Bruno Rizzi

Early activities

Born in Porto Mantovano, he joined the Italian Socialist Party in 1918 but among others, left in 1921 to be among the founders of the Communist Party of Italy (PCI) in 1921. He left the PCI in 1930.

Due to persecution by the Fascist regime, Rizzi emigrated to France. During the later 1930s he intervened in the debates involving Leon Trotsky, James Burnham and Yvan Craipeau concerning the nature of the Soviet Union.

Writings on Bureaucratic States and later life

His most important work, La Bureaucratisation du Monde ("Bureaucratisation of the World"), was published in Paris in 1939, but most copies were seized by the French government. In it he stated that Fascism and Stalinism were developing similar political methods. Trotsky thoroughly criticized Rizzi's conflation of Fascism and Stalinism as part of his polemic "In Defence of Marxism" which was written to oppose the positions of the Burnham-Shachtman minority in the US Socialist Workers Party.

It would be more than 30 years before an abridged version of this work would be published in Italy. In the original text he argued for common cause by the totalitarian regimes of Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union:

The racist struggles of national socialism and fascism, fundamentally, are nothing but an anti-capitalist campaign led by a new social synthesis, theoretically erroneous but practically just (La question juive in the 1939 edition, omitted from later editions).

Following the fall of France in 1940, he published the pamphlet Écoute Citoyen! ("Listen, Citizen!"), in which he repeated these claims.

Rizzi returned to Italy in 1943, but withdrew to private life, working as a shoe salesman. He contributed irregularly to Critica Sociale, Tempi Moderni and Rassegna di Sociologia. He died in Bussolengo.