The first anti-fascism of the Argentine Communist Party, 1922-1935

Abstract

The Argentine Communist Party exhibited a changing position against fascism. Since 1922, it identified the Mussolini regime as a variant of bourgeois reaction and brandished a proletarian anti-fascism among the workers and the Italian community´s left. Then this party discovered other images in the national scene, under the incipient features of a "criollo fascism." Since 1928, it completed this local translation and appealed to the categories of "national fascism" and "social fascism", extending the scope of the counterrevolutionary phenomenon to almost the entire political spectrum, with the typically sectarian language of the Comintern "third period". In the first half of the 1930s, the fight against fascism was a political-moral support, which legitimized a risky militancy for workers' causes and against anti-communist repression. There was a turning point in 1935: the "popular front" redefined communist anti-fascism, connecting it with democratic and republican traditions.