Fascism and Syndicalism
By Benito Mussolini
Dear friends!
With great enthusiasm I carry out the task entrusted to me by the Directorate of the Party, by the Milanese Fascist League and by the Fascist Parliamentary Group, namely bringing the cordial and fraternal greetings of all Italian Fascism to the first National Assembly of Syndical Guilds. I am not being rhetorical when I say great enthusiasm. These words truly represent my intimate thoughts and feelings.
If I may be immodest, I remind you that I was one of the first people in Italy in the immediate post-war period who tried and succeeded in spreading the principles of national syndicalism or Fascist syndicalism. The effort was not in vain, because today, after such a short space of time, we have the privilege of witnessing this impressive gathering of authentic forces of the true Italian working people. Now it is no longer a question of investigating whether or not we should implement syndicalism, because the question has already been solved by the practical necessities of life, leaving no time for theories.
Gentlemen!
When one wants to win, it is necessary to sabotage and destroy the enemy in all his shelters, in all his trenches. As long as Fascism concerned itself mainly with foreign policy problems, the Socialists maintained an attitude of hostility towards us because it depicted us as imperialists and warmongers anxious for new wars, but in reality they knew that these accusations were false.
When we walked directly into their backyard, i.e. when we tried to collect the working masses and when we formed trade unions and cooperatives, the Socialists became furious because they felt that we were trespassing on their turf and threatening to take away their most sensitive and vital support base.
But there is a much simpler and much deeper reason, dear friends, and it is this: workers are also—and above all—part of the Nation.
Spiritual workers, manual workers. Our syndicalism includes all of them and establishes the necessary hierarchies between them. It is evident—and even Lenin has recognized this in Russia—that the engineer must be paid more than the manual laborer.
There are, as I said, between sixteen and twenty million spiritual and manual workers. Can we neglect them? Should we consider them as a vile and intractable class? Should we abandon this class—which is neither vile nor intractable—and allow them to continue to be exploited by the Red demagogues? No, we can not allow this! If we truly want to make the Nation great, then we can not ignore the working classes. The working classes—quiet, orderly, conscious—are a guarantee to the greatness of the Fatherland, not a hindrance.
Therefore we must implement syndicalism. But which syndicalism? It is on this point that I wish to draw your attention.
The men who are leading the National Syndical Guilds give me the highest expectation that Fascist syndicalism will never be a copy of socialist or extremist syndicalism. Our syndicalism must be qualitative, not quantitative. We can not reject the masses, but at the same time we must not look to them too much and flatter them and promise them things that can not realistically be given. Just as political Fascism represents an aristocracy in Italian national society—an aristocracy of courage, will and faith—so Fascist syndicalism must gather the aristocracies of the proletariat, because those who possess quality will eventually sweep away quantity, if they truly wish and desire to do so.
My friend Rossoni, whose activity I have been following for ten years, is inspired by this criteria. He was one of the first in America to proclaim in his newspaper that the Fatherland is not denied—because above all it is ridiculous to deny it—but conquered. Having lived abroad for a long time, he became convinced that classes—not two, but two hundred—are certainly a reality, but that this same reality is constituted by this irrepressible, historical, physiological and moral fact: the Nation. We must therefore reconcile these three elements in Fascist syndicalism: the Nation, production, and the interests of the working classes.
It is therefore necessary for Fascist syndicalism to be the result, the harmonic and harmonious fusion of the past, which teaches us and has handed down great things to us, and of the future, towards which we strive with all our strength; of law and duty; of acquired experiences. This must be and this will be Italian Fascist syndicalism. And next to political Fascism—which, aside from the Bolshevik phenomenon, is most certainly the most interesting and richest phenomenon of destiny that arose in post-war Europe—Fascist syndicalism must arise, and it will liquidate all the after-effects of those socialist dogmas which were collapsed as a result of the war.
Fascist syndicalism must constitute the impetuous and overwhelming youth of the Italian proletariat which has rediscovered the Fatherland and which wants to make it prosperous, great and free. It must be open, therefore, to these first avant-gardes of Fascist workers who have proven how much sacrifice is in their souls in Rovigo, Ferrara and Bologna! Open to the whole aristocracy of labor, because it must prepare the way for the new and larger destinies of the Fatherland.
