[lbo-talk] Creeping Fascism

Mike Ballard swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au
Thu Jan 3 04:27:48 PST 2008


Chip Berlet said:

I did what Michael did, tracked down as much of Mussolini's writings in English as I could find, and I ended up in the same book. I found a copy of the Encyclopedia Italiana (in Italian) and had every paragraph with anything close to "corpor" in it translated. Nothing even as direct as what Michael lists below, which is a typical sentiment from Mussolini about what he meant by fascism as the "corporate state."

If anyone else has anything more direct from Mussolini, please let me (and

Michael) know. ******

What Michael quoted:

I tried for a while a few year's ago to locate Chip's hoax quote. This is the closest I came:

Mussolini, Benito. 1936. The Corporate State (Firenze: Vallecchi).

32: "Fascist corporate economy is the economy of individuals of associated

groups and of the State."

47-8: "This fond of economy is regulated, strengthened and harmonized for the

sake of collective utility, by the producers themselves -- be they employers,

technicians or workers -- by means of the corporations created by the State which, representing as it does the whole nation."

****************************************************

Ah yes, the essence of fascism is to think of employers as producers--haw! This is at the core of fascist class collaborationist syndicalism.

Anyway, more quotes below. Fascism is indeed a nationalist ideology which recognises classes but demands that they no longer struggle with each other over the social product of labour. Instead, classes are to collaborate to strengthen the nation. Hitler's fascism was also impregnated with these notions.

Mike B)

********************* 8. Outside the State there can be neither individuals nor groups (political parties, associations, syndicates, classes). Therefore, Fascism is opposed to Socialism, which confines the movement of history within the class struggle and ignores the unity of classes established in one economic and moral reality in the State: and analogously it is opposed to class syndicalism. (my MB interjection: class syndicalism is like the sort of unionism which the IWW promotes) Fascism recognizes the real exigencies for which the socialist and syndicalist movement arose, but while recognizing them wishes to bring them under the control of the State and give them a purpose within the corporative system of interests reconciled within the unity of the State.

and later in this piece

It might be said against this programme that it is a return to the corporations. It doesn’t matter!....I should like, nevertheless, the Assembly to accept the claims of national syndicalism from the point of view of economics

Is it not surprising that from the first day in the Piazza San Sepolcro there should resound the word ‘Corporation’ which was destined in the creations at the base of the regime?

and later

But when one says liberalism, one says the individual; when one says Fascism, one says the State. But the Fascist State is unique; it is an original creation. It is not reactionary but revolutionary in that it anticipates the solutions of certain universal problems. These problems are no longer seen in the same light: in the sphere of politics they are removed from party rivalries, from the supreme power of parliament, from the irresponsibility of assemblies; in the sphere of economics they are removed from the sphere of the syndicates’ activities—activities that were ever widening their scope and increasing their power, both on the workers’ side and on the employers’—removed from their struggles and their designs; in the moral sphere they are divorced from ideas of the need for order, discipline and obedience, and lifted into the plane of moral commandments of the fatherland ..


>From “The Doctrine of Fascism” written by Benito Mussolini in 1932 in
collaboration with Giovanni Gentile.

The state must return to its traditions, interrupted by the triumph of liberal ideology, and treat the modern syndicates exactly as it treated the medieval corporations. It must absorb them and make them part of the state.

and

The workers’ syndicates and the employers’ syndicates must join together within each industry to form one single mixed syndicate, organized, of course, into two or preferably even three sections, since it would be right and proper for management, the engineers, technicians and factory managers, to be specifically represented.


>From “The Syndicates and the Crisis Within the State” by Alfredo Rocco, 1920

XIV. The Corporative State


>From this characteristic of the Fascist state there springs, however, the great
social and constitutional reform which Fascism is realizing by creating a corporative syndicalist regime and working to replace the liberal state by the corporative state. Fascism has in fact taken over from syndicalism the idea of syndicates as an educative moral force, but since the antithesis between state and syndicate must be overcome, it has endeavoured to develop a system whereby this function should be attributed to syndicates grouped together into corporations subject to state discipline and indeed reflecting with themselves the same oragnization as the state.

“From the Origins and Doctrine of Fascism” by Giovanni Gentile, 1934

All quotes taken from: "Italian fascisms from Pareto to Gentile (Roots of the right)" by Adrian Lyttelton

"Would you have freedom from wage-slavery.." Joe Hill http://www.shelfari.com/o1516968161

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