadership came to define as “violent.” Communists in Bombay and Calcutta began to organize the industrial working classes in those regions in 1928 and 1929 (ibid.: 55–56). Strikes increased in number and frequency, especially in the years following 1934 when leftists within the Congress Party formed an internal faction known as the Congress Socialist Party (CSP). Following a period of setbacks in the labor movement between 1930 and 1934 as a direct result of British repression and the imprisonment of communist trade union leaders, in 1934 strikes began to double the man-days lost each year (Revri Reference Revri1972: 185). Waves of large strikes in the textile and jute mills, most famously in Bombay and Calcutta, swept across the country from 1936 onwards.

This wave of radicalism met with resistance from both the British and the Congress Party. But this resistance took different forms. The British colonial regime deployed a policy of repression. Paranoid about communist conspiracies that could shake the foundations of their empire, they undertook mass arrests of nationalist leaders, particularly communists, proscribed literature, and cracked down on communist cells. Within the Congress Party, the conservatives sought to co-opt the leftists by prioritizing the nationalist struggle in relation to the class struggle. A key part of their strategy here was to strictly define the tactical terrain on which the anti-colonial struggle would be carried out. These two responses were intimately connected. The non-violence of the anti-colonial movement depended on the violence of the British colonial state.

We begin the analysis here with a discussion of repression. As Haithcox writes, “Faced with a challenge of unprecedented magnitude, the government of India was compelled to make large scale arrests” (1971: 149). In 1931 the British accused three communists of plotting to kill British officials and sentenced them to death by hanging, in what was subsequently known as the Meerut Conspiracy Case. A secret file on the proceedings stated:

Although the three communists were hanged in an effort to send a direct message to would-be insurgents, death by hanging was employed more sparingly as a technique of repression. Instead, the British relied on a well-trained and effective police force—the Criminal Investigation Department or CID—fashioned after the London Metropolitan Police's own CID. There was “very little that went on among the Communists that the CID did not learn about sooner or later,” according to Overstreet and Windmiller (Reference Overstreet and Windmiller1959: 63). During the 1930s various emissaries from the Comintern were arrested and deported by the CID before they could gain influence in India (ibid.: 149). The reliance on police-work rather than the military was a political technique of colonial power influenced by working class protests and radicalism in the home countries. However, the idea of relying upon a large and well-trained police force was stimulated by the fear of sudden upsurges that could be prevented through proper intelligence. Police crackdowns and mass arrests disrupted communist mobilization, particularly during the 1930s while the party attempted to gain a foothold within the mainstream of the anti-colonial movement.

While the British used force against the left, the leadership of the Congress Party shaped tactics. The Gandhi-led Congress embraced non-violence, an aversion to strikes, land grabbing, burning of land records, and non-payment of taxes (Haithcox Reference Haitchox1971: 97; Sarkar Reference Sarkar1983a: 50). Guha (Reference Guha1997) and others have pointed to the disciplinary effects of Gandhi's moral injunctions, in which self-purification and control were translated into a political goal. Each time public protest turned violent, Gandhi asked what the corrective atonement would be. In doing so, he channeled political anger into peaceful mass activities in which there was to be “no assembling in crowds, no rioting, no inflammatory speeches, no meetings and hartals (strikes) on every occasion” (ibid.: 150). Thus Gandhi's moral leadership made a clear distinction between violent and non-violent groups, thereby excluding many forms of direct collective action, not necessarily involving bodily or physical violence, from the movement for independence.

Significant among the marginalized radical protests were those led by lower-caste associations that challenged the caste hierarchy, raising questions about the very edifice of Hindu society, as well as the upper-caste bias of the nationalist movement led by the Congress Party (Ambedkar Reference Ambedkar1968 [1939]; O'Hanlon Reference O'Hanlon1985; Omvedt Reference Omvedt1976). The fiery untouchable activist B. R. Ambedkar launched bitter criticisms of the Gandhian nationalist movement, as did Jyotibao Phule, the social reformer among the low-caste untouchables in Maharashtra. Both pointed to the manner in which the Congress Party's privileging of political independence from the British had failed to consider the “first” colonization of the untouchables; indeed, its upper caste leadership was charged with a deliberate subversion of the aims of lower castes.

Gandhi led a largely moral campaign against untouchability, yet because he failed politically to integrate the caste issue into the core of Congress' agenda, most Congressites at the ground level either ignored this campaign or interpreted it as an ideology of benevolence and trusteeship rather than a call radically to democratize the emerging shape of the Indian polity. This may have been because Gandhi himself balked at calling for the eradication of caste, as well as the fact that a more revolutionary upheaval of the caste system would necessarily have to confront the property relations that supported caste relations. In regions where caste associations were particularly militant, developing outside of or within areas left open by weak local Congress Party associations, the confrontations between castes were usually violent. In Tamil Nadu, for example, the low-caste Dravidian leaders often turned violent against the Brahmins (Washbrook Reference Washbrook1976). Likewise, in Satara district of Maharashtra, the untouchable caste Mahars led a rebellion in 1933 in several villages, attacking landlords and raiding their lands. In both cases, the violent challenge to the caste hierarchy and segregation took place outside the Congress Party-led nationalist movement.

Following this period of leftist insurgency, Indian industrialists in particular were ambivalent towards the Congress Party. Nehru's popularity with the rank and file and his socialist leanings infuriated big business (Markovits Reference Markovits1985: 108). Yet, his election to the position of President of the Congress Party in 1933 had little effect on the program of the Congress as a whole, and the majority defeated his proposal to introduce direct affiliation of workers and peasants' organizations to the Party. The business community launched a vitriolic attack on Nehru, fearing that his ‘extreme’ ideas would find fertile ground in the context of economic misery across the country. Despite political differences among the industrialists, many signed a manifesto in 1933 that constituted a clear attempt to interfere in Congress politics and demonstrated growing political unity among them (ibid.). Internal rebellion reinforced this resistance within the right wing in the Congress Party, particularly from the Bombay Presidency and United Provinces, where Nehru's espousal of socialism had been the strongest. On 29 June the moderates within the party sent a collective letter of resignation to Nehru, withdrawing this threat only after Nehru promised to ratchet down his speeches. This defeat of Nehru and the left could be attributed at least indirectly to the manifesto circulated by big business, and its mobilizing effect on the propertied classes more generally, as well as its supporters within the Congress party (ibid.) By 1936 Indian big business was closely allied with the Congress Party, in opposition to the British government.

Despite the continued dominance of the right within Congress, the rise of a distinct left wing had important consequences. Worker demands began to appear in Congress manifestos and Sarkar (Reference Sarkar1983a: 59) notes an increasing use of a “socialist idiom.” Thus by the late 1930s the Congress Party embodied an organization not dissimilar from Italian fascism: a mass party dominated by propertied interests (ibid.: 66). The socialist component of the movement found its way into the post-independence state through the Congress left and specifically through its Nehru wing. The new post-independence economy was founded on principles that represented the historical alternative to social revolution by protecting private property rights, and opting for a mixed economy of public and private ownership. The implementation of state planning as a way to organize the post-independence economy was itself the product of struggles between Nehru's socialist ideas and his fascination with Russia's development after 1917, and the concerns of right-leaning Congress members. The British government itself weighed in with support for planning after 1937, arguing that some redistribution of wealth would strengthen colonial rule. But in the end Nehru muted the idea of planning as a technique of socialism, linking it instead to the idea of national reconstruction. As Chakravorty (Reference Chakravorty1992: 282) observes, Nehru thought he could establish a “‘socialist economy within a democratic structure’ without disrupting the existing social order and multi-class Congress platform ‘since [any attempt to bring about] a premature conflict on class lines would lead to chaos and possibility of prolonged inability to build anything.’” Congress was thus able to incorporate socialist elements by appealing to a logic of postponement in which national unification was presented as the precondition of social transformation.

The mass mobilizing threat in India differed from that in Italy. Rather than a concentrated insurrectionary threat, the 1930s in India were marked by waves of mass mobilization that Gandhi and other Congress leaders sought to harness for mass movements such as the civil disobedience movements, and in 1942 the militant Quit India movement. As historian Sumit Sarkar writes, “The years 1935, and particularly 1936, saw the emergence of a pattern in Indian politics which would be repeated often, both before and after Independence. Outwardly, all the signs were of a significant lurch to the Left: growing Socialist and Communist activity (despite the 1934 ban on the CPI), numerous labor and peasant struggles, the formation of several Left-led all-India mass organizations … . Yet in the end the Right within Congress was able to skillfully and effectively ride and utilize this storm …” (1983b: 338). During the whole period between 1920 and 1947 there was a struggle between the more “spontaneous,” that is, direct initiatives by popular classes, and the Congress Party leadership.

Why was the Congress Party able to co-opt popular mobilization? One of the main reasons was the centrality of the struggle for home rule. The party could co-opt the left by presenting national unification as the precondition for social transformation. Thus Congress was able to tame and moderate socialist influences within the party, and co-opt more radical ones outside it. In this task it was assisted by the British who sought to repress any signs of radical activity whose growth might threaten a communist revolution, much like the radical movements that had erupted in the post-Depression years across the world. Even in these favorable conditions, however, it was essential for the movement to exercise strict control over political tactics. Where the party lost control over such tactics, the outcome was very different.

Historical Alternatives in India

One way of establishing the importance of non-violent tactics to Congress domination of the nationalist movement is to examine cases in which Congress failed to establish such control. Two cases in particular point toward potential alternative trajectories for other parts of India because they succeeded in knitting together and surpassing the localism and fragmentation of subaltern resistance. First, in the southern state of Kerala, skillful maneuvering by communists within the nationalist movement, and within the Congress party, allowed various forms of popular insurgency to expand beyond the margins of Congress nationalism as it took shape elsewhere. Working within the Congress Party, socialists (who later joined the communist party) expanded the repertoire of Congress protests from town-based picketing to workers' strikes, tenants' invasions of land, and, during the 1940s, often violent protests in which workers burned bridges and blockaded roads.

During this period communists won hegemony of the nationalist movement, carrying this forward to the first electoral victory of a left party (barring the communists in San Marino, Italy) in the post-independence era, in 1957. The communists in Kerala implemented a social revolution of sorts, carrying out massive land reforms, minimum wage bills, and an extensive network of welfare policies that raised literacy and life expectancy to the highest levels in India (and in the developing world more generally). In many ways Kerala represents a trajectory ‘that might have been’ had there been a stronger challenge to the passive revolution led by the Congress Party in other regions of India.

Another case in southern India, however, provides a different sort of evidence of the political possibilities for a left-led challenge to passive revolution. A strong challenge to landlords and the state emerged through a large peasant rebellion in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, also known as the Telengana Rebellion in 1946. The Telengana case is particularly instructive because Andhra Pradesh possessed an extremely primitive political order. The conditions that allowed Congress to flourish elsewhere were absent here. The Sultan of Hyderabad, Nizam Mir Usman Ali Khan, exploited economically and dominated politically an impoverished peasantry, and was one of the wealthiest individuals in the world in the 1940s (Roosa Reference Roosa2001: 58). The Nizam initially resisted national unification, and repressed the local Congress party organization. In this political atmosphere the communists quickly rose to political prominence (ibid.: 61–66).

After independence the situation changed. In September 1948 the Indian army invaded Hyderabad, in part in order to use martial law against the Communist party. During this period (1948–1949) organized peasants in the Telengana area followed a new line within the party of a guerrilla war against the “fake independence” of the Nehru government. By 1948, the Communists had organized 2,000 peasants into 100 armed guerrilla squads. In the large peasant insurrection that followed between 1948 and 1951, peasant squads created “liberation zones” and conducted a massive campaign of decimating landlords, seizing land and grain in village after village. Police forces crushed and surrounded them. In the aftermath, the CPI (Communist Party of India) renounced the use of violent tactics, and “moderate” voices within the party calling for the adoption of the parliamentary path of peaceful transition to socialism emerged as the dominant strategic and tactical strand.Footnote ⁴

The two cases of Kerala and the Telengana rebellion throw into dramatic relief what could occur when Congress lost tactical control of the nationalist movement. In Kerala the alternative possibility was to some extent realized. The result was the closest approximation to a welfare state found in the developing world, a set of policies that successive governments implemented, dramatically reducing social inequality, raising literacy rates, and lowering mortality rates to levels not achieved in most of the third world. In Telengana a very radical alteration in the structure of class relations was clearly a possibility, but it was suppressed by force.