Fascism in power loses social base [18]

Wellred

Core Argument

The chapter argues that fascism, once securely in power, inexorably loses its original social base, transforming from a mass movement rooted in petty-bourgeois desperation into a hollow military-police dictatorship. The core narrative traces the trajectory of Italian fascism from its rise to its decay, culminating in military collapse. The bourgeoisie, lacking the reserves of stronger imperialist powers, intensified exploitation of the Italian masses after the post-war crisis. The proletariat’s revolutionary potential was sabotaged by reformist leadership, leaving the ruined middle class—which could have been won to socialism—to turn in despair to Mussolini’s bands, financed by big industrialists and protected by the state. Once in power, however, fascism fails to halt the impoverishment of the petty bourgeoisie; instead, the totalitarian state accelerates it. The regime’s initial support ebbs away, leaving a bureaucratic dictatorship sustained not by strength but by the apathy and demoralisation of the Italian masses, themselves a product of the betrayals by their own organisations.

The chapter draws on the historical context of post-war Italy, the rise of Mussolini in 1922, the Matteotti crisis, and the subsequent consolidation of fascist rule. It uses the Abyssinian war and intervention in Spain as evidence of the regime’s desperate outward expansion, which only deepened internal misery. The key polemic is directed against the reformist socialist leadership, whose clinging to “legal” methods blocked the working class from overthrowing fascism when it was vulnerable. The chapter also implicitly argues against the British ruling class’s mockery of Italian “cowardice,” insisting that the army’s collapse—composed mainly of exploited peasants who saw landlords, not foreign enemies, as their real opponents—was a product of fascism’s internal rot. Trotsky’s analysis is invoked as authoritative: only a sharp shock, such as military defeat, could rouse the masses from lethargy. The chapter concludes that Italy’s defeats revealed the regime’s bankruptcy, and a molecular process of recovery had already begun, evidenced by strikes, peasant revolts, army mutinies, and troops captured while singing “Bandiera Rossa.” The fascist edifice, rotten for two decades, had no live element left.