Revolution was a topic supremely exercising intellectuals in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In one country after
another, self-selected and self-admiring men and a few women
took their inspiration from the French revolution and Karl
Marx. They met, corresponded with one another, and
concerted their programs, and sometimes their conspiracies,
through the Second and then the Third International. As
though it were a mere matter of opportunity and
organization, they debated who was to be murdered, and when
and how, and in what numbers. These debates found
consummation in the careers of Lenin and Stalin, and their
many imitators, arguably including Hitler. And by means of
the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting, as Auden
was to put it, people of supposedly sensitive disposition
were promoting the execution squad and the armed mobs in the
street, thus becoming accessories to the totalitarian crimes
of the recent age.

Many have likened the unconditional surrender of so many
intellectuals to Marxism to a religious phenomenon, and the
passing of time seems more and more to confirm such an
explanation. Marx was an improbable deity. For all the wide
range of his reading, he was coarse and brutal as a thinker,
as in the way he lived. Prescription for him was the end of
argument. But he had the one over-arching idea that class
warfare
is the motor necessarily driving history. Deemed
elect by definition, the proletariat was to dispossess and
eliminate other classes, whether feudal, bourgeois, or
capitalist, all deemed irredeemably non-elect, therefore
condemned to death. The idea of class warfare appealed
naturally to hard men because it could serve so well to
justify a predisposition to murder strong enough altogether
to detach them from reality.

Class is only a figment, a reduction of human beings to
their material means and occupations, in short one of those
vacuous organizing principles that those with a sociological
bent like Marx are in the habit of inventing. Marx’s
one-time friend, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, and
certainly a hard man, foresaw that the projected
“dictatorship of the proletariat” was bound to end in
tyranny and corpses. Such admirers of Marx as Friedrich
Engels, Eduard Bernstein, and Karl Kautsky also came to have
doctrinal doubts, but still class warfare as a sacrosanct
engine of politics and history worked its way deep into the
European imagination, to become the core value of the
Communist Party.

Class warfare took on different glosses in different
nations. In Italy, the hard men were formed in a famously
historic culture of violence, compounded with genuine
revolution against foreign occupiers as well as the turmoil
of the Risorgimento. There was also plenty of injustice and
inequality for the hard men to latch on to. Naples and the
southern provinces were a by-word for human misery.

Richard Drake is an academic who has previously written
about the Italian Left, and in Apostles and Agitators he
describes in self-contained essays the careers of seven of
Marx’s principle disciples in Italy, the hard men who
perpetuated his influence and built the Communist movement
there. Giving his accounts of these leading Italian
Marxists, Drake has based himself almost exclusively on
their publications, reported speeches, and letters. The
result is certainly elegant, but limited by its literary
approach, not to say stylization. The context in which these
hard men operated is left to look after itself. The
industrial unrest, peasant uprisings, political crises, wars
and other events against which to measure the opinion and
careers of these revolutionaries are passed over with a
distant nod at most. Also accorded only an oblique mention
here and there was what Drake calls a “time-honored play
between reform and revolution.” He drops the names of the
reformers—Filippo Turati, Giovanni Giolitti
—on to the
pages as though they were self-explanatory. Specialists
alone will be able to fill in the blanks, and know that
those who advocated reform were both brave and right in
their stand. It is only when measured properly against
reformers that revolutionaries stand revealed as the
monsters they were.

Again, the names of the revolutionaries for the most part
will be familiar only to specialists. Carlo Cafiero, for
instance, came from a privileged background, spent some time
in London where he knew and idolized Marx, married an
aristocratic lady, and lavished his fortune on promoting
revolution. The first to popularize the writings of Marx in
Italy, he himself understood that in the revolution people
would have to be killed, and he glorified “the knife, the
rifle, and dynamite.” He died in the mad-house. Antonio
Labriola wrote what Drake calls “a major work of Marxist
theory” with the characteristic title of “Essays on the
Materialistic Conception of History.” Arturo Labriola (no
relation of Antonio) met and worked with Georges Sorel in
Paris, and through him came to believe that workers’ strikes
would trigger the revolution. He lived until 1959, long
enough to be able to understand the futility of his life’s
work, and to renounce it.

Benito Mussolini was self-educated, and he too came to
Marxism via Sorel, picking up and adopting the idea of class
struggle. Undoubtedly he was a hard man, with no qualms
about a revolution which would kill people. Opposing the
Italian invasion of Libya in 1911, he was sent to prison for
a year. Right up to the eve of the First War, he was
calling Marx “the magnificent philosopher of violence,” and
advocating left-wing revolution and a neutral foreign
policy. The revolutionary wing of the Socialist Party made
a hero of him. Once the war was under way, however, he
reversed his opinion abruptly but sincerely, and was
expelled from the party. Joining the army, he rose like
Hitler to non-commissioned rank. Mussolini founded his
fascist movement in 1919; his revolutionary friends put on
black shirts, and not long afterwards they began to
persecute and murder erstwhile colleagues in true Marxist
style. Drake makes it unmistakably clear that Italian
fascism was a split-off or mutant from revolutionary
socialism.

The Communist Party was founded at the same moment out of
the rump of the revolutionary socialists. Amadeo Bordiga,
its first secretary general, had been a close colleague of
Mussolini’s. Class war was imperative in his opinion, and
he welcomed the Bolshevik revolution as a fine example of
it. Not quite agile enough, he backed Trotsky against
Stalin, and was lucky to live to tell the tale. Antonio
Gramsci replaced him as secretary general. Born into a poor
Sardinian family in 1891, he suffered from a hump on his
back and general bad health. Like Mussolini, he was a
brilliant journalist. The fascist regime cracked down on the
Communist Party and dissipated it in 1926, sending Gramsci
to prison. Before his death there in 1937 he was able to
write copiously, developing the original view that
Communists ought to evolve from the tactic of primitive
revolution, and instead infiltrate the institutions of
society and so take power from within. Their conspicuous
success in doing exactly this in the post-Stalin era has
given Gramsci a reputation as “the most famous and
influential Marxist in the world today,” in Drake’s words.

Palmiro Togliatti was Gramsci’s rival and successor. Much of
his career in the Mussolini period and right through the
Second War was spent in Moscow as a Comintern agent. His
most important Comintern assignment was in Spain during the
civil war there, when he was responsible for sending many
Communists to their death. A hard man certainly, a
slave-executioner, he could read the omens correctly and
took due care to back Stalin in matters great and small, and
so survived to return to Italy in 1945, lead the Communist
party, and enter the government. In an example of black
humor, this blood-drenched old Stalinist was soon overtaken
by Italian Maoists, and the likes of Adriano Sofri and Toni
Negri, the founding fathers of the Red Brigades. Almost
exclusively born into privileged backgrounds, the members of
the Red Brigades murdered twelve hundred people before the
state at last mobilized, brought them to justice, and
sentenced them to prison. Perhaps second only to the Soviet
Union, Italy cherished the tradition of revolutionary
Marxism, but seemingly it has come to an end there too, and
all that survives is the memory of delusion and inhumanity.