Discusión y análisis de constructos

Mussolini’s personal dictatorship was strengthened by his ministerial shake-up of July 1932. This undid the apparent delegation in 1929 of important government office to prominent figures of the regime other than himself. Rocco went from the Justice ministry, Grandi from Foreign Affairs and Bottai from Corporations. Mussolini personally reassumed headship of the latter two, and in further reshuffles in 1933 once again became the nominal minister for all of the armed forces. The changes probably ran deeper than Mussolini’s congenital suspicion of collaborators who knew their own mind. They clearly reinforced the reality and the impression that Mussolini was, effectively, the govern-ment and that the regime’s future was ultimately dependent on himself and what he achieved. The depersonalised figure of the cult of the Duce, a leader of more than normal talents and qualities, above and beyond the fray, did correspond in some way to Mussolini’s self-imposed solitude in government, and reinforced his sense of being a man with a mission.

The self-elevation of the Duce coincided with the first serious official attempts to launch Fascism as an international phenomenon, which were clearly related to the deepening of the worldwide economic Depression. Its severity, duration and extent gave ample scope and justification to Fascist claims that it marked the crisis of liberal capitalism and parliamentary democracy, and the start of the fascist era. The formal statement of Fascist doctrine was published under Mussolini’s name in 1932. Fascist movements were emerging in other European countries and the Nazis were on the verge of power in Germany, lending credence to Mussolini’s prediction that Europe would shortly be fascist or ‘fascistised’ on the model of Fascist Italy. The officially sponsored international Volta conference in late 1932 discussed the ‘universal’

aspects of fascism. It anticipated the regime’s effort to create a fascist

‘International’ of European movements recognising the primacy of the Italian version. The launch and, as it turned out, culmination was a multinational conference in Montreux in December 1934. This gathering attracted some obscure fascist adventurers keen to get Italian patronage and funding, as well as fascist movements of some signifi-cance, such as the Romanian Iron Guard. It agreed, albeit in the loosest terms, that a defining element of international fascism was corporativism.

The Fascist ‘corporate state’ was projected as a new social and political order, a ‘Third Way’ alternative to both the socially unjust and

self-evidently dysfunctional liberal capitalism, and the state collectivism of communist Russia. As such, Italian Fascism exercised during the Depression years an appeal and fascination in European politics that was not confined simply to fascist movements.

Corporativism occupied a major place in Fascist ideology and propa-ganda in the Depression years, and significantly remained largely a matter for international consumption. In Italy itself the corporative structures reflected only too well the balance of forces and compromises underpin-ning the foundation of the regime. In 1929 Bottai had urged on the Grand Council the actual enactment of a provision in the 1926 law setting up his Ministry, for a National Council of Corporations.

Established in March 1930, it was made up of seven large sections, corporations in embryo, bringing together the employer and worker organisations covering the main branches of the economy, which also met in a general assembly and were represented on a Central Corporative Committee. The National Council appeared to have normative as well as consultative functions, which suggested a role in the co-ordination and planning of production itself. This was carried over into the 1934 law which finally created twenty-two corporations for the productive cycles of the major sectors of industry, agriculture and services. The corporations could fix the prices of goods or rates for services in their own areas and issue norms ‘to regulate economic relations and the unitary discipline of production’.¹⁷

Such provisions were for self-governing, inter-class organs of producers which could manage production in the various branches of the econ-omy and also co-ordinate production between sectors. In practice, they were inoperative. Deciphering what the corporations actually did was, to reapply Gaetano Salvemini’s phrase, like ‘looking in a dark room for a black cat which is not there’.¹⁸ But there was a basic unreality to the idea of producers’ self-management of the economy in the condi-tions of Fascist dictatorship.

The corporations were basically councils where workers’ and employers’ representatives met in the presence of PNF or Ministry of Corporations officials embodying the ‘national’ interest. Only one side, however, was genuinely representative. Members of the employers’

organisations were usually technically equipped managers actually chosen by the employers. Despite confirmation in 1934 of the barely observed principle of election to major syndical posts, the representatives of workers’ syndicates in the corporations were generally not workers or men close to workers and the environment of work. The ex-revolutionary

and interventionist syndicalists had given way since the sbloccamento of Rossoni’s national workers’ confederation in 1928 to a new breed of middle-class and careerist syndical officials drawn from the PNF and the Ministry of Corporations. There was little possibility of the corporations becoming a real forum for the harmonisation of all producers when representation was so unbalanced. Those who were most strongly represented won out. Without some equivalence of inter-est representation, the corporations were easily dominated by employers and by the pro-employer ‘productivist’ rationale which informed every government measure in the field from the 1926 syndical law onwards.

Again, the corporations’ formal powers of economic co-ordination were deliberately circumscribed by the government. All deliberations of the corporations had to be approved in the National Council of Corpor-ations assembly or, after 1935, by the Central Corporative Committee, whose convenor and president was the Head of Government. Corpora-tive regulations only had effect when issued as a decree of the Head of Government. It was the executive’s ultimate control which reassured Confindustria that economic decisions would be a matter for Mussolini and the government and that the corporative system would not become an economic planning mechanism interfering in production. This really revealed that the corporative ideal of delegated economic decision-making by self-run producer organisations was incompatible with the centralised state authority at the centre of Fascist ‘totalitarianism’. As party leaders liked to point out, Mussolini led a Fascist not a ‘corporate state’, and political control was not to be passed down to even the regime’s own permanent economic organisations.

Practically all the government’s economic measures during the Depression years were proclaimed as advances of the corporative econ-omy. But in reality, as Bottai and other Fascist corporatists realised, these were mainly emergency and ‘acorporative’ actions, a response to the depth of the economic crisis. Industrial production in Italy and worldwide was at its lowest point in 1932. It was at this juncture that the government intervened in a way that continued the policies of the revaluation crisis of the late 1920s. In June 1932 a law made the formation of consortia or cartels obligatory where a large majority of firms in any sector favoured it. By dividing up a shrinking market among existing producers, cartels deliberately limited competition and held up prices in a depressed economy.

The January 1933 law setting up a licensing scheme for new and expanded industrial plant could have become a lever for state direction

of industrial investment and development. But it worked in the same way and served the same interests as government-endorsed cartelisation.

Competition was restrained to protect the current market share of existing firms. Industrialists applied for authorisation to set up new factories and then did nothing, simply to pre-empt the entry of any potential rival firms onto their patch.

The government connived at this use of its economic rescue package, even when these emergency measures were eventually integrated with the corporative structures. From 1935 the corporations supposedly supervised consortia established in their areas. In 1937 they were responsible for the running of the licensing system, having always been expected to give an opinion on new plant applications. The Ministry of Corporations anyway in practice relied on Confindustria’s technical expertise in the evaluation of applications, while the employers’ domin-ant position within the corporations ensured that ‘productivist’ criteria prevailed. There was a real sense here of the private use of public power, of business or its biggest exponents carving up the domestic market with official endorsement.

The intrinsically Fascist character of the regime’s economic crisis management was in the continued coercion of labour through the PNF and syndicates. As in 1926–27 there were more officially imposed wage cuts between 1930 and 1934, heavier in agriculture than in industry, which prevented employed workers from enjoying the full benefits of falling prices during the Depression. A forty-hour week was similarly enforced in industry in October 1934 in order to create more employ-ment. Industrial workers with large families were in part compensated for loss of income through shorter working hours, by the introduction of family allowances, a measure soon subsumed under the regime’s continuing demographic ‘battle’.

The government’s resistance to the lira’s devaluation throughout the Depression meant a constant revaluation of the currency, as, crucially, the sterling and the dollar were devalued in 1931 and 1933. An overvalued lira contributed to a growing balance of payments deficit and the outflow of Italy’s foreign currency and gold reserves during 1933–34. It was this situation which led the government in early 1934 to set up yet another special agency, the Institute of Foreign Exchange, through which it could both monopolise and regulate foreign exchange and currency trading. From February 1935 quotas were imposed on imports, in relation to the availability of foreign currency to pay for them.

This gave a further impetus to import substitutionism and autarky.

The most important government salvage operation during the Depression occurred completely outside the corporative framework and was never even formally accommodated to it. A special feature of Italian capitalist development from the late nineteenth century had been the interlocking of the major banks and industries. Banks lent to and invested in industry and held industrial shares as collateral. The crisis in industrial production was so severe during the Depression that the stability of the country’s banking system was also threatened. The banks had lent money to now ailing industries, whose shares in the hands of the banks were declining in value.

A series of attempted rescues of banks and industries using public money was made in 1931. Mussolini in late 1932 delegated the working out of a definitive salvage operation not to the Ministry of Corporations, but to the Finance Minister, Guido Jung, and Alberto Beneduce, a tech-nocrat with feet in both private industry and state-run credit institutions.

The outcome was the establishment of the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI) in 1933, a kind of giant state holding company.

IRI took over the industrial share assets of the three banks, in return for paying off the banks’ enormous debts to the Bank of Italy, incurred during the unsuccessful operations of 1931. This colossal public payment of private industrial and banking losses finally ended the connection between the banks and industry. It was the start of a reorgan-isation of the entire banking and credit sector culminating in the 1936 banking law. The banks were restricted to supplying normal short-term commercial credit, while for medium- and long-term capital investment, industries went to the stock market and mainly state-owned financial institutions.

These were very significant and lasting changes in the organisation of the capitalist economy in Italy. But it was probably not the original intention to make IRI anything other than a temporary dispensary for sick industries in extraordinary economic conditions. IRI was meant to reorganise, rationalise and reprivatise the industries whose shares it now held, and this happened in the case, for example, of the profitable electricity companies. But not all of IRI’s holdings were as attractive to private enterprise. IRI’s existence during and beyond Fascism rested on its continued responsibility for administering the loss-making industries which the private sector would not touch, especially the iron and steel, shipbuilding and navigation companies. With IRI, state intervention in the economy took on a new institutional form. Through the entrepre-neurial public body, the state had a sometimes majority share-holding in

many firms which retained the structure and management of private companies. The boards of IRI’s companies were filled by the same men who were on the boards of businesses in the increasingly monopolistic private sector.

All this ran parallel to the corporations and resembled a ‘consortial’

rather than a ‘corporate’ state. It was clear that the government was not prepared to entrust its economic rescue measures during the Depression, which had to be rapid and functional in effect, to the complicated mechanisms of the corporations. The problem was how to reconcile the corporative apparatus with increasing state direction of the economy.

The government resolved it by ignoring the former and developing an alternative network of public bodies with economic functions.

State economic intervention was initially made necessary by the severity and duration of the Depression, and then by the imperatives of Fascist foreign policy. By late 1934, planning and spending for the con-quest of Ethiopia was under way. The various public agencies which had originated as emergency measures of the Depression were now used to regulate an economy being geared up for war. Italy’s growing isolation from the international economy was reflected in the collapse in value of its foreign trade. As for other countries which sought some kind of refuge in protected domestic and imperial markets, this was a consequence of the Depression and also in Italy’s case, of the govern-ment’s refusal to devalue. But in the end it was the Fascist governgovern-ment’s military and imperialist foreign policy, and the knock-on effect of directing the economy towards autarky, which finally scuppered the corporative system as a way of organising society and the economy.

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5 The Creation of the Fascist