Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism by Gregor A. James

Author:Gregor, A. James
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2011-07-31T04:00:00+00:00

MICHELS AND “PROLETARIAN NATIONALISM”

The entire, complex argument found in L’imperialismo italiano contains all the elements of Olivetti’s rationale supporting the war in North Africa. The principal difference between the two resides in the fact that Michels’s rendering is a more detached, didactic, and less dramatic, presentation. Other than that, one does not find any effort on the part of Michels to explain the sequence of events leading up to the war by assigning exclusive efficacy to class interests. For Michels, as was the case with Olivetti, the war in Tripoli had other than economic causes. However much some members of the business community profited from the sale of comestibles, uniforms, and ancillary military supplies, for example, and however much entrepreneurs in heavy industry profited from the provision of iron and steel together with the sale of weapons of war to the state, Michels argued that the desire for such gain could not have determined the decision to engage the Caliphate in 1911. There were enough economic interests desirous of peace to neutralize those inclined toward war.43 Clearly convinced that economic variables could hardly account for Italy’s decision to undertake war against the Turks,44 Michels cited three influences he considered far more determinant: demographic, political, and psychological.45

That Italy found itself attempting to support a rapidly growing population created all-but-intolerable political, economic, and moral pressures on its ruling class. Michels dutifully recited the statistics recording the numbers of Italians who had fled their homeland over the preceding two decades to seek opportunity elsewhere. Together with that accounting, Michels recounted the budget of humiliations suffered by those workers who had settled on foreign shores. He reported that the Italians—almost all workers—were regularly demeaned, often assaulted, and not infrequently killed by mobs in the lands in which they sought succor. They were lynched in the Southern United States, and made subject to homicidal assault in France, in Switzerland, in Argentina, and in Brazil.46

Michels saw the woes of Italian migrants the result of several factors. Italy was poor, and singularly ill considered by the more advanced countries. Its government was incapable of extending any effective defense for Italian citizens who sought work in foreign countries. Italy had neither military nor economic leverage with those foreign governments that controlled the lives of its translocated citizens.

Michels argued that Italy, because of its retrograde economy, could not support its population—and could not protect them when they sought livelihood elsewhere. The peninsula’s population was denser than almost any country in Europe, and its industrial base, while developing, was insufficient to provide employment for all those who made themselves available. Agriculture, centuries old, conducted with the most primitive of methods, largely labor intensive, still found itself burdened with surplus labor.

In the course of his account, Michels, like Olivetti, focused primarily on the retrograde character of Italian industrial development. He spoke of an Italy decades, if not centuries, behind the North European countries.47 Italy was capital poor, almost half its population illiterate, and ill prepared for tasks in a modern setting. Italy, at the turn of the twentieth century, was something other than a developed nation.

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