332 THE RISE OF ITALIAN FASCISM

incapable of resistance. They became resigned to the
elimination of one and then another category of workers ;
those who had a patch of ground in the sun, those who had
no families dependent on them, the latest comers to the
factory. This policy of despair gradually impaired the
solidarity of the workers' front. Those who were sacrificed,
with the tacit or formal consent of those who remained,
departed embittered, sometimes desperate. Such a state
of affairs could only be tolerated if it led to something better.
But the workers, on the contrary, felt that they had reached
an impasse, and that their sacrifice was useless, since anyhow
the employers managed in the end to reduce their staff as
much as they liked. The deadlock might have been ended
by a firm policy uniting all the national resources to end the
depression and assure at all events a minimum living wage
to all workers. But who could have carried out such a
policy? Not the socialists, who had been explaining for
two years that this was a crisis of the capitalist system, that
it was actually the final crisis of this system, and that the
bourgeoisie must be left to shift for itself. Still less the ruling
classes, whose one aim and obsession was the political and
industrial enslavement of the workers. Fascism was there
to simplify their task.

Consequently the slump, which the socialists had reckoned
as an asset, proved their undoing. For every slump starts
a process of social disintegration, with results that cannot
be foretold dependent as they are upon uncertain human
reactions. An exasperated desire to 6 put an end to things3
somehow may lead to despondency and panic unless it is
directed towards some concrete aim, and allowed a glimpse
of a new order. The slump crushes those who cannot thus
look ahead and are therefore without hope. Its value as a
revolutionary factor lies in the forces of order it sets in
motion; if these are not the forces of a new order, it only
serves to consolidate the old.

The economic crisis in Italy coincided with a political
one. Every branch of the state, police, executive, magistracy
and army, gave its support to the fascists, in ways varying