Fascist Voices by Duggan Christopher

Author:Duggan, Christopher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2013-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

The economics of intimacy

The majority of the many millions of Italians who wrote to Mussolini did so because they faced economic hardship. Requests for subventions, jobs, pensions, the award of contracts, or assistance with securing loans or sorting out bureaucratic problems, had long been part of the clientelistic politics on which liberal Italy had been built. Deputies had depended for electoral success largely on promising to reward their voters with financial concessions extracted from the government. The abolition of elections under fascism had certainly not ended clientelism at a local level, as the career of Roberto Farinacci and many other provincial ras amply demonstrated, but the emergence of the cult of the Duce as the central pillar of the regime had greatly encouraged people to turn directly to the head of government for aid. This trend accelerated in the early 1930s as the regime increased its programmes of welfare support in response to the ravages of the Great Depression. Though clientelistic practices were in some respects officially frowned on as inherently servile and thus unbecoming of the ‘new’ Italian, in reality little was done to discourage supplications to Mussolini. What better sign of faith was there than having the humility and the trust to turn in one’s hour of supreme need to the Duce?

From the outset fascism had regarded itself as a movement of the spirit, determined to counter the corrosive materialism of both liberalism and socialism, and when it came to power it had no specific new policies for dealing with the widespread unemployment and poverty in the country. Nor did it hold out to the masses any new dreams of economic betterment to replace those that it had left brutally shattered in the destruction of the socialist movement. Many of the government’s early initiatives were intended primarily to allay the anxieties of the establishment and win over the conservative business community. Reduced public expenditure, the lowering of tariffs, and the abolition of various taxes contributed to the boom in manufacturing that occurred (as elsewhere in Europe) in 1923–25. In agriculture, the ‘battle for grain’ was of benefit principally to large arable farmers. So, too, was the programme of ‘integral land reclamation’, which was introduced from the later 1920s with the aim of raising production levels through extensive investment in irrigation works, road building and reafforestation. Private landowners were supposed to contribute to the cost of the schemes, but in the absence of serious penalties for non-compliance, many failed to do so.59

The increased state control over labour that took place in the second half of the 1920s, with the monopoly of workers’ representation by fascist unions and the banning of strikes, was widely talked about as a staging post towards what was known as ‘corporativism’. Many leading fascists had been influenced by the pre-war ideas of the revolutionary syndicalists. They had talked of constructing a more modern and equitable political system by having every economic category in the country – employers as well as employees – represented on an

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