Fascism and socialism: political rivalry escalating into violent repression

Fascism and socialism: political rivalry escalating into violent repression is a conflict over more than competing political doctrines: it is a contest for control of workplaces, rural communities, public institutions, and the state. The narrative first shows socialist organizations exercising real power over labor and agricultural life, then follows the Fascist movement’s organized violence as it breaks that power apart. The conflict’s decisive turn lies in the contrast between the socialists’ locally rooted organizations and the squads’ capacity for rapid, concentrated action—and in the growing ability of Fascism to convert street violence into political leverage.

Competing organizations and material stakes

The struggle takes shape in a landscape where labor organization governs everyday economic relations. In Bologna, socialist influence reaches into the city’s chambers of labor and municipal politics, while in the surrounding countryside the leagues, cooperatives, and other local institutions connect villages to the Socialist Party. The account describes disputes over access to work, housing, and bread as well as over property and political authority. Employers, tenants, small landowners, and landless workers do not occupy interchangeable positions in this system: each experiences its rules and risks differently, and the resulting antagonisms make rural politics especially combustible.

Ferrara offers the clearest measure of the leagues’ organizational reach. In Emilia, socialists control 223 of 280 municipalities, and the farmhand population averages only 120 working days a year. Hiring offices, labor shifts, threshing, seed supplies, and planting are brought under collective control. The system gives workers leverage against landowners, but makes breaches of its rules intensely consequential: those who accept lower wages or otherwise weaken collective discipline can face exclusion from ordinary community life. In Ferrara, 81,000 people are registered with the leagues of proletarian unity by mid-May, including agricultural workers, tenants, sharecroppers, and small landowners. Their victories extend beyond wages to hiring arrangements and, in some cases, the choice of crops; landowners are left with capital but much less control over production.

This strength is also a vulnerability. The socialists’ organizations are rooted in particular communities and built through accumulated labor and sacrifice. The account contrasts that rootedness with the mobility of the Fascist squads, whose members can be transferred, concentrated, and sent against targets elsewhere. The struggle is therefore not only about which program commands support, but about which side can move resources and people quickly, and which side bears the cost of defending fixed institutions.

From political tactic to organized destruction

Mussolini’s approach to the conflict is double-sided. Seeking to enter parliamentary politics, he accepts an alliance with Giolitti’s national blocs, even as the squads remain hostile to parliament and do not regard seats in it as their purpose. Mussolini presents participation as a way to continue the movement’s struggle from within. At the same time, he intends to use disorder to demonstrate that he alone can restore order. In this strategy, the same movement can claim to oppose violence while relying on it, and can enter constitutional politics without giving up its anti-parliamentary origins.

The brutality of the violence makes that balancing act politically necessary. In April 1921, fascists kill teachers’ union activist Carlo Cammeo in a schoolyard; in Foiano, squadristi kill nine people after staging an improvised inquiry in the town square. Mussolini responds with a public distinction between Fascist violence and its socialist counterpart, presenting the former as bounded and corrective. The narrative exposes the contradiction: the political effort to reassure moderate opinion proceeds alongside attacks that make such reassurance difficult to sustain. Violence is treated both as a means of defeating socialism and as a liability that must be carefully described and managed.

In Ferrara, the attacks are not isolated clashes but a coordinated campaign against the institutions sustaining socialist power. On April 8, the employment bureau in Jolanda is burned and its administration forced to resign. After squadrista Arturo Breviglieri is killed during a raid in Pontelagoscuro, his comrades occupy the town and attack its Chamber of Labor. On April 11, squads attack the labor organization in Granzette, and its treasurer Luigi Masin is killed at home in front of his family. On April 14, about a hundred squadristi besiege Ferrara for two days and storm the Casa del Popolo and the railwaymen’s association. The attacks continue against organizations in Bondeno, Gaibanella, and Ostellato.

The cumulative effect is institutional destruction. Within a few months, nine chambers of labor, a cooperative, and nineteen peasant leagues in Ferrara are obliterated. The Rovigo Chamber of Labor, associated with Giacomo Matteotti’s political formation, ceases to exist after repeated destruction of its material possessions. In the countryside, some peasants tear down red flags and join Fascist unions; those who resist face further attacks on their communities and livelihoods. Socialist leaders are stunned by the speed of the collapse, while public capitulations become common. The account sets the destruction of these institutions against the long effort that built them: a community center represents generations of organization, whereas an attacking squad can arrive by truck and leave it in ruins.

Unequal capacity and the failure of resistance

The narrative attributes the squads’ advantage to organization as well as force. Many Fascists are former Arditi or soldiers and are led by officers; they can be transferred and deployed as a mobile force. Workers and peasants, by contrast, depend on their local institutions and on gains secured through prolonged collective struggle. This produces an asymmetry between an offensive force able to choose where and when to strike and communities whose most valuable resources are the organizations they must defend. The contrast also helps explain why control can disappear so quickly: the institutions that make collective life possible are precisely the structures the attacks target.

Mussolini’s attempt at pacification follows a shift in political circumstances rather than a settled reconciliation. After the Sarzana incident, the narrative emphasizes that hundreds of squadristi had been routed by fifteen Carabinieri. The episode exposes the difference between attacks on unarmed, disorganized opponents and confrontation with a trained force. Meanwhile, the fall of Giolitti and the formation of Ivanoe Bonomi’s government raise the possibility that moderate socialists and Catholics might unite against Fascism. Mussolini fears that such a coalition could isolate the movement, and proposes stopping individual violence, prohibiting punitive raids, examining members’ criminal records, and removing recent recruits from positions of command.

The proposal meets resistance from provincial Fascist leaders, who oppose making peace with the socialists. It does not end the conflict. By December, the pacification pact has been retracted, and Matteotti tells the Chamber of Deputies that provincial squads treated it as a scrap of paper. Large raids may have ceased for a time, he argues, but attacks on villages and peasant homes continue; the assailants remain armed and unpunished. His speech makes parliament another arena of the conflict, but the interruption of his address by shouting and protest demonstrates how little agreement exists even over whether the violence can be openly named.

The strike, political transformation, and aftermath

The general strike of 1922 is the workers’ and peasants’ final attempt to resist the expanding Fascist offensive. Proclaimed by the Labor Alliance as a defense of political and union liberties, it is described as a last gamble. The announcement is disclosed prematurely, disrupting the plans. Fascist leaders seize the opportunity to issue an ultimatum to the state, claiming the right to act if it cannot demonstrate authority. The state’s hesitation and the movement’s readiness to take action together expose how far political initiative has shifted.

The strike is called off on August 4, but repression continues afterward. Hundreds of cooperatives, associations, and chambers of labor are destroyed throughout the country, and socialist administrations resign. On August 12, smoke from fires remains visible as Mussolini flies over Tuscany, Emilia, and the lower Po Valley. Filippo Turati describes the strike as a decisive defeat and acknowledges that Fascists have become masters of the political field. The defeat is not simply a failed stoppage: it marks the destruction of much of the organizational infrastructure through which socialist politics had operated.

That outcome accompanies a broader transformation in the Fascist movement. Born anti-party, anticlerical, socialist, revolutionary, and republican, it becomes a conservative, monarchical party with its own armed force and an alliance with the ruling class against which its founders had once struggled. The language of political competition remains—elections, parliamentary speeches, government decrees—but the conditions of competition have changed as socialist organizations are shattered and armed Fascist power grows. The conflict thus ends not with a negotiated settlement between equivalent movements, but with one side’s local institutions dismantled and the other increasingly able to turn violence into authority.