Week 128

 

I had promised a break in our coverage of the Adriatic question and the unfortunate attempts of the Italian Government to solve it. And, indeed, while I had originally meant to discuss Mussolini's preparations for the elections of November 1919, I instead ended up trying to answer a question on whether Mussolini was an opportunist or a true believer in fascism. Here, for convenience, courtesy of /u/29adamski

I was reading about Mussolini and his rule and read about how Mussolini was a socialist right up until the first world war before completely changing his stance. Was this a genuine ideology change or was he simply changing because he saw the opportunity for power through nationalism? What is the debate amongst historians about this?

Since I have used a good number of contributions already posted during previous weeks, I am not going to recycle the whole thing here, but I am posting only the introductory part. You can, of course, check the rest, if you have time and patience (portions of it may be added later on, as I am still finishing it), following the link above.

 

 

That's most definitely not a bug. Unfortunately, before we attempt to answer whether someone truly believes in Fascism, we should ask ourselves: what does a true believer in Fascism believe?

Was this a genuine ideology change or was he simply changing because he saw the opportunity for power through nationalism?

Your question does play a central role within the historiography of Italian Fascism, and more so in the examination of Mussolini's specific political trajectory. Before I attempt to address it, though, I feel the need to call your attention to the fact that, as you framed it, it appears to involve an assumption that may be somewhat misleading in our present case. There may be a fundamental opposition between the two terms of the problem, but it doesn't have to. Indeed, in so far as Mussolini goes – and, by extension, at least to a degree, for Fascism as a whole – the antinomy between true beliefs and opportunism is a secondary, if not entirely inconsequential one. By adopting it acritically, we risk undertaking our examination of Fascism and its ideological contents under our own preemptive assumption of what an ideological belief should look like, and thus disregarding ideological elements of decisive value for those who experienced them, in consequence of the fact that we do not recognize them as an active, effective ideology.

It's a difficult pitfall to avoid. Fascism is often shallow, incoherent, passionately “problematist” and quickly dismissive of problems, action and (little) thought, totalitarian and unfinished, if not hardheartedly cobbled together – its ideological core appears to run skin-deep. One should not be surprised to hear Benedetto Croce – insightful scholar of late XIX Century ideologies – replying, back in 1924, to those who had asked for his take on Fascism, that, after a cursory examination of the new movement, he could not find “any new conceit” nor the “new philosophy, supposedly implicit in it” and concluding that “I am afraid there is no new conceit, because there can't be”. But in our examination of a Fascist ideology, we should not be dissuaded by the perceived absence of a system, and look instead for something closer to a behavioral pattern. If Fascism can't explain itself, or elects not to bother with, acts may serve as guidance, words assist in conveying meaning, patterns reveal intention, and opportunities inspire belief.

In the words of historian Emilio Gentile, disregarding any ideological manifestation of Fascism just because we can conveniently and effectively point out that it makes for a poor, incoherent and ill-conceived ideology, would be

tantamount to argue that, if a person doesn't think with the same systematic rigor of a philosopher, then they don't possess a worldview which, no matter how simplistic or eclectic, regulates, inspires and justifies their behavior.

The comparison may not be a flattering one, and should not lead us to look at Fascism as purely brutish, obtuse, anti-intellectual out of ignorance, but rather it should alert us to the fact that, at the time when Fascism appeared, at the end of the Great War, and as well at the turn of the Century, when many of its original influences developed, the coherent formulation of a system – whether philosophical, ideological or political – appeared to many as a thing of the past, unnecessary or entirely to be rejected, and the grand, complex machineries of positive thought, something to be broken down and scrapped for parts. In this specific environment, Fascism may appear more attuned to the intellectual sensibility of its age than one might believe at first glance.

Which is not to say that we should regard Fascism as a mere empty vessel, ready to receive whatever convenient ideological fragments the ongoing political, social and economical events had produced, and therefore as an inherently opportunistic political formulation. Fascism certainly had ideological elements which characterized it, but not in the form of an ideological foundation – if I were to try and describe it in abstract terms, I'd say it had a “non ideological” or even “anti-ideological” ideological core, where a rejection of ideological formulations came first, and before the subsequent rationalization of pragmatism. In this sense, Fascism did, quite often, and by design, approach the solution of a fundamental antinomy by ignoring it.

Furthermore one should also be wary of insisting too much on the “incoherence” of Fascism as evidence of its fundamental ideological vacuity. Incoherent it may very well have been – and this should inspire caution, and plenty of it, to those who wish to seek the ideology of Fascism in a purely abstract fashion, through the examination of its “sacred texts” and accurate calibration of scholarly glosses – but its lack of coherence does not allow one to conclude, somewhat conveniently, that there is nothing to be learned in the examination of its untidy ideological shelves.

One may recognize – argues E. Gentile [Le origini dell'ideologia fascista, ed. 2011] – in all political movements, a dissonance between ideology and action, incoherence of programs, changes of direction, compromises and adjustments to circumstances […] In every political movement there is a complex of fundamental principles which define its identity, despite the inevitable alterations determined by its evolution […] establishing its ideological core in a definitive manner […]

Certainly there is in Fascism a degree of pragmatism and relativism arguably greater than in other movements; but this wasn't mere opportunism and ideological emptiness; pragmatism and relativism were features of a mindset and ideological imprint, which contrasted theory with [direct] experience, the experiment of action to a coherence of doctrine, faith in myths to rational persuasion.

 

Where does this leave with regards to Mussolini himself? Pretty much where we started, I'd say. One needs to keep in mind – and more so if we are to address the argument of opportunism – that Mussolini's transformation didn't take place in a vacuum. And that, as a general rule, people, including those holding sincere beliefs, change; even if, one might argue, most of them don't end up as leaders of a Fascist dictatorship.

The experience of the Great War was one of transformation. And, if the extent of this transformation in so far as the material and moral condition of the Italian masses went has been called into question, the degree to which it affected the social, political and intellectual elites and the active portion of civil society can't be overstated. To the men returning from the trenches – to those who bothered with the whole idea of change, that is – truly appeared a new Italy, or better, the old Italy on the verge of becoming new. For many of them, holding onto things of old, when they were called to one last fateful endeavor, may have appeared almost inconceivable.

Mussolini certainly did come to represent those feelings. He did so from the pages of his newspaper, carefully, craftily embodying a climate, moving in a landscape of ideological fragments, appealing to the combatants, veterans, to a whole galaxy of lesser elites struggling to hear a voice directed at them, until those fragments coalesced into recognizable forms. He did so with his personal trajectory, from new man of the Italian “intransigent” socialism, to new man of interventionism, to new man of the anti-Bolshevik reaction, to new man on the Italian political scene, and then to his eventual affirmation as the youngest Prime Minister in Italy's history. Always changing, always moving past things, always leading the way, until he found a place comfortable enough to stay, and – as he told his biographer Emil Ludwig - “I have come to stay as long as I can”.

Cross culturally the theatre has been associated with sex work at various points in history. In both China and Japan theatre was populated by a marginalized class. Throughout the centuries the severity of this marginalization has waxed and waned depending on the legal classification of the entertainers, and largely that legal definition included expectations of sex work. During the periods where the theatre class had the possibility to be socially mobile their ability to capitalize on that depended entirely on their relationships and service to the upper echelons of society, service which included sex work.

Japan:

In Japan starting prior to the Heian Period itinerant performers and their works arrive on the historical stage and immediately see mass popularity. Such performances grew out of religious ritual, both indigenous and imported but rapidly were secularized. Their early relationship to sex work is documented by Jacob Raz:

Wandering miko turned from early times to performances accompanying their religious functions, and later turned gradually into wandering actress-prostitutes. Examples in the Muromachi period were the aruki-miko, the mai-mai, and the shirabyōshi, ancestresses of the yujō, onna-tayū, amigasa, kihachijō and other wandering shamisen players, prostitute-entertainers of the Edo period.

Such aruki-miko, etc, were also associated with the outcast, or lowest class of people, the ningaimono 制外者 (outcasts), and this social stigma remained despite later opportunities for entertainers at upward social mobility. Within the Edo period, even prior to the appearance of Okuni and her establishment of kabuki, this association with sex work continued. Forms of all female troupes for Noh theatre, onna-sarugaku or nyobo-sarugaku, depended on patronage in part due to the attractiveness and perceived or actual sexual availability of the actresses.

Once Okuni began performing her kabuki (in 1557) she gave rise to both a new form of street theatre, and though there is little evidence that she or her troupe specifically engaged in sex work she was an aruki-miko and kabuki was quickly tied to sex work in the minds of the masses and the government. Even the main set of her imitators were residents of the pleasure quarters and licensed courtesans. This variation of kabuki by courtesans was so prevalent it has its own name, yujo-kabuki, or prostitute’s kabuki. This strong connection to sex work caused the bakufu to outlaw women on the stage in 1620.

In the Tokugawa period the legal and social status of actors were of the lowest class, and the fact that the law allowed only men to appear on stage had no affect on the broader social attitude that they were sex workers. From Gerstle:

This attitude remained official policy because actors were continually, throughout the Tokugawa period, restricted in where they could live and legally administered as beggars. They were considered male prostitutes and accordingly the theatre district was put near the Yoshiawara pleasure quarter far from the center of Edo.

The urban spaces in which theatre workers were allowed to dwell were the pleasure quarters, much as in China as will be detailed below, and accordingly they were expected to sell sex as “Commoners—as well as the bakufu—viewed these two spheres of entertainment [theatre and sex work] as two sides of the same coin.” This social stigma is borne out in the language used to refer to the pleasure quarters. “For city dwellers these two areas were the worlds of pleasure and fun, a forbidden sphere outside restrictive society, often termed akusho (evil places) or chikusho (Buddhist realm of beasts) while the popular term was gokuraku (paradise.)”

After the ban on female performers the variation of kabuki with young boys playing the female roles, wakushu-kabuki, flourished. The association with sex work, however, did not wane as “both served as advertisement for prostitution.” The nature of the sex work shifted from heterosexual to homosexual, and this again did not endear the theatre to the government. Wakushu-kabuki was banned in 1652, but adult male actors continued to engage in sex work.

The latter half of the seventeenth-century gave rise to a minor literature in theatrical ranking of actors. This form, kabuki hyobanki, is very similar to the below huapu texts both in intent, imagery, and literary roots. Hyobanki started as a publication ranking the courtesans of the pleasure district and turned into rankings of actors during this period, just as huapu did in China at approximately the same time period. Both hyobanki and huapu centered on the actors instead of criticism of the theatrical arts and purported to bestow honors on the actor-subjects, but operated more to accrue social capital for the authors. Being an honored actor in either hyobanki or huapu did engender more social mobility, however, through possible patronage by the author or their circle.