Fighting Fascism: How to Struggle and How to Win - Fascist apparatus

Table of contents

This defeat prompted Mussolini to set about constituting fascism as an organized and centralized party; until then it had been only a loose movement. The transformation took place at the first fascist congress in November 1921. While Mussolini won on this point, he was defeated in the selection of the party leadership; he did not have it fully under his control. His personal supporters made up only one half; the other half were monarchist Agrarians. This situation is significant. It indicates a conflict within fascism that has continued and intensified up to the present day, a conflict that will contribute to fascism’s decay. It is the conflict between agrarian and industrial capital or, in political terms, between monarchists and republicans. The party now has 500,000 members.

Constituting fascism as a party was not enough in itself to grant Mussolini the power to become master of the working class and to compel the proletariat, through even more dismal drudgery, to contribute to the reconstruction and further development of the capitalist economy. For this purpose he needed a dual apparatus. One apparatus to corrupt the workers, and another to suppress them with armed force and terrorist means.

The apparatus to corrupt the workers’ movement was created by founding the fascist unions, named “national corporations.” They were to carry out systematically what fascism had done from the start: combat the revolutionary workers’ movement, indeed every independent movement of the workers. Mussolini always rejects the charge that he is conducting a struggle against the working class. He continually gives assurances that he wants to raise the working class materially and culturally and not lead it backwards into “the harrowing conditions of a slave-like existence.” But all that must be in the framework of the “nation” and subordinated to its interests; the class struggle is sharply rejected.

The fascist trade unions were founded with the explicit goal of providing an antidote against not only the revolutionary organizations of the proletariat but also against class organizations of any kind. Every proletarian class organization is immediately suspected by Mussolini and his henchmen of being revolutionary in character. Mussolini created his own trade unions, encompassing all workers, employees, and employers in a given trade or industry. Some of the organized employers have declined to join Mussolini’s unions, as has the agricultural league and the league of industrialists. Nonetheless, despite their heresy, they are not called to account by fascist punitive expeditions. These forays take place only where proletarians are concerned, who perhaps are not even in the revolutionary movement but nonetheless struggle in accordance with their class interests. Tens of thousands of workers have been forced to join the fascist unions, which are said to include about 800,000 members.

The fascist groups for terrorist subjugation of the working class in Italy are the so-called squadrons. These constitute a military organization that has evolved out of the agrarian punitive expeditions. Bands of “punishers,” which here and there formed spontaneously, became permanent organizations of paid mercenaries, who carry out terror as a profession. The squadrons developed over time into a purely military force, one that carried out the coup and underpins Mussolini’s dictatorial power. After the seizure of power and the establishment of the fascist state they were legalized as a “national militia,” a part of the bourgeois state. They are committed, as was officially declared, “to the service of God, the nation, and the prime minister”—please note: not the king. There are various estimates of their strength. At the time of the fascist coup they numbered between 100,000 and 300,000;^[5] now they are half a million.