the war caused a political hiatus, by 1919 Italy had become increasingly unstable with factory occupations, the rise of ‘Bolshevism’, and increased militant working-class activity. Opposed to this were the bourgeois and church-based parties, the industrial aristocracy, royalists, mainstream politicians and opportunists like Mussolini who moved from socialism to fascism. The Russian Revolution had frightened European capitalists, the bourgeoisie and the clergy, so raising the spectre of communism served as a useful tool for the right wing: Mussolini talked up the ‘Red Peril’ to justify strike-breaking and violence against workers. Following the syndicalist factory occupations of 1920, which some saw as a precursor to social revolution, fascism seemed to present a solution for the Italian mainstream against increased working-class militancy: in September, half a million workers had occupied the factories. Mussolini’s skill as an orator and propagandist (he was a journalist by trade), combined with his natural charisma, gave the impression of a strong man who could lead Italy into the future and away from the disruption.
Mussolini’s fascism was essentially placatory, attempting to appease church, state and crown, as well as the bourgeoisie and working class. There was less a rigid ideology and more of a set of multilateral platitudes that Mussolini used with some dexterity to appeal to all those who felt strongly about unity and nation and feared the ‘Red Terror’. He was not exempt from utilising socialist and anti-capitalist rhetoric to appeal to the sections of the working class who felt disenfranchised by the triumvirate of God, government and sovereign as and when appropriate. Early fascism attracted professional soldiers, students who had missed out on the fun of war and the Italian futurist art movement (whose Russian counterparts were, on the contrary, pro-Bolshevik), alongside shopkeepers, smaller business owners and some factory bosses. They were initially attracted to fascism’s simple answers dressed up in fancy hats with the chance of a bit of argy-bargy. There was also a strong criminal element, not just the violent, that were attracted (then as now) to fascism, which was exemplified in the later gangsterism of local fascist leaders. Mussolini realised the youthful and adventurist appeal of fascism and began to organize the Squadristi, a fascist militia, into a national organization that eventually usurped local government, police and military control in certain towns and cities. Armed with their manganello clubs, the Squadristi were free to attack the members and organizations of the left.
The years 1919 and 1920 were the years of factory occupations and militant working-class opposition by anarchists, syndicalists, communists and socialists. These became known as the Biennia Rosso, the Red Years, and along with post-war scarcity and unrest, inflation, increased working-class agitation for better working conditions, and the fear of Red Revolution, enflamed the consternation of the bourgeois and capitalist classes. Fascism played on this and presented a strong-armed, patriotic response, an ideology of action not words. Many of the workers’ concerns were economic, but given the strength of militant organizations they took on a revolutionary aspect, particularly ‘by the Anarchist and Anarcho-syndicalists where they were influential in the labour movement in Liguria, Tuscany and the Marche’.9 The factory council movements in militant cities like Milan and Turin also presented a threat to the ownership of the means of production. The most prominent working-class organizations were the Socialist Party of Italy ( PSI), the council communists, and the anarchists and syndicalists, whose voices were heard in Antonio Gramsci’s newspaper L’Ordine Nuovo (New Order) and Malatesta’s Umanita Nova, and it was the latter who said prophetically, ‘if we do not go on to the end we shall pay with bloody tears for the fears we are now causing the bourgeoisie’.10 The industrial class and other concerned affected parties, such as farmers and landowners, helped finance the fascist organization who also had the tacit backing of the church, state and crown against the rise of ‘Godless Bolshevism’.
Fascism benefits from either real or perceived crises and plays on the fears of the bourgeoisie and leaders of capital, and Mussolini played on these fears, presenting himself as an antidote to both social and industrial unrest. Political aggression was fetishized by Mussolini and was an inherent part of his fascist ideology of action, of taking control of the situation using might rather than ‘right’, and of attracting moderates and right wingers who were scared of the ‘crisis in law and order and by the increase in violence. On the left, this took the traditional forms of intimidation, connected with strikes, riots and protests in the piazza.’11 The factory occupations of 1920 had proved to be a pivotal moment for the working-class movement, which could not transform the situation into a full-blown revolution. Mussolini capitalised on this as proof of the Bolshevist threat, and the failure of the anarchists, syndicalists and socialists proved to be decisive (the communists were yet to split away from the PSI and were not yet influential in the syndicates).
Although the squads were not overtly active as strike-breakers in this instance it was something they would later become professional at, thus emphasising the anti-working-class nature of fascism. The fascist squads involved themselves in labour disputes, protecting scabs and intimidating socialist councils and other organizations. The squads were active against syndicalists in Genoa in 1922 and broke the union hold over the docks in order to implement scab labour, something that the ship owners no doubt welcomed with relief. In 1922, the Socialists called a general strike, which again roused bourgeois fears of working-class revolt and saw Squadristi actions against militants.
The Squadristi
The whole espirit de corps of the blackshirts was concentrated in the squad.
—Adrian Lyttelton in The Seizure of Power
It is unlikely that Mussolini would have achieved his political success without the use of violent gangs to intimidate the opposition. He had always seen political violence as some sort of redemptive medicine, and this reached its apotheosis in the Squadristi who operated in a gangster, extra-legal manner and became answerable only to the local leaders.
After Mussolini took power in 1923, the squads operated as a paramilitary force to implement the fascist programme—a programme that seemed vague at best and opportunistic and contradictory at worst. Italian fascism, it would seem, was whatever Mussolini wanted it to be at any given point.
The squads were led by the Ras (after the Ethiopian term for boss) and grew in such strength that their local power eclipsed institutional power. Even sympathisers, including Mussolini, worried about their autonomy and had difficulty controlling their violent excesses. The squads organized ‘punitive expeditions,’ usually in trucks lent by military or police sympathisers, against political opposition, and eventually controlled their locality through intimidation and often murder. The squads also occupied socialist cooperatives and forced peasants out of their collectives and back into the hands of the landowners. Typical squad members were students, ex-soldiers and tradesmen, as well as professional criminals, and there was often ‘a loose, informal relationship between a group of adolescents, somewhat resembling that of a youth gang’.12 The squads represented the idealization of fascist action and the embodiment of the political violence that was so central to Mussolini’s ideas—at meetings Mussolini would boast that he preferred weaponry and thuggishness to the more legitimate ballot. However, once the ‘Red Threat’ had been pacified, the Squadristi turned to more lucrative ventures such as extortion, blackmail and drugs.
AVANTI!
One of the Squadristi’s first acts of outright political violence, led by Marinetti, the Futurist polemicist, was the burning of the socialist Avanti newspaper offices in Milan in 1919. The printing presses were destroyed and this arson attack operated as crude censorship as well as violent intimidation. Avanti was the newspaper at which Mussolini himself had worked between 1912 and 1914 before he donned the black shirt of fascism. A fascist group also attacked a socialist parade with bombs, and the police did very little to stop it: ‘[ Mussolini] took good note that when the victims of street violence were on the extreme left the police would
