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THE MORE IT CHANGES, THE MORE IT REMAINS THE SAME”
For the second time within the brief space of a few weeks the shadow government of “liberated” Italy has had its face lifted. Marshal Pietro Badoglio, the fascist butcher of Abyssinian ill-fame, has stepped down from the premiership and has been replaced by an aged “Liberal,” 71-year-old Ivanoe Bonomi, who once held the office of premier in pre-Mussolini days.
The little King, Victor Emmanuel, moved into the shadows after the Allied armies had occupied Rome and into his place has stepped the fascist bootlicker, Prince Humbert, whose task it is to make himself palatable to the outraged Italian masses—if he can—and thus preserve the royal prerogatives and immense privileges of the rotten House of Savoy.
If he can! When the fascist prince appeared on the balcony of the Quirinal Palace in Rome revolver shots flew forward from among the crowd of monarchist scum organized to give him greetings. The masses have long memories!
It was with these revolver shots ringing in their ears that the parties of the “Italian Committee of Liberation”—Stalinists, Social Democrats, Liberals, Catholics—went into a quick huddle to give their regime another “democratic” face-lifting. The Allied diplomats and the Stalinists pressed for the retention of Badoglio. But the others, acutely aware of the revolutionary temper of the Romans, pushed Badoglio out and shoved Bonomi in. Cabinet posts were reshuffled a little to let in a few of the Romans.
But the character of the regime has not been changed in the slightest. It remains a police-military dictatorship, supported by Allied arms, and in no way subject to popular control. It will continue, like its predecessors, to rule by decree. It, too, is crowned by the hated monarchy.
THE REASON FOR THE RESHUFFLE
The reason for the reshuffle, and the ouster of Badoglio, were revealed by the Rome correspondent of the New York Times, who told how Prince Humbert, together with Badoglio and his cabinet, arrived in the Eternal City after its fall to find “a hot situation, almost a threatening crisis, on their hands.” The revolver shots increased the heat, and, as the correspondent discloses, “it was a day of great argumentation, which was resolved only because all concerned were determined to form a cabinet quickly.”
Yes, the day was hot—hot with the breath of mass rebellion. A new attempt at deception of the masses became urgent. There emerged a “new” cabinet, a new governmental façade in which nothing essential was changed. Its policy is to preserve Italian capitalism, to hold the masses down, to repress, with the aid of the Allied imperialists, any attempt at revolution.
Quite characteristically, it was the Stalinist Palmiro Togliatti, who fought to the last for the retention of Badoglio as premier in the cabinet-making session. This was reported by the New York Times correspondent, who wrote: “ …. only the Communists here are supporting the Premier, under the orders of Signor Togliatti, who is also known as Ercole.”
What was in the mind of this GPU agent and his master Stalin, who originally came to the rescue of the Badoglio regime when the Italian people seemed about to cast it into the garbage can? They fear that the slightest upset in the ruling junta may precipitate a revolutionary crisis in “liberated” Italy. They are acutely sensitive to the delicate balance of class relations. Any change at the top may precipitate an upheaval below.
But the pressure of pdpular anger was too great and so Badoglio had to go. His successor revealed the nature of the political trick when he “paid tribute to Marshal Badoglio” but added quickly that “anyone with the slightest tinge of fascism” would be banned from the new government. This “tribute” to the fascist butcher of ‘Ethiopia, and the fact that the fascist bootlicker Humbert remains, are the measure of the “new” regime. It is certain that the masses will not tolerate Bonomi and his clique very long.
LENIN’S ANALYSIS OF CABINET SHIFTS
The correct analysis of ministerial changes in periods of social crisis was made more than a quarter of a century ago by Lenin. Commenting on the constant shifts of cabinets that took place in Russia in 1917 after the downfall of Czarism, and in particular, with reference to the entry of Russian Populists end Mensheviks into the ministry, Lenin wrote:
“Let us suppose everything goes well. Even so there be not a shadow of doubt that those who have promised will not be able to carry out their promises. ‘We shall help in league—with the capitalists—to bring the country out of its crisis, to save it from ruin, to rid it of war’—this is what the entrance into the ministry of the leaders of the petty bourgeoisie, the Chernovs [leader of the Populists] and Tseretelis [leader of the Mensheviks], actually means. Our answer is: Your help is not sufficient. The crisis has advanced infinitely farther than you imagine. Only the revolutionary class, by taking revolutionary measures against capital, can save the country-and not our country alone. The crisis is so deep, so widely ramified, so world-wide in its scope, so closely bound up with capital, that class struggle against capital must inevitably take the form of political domination by the proletariat and a smir proletariat. There is no other escape.” (Lenin’s Collected Works. English Edition, vol. XX, book 2, p.45.)
This correct Marxist analysis of the role and bankruptcy of bourgeois democracy was restated as follows in the resolution on the Perspectives and Tasks of the Coming European Revolution adopted, November 2, 1943, at the Fifteenth Anniversary Plenum of the Socialist Workers Party:
“The only alternative to the continued rule of monopoly capitalism is the Workers’ and Farmers’ Government based upon Workers, Soldiers and Peasants Councils. The decay of capitalism and the acuteness of class conflicts forbid another extended period of bourgeois democracy for war-torn Europe …. The fact that the economic pre-conditions for an extended period of bourgeois democracy in Europe have disappeared does not, however, put an end to the role that bourgeois and petty-bourgeois democrats can play to stem the advance of proletarian revolution. With the collapse of fascism, capitalism will attempt to rule by means of naked military force, as already demonstrated in Italy. When this device proves powerless to control the insurgent masses, the native capitalists, allied with the invading imperialists, will push forward their treacherous democratic, social-reformist and Stalinist agents in an effort to strangle the revolution in a ‘democratic’ noose.”
Lenin’s prognosis of the cabinet shifts in Russia in 1917 applies with equal force to the cabinet shifts we are witnessing today in Italy.
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