Mussolini founded a new newspaper, Il Popolo d'Italia. The name itself — The People of Italy — is instructive because it illustrates the subtle change in Mussolini's thinking and the first key distinction between socialism and fascism. Socialism was predicated on the Marxist view that "workers" as a class were more bound by common interests than any other criteria. Implicit in the slogan "Workers of the world, unite!" was the idea that class was more important than race, nationality, religion, language, culture, or any other "opiate" of the masses. It had become clear to Mussolini that not only was this manifestly not so but it made little sense to pretend otherwise. If Sorel had taught that Marxism was a series of useful myths rather than scientific fact, why not utilize more useful myths if they're available? "I saw that internationalism was crumbling," Mussolini later admitted. It was "utterly foolish" to believe that class consciousness could ever trump the call of nation and culture.39 "The sentiment of nationality exists and cannot be denied." What was then called socialism was really just a kind of socialism: international socialism. Mussolini was interested in creating a new socialism, a socialism in one state, a national socialism, which had the added benefit of being achievable. The old Socialist Party stood in the way of this effort, and thus it was "necessary," Mussolini wrote in Il Popolo, "to assassinate the Party in order to save Socialism." In another issue he implored, "Proletarians, come into the streets and piazzas with us and cry: 'Down with the corrupt mercantile policy of the Italian bourgeoisie'...Long live the war of liberation of the peoples!"40
In 1915 Mussolini was called up for service. He fought well, receiving shrapnel in his leg. The war tended to accelerate his thinking. The soldiers had fought as Italians, not as "workers." Their sacrifice was not for the class struggle but for the Italian struggle. He began to formulate the idea — known as trincerocrazia — that veterans deserved to run the country because they had sacrificed more and had the discipline to improve Italy's plight (echoes of this conviction can be found in the "chicken hawk" epithet today). "Socialism of the trenches" seemed so much more plausible than socialism of the factory floor, for Mussolini had in effect seen it. On March 23, 1919, Mussolini and a handful of others founded the Fasci di Combattimento in Milan, aiming to form a popular front of pro-war leftists, from socialist veterans groups to Futurist, anarchist, nationalist, and syndicalist intellectuals. Some highlights from their program:
* Lowering the minimum voting age to eighteen, the minimum age for representatives to twenty-five, and universal suffrage, including for women.
* "The abolition of the Senate and the creation of a national technical council on intellectual and manual labor, industry, commerce and culture."
* End of the draft.
* Repeal of titles of nobility.
* "A foreign policy aimed at expanding Italy's will and power in opposition to all foreign imperialisms."
* The prompt enactment of a state law sanctioning a legal workday of eight actual hours of work for all workers.
* A minimum wage.
* The creation of various government bodies run by workers' representatives.
* Reform of the old-age and pension system and the establishment of age limits for hazardous work.
* Forcing landowners to cultivate their lands or have them expropriated and given to veterans and farmers' cooperatives.
* The obligation of the state to build "rigidly secular" schools for the raising of "the proletariat's moral and cultural condition."
* "A large progressive tax on capital that would amount to a one-time partial expropriation of all riches."
* "The seizure of all goods belonging to religious congregations and the abolition of episcopal revenues."
* The "review" of all military contracts and the "sequestration of 85% of all war profits."
* The nationalization of all arms and explosives industries.41
Ah, yes. Those anti-elitist, stock-market-abolishing, child-labor-ending, public-health-promoting, wealth-confiscating, draft-ending, secularist right-wingers!
In November the newly named and explicitly left-wing Fascists ran a slate of candidates in the national elections. They got trounced at the hands of the Socialists. Most historians claim this is what taught Mussolini to move to the "right." Robert O. Paxton writes that Mussolini realized "there was no space in Italian politics for a party that was both nationalist and Left."42
This, I think, distorts the picture. Mussolini did not move fascism from left to right; he moved it from socialist to populist. An unwieldy phenomenon, populism had never been known as a conservative or right-wing orientation before, and it is only because so many were determined to label fascism right-wing that populism under Mussolini was redefined as such. After all, the notion that political power is and should be vested in the people was a classical liberal position. Populism was a more radical version of this position. It's still a "power to the people" ideology, but it is skeptical of the parliamentary machinery of conventional liberalism (e.g., checks and balances). In the United States the populists — always a force on the left in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — pushed for such reforms as direct elections of senators and the nationalization of industry and banking. Direct democracy and nationalization were two of the main planks of the Fascist agenda. Mussolini also stopped calling Il Popolo d'Italia a "socialist daily" in favor of a "producers' daily."
An emphasis on "producers" had everywhere been the hallmark of populist economics and politics. The key distinction for "producerism," as many called it, was between those who created wealth with their own hands and those who merely profited from it. William Jennings Bryan, for example, was keen on distinguishing the good and decent "people" from "the idle holders of idle capital." The populists sought to expand the scope of government in order to smash the "economic royalists" and help the little guy. This was Mussolini's approach in a nutshell (much as it is that of left-wing icons of today, such as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez). Fascist slogans included "The land to him who works it!" and "To every peasant the entire fruit of his sacred labor!" Mussolini still employed warmed-over Marxist theory when convenient — as many populists did — to explain his new fondness for the small landowner. Italy was still a "proletarian nation," he explained, and so needed to develop economically before it could achieve socialism, even if that meant making a pragmatic nod to capitalist expediency in the form of trade. Lenin had made the identical adjustment under his New Economic Policy in 1921, in which peasants were encouraged to grow more food for their own use and profit.
None of this is to say that Mussolini was a deeply consistent ideologue or political theorist. As a pragmatist, he was constantly willing to throw off dogma, theory, and alliances whenever convenient. In the few years immediately following the formation of the Fasci di Combattimento, Mussolini's main governing themes were expediency and opportunism. This was, after all, the age of "experimentation." FDR would later preach a similar gospel, holding that he had no fixed agenda other than to put Americans to work and launch a program of "bold experimentation." "We do not distrust the future," FDR declared. "The people...have not failed. In their need they have...asked for discipline and direction under leadership. They have made me the present instrument of their wishes. In that spirit I take it." Likewise, the Fasci di Combattimento, Mussolini wrote in May 1920, "do not feel tied to any particular doctrinal form." And much as Roosevelt would later, Mussolini asked the Italian people to trust him now and worry about an actual program down the road. Shortly before he became prime minister, he famously responded to those who wanted specifics from him: "The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner the better."43