FASCISTS CAN BE SMASHED

PHOTOGRAPHS BY Only once have the new fascists of Italy faced the united strength of the working class and that once they were soundly beaten.

The confrontation took place at Genoa in 1960 where the fascist MSI was holding its annual Congress. The Communist Party leadership called together other parties of the left and a General Strike was launched.

The response from the working class, which led the resistance fight against Mussolini, was immediate and massive. The factories closed and hundreds of thousands of workers streamed into the city. On July l the prefect of police called up the trade union headquarters. 'Call-off the strike, ' he said. 'The Congress has been cancelled.' was a blow that the fascists remember to this day with hatred and fear. Their punny social forces had been exposed, it had been proved that the human dust they represented could be defeated by class action.

Over a decade has passed since the Genoa days and the situation nOW more grave. The fascists have been nourished by the deliberate and persistent refusal of the ultra-Stalinist leadership of the PCI (Italian Communist Party) to mobilize the working class against fascism.

The contrast between Genoa and Rome last week, when the fascists held their 10th Congress, was stark and revealing. Until two weeks before the fascists met there was no mention of the Congress or any call for mobilization in the two mass communist daily papers.

Eventually, under great pressure from their own rank and file, the Stalinists did oranize a protest and a two. our (!) General Strike in the city. Even this lethargic campaign called forth a huge demonstration of 100,000 workers, youth and large sections of the middle class this, in Rome, a city dominated by civil servants, not a noted CPI stronghold.

The masses were marched from the Coliseum to Porta San Paola and the monument for the resistance behind the Italian national flag the Stalinists always pose as the true guardians of the Italian nation'-the only other place such antics were observable was at Palazzo Dei Congressi where the MSI also met beneath the shadow of the Italian tricolour their policy of collaboration with the capitalist and petty-bourgeois parties of Italy.

Once mobilized in political action, Italian workers would not confine their attack to the fascists-the campaign would broaden out include Tne reactionaries in the Christian Democrat, Liberal and RepubParties.

This is what the Stalinists fear most. It would jeopardize their policy of subordinating class interests to that of collaboration with capitalism. Workers would demand their own socialist reforms in place of the Stalinists' for change in the 'structure' of Italian big business.

So Stalinists continue their insane campaign ing on 'the state' to put down fascism -insane because 'the class powerful enough and capable of driving every fascist into the Mediterranean.

There is a long history of Stalinist treachery. It was the CPI which, after the defeat of fascism, helped to restore capitalism in Italy in 19441945.

The working class and CPI militants led the resistance. Between the beginning of the fascist collapse, in 1943, and 1946 party membership rose from a few thousand to 1.7 million (membership now stands at 2.5 million).

But the partisans were ordered by the party leadership to relinquish their de facto control of the country to the Allied command, then later to the capitalist coalition government.

Despite this total lack of