Exercises on Fascism

Did support for the Triple Entente in World War I bring good results for the Italians? Justify your answer.

Point out two situations that indicated the rise of the fascist movement among Italians.

Highlight some of the key actions of Italian foreign policy in the early years of Mussolini's government.

(UFMG 2008) Read this excerpt:

“Milan black shirts, comrades workers! Five years ago, the columns of a temple that seemed to defy the centuries collapsed. What was underneath these ruins? The end of a period of contemporary history, the end of the liberal and capitalist economy [...] Faced with this confirmed and irrevocable decline, two solutions appear:the first would be to nationalize the entire economy of the Nation. We reject it, as we do not want to multiply the number of state employees by ten. Another is imposed by logic:it is corporatism encompassing the producing elements of the Nation and, when I say producers, I do not mean only industrialists but also workers. Fascism established the equality of all in the face of work. The difference exists only in the scale of the various responsibilities. [...] The State must solve the problem of distribution in such a way that the paradoxical and cruel fact of misery in the midst of opulence is no longer seen.”

(Speech by Mussolini to Milanese workers on October 7, 1934. In:MATTOSO, Kátia M. de Queirós. Texts and documents for the study of contemporary history (1789-1963). São Paulo:Hucitec:Edusp, 1977. p. 175-177.)

From this reading and considering other knowledge on the subject, it is INCORRECT to say that Italian fascism:

a) was anti-capitalist and proposed to install a new collectivist social order, without classes.
b) made a vehement defense of work, highlighting it as a unifying element of social forces.
c) proposed the union of the capital and work, mediated by the State and based on corporatism.
d) he considered himself the creator of a new time and a new man, in which he rivaled the socialist discourse.

How did the approval of the Carta Del Lavoro laws determine the strengthening of Benito Mussolini's government in Italy?

Not. The huge financial and territorial losses of the Italian government were not expressed in territorial gains that could compensate for the investment made in this conflict. In such a way, the Italians lived a serious economic crisis marked by the increase of inflation, the stagnation of several productive sectors and unemployment. In the political field, the government was unable to promote a coalition capable of overcoming the problems that urgently needed to be resolved.

Firstly, we can highlight the action of the fascist militias, the so-called black shirts, which carried out combat actions against socialist and communist groups. Later, the so-called “March on Rome”, held in 1922, was able to expose the rapid rise of the fascist movement among Italians and impose the arrival of leader Benito Mussolini to the government of the country.

Interested in expanding the country's economic gains, Benito Mussolini developed an imperialist policy that resulted in the conquest of Ethiopian territory, located in Africa. Such an action, carried out at great cost, ended up destabilizing the organization of Italian forces in their future insertion in the conflicts of World War II.

Letter A. By having a position contrary to liberalism, Italian fascism cannot be considered anti-capitalist because it adopts measures of such a nature interested in the development of the economy and the strengthening of the bourgeois class. At the same time, we must emphasize that the fascists believed in the mobilization of classes in favor of the nation and not in the simple extinction of them.

After these laws were passed, workers were organized into cooperatives closely controlled by the Fascist government. In this way, constant strikes and political opposition were forcibly replaced by a logic in which the strengthening of links with the State determined the notion that national interests became more important than the class struggle between workers and the bourgeois class. .