which ‘have taken effect miraculously and mysteriously in the soul of the Italian
people’. War is ‘the sole hygiene of the world’ (Griffin, 1995: 38, 41–2, 44–5, 71,
85).Corporativism, violence and the state
There is a strong economic imperative for fascism. D’Annunzio, a fervent nationalist
and military leader who had occupied the Adriatic port of Fiume in September 1919,
argued for a corporate structure that embraced employees and employers, public
and private, within a state that expressed the common will of the people. Mussolini
organised the whole country into 22 corporations. Lyttelton (1979) argues that these
were held up as fascism’s ‘most imposing creation’: in fact, they served no serious
function except as a front for groups of leading industrialists to control raw material
allocations and investment decisions (Griffin, 1995: 97).
The trade unions were seen as contributing loyal employees within this struc-
ture – strikes and lockouts were banned – and syndicalists like Sergio Panunzio
(1886–1944) saw in revolutionary trade unionism, or syndicalism, a force that would
transcend its adolescent phase by building up the state. A new national class was
to be created – the essence of a civilisation that is neither bourgeois nor proletarian.
Mussolini spoke of ‘conscious class collaboration’ and, although the regime attacked
both liberalism and socialism, the tiny Italian Social Republic declared that it aimed
to abolish the whole internal capitalist system (Griffin, 1995: 47, 49, 64, 87). In
practice, employers were regulated by the Italian state, but anti-capitalism was more
rhetoric than reality.
Maronetti spoke of ‘violence, rehabilitated as a decisive argument’, and when
links were forged with Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini declared that both fascists and
Nazis believe in violence ‘as the dynamo of their history’. The work of the French
anarcho-syndicalist Sorel was hugely influential because Sorel had extolled both the
importance of myth and the need for violence (Griffin, 1995: 36, 45, 79).
Not surprisingly, the state was given a pivotal role, a spiritual and moral entity
that, Mussolini declared, is the conscience of the nation. The state is the foundation
of fascism: the state organises the nation and is concerned with the growth of empire.
Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944) was the key intellectual of the regime and, drawing
upon a version of Hegelian idealism, he pronounced the fascist state to be an ‘ethical
state’: it is the state of ‘man himself’. The leader is revered with a capital ‘L’.
Mussolini ridiculed the ‘demo-liberal’ civilisation, while praising Hitler for creating
‘a unitary, authoritarian, totalitarian state, i.e. a fascist one’, although he acknow -
ledges that Hitler operated in a different historical context. Oneness is asserted with
a vengeance: in Mussolini’s words, the ‘order of the day is a single, categorical word
which is imperative for all’ (Griffin, 1995: 63, 70, 72–3, 79, 82).
Reason is rejected: as an anonymous fascist put it, ‘blood is stronger than
syllogisms’. (A syllogism is a logical statement in which a conclusion is drawn from
two propositions, e.g. all dogs are animals, all animals have four legs and, therefore,
all dogs have four legs. A false syllogism!) Mussolini was likened to a messiah who
evangelised millions, and despite the anti-clericalism of some fascist supporters, a
pact with the Vatican was signed. Irrationalism and mysticism expressed itself in286 Part 2 Classical ideologies