Page:L. W. - Fascism, Its History and Significance (1924).pdf/23

 Rh been bitter. In November, 1922, when the Fascist government was in power, an attack on the eight-hour day of the State railway was made. The Fascist Railway Union in Naples retaliated by seizing the Nation and driving out the Government officials, who were endeavouring to enforce the new hours system. This revolt, like so many others, was suppressed, but it is symptomatic of the workers' attitude to the Fascist regime even inside the National Corporations.

The Fascists have given figures of membership which indicate a very high percentage of workers organised in the Corporations. There is no doubt that a large number of workers joined the Corporations out of fear: they saw what happened to active members of the genuine Unions, and they hoped to escape the wrath of their masters by enrolling in the Yellow Unions. Their great value to Fascism lay in the fact that they brought the masses under the ideological influence of Fascism and gave the Fascists unparalleled opportunities for propaganda. It was through the Corporations that Fascism, which had been an isolated terrorist movement and had developed into an organised political party, now finally became a genuine mass organisation in the sense that it controlled the minds and actions of the majority of the workers. When that point had been reached, the seizure of the power of the State became possible.

But this was in fact only achieved through further acts of treachery on the part of the right wing leaders of the working class. These had, by their advocacy of the evacuation of the factories, first opened the road to the Fascists. Then, as the terror developed, appalled by the consequences of their weakness, they could conceive no better remedy than an abject surrender—which they called "complete passivity till the storm blew over!" From the extreme of futile pacifism, the leaders rushed to another and (in the circumstances) disastrous policy. Turati, in July, 1922, made efforts to secure inclusion in Facta's newly formed cabinet, but the bourgeois terms were impossibly high. This left Turati and his friends in a difficult position, and they made a bold bid to recover their prestige by a move to the left. They declared a general Strike. But the movement was badly organised. Whether the reformists were determined to bring about a failure so that they might use it as an argument against direct action, or whether they blundered through incompetence, is not clear. What is beyond dispute is that the declaration of a Strike and its immediate and total collapse played into the hands of the Fascists. "The Bolshevik danger" was the slogan. The Fascists could point to the frivolity and the ineffectiveness of the socialist leaders as an awful warning of what might happen if the socialists obtained power. And as the labour movement broke up under the badness of its leadership,