WEBVTT NOTE Fascism, Anti-Fascism, and the Welfare State 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:08.000 First of all, I would like to present the argument that fascism is a movement generally of the right. 2 00:00:08.000 --> 00:00:14.000 I am not sure, however, that all of these people here would necessarily belong to the right. 3 00:00:14.000 --> 00:00:23.000 Certainly Peron would not, given the fact that he stripped the middle class of their means 4 00:00:23.000 --> 00:00:29.000 and engaged in all sorts of wild and predatory and ultimately destructive social experiments. 5 00:00:29.000 --> 00:00:35.160 movements, Mussolini perhaps would come a little closer to what I understand is the 6 00:00:35.160 --> 00:00:41.960 right. Hitler definitely would not. Franco is part of the right, but I'm not quite sure 7 00:00:41.960 --> 00:00:46.240 that he would fit the fascist model. He's somebody who is forced to take over some of 8 00:00:46.240 --> 00:00:52.960 the trappings of fascism because he becomes willy-nilly the leader of the phalange, which 9 00:00:52.960 --> 00:00:59.560 with the Spanish Fascists, and then he does all he can to throw philanderists in jail. 10 00:00:59.560 --> 00:01:06.000 But I am willing to make the argument that fascism, particularly in its paradigmatic 11 00:01:06.000 --> 00:01:09.160 Italian form, is a movement of the right. 12 00:01:09.160 --> 00:01:14.640 That is to say, it is one that is organized to deal with the problems of a very violent 13 00:01:14.640 --> 00:01:20.420 left, although not necessarily in a way that solves economic problems effectively. 14 00:01:20.420 --> 00:01:25.860 I would agree with Professor Higgs that the kind of corporatist model that is thrown together, 15 00:01:25.860 --> 00:01:33.660 that is improvised as a way of dealing with economic problems has been a kind of millstone 16 00:01:33.660 --> 00:01:36.420 around our necks ever since. 17 00:01:36.420 --> 00:01:41.380 But nonetheless, I would say in terms of the initial impulse of the fascist movement, the 18 00:01:41.380 --> 00:01:49.620 reason that it is able to attract followers, it has this momentum because it is seen as 19 00:01:49.620 --> 00:01:52.660 as an anti-leftist movement. 20 00:01:52.660 --> 00:01:58.820 I think that despite all the political correctness that prevails in our universities and the 21 00:01:58.820 --> 00:02:04.660 anti-fascist insanity that seems to have gripped Europe, which has nothing to do with fascism, 22 00:02:04.660 --> 00:02:09.720 but rather with an attempt to suppress politically incorrect opinion, there has been a lot of 23 00:02:09.720 --> 00:02:16.020 scholarship done on fascism in the last 40 years in an attempt to sort of make sense 24 00:02:16.020 --> 00:02:20.420 or provide a kind of taxonomy for this phenomenon. 25 00:02:20.420 --> 00:02:24.900 And there are different kinds of fascisms or things that are called fascists that arise 26 00:02:24.900 --> 00:02:32.700 in the interwar period, going, I suppose, from something like clerical fascism in Austria, 27 00:02:32.700 --> 00:02:42.780 in Spain, in Portugal, to the Spanish phalangist, Hungarian arrow cross, which is an extremely 28 00:02:42.780 --> 00:02:49.140 Vicious form of fascism closely allied to the German phenomenon. 29 00:02:49.140 --> 00:02:54.420 The connections among these variations of fascism is something that has been discussed. 30 00:02:54.420 --> 00:03:00.780 Also the question of whether they do form, in fact, some kind of hole, common hole, whether 31 00:03:00.780 --> 00:03:06.500 they partake of the same sufficiently large number of characteristics to be seen as part 32 00:03:06.500 --> 00:03:09.860 of the same general movement. 33 00:03:09.860 --> 00:03:16.620 One of the ways by which, I suppose, one can deal with this problem is by looking at the 34 00:03:16.620 --> 00:03:21.740 original fascism, the primordial fascism, which is Italian, and then seeing how many 35 00:03:21.740 --> 00:03:28.060 of these characteristics get passed on to other forms of fascism that develop later. 36 00:03:28.060 --> 00:03:33.560 There also is an attempt, and I think this is an entirely justified attempt, to which 37 00:03:33.560 --> 00:03:42.320 which Ralph Reiko suggested between the Italian model and the very radicalized form of fascism 38 00:03:42.320 --> 00:03:45.640 that takes over in Germany. 39 00:03:45.640 --> 00:03:52.360 I think the two probably have about as much in common as Swedish social democracy and 40 00:03:52.360 --> 00:03:55.400 Soviet communism. 41 00:03:55.400 --> 00:04:01.760 And the attempt to sort of throw them together is a problem which I think mars the work of 42 00:04:01.760 --> 00:04:09.000 of a great historian of fascism, Ernst Nolte, whose work I generally agree with, but who 43 00:04:09.000 --> 00:04:14.700 is entirely wrong in seeing German fascism, what he calls German fascism, as simply a 44 00:04:14.700 --> 00:04:22.040 subgenus of European counter-revolutionary thinking which manifests itself in generally 45 00:04:22.040 --> 00:04:26.360 similar ways in Italy, France and in Germany. 46 00:04:26.360 --> 00:04:35.200 I think the German form is different, it is much more virulent, it is much more radical, 47 00:04:35.200 --> 00:04:42.360 and in a sense it is less right-wing, because it absorbs so much Stalinism. 48 00:04:42.360 --> 00:04:49.360 It not only claims, as Nolta, I think, argues with varying degrees of cogency, it not only 49 00:04:49.360 --> 00:04:55.080 is a reaction against Stalinism, it absorbs a lot of Stalinism, the concentration camps, 50 00:04:55.080 --> 00:05:04.520 the mass murder, the wild experiments, the hysterical expansionism and so forth, much 51 00:05:04.520 --> 00:05:09.080 of which it takes from the communist model. 52 00:05:09.080 --> 00:05:14.520 Now there is of course in Germany a form of something like Italian fascism, the black 53 00:05:14.520 --> 00:05:23.560 front, the national Bolschwicks, the movement around Kurt Schleicher to create a kind of 54 00:05:53.560 --> 00:06:11.560 and something which may in fact influence Mussolini's decision to throw in his lot with Hitler with the events in Austria in the mid-30s where the clerical fascists under Engelbert Dolfus are going to be undermined by the Germans. 55 00:06:11.560 --> 00:06:18.560 The Germans actually are going to kill off Dolfus and then in 1938 they occupy the country and send all these people to concentration camps. 56 00:06:18.560 --> 00:06:30.560 The clerical fascists were a kind of Catholic authoritarian regime that depended upon Italian fascist support and they were very decidedly against the German Nazis. 57 00:06:30.560 --> 00:06:34.560 But that model of fascism obviously is not going to work. 58 00:06:34.560 --> 00:06:47.560 It was sort of corporatist, clericalist, authoritarian, anti-socialist and enjoyed at least some sort of tacit approval from apparently from Ludwig von Mises. 59 00:06:47.560 --> 00:07:17.560 This model is going to be replaced by the far more virulent German model after 1938 and this is very important because wherever that German model travels and wherever the Third Reich will establish its power, you'll have Jews dragged off the concentration camp, virulent anti-Semitism, all of the other features of Hitlerian fascism or Nazism, which 60 00:07:17.560 --> 00:07:25.060 not only creates a kind of alternate model to an earlier, much more bland form of fascism, 61 00:07:25.060 --> 00:07:30.060 but will also take over these other forms of fascism and radicalize them. 62 00:07:30.060 --> 00:07:37.560 So I think there is an argument to be made that the German situation, the German case, 63 00:07:37.560 --> 00:07:45.060 which becomes the dominant form of fascism because of the economic and military power of the Third Reich, 64 00:07:45.060 --> 00:07:53.060 will corrupt all the other forms of fascism, and in many cases impose their own forms of alternate fascism, 65 00:07:53.060 --> 00:07:57.060 where there are other authoritarian rightist movements that had existed. 66 00:07:57.060 --> 00:08:05.060 Where, however, I would agree with Ernst Nolte, who was probably the major historian of fascism, 67 00:08:05.060 --> 00:08:11.060 and one of the most controversial, by the way, is that fascism is a secondary phenomenon. 68 00:08:11.060 --> 00:08:26.060 It is a reaction against the left. It might come up with goofy economics. It may put corrupt opportunistic people in power to replace other corrupt opportunistic people, in the case of Italy. 69 00:08:26.060 --> 00:08:37.060 But it is a reaction against the left, given the balance of forces that exist within those particular societies. 70 00:08:37.060 --> 00:08:50.060 I think it also is sort of an interesting game in counterfactual history to imagine what would the fascist, the Italian fascist, have been like if Hitler did not come along. 71 00:08:50.060 --> 00:09:05.060 And I think we could imagine, and this is not unreasonable given the assumption, Italy had remained a fascist country and had passed on its model to its European neighbors. 72 00:09:05.060 --> 00:09:15.060 Would anyone except for the descendants of Italian anti-fascist exiles, the Fuori Ushiti, care enough to call themselves anti-fascists? 73 00:09:15.060 --> 00:09:20.060 Or would the neoconservative press today be conjuring up the bugaboo of Islamofascism? 74 00:09:20.060 --> 00:09:33.060 And even in this counterfactual narrative, if we still had the misfortune of having to put up with the neoconservative press, would it be calling its right-wing enemies fascists? 75 00:09:33.060 --> 00:09:45.060 More likely we would learn of how the Italian Duce helped to launch the Israeli nationalist right, also known as the bearers of global democracy, on their later rise to political importance in the Middle East. 76 00:09:45.060 --> 00:10:01.060 After all, as the leading historian of Italian fascism, Renzo de Felice, has shown in Michael O'Deen, the neoconservative in his dissertation, many of the right-wing Zionists, Zeb Jabotinsky, the revisionist Zionists, were usually attracted to Mussolini. 77 00:10:01.060 --> 00:10:02.060 Mussolini. 78 00:10:02.060 --> 00:10:06.980 Indeed, before the Duce threw in his lot with Hitler in 1936, he had gone out of his way 79 00:10:06.980 --> 00:10:11.420 to cultivate Zionist admirers and to deplore Hitler's anti-Semitism. 80 00:10:11.420 --> 00:10:16.860 His fascist party structure was full of Jews, as Ralph pointed out, and as Felice reminds 81 00:10:16.860 --> 00:10:23.260 us by the mid-20s, over one-tenth of Italian jury had taken the initiative to apply for 82 00:10:23.260 --> 00:10:25.180 fascist membership. 83 00:10:25.180 --> 00:10:31.180 At that time Mussolini was denouncing Bolsheviks and Freemasonry and barbaric Germans, but 84 00:10:31.180 --> 00:10:37.900 had nothing to say against Jewish ministers like Luigi Lozati or fascist, what do you call 85 00:10:37.900 --> 00:10:44.620 the fascista di adattamento, the opportunistic fascist, the one who joins, and the head of 86 00:10:44.620 --> 00:10:51.820 the Italian industrialist confederation, Gino Olivetti, who was a Sephardic Jew and who 87 00:10:51.820 --> 00:11:06.300 What I am suggesting is that it is altogether possible to imagine a benign, historically 88 00:11:06.300 --> 00:11:11.380 insignificant fascism in a way that it is harder to do for communism, or dare I to say 89 00:11:11.380 --> 00:11:14.740 for social democracy, or Wilsonianism. 90 00:11:14.740 --> 00:11:20.140 That is because those who, like Benedetto Croce and Luigi Naudi, thought fascism was 91 00:11:20.140 --> 00:11:36.780 One reason for this is that classical fascism generally prevailed in relatively weak countries, 92 00:11:36.780 --> 00:11:45.900 places that enacted fascist or quasi-fascist experiments, usually involving the invocations 93 00:11:45.900 --> 00:11:52.080 of corporate state economies, at least on paper, Portugal, Italy, Hungary, Austria, 94 00:11:52.080 --> 00:11:57.400 were places that lacked the means to engage in cataclysmic military adventure. 95 00:11:57.400 --> 00:12:02.020 In fact, most of them, unlike Mussolini, after his partnership with Nazi Germany, had no 96 00:12:02.020 --> 00:12:04.240 interest in doing so. 97 00:12:04.240 --> 00:12:09.800 By contrast, the advocates of global democracy, like the advocates of world communist revolution 98 00:12:09.800 --> 00:12:14.840 and of Islamic revolution, have had larger armies and better weapons systems to work 99 00:12:14.840 --> 00:12:15.840 with. 100 00:12:15.840 --> 00:12:19.680 Surely no one in this room would be worried if the world's major advocate of a global 101 00:12:19.680 --> 00:12:26.080 democratic revolution, advanced by force of arms, were the Prime Minister of Liechtenstein. 102 00:12:26.080 --> 00:12:31.040 But a second reason is that classical fascism in practice, looking at the Italian case as 103 00:12:31.040 --> 00:12:37.560 our illustration, did very little to change the socioeconomic structure of the country. 104 00:12:37.560 --> 00:12:42.800 In this instance, one has to look beyond the American depictions of Italian fascism, which 105 00:12:42.800 --> 00:12:46.800 which had more to do with taking positions in American politics than what was going on 106 00:12:46.800 --> 00:12:48.360 in Italy. 107 00:12:48.360 --> 00:12:54.080 As John Patrick Diggins documents in his book Mussolini's Italy, the View from America, 108 00:12:54.080 --> 00:13:03.960 1922 to 1941, up until the turn toward Hitler, Mussolini enjoyed remarkably good press in 109 00:13:03.960 --> 00:13:05.800 the Anglophone world. 110 00:13:05.800 --> 00:13:10.520 The New Republic, not only Winston Churchill, but the New Republic saw Italy as a model 111 00:13:10.520 --> 00:13:15.720 of Economic Reform, brought about through a strong centralized state, and while the New 112 00:13:15.720 --> 00:13:20.520 Republic contributors did not give up on the usability of the Soviet experiment, they were 113 00:13:20.520 --> 00:13:24.840 quite happy to celebrate the Italian National Revolution. 114 00:13:24.840 --> 00:13:29.680 The Columbia University professor and disciple of John Dewey, Herbert Schneider, often referred 115 00:13:29.680 --> 00:13:34.120 to the ideal of early America as Jefferson's fascism. 116 00:13:34.120 --> 00:13:39.800 In any case, it was not Ezra Pound who thought up retrospectively, thought up this retrospectively 117 00:13:39.800 --> 00:14:07.800 In a provocative study in German and found to Favon Schaff, fascism was, National Socialism was, New Deal, German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch has documented the extent to which FDR and his brain-trusters were enamored of the language and putative achievements of the Italian road to state planning. 118 00:14:07.800 --> 00:14:12.760 While FDR always despised the Germans, which may have contributed to his immediate estates 119 00:14:12.760 --> 00:14:19.160 for Hitler as an advertised German nationalist, he admired Italy's authoritarian government. 120 00:14:19.160 --> 00:14:24.360 He adopted its military analogies for economic planning and for public works. 121 00:14:24.360 --> 00:14:29.560 Defenders of the NRA, as Chauvin shows, did not shun the comparison then drawn between 122 00:14:29.560 --> 00:14:34.920 American emergency measures and fascism, but they did point out that the U.S. can incorporate 123 00:14:34.920 --> 00:14:50.640 It is important to clarify this leftist affinity from Mussolini, as Diggins does, with the 124 00:14:50.640 --> 00:14:55.440 obvious intent of separating the American left from their documentable association with 125 00:14:55.440 --> 00:14:59.940 Italian fascism, which I think he's actually embarrassed by this. 126 00:14:59.940 --> 00:15:06.740 But it is true, as Diggins and Frederico Chabot, the Italian historian, explain, that Italian 127 00:15:06.740 --> 00:15:12.020 fascism's typical routers in the United States and in England were the commercial and at 128 00:15:12.020 --> 00:15:16.980 least part of the professional class who did admire Mussolini because the trains were running 129 00:15:16.980 --> 00:15:22.980 on time, arrivando in orario, and because the horrible strikes which had torn Italy 130 00:15:22.980 --> 00:15:26.940 apart after World War I had ended. 131 00:15:26.940 --> 00:15:30.940 Italian Americans who had generally encountered social discrimination, especially at the hands 132 00:15:30.940 --> 00:15:35.940 of their fellow Catholics, Irish Catholics, view the Italian National Revolution with 133 00:15:35.940 --> 00:15:37.840 exuberant sympathy. 134 00:15:37.840 --> 00:15:43.900 This remains so beyond the invasion of Ethiopia and despite the noisy presence of the exiles, 135 00:15:43.900 --> 00:15:50.400 at least some of whom in Paris became the targets of Italian fascist assassins. 136 00:15:50.400 --> 00:15:55.620 One might imagine that southern Italian peasants settled in American city had no way of relating 137 00:15:55.620 --> 00:15:59.700 According to anti-fascist intellectuals, who had their own agendas, which were usually 138 00:15:59.700 --> 00:16:03.280 Marxist and emphatically anti-Catholic. 139 00:16:03.280 --> 00:16:07.480 Another group that generally favored the Italian regime were strong self-identified Catholics, 140 00:16:07.480 --> 00:16:13.500 particularly after Mussolini made his peace with the Vatican in 1929, thereby ending disputes 141 00:16:13.500 --> 00:16:16.720 going back to Italian unification. 142 00:16:16.720 --> 00:16:21.640 In one of Clifford Odette's plays that I saw as a teenager, I recall a devoutly Catholic 143 00:16:51.640 --> 00:17:03.640 But prominent socialist intellectuals, including George Bernard Shaw, John Dewey and FDR's advisors, found fascist Italy equally congenial for their own reasons. 144 00:17:03.640 --> 00:17:11.640 This may explain why the anti-New Deal side in American politics, including Professor Higgs, has become so anti-fascist. 145 00:17:11.640 --> 00:17:20.640 Almost all critics of FDR and his New Deal seized on comparisons between European fascism and an American centralized welfare state. 146 00:17:20.640 --> 00:17:37.640 The anti-fascist line of criticism going from Garrett Garrett, John T. Flynn, Isabel Patterson, down to many seated in this room today has focused negatively on the connection, which I think in some cases are real, between FDR and Mussolini. 147 00:17:37.640 --> 00:17:46.640 It is also a key topic of a meticulously researched thick study by libertarian historian Howard Dickman, Industrial Democracy in America. 148 00:17:46.640 --> 00:17:47.640 of America. 149 00:17:47.640 --> 00:17:53.380 Dickman explores the conceptual and policy overlaps between fascist documents, particularly 150 00:17:53.380 --> 00:18:01.720 Mussolini's Carta del Avro, the workers' chart put together in 1927 by Alfredo Rocca, Italian 151 00:18:01.720 --> 00:18:06.440 minister of justice, and the Wagner and Norris LaGuardia labor acts. 152 00:18:06.440 --> 00:18:10.600 Dickman is correct to call attention to certain shared tendencies. 153 00:18:10.600 --> 00:18:19.620 For example, the dogged attempt by Italy and the United States' Central States to determine 154 00:18:19.620 --> 00:18:28.160 work relations, partly by taking or pretending to take the part of compulsory unions against 155 00:18:28.160 --> 00:18:29.960 the captains of industry. 156 00:18:29.960 --> 00:18:34.080 He is also right to suggest that the New Deal is a move toward incorporating the economy 157 00:18:34.080 --> 00:18:40.440 into the state, in accordance with the fascist motto, tutto nello stato, niente fuori dello 158 00:18:40.440 --> 00:18:45.960 stato, nulla controllo stato, everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing 159 00:18:45.960 --> 00:18:50.680 against, nulla controllo stato, nothing against the state. 160 00:18:50.680 --> 00:18:57.720 Still, it might be asked, which regime moved on the economic front toward state control 161 00:18:57.720 --> 00:18:59.540 more decisively? 162 00:18:59.540 --> 00:19:04.380 In my book, After Liberalism, there is an implied answer to this question that I was 163 00:19:04.380 --> 00:19:06.940 too timid to state directly. 164 00:19:06.940 --> 00:19:09.820 Let me amend that cowardly oversight. 165 00:19:09.820 --> 00:19:14.160 The more ambitious move towards social democracy took place in the United States. 166 00:19:14.160 --> 00:19:19.220 What happened in Italy, and in fact in most fascist countries, was by comparison small 167 00:19:19.220 --> 00:19:20.340 beer. 168 00:19:20.340 --> 00:19:24.620 Dickman notes that in both countries, as a result of centralized control of working and 169 00:19:24.620 --> 00:19:31.340 and Bargaining Relations, compulsory unionization was enforced and the statutory agreements between 170 00:19:31.340 --> 00:19:39.340 labor and industry encouraged while the state employed mass industry unions to maintain 171 00:19:39.340 --> 00:19:43.100 economic peace by taking their side. 172 00:19:43.100 --> 00:19:48.100 One critical difference between the two situations analyzed, however, warns some attention. 173 00:19:48.100 --> 00:19:53.860 In Europe and quite conspicuously in Italy, fascist movements came to power as reactions 174 00:19:53.860 --> 00:19:58.060 Against Violence Strikes that often paralyze the economy. 175 00:19:58.060 --> 00:20:06.020 In this painfully modernizing economy, characterized by sharp social polarity, the fascists became 176 00:20:06.020 --> 00:20:11.340 Volans, Nolans, willy-nilly a force of order. 177 00:20:11.340 --> 00:20:15.980 While they claimed to be opposed to bourgeois decadence as well as Bolsheviks and anarchist 178 00:20:15.980 --> 00:20:22.520 strikers, they typically enjoyed broad support from the commercial and professional strata. 179 00:20:22.520 --> 00:20:30.840 The confederazione delle industriale italiane, the confindustria, as it's called, the confederation 180 00:20:30.840 --> 00:20:36.760 of manufacturers led by Giovanni Olavetti, as shown in Franklin Adler's monograph on 181 00:20:36.760 --> 00:20:43.580 confindustria during the fascist era, generally had very cordial relations with the ducce. 182 00:20:43.580 --> 00:20:49.680 Large industries were not required under the Carta to organize themselves into syndicate, 183 00:20:49.680 --> 00:20:53.620 and the unions under state control. 184 00:20:53.620 --> 00:20:58.760 The owners of industry thereafter called the dottori del lavoro, the givers of work, at 185 00:20:58.760 --> 00:21:04.800 all levels had vast leeway in the matter of the right to fire. 186 00:21:04.800 --> 00:21:10.000 Mussolini hesitated to do more than send a letter of rebuke to Giovanni Agnelli, the 187 00:21:10.000 --> 00:21:15.840 head of fiat, when he laid off large parts of his workforce in 1926. 188 00:21:15.840 --> 00:21:21.920 for Conta Industria, as Felice indicates in his book Mussolini al Fascista, helped draft 189 00:21:21.920 --> 00:21:27.880 the Carta, and those who, like Giovanni Bottai, Edmondo Rossoni, and other radical left-wing 190 00:21:27.880 --> 00:21:33.320 fascists, pushed for economically radical forms of fascism, allied to the trade union 191 00:21:33.320 --> 00:21:37.280 movement, were thoroughly defeated in the discussions. 192 00:21:37.280 --> 00:21:42.600 Large industrials were left in charge of the national economy once they had made minimal 193 00:21:42.600 --> 00:21:47.720 phrasiological concessions to the authors of the Carta. In the final draft produced 194 00:21:47.720 --> 00:21:53.720 by Roca, the workgivers promised to consult national employment centers in the course 195 00:21:53.720 --> 00:22:00.240 of hiring workers. There was one small line there, which is sort of very indicative of, 196 00:22:00.240 --> 00:22:07.000 you know, at least the rhetorical direction in which the owners of industry were referred 197 00:22:07.000 --> 00:22:13.000 or private enterprise, I'm sorry, was referred to as uno strumento più perfetto e più utile 198 00:22:13.000 --> 00:22:21.000 delle interesse sociali. It is a more perfect and more useful instrument of the social interest 199 00:22:21.000 --> 00:22:28.000 and it becomes instead of nel interesse della nazione, the interest of the entire nation. 200 00:22:28.000 --> 00:22:35.000 The reason I mention this to you is that in the Sharon Statement drafted by Bill Buckley in 1961, 201 00:22:35.000 --> 00:22:47.000 He defends private enterprise for exactly the same reason given in the Cate de Lavro, that it is in the interest of the nation to a private enterprise. 202 00:22:47.000 --> 00:22:54.000 I don't know whether he went there and borrowed this, you know, from this document, but it is the same, it's exactly the same language. 203 00:22:54.000 --> 00:23:03.000 And, you know, I looked at it, I think, about a month ago, and I was very struck by the fact that this was simply a translation from the Italian phrase. 204 00:23:03.000 --> 00:23:09.200 There was in fact a project pushed by the more extreme fascists in Italy, the Arditi, 205 00:23:09.200 --> 00:23:16.040 as they were called, for a carta syndicalista, for a unionization chart in which everybody, 206 00:23:16.040 --> 00:23:21.440 including industrialists, would have to organize as a labor union, you know, under the fascist 207 00:23:21.440 --> 00:23:22.440 state. 208 00:23:22.440 --> 00:23:26.440 And this would have integrated the managers, the owners of industry into a corporate state 209 00:23:26.440 --> 00:23:32.980 framework and would have placed state commissars of labor, the fiduciari, in charge of social 210 00:23:32.980 --> 00:23:40.220 Social Relations within every factory in Italy. This went absolutely nowhere. Not only because 211 00:23:40.220 --> 00:23:45.820 Mussolini spent his energy convincing Italian industrialists that property is a sacred right 212 00:23:45.820 --> 00:23:52.160 under fascism. Now, I could not imagine, you know, even President George W. Bush saying 213 00:23:52.160 --> 00:23:56.540 anything like that, you know, under our global democracy, whatever he calls the government 214 00:23:56.540 --> 00:24:01.320 of the United States today, that private property is a sacred, I couldn't even imagine anyone 215 00:24:01.320 --> 00:24:10.320 The media would beat up on him as a Nazi the next day, but Mussolini, in his letters, keeps saying that fascism considers private property a sacred right. 216 00:24:10.320 --> 00:24:29.320 But also, finally, because Confindustria had the upper hand in Italian government's plan for industrial growth, there was nothing that went into that card that did not have to be signed off on by Olivetti and other leaders of the Italian Manufacturing Union. 217 00:24:29.320 --> 00:24:30.320 Education. 218 00:24:30.320 --> 00:24:34.000 They had to agree on all the wording and nothing could get by without them. 219 00:24:34.000 --> 00:24:41.680 Now one reason for this, as Felice points out, is that fascism is made up of two groups 220 00:24:41.680 --> 00:24:47.040 which one would think would not really get along, but they're forced into the movement 221 00:24:47.040 --> 00:24:48.520 together. 222 00:24:48.520 --> 00:24:52.000 And I think both Ralph and Bob mentioned these groups. 223 00:24:52.000 --> 00:24:57.400 One is the middle class, the people who don't want socialist revolution. 224 00:24:57.400 --> 00:25:03.840 And they are referred to unceremoniously in Italian as fianchegi attori, holders, hangers-on, 225 00:25:03.840 --> 00:25:04.840 the hangers-on. 226 00:25:04.840 --> 00:25:08.480 But they make up the vast membership of your party, they're paying the dues, everything 227 00:25:08.480 --> 00:25:11.600 else, the hangers-on, the fianchegi attori. 228 00:25:11.600 --> 00:25:14.000 And they do not want any movement towards socialism. 229 00:25:14.000 --> 00:25:20.400 I mean, they're determined to sort of keep things as they are, sacredness of property, 230 00:25:20.400 --> 00:25:23.600 the owners of the industry of right to hire, do anything they want. 231 00:25:23.600 --> 00:25:26.760 Then you also have the non-unionized labor force. 232 00:25:26.760 --> 00:25:30.760 The people who do not like this, the workers who do not want to be in the socialist, they 233 00:25:30.760 --> 00:25:37.560 do not want to be part of the socialist movement, and the result of this is you have to find 234 00:25:37.560 --> 00:25:43.560 some kind of economic arrangement in which these workers are shown that you made the 235 00:25:43.560 --> 00:25:50.440 right choice, we're not going to really just deliver you to the wolves and so forth, but 236 00:25:50.440 --> 00:25:57.480 and at the same time do nothing to make the industrialist, the industriale, feel uncomfortable 237 00:25:57.480 --> 00:25:59.480 with the fascist government. 238 00:25:59.480 --> 00:26:07.640 A detail that Dickman, by the way, in his book, does not really deal with is that what 239 00:26:07.640 --> 00:26:13.340 frames the discussion about the Carta in Italy that he quotes are the economic policies leading 240 00:26:13.340 --> 00:26:14.340 up to it. 241 00:26:14.340 --> 00:26:33.340 In 1926, Mussolini and his economic minister embarked on wide-ranging deflationary measures intended to make the lira more competitive with the dollar and the pound sterling, and these measures, which have occasioned volumes of commentary, exacted enormous costs from the Italian working class. 242 00:26:33.340 --> 00:26:42.340 The deflation contributed to high unemployment, at least in the short term, and had the overall effect of reducing wages, a process that took place with government prodding. 243 00:26:42.340 --> 00:26:49.340 A purported value of this deflationary program was higher exports, but it took a while before even this benefit could be seen. 244 00:26:49.340 --> 00:27:01.340 There was also a plan then brooded about to put Italy on the gold standard from which Mussolini and Volpi, his Minister of Finance, gradually retreated, but not before giving it considerable thought. 245 00:27:01.340 --> 00:27:08.340 The Carta, which was also in the works, was viewed as a concession to the unions, the working class generally. 246 00:27:08.340 --> 00:27:15.340 Those who had borne the burden of deflation were being rewarded, but as it turned out, mostly with high-flown rhetoric. 247 00:27:15.340 --> 00:27:18.340 In the U.S., it was altogether different. 248 00:27:18.340 --> 00:27:26.340 The United States, under Franklin Roosevelt, moved in the direction of a new social order being constructed by a democratic welfare state. 249 00:27:26.340 --> 00:27:35.340 FDR's labor legislation did represent a decisive taking of sides for centralized administration and for mass labor unions 250 00:27:35.340 --> 00:27:40.340 against what Arthur Schlesinger has dismissively called the old order. 251 00:27:40.340 --> 00:27:44.940 As far as I know, the ones who drafted such laws did not quake in their boots, 252 00:27:44.940 --> 00:27:48.940 as the Duce did, about offending the upholders of private property. 253 00:27:48.940 --> 00:27:52.540 Nor do they worry about counter-revolutionary hangers-on, 254 00:27:52.540 --> 00:27:57.940 who might come to see them as the mere fear-weather friends 255 00:27:57.940 --> 00:28:01.040 who only pretended to care about private property. 256 00:28:01.040 --> 00:28:03.840 The new dealers move with wind in their sails 257 00:28:03.840 --> 00:28:09.720 toward creating a post-liberal, post-bourgeois regime that was suitable for a mass democracy 258 00:28:09.720 --> 00:28:12.400 governed by a managerial state. 259 00:28:12.400 --> 00:28:20.240 In comparison to this opera bouffe, Descartes de Lavereau, in a showcasing of the principles 260 00:28:20.240 --> 00:28:25.000 of fascist doctrine, the New Deal was indeed history of the first order.