The Perverse Welfare State

Both the Italian Fascist Party and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party were born in struggles against the socialists and the communists. In spite of this—or perhaps precisely for that reason—both of their programs stressed social matters. In 1933, one Communist International (Komintern) activist reported: “It is said that among those voting for the Nazis are over two million workers, many of them unemployed. They’ve been fooled by the anti-capitalist demagogy of the Nationalist Socialists.”³ Indeed, the party managed to join members of all the social classes, becoming a kind of “catch-all party.”

Neither the fascists nor the Nazis rejected private property as such—yet it was to be used for the good of the nation and/or the race. The class struggle was to be rejected, or to be precise, as Enrico Corradini, an ideologue of Italian nationalism, phrased it before World War One, it was to be transferred to an international level. The “proletarian nations” were to cast off the “yoke” of the system hampering their development. Internal cohesion was of the essence: “Because nationalism is by definition national in politics, it cannot fail to be national in the domain of economics, as the two things are interconnected.”⁴ Thus, workers had to be incorporated into the life of the state, to “tear” them from leftist influence.

Both in Italy and Germany it remains debatable as to whether we may speak of a “social revolution.”⁵ Critics point out that in both cases the beneficiaries of most reforms were in the middle class, while the lower class profited less. The destruction of independent professional unions and abolishment of the right to strike left workers without protection. In the Reich, “Wages were increasingly tied to productivity, and by 1939, a 5 to 10 percent decline in real wages had developed, though this was partly offset by new fringe benefits.”⁶

On the other hand, apart from the financial benefits, regime organizations offered sports and culture associations—on the Apennine Peninsula, this included (as of 1930) “1,350 theaters, 8,000 libraries, 2,000 drama societies, and 3,000 musical ensembles.”⁷ The Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (OND) enlisted 3.8 million out of around eleven million workers in 1939. The organization held only twenty per cent laborers and seven per cent peasants, yet this was the first time many of them “got something” from the state.⁸ In the Reich, the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF) gathered six million workers, who even received twelve days’ paid holiday in 1939.⁹

The welfare state Hitler and Mussolini envisioned differed from the liberal-democratic variant we now know, however. Above all, the community that solidarity was meant to build was rigidly defined—the political opposition, ethnic minorities, or groups stigmatized as harmful (such as homosexuals) were not acknowledged in it. Both regimes placed growing emphasis on the racial aspect of citizenship, to which no “foreigner” could aspire.

A second vital element was militarization, a true obsession of these dictators. German workers could be happy that Hitler had staved off unemployment, yet the Reich’s economy was in fact subordinated to weapons production.¹⁰ Ordinary Germans, who essentially supported their Führer, watched the outbreak of war with trepidation,¹¹ reasonably worried about what a conflict with the great superpowers could bring. The Italians as well, proud of having conquered Ethiopia, began to observe Mussolini’s actions in 1939 with growing apprehension.¹² In either case this anxiety was, of course, justified.