Quotes

You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.

[His testament, written before his death in 1940] Life is beautiful.

In all the countries where fascism became victorious, we had, before the growth of fascism and its victory, a wave of radicalism of the masses-of the workers and the poorer peasants and farmers, and of the petty bourgeois class. In Italy, after the war and before 1922, we had a revolutionary wave of tremendous dimensions; the state was paralyzed, the police did not exist, the trade unions could do anything they wanted-but there was not party capable of taking the power. As a reaction came fascism. In Germany, the same. We had a revolutionary situation in 1918; the bourgeois class did not even ask to participate in the power. The social democrats paralyzed the revolution. Then the workers tried again in 1922-23-24. This was the time of the bankruptcy of the Communist Party-all of which we have gone into before. Then in 1929-30-31, the German workers began again a new revolutionary wave. There was a tremendous power in the Communists and in the trade unions, but then came the famous policy (on the part of the Stalinist movement) of social fascism, a policy invented to paralyze the working class. Only after these three tremendous waves did fascism become a big movement. There are no exceptions to this rule-fascism comes only when the working class shows complete incapacity to take into its own hands the fate of society.

In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle "Who does not work shall not eat" has been replaced by a new one: "Who does not obey shall not eat".