“We are the state”

“We are the state” is the most compressed statement of fascism’s claim to identify its own movement with the political community it seeks to rule. In Benito Mussolini’s account of the new party’s program, the formula turns a question about the state into an assertion of possession: fascism does not merely seek authority within the existing order but presents itself as the force that will define the nation and speak for its people.

The claim in Mussolini’s program

The phrase appears in a three-hour speech laying out the future of the National Fascist Party. Mussolini presents fascism as a synthesis capable of absorbing liberalism, while insisting that violence has buried the methods that came before. He promises to make Italians into a single national people, replacing regional identities with an undivided Italian identity, and connects national greatness to an imperial ambition. The Roman Church, too, is incorporated into this account of empire, in contrast with what he dismisses as outdated anticlericalism. The state formula therefore belongs to a broader program: national unity, imperial reach, and the incorporation of institutions into a single political vision.

The speech gives the assertion a sharp economic and social qualification. Mussolini describes the desired economy as liberal in the classic sense, while presenting fascism as the movement that will educate and direct the masses. The people are not simply declared sovereign in the abstract; they are to be served and instructed by their interpreter, and disciplined when judged to be wrong. His statement that fascists are the state sits beside this hierarchical account of who may interpret the people’s needs and how they may be made to conform.

From political identity to national rebirth

The expression gains force from the book’s recurring contrast between a supposedly exhausted old order and a new political generation. In the postwar vision, the old politicians are described as spent while millions of returning soldiers press into public life. The future is divided between those who belonged to the past and those who will shape what comes next. Against that backdrop, the state claim offers more than a constitutional proposition: it presents fascism as the answer to political vacancy and as the agent of a national beginning.

That promise is repeatedly framed through the language of youth, renewal, and collective destiny. In Gabriele D’Annunzio’s speech to his legionnaires, Fiume is set against the perceived decay of the postwar settlement and associated with youth, life, and a future carried by the dead and the unborn. Later, Mussolini is represented as the herald of a new age, while a public celebration recasts the movement’s growth as a passage from a handful of adherents to a multitude, from a people to a nation, and from a nation to a state. These scenes make the phrase’s logic visible: the state is imagined as the culmination of a mobilized national community, not merely as a set of offices or laws.

Mass participation and political ritual

The claim is reinforced by the book’s attention to crowds, ceremonies, and coordinated public feeling. At the burial of the Unknown Soldier, the body of one unidentifiable fallen serviceman is made to represent the war dead collectively. Fascist leaders kneel at the tomb in Rome, and the ceremony is described as evidence that politics is becoming a religion. In this setting, the state’s authority is attached to shared mourning and national sacrifice as well as to party organization.

Other scenes expose a more coercive side of the same political world. At a Milan demonstration in 1919, socialist marchers and an opposing, smaller group of officers, Arditi, and Futurists confront one another across a cordon; the brief clash turns the street into a scene of political violence. The image does not itself define the phrase, but it sits beside a program in which fascism claims the right to absorb earlier methods through force. The assertion that the movement is the state thus carries a tension between national unity as a promise and the violent means through which political opponents are confronted.

Meaning and limits

The phrase is a declaration of political identity, not a detailed account of government machinery. Its significance lies in the way it collapses distinctions: between party and state, between a movement and the nation, and between speaking for the masses and directing them. The speech’s simultaneous appeal to liberal economics, imperial ambition, religious authority, and disciplined mass politics shows how capacious the claim is meant to be. It gathers unlike elements under the authority of a single national project.

The book also places this language against the human cost and instability of the period. Its scenes of returning veterans, political confrontation, and public commemoration refuse to make national rebirth a purely abstract idea. The formula promises that a divided society can become one people under fascist leadership; its implied price is that rival political claims and independent forms of allegiance have little room within that unity. “We are the state” therefore functions both as a slogan of incorporation and as a warning about the movement’s ambition to speak for the whole country.