Thèses de Lyon

The “Lyon Theses” are a unique document on the interwar European crisis and the changes in the mass parties inherited from the 19th century. The future secretary of the Italian Communist Party analyses the structural causes of the Italian political crisis, of which Fascism was the climax, and deduces the party’s mission and internal organization. The national crisis is referred to the formation of the risorgimentale State, with its specific coalition of ruling classes, and then to the disconnection of the main mass parties from the social needs of the subaltern classes: the industrial proletariat of the North and the peasantry of the South. Because of the social and geographical dualism that separates them, the Communist Party is charged with the historic mission of building the conditions for their alliance, which the industrial bourgeoisie and the urban petty-bourgeoisie, hegemonic under fascism, aim precisely to counter.