Station Genova Brignole.
"The government of the Right from 1861 to 1876 had merely, and timidly, created the general external conditions for economic development - rationalisation of the government apparatus, roads, railways, telegraph - and had restored to health the country's finances, over-burdened by the wars of the Risorgimento. The Left had attempted to remedy the hatred aroused among the people by the Right's unilateral fiscalism, but it had only succeeded in acting as a safety-valve: it had continued the policies of the Right with a left-wing personnel and phraseology."[1]
Station Genova Brignole.
"[Massimo Fovel] began as a "young radical" before the war. He wanted to rejuvenate the traditional democratic movement by giving it a more concrete and modern content, and flirted a bit with the Republicans, especially with the federalist and regionalist trends (Oliviero Zuccarini's Critica Politica). During the war he was a Giolittian neutralist: in 1919 he joined the Socialist Party in Bologna, but never wrote for Avanti!"[2]
Piazza Guiseppe Verdi, met kantoorgebouw van Banca Carige in beeld.
"The Torinese industrialists had acquired the old and infamous Gazzetta di Torino in order to transform it and make it their own direct mouthpiece. Fovel aspired to become editor-in-chief of the new combination and was certainly in contact with industrial circles. But Tommaso Borelli, a "young liberal" was chosen instead. [....] After [The Congress of] Livorno [at which the Communist fraction definitively split from the Socialist Party and formed the Communist Party of Italy] Fovel was not heard offor [sic] some time. He reappeared in 1925, as a collaborator on Avanti! with Nennis and Gardenghi, and set up a campaign in favour of the vassalage of Italian industry to American finance. [...] In 1925-26 Fovel was a frequent contributor to La Voce Repubblicana. Today (1929) he upholds corporatism as a premiss for an Italian form of Americanisation."[3]
Priester aan het werk op de Via Antonio Gramsci, waar de stad aankomt bij de waterkant. Rechts het snelwegviaduct dat het stadscentrum scheidt van het water.
"What would appear significant in Fovel's thesis [...] is his conception of the corporation as an autonomous industrial productive bloc destined to resolve in a modern and increasingly capitalist direction the problem of further development of the Italian economic apparatus. This is opposed to the semifeudal and parasitic elements of society which appropriate an excessive tithe of surplus value and to the so-called "producers of savings". The production of savings should become an internal (more economical) function of the productive bloc itself, with the help of a development of production at diminishing costs which would allow, in addition to an increase of surplus value, higher salaries as well. The result of this would be a larger internal market, a certain level of working-class saving and higher profits."[4]
Cruiseschip vaart uit, Golf van Genua.
"This condition could be called "a rational demographic composition" and consists in the fact that there do not exist numerous classes with no essential function in the world of production, in other words classes which are purely parasitic. European "tradition", European "civilisation", is, conversely, characterised precisely by the existence of such classes, created by the "richness" and "complexity" of past history. This past history has left behind a heap of passive sedimentations produced by the phenomenon of the saturation and fossilisation of civil-service personnel and intellectuals, of clergy and landowners, piratical commerce and the professional (and later conscript, but for the officers always professional) army. One could even say that the more historic a nation the more numerous and burdensome are these sedimentations of idle and useless masses living on "their ancestral patrimony", pensioners of economic history."[5]
Zicht op het San Teodoro district van bij de Via Antonio Gramsci. Rechts de San Benigno North Tower, waar een groot deel van de stadsadministratie gevestigd is. De toren-wijk is het "business district" van de stad.
"The curious biographical note [...] about the apparently insignificant figure of Massimo Fovel, is interesting for the light it throws on part of the intellectual fringe of the Italian labour movement in the period immediately following the First World War and on the facility with which certain Social Democrats and "Radicals" passed into active complicity with the socio economic manifestations of fascism."[6]
"In the case of Americanism, [...] we are not dealing with a new type of civilisation. This is shown by the fact that nothing has been changed in the character of and the relationships between fundamental groups. What we are dealing with is an organic extension and an intensification of European civilisation, which has simply acquired a new coating in the American climate."[7]
"In the opposition movement to fascism the most important part has passed to the Liberal Party because the bloc has no other program to oppose to fascism than the old Liberal program of parliamentary bourgeois democracy, the return to the constitution, to legality, to democracy. In the discussion concerning the succession to fascism, according to the congress of the Liberal Party the Italian people is placed by the opposition before a choice: either fascism or liberalism. [...] When the Communist Party, in the days after the assassination of Matteoti, issued the slogan: “Down with the government of assassins! Dissolution of the Fascist militia!” it didn’t think that the government of assassins should be replaced by a government of those who in all their policies had opened the way to and armed the assassins."[8]
"The liquidation of fascism must be the liquidation of the bourgeoisie that created it."[9]
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