Left-interventionism

Left-interventionism was a minority position among socialists, such as the young Palmiro Togliatti, that, in the words of Battista Santhià, distinguished "between the imperialist war and the just national claims against the old imperialisms; they did not consider it right that some Italian provinces should remain under the dominion of a foreign state, moreover a reactionary one.

"[4] Left-interventionism (in Italian: interventismo di sinistra) originated from a process of internal self-criticism carried out by a substantial part of the revolutionary syndicalist movement, which, after the failure of Red Week in June 1914, gave rise to a theoretical evolution of its thinking.

[1] On 5 October 1914, Angelo Oliviero Olivetti created the Fasci Rivoluzionari d'Azione Interventista, into which all the movements in the area converged, and at the same time a manifesto, a political program supporting left-interventionism, was promoted.

The movement aimed to operate a strong critique of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and its neutralist position, seeing its failure to support the war as a lack of political perspective and reactionarism toward history in motion.

[8] This cost Mussolini his removal from the newspaper on 20 October 1914,[9] also the date in which the PSI published a manifesto in which it was reiterated its opposition to the conflict, and a few weeks later, on 8 November 1914, the same party reunited in Bologna to unanimously express the position of incompatibility between socialism and war.

Salvemini thought that "Germany's victory over France would be considered as proof of the incapacity of democracy to live freely alongside authoritarian political regimes, and would unleash the damage and shame of a long anti-democratic reaction on all of Europe.

[15][16] In his work about Nenni's life, Guido Cerosa [it] saw 24 November 1914, the date of his expulsion from the PSI's Milanese section "for political and moral unworthiness",[17] as the death of Mussolini as a socialist left-interventionist and the beginning of a process that would see him leading the Italian fascist movement.

Later in December, Mussolini published an article entitled "Trincerocrazia" ("Trenchcracy"), in which he reclaimed for the veterans of the trenches the right to govern post-war Italy and prefigured the combatants of the Great War as the aristocracy of tomorrow and the central nucleus of a new ruling class.