Mussolini Also Did a Lot of Good by Francesco Filippi

Author:Francesco Filippi
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781771862639
Publisher: Baraka Books

Alone against the world!

Another important Fascist economic policy—partly the fruit of an increasingly aggressive foreign policy—was so-called “autarchy,” the production of everything the state needed within its own national boundaries. In a celebrated speech to the assembly of the National Council of Corporations on March 23, 1936, Mussolini declared the need to move to a new form of economic development that would allow the country to address its coming military challenges.22

The idea pursued by the regime was basically to build a self-sufficient economy free from the influences of the international market. This step, it was argued, would allow Italy to move freely on the international stage without fearing sanctions from other countries. This military conception of international relations clashed, however, with the reality of an economy based on manufacturing dependent on international trade to grow but which had no raw materials and whose small domestic consumer market was still depressed. Propaganda campaigns on the need for national production of goods were described as “battles” and organized like veritable military campaigns, with targets to hit and schedules to meet.

One of the most famous was the great “Battle for Grain.” Grain production was one of the many sectors in which Italy was not self-sufficient and forced to import goods from other countries. The propaganda was non-stop and photographs of a bare-chested Duce threshing bales of grain to set a good example have gone down in history. Though there was an increase in grain production,23 Italian wheat now had to compete with a global commodities market in which raw materials from the vast prairies of the United States and Canada cost much less, even if they were transported from across the ocean. For ordinary citizens, the first true fruit of autarchy was thus the fact that they were unable to enjoy the benefits of international trade, such as the drop in prices of agricultural produce.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.