2L - Political breakdown and the rise of extremism: strikes
Liberal Italy's collapse grew from the interaction of labour conflict, organised Fascist violence and failures of political cooperation. This lesson traces how conflicts over wages and authority became a challenge to parliamentary government between 1919 and 1922.
Strikes and the Biennio Rosso
The Biennio Rosso, or “Two Red Years”, describes the intense labour mobilisation of 1919–1920. Industrial workers struck over wages and conditions; agricultural labourers sought better pay and control over hiring; peasants occupied land in some regions. These activities reflected different circumstances. A farm labourer seeking enough paid days to support a family did not necessarily share a factory activist's programme for workers' control. Socialist symbols and revolutionary speeches could accompany practical economic demands.
Labour organisation could challenge employers' authority even without a national revolution. Agricultural leagues sought to influence who was hired and on what terms. In some areas their pressure, boycotts and intimidation affected small farmers and workers who did not accept socialist leadership as well as large landowners. Employers and conservative groups could interpret this local power as evidence that the government had abandoned them. The fear of a Russian-style revolution became politically powerful, although fear should not be treated as proof that the Socialists had a coordinated plan capable of overthrowing the state.
In September 1920 a dispute in the engineering industry culminated in factory occupations, notably in Turin and Milan. A lockout occurs when employers exclude workers from workplaces during a dispute. Faced with lockouts and conflict over wages, workers occupied factories and sometimes continued production. Factory councils and armed guards made the challenge appear revolutionary. However, maintaining production required supplies, finance and customers; occupation alone did not transfer national political power to the workers.
Giolitti avoided a general military assault on the occupied factories and encouraged negotiation. Union leaders accepted a settlement involving wage improvements and proposals for worker participation in industrial control; the promised control did not become a lasting transfer of authority over industry. Workers left the factories. His method helped end the immediate confrontation without a national civil war, but disappointed revolutionary activists and convinced some employers that the liberal state was too hesitant to defend property.
The timing matters. Fascist expansion accelerated after the peak of factory occupations, as socialist unity and mobilisation weakened. Fascism cannot be explained simply as a response that grew in proportion to an ever stronger revolutionary movement. The occupations left memories and fears that anti-socialist forces could exploit during a period when the practical revolutionary opportunity was already receding.
Squadrismo and the destruction of opposition
Fascist violence became an organised method for destroying opponents' ability to act politically. Squadrismo was the activity of armed Fascist squads, commonly called Blackshirts, operating outside ordinary legal procedures. Local leaders, known as ras, built power through these groups. Trucks allowed squads to concentrate quickly against a town or village; weapons and military experience increased their ability to intimidate dispersed opponents.
The targets included union offices, cooperatives, socialist newspapers and elected councils. Attacks on leaders, beatings, forced humiliation and killings discouraged people from holding office, attending meetings or organising strikes. Burning a cooperative could destroy both an opponent's political meeting place and a practical source of employment or affordable supplies. Violence therefore changed the conditions in which politics operated; it was more than a series of angry exchanges between individuals.
The Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti described these methods in Parliament in January and March 1921, drawing on attacks in the Polesine. He himself was assaulted at Castelguglielmo on 12 March. The case shows how even an elected representative could be prevented from operating safely in his constituency. Parliamentary status offered little practical protection where armed opponents could obstruct meetings and threaten organisers.
Landowners helped fund or equip squads, especially where agricultural leagues had restricted their authority over labour. Some employers and middle-class supporters regarded the Fascists as a means to restore their position. Fascism also had its own nationalist ambitions and activist culture: its members were not merely hired instruments obeying every donor. Local power and commitment to violent action could pull squad leaders in directions that complicated Mussolini's parliamentary bargaining.
Socialist intimidation and other political violence formed part of the background, but recognising them does not make every organisation's aims and methods identical. Fascist offensives systematically dismantled established labour and democratic institutions and extended to Catholics, republicans and other opponents. The consequence was an increasing imbalance in opponents' freedom to organise and resist.
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