Thread by @TAJackson20

I've been told some people didn't have enough time to read chapter 4 before I posted chapter 5. Hopefully you've all managed that now because it's time for

A. James Gregor's "Mussolini's Intellectuals"
CHAPTER SIX
Ugo Spirito and the Rationale of the Corporative State

Last Time: Gentile & Spirito completed German Idealism. Mussolini notes Lenin's initial failures and adopts a "Manchester liberal" temporary governance. This makes people uppity and start asking for 🏳️‍🌈 shit like "stop killing opposition MPs" or "have fair elections."

Anyway, after refusing to cuck (and expending a great deal of castor oil) Mussolini now has the problem of figuring out to actually do with that totalitarian government that he's constructed. Fortunately, 'actualizing' was literally the entire point of fascist idealism.

The process involves totally repudiating European political tradition for the last four or five centuries, but those convictions were crazy and wrong Anglicisms anyway. (c.f. my earlier threads on Alasdair MacIntyre's history of ethics and David Graeber's history of debt)

The essential process of de-Anglicising your mind: stop being an autistic reifier.

"Recreating a healthy and functional national community from a fractured and atomized hellscape is a nice idea, but I would rather not do it if it inconveniences or places obligations on me as a property owner in any way."
-The Eternal Conservative

Anyway, Gentile and Spirito hit on a rather obvious point here that everyone forgot: man is a political animal and his individual development is inseparable from social/political integration. Hence: integrism

(Please google the phrase "feral child" if you believe otherwise. tia)

Liberals: "Individuals! Out of nowhere!"
Marx: "The individual is contingent on a person's material living conditions, you fools!"
Gentile: "And guess what THAT is contingent on? 😏"

*Anna Wierzbicka intensifies*

Marxism is fine, but the problem is that it doesn't go far enough. For example, it labors under the delusion that you can separate property into the categories of "private" & "socialized," and that these distinctions are meaningful.

Gentile makes no such errors.

Spirito is more right than he knows: those ideas of individual rights he speaks against were cultivated BY the would-be absolute monarchs in the first place to undermine their rivals in the nobility. (cf. Barzun & Jouvenel)

Continued note on the above: we can now see that, ideologically, socialism is a form of capitalism and vice versa, "the Mirror of Production" as Baudrillard put it. Few know this. reactionaryfuture.wordpress.com/2016/11/07/loc…

This is all incredibly sensible, so I'd like to take this time to remind you that, as we learned in the first chapter, liberals and/or communists didn't even try to refute any of this and just accused fascists of being sadomasochists instead. (cf. Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom)

And here we come to the place where I part ways with fascism. Authority and sovereignty always exist, you can't abolish the institution of "the ruling class," not even by expanding it to include everyone. Fascism is the sanest form of modernity, but modern it remains.

This bit though, that's something I can agree with in its entirety without reservations.

As I noted before, this is why fascism, always fails in the long run:

Fascism is a plan to make syndicalism work.
Syndicalism is a plan to make Marxism work.
Marxism is a plan to make liberalism work.
Liberalism is a plan to make democracy work.
Democracy can't work.

"True Rousseauianism has never been tried."

There, copy and paste that for a couple hundred years and you have modern history. I just saved you all hours of research.

How anyone could understand all of this and still want a "real" democracy anyway boggles the mind. Popular sovereignty is the most addictive concept ever created.

Including footnotes this time because it's fun to remind you all that Gregor has been writing about what Fascism is for more than 30 years longer than Mussolini actually reigned.

Back to the text, we note the Rousseau coming through even stronger here. @KANTBOT20K was right to call him the first fascist.

But I can't stay mad at these people forever, especially when they're taking it to the "I fucking love science" liberals.

Reminder: Evelyn Waugh was right; the Italians were the only good guys in World War 2.

Second reminder: Post-modernists in general, and Feyerabend specifically, were entirely correct in their critiques and their only flaw was doubling down on the "autonomy" and "liberation" memes.

The fascists handled this much better. Rather than saying "British Empiricism is false, therefore there's no such thing as truth or reality," the Actualists do this:

Gregor reiterates and reinforces this in the footnotes, complete with more documentation of Anglo/liberal perfidy on this subject.

Remember when I said that Socialism's problem was that it didn't go far enough? Marx being okay with British thinkers up to and including David Ricardo? Well, guess what, fascists weren't afraid to FULLY address the economist question.

>It's a "liberalism is implicitly premised on heretical Christianity" episode

For those of you still mystified by the (Neo)absolutist/Jouvenelian claim that liberalism was promoted by centralizing societal power centers, this right here is a good example of why the leviathan is empowered by liberalism and consequently endorses it.

All of this was a long way of explaining what the fascist state understood the telos of its totalitarianism to be: the simultaneous transcendence and unification of all the people's and classes of Italy.

The first attempt doesn't work too well. Something else needs to be done.

And, by good (?) fortune, the Great Depression happens and things are so bad that it gives Mussolini carte blanche to fix.

As mentioned before, the labor courts were counterproductive. While they were an improvement on what they replaced, they entrenched class differences rather than sublating them. Mussolini tries restructuring the entire system to amalgamate workers and employers. Will it work?

Spirito, at least is confident in the design. Let's see how that plays out.

Shades of James Burnham here. Spirito is right, of course, but how can you syndicate an entire country AND avoid SCALE problems at the same time?

But beyond that, Spirito realizes that the very definitions and conceptions of "property" in the first place have to be reformulated to purge the whiggery.

Finally, Spirito proposes to merge the functions of worker and capitalist themselves. Mussolini OKs it and Gentile writes it down as official.

And to think, there's stupid commies to this day that think that fascism is a variety of capitalism in any way.

This idea succeeds wildly—as trolling. Literally everyone from Catholics to Julius Evola get butthurt.

'a “perma-nent technical office,” responsible for program projections—uniting all the elements of production through scientific, indicative planning.'
&
'The state would not be “a centralized bureaucracy"'
🤔

Like I said, literally everyone was enraged by this. Does Mussolini disavow? Does he scapegoat Spirito? Fuck no, he personally defends him. It's amazing how easy it is not to be a cuck when you aren't drinking John Locke's Kool-Aide.

I'm starting to see why people compared Donald Trump to this man. What an absolute legend.

So Mussolini had the problems of SCALE and managerialism pegged a solid decade BEFORE Burnham, but his solution was simply to construct a system that would scale better.

These are all very lofty principles, how do you put them into practice? Like this:

"This is just a manifestation of capitalism in decline, guys. It's the bourgeoisie, I swear."
t. Trotsky.

The downside to all of this is that Mussolini gets it into his head that Italy is a world power now and not a marginal state playing catch-up. (quite excellently, mind you, but still...)

Next time: Things don't go quite according to plan.