Libertà di Opinione by Vauro Senesi (2019). Image provided by courtesy of the artist
To invoke the “constitution written by the partisans” served both as callback to the role of popular mobilization in the defeat of Nazi-fascism and as a programme of social aspirations to be realized in the present. Throughout its Cold War-era exclusion from national government, the PCI invoked the constitutional assertion that Italy is a “democratic republic founded on labor” (Article 1), as well as this document’s insistence on removing the socio-economic barriers to freedom, equality, and workers’ full participation in economic and democratic life (Article 3).
Even after the 1991 dissolution of the PCI, historically linked associations like the ANPI (National Association of Italian Partisans) have continued this crusade, portraying the constitution as both a national asset and a signal achievement of antifascism. Yet when, in December 2016, centrist Prime Minister Matteo Renzi sought to change the constitution to strengthen the executive, the biggest voting blocs in defense of the status quo came from outside the historic Left—the Five Star Movement (M5s) and, to a lesser extent, the Lega.
These parties’ No campaign entailed a large measure of opportunism—the referendum was, from these parties’ perspectives, above all a matter of unseating Renzi, who had promised to resign in case of defeat. Their primary focus on the next election—and relative lack of interest in the content of the constitution—thus differed from left-wingers in Renzi’s own party who campaigned for No, and who after his defeat founded a new party called Articolo Uno. Yet both the Lega and M5s—two forces unrelated to the “constitutional arch” which wrote this document in 1946–1947, or even their successor parties—portrayed Renzi’s initiative as an assault on republican traditions. This had an element of the paradoxical, for while neither party is connected to the historic filiation of Italian fascism, both stand distant from the antifascist culture of the post-1945 constitutional arch. In contrast to Lega Nord founder Umberto Bossi, the now-“national” party’s leader Matteo Salvini has repeatedly flirted with CasaPound (a neofascist movement built around an occupied social center in the capital); for their part, M5s leaders have invoked the idea of “marching on Rome,” while also portraying the public commemoration of antifascism as part of a grey institutional political correctness. Even more remarkable is the approach taken towards the constitution in recent years by forces who do directly descend from, or identify with, the fascist tradition. These notably include Fratelli d’Italia (a “national conservative,” “postfascist” force descended from the post-war Movimento Sociale Italiano, MSI) and the younger, more radical, and smaller CasaPound.
These forces have sought to appropriate the constitution in two distinct ways, either as a basis for legitimization (i.e. by identifying with an unproblematically antifascist document) or, more subversively, as a tool for questioning the established parties’ claim to stand for the Republic’s professed social values. Fratelli d’Italia’s emphasis on this former theme especially owes to its roots in the postfascist milieu of the 1990s, and in particular Alleanza Nazionale—the vehicle by which former MSI cadres like Gianfranco Fini and Gianni Alemanno sought a place in Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right alliance. Amidst the collapse of the “constitutional arch” parties at the end of the Cold War, in the 1994 general election, the camerati of the MSI made a bid for unoccupied political territory, seeking to create a pro-European conservative force within Berlusconi’s coalition, akin to Spain’s Partido Popular (itself founded by former Francoite officials). This was a contradictory process—leader Fini ultimately journeyed to the liberal center while others colleagues (including both Alemanno and Alessandra Mussolini) joined Berlusconi’s own Popolo della Libertà.
There were broader circumstances behind the legitimization of these forces. With the rise, in the 1990s and 2000s, of revisionist pop-history accounts of World War II,1 as well as Berlusconi’s own trolling comments about Il Duce, a postfascist could seek rehabilitation by terming fascism as an “absolute evil” (Fini) or describing the values of the resistance to Nazism as “universal” (as former MSI youth leader Gianni Alemanno put it after his election to the Rome mayoral office in 2008) even while drawing focus to the PCI’s historic crimes. The framing device for this shift was, precisely, the embrace of constitutional mores, in the guise of democratic respectability and the rejection of violence. This is the operation reproduced in the present by Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia. Created in 2012, it has regrouped most of the postfascist milieu in an independent party, whose logo integrates that of the old MSI, allied to the Lega and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia.
Different from this bid for institutional respectability—though overlapping in some respects—is the approach of CasaPound, on which we shall focus in this article. Despite its more stridently anti-systemic character, it far more consistently invokes the specific values of the constitution (as it interprets them) in defense of an explicitly fascist programme suited “for the third millennium.” This subcultural force, whose media presence far outstrips its electoral scores (below 1% in national contests), promotes itself as “filling in” for both a Left, which has abandoned poor and working-class Italians, and policemen supposedly restrained from dealing with crime by immigrants. In this regard, CasaPound is notable for its “anticapitalist” rhetoric, which goes beyond the Catholic-paternalist, protectionist, or “communitarian” spin that postfascists like Alemanno (and the “Destra Sociale” current) or indeed Fratelli d’Italia have put on their conservative politics. While these varied forces (and other nostalgic militant circles like Fiamma Tricolore or Roberto Fiore’s Forza Nuova) all make up part of the “family album” of Italian fascism, CasaPound has gone furthest of all in appropriating rhetoric, talking points, and practices more commonly associated with the historical left, in particular in the defense of the constitution. This can take the form, common to far-right circles in other countries, of a simple appeal to “free speech.” This was notable in the case of the controversy around its publisher Altaforte’s participation at the Turin book fair in May 2019 (which was ultimately blocked). Yet it also occurs on the more substantive ground of economics and democratic sovereignty, as CasaPound poses as a fighter against neoliberal globalization.
Sansepolcrismo 2.0?
A pinch of salt may be in order here. How seriously are we to take CasaPound’s statements on economic policy or jurisprudence? When we look at it for what it really is—not a mass movement or indeed a regime-in-waiting, but a perhaps 2000-strong militant subculture with pretensions of grandeur—we might doubt the importance of its programmatic claims. CasaPound’s recruitment of young people from football hooligan circles or its own student organization Blocco Studentesco seems defined by sociality—sport, street brawling, music, clothing, and networks of friends and family—rather than the particular seductive force of its political treatises. Yet even the ideological framing of this kind of activity—one able to give militants the sense that their collective can project itself into public life as a “serious” political force—can make use of more conventional instruments of party organization, for instance the CasaPound publisher and bookshop, its debates and summer school (Rivoluzione), and indeed its magazine, Il Primato Nazionale. The ideas contained within this publication give us a sense not only of what this force wants to tell its members about their activity, but also about the historical moment that it expresses. That is, it gives us insight into which parts of the fascist tradition might be considered relevant to our own time in connection with other elements of the cultural context. Following historians like Roger Griffin, it can, indeed, be worth taking fascists’ ideas seriously.
In particular, Il Primato Nazionale shows CasaPound’s extreme ideological flexibility, not only projecting its particular fascist ideas onto the terrain of rival, more mainstream forces, but also seeking to conquer the space left open by other forces who have changed their political alignments. This is evident even in its self-description. Not only does Il Primato Nazionale call itself a periodico sovranista (harking back to Sovranità, a short-lived 2015 front created by CasaPound and the Lega) but also adopts the classic phraseology of M5s by counterposing itself to the “ultimate expression of the casta”—the media (Scianca 2019).
Yet more remarkable, however, is CasaPound’s raid on such a totemic flagship of the left and anti-fascism as the constitution, including its specific socio-economic premises. This was visible in the social center’s campaign for the March 2018 general election—indeed, point 16 of CasaPound’s programme insisted upon “the real application of the constitution” in economic matters. An article in Il Primato Nazionale even presented CasaPound as the only force who understood what the constitutional framers had intended in the field of economic policy (La Redazione [de Il Primato Nazionale] 2018). Citing the discussions in the post-war Constitutional Assembly’s Third Sub-Commission, focused on socio-economic questions (here wrongly cited as the Second), this article identifies CasaPound with both the constitutional invocation of the protection of labor and the need for the state to intervene where private property and market competition contrast with the well-being of society.
At this level of abstraction, it is no surprise that resonances exist between fascism and the socialist and Keynesian ideas that shaped mass politics at different points from the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. In fascism’s historic competition with the Marxist left, a long tradition of “socially” oriented currents has promised to place limits on private property or otherwise direct capital in the national interest: one of the much-proclaimed “achievements” of Benito Mussolini’s regime was its Labor Code, and the creation of the Institute for National Reconstruction (IRI) in 1933 provided an at least embryonic basis for dirigiste policies in the postwar period (Parlato 2006, 2008). Beyond the actual economic policies of the regime (whose overall record on labor rights, conditions, and pay was nothing short of woeful), such a “social” fascism can draw on the various unfulfilled projects attached to it by its intellectual outriders. CasaPound can especially be identified in the tradition of what historian Giuseppe Parlato calls the “fascist left” of the regime period—the “revolutionary” and “syndicalist” current built around such 1930s journals as Lo Stato Corporativo or Lavoro Fascista, and complemented in neofascist self-narration by such reference points as Georges Sorel, the original fascist programme of 1919 (known as sansepolcrismo) and the “socialization measures” decreed by the Verona Congress of 1943, under a Salò Republic now shorn of the monarchy as well as most of its ruling-class support.
CasaPound is unembarrassed about such connections—it was no surprise that it hosted a presentation of Parlato’s own book. But particularly interesting, for our purposes, is the way that—just like historical fascism—CasaPound continually attaches the ideas of its own tradition to others drawn from other cultural matrices. Indeed, with the main political forces of the Constituent Assembly period today having disappeared (especially the Communists, Socialists, and Christian Democrats, each of which broke up in the early 1990s), CasaPound is freed to appropriate the constitution as a national heritage now released from the political antagonisms—and the anti-fascist culture—of the immediate postwar period. This is especially notable in the weekly Il Primato Nazionale column by non-member Diego Fusaro. A pupil of Marxist philosopher Costanzo Preve and one of the most televised “public intellectuals” in Italy, Fusaro has radicalized Preve’s own nationalist positions to become a leading interlocutor (and legitimizer) of CasaPound in the most mainstream media. In a 2012 piece for Il Primato Nazionale, Fusaro shone a light on the rhetorical focus of the neofascist party as he portrayed Italian elites’ own bid to break with the postwar constitution. Where former Bank of Italy Governor Guido Carli had criticized this document as “the point of intersection between the Catholic and the Marxist conceptions of the relations between society and state,” Fusaro claimed the “global-elitist,” “post-democratic,” “no border,” “free market” elite now sought to cast this aside.
It is not hard to see why such ideas could gain “cut-through”—or why CasaPound would want to promote them. The last three decades of economic stagnation and crisis have, in fact, seen the blue-collar electorate become the single most volatile element of the Italian political panorama, now unbound from its historic ties to the Left, with categories like the unemployed and the owners of small businesses also unbound from traditional party containers. The main heir to the Communist Party, the Democrats (PD) today have an especially direct class correlation, in the sense that wealthier Italians are more likely to vote for it, while it scores under 10% support among blue-collar and unemployed Italians. This change in the class connotation of a “center-left” strongly associated with institutional Italy has, moreover, been allied to its strong rhetorical shift away from the protection of workers in favor of liberal Europeanism. Though CasaPound is too small for us to gain reliable data on where its voters really come from (and indeed, its lack of mass following casts doubts over its ability to exceed a subcultural voto d’opinione), it has clearly chosen to frame itself as a polar opposite to the PD, in defense of those this latter party has “betrayed.” It hence combines a discourse of economic protection with an identitarian revolt against the (allegedly) combined forces of economic globalization, the single currency, and the rise of what the far-right call “fuschia” identity politics. With scant prospects of economic recovery and the left moving away from the material defense of workers, CasaPound like other far-right forces can instead hope to engage downwardly mobile Italians on the terrain of “cultural protection”—defending the values of the humiliated poor against cosmopolitan and culturally liberal elites.
This bid to strip the constitution from its antifascist origins and ally it to a series of reactionary signifiers also helps us understand why Fusaro’s own claims to be a “Marxist” or “Gramscian” philosopher should not be taken too seriously. Reliant on a farcical decontextualization and dehistoricization of the (communist) figures he is talking about, Fusaro’s efforts consist of removing the materialism from Marxism and reducing Antonio Gramsci to a transhistorical cultural theorist. While Fusaro is anything but unique in that regard, and perhaps not subjectively a fascist, his public interventions perform a classically fascist function of adopting elements of the Marxist thought-system while subordinating them to an opposed, exclusive conception of solidarity based on nationalism only. In autumn 2019, he announced plans for a new party called Vox (named after the recent Francoite split from the Spanish Partido Popular) whose founding statement promised that it would combine “left-wing ideas with right-wing values”). An especially notable aspect of Fusaro’s discourse is his use of queues of epithets designed to link together different ideas while impoverishing each of them. Especially widely mocked on social media is his recurrent tendency to speak in terms of “turbo-capitalism,” “hyper-globalization,” or “super-liberalism.” These compounds are designed to give the idea of an accelerating destruction of previous social structures, yet at the same time point back to a more regulated, less intensely competitive capitalism restricted within national bounds.
Nonetheless, this also serves the purpose of recoding the Marxist and Catholic inspirations for the Italian Constitution as simply “national” in character, thus allowing them to be counterposed to neoliberal assumptions which are instead projected onto the global level. For Fusaro, writing in Il Primato Nazionale, the European Union “hates” constitutions like Italy’s because they are bastions of national sovereignty, as against the unfettered free market (Fusaro 2018a). Citing the 2012 constitutional reform—whereby the budget-balancing mandated by the Maastricht Treaty was directly integrated into the Italian Constitution—Fusaro portrayed a “financial aristocracy” and banking “globocrats” waging war on national sovereignty and democracy itself. Further invoking the “new world order” and “single way of thinking” imposed since the fall of the Eastern Bloc, Fusaro portrays a world in which all leaders who resist the demands of JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are the victims of “colour revolutions” (Fusaro 2018b). This is allied to the war against the cultural fabric of Italy waged by these same elites, for instance the “gender totalitarianism” of “forcing children to write gay love letters,” or the bid to “Third-World-ize” Europe through mass immigration (Fusaro 2018c, 2019).2 The battle is thus displaced from the ground of economics proper to a cultural terrain in which the constitution is recast as a generic banner of Italian nationhood .
A Cordon Sanitaire?
In Il Primato Nazionale’s hosting of non-member Fusaro, as in interventions by CasaPound’s own militants, we see a curious interplay between neofascism’s purportedly antisystemic character (opposed to the European Union and neoliberal capitalism), its claim to a nonparty, institutional tradition (the defense of the Italian Constitution), and its attempt to occupy a terrain once identified with the Left. In a further gesture towards its own “transversal” character, the February 2018 editorial cited above denied that the Left had any right to claim the constitution’s values as its own: indeed, it cited constitutional Sub-Commission President Gustavo Ghidini to the effect that the economic articles of the constitution are not a “Socialist-Communist” project. The date of these comments goes unmentioned, as does the direct motivation for Ghidini’s claims—in February 1947, three months before this intervention, he had joined a soft-left, anticommunist split from the Socialists known as the Partito Socialista dei Lavoratori Italiani (PSLI). Yet in the pages of Il Primato Nazionale, such a citation has the effect not simply of denying the Left’s claim over the constitution—for instance, by also citing the role of the PSLI or the Christian Democrats—but rather of portraying it as above all political divides. Here we can draw parallels with former MSI cadre’s Alemanno’s recasting of the World War II resistance: forced to apologize after his 2008 election victory was greeted by fascist-saluting skinheads outside city hall, he visited Rome’s synagogue to condemn the German occupation and insist Resistance values were the “property of all Italians” even as he condemned the crimes committed by “all sides” in the “civil war.” The effect, in both cases, is to deny the Left’s ownership of its totemic traditions while relativizing or even denying their specifically antifascist content.
The May 2019 affair over Altaforte’s participation at the Turin book fair was a case in point. While left-wing publishers as well as commentators and activists in wider society insisted that the constitution did not guarantee “free speech” to fascists, CasaPound defended itself on precisely this terrain. Notable in this regard was an article for Il Primato Nazionale by one Adolfo Spezzaferro (“Adolf Iron-Smasher”) whose title invoked the “ignorance” of whoever claimed “The Constitution is Anti-Fascist” (Spezzaferro 2019). When left-wing writer Christian Raimo sought to organize opposition to Altaforte’s presence at the Salone del Libro, the CasaPound journal replied: “In truth the response to all the doubts now gripping Raimo’s followers is in a book – the constitution itself, that is. So good reading to all” (Spezzaferro 2019). Perhaps Spezzaferro did not make it to the end of this “book,” the twelfth of whose Disposizioni transitorie e finali expressly forbids “the reorganization in any form of the dissolved fascist party”—a principle complemented by the 1952 Scelba Law, criminalizing any public “exaltation of fascism’s exponents, principles, deeds, or methods.” Yet while the constitution recognises no unlimited right to free expression and association, fascist parties have long avoided any penal sanctions, it still today being left up to private platforms like Facebook to choose whether to silence them.
In this sense, it is also worth putting the advance of postfascist and neofascist forces in a broader historical context. The so-called cordon sanitaire against fascists in the post-World War II era, banning them from any return to national government, relied not simply on the constitutional provisions against the “reorganization” of the fascist party but, rather, on the constant vigilance and organized presence of mostly left-wing and labor-movement forces, determined to bar Mussolini-nostalgics from public life. Instructive in this regard was the affair surrounding Fernando Tambroni’s short-lived government in 1960, which relied on the MSI for its majority in parliament, if not integrating any neofascist ministers. This arrangement—together with provocative plans to hold the MSI congress in antifascist Genoa, with the rumoured participation of the Salò-era police chief—sparked rioting in the north-western port city, which was then echoed in clashes around Italy in which a total of 11 protestors were killed. It was, in truth, this moment that killed off plans for rehabilitating a “mainstreamed,” “conservative” MSI, after which point it would take until the end of the “First Republic” in 1992–1994—and the dissolution of the Communist, Socialist, and Christian-Democratic Parties—before historic MSI leaders like Alemanno and Fini could guide their Alleanza Nazionale into cooperation with Berlusconi, and a first chance in national government.
CasaPound is not itself anything like a potential force of government, or even as a minor ally for other hard- and far-right forces: in June 2019, it announced that it was abandoning its participation in elections, marking its failure to present a meaningful alternative to either the (non-fascist) Lega or Fratelli d’Italia, a more effective force in gathering postfascist identitarian support (and by spring 2020 polling as high as 14% of the vote). Yet even the militant and openly Mussolinian CasaPound, known for its thuggish behaviour (towards journalists and not only its main target, immigrants), has achieved a measure of “respectability” in political debate as other forces loosen their historic rejection of debate with fascists. This most obviously owes to the mainstreaming of previous fascists who maintained their ties to more militant circles, for instance 2008–2013 Rome Mayor Gianni Alemanno, who even proposed to buy out the social center occupied by CasaPound using city funds. But the opening to the neofascists goes much wider—for instance, in July 2016 the mayor of Bolzano, the Democratic Party’s Renzo Caramaschi (Berizzi 2016), drew the ire of ANPI when he sought a pact with CasaPound councillors, an alliance also realized in the student elections in Frosinone that December (Senza Tregua 2016). These incidents, but moreover the general acceptance of CasaPound as a legitimate participant in public debate, have served to relativize its fascist ideas.3
Far further along this road is Fratelli d’Italia, a party with the MSI symbol in its logo, former ministers in its ranks, and a close alliance with the Lega, as Berlusconi becomes less central to the overall Italian political chessboard. In an era of extreme political volatility—and opportunism—it has become an established part of the parliamentary mainstream, with sitting Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte (by now heading an M5s-Democratic coalition) attending its Atreju summer school in September 2019 (Colli 2019). Conte had earlier made a positive impression at an analogous event hosted by Articolo Uno, presenting himself as a man of the Left: himself attending Atreju, Salvini mused that Conte ought to tell the Fratelli d’Italia faithful that he was “a right-winger with a fascist granddad” (Guerzoni 2019). Yet the highlight of the postfascist meetup was not the appearance of the Italian prime minister, but rather his Hungarian counterpart, Viktor Orbán. After the far-right authoritarian told the crowd of his work in defending Christian Europe from Islam, the assembled militants began to sing a historic neofascist anthem, “Avanti Ragazzi di Buda.” Relating the tale of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the song narrates the tale of the popular uprising crushed by Soviet tanks, ending with the lament “students, farmworkers, peasants—the sun no longer rises in the East.”
Across Europe, the forces represented by Orbán are today making headway, with forces of a type with Fratelli d’Italia everywhere more and more legitimized. This does, indeed, include a discrete battle over historical memory itself, prolonging that battle fought in the Italy of the 1990s and 2000s. The heirs to fascism assert their republican-democratic mores whereas the history of the Communist Party is either demonized (with its partisan struggle portrayed as a violent sectarian movement and prelude to a Stalinist coup) or else stripped from it (with the constitution recast as a simply “national” heritage no longer to be ascribed to the parties that actually wrote it). This rewriting of history reached its pinnacle in the European Parliament vote just two days before Orbán’s appearance at Atreju, where parliamentarians from across the political spectrum—including even former Italian Communist MPs—voted to condemn all “totalitarianisms” as the same (Castellina 2019), and put communism on the same footing as Nazism. For those who promote the “fascism of the third millennium,” such a decision only brings a fresh round of legitimation, erasing whatever remains of the antifascist consensus won after World War II. Italy is still today far from the conditions of the 1930s. But what the far right wins, with each fresh bid to appropriate and recast historical memory, is the rollback of the victories the Left thought it had won in the 1940s.