The New Italy

In a speech of studied gravity before the National Council of Corporations in Rome last Tuesday Signor Mussolini declared to his hearers that the economic crisis under which the whole of creation groans and travails today is not a crisis in the private capitalist system, but of it. The Duce went further: the capitalist system had had its day. Its dynamic phase endured from 1830 to 1870; the static lasted only a decade, from 1870 to 1880; then came the phase of ‘decadence’, inaugurated by a system of cartels and trusts, and developing into a state-regulated economy. In this process the private capitalist system had ceased to be merely economic; it had become a widespread social problem, under whose baleful influence we were now standardized from the cradle to the grave: ‘a diabolical thing!’. These seem strange words from the creator of Europe’s corporative state par excellence; but stranger still followed. Signor Mussolini thought that Italy was not a capitalist nation, and never would be one. The corporative principle will in future secure the people’s well-being; therefore the new Chamber of Deputies, that relic of capitalist politics, when elected, will vote its own euthanasia and straight away proceed to commit it. Thereafter the National Council of Corporations is to assume power. The old parliamentary system, born with dynamic capitalism and liberalism, was now, like them, ripe for death. The Italian corporative renascence today, in a world of general crisis, would then impose itself everywhere, in Signor Mussolini’s view.