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Date Posted: 16:48:43 06/24/99 Thu
Author: Per Rasmussen
Subject: Palmiro Togliatti

Palmiro Togliatti was born in Genoa, Italy, in 1893, and died in 1964. He had led the Italian Communist Party since 1927, and was a member of the Executive of the Communist International from 1927 to 1943. One million people marched in his funeral procession.

The understanding and defeat of fascism was central to Togliatti's work. He never forgave those intellectuals who shunned the struggle against fascism in favor of the quiet life of the academy. In 1955 he wrote: "It is not from the 'masters' of liberalism that we learned what is freedom, how to acquire it, how to defend it. This is the lesson we learned when we saw the burning homes of workers and peasants who wanted to live like men. The 'masters' of liberalism remained silent then, they did not protest, maybe they even quietly applauded."

According to Togliatti, fascism should not be reduced merely to another form of capitalist reaction. What was required was an understanding of the unique character of fascism, and of how the fascists appealed to the masses. The struggle against fascism would have to include a united front of the working class and its allies, and the non-proletarian petty-bourgeois elements. In short, the anti-fascist struggle could not be only a struggle for socialism, but also a struggle for the recovery of the bourgeois-democratic rights which fascist policy was quickly eroding.

Togliatti understood that the fascist movement was a mass movement. It was a movement that, in the service of capitalism and imperialism, was drawing to itself elements of both the working class and, especially, the middle classes. A successful united front would have to organize, therefore, both socialist and non-socialist resistance.

Togliatti's Lectures on Fascism, delivered in 1935, have an inestimable value to anti-fascist workers today. They are, as Gus Hall pointed out, "not only lessons in history; they are lessons in the use of Marxism-Leninism."

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