Anti Federalist
03-18-2016, 09:09 AM
A long read, but worth it, to see what we are dealing with.
What Is Fascism?
https://mises.org/library/what-fascism
April 26, 2008John T. Flynn
[This article is excerpted from As We Go Marching, part 1, chapter 10. An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Dr. Floy Lilley, is available for download.]
Mussolini became premier in October 1922. With the innumerable arguments about the march on Rome or with the story of the violent, lawless, and outrageous tactics he used to come to power we are not concerned here. That history has been told many times. Our business is to see the use he made of his power to fashion a new form of society.
He did not have a majority in parliament. He had to form a coalition cabinet which included a moderate socialist and a member of the Popolari. Some liberal politicians saw the hope of a stable government and the General Confederation of Labor (socialist) agreed to collaborate. Mussolini, of course, began to move toward dictatorship. But the full dictatorship did not come until 1925, after the assassination of Matteoti.
We will now see the elements of the fascist society emerge point by point. First we must note one important difference between Communism and Fascism which becomes clear here. Socialism has a definite philosophy, based upon clearly enunciated principles which had long been debated and were widely understood. Socialists disagreed among themselves on certain points and upon programs of action. But socialism as a system of social structure with an organized body of doctrine was well understood. This was not true of Fascism. Whether it was capitalist or anticapitalist, labor or antilabor, no one could say until the leaders themselves decided upon a course of action. It was improvised as the movement went along. Therefore we cannot define Fascism as a movement committed to the collection of principles enunciated in its formal proclamation of principles and objectives the Eleven Points of San Sepolcro. Mussolini, being in pursuit of power, made that objective the mold by which his policies were formed. Behold now the erection of the great Fascist edifice.
1. He had been a syndicalist and hence anticapitalist. The original program included a demand for confiscation of war profits, confiscation of certain church property, heavy inheritance and income taxes, nationalization of arms and munitions plants, and control of factories, railroads, and public services by workers' councils. These, Mussolini said, "we have put at the head of our program." But in power he did none of these things. Signora Sarfatti quotes him as saying:
I do not intend to defend capitalism or capitalists. They, like everything human, have their defects. I only say their possibilities of usefulness are not ended. Capitalism has borne the monstrous burden of the war and today still has the strength to shoulder the burdens of peace . It is not simply and solely an accumulation of wealth, it is an elaboration, a selection, a coordination of values which is the work of centuries . Many think, and I myself am one of them, that capitalism is scarcely at the beginning of its story.1
On another occasion he said: "State ownership! It leads only to absurd and monstrous conclusions; state ownership means state monopoly, concentrated in the hands of one party and its adherents, and that state brings only ruin and bankruptcy to all." This was indeed more in conformity with his syndicalist faith, but it completely negated the original Fascist platform. The first point we shall have to settle, therefore, is that fascism is a defense of capitalist society, an attempt to make it function. This view, which Mussolini did not entertain when he began, he came around to as he saw that Italy, in spite of all the disorder, had no mind to establish a socialist state. Moreover, he attached to himself the powerful industrialists and financiers of Milan and Rome along with many of the nobles, two of those powerful minorities essential to his general aims. Thus he molded Fascism into a powerful weapon to beat down the Red menace. But it was Italy which molded him to this philosophy, new for him, the man who, when the factories were occupied, had applauded the act of the workers.
2. Next Mussolini had denounced "demagogic finance" and promised to balance the budget. However, he lost little time in turning to the time-worn favorite of ministers the unbalanced budget. As late as 1926 he wrote in his autobiography: "The budget of the nation [as he came to power] had a deficit of six and a half billions. It was a terrific figure, impossible for an economic structure to bear . Today we have a balanced budget." The surface facts supported that statement. His first budget showed a deficit of 4,914,000,000 lire; his second a deficit of only 623,000,000; and his third (192425) a surplus of 417,000,000 lire. It is entirely probable that Mussolini believed a balanced budget a good thing and consistent with his other promises. But Mussolini's policies were made for him by the necessities of power, not by the laws of economics. At the very moment he was boasting of a balanced budget he was on the eve of a huge deficit of nine billion, in 192627. The year after that he balanced the budget once more so far as his books showed, and this was his last. From then on Italy was to float upon a sea of deficits, of spending and ever-rising national debt.
But as a matter of fact, Mussolini never balanced a budget. Immediately on taking office he proceeded to spend more on public works than his predecessors. Dr. Villari, Fascist apologist, says that between 1922 and 1925, despite drastic economies, Mussolini spent 3,500,000,000 lire on public works compared with only 2,288,000,000 lire in the previous three years. He also spent more on the army and navy and continued to increase those expenditures. How Mussolini could spend more than his predecessors on arms and on public works and yet balance the budget excited the curiosity of Dr. Gaetano Salvemini, who investigated the subject with surprising results.
Dr. Salvemini discovered that Mussolini resorted to a subterfuge to pay contractors without increasing his budget. He would make a contract with a private firm to build certain roads or buildings. He would pay no money but sign an agreement to pay for the work on a yearly installment plan. No money was paid out by the government. And hence nothing showed up in the budget. Actually the government had contracted a debt just as much as if it had issued a bond. But because no money passed, the whole transaction was omitted from the treasury's books. However, after making such a contract, each year the government had to find the money to pay the yearly installments which ran from ten to fifty years. In time, as the number of such contracts increased, the number and amount of the yearly payments grew. By 1932 he had obligated the state for 75 billion lire of such contracts. The yearly payments ran to billions. What he did by this means was to conceal from the people the fact that he was plunging the nation ever deeper into debt. If these sums were added to the national debt as revealed in the treasury admissions, the actual debt was staggering ten years after Mussolini's ascent to power on a promise to balance the budget. According to Dr. Salvemini's calculations, the debt of 93 billion lire, when Mussolini took office, had grown to 148,646,000,000 lire in 1934. To what breath-taking sum it has now risen no one knows.2 But an Associated Press dispatch to the New York Times (August 8,1943) announced that the Italian debt was then 405,823,000,000 lire, and the deficit for the year was 86,314,000,000 lire.
Mussolini made no secret of the fact that he was spending. What he concealed was that he was loading the state with debt. The essence of all this is that the Fascist architect discovered that, with all his promises, he had no formula for creating employment and good times save by spending public funds and getting those funds by borrowing in one form or another doing, in short, precisely what Depretis and Crispi and Giolitti had been doing, following the long settled practice of Italian governments. Thus spending became a settled part of the policy of Fascism to create national income, except that the Fascist state spent upon a scale unimaginable to the old premiers save in war. But in time the Fascist began to invent a philosophical defense of his policy. What the old prewar ministries had done apologetically the Fascists now did with a pretension of sound economic support. "We were able to give a new turn to financial policy," says an Italian pamphlet, "which aimed at improving the public services and at the same time securing a more effective action on the part of the state in promoting and facilitating national progress."3 It was the same old device plus a blast of pretentious economic drivel to improve its odor. Thus we may now say that fascism is a system of social organization that recognizes and proposes to protect the capitalist system and uses the device of public spending and debt as a means of creating national income to increase employment.
3. The third point to be noticed has to do with industry. For decades, as we have pointed out, men of all sorts believed that the economic system ought to be controlled. Mussolini accepted completely the principle that the capitalist economic system ought to be managed planned and directed under the supervision of the state. By this he did not mean that kind of state interference we employed in America before 1933 that is, regulatory commissions to prevent business from doing certain unlawful things such as combining to restrain trade. What he had in mind was what so many in Italy had in mind, that some force should be brought into being to direct and manage the movement and operation of economic law controlling such great glandular energies as production, distribution, labor, credit, etc.
In doing this Mussolini was again complying with a general though vague desire of the people. And in doing it he had in mind two generally favored objectives. First, there was a growing weariness of the eternal struggle between employers and employees. Second, people wanted in some general way the functions of production and distribution managed in the interest of better times.
Nothing that Mussolini did fell in with his own ideas more than this. He was a syndicalist. And, as we have pointed out, it was the central principles of syndicalism that were making their way unnoticed into the thinking of all sorts of people. The syndicalist believed that industry should be controlled. So did Mussolini and so did most other people. The syndicalist believed that this control should take place outside the state. So did Mussolini and so did almost all others. The syndicalist believed that society should be organized for this control in craft groups. So did labor, industrialists, the people. And so did Mussolini. The syndicalist believed that industry should be dominated not by consumers or citizens as such but by producers. So did most others including the Duce. There was only one point on which they differed. That was the meaning of the word "producers." The employers considered themselves the producers. The syndicalists believed the workers were the producers. One way to resolve that question was to call them all producers. After all, outside of the doctrinaires of various groups, the masses among them had in mind very practical ends. The bosses wanted to curb competition, protect themselves from what they called "overproduction," and from what they also called the unreasonable aggressions of labor. The leaders and doctrinaires among the laboring groups had theories about workers' councils, etc. But what the membership wanted was higher wages, better working hours, job security, etc. The seemingly wide gap between the employers' and the workers' definition of the word "producers" was not so great. An organization that would form all the producers the employers and employees into trade groups under state authority in separate groups but brought together in some sort of central liaison agency or commission, in which the rights of workers to bargain with their employers would be preserved, while the employers would have the opportunity to make, with the backing of the law and upon a comprehensive scale, regulations for the planning and control of production and distribution, came close to satisfying the desires of many men in all parties.
All this did not correspond completely to the Sorel syndicalist's blueprint for society, but it drew most of its inspiration from that idea. So much is this true that the system has come to be frankly called Italian syndicalism, and Fascist historians and apologists like Villari now refer to Italy freely as the syndicalist state.
Whether Fascism was capitalist or anticapitalist, labor or antilabor, no one could say until the leaders themselves decided upon a course of action. It was improvised as the movement went along.
It would not be true to say that this is precisely what employers and labor leaders and their union members wanted. The point I make is that at the bottom of it was the central idea that these groups held in one degree or another, and that while it certainly excited the opposition of many, it corresponded sufficiently with a general drift of opinion to paralyze any effective opposition to it. It was moving in the direction of a current of opinion of several, in fact and not wholly against such a current.
Out of all this came the Fascist Corporative System and then the Corporative State. Briefly, it is built on the old syndicalist principle that there is a difference between the political and the economic state. The political state is organized by geographic divisions and has as its function the maintenance of order and the direction of the defense and progress of the nation. The economic state is organized in economic divisions, that is according to craft or industrial groups, and has as its function the planning and direction of the economic society.
Employers are organized into local trade associations called syndicates. The local syndicates are formed into regional federations, and all these regional federations into a National Confederation. The same holds true of the workers. In each locality the local labor syndicate or union and the local employers' syndicate or trade association are brought together in a corporative. The regional federations are brought together in a regional corporative. And the National Confederations of Employers and of "Workers are united in a great National Corporative. I refrain from going into any details about the functions and techniques of these bodies. It is conceivable that in different countries they might differ widely as indeed they have. But the central principle will be the same that through these federations and corporatives employers and workers will plan and control the economic system under the supervision of the state. Mussolini himself called this "self-regulation of production under the aegis of the producers."
In time Mussolini went further and made this the basis of reorganizing the state. Instead of abolishing the Senate as he had promised in his original platform, he abolished the Chamber of Deputies and substituted for it the Chamber of Fasces and Corporations, the members of which are supposed to represent the great trade and professional estates along with the representatives of the Fascist state. This Mussolini has called the Corporative State. He looks upon it as his greatest contribution to the science of government.
At this point we can say that fascism is (1) a capitalist type of economic organization, (2) in which the government accepts responsibility to make the economic system work at full energy, (3) using the device of state-created purchasing power effected by means of government borrowing and spending, and (4) which organizes the economic life of the people into industrial and professional groups to subject the system to control under the supervision of the state.
4. Mussolini, having incorporated the principle of state-created purchasing power into his system, turned naturally to the old reliable project of militarism as the easiest means of spending money. It is scarcely necessary to dwell on this since our newspaper files are well supplied with statements of returning American travelers since 1935 telling, some with an accent of approval, how Mussolini has solved the problem of unemployment in Italy by means of expenditures on national defense. Some of our own high officials have found occasion to comment on this fact, contrasting his accomplishment with our own failure to put our people to work.
Money was spent on highways, schools, public projects of various kinds, and on the draining of the Pontine Marshes, which became in Italy the great exhibition project not unlike our TVA in America. But this was not enough, and so he turned more and more to military expenditures. It must also be said that this fell in with his own tastes and temperament and with certain other objectives he had in mind, such as the elevation of the Italian spirit by this display of warlike power.
William Ebenstein gives the following figures for Fascist outlays on the army and navy:4
192425 3,240,000,000 Lire
193435 4,330,000,000 "
193536 10,304,000,000 "
193637 12,865,000,000 "
Compared with Great Britain, which spent 20 percent of her budget on defense in 1936, and France, which spent 27.2 percent, Italy spent 31 percent. In 1939 she spent 52 percent.
The militarization of Italy became an outstanding feature of the new regime. And the economic value of this institution in relieving unemployment while inducing the population to submit compliantly to the enormous cost became a boast of Fascist commentators.
5. It is not necessary to comment on the Fascist brand of imperialism. What we have already observed on that head the intimate connection of militarism and imperialism applies with full force here. It is unthinkable that Mussolini could induce the people of Italy to bear with patience the load of deficits and debt and taxes which this policy forced without supplying them with an adequate reason. Of course the reasons were the same old ones the necessity of defense against enemies and external dangers daily magnified by propaganda, the economic necessity of colonies, and the appeal to the purple spirits in the population, the lovers of action and danger and glory. The extent to which Mussolini worked all these instruments is too well known and too recent to call for any further comment. The very nature of his regime called for action, ceaseless action, like a man on a bicycle who, if he stops, will fall. Imperialist ambitions, the re-creation of a new Roman Empire became an essential part of the whole scheme of things, intimately bound up with the policy of spending and with the propaganda of egoism and glory directed against the imagination of the people.
In 1929, the Depression, which struck every capitalist nation, hit Fascist Italy. Foreign and domestic trade was cut in half. Factories cut their output in half. Unemployment rose 250 percent. The problem of the Fascist magician was to reverse all this. Mussolini blamed it not on the defects in Fascist doctrine, but on the "bourgeois spirit with its love of ease and a career" which still lurked in Italy. What was the remedy? "The principle of permanent revolution," he cried in a speech March 19, 1934.
He repudiated the doctrine of peace. "War alone brings up to the highest point the tension of all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it." This he called "dynamism." What he meant was that he had no weapon against the inevitable economic crisis save that ancient one more and more military expenditures paid for with borrowed funds and supported by the evangel of heroism and high adventure ending in war.
To sum up, we may say, then, that Fascism in Italy was and is a form of organized society (1) capitalist in character, (2) designed to make the capitalist system function at top capacity, (3) using the device of state-created purchasing power through government debt, (4) and the direct planning and control of the economic society through corporativism, (5) with militarism and imperialism imbedded in the system as an inextricable device for employing a great mass of the employables.
There is one more ingredient. But before we look at it, let me point out that none of these activities or policies already described involves moral turpitude according to the codes of the great nations of the West. It is entirely possible for an ordinarily decent person to approve and defend both public debt and spending, the corporative or guild system along with militarism and imperialism. In my view both militarism and imperialism are evil things, but not in the view of Western culture. There is no revolt against Western culture in any of these things, for all of them have been present in it for centuries, and the West is well peopled with the bronze and marble statues of heroes who have been associated with their advance.5
It is for this reason that it is an easy matter for ordinarily good citizens to look with indifference or tolerance or even approval upon the juncture of these several forces in our midst. My own opinion, however, is that no state can undertake to operate these separate devices all together to save the capitalist system without sooner or later finding itself confronted with the necessity of employing force and suppression within its own borders and upon its own people.
It is a fact, as we have seen, that minister after minister over many years used the policies spending and borrowing, militarism and imperialism, and that business control was attempted by private business organizations but the use of these devices never succeeded, first because they were never tried on a sufficiently large and persistent scale and second because within the framework of the constitutional representative system it was not possible to carry them to their full and logical lengths. The difference between Mussolini and his old parliamentary predecessors and precursors is that he used their devices upon the grand scale and organized the internal force that was necessary to give them an ample test. And he was enabled to do this because of the extensive and demoralizing collapse of the whole system which had been slowly degenerating for several decades and whose degeneration had been completed by World War I. We can now examine this sixth and final ingredient.
In all that we have seen thus far there is the familiar pattern of the man devoted to power and in possession of that power fumbling about for the means of meeting the problems of the society that pressed on him from every side. There is complete evidence that Mussolini when he began his march to power had no program. Both Professors Volpe and Villari, Fascist apologists, admit that the original program was "confused, half demagogic, half nationalist, with a republican trend." He dropped one after another of his original principles as he found it expedient to make his policies conform to the great streams of public opinion and demand as soon as he recognized them. When he took power his program had changed to the point where he was committed to an attempt to make the capitalist system work. The antimonarchist became the pillar of the Crown. The syndicalist revolutionist became the savior of capitalism. The anticlerical became the ally of the Church. But how he would make this capitalist system function was a point on which he was far from clear. His position was wholly different from that of Lenin and Stalin, who overthrew an existing economic and political order and faced the task of establishing a new one whose fundamental principles and objectives and techniques were all supposedly well understood. Mussolini was committed to making the existing economic system work at the end of several decades during which it was crumbling to ruin.
Mussolini was certainly no absolute dictator when he took office as premier in 1922. He was summoned to office in a constitutional manner, though he had created the condition which ended in that summons by violent measures which could not be called civilized. He did not have a majority in the Chamber. He had to function with a coalition cabinet containing a socialist and a member of the Popolari. It was in every sense a parliamentary government that he headed. Few looked for the absolute dictatorship which ultimately developed. As usual men were deceived by their own inveterate optimism and the words of politicians. One of the most exasperating features of political movements in the last twenty years has been the habitual use of meaningless words by the Machiavellian leaders.
There has always been a tendency among politicians to juggle with words. But in the last dozen years, when the art of propaganda has been developed to a high degree and all sense of moral value has evaporated from public pronouncements and documents, leaders of democratic countries make statements so shockingly at variance with their convictions and intentions that the casual listener is almost wholly defenseless against them. It is difficult to believe now that Mussolini ever prattled about democracy. Yet he did. Only two years before he took power he boasted that the Great War was a victory for democracy. Of Fascism he said, when he took office, "that a period was begun of mass politics and unqualified democracy." Mussolini had been an antimonarchist. When first named to the legislature he, with some of his colleagues, remained away from the Chamber on the occasion of the king's speech as a gesture of disdain of the monarchy. The year before he assumed power he declared Fascism was ready to cooperate with the liberal and socialist groups. He urged freedom of speech for the socialists who, he declared, were no longer dangerous to the state and should be permitted to carry on their propaganda. Ivanoe Bonomi, who preceded him as premier, says that he tried to recall his party to its original republicanism and that he insisted the use of force must be abandoned against the organization of the proletariat. Mussolini's party showed its distaste for these attitudes at the party congress in November 1921. But these were taken as an indication of Mussolini's own position.
Continued...
What Is Fascism?
https://mises.org/library/what-fascism
April 26, 2008John T. Flynn
[This article is excerpted from As We Go Marching, part 1, chapter 10. An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Dr. Floy Lilley, is available for download.]
Mussolini became premier in October 1922. With the innumerable arguments about the march on Rome or with the story of the violent, lawless, and outrageous tactics he used to come to power we are not concerned here. That history has been told many times. Our business is to see the use he made of his power to fashion a new form of society.
He did not have a majority in parliament. He had to form a coalition cabinet which included a moderate socialist and a member of the Popolari. Some liberal politicians saw the hope of a stable government and the General Confederation of Labor (socialist) agreed to collaborate. Mussolini, of course, began to move toward dictatorship. But the full dictatorship did not come until 1925, after the assassination of Matteoti.
We will now see the elements of the fascist society emerge point by point. First we must note one important difference between Communism and Fascism which becomes clear here. Socialism has a definite philosophy, based upon clearly enunciated principles which had long been debated and were widely understood. Socialists disagreed among themselves on certain points and upon programs of action. But socialism as a system of social structure with an organized body of doctrine was well understood. This was not true of Fascism. Whether it was capitalist or anticapitalist, labor or antilabor, no one could say until the leaders themselves decided upon a course of action. It was improvised as the movement went along. Therefore we cannot define Fascism as a movement committed to the collection of principles enunciated in its formal proclamation of principles and objectives the Eleven Points of San Sepolcro. Mussolini, being in pursuit of power, made that objective the mold by which his policies were formed. Behold now the erection of the great Fascist edifice.
1. He had been a syndicalist and hence anticapitalist. The original program included a demand for confiscation of war profits, confiscation of certain church property, heavy inheritance and income taxes, nationalization of arms and munitions plants, and control of factories, railroads, and public services by workers' councils. These, Mussolini said, "we have put at the head of our program." But in power he did none of these things. Signora Sarfatti quotes him as saying:
I do not intend to defend capitalism or capitalists. They, like everything human, have their defects. I only say their possibilities of usefulness are not ended. Capitalism has borne the monstrous burden of the war and today still has the strength to shoulder the burdens of peace . It is not simply and solely an accumulation of wealth, it is an elaboration, a selection, a coordination of values which is the work of centuries . Many think, and I myself am one of them, that capitalism is scarcely at the beginning of its story.1
On another occasion he said: "State ownership! It leads only to absurd and monstrous conclusions; state ownership means state monopoly, concentrated in the hands of one party and its adherents, and that state brings only ruin and bankruptcy to all." This was indeed more in conformity with his syndicalist faith, but it completely negated the original Fascist platform. The first point we shall have to settle, therefore, is that fascism is a defense of capitalist society, an attempt to make it function. This view, which Mussolini did not entertain when he began, he came around to as he saw that Italy, in spite of all the disorder, had no mind to establish a socialist state. Moreover, he attached to himself the powerful industrialists and financiers of Milan and Rome along with many of the nobles, two of those powerful minorities essential to his general aims. Thus he molded Fascism into a powerful weapon to beat down the Red menace. But it was Italy which molded him to this philosophy, new for him, the man who, when the factories were occupied, had applauded the act of the workers.
2. Next Mussolini had denounced "demagogic finance" and promised to balance the budget. However, he lost little time in turning to the time-worn favorite of ministers the unbalanced budget. As late as 1926 he wrote in his autobiography: "The budget of the nation [as he came to power] had a deficit of six and a half billions. It was a terrific figure, impossible for an economic structure to bear . Today we have a balanced budget." The surface facts supported that statement. His first budget showed a deficit of 4,914,000,000 lire; his second a deficit of only 623,000,000; and his third (192425) a surplus of 417,000,000 lire. It is entirely probable that Mussolini believed a balanced budget a good thing and consistent with his other promises. But Mussolini's policies were made for him by the necessities of power, not by the laws of economics. At the very moment he was boasting of a balanced budget he was on the eve of a huge deficit of nine billion, in 192627. The year after that he balanced the budget once more so far as his books showed, and this was his last. From then on Italy was to float upon a sea of deficits, of spending and ever-rising national debt.
But as a matter of fact, Mussolini never balanced a budget. Immediately on taking office he proceeded to spend more on public works than his predecessors. Dr. Villari, Fascist apologist, says that between 1922 and 1925, despite drastic economies, Mussolini spent 3,500,000,000 lire on public works compared with only 2,288,000,000 lire in the previous three years. He also spent more on the army and navy and continued to increase those expenditures. How Mussolini could spend more than his predecessors on arms and on public works and yet balance the budget excited the curiosity of Dr. Gaetano Salvemini, who investigated the subject with surprising results.
Dr. Salvemini discovered that Mussolini resorted to a subterfuge to pay contractors without increasing his budget. He would make a contract with a private firm to build certain roads or buildings. He would pay no money but sign an agreement to pay for the work on a yearly installment plan. No money was paid out by the government. And hence nothing showed up in the budget. Actually the government had contracted a debt just as much as if it had issued a bond. But because no money passed, the whole transaction was omitted from the treasury's books. However, after making such a contract, each year the government had to find the money to pay the yearly installments which ran from ten to fifty years. In time, as the number of such contracts increased, the number and amount of the yearly payments grew. By 1932 he had obligated the state for 75 billion lire of such contracts. The yearly payments ran to billions. What he did by this means was to conceal from the people the fact that he was plunging the nation ever deeper into debt. If these sums were added to the national debt as revealed in the treasury admissions, the actual debt was staggering ten years after Mussolini's ascent to power on a promise to balance the budget. According to Dr. Salvemini's calculations, the debt of 93 billion lire, when Mussolini took office, had grown to 148,646,000,000 lire in 1934. To what breath-taking sum it has now risen no one knows.2 But an Associated Press dispatch to the New York Times (August 8,1943) announced that the Italian debt was then 405,823,000,000 lire, and the deficit for the year was 86,314,000,000 lire.
Mussolini made no secret of the fact that he was spending. What he concealed was that he was loading the state with debt. The essence of all this is that the Fascist architect discovered that, with all his promises, he had no formula for creating employment and good times save by spending public funds and getting those funds by borrowing in one form or another doing, in short, precisely what Depretis and Crispi and Giolitti had been doing, following the long settled practice of Italian governments. Thus spending became a settled part of the policy of Fascism to create national income, except that the Fascist state spent upon a scale unimaginable to the old premiers save in war. But in time the Fascist began to invent a philosophical defense of his policy. What the old prewar ministries had done apologetically the Fascists now did with a pretension of sound economic support. "We were able to give a new turn to financial policy," says an Italian pamphlet, "which aimed at improving the public services and at the same time securing a more effective action on the part of the state in promoting and facilitating national progress."3 It was the same old device plus a blast of pretentious economic drivel to improve its odor. Thus we may now say that fascism is a system of social organization that recognizes and proposes to protect the capitalist system and uses the device of public spending and debt as a means of creating national income to increase employment.
3. The third point to be noticed has to do with industry. For decades, as we have pointed out, men of all sorts believed that the economic system ought to be controlled. Mussolini accepted completely the principle that the capitalist economic system ought to be managed planned and directed under the supervision of the state. By this he did not mean that kind of state interference we employed in America before 1933 that is, regulatory commissions to prevent business from doing certain unlawful things such as combining to restrain trade. What he had in mind was what so many in Italy had in mind, that some force should be brought into being to direct and manage the movement and operation of economic law controlling such great glandular energies as production, distribution, labor, credit, etc.
In doing this Mussolini was again complying with a general though vague desire of the people. And in doing it he had in mind two generally favored objectives. First, there was a growing weariness of the eternal struggle between employers and employees. Second, people wanted in some general way the functions of production and distribution managed in the interest of better times.
Nothing that Mussolini did fell in with his own ideas more than this. He was a syndicalist. And, as we have pointed out, it was the central principles of syndicalism that were making their way unnoticed into the thinking of all sorts of people. The syndicalist believed that industry should be controlled. So did Mussolini and so did most other people. The syndicalist believed that this control should take place outside the state. So did Mussolini and so did almost all others. The syndicalist believed that society should be organized for this control in craft groups. So did labor, industrialists, the people. And so did Mussolini. The syndicalist believed that industry should be dominated not by consumers or citizens as such but by producers. So did most others including the Duce. There was only one point on which they differed. That was the meaning of the word "producers." The employers considered themselves the producers. The syndicalists believed the workers were the producers. One way to resolve that question was to call them all producers. After all, outside of the doctrinaires of various groups, the masses among them had in mind very practical ends. The bosses wanted to curb competition, protect themselves from what they called "overproduction," and from what they also called the unreasonable aggressions of labor. The leaders and doctrinaires among the laboring groups had theories about workers' councils, etc. But what the membership wanted was higher wages, better working hours, job security, etc. The seemingly wide gap between the employers' and the workers' definition of the word "producers" was not so great. An organization that would form all the producers the employers and employees into trade groups under state authority in separate groups but brought together in some sort of central liaison agency or commission, in which the rights of workers to bargain with their employers would be preserved, while the employers would have the opportunity to make, with the backing of the law and upon a comprehensive scale, regulations for the planning and control of production and distribution, came close to satisfying the desires of many men in all parties.
All this did not correspond completely to the Sorel syndicalist's blueprint for society, but it drew most of its inspiration from that idea. So much is this true that the system has come to be frankly called Italian syndicalism, and Fascist historians and apologists like Villari now refer to Italy freely as the syndicalist state.
Whether Fascism was capitalist or anticapitalist, labor or antilabor, no one could say until the leaders themselves decided upon a course of action. It was improvised as the movement went along.
It would not be true to say that this is precisely what employers and labor leaders and their union members wanted. The point I make is that at the bottom of it was the central idea that these groups held in one degree or another, and that while it certainly excited the opposition of many, it corresponded sufficiently with a general drift of opinion to paralyze any effective opposition to it. It was moving in the direction of a current of opinion of several, in fact and not wholly against such a current.
Out of all this came the Fascist Corporative System and then the Corporative State. Briefly, it is built on the old syndicalist principle that there is a difference between the political and the economic state. The political state is organized by geographic divisions and has as its function the maintenance of order and the direction of the defense and progress of the nation. The economic state is organized in economic divisions, that is according to craft or industrial groups, and has as its function the planning and direction of the economic society.
Employers are organized into local trade associations called syndicates. The local syndicates are formed into regional federations, and all these regional federations into a National Confederation. The same holds true of the workers. In each locality the local labor syndicate or union and the local employers' syndicate or trade association are brought together in a corporative. The regional federations are brought together in a regional corporative. And the National Confederations of Employers and of "Workers are united in a great National Corporative. I refrain from going into any details about the functions and techniques of these bodies. It is conceivable that in different countries they might differ widely as indeed they have. But the central principle will be the same that through these federations and corporatives employers and workers will plan and control the economic system under the supervision of the state. Mussolini himself called this "self-regulation of production under the aegis of the producers."
In time Mussolini went further and made this the basis of reorganizing the state. Instead of abolishing the Senate as he had promised in his original platform, he abolished the Chamber of Deputies and substituted for it the Chamber of Fasces and Corporations, the members of which are supposed to represent the great trade and professional estates along with the representatives of the Fascist state. This Mussolini has called the Corporative State. He looks upon it as his greatest contribution to the science of government.
At this point we can say that fascism is (1) a capitalist type of economic organization, (2) in which the government accepts responsibility to make the economic system work at full energy, (3) using the device of state-created purchasing power effected by means of government borrowing and spending, and (4) which organizes the economic life of the people into industrial and professional groups to subject the system to control under the supervision of the state.
4. Mussolini, having incorporated the principle of state-created purchasing power into his system, turned naturally to the old reliable project of militarism as the easiest means of spending money. It is scarcely necessary to dwell on this since our newspaper files are well supplied with statements of returning American travelers since 1935 telling, some with an accent of approval, how Mussolini has solved the problem of unemployment in Italy by means of expenditures on national defense. Some of our own high officials have found occasion to comment on this fact, contrasting his accomplishment with our own failure to put our people to work.
Money was spent on highways, schools, public projects of various kinds, and on the draining of the Pontine Marshes, which became in Italy the great exhibition project not unlike our TVA in America. But this was not enough, and so he turned more and more to military expenditures. It must also be said that this fell in with his own tastes and temperament and with certain other objectives he had in mind, such as the elevation of the Italian spirit by this display of warlike power.
William Ebenstein gives the following figures for Fascist outlays on the army and navy:4
192425 3,240,000,000 Lire
193435 4,330,000,000 "
193536 10,304,000,000 "
193637 12,865,000,000 "
Compared with Great Britain, which spent 20 percent of her budget on defense in 1936, and France, which spent 27.2 percent, Italy spent 31 percent. In 1939 she spent 52 percent.
The militarization of Italy became an outstanding feature of the new regime. And the economic value of this institution in relieving unemployment while inducing the population to submit compliantly to the enormous cost became a boast of Fascist commentators.
5. It is not necessary to comment on the Fascist brand of imperialism. What we have already observed on that head the intimate connection of militarism and imperialism applies with full force here. It is unthinkable that Mussolini could induce the people of Italy to bear with patience the load of deficits and debt and taxes which this policy forced without supplying them with an adequate reason. Of course the reasons were the same old ones the necessity of defense against enemies and external dangers daily magnified by propaganda, the economic necessity of colonies, and the appeal to the purple spirits in the population, the lovers of action and danger and glory. The extent to which Mussolini worked all these instruments is too well known and too recent to call for any further comment. The very nature of his regime called for action, ceaseless action, like a man on a bicycle who, if he stops, will fall. Imperialist ambitions, the re-creation of a new Roman Empire became an essential part of the whole scheme of things, intimately bound up with the policy of spending and with the propaganda of egoism and glory directed against the imagination of the people.
In 1929, the Depression, which struck every capitalist nation, hit Fascist Italy. Foreign and domestic trade was cut in half. Factories cut their output in half. Unemployment rose 250 percent. The problem of the Fascist magician was to reverse all this. Mussolini blamed it not on the defects in Fascist doctrine, but on the "bourgeois spirit with its love of ease and a career" which still lurked in Italy. What was the remedy? "The principle of permanent revolution," he cried in a speech March 19, 1934.
He repudiated the doctrine of peace. "War alone brings up to the highest point the tension of all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it." This he called "dynamism." What he meant was that he had no weapon against the inevitable economic crisis save that ancient one more and more military expenditures paid for with borrowed funds and supported by the evangel of heroism and high adventure ending in war.
To sum up, we may say, then, that Fascism in Italy was and is a form of organized society (1) capitalist in character, (2) designed to make the capitalist system function at top capacity, (3) using the device of state-created purchasing power through government debt, (4) and the direct planning and control of the economic society through corporativism, (5) with militarism and imperialism imbedded in the system as an inextricable device for employing a great mass of the employables.
There is one more ingredient. But before we look at it, let me point out that none of these activities or policies already described involves moral turpitude according to the codes of the great nations of the West. It is entirely possible for an ordinarily decent person to approve and defend both public debt and spending, the corporative or guild system along with militarism and imperialism. In my view both militarism and imperialism are evil things, but not in the view of Western culture. There is no revolt against Western culture in any of these things, for all of them have been present in it for centuries, and the West is well peopled with the bronze and marble statues of heroes who have been associated with their advance.5
It is for this reason that it is an easy matter for ordinarily good citizens to look with indifference or tolerance or even approval upon the juncture of these several forces in our midst. My own opinion, however, is that no state can undertake to operate these separate devices all together to save the capitalist system without sooner or later finding itself confronted with the necessity of employing force and suppression within its own borders and upon its own people.
It is a fact, as we have seen, that minister after minister over many years used the policies spending and borrowing, militarism and imperialism, and that business control was attempted by private business organizations but the use of these devices never succeeded, first because they were never tried on a sufficiently large and persistent scale and second because within the framework of the constitutional representative system it was not possible to carry them to their full and logical lengths. The difference between Mussolini and his old parliamentary predecessors and precursors is that he used their devices upon the grand scale and organized the internal force that was necessary to give them an ample test. And he was enabled to do this because of the extensive and demoralizing collapse of the whole system which had been slowly degenerating for several decades and whose degeneration had been completed by World War I. We can now examine this sixth and final ingredient.
In all that we have seen thus far there is the familiar pattern of the man devoted to power and in possession of that power fumbling about for the means of meeting the problems of the society that pressed on him from every side. There is complete evidence that Mussolini when he began his march to power had no program. Both Professors Volpe and Villari, Fascist apologists, admit that the original program was "confused, half demagogic, half nationalist, with a republican trend." He dropped one after another of his original principles as he found it expedient to make his policies conform to the great streams of public opinion and demand as soon as he recognized them. When he took power his program had changed to the point where he was committed to an attempt to make the capitalist system work. The antimonarchist became the pillar of the Crown. The syndicalist revolutionist became the savior of capitalism. The anticlerical became the ally of the Church. But how he would make this capitalist system function was a point on which he was far from clear. His position was wholly different from that of Lenin and Stalin, who overthrew an existing economic and political order and faced the task of establishing a new one whose fundamental principles and objectives and techniques were all supposedly well understood. Mussolini was committed to making the existing economic system work at the end of several decades during which it was crumbling to ruin.
Mussolini was certainly no absolute dictator when he took office as premier in 1922. He was summoned to office in a constitutional manner, though he had created the condition which ended in that summons by violent measures which could not be called civilized. He did not have a majority in the Chamber. He had to function with a coalition cabinet containing a socialist and a member of the Popolari. It was in every sense a parliamentary government that he headed. Few looked for the absolute dictatorship which ultimately developed. As usual men were deceived by their own inveterate optimism and the words of politicians. One of the most exasperating features of political movements in the last twenty years has been the habitual use of meaningless words by the Machiavellian leaders.
There has always been a tendency among politicians to juggle with words. But in the last dozen years, when the art of propaganda has been developed to a high degree and all sense of moral value has evaporated from public pronouncements and documents, leaders of democratic countries make statements so shockingly at variance with their convictions and intentions that the casual listener is almost wholly defenseless against them. It is difficult to believe now that Mussolini ever prattled about democracy. Yet he did. Only two years before he took power he boasted that the Great War was a victory for democracy. Of Fascism he said, when he took office, "that a period was begun of mass politics and unqualified democracy." Mussolini had been an antimonarchist. When first named to the legislature he, with some of his colleagues, remained away from the Chamber on the occasion of the king's speech as a gesture of disdain of the monarchy. The year before he assumed power he declared Fascism was ready to cooperate with the liberal and socialist groups. He urged freedom of speech for the socialists who, he declared, were no longer dangerous to the state and should be permitted to carry on their propaganda. Ivanoe Bonomi, who preceded him as premier, says that he tried to recall his party to its original republicanism and that he insisted the use of force must be abandoned against the organization of the proletariat. Mussolini's party showed its distaste for these attitudes at the party congress in November 1921. But these were taken as an indication of Mussolini's own position.
Continued...