Guido La Barbera Preface to the English Edition In 1943, in an Italy still devastated by war, the political and military crisis of Fascism catapulted a new generation of workers into the political struggle. Many of these youths received their ‘political baptism’ in the armed struggle against Fascism, the Resistance. Among those youths there was the widespread hope – and often the conviction – that the Resistance meant fighting against society divided into classes, against exploitation, and against capitalism as a social system and not only against one of its most repressive, violent and bloody forms. But, at the end of the war, those aspirations were to be bitterly disappointed. The fall of Fascism merely meant a change in the political shell and postwar restructuring was being carried out thanks to the perpetuation of the same mechanisms of capitalist exploitation, guaranteed by a different form of class rule. The political and social struggles had activated a...