Italy faced serious postwar economic problems. Wartime governments had printed money to pay for arms, and inflation intensified. By the end of 1920 the lira was worth only one-sixth of its 1913 value. Savings became nearly worthless, and rents collected by landowners plummeted in value. Meanwhile, the major arms and shipbuilding firms went bankrupt after the war for lack of government orders. Unemployment rose to two million as returning soldiers searched for work. Peasants, organized by trade unions, ex-servicemen’s groups, or Catholic leagues, seized land for themselves, especially in the south; agricultural labourers went on strike at harvest time. Trade unions, now operating again, pressed for higher wages, and strikes, including those in the public services, became routine. A series of stoppages paralyzed the railroads, as well as postal and telegraph services.

Throughout the biennio rosso (“two red years”; 1919–20), revolution appeared imminent. While spontaneous land occupations swept through the south, riots and lootings hit shopkeepers in the north and centre in the summer of 1919, and prices were cut by half throughout the country. Socialist deputies walked out of parliament in December 1919 to protest the presence of the king. They were attacked by nationalists, and widespread general strikes followed. In April 1920 the Piedmontese General Strike blocked work throughout Piedmont. The Socialist Party and the trade unions met in Milan to decide, absurdly, whether or not to call a revolution. They voted against, and Piedmont was isolated. In June 1920, mutinies, riots, and strikes hit the Ancona region and threatened to become an insurrection. Massive rural-worker agitation swept the whole of the Po valley and threatened the harvest during the summer of 1920. The Catholic “white” (as opposed to the Socialist “red”) union federation, the CIL (Confederazione Italiana Lavoratori), formed in 1918, grew massively throughout the biennio rosso, above all in the agricultural regions of the north and especially around Bergamo, Brescia, and Cremona. A Catholic left even emerged in the north that preached revolution and led long strikes in Lombardy and the Veneto. Yet this mass movement never linked up with the Socialists, whose ideological anticlericalism alienated them from all wings of the Catholic movement.

The biennio rosso concluded with sit-down strikes in which workers occupied most of the factories of the north in August and September 1920. For three weeks workers attempted to continue production, seeking to promote the idea that they could “replace the ruling class” in thousands of factories across Italy. Meanwhile, the government (led again by the wily Giolitti) and the industrialists waited for the occupations to fizzle out, which they eventually did. The factory occupations marked not the beginning but the end of the mass movements of the biennio rosso.

The Socialist Party was dominated by its maximalist wing, a faction led by Giacinto Serrati that abandoned the Socialists’ prewar and wartime reformist policy for a more radical approach, and by the New Order (Ordine Nuovo) group of intellectuals based in Turin around Antonio Gramsci. These Socialists continually proclaimed the need for revolution and their desire to “do as in Russia.” Reformist leaders, such as Turati, were isolated and vilified. However, the party did little to actually prepare for revolution, and its working-class base, as well as most trade union leaders, remained largely moderate and reformist. Only in Turin, where the factory council movement undermined both union and employer power, did revolutionary practice go beyond the empty rhetoric of the maximalists. As Serrati put it, the maximalists based their strategy on the view that “We Marxists interpret history, we do not make it.” Very little attempt was made to link up the two great classes of Italian society, the workers and the peasants, and the middle classes were either ignored or reviled as “doomed to disappear.” “Who does not work shall not eat” was one popular maximalist anti-middle-class slogan. Socialists and unions were extremely hostile to small property and favoured land collectivization, a policy that alienated the new class of small landowners created before and after the war across Italy. Catholic and Socialist unions also fought each other bitterly throughout this period and failed to form alliances to fight the Fascist onslaught against both movements after 1920. Each movement was hamstrung by its deep-rooted, ideological distrust of the other—the Socialists by their anticlericalism, the Catholics by their antisocialism.

The postwar coalition governments of Nitti (1919–20) and his successors Giolitti (1920–21), Ivanoe Bonomi (1921–22), and Luigi Facta (February–October 1922) were all weak and could do little except repress the strike movements by force or urge industrialists and landowners to make concessions not only on pay but even on “control” of the workplace. Inflation threatened the livelihood of many of those on fixed incomes, especially pensioners, administrative workers, and other groups not able to organize as effectively as industrial workers. These governments were powerless to keep prices from rising or to satisfy the demands of the unions. Nor was there any attempt at serious reform of the state or the economy—a project that Turati outlined in his Rifare l’Italia! (1920; “Remake Italy!”). The possibility of a democratic revolution was lost in the violence, bitterness, and fear of the postwar years.

Diplomatic and economic failures undermined middle-class confidence in government, especially when Giolitti also imposed taxes on war profits. In 1919 universal male suffrage and proportional representation were introduced for parliamentary elections. The result, in the new parliament elected in November 1919, was that the Socialists, with 30 percent of the vote, became the largest party, with 156 seats, and the new (Catholic) Italian Popular Party, with more than 20 percent of the vote, won 100 seats. These two parties dominated northern and central Italy. Giolitti had to bring the Popular Party into his government in 1920 and make many concessions to certain peasant interests, including giving guarantees to squatters and giving the Ministry of Agriculture to the Catholics. These reforms did not go far enough to satisfy the landless peasants but managed to terrify landowners. Furthermore, the two “subversive” parties won control of almost half the municipalities in the autumn of 1920, ensuring that Socialist or Catholic cooperatives would be given all local public works contracts. The radical language of the maximalist local campaigns particularly alarmed the urban middle classes.

In January 1921, during a congress in Livorno, the left wing of the Socialists split away to found the Italian Communist Party (Partito Communista d’Italia, later Partito Communista Italiano [PCI]; now Democrats of the Left [Democratici di Sinistra]), which increased middle-class alarm. In reality, this split was a sign of defeat and weakened the left. The Communist Party—led by Amadeo Bordiga (until 1924), who advocated abstention from elections, and then by Palmiro Togliatti—pursued a sectarian policy of eschewing anti-Fascist alliances, which made the victory of the right far easier than it might have been. The PCI began to depend heavily on support and orders from Moscow, a close relationship that was to last well into the 1970s.