Fascist by design Italy’s Lessons for Neoliberal Democracies

Squadrismo

Benito Mussolini’s seizure of power in 1922 was not a revolution, but the culmination of deliberate political choices by conservatives and liberals seeking to quell the social unrest of 1919–1920, known as biennio rosso (the red biennium).

Post-war Italy faced one of capitalism’s gravest crises. The Italian economist Clara Mattei writes that an anti-capitalist awakening was possible given the state interventionism that Italy employed like the other warring nations to confront the enormities of the war-production efforts. Entire sectors were collectivised as the government employed more workers and regulated the cost and supply of labour, showing that wage relations were political choices rather than natural economic equilibrium. Unions became more powerful, and workers realised that they had the leverage to demand more social rights, supported by the work of leftist intellectuals like Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti.

With inflation skyrocketing, an unprecedented social upheaval swept the country. The revolutionary movement culminated in 1920, concentrated in northern Italy but expanding across the whole national territory. In this context where landowners, industrialists and centre-right politicians feared the subversion of society and erosion of national values, Benito Mussolini, a failed politician, gave them a tool to protect their interests: squadrismo. 

Squadrismo was the movement of fascist action squads targeting socialists, communists, and revolutionaries. Through these squads, fascism took root as a violent counter-revolutionary force wherever elites perceived the state to be unable to protect property and hierarchy. It also answered a sense of national victimhood and decline that followed World War I. Decline was blamed on individualistic liberalism, falling birth-rates, class conflict, and foreign influences. News outlets like The Economist and Il Sole mirrored elite sentiment, portraying fascists as patriots who had ended the Bolshevik threat by ‘abandoning legal ways’ to save the nation. The new ways involved beatings, kidnappings, murders and the forced administration of castor oil, especially in socialist towns, while state authorities turned a blind eye.

Within a short time, squadrismo became entrenched in local politics, and Mussolini’s popularity among elites soared. In 1921, the liberal Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti called elections and put forward a conservative alliance known as Blocco Nazionale, a right-wing coalition including Mussolini’s new Fasci di Combattimento. The socialist front held, however, and Blocco Nazionale did not win, but Mussolini became the third most voted parliamentarian and gained 35 seats. Successive government crises in 1921 and 1922 allowed him to consolidate power within parliament.

Mussolini used fear of socialism, conservative compliance, state authorities’ acquiescence, and threat of violence to finally seize power. On 28 October 1922, tens of thousands of fascist Blackshirts, Camicie Nere, were camped outside Rome – poorly equipped and in dire conditions – a bluff that could have been easily exposed by the royal garrisons defending the city. Yet the monarch, Victor Emmanuel III, did not sign the martial law decree and offered the position of prime minister to Mussolini. On official royal invitation, Mussolini arrived in Rome on 30 October. The following day, tens of thousands of Blackshirts were allowed in the city for a royal salute. The ‘vigorous fascist revolution’ (la gagliarda rivoluzione fascista) immortalised in memory was the mythification of this bluff.

Once in power, Mussolini destroyed the very liberal democracy that gave him the tools and expedients to neutralise socialist unrest. Every time they faced a political choice, elites chose the anti-socialist, counter-revolutionary one, paving Mussolini’s road to power by accepting compromise after compromise in an attempt to save and restore the country’s capital and order through the means of fascist squadrismo. It was not the strength of the Blackshirts but the cowardice of the monarchy and conservatives’ refusal to risk their own force that secured power for Mussolini. In November 1922, the Italian stock market soared: capitalism had been saved.

This first iteration of far-right political violence shows how the defence of capitalism and the fear of social upheaval led elites to tolerate and legitimise violence as an instrument of order. Here, political violence was not just the use of force but a deliberate political strategy, framed as necessary to preserve both capitalist order and national identity. What began as extra-legal violence by squadristi was then absorbed into the state itself, giving life to the fascist dictatorship under Il Duce.

This essay will not narrate the horrors of this period. After 20 years, Italy was freed from Nazi-Fascism by the resistance and the Allies. Mussolini was killed by partisans in 1945 as he was fleeing to Switzerland. He was hung upside down in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto.

The history of neofascist terrorism in Italy during the anni di piombo (1969–1982) is a history of rogue secret services, state complicity, cover-ups, and foreign interference. The expression was borrowed from Margarethe von Trotta’s film Die bleierne Zeit, which won the Golden Lion at the 38th Venice International Film Festival in 1978.

Marked by political violence from both far-right and far-left actors, the period saw the latter, such as Brigate Rosse, Prima Linea, and Nuclei Armati Proletari, aiming their attack towards the heart of the state by targeting authorities, officials, and trade unionists. Neofascist terrorism, in contrast, operated covertly as part of a strategy of tension, defined as the use of political violence to instill fear among the population and thereby justify an authoritarian turn.

This period cannot be separated from the incomplete process of defascistisation after 1945. The 1946 Togliatti amnesty ensured that large parts of the civil service, judiciary, police and military remained staffed by former fascists, allowing fascist culture and networks to persist within the state apparatus. And although the Constitution banned the re-organisation of the Fascist Party, former fascist officials quickly returned to politics and public life. For example, Giorgio Almirante, former Head of Cabinet in the Nazi-fascist Repubblica di Salò and writer for La Difesa della Razza, founded the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) party to preserve fascism’s political legacy. Licio Gelli, a former liaison between fascist authorities and Nazi Germany, became Venerable Master of the clandestine far-right Masonic lodge, Propaganda Due (P2), which had an important role in the years of lead.

During the Cold War, Italy became a geopolitical frontline. The presence of the largest communist party in Western Europe, combined with renewed labour mobilisation in 1968, alarmed conservative forces and Western allies. Just as in the 1920s, it was when the capitalist hierarchy appeared fragile that far-right violence re-emerged. In this context, this was closely rooted in MSI and its offshoots, Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale. Key figures moved between these organisations, maintaining both political and operational continuity.

The Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan, which killed 17 people and injured 88, is the event that marked the beginning of the anni di piombo and the so-called massacre phase of the strategy of tension. Initial investigations blamed anarchists, following a ‘red trail’. Later inquiries uncovered a ‘black trail’, exposing the role of neofascist groups and deliberate efforts to shift responsibility onto the left. The Istituto Treccani describes the massacre as an act of extremist groups, notably Ordine Nuovo, acting alongside rogue sectors of the Italian security apparatus in response to the powerful cycle of social struggles in 1968 and 1969, and to the electoral rise of the Italian Communist Party (PCI).

The involvement of rogue sectors of the state during this period proved to be on a much larger scale and of a more systematic nature. For example, the judgments in the Piazza della Loggia bombing in Brescia exposed that gendarmerie officials diverted the investigations of the attacks. Moreover, reports indicated the strategic involvement of the CIA in instigating and supporting these waves of right-wing terrorism in Italy during the 1970s. This support probably came in connection with a broader European, NATO-linked ‘stay behind’ operation which in Italy, under the code name Gladio, took the form of a covert paramilitary structure.

Judicial and parliamentary inquiries revealed links between neofascist militants, sectors of the secret services, national gendarmerie units and the far-right Masonic lodge P2 to sustain the strategy of tension. These relationships involved systematic obstruction through depistaggi (cover-ups and false leads) that diverted investigations. Members of P2 also participated in the failed Golpe Borghese coup attempt of 1970. 

Yet this strategy ultimately failed, not because Italian society was immune to authoritarianism, but because the dominant political and economic elites did not require an overt authoritarian restructuring of the state to protect the capital order, as neoliberalism took hold of Italy in the 1970s and 1980s. As Nicos Poulantzas argued, the capitalist state proved capable of containing social unrest through what he called authoritarian statism: intensified state control combined with the hollowing out of democracy.

By the end of the anni di piombo, the far-right had to recontextualise itself in a world where socialist revolution had failed, the Soviet Union was collapsing, and capitalism was no longer under threat.

With the political crisis of the early 1990s and the dissolution of the mainstream parties, the MSI leader Gianfranco Fini rebranded the party as Alleanza Nazionale (AN) while rhetorically embracing the constitution and anti-fascism. In 1994, AN entered government through an alliance with the business tycoon and P2 member Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. In 2019 Berlusconi himself stated that Forza Italia had ‘legitimised and constitutionalised the Fascists’ back in 1994. This eventually led to the rise of Giorgia Meloni, who began in the MSI and later joined Alleanza Nazionale.

It is here that Nicos Poulantzas’ concept of authoritarian statism becomes crucial for understanding Italy’s trajectory. Writing in the late 1970s, Poulantzas argued that neoliberalism does not diminish the state but re-organises it, producing ‘an intensification of state control over every sphere of socio-economic life, combined with a decline in democratic institutions and popular freedoms.’ The state becomes stronger and more centralised, as democratic participation and social protections are hollowed out.

As neoliberalism took hold in the 1980s, key levers of democracy were outsourced to technocratic institutions. The former Minister of the Economy Guido Carli wrote:

The European Union implies … the abandonment of the mixed economy, the abandonment of economic planning, the redefinition of the modalities of composition of public expenditure, the restriction of the powers of parliamentary assemblies in favor of government . . . the repudiation of the concept of free social provisions (and the subsequent reform of healthcare and social security systems) … the reduction of the presence of the state in the financial and industrial systems …the abandonment of price controls and tariffs.

This meant that the terrain of left-wing struggle (economic planning, redistribution, social rights) had gradually moved beyond democratic reach. The revolutionary left that had fuelled the biennio rosso and 1968 protests could no longer grasp the system it opposed. And while Berlusconi always maintained an almost comical stance against communism, with slogans like ‘you will always be poor communists’ (sarete sempre dei poveri comunisti), he embodied exactly this shift. As Enzo Traverso observes, Berlusconi’s governments did not revive classical fascism, but they ‘introduced a cultural and political environment in which fascist genealogies could reappear without scandal’. Under Berlusconi, media concentration, personalised executive power, and the demonisation of critics as communists reshaped the political field. The police brutality and human rights violations that surrounded the 2001 G8 in Genoa, where protesters were beaten, tortured and forced to chant fascist slogans, were a clear demonstration of authoritarian statism in practice – where coercion was no longer presented as dictatorship, but as the defence of public order within a neoliberal democracy that now safeguarded the social and capital hierarchy within its own state structure.

From Berlusconi onwards, fascism’s political legacy in Italy has been steadily normalised. The far-right no longer needed to overthrow the liberal order; it could operate within it. Neoliberal restructuring had already eroded the capacity of democratic institutions to represent popular interests. Power shifted from parliaments to executives, citizens to markets, politics to technocracy. Within this landscape, the old fascist logic of hierarchy, nationalism and exclusion could comfortably reassert itself.

Giorgia Meloni’s rise therefore must be understood as the culmination of this process rather than its end. Similar to Fasci di Combattimento, and therefore the National Fascist Party itself, Fratelli d’Italia was portrayed as a rupture from mainstream parties but emerged in continuity with their neoliberal policies. With this inheritance and the persistence of ‘red phobia’ in Italian public life, when the so-called migrant crisis began in 2013 and peaked in 2015, it provided fertile ground for parties like Fratelli d’Italia and Matteo Salvini’s Lega, which rode the wave of the discontent caused by the 2008 financial crisis and redirected it against migrants, Roma people, Muslims, LGBTQ+ citizens, and even cultural outsiders. 

Exclusion of social heterogeneity is now becoming law, for example with the Security Bill punishing peaceful protesters with sentences of up to 20 years or with provisions against ‘gatherings’ aiming at raves and, arbitrarily, any invasion of terrains and buildings deemed dangerous to the public order. Other laws criminalise surrogate parenthood performed abroad, with a major impact on LGBTQ+ families. These are clear expressions of the interplay between what Galtung defined as cultural and structural violence, and how they affect real lives.

Logos of Movimento Sociale Italiano and Fratelli d’Italia

Meloni’s leadership parallels other neoliberal democracies. Italy’s long fascist lineage helps us identify the substance of fascism, namely anticommunism and the defence of capital, and recognise how these traits adapt to neoliberal conditions. This continuity makes Italy an illustration of a wider pattern. Even in countries with no fascist past, democracies are turning towards illiberal forms of (national) protection. The essence remains the safeguarding of capital and a homogeneous cultural identity against perceived threats.

This form of post-fascism has been particularly subtle. Elections continue, but their meaning narrows as the space for contestation shrinks. Violence persists, not as open terror but as structure, in the policing of migration, the criminalisation of protest, the systematic erosion of social rights. The shift from physical to structural violence, from paramilitary to bureaucratic control, marks the adaptation of fascism to neoliberalism, whereby the state has absorbed the responsibility of protecting capitalism in a way that has allowed post-fascism to remain post-fascist. 

For now.

Openly illiberal and violent behaviours are increasingly normalised. The assault on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 and Jair Bolsonaro’s attempted coup in Brazil a year later should be understood not as anomalies but as warnings. As these politics spread across democracies, far-right movements grow emboldened to pursue violent projects that are not condemned by international allies who share their worldview.

But if neoliberal democracy had been sufficient to preserve the capitalist status quo, it would not explain why the system continues to harden under Meloni, Trump, Modi, Orbán and Milei alike. 

In addressing authoritarian statism, Nicos Poulantzas affirmed that in advanced liberal democracies it was likely to take the form of selective internationalism, intensified technocracy, and police violence. In other contexts, particularly in countries dependent on larger imperialist powers, it could produce exceptional forms such as fascism or military dictatorship, like in Latin America in the 1960s-1970s. What remains is the question of whether the subtler form can evolve into the other.

My contention is that the logic Poulantzas described now operates inside advanced democracies through a different mechanism. Dependency no longer runs only along an imperialist chain of states but also through a transnational capitalist class whose mobility, resources and influence are rendering nation states increasingly dependent. What this means is that while at the dawn of neoliberalism only the countries at the bottom of the imperialist chain were particularly susceptible to overtly authoritarian regimes, now this risk has spread across countries at the top of the imperialist chain because they have lost their independence to financial markets and the transnational capitalist class, which now controls the levers of global policy-making. In this way, the increasing incidence and intensity of right-wing governance projects in neoliberal democracies such as Italy can be seen as a symptom of this change.

Just as the rise of fascism in the twentieth century was facilitated by the dependency of states on foreign loans, markets, and external economic constraints, today many of the countries that once constituted the neoliberal and imperial core find themselves in a comparable position of dependence. Their vulnerability no longer lies primarily in inter-state hierarchies, but in their subordination to a transnational capital. This renewed dependency endangers once again the democratic substance of political life in Italy and other neoliberal democracies, creating the conditions in which authoritarian practices can resurface once again.