Under the Axe of Fascism

Gaetano Salvemini

• Publisher: Borodino Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781789122381
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

THE "march on Rome" of October 28th, 1922, marked the advent to power of the Fascist Party in Italy under the leadership of Benito Mussolini. The seizure of the government through a coup d'état was justified by the claim that Italy had to be rescued from the imminent danger of a Bolshevist revolution. Before the eyes of a world horrified by the tragedy of Russia, Italian Fascism assumed the role of the knightly Saint George who had slain the red dragon of Communism. The legend appealed to the imaginations and soothed the fears of all the good people of Europe and America. It became the sacred myth around which was woven the early Fascist propaganda.In the present book the reader will find hard facts, not vague legal formulæ; concrete realities, not abstract doctrines. Its purpose is to provide the English-speaking public with accurate information not about the whole economic, social, and political system of the Fascist dictatorship, but about one single phase of it, i.e. those institutions through which Fascism claims to have solved the problem of the relations between capital and labour.

PART ONE — THE “CORPORATIVE STATE”

CHAPTER I — THE ORIGINS OF FASCIST “SYNDICALISM”

DURING the half century of free government in Italy, associations of every sort sprang into being: clubs for political, religious, philanthropic, sporting, educational, and recreational purposes; societies for mutual aid; co-operative societies of consumers and producers, co-operative buying associations; building societies; trade unions; associations of industrialists, landowners, bankers, professional men, civil servants, priests, teachers, and students; associations of ex-service men, disabled soldiers, etc. Some of these associations were grouped in national organisations, others remained unaffiliated, but all competed freely under the most varied political and religious banners.

Unfortunately, no reliable statistics on these associations have ever been compiled. The only figures available are those for the trade unions and the co-operative societies. Towards the end of 1920, at the moment when Italian trade-unionism reached its greatest expansion, there were 2,300,000 trade-unionists who formed a national organisation called the General Confederation of Labour under Socialist leaders, while 1,800,000 belonged to the Italian Confederation of Workers, associated with the People’s Party (Partito Popolare) under a Christian-Democratic flag.{5} There existed also the Italian Syndicalist Union, run by revolutionary Syndicalists and Anarchists, and the Italian Union of Labour created by Socialists and Syndicalists who during the war had become also nationalist. No official figures of membership for these two bodies are available, but it was said that the former had about 500,000 members and the latter about 200,000 members. The co-operative movement had likewise achieved a high degree of development. In March 1921 government statistics gave the number of co-operative societies as 19,377.{6}

Today Mussolini and the Fascists can say with Molière’s Sganarelle: “Nous avons changé tout cela.”

At the end of 1920 the Fascists began methodically to smash the trade unions and the co-operative societies by beating, banishing, or killing their leaders and destroying their property. They made no distinction between Christian-Democrats and Socialists, between right-wing and left-wing Socialists, between Socialists and Communists, or between Communists and Anarchists. All the organisations of the working classes, whatever their banner, were marked out for destruction because they were “Bolshevist.” The Fascists were provided with arms, ammunition, and means of transportation by the military authorities, and could almost always count upon the passive and frequently even the active connivance of the police. Their opponents were divided among themselves and hence incapable of united action, insufficiently furnished with arms or without any arms at all, and paralysed by the pro-Fascist sympathies of the police, whose role in the struggle resembled that of Mephistopheles in the duel between Faust and Marguerite’s brother. Under these circumstances, the Fascist had to fear only individual reprisals, necessarily uncoordinated and inefficient. Their victory was inevitable.{7}

A single episode will suffice to give an idea of the nature of the civil war in Italy in 1921 and 1922. In a street fight that occurred in the city of Ravenna on July 26th, 1922, seven persons were killed, among them a Fascist. This is the manner in which the leader of the Fascists in the “anti-Bolshevist” reprisals described his glorious exploits:

That night our storm-troops proceeded to destroy the vast headquarters of the Confederation of the Socialist Co-operatives of the province....The old palace was completely destroyed…. We undertook this task in the same spirit with which we demolished the enemy’s stores in wartime. The flames from the great burning building flashed ominously into the night. The whole city was illumined by the glare. We had to strike terror into the hearts of our opponents. Fascists are not slain with impunity…. Scarcity of water assisted the work of the flames. The large amount of provisions with which the building was stocked rendered the fire inextinguishable....I went to the chief of police and announced to him that I would burn down the houses of all the Socialists in Ravenna unless he gave us within half an hour the necessary means for transporting the Fascists elsewhere. I demanded a whole column of trucks. The police officers lost their heads, but after half an hour had passed they told us where we could find trucks already supplied with gasolene. I had asked for these trucks on the pretext that I wished to take the indignant Fascists away from the city. In reality, I was organising the “column of fire,” as our opponents described it, in order to extend our reprisals to the whole province. The march of the trucks began at eleven o’clock yesterday morning, the twenty-ninth, and ended this morning, the thirtieth. We had almost twenty-four hours of continuous travelling, during which no one stopped for a moment’s rest or food. We passed through towns and villages in the province of Forli and the province of Ravenna, destroying and burning all the centres of the Socialist and Communist organisations. It was a terrible night. Our passing was marked by mounting columns of fire and smoke. The whole plain of Romagna up to the hills was subjected to the reprisals of the outraged Fascists, determined to put an end to the Red terror. Innumerable episodes. Encounters with the Bolshevist rabble, in open resistance, none. All their leaders were in flight. The headquarters of the organisations, Socialist clubs, co-operatives—these were practically deserted.{8}

While the civil war was going on, new Fascist unions were being created which were called “economic syndicates.” The first of these “syndicates” arose on February 28th, 1921, in the little town of San Bartolomeo in Bosco in the province of Ferrara.{9} In November 1921 the members of the “economic syndicates” numbered 64,000,{10} and by January 1922, 250,000.{11} Speaking of these early recruits on May 7th, 1928, Mussolini admitted that “a number of them had no clear idea of where they were going.” They were facetiously dubbed “prisoners of war.”

In January 1922 a “syndical convention” was held in Bologna, at which it was decided that all Fascist “syndicates” should be grouped into five “corporations”: agriculture, industry, commerce, seamen, and the middle and intellectual classes. The five “corporations” were to form a “General Confederation of National Syndicates.” Each “corporation” was to “gather within itself all the professional, intellectual, manual, and technical activities.”{12} Yet employers and workers were not to be thrown indiscriminately into the same “corporation.” The employers’ and the employees’ associations, while remaining distinct from each other, were, however, to be subject to a common higher governing body called a “corporation.” For this reason the “corporations” were also called “mixed syndicates.” But the employers did not let themselves be seduced by the Fascist sirens; they stuck to their own associations and left the workmen, the artisans, the small landowners and farmers—in short, the small man—to be regimented by the Fascists.{13}

Between January and June 1922 the number of organisation members rose from 250,000 to 459,284{14}; by August 1922 there were 800,000,{15} and the same number in October of that year, when Mussolini seized power.{16}

The budgets of these organisations as well as the salaries paid the officials were shrouded in mystery. It is scarcely too much to attribute the larger portion of their income to subsidies from industrialists, large landowners, merchants, bankers, and others who welcomed the violent destruction of the unions and cooperative societies.{17}

The chief organiser of the new Fascist unions was Edmondo Rossoni. After the fashion of Mussolini, Rossoni had been before the war a revolutionary Socialist of the extreme left. He had been a militant of the revolutionary-Syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World in the United States. On June 1st, 1911, a group of “prominent” Italians placed a wreath on the monument to Garibaldi in New York. Following this “patriotic” demonstration the Italians of a revolutionary stamp staged one on their own account. The orator who held forth at the monument was none other than Rossoni.

Rossoni [we read in the paper Il Proletario for June 2nd, 1911], with a sonorous voice that vibrates in one’s ears like the string of a taut bow, lashes out against the whole filthy crew of swindlers, exploiters, counterfeiters who need the cloak of patriotism to conceal their plunder. And after having declared that he assumes full responsibility of his act, amidst a delirium of applause he spits with might and main on the King’s tricolour and on the wreath of the prominent citizens. Our protest has been made and we are satisfied. But not Rossoni, for he throws himself once more at the pedestal of the monument and proposes that each one of those present file before the wreath and decorate it with a conscientious spit, which everyone does, applauding.{18}

When the war broke out, Rossoni, like Mussolini, suddenly discovered that he too was a nationalist. He returned to Italy, and in May 1918 with other Socialists no less revolutionary and no less patriotic than he, helped found the Italian Union of Labour with the programme of “war against the capitalist system and all the institutions upholding that system.”{19} In 1919 and 1920 this organisation adopted an attitude more revolutionary than that of the Socialist-controlled General Confederation of Labour, thereby hoping to win the working masses to the nationalist ideology, but it never succeeded in obtaining a wide influence. Rossoni was a general without soldiers when in 1921, after “secret travail”{20} similar to that which in 1914 had caused him to change allegiance a first time, he left the Italian Union of Labour and threw himself body and soul into the Fascist movement.

The officials of the new Fascist unions were appointed by Rossoni.{21} The term “syndicates,” by which the Fascist unions were designated, was the last remaining shred of the old revolutionary syndicalist banner under which Rossoni and several of his coadjutors had begun their careers as politicians.

NOTE

The amounts of the subsidies paid by Italian capitalists to Mussolini and other Fascist chieftains have never been and probably never will be published. But there is no lack of evidence to substantiate our statement.

The most active propaganda agent of Fascism in the English-speaking countries, Signor Villari, admitted in 1926 that “many adhered to the movement for selfish reasons—landlords and manufacturers who simply regarded it as a form of protection for the right of property.”{22} It is quite improbable that these gentlemen asked to be admitted or were admitted into the Fascist organisations with empty hands.

The official daily of the Vatican, the Osservatore Romano, i...