Revolutionary Syndicalists Called Themselves Marxists; Arturo Labriola Developed His Concept of Italy as a "Proletarian Nation" Exploited by the International Division of Labor

Revolutionary syndicalism began to grow in Italy after 1900, based particularly on the Camere del Lavoro, regional labor exchanges in northern Italy designed to remedy the numerical weakness of the regular trade unions. Though the revolutionary syndicalists called themselves Marxists, their doctrines and tactics were unorthodox, and they had left the Italian Socialist Party by 1907. During 1907–8 they led a radical strike wave and by 1909 had mostly withdrawn from the predominantly Socialist trade union federation, the CGL, three years later organizing a smaller Unione Sindacale Italiana (USI) with no more than a hundred thousand members.

In the process, the ideas of the revolutionary syndicalist leaders became increasingly radical and heterodox. Arturo Labriola, one of their main theorists, had briefly emigrated abroad and had observed discrimination against Italian workers. He developed his own concept of the “proletarian nation”—that Italians as a nationality, rather than merely as a class, were the objects of exploitation by the international division of labor, and that revolutionary transformation must therefore be concerned not merely with one class but with the entire society.

--Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-45 (London: Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2003), 66.