crumbling,' Mussolini later admitted. It was 'utterly foolish' to believe that class consciousness could ever trump the call of nation and culture.39 'The sentiment of nationality exists and cannot be denied.' What was then called socialism was really just a
In 1915 Mussolini was called up for service. He fought well, receiving shrapnel in his leg. The war tended to accelerate his thinking. The soldiers had fought as Italians, not as 'workers.' Their sacrifice was not for the class struggle but for the Italian struggle. He began to formulate the idea — known as
* Lowering the minimum voting age to eighteen, the minimum age for representatives to twenty-five, and universal suffrage, including for women.
* 'The abolition of the Senate and the creation of a national technical council on intellectual and manual labor, industry, commerce and culture.'
* End of the draft.
* Repeal of titles of nobility.
* 'A foreign policy aimed at expanding Italy's will and power in opposition to all foreign imperialisms.'
* The prompt enactment of a state law sanctioning a legal workday of eight
* A minimum wage.
* The creation of various government bodies run by workers' representatives.
* Reform of the old-age and pension system and the establishment of age limits for hazardous work.
* Forcing landowners to cultivate their lands or have them expropriated and given to veterans and farmers' cooperatives.
* The obligation of the state to build 'rigidly secular' schools for the raising of 'the proletariat's moral and cultural condition.'
* 'A large progressive tax on capital that would amount to a one-time
* 'The seizure of all goods belonging to religious congregations and the abolition of episcopal revenues.'
* The 'review' of all military contracts and the 'sequestration of 85% of all war profits.'
* The nationalization of all arms and explosives industries.41
Ah, yes. Those anti-elitist, stock-market-abolishing, child-labor-ending, public-health-promoting, wealth- confiscating, draft-ending, secularist right-wingers!
In November the newly named and explicitly left-wing Fascists ran a slate of candidates in the national elections. They got trounced at the hands of the Socialists. Most historians claim this is what taught Mussolini to move to the 'right.' Robert O. Paxton writes that Mussolini realized 'there was no space in Italian politics for a party that was both nationalist and Left.'42
This, I think, distorts the picture. Mussolini did not move fascism from left to right; he moved it from socialist to populist. An unwieldy phenomenon, populism had never been known as a conservative or right-wing orientation before, and it is only because so many were determined to label fascism right-wing that populism under Mussolini was redefined as such. After all, the notion that political power is and should be vested in the people was a classical liberal position. Populism was a more radical version of this position. It's still a 'power to the people' ideology, but it is skeptical of the parliamentary machinery of conventional liberalism (e.g., checks and balances). In the United States the populists — always a force on the left in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — pushed for such reforms as direct elections of senators and the nationalization of industry and banking. Direct democracy and nationalization were two of the main planks of the Fascist agenda. Mussolini also stopped calling
An emphasis on 'producers' had everywhere been the hallmark of populist economics and politics. The key distinction for 'producerism,' as many called it, was between those who created wealth with their own hands and those who merely profited from it. William Jennings Bryan, for example, was keen on distinguishing the good and decent 'people' from 'the idle holders of idle capital.' The populists sought to expand the scope of government in order to smash the 'economic royalists' and help the little guy. This was Mussolini's approach in a nutshell (much as it is that of left-wing icons of today, such as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez). Fascist slogans included 'The land to him who works it!' and 'To every peasant the entire fruit of his sacred labor!' Mussolini still employed warmed-over Marxist theory when convenient — as many populists did — to explain his new fondness for the small landowner. Italy was still a 'proletarian nation,' he explained, and so needed to develop economically before it could achieve socialism, even if that meant making a pragmatic nod to capitalist expediency in the form of trade. Lenin had made the identical adjustment under his New Economic Policy in 1921, in which peasants were encouraged to grow more food for their own use and profit.
None of this is to say that Mussolini was a deeply consistent ideologue or political theorist. As a pragmatist, he was constantly willing to throw off dogma, theory, and alliances whenever convenient. In the few years immediately following the formation of the Fasci di Combattimento, Mussolini's main governing themes were expediency and opportunism. This was, after all, the age of 'experimentation.' FDR would later preach a similar gospel, holding that he had no fixed agenda other than to put Americans to work and launch a program of 'bold experimentation.' 'We do not distrust the future,' FDR declared. 'The people...have not failed. In their need they have...asked for discipline and direction under leadership. They have made me the present instrument of their wishes. In that spirit I take it.' Likewise, the Fasci di Combattimento, Mussolini wrote in May 1920, 'do not feel tied to any particular doctrinal form.' And much as Roosevelt would later, Mussolini asked the Italian people to trust him now and worry about an actual program down the road. Shortly before he became prime minister, he famously responded to those who wanted specifics from him: 'The democrats of
From 1919 to 1922, when Mussolini led the March on Rome and became prime minister, his first objective was power and combat. Make no mistake: many Fascists were skull crackers, leg breakers, and all-purpose thugs, particularly among the OVRA, the secret police of the Fascist state modeled after Lenin's secret police, hence the nickname 'Cheha.' The casualties from the Fascist-initiated 'civil war' hover around two thousand, with 35 percent of the dead confirmed leftists and 15 percent Fascists. This may sound like a lot or a little depending on your perspective, but it is worth keeping in mind that more Italians died during this period from traditional Italian Mafia wars. It's also worth noting that many Fascists were actually impressive, respectable men who earned not only the cooperation of the police but the sympathy of both judges and the common man. In a national contest between two broad factions, the Italian people — workers, peasants, small-business men, and professionals, as well as the well- to-do and wealthy — chose the Fascists over avowed international socialists and communists.
Mussolini's style was remarkably similar to Yasir Arafat's (though Arafat was undoubtedly far more murderous). He played the political game of claiming to seek peaceful accords and alliances while straining to contain the more violent elements within his movement. His hands were tied, he'd claim, when squads of Fascist Blackshirts broke the bones of his opponents. Again like Lenin — and Arafat — Mussolini practiced a philosophy of 'the worse the better.' He celebrated the violence committed by socialists because it gave him the opportunity to commit more violence in retribution. A brawler who'd been in countless fist and knife fights, Mussolini saw physical violence as a redemptive and natural corollary to intellectual combat (in this he was a lot like Teddy Roosevelt). There's no need to defend Mussolini against the charge that he was a practitioner of organized political violence, as some of his more friendly biographers have tried to do. It's easier to concede the points of both defenders and
