Fascism

Fascism was born in Milan on Sunday the 23rd of March, 1919. War veterans, syndicalists who had supported the war and Futurist intellectuals gathered in the meeting room of the Milan Industrial and Commercial Alliance, overlooking Piazza San Sepolcro, to "declare war against socialismÐ'...because it has opposed nationalism." Mussolini called his movement the Fasci di Combattimento, which can be translated to "fraternities of combat." Fascism obtained its name and took its first steps in Italy, expressing nationalism, anti-capitalism, and active violence against both bourgeois and socialist enemies. The Fascist program, issued two months later, was an inquisitive combination of patriotism and radical socialism. On the national side, Fascism called for Italian expansion in the Balkans and around the Mediterranean. On the radical side, the movement proposed a reduction of the age of voters to eighteen years, abolition of the upper house, convocation of a national assembly to draft a new constitution for the state, an eight-hour working day, worker participation in "the technical management of industry", "the partial expropriation of all kinds of wealth" by a heavy and progressive tax on capital, confiscations of certain Church properties and eighty-five percent of war profits. The experience of the First World War has been frequently studied as the immediate cause for the rise of Fascism. The successful campaign to bring Italy into the war in May 1915 first brought together the founding elements of Italian Fascism. "The right to the political succession belongs to us", announced Mussolini at the founding meeting of the Fasci di Combattimento in March 1919, "because we were the ones who pushed the country into war and led its victory."