Here's a clue:
By 1938, after Italy, for all intents and purposes, had emerged from the effects of the international depression, the entitites under the control of the IRI proceeded to produce 67 percent of Italy's ferrous minerals, 77 percent of cast iron, and 45 percent of its steel. About 80 percent of all shipbuilding undertaken on thepeninsula was done under the auspices of Finmare - and Finmeccanica was producing 40 percent of all machine products. The major part of all infrastructure development was the product of the efforts of similar parastate entities. In effect, by the end of the 1930s, the economy of Fascist Italy was the most extensively state controlled in all of Europe - with the exception of the Soviet Union. (from A. James Gregor's 'Mussolini's Intellectuals")
When Mussolini said he was a socialist and that he believed in state control and state direction, these weren't idle words meant to cover up his capitalist streak. Il Duce really did believe in such a state - indeed in one where the economy was organised through "national confederations of syndical organisations" rather than through the market. There is nothing right-wing - if by right-wing you mean conservative or (in the traditional rather than American sense) liberal - about Fascism. It is just another bastard child of socialism.
....
1 comment:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/trial-Mussolini-CASSIUS-Michael-FOOT/dp/B001E087GE
"“I could not help being charmed, like so many other people have been, by Signor Mussolini’s gentle and simple bearing and by his calm, detached poise in spite of so many burdens and dangers. Secondly, anyone could see that he thought of nothing but the lasting good, as he understood it, of the Italian people, and that no lesser interest was of the slightest consequence to him. If I had been an Italian I am sure that I should have been whole-heartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism. I will, however, say a word on an international aspect of fascism. Externally, your movement has rendered service to the whole world. The great fear which has always beset every democratic leader or a working class leader has been that of being undermined by someone more extreme than he. Italy has shown that there is a way of fighting the subversive forces which can rally the masses of the people, properly led, to value and wish to defend the honour and stability of civilised society. She has provided the necessary antidote to the Russian poison. Hereafter no great nation will be unprovided with an ultimate means of protection against the cancerous growth of Bolshevism.”
Post a Comment