-Caveat Lector-
Italian Fascism: An Interpretation
by JAMES B. WHISKER
from The Journal of Historical Review, 4/1 [Rightist IHR]
When the Grand Council of Fascism on 25 July 1943 removed
Benito Mussolini from his position as head of government, fascism
ended in Italy. Its ending was as surprising as its beginning,
back when, on 28 March 1922, some 300,000 Blackshirts under
Mussolini's command seized the Italian state. The events between
those dates can be chronicled. The explanation of what had
transpired is much more elusive. Fascism was touted by Mussolini
as a unique combination of thought and action, yet fascism was
still seeking an ideology after the Second World War was over.
The roots of fascism are many and complex.[1] The fascist
leadership, notably Mussolini, admitted the multi-faceted
influences of liberalism, Marxism, syndicalism, Risorgimento,
socialism, Catholicism and nationalism on their ideology.[2]
Their speeches and writings were replete with quotations from
Schopenhauer, Hegel[3], Sorel, Saint-Simon, Pareto, Mosca,
Mazzini and a hundred other writers. They admitted fascism was a
unique blending of all of these and much more, yet they were
never able to wholly explain it to their own satisfactions.
Italian fascism was the first application of what would
become a generic ideology encompassing, or allegedly
encompassing, movements of the political right in every nation of
Western Europe, the United States, the British Commonwealth
nations and even Japan.[4] It was believed by Italian leaders to
be highly exportable, yet it carried strong Italian nationalistic
overtones. It was essentially non-racist, yet in Italy it
preached the gospel of the coming Italian race of ["Supermen"].
Italian fascism had at least four principal phases. Until
1925, it was political action seeking an ideology. Mussolini had
himself been variously a socialist, a pacifist, an
internationalist, a war hawk, an anarchist, a statist, and, most
of all, a pragmatist.[5] When he sought an ideology he found none
to satisfy him. When he came to power after the 1922 March on
Rome he found himself in charge of the state but without a
guiding and inspirational system of thought. The first phase
lasted until the first fascist state was founded in 1925.
From 1925 until 1938 the first fascist state operated. Its
primary theoretician was Alfredo Rocco.[6] As he conceived it,
the state was to be a strong, modern nation-state, accepting both
the ideas of capitalism in the socio-economic sphere and a
syndicalist state which brought about a forced union of labor and
capital. Rocco encouraged the tendency of the fascist-sponsored
capitalism to form monopolies and cartels because he believed
that this increased productivity and thus encouraged the growth
of state powers. The new elites of modern society-labor unions,
industrialists, party bureaucracy and civil servants-were to be
placed under the authoritarian control of the state. Indeed, the
state became the single value to which all other values,
including the fascist party itself, were to be subordinated.
Rocco conceived of creating direct channels of communication
between the masses and the party hierarchy. He demanded that a
hierarchical arrangement of capitalism be created, one in which
the masses would be supportive of the regime because the regime
would guarantee them full employment and higher wages. The party
would provide the mechanism for mass communication with the
leaders of the state. The combination of workers, industrialists
and the omnipresent party representatives would ensure full and
peaceful cooperation which would benefit all while strengthening
the power of the Italian state.
In this second period of fascism, the Italian electorate
still played a major role. The 400 candidates for the legislature
had to be approved by the voters. The workers played a larger
role in the selection of their representatives and the people at
large had some role in the nomination of the 400 candidates for
the legislature.[7]
In the third phase of fascism, Mussolini had come under the
spell of Adolf Hitler and his national socialist state. He was
increasingly influenced by the anti-Semitic wing of the fascist
party led by Farinacci and Preziosi. From 1938 until he was
relieved of command by the Grand Fascist Council in 1943
Mussolini became the victim of his own propaganda efforts. He
dreamed of wars of conquest, wars that were far and away beyond
the industrial capacity of the state to sustain. He involved the
state in wars of colonial conquest, perhaps the last of the great
imperialistic wars of Europe.[8]
In 1938 a change was made in the Italian government which
separated the people from the decision-making process entirely.
The list of parliamentary candidates was no longer offered to the
masses for their approval. Mussolini merely emulated Hitler by
creating the totalitarian state while removing basic
democracy.[9]
During the final years of the second phase of fascism[10]
Alfredo Rocco had fallen into disfavor as had the quadrumvir
Balbo,[11] the party leader Starace, the syndicalist thinker
Rossoni and former party secretary Giuriati. Mario Palmieri[12]
had a brief career as party theoretician and Mussolini[13] had
attempted himself to create a theory of fascism. Generally, the
third period of fascism had produced neither the presciptions for
an ideology Rocco had offered earlier nor the descriptions of
fascist procedures that marked the attempts to explain fascist
doctrine in the later stages of the second fascist period.
After Mussolini's fall from power and his heroic rescue by
German paratroopers, a proto-fascist state with Mussolini
nominally at its head was created under the watchful protection
of nazi troops. Precious little time remained to develop a
theory. Mussolini was wholly preoccupied with staying alive and
with dealing with his protectors. Valuable time was spent in
dealing with the traitors within the party who had fired the Duce
in 1943. A show trial and subsequent executions of these traitors
took place. Mussolini's son-in-law Count Ciano was among those
executed.
Giovanni Gentile had been among those competing with Rocco
for Mussolini's favor in earlier periods of fascism. He had held
positions of minor consequence in the fascist state, culminating
in his ministership of education. Now, with the Italian fascist
state crumbling around him, and without a direct charge from
Mussolini, Gentile created the last Italian fascist theory.[14]
Properly enough, it was more philosophical than the earlier
attempts at creating an ideology were.
Gentile's theory had its descriptive moments, but, in the
large, he offered a wholly philosophical oversight into pure
fascism. It had little in the way of a call to arms. It was not
the usual post facto justification for what had transpired. It
was a highly exportable theory of the state set against a fascist
state background.
Each man is unique because of his own individual
experiences. He forms other associations which become unique
because of the collective group experiences; these group
experiences, in turn, bear on the individual. The highest
association an individual can form is with all his fellows in the
state mechanism. The state is the ultimate association and it has
its own collective experiences which mark it different from all
other states which have existed, do exist or can exist. The
state, like all other human associations, profits from both its
own collective experiences as a state and the individual
experiences of its component parts, that is, both the individuals
and the subservient associations which are merged into the
organic state. The state, the individual and all human
associations thus have life, conscience, and will to achieve. The
uniqueness of the state experiences then bend back upon each and
every citizen who fully cooperates within the state to enrich
these lives and add to their individual memories and experiences.
The state is thus given a real, organic fife. It is
necessarily supreme. All that is, within the state, is brought to
fulfillment in the state. Nothing that is, within the state, can
be permitted to exist beyond the reaches of the state. Nothing
that is, within the state, can be permitted to go against the
state. The state is the culmination of all human endeavors. It is
the final resting place of all that man has created. The state
knows, sees, participates in, profits by all that man does. Man
is because the state is. Man lives because he has the state
wherein to live. Without the state man is nothing, can become
nothing.
It is thus the natural destiny of man to be linked with the
state. The corporate state gives man the schema wherewith to
associate himself with other men. The corporate state provides
the forum for discussion of problems. It is the conduit with
which man communicates with the natural leaders of the state. It
is also the pipeline which the state uses in communicating with
individual men or corporations or groups of men who are employed
in industries. Without the corporate framework man could not
associate with the state. He would be separated from the state
and from his fellow men. He would be isolated and devoured by the
nameless and uncontrolled masses who would be without form,
substance or discipline.
By the time Gentile had completed his "Genesis and Structure
of Society" fascism was dead as an ideology. The proto-fascist
states such as Spain, Argentina and Portugal were, at best,
minimally interested in having a philosophy of fascism
articulated for the use of the leaders. The final stage of
fascism is, thus, largely an artificial construct of political
scientists and historians. Mussolini apparently was even unaware
of Gentile's work and Gentile could hardly have been expected to
have been especially interested in the German occupation
government nominally headed by Mussolini.
Fascism operated as a reasonably efficient statist system
with admitted strong totalitarian overtones until it became
interested in wars of colonial conquest. It had come to power
because of the decaying social, economic and political conditions
of post-World War I Italy. It had brought order out of chaos.
Indeed, order was its strong selling point when, after a series
of crippling strikes sponsored by the socialists, it had managed
when the liberal democratic state could not manage. Fascism
bragged of its accomplishments in areas such as making trains run
on time and draining swamps. With agencies not unlike those found
in the American New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, it tried to use
state power to combat the economic catastrophies of the great
depression.[15]
The great irony of fascism is that it taught that the
highest form of the state is found in the nation at war. No
matter how great the state may be in normal times it takes on
even greater dimensions, greater self-fulfillment, greater
attributes as a result of a national war. Of these national wars,
the most significant in the life of the nation was the war of
imperialistic conquest. A state for fascism grows or it dies. A
vibrant and dynamic state is constantly seeking new areas of
conquest. It seeks to grow at the expense of those states which
are dying, hence contracting, and it grows at the expense of
those states which have never matured and become great nations.
Wars are the duty of the truly modern, organic state.[16]
Where fascism had grown, even flourished, in peacetime, it
faltered in war. While it is true that the Italian state had
grave problems in trying to support the war machinery when
engaged against the Western Allies, it is equally true that Italy
had grave problems even against backward, non-industrial powers
before the beginnings of the Second World War. Only with the
greatest difficulties had Italy defeated Ethopia and Albania. Its
ill-fated expeditions against Greece were saved from defeat only
by the ultimate, but reluctant, involvement of the German war
machine. Of course, later, Hitler was pulled into North Africa in
an attempt to aid the failing Italian armies of his ally,
Mussolini.
The interest of Mussolini in re-establishing the Roman
Empire, or at least a portion of it, illustrates the point made
above that, after a decade and a half of propaganda directed at
the masses, Mussolini and much of his sub-leaders had become
themselves victims of fascist propaganda. Had he not sought
colonial expansion, Mussolini might have ruled indefinitely.
European leaders made little attempt to discredit Italian
fascism. As late as the mid-1930s, most European leaders seemed
to have supported the fascist state as merely an expression of
rightist political reaction to socialism and bolshevism. The
Communist International did not really begin to see fascism as a
competing ideology until its Sixth Congress in 1928.[17] Still,
it was to the Comintern mostly a reactionary state which defended
big business while offering nationalistic slogans to the workers.
When it failed to control the workers by propaganda it was, as a
typical reactionary capitalist political form, willing to use
force, murder, terrorism and coercion to work its will.
Fascism shared with bolshevism a common Marxian
heritage.[18] Both were formally rooted in socialist tradition,
both scientific and utopian.[19] Several modern analysts have
suggested that Mussolini was at heart a Marxist. It was largely
an academic dispute on how Marx was to be read and interpreted
that kept Marxists and fascists apart ideologically. It was a
question of whose Marxism one accepted as true belief that
separated fascism from bolshevism. Fascism accepted, in the
large, the unorthodox renderings of Marxism as transmuted by
Georges Sorel whereas Lenin accepted his own and other Russian
interpretations of Marxism.
Sorel[20] added to Marxism a belief in myth. Social
phenomena were to be studied through an image of irrational
force, and not pragmatically as Marx had stated. Sorel had found
Marx to be impractical in terms of solving the problems of the
workers. Rather than concluding that a broad and sweeping
revolution to destroy the old capitalist state and create a new
communist state was necessary. Sorel concluded that rational and
planned activity was useless in the face of irrational nature. He
had fathomed natural and irrational forces that could be
understood and assailed only by mythical means. The
dissatisfaction of the proletariat was essentially irrational and
emotional. The solution to the problems had then to be irrational
and mythical, harnessing irrational and mythical nature. Once
fathomed by the working class, or at least by their leaders, this
irrational nature could unleash such mythical forces as the world
had never seen before. The emotional needs and drive of the
workers could only be directed by myth.
For Sorel the force which accompanies a drive by a people is
always and necessarily accompanied by violence. Irrational power,
the consequence of working with irrational nature, is especially
violent. One then must accept violence as a fact of life, a
necessary condition of mankind moving and changing and achieving.
It is in effect the price one must pay for progress. But unless
the violence is understood it can be as destructive to the mover
as to the intended object of the violence.
Marx had offered rational explanations for reality as Sorel
saw it. But rational explanations imply the existence of rational
problems. Indeed, the problems of the proletariat were natural,
hence, for Sorel, irrational, hence, mythical. Thus Marxism had
failed and would continue to fail as an explanation of reality
because it sought only rational reasons, rational means and
rational explanations. Sorel's philosophy was essentially a
philosophy of myth, irrational and natural. It would succeed
because it was irrational and offered man a belief and not a
logic.
Political solutions, in the normal sense of politics, were
worse than useless; they were misleading. Offer instead, Sorel
taught, new beliefs, new myths to men. Ask them to believe, not
to reason and the solution to the proletarian dilemmas were at
hand.[21]
The proletarian problem was, first, a professional, not a
political, problem. The frustrations of the proletariat were
professional in nature. Professional problems implied
professional remedies, including strikes and trade unionism.
Action must be violent professional activity to be most
effective. One must have or develop faith in the natural,
irrational but professional capabilities of the proletarian
class. One must follow the basic worker impulses to action. These
impulses will be mythical visions of the better world, but not
blueprints designed to lay out in specific terms the design of
the new city. The road to the new city would clearly be dotted
with incidents of physical violence. One must be prepared for
such violence or its occurences will shock and delay.
As with every problem there is a solution. Cooperation
within a state sponsored framework will provide an answer. This
came about through an unusual, Italian conception of Hegel's
dialectic.[22] In the writings of Italian Hegellans, the
conflicting and mutually exclusive thesis and anti-thesis do not
disappear completely as they do in Hegel's pure dialectic.
Rather, in the synthesis, formed by the clash of thesis with
antithesis, the individual elements of both thesis and antithesis
are still evident. While the synthesis may indeed be a higher and
better idea than its progenitors, the thesis and the antithesis,
it still shows separately each of its sires. Thus, in Italian
Hegelian philosophy it is possible to see labor and management,
that is, proletariat and bourgeoisie, existing together, although
diametrically opposed to one another, in the synthesis.[23]
The practical application of this doctrine is seen in
syndicalism.[24] Within the syndicate one finds both labor and
management. They are joined there by the fascist representative,
that is, the representative of the omnipresent state mechanism.
In the co-joining of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie one has
a new synthesis, the others being respectively the thesis and the
antithesis. The new synthesis is the syndicate and it has
recognizably within it the heretofore diametrically opposed
classes of the workers and management. Hegel's law of "negation
of the negation"[25] wherein the worst or most negative elements
of each of the dialectically opposed thesis and antithesis cross
one another out is at work. The most negative, the most mutually
exclusive, the most hostile elements of management and labor are
negated. Under the beneficent eye of the fascist representatives
this frozen dialectic, this syndicate, operates to the good of
state, labor and management.
With the introduction of the syndicate would also be created
what French utopian writer Saint-Simon[26] called a
national-industrious class, what Sorel called a producer class.
Within the group were all those who were productively engaged in
bettering the state. It was, in turn, opposed by those indolent
souls who contributed nothing to the well-being of the state,
what SaintSimon called the anti-national class.
Sorel did not trust the workers and the industrialists to
come up with such a cooperative arrangement on their own. Indeed,
even after the syndical arrangement was fixed one might
reasonably expect neither would wholeheartedly support it or work
within it. This then was the reason for the fascist party. It
would be given the coercive power by Mussolini not only to
control the syndicalist structure but to force creation of it in
the beginning. Without the use of force, violence if necessary,
syndicalism could neither be created nor maintained.
One can see in the willingness to use state coercive power
to achieve an end the, general will philosophy of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. In his "Social Contract"[27] he had spoken of a general
will, that is, of a set of values which had to be created and
then authoritatively allocated for the masses, even if they did
not consent to such allocation. There was a general will, that
which represented the greatest good for the masses, a distillate
remaining from the individual wills of all men after their own
petty desires had crossed one another out. This was really a
political program that carried with it quality of moral
necessity. It had to be enacted, once recognized, for the good of
all men in the state. Where men could not or did not recognize
what was in their own best interests the state was obliged, in
order to justify its existence, to step in and guarantee that the
provisions of the general will be carried into execution.
The fascist state then could justify its actions both in
creating syndicalism and in enforcing compliance with its
requirements under good, liberal Rousseauist philosophy. Creating
a general will and carrying it into execution is correct liberal
philosophy.
The general will of course could be expressed in natural,
irrational terms in order to make that compatible with Sorel. The
fascist party was able to sustain its claim to legitimacy by
assuming a guardianship over the contents of the general will.
The myth, in turn, was legitimate because it was recognized,
sustained and articulated by the fascist party. The myth became
whatever the fascist party saw it being at any given time. It was
ultimately enforced by legitimatized violence and the power of
the totalitarian state mechanism.
In fascism there was a reciprocity established with the
producer class. Production, full employment, wages, prices,
distribution and the like were guaranteed by the state. In turn,
both management and labor gave up the right to have strikes,
lockouts, and disorders which would interrupt the production
processes. Since they could not legally act independently, they
would only act together, not as capital and labor, but as the
producer class. Outside fascism such a class was not held to be
possible.[28]
Since only fascism could provide the essential union of
workers and management into the producer class, it was logical
that the state should have a monopoly of power.
<cont'd in part 2>
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