Mussolini and Fascism

Fascism and Mussolini are two co-constitutive, mutually-supporting words. Mussolini is fascism’s champion, its leader, its great duce. Fascism is Mussolini’s platform, tribune, and chariot. To understand better a piece of this stage of the European crisis, let us quickly go over the history of the fascists and their great leader.

Mussolini, as it is known, is a politician of socialist origin. As a socialist, his position was neither centrist, nor reserved, but fiery and extremist. He held a role consonant with his temperament, because he is, in body and soul, an extremist. His place is on the extreme left, or on the extreme right. From 1910 to 1911 he was one of the leaders of the socialist left. In 1912 he led the expulsion of four collaborationist representatives from the socialist party: Bonomi, Bissolati, Cabrini and Podrecca, and then took the helm at Avanti. Then came 1914 and the war. Italian socialists demanded Italian neutrality, but Mussolini, as always restive and belligerent, rebelled against the pacifism of his brethren and advocated Italy’s intervention in the war. He gave, initially, a revolutionary point of view to his interventionism. He maintained that extending and exasperating the war would hasten European revolution. However, in reality, within his interventionism pulsed his warrior psyche, which could not reconcile itself to a passive and Tolstoyian neutrality. Mussolini abandoned leadership of Avanti and founded in Milan Il Popolo d’Italia to sing praise of the attack on Austria. Italy joined the Entente, and Mussolini, protagonist of the intervention, became one of its soldiers as well.

Then came victory, armistice, and demobilization, and along with them, an idle period for the interventionists. D’Annunzio, longing for heroic feats, lead the Fiume adventure. Mussolini created the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, the fasces of combat. But in Italy, it was a revolutionary, socialist moment. For Italy, the war had been a bad deal. The Entente had offered it meager scraps of the spoils of war and haggled stubbornly over the ownership of Fiume. All in all, Italy had left the war with feelings of discontent and disenchantment. It was under this influence that elections took place. The socialists won 155 seats in parliament. Mussolini, candidate for Milan, was pummeled by socialist votes.

But these feelings of disappointment and national depression were ripe for a violent nationalist reaction, and were the roots of fascism. The middle class is peculiarly vulnerable to the loftiest patriotic myths. And the Italian middle class, furthermore, felt distant from, and adversarial to, the socialist proletariat. The middle class did not forgive socialist neutrality. They did not forgive the high salaries, the state subsidies, the social laws which the socialists had wrung from them during and after the war under fear of revolution. The middle class chafed and suffered at the fact that the neutral, and even defeatist, proletariat should turn a profit from a war it did not even want, and whose results it undermined, shrunk and disdained. This middle class angst found a home in fascism. Mussolini in this way attracted the middle class to his fasci di combatimento.
Some socialist and syndicalist dissidents joined the fascists, bringing with them their skills in organizing and capturing the masses. Fascism was not yet a programmatic or consciously reactionary and conservative sect. Fascism, rather, believed itself to be revolutionary. Its propaganda contained subversive and demagogic aspects. Fascism, for example, excoriated the nouveaux riches. Its principles—tendentially republican and anticlerical—were infused with the mental uncertainty of the middle class which, instinctively dissatisfied and disgusted with the bourgeoisie, is vaguely hostile to the proletariat. The Italian socialists committed the error of failing to employ clever political methods to shift the spiritual attitude of the middle class. Quite the opposite, they exacerbated the enmity between the proletariat and the petite bourgeoisie, disdainfully treated and slandered by some of the stone-faced theoreticians of the revolutionary orthodoxy.

Italy entered a period of civil war. Frightened by the odds of revolution, the bourgeoisie armed, supplied and fanned the flames of fascism, and pushed it towards the grisly persecution of socialism, the destruction of the unions and revolutionary cooperatives, to the breaking of strikes and uprisings. Fascism thus became a numerous and battle-hardened militia. It ended up stronger than the state itself. That is when it claimed power. The fascist brigades conquered Rome. Mussolini, in “blackshirt” uniform, took office, compelled the obedience of the majority of parliament, and inaugurated a fascist regime and a fascist era.

About Mussolini, much has been written, mostly fiction, little fact. Due to his political belligerence, it is nearly impossible to neatly and objectively define his personality and figure. Some descriptions are panegyric and deferential; others, rancorous and propagandizing. Mussolini is known episodically, through anecdotes and snapshots. It is said, for example, that Mussolini is the architect of fascism, it is believed that Mussolini “created” fascism. It is quite true that Mussolini is a seasoned agitator, an expert organizer, a dizzyingly energetic character. His activity, his dynamism, his tension, all hugely influenced the fascist phenomenon. During the fascist campaign, Mussolini would, in a single day, speak in three or four cities. He would hop by airplane from Rome to Pisa, from Pisa to Bologna, from Bologna to Milan. Mussolini is a volatile, man, dynamic, verbose, italianissimo, singularly gifted at exciting crowds and agitating the masses. He is fascism’s organizer, champion, and great duce. But he was not its creator, he was not its architect. He extracted a political movement from a state of mind, but he did not mold this movement in his image and likeness. Mussolini did not give fascism a spirit or a program. On the contrary, fascism gave its spirit to Mussolini. His consubstantiation, his ideological identification with the fascists, obligated Mussolini to rid himself, to purge himself, of the last traces of his socialism. Mussolini needed to assimilate, to absorb, anti-socialism, middle-class chauvinism, to herd and organize the middle class into the ranks of his fasci di combattimento, and he had to define his politics as reactionary, anti-socialist and anti-revolutionary. In this way, the case of Mussolini is unique from those of Bonomi, of Briand, and other ex-socialists. Bonomi and Briand have not been forced to break explicitly with their socialist origin. That said, they have claimed a minimal socialism, a homeopathic socialism. Mussolini, on the other hand, has gone so far as to claim he blushes at his socialist past like a grown man blushes at his teenage love letters, and has lept from the extremest socialism to the extremest conservatism. He has not attenuated, has not curbed his socialism; he has abandoned it wholly and entirely. His economic proposals, for example, are totally averse to interventionism, statism or fiscalism. They do not accept the transactional type of capitalist and entrepreneurial state: they tend to restore the classic type of tax-and-police state. His points of view are today diametrically opposed to those he held yesterday. Mussolini was a believer yesterday just as he is a believer today. Through what mechanism has he undergone this conversion from one doctrine to another? It is not an intellectual, but an irrational phenomenon. The engine powering this ideological change was not intellectual, it was sentimental. Mussolini has not freed himself of his socialism, either intellectually or conceptually. Socialism was in his mind not a concept but a feeling, in the same way that fascism is not for him a concept but a feeling as well. Let us note this psychological and physiognomical fact: Mussolini has never been an intellectual man, but a sentimental one. In politics, in the press, he has been neither a theoretician nor a philosopher, but a rhetorician and conductor. His language has not been programmatic, principled, or scientific, but passionate and sentimental. The weakest of Mussolini’s speeches have been those in which he has attempted to define the parentage, the ideology of fascism. Fascism’s program is confused, contradictory, heterogeneous: it contains, mixed helter-skelter, liberal concepts alongside syndicalist concepts. That is to say, Mussolini has not offered to fascism a true program; he has offered a plan of action.

Mussolini has gone from socialism to fascism, from revolution to reaction, by way of emotion, not concept. All historical apostasies have been, most likely, a spiritual phenomenon. Mussolini, revolutionary extremist yesterday, reactionary extremist today, is no Julian. Like that emperor, a character of Ibsen and Merezkovskij, Mussolini is a restless man, theatrical, deluded, superstitious and mysterious, who feels chosen by Fate to order the persecution of the new god and return to their altarpiece the moribund gods of yesterday.