Class collaboration is another fundamental point of fascist syndicalism. Capital and labour are not antagonistic terms, they complete one another; one cannot do without the other, and therefore they must understand each other, and it is possible for them to understand each other.Footnote 1
Benito Mussolini, 1926If not for the horrors of the war, that ungodly year 1942 might best be remembered today for a world's fair in the city of Rome. This is in any case what Benito Mussolini's regime had envisaged for 1942: a year-long international exhibition to mark the twentieth anniversary of fascist rule in Italy. The celebration would never take place as the world was then embroiled in the greatest man-made calamity in history, with ‘total war’ replacing palatial exhortations of fascism's grandeur. Still, a new permanent city, the precise size of the original eternal city (4 square kilometres), was built for the fair on Rome's periphery. Today it forms the core of Rome's bustling EUR (Esposizone Universale di Roma) district south of the city centre; its modern marble and travertine-clad renditions of iconic ancient structures like the Colosseum and the Pantheon remain as altars to fascism.
Much like the colossal architectural developments, the labour utilised to construct the new city became a critical public spectacle in the final years of fascist rule in Italy, highlighted in films, covered by the fascist press and featured on the itineraries of Rome's most important international visitors. Construction of the ‘new’ Rome between 1937–42 provided opportunities to indicate fascism's transformative nature through the exemplary ‘new’ Italian worker. At peak of construction in 1939–40 an army of 5,000 workers laboured up to fifty-four hours a week to construct the new city from the ground up in ‘record time’.Footnote 2 Coupled with the management of everyday life in the adjacent model Worker Village (Villaggio Operaio), a new complex of dormitories that lodged 1,400 men from all over Italy, the physical labour involved in constructing the city was shown to be generative of a new culture – a unique set of experiences and identifications for workers under fascism.Footnote 3
In this article I argue that the social activity of thousands of wage labourers was guided by not only the production of buildings but also the purported fabrication of a distinct Italian fascist worker subjectivity. With the aim of fashioning pliant workers lacking in proverbial ‘class consciousness’, fascist thinkers publicly exhibited Italian workers as fixed within a ‘natural’ hierarchy of honorific bonds. In these renderings of the ‘new’ worker, class antagonisms in the modern division of labour are replaced with illustrations of exemplary sacrifice to familial and interpersonal authority. This approach to worker subjectivity signals a new direction in the literature on labour under fascism, which has focused largely on critical questions of working-class ‘consent or dissent’ to the regime.Footnote 4 While relying upon this cumulative body of literature, this study instead examines the way in which ideologues depicted an ideal labouring subject that was both modern and imbued with carefully selected traditions of alleged contra-modern Italian cultural origin. This work thus extends the literature on the fascist cult of Imperial Rome, which is especially influential in studies of aesthetics, to the domain of labour, where the regime sought to demonstrate that it was instilling the habitus of ancient Rome in the production of dutiful and compliant workers.Footnote 5
Through analysis of a documentary film and a dramatic screenplay on labour in the construction of the EUR, as well as publicised visits to the worksite for select dignitaries, I show that narratives produced around the Italian worker made the relations of thoroughly modern wage labour appear transhistorical.Footnote 6 The privileged traditions, I argue, were to have the effect of further naturalising fascism's intensely hierarchical social relations with the function of undermining mass worker organisations, which was at the heart of syndicalism and later corporatism as systems that subsumed ‘class interests’ to both employers and the state. In so doing the fascist state appropriated labour as ‘labour’ to form the constitutive ground for a common world of meaning, a historically new, categorical appropriation of labour for political purposes that would in reality have been thoroughly unrecognisable to the ancients. Indeed, the image of culturally pious workers ready for sacrifice did not draw upon real ‘tradition’ in any deep cultural sense but rather was itself carefully cultivated by the regime for consumption at home and abroad.
Following the review of public demonstrations of labour, designed to show that the regime was inculcating a habitus of fascism within workers, I examine attempts to manage lives in the Worker Village and contrast these efforts with a focus on the ‘everyday’ through onsite reports. In spite of appearances, the conditions for workers who built the EUR and lived in its environs were punishing.Footnote 7 In fascist Italy labour management held decisive legal and structural advantages over workers, with organised labour effectively consigned to state control in the name of ‘class collaboration’.Footnote 8 Alongside the destruction of formal independent mechanisms for labour to contest its condition, worker acquiescence was aided by the scarcity of jobs, the slashing of wages and the criminalisation of poverty and unemployment.Footnote 9 What limits did fascist aims regularly encounter when confronted by real workers in the construction of the EUR, as yielded by an examination of responses to the regime's mandates within the built environment? I contend that although workers never quite embodied the new ‘fascist man’ (homo fascistus), the regime grounded cultural norms in a constrained field of practice, generating a framework for the domination of labour, a point revisited in the conclusion along with general reflections on the so-called ‘fascist’ labour.
The Fascist Worker Spectacular
In terms of its value as spectacle labour activity in the construction of the EUR would claim a place alongside football matches and exhibitions of military firepower. The Ministry of Popular Culture (Ministero della Cultura Popolare; MinCulPop) and the Educational Film Union Institute (L'Unione Cinematografica Educativa; LUCE), which together helped to coordinate and film those spectacles, were also tasked with taking labour in the construction of the EUR to the big screen. In this section I critically interrogate a documentary film produced by the abovementioned agencies along with a semi-independent screenplay by a former MinCulPop official to show that the regime appropriated and mobilised a very specific image of labour (so-called ‘fascist labour’) to generate political meaning.
How the E 42 Was Born (Come nasce l'E 42) was a state propaganda film in which labour for the 1942 World's Fair (promoted as the ‘E 42’) takes on a prominent role. Because the structure of the fifteen-minute film is less narrative than it is associative and symbolic, I pair analysis of it with an examination of an original feature length screenplay by Jacopo Comin, a fascist functionary who had himself filmed war games as LUCE coordinator for Hitler's 1938 Rome visit.Footnote 10 Though Comin's screenplay Birth (Nascita) never proceeded to production due to the war, his script contains scenes that actively mirror segments of the abovementioned documentary film and more broadly mimics the production of knowledge around labour activities disseminated to the public for the World's Fair.Footnote 11 Indeed, Comin was likely very familiar with How the E 42 Was Born, as it was released to the public by his former employer one year before his own screenplay was submitted to the regime for approval to film at the EUR worksite. The title of Comin's screenplay Birth even appears to build upon the documentary title How the E 42 Was Born.
In both the documentary film and Comin's screenplay, the Italian cultural ‘rebirth’ was realised with regard to the public image of labour practice as generating specific forms of identity and relationship, knowledge and expression that were said to be rooted deep in the Roman past – even if in ancient Rome work in itself was not constitutive of what it meant to be a Roman.Footnote 12 How the E 42 Was Born shows the construction of the EUR from an apocryphal setting in nature through different technical phases, with its true focus the relationship between hierarchy and the manual labourer in the project of reclamation (bonifica) of land and the new fascist man. The film begins with the portrayal of barren nature. As a narrator pleasantly describes the location, the scene adopts gentle music accompanied by shots of the pastoral Roman ‘steppe’, an empty landscape destined for glory upon the entry of the state. The original residents of the EUR, hundreds of whom lived in thatched huts and who were removed from the land, are not shown.Footnote 13 Even nature here has a unique cultural valence for labour. As the film communicates, nature was more than conquered, it was ‘reconsecrated’, a reference to the regime's plan to build Rome out toward its ancient seaport from which the Mediterranean was once ruled. In the intervening centuries since its fall, Rome receded from the sea to its interior state of decline, its greatness superseded by nature. In this sense the massive labour project was geographically and symbolically connecting Rome to the sea once more. The Italian worker was reconsecrating space and time as a spiritual endeavour of tangible cultural magnitude while itself being remade in the process.
Following this romantic introduction, a large team of unskilled workers is shown sprinting into the scene with the primitive tools of manual labour, such as pickaxes and shovels, to plant a symbolic Roman tree. Mussolini is next seen strutting across the site with a team of military officials. The music is triumphant before slowing into the paced rhythm of a military march, and then into the triumphant score of military parades. Subsequently, Mussolini is shown examining the scaled model of the final EUR product with foreign dignitaries. With scenes cleverly ordered to show hierarchy continuously restored, the documentary features a distinct order of labour that confers power to managers through the relationship between planning and practice. When the narrator returns, Mussolini is shown signing an inaugural document; a building foundation is constructed in the next clip.Footnote 14 This is the world of men mapping strategy and making decisions, the managerial work of statesmen. Relations amongst workers here do not occur naturally, nor are they formed by equality, redistribution or cultivating one's own capital. Instead, bonifica of labour and land is achieved through the mediation of leaders.
How the E 42 Was Born reproduces the ancient Roman soldierly culture of disciplina in a modern, yet hierarchical order, with Italian workmen as worthy subjects epitomised by stoical virtues.Footnote 15 Throughout the film shots of individual workers fulfilling arduous tasks appear. One man is shown repeatedly, shirtless as he swings a pickaxe, the labouring archetype of the new fascist man.Footnote 16 These single shots are quickly juxtaposed with individuals working in teams, if not in unison, set to a violent, brutal score. Workers are engaged in the same activity but set to their own rhythm, albeit fervently, not striking a harmonious single, joyous note as in the films of Soviet Socialist Realism from the same period.Footnote 17 When labour managers appear they direct workers with immediate effect. Whether individually or in groups, labour under fascism is shown to be a virtuous duty for reconstituting ‘Italianness’ (Italianitá). In the final scenes of the film sacrifice to the hierarchal order is shown to achieve enormous returns in the form of grandiose EUR buildings and massive machines that practically disappear labouring man altogether. The suffering of labour in the present will have paid clear dividends for Italians now and into the future, demonstrating that it was right to have bestowed such faith in Italy's leadership.
If the title of the film was instead posed in the form of the question ‘How Was the E 42 Born?’, the answer would approximate ‘Romanesque sacrifice and deference for fascist authorities’. What then, for Jacopo Comin, was being ‘born’ at the worksite if not the same E 42 fairgrounds?
Comin describes the EUR site as the natural place to demonstrate the ‘character’ of the ‘new fascist man’ that Italy was giving birth to, as constituted by the new fascist labour form.Footnote 18 Comin submitted his original screenplay on this ‘new worker’ of fascism to the EUR Agency (Ente Autonomo Esposizione Universale di Roma) – tasked with administering all aspects of construction and organisation for the 1942 World's Fair – along with a letter seeking permission to film at the EUR worksite. Comin writes that Birth must be filmed there as it provided the preeminent public spectacle of labour power in the regime's imperial epoch.Footnote 19 The stars of the ‘blockbuster’ film, asserted Comin, would be ‘the workers, the foremen, the engineers; the men who live in the E 42 environs’.Footnote 20 At a time in which fascist labour, in a slightly different register, was ‘exalted as a formative element of character’,Footnote 21 the film Birth, said Comin, would thoroughly demonstrate the fascist regime's new ‘political’ and ‘ethical’ approach to labour.Footnote 22
Comin's screenplay is a veritable epic of ‘fascist’ primitive accumulation that charts Angelo's transition from peasant boy to wage-earning fascist man through mediation by the regime. We learn that eighteen year-old Angelo, who not by coincidence shares the same 1922 birth as the regime itself, was put up for adoption as a newborn and raised by an old shepherd in a shack on Rome's desolate outskirts. The screenplay begins with Angelo rising from his slumber to the sounds of sleeping sheep in the manger. The setting for the movie is romantic and pastoral, but the idyll is quickly shattered by a loud siren emanating from the nearby E 42 work zone, signalling labour discipline oriented around clock time. That day Angelo would begin his life as a wage labourer. The old shepherd had urged Angelo to find new work, ‘noting that every day their profession has become more difficult’.Footnote 23 The scene is replete with imagery of provisional fences to suggest that enclosure was encroaching on common grazing lands. As Angelo departs for his first day of manual labour the siren stands in sharp relief to the peacefulness of sheep grazing on the prairie. ‘The initial theme contrasting the prehistoric world and environs of the Roman countryside, personified by the two shepherds, and the new world, the Exposition, that rises and advances, represents a FITTING commentary’, writes Comin in his proposal to the EUR Agency, (emphasis in original).Footnote 24 The ‘machine in the garden’ trope, whereby machines suddenly disrupt idyllic landscapes as a sign of rapid industrialisation, appears here with inevitability, even necessity.Footnote 25 After a brief lament for the passing of the natural world, labour time must inevitably be given over by individuals to a society plying labour power en masse. The hidebound forms of labour sociality that Angelo was more habituated to would not be wholly obliterated; by joining older forms with modern wage labour, as personified by Angelo, the new fascist man would be realised.
In Birth workers from all over Italy heed the siren and crowd the entrance gate to the EUR. Crossing the fence, earlier a barrier to Angelo's continued peasant existence, here signifies his entry into a national community of wage labourers. As Angelo leaves the fluffy, sleeping sheep for the mechanised construction zone he enters a constitutive ground of social meaning. After the first day of work, we are introduced to Angelo's new co-workers in the mess hall. ‘Accustomed to the extended silences of the pastures, the immense horizons that he's always viewed in solitude have been transformed by his companions’, the script continues.Footnote 26 His fellow workers have been mobilised by the fascist state from all parts of Italy to build the EUR. ‘The continuous arrival of new workers, the mix of new dialects – the reinvention of man's essence and the earth's character – amaze Angelo like the revelation of a new world’, Comin notes.Footnote 27 The experience of labour begins to reconstitute Angelo much as it transforms the natural world, the fresh fascist exteriority of the EUR being matched by a new interiority. Meanwhile, the activity of building the EUR creates the fascist man whose spirit the EUR is meant to display.
Though at first Angelo pines for his boyhood as a shepherd, he soon begins to lose himself in his new work, made meaningful by these new forms of ‘classical’ solidarity. While highly romantic, there was a modicum of accuracy in Comin's depiction of these workers. Upon migrating to cities, rural peasants under fascism typically secured employment in construction, where lack of skill was a lesser hindrance, with only second-generation migrants securing industrial work.Footnote 28 Many of the lives that were used and at times exhausted in the ‘brick by brick’ construction of fascist ideology at the EUR were recent migrants from the impoverished countryside, villages that contained Italy's industrial reserve army.Footnote 29
As Angelo's new companions discuss the arrival of workers from all over Italy and repatriated from abroad, we are introduced to Vincenzo, processing his papers at a nearby police station. Vincenzo is fifty years old and returning to Italy from Tunisia, where he had been working in agriculture for the past eighteen years. Vincenzo had left the peninsula in search of stable employment and also to evade the responsibility of caring for a new son born out of wedlock and given up for adoption. We soon learn that Vincenzo is Angelo's estranged father. As Vincenzo is hired as a security guard to police the EUR workers, he is the father who becomes again the rightful guardian in more than one sense. Vincenzo thus regains a determinate social location with a family and a nation, overcoming liberalism, which had reduced him to a package of embodied labour power, exported for sale abroad. It is through Vincenzo, in whom hierarchy is disguised as a familial relation, that Comin shows how fascist culture was claiming to institute a modern economy together with a return to ‘older’ modes of social cohesion. Though the exigencies of a changing world had suddenly thrust both Angelo and Vincenzo from their lives in more ‘organic’ settings, the labour antagonism between the impersonal monitors and the monitored is here broken down and resurrected along the reconstituted lines of patriarchy.
Angelo soon falls in love with Luisa, a poor young woman, ‘a simple, rural beauty’.Footnote 30 Born to a drifter family that roams about the countryside panhandling in a mule drawn wagon, Luisa also found steady work around the construction of the EUR. In one scene Angelo and Luisa sneak through a perimeter fence after hours to frolic in the worksite. Suddenly, a security guard spots the young couple. The guard is Vincenzo. The young couple attempts to escape but Angelo is caught. When Vincenzo shines his light onto Angelo, he is astonished by Angelo's striking resemblance to himself. Vincenzo immediately wonders if Angelo is the son whom he had left behind eighteen years earlier. Vincenzo does not tell Angelo that he might be his father, as he believed his son to be working nearby as a shepherd. However, instead of taking him to police headquarters for prosecution, he escorts Angelo back through the gated entrance and sends him on his way. Thus ‘father cop’ neutralises the antagonism between the worker-overseer and the worker-overseen while peacefully mediating the private property opposition of inclusion and exclusion generated by enclosure. The abstract paternalism of the anonymous yet authentic father in the form of the paternal police authority figure represents the coming together of opposing interests in the division of labour. The sense of the fascist ‘family of workers’ here is both actual and symbolic: all workers in the division of labour, whether they are managers, police officers or unskilled transient labourers, are objects of family-based attachments and subjects of paternal compassion. Worker solidarity is not formed along the lines of class, or in the victory of the proletariat in the form of a new state; instead, solidarity for the new fascist worker is based upon notionally older, deferential, patriarchal bonds.
In the finale of the screenplay, a worker embittered by Angelo's relationship with Luisa attacks Angelo in a remote location of the worksite and ultimately overpowers him. Angelo is thus returned to the natural state in which Birth begins, lying near a simple rustic shack on the periphery of the EUR worksite. However, this thatched hut will be momentarily blown apart with dynamite, a final symbolic act for that world that fascism was destroying. Will the rivalry for Luisa, infused with passion, sentimentality and self-interest rupture fascist family–labour solidarity and jeopardise the life of the new wage labourer man? With Angelo about to be blown to pieces, the new worker and the progress of the fascist nation itself now hangs in the balance. The expanding fascist economy has opened the possibility of boundless rivalry, a possibility that must be ideologically foreclosed for the sake of social stability. Should ‘ancient’ patriarchal labour solidarity break apart as Italy embraced the explosive technologies of modernity, and as Europe plunged into the theatre of destruction, the fascist revolution could fail.
Meanwhile, other workers discover that Angelo has been beaten unconscious. The sounds of exploding dynamite are countered by the workers’ shouts of distress. The thatched hut where Angelo lies is mined and ready to blow. Just then Angelo's estranged mother Giuditta arrives to inform Vincenzo that his son is among the labourers at the EUR. Vincenzo's sense that Angelo is his son is quickly affirmed, motivating him to sprint alone toward the shack to save his son. In this race against time Vincenzo mediates the oppositions between the progress of man and the time-honoured principles of duty, sacrifice and family-based labour harmony. As the successive explosions approach Angelo, the workers genuflect and pray. This time the pater-worker would not abandon the son. Reaching the rustic hut, Vincenzo grabs the unconscious Angelo and carries him off, dynamite exploding at his feet. A stone launched into the air violently strikes him, but with superhuman strength he perseveres to bring Angelo to safety. Back in the emergency clinic of the Worker Village, Vincenzo tells Angelo that he is his father and makes a final request as he lies dying from his wound: that Angelo take his name. The workers will thereafter refer to Angelo as ‘Vincenzo’ in unison during roll call. Vincenzo's final act shows human labour expenditure taking the form of virtuous sacrifice to reconstitute the pater familias. Meanwhile, an ethic of sentimentalised sacrifice has solved the rivalry. Angelo must prove himself equal to the sacrifices made by his ancestors. In doing so, his persona merges with theirs and his wants are those of the community itself. As the abstract paternalism of the anonymous yet authentic father becomes concrete in this very last moment, Mussolini's fascist project is salvaged.
Both How the E 42 Was Born and Birth transmit an ethic of ‘fascist’ labour that revolve around sacrifice to the commands of hierarchy. Comin shows older, hierarchal relations of work as modulating the impersonal nature of wage labour for transitioning workers, ensuring the present and future of the ‘new fascist man’. The workplace relations commensurate with a regime of accumulation are here encoded as modes of traditional labour sociality based on kinship. Critically, worker solidarity in both films is not developed along class lines, or the victory of the proletariat in the form of a new state; instead, solidarity for the new fascist worker is based upon ‘older’ patriarchal bonds.
Resurrecting Italy's Past to Reveal its Future
As portrayed in How the E 42 Was Born, hundreds of esteemed foreign dignitaries were given tours of the EUR site during the workday, as Italian leadership believed that the fascist labour form could impress a wide array of visitors, from Italy and abroad. The new worker, pliant to the rhetoric of ‘traditional’ forms of labour hierarchy amid contemporary exigency, was made the showpiece in a spectacle that featured Mussolini wielding labour power on a mass scale, like the emperors he aspired to replicate. Italians like King Vittorio Emanuele III, Achille Starace, the Ciano family, Pope Pius XII and Italian born Queen of Bulgaria Tsaritsa Ioanna were eyewitnesses to labouring activities in the construction of the EUR. A group of cardinals took a trip from Vatican City to admire the ‘ardent labour’.Footnote 31 Large delegations came from Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, Croatia, Japan and Romania. One Lithuanian journalist wrote that the EUR site was a ‘true symbol of what is possible with the united will of labour’.Footnote 32 The exiled king of Spain and now resident of Rome, Alfonso XIII, visited the site. Delegations of Germans also came to view the spectacle of labour at the EUR, including architects, senior members of the Nazi party hierarchy, a Reich cultural commission and filmmakers, as well as generals and their families.Footnote 33 Governor of Nazi-occupied Warsaw and key planner of the Jewish Ghetto, Dr Ludwig Fischer, Prince Georg of Bavaria, Nazi education minister Bernhard Rust, chief Nazi architect Albert Speer and Adolf Hitler each took in the display of labour at the EUR.
Fascism also enjoyed favour among prominent figures from countries that subsequently positioned themselves as being ideologically opposed to it, illustrating the degree of international support that it enjoyed during the period. In June 1936, only weeks after the Italians seized Addis Ababa in the Second Italo–Ethiopian War, the Paris-based Bureau International des Expositions officially sanctioned the regime's plan for the E 42. In June 1938 the British sent a delegation of twenty-five prominent English industrialists and the City Livery Club, an alliance of various British guilds, to visit the E 42 worksite.Footnote 34 A number of prominent Americans visited as well, including the former ‘hard hitting’ New York City police commissioner Grover Whalen, then president of the 1939 New York World's Fair.Footnote 35 In spring 1940 France's E 42 Chairman Rene Besnard visited the fascist monuments under construction and took a full tour of the Worker Village before enjoying refreshments in a bar frequented by workers. The French, Besnard explained, were intent on erecting a Le Corbusier exhibit that would faithfully recreate a visit to Paris.Footnote 36 Yet just weeks later Italy declared war on France as the Nazis hoisted the Swastika atop the real Ville Lumière.
After Italy entered the war on the side of the Nazis in June 1940, visitors to the EUR worksite were most often Italian or German. Those most intrigued by the fascist labour spectacle tended to be German visitors, while securing Nazi praise for Italian labour was a priority for the Italian regime. Because work on the E 42 had slowed considerably by early 1941 it was suggested by the EUR Agency that German architects only tour in the afternoon or mid-morning so that they could ‘visit the worksite in the presence of the workers, without which it would give the impression that the works of the EUR have been abandoned’.Footnote 37 Members of a delegation from the Advertising Council of the German Economy (Werberat der Deutschen Wirtschaft), including Heinrich Hunke, the director of Nazi foreign propaganda, were captivated by the ‘grandiosity, the organisation, the efficiency and modernness’ of the worksite.Footnote 38 Leonardo Conti, Swiss born Chief of Health in the Reich, was ‘particularly struck by the Worker Village and its functioning in various aspects, asking many questions and tasting a variety of dishes, commenting favourably on the generosity of the food as well as on its price. The guest was praised by a number of workers.’Footnote 39 German speaking Swiss reporters were pleased with the lively pace of labour in the work zone, calling it a spectacle of calm. ‘All of the public works proceed in a busy manner. Even with the reduction of work [due to the war], it continues to let employers hire through a variety of contracts, it gives work to numerous labourers and demonstrates to the world that Italy pursues its construction projects with serene virility.’Footnote 40 The Reich Chamber of Film (Reichsfilmkammer) was impressed by the continuation of work on the EUR during the war. It asked permission to ‘film the workers close-up and direct a series of scenes of workers’ lives in the EUR and the Worker Village.’Footnote 41 In the same year Baldur von Schirach, head of the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend), visited Rome and the EUR construction site, working with sculptors on a statue and dining with other labourers in the Worker Village mess hall.Footnote 42
The supreme ceremonies of labour at the EUR were reserved for the Duce himself, the great Caesar who was creating grandiose structures on the peninsula to rival the edifices of the ancient Roman past. The regime's well-orchestrated inauguration of the Worker Village on 18 April 1939 created an opportunity for the regime to portray Mussolini as the great father of the unskilled labourer.Footnote 43 After the initial pomp and circumstance, and ‘between incessant demonstrations of faith’ by the workers in attendance, Mussolini personally conducted a military-like inspection of the new worker quarters, taking ‘into account the minute details of the structures, the organisation and functioning of the range of services. The “Village” presents itself as harmonious and gay’, wrote Il Messaggero, a Rome daily newspaper, the genial atmosphere perhaps aided by the promise of double pay for workers who attended the ceremony.Footnote 44 The regime's orchestration of Mussolini's visit to the EUR site demonstrated very publicly the Duce's association with the E 42, the workers, and the Worker Village.
On 21 April 1939, just two days after Mussolini's visit, a massive rally of workers and fascist leaders was held in the E 42 worksite, ripe for the next morning's headlines. As a substitute for the socialist May Day as well as the anniversary celebration of Rome's mythical founding 2,692 years before, 21 April was a modern ‘revolutionary’ state holiday with the content of tradition that preceded modernity. This annual ritual of fascist ontology, it could be said, ‘opposed the secular “clock time of capitalism”, and posited in its stead an alternative time’,Footnote 45 the non-secular, irreversible time of royal coronations and dispensations of the Bible: the ceremonial procession of destiny. As an Italian worker holiday that celebrated the ‘Roman values of work and discipline’, the 21 April holiday had found an appropriate mise en scène in the EUR construction site that year.Footnote 46
The EUR would become a vital national symbol of that mediation of tradition and transformation during the late fascist period. In 1922 the fascist regime had come to power amid the political and economic turmoil of the First World War and its aftermath. Of the supposed ‘great powers’ of Western Europe at the time of the First World War, Italy was said to be the least developed. Over half of Italy's workers were peasants and farmers, an extremely high number compared to Germany (35 per cent) and the United Kingdom (8 per cent).Footnote 47 After seeing the wretched living conditions of peasants in southern Italy on the eve of the First World War, Booker T. Washington, the American civil rights leader, quipped that conditions for African-American sharecroppers in the poorest regions of the racially segregated southern United States were ‘incomparably better than the condition and opportunities of the agricultural population in Sicily’.Footnote 48 Compounding the widely reported prevalence of poverty and malnutrition, Italy's lack of organisational capacity for mass mobilisation impaired its performance in the war.Footnote 49 Italy's allies used its relative lack of success to break the 1915 Pact of London, limiting the nation's ‘entitlements’ as war victors at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Italian nationalists considered the First World War a ‘mutilated victory’– a popular refrain taken up by revanchist fascists in the following years.Footnote 50 War veteran turned dictator Benito Mussolini sought to bring Italy onto the world stage through competition as a way to transform perceptions of Italy.
One critical objective of the EUR was to make it seem as though Italian labour under fascism had ascended to the heights of the more industrialised nations while maintaining Italian specificity, an objective for which construction labour was especially well suited compared to more homogenous and technical manufacturing methods. The regime, in many of its plans, presented the superb capacity of fascist labour management to execute a massive project requiring thousands of labourers.Footnote 51 By demonstrating accomplishments in the field of production in a way that held to the traditions of the Italian worker, labour in the EUR countered common perceptions of Italy's ‘backwardness’ while maintaining the ‘dignity’ of cultural specificity. Mussolini even planned to make the World's Fair Exhibit of Labour into a permanent museum worthy of comparison with the Deutsches Museum in Munich.Footnote 52 Indeed, the E 42 was the great national endeavour that gave employment opportunities to peasants like Comin's fictional Angelo and Vincenzo, where father and son were reunited under a new modern labour ethic that had resurrected Italy's past heritage and revealed its future destiny.
It Takes a Village to Make ‘The Worker’
As Jacopo Comin shows, it would take a village to make the new worker of fascism. Early in the screenplay for Birth, Comin depicts the experience of protagonist Angelo and his fellow workers quartering in a dusty, roadside trattoria owned and operated by Giuditta, who unbeknownst to Angelo at the time is his long-estranged mother.Footnote 53 Not long into the screenplay the Worker Village is finished and Angelo moves into a new dormitory. Workers adorn their living spaces with mementos and pictures of loved ones. ‘At night, the assemblies in the dining hall are full of happiness and a sense of serene comradeship. Rooms are full of workers writing to their families. It is like a new home.’Footnote 54 Angelo's world of the Worker Village appears at once as a space of abstraction, as if the young protagonist was thrust into Plato's utopian realm of the Republic – in which the traditional family no longer exists, and where the intersubjective influences (even recognition) between biological parent guardians and children have vanished. The abstraction of relationships in the dormitory would however be transformed by the regime, with the paternal authority of the fascist state newly mediating these relationships. Comin shows this space as the ‘zero point’ for the reconstitution of meaning under the auspices of a new form of labour solidarity based around patriarchy and hierarchy.
With many unskilled agrarian workers passing through the EUR in construction roles, the regime built the Worker Village as a site for cultural re-education, creating the ‘new fascist worker’ while turning its production into an object of display for dignitaries. Situated just outside the EUR perimeter fence, the Village also allowed the regime to maintain its labour pool in close proximity to the worksite, maximising supervision and extraction of labour time. The Village, ‘a downright miniature city’ according to the film How the E 42 Was Born, was equipped with ten dormitories for a vacillating daily occupancy of 1,300–400 workers, a vast cafeteria, convention hall, post office and medical clinic, as well as the offices for the Fascist Union of Industrial Workers, which in principle represented the interests of workers.Footnote 55
With its prominent placement on the itineraries of visitors, the Worker Village provided the regime with the opportunity to showcase the lives of workers under fascism in a favourably coordinated environment. ‘Given the proximity of the Village to the E 42 site, it is considered to be an object of visits on the part of tourists and foreign authorities’, wrote artist and political official Cipriano Efisio Oppo to Mussolini.Footnote 56 By April 1939 the conditions for coordinating and staging the lives of the fascist Italian worker were in place, right on time for Mussolini's abovementioned visit. Entertainment was provided for the Worker Village to ensure the inculcation of a hierarchical labour solidarity based on ‘Italian tradition’ rather than class solidarity. Loudspeakers were positioned around the Village to air fascist state radio so that workers could ‘automatically tune in’ to programming.Footnote 57 To further structure the leisure time of hired hands, fascist propaganda films and newsreels were projected onto a big screen in the main piazza of the Worker Village one night per week, while regular lectures were held featuring speakers from the Institute of Fascist Culture.Footnote 58
The EUR Agency organised regular performances by the After-Work Choir of Factory Workers for residents of the Worker Village. Choir members, 140 workers from Rome's industrial plants, were adorned in folkloric costumes and performed traditional Roman, Neapolitan and Romagnoli songs.Footnote 59 The National After-Work Agency (Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro; OND) was the parent fascist national ‘after work’ leisure organisation that had manufactured the After-Work Choir of Factory Workers. The OND, the historian de Grazia argues, ‘as social mediator and disciplinarian of labour’, was designed to serve as a tool for fascist mass organising (and mass persuasion) by regime and employer alike.Footnote 60 Paxton writes that the OND was the regime's utmost attempt to bring fascism into the everyday lives of Italians and to ‘penetrate Italian society down to country towns’.Footnote 61 The OND did not only spread fascist culture into rural Italy, however. Through its ambitious folkloric programme, constituting the National Commission for the Popular Arts in 1928,Footnote 62 the OND also brought ‘authentic’ cultural tradition from the countryside into Italy's urban centres. The OND was influential in developing folkloric programming, allowing industrial workers to be practitioners of ‘ethnic’ customs as well as direct purveyors of ‘traditional’ cultural practices for their fellow EUR workers. In the case of the Worker Village, then, the OND functioned not only to ‘Taylorize leisure’, but also as an intervention in which the Italian worker would embody the very traditions that mechanised labour was increasingly undermining, while also creating the material conditions for their apotheosis at the EUR.Footnote 63
Fascist OND programming, like the performance of the Choir of Factory Workers, also showcased the participatory role of labourers under fascism in a way that upheld the culturally bound relationship of the worker to hierarchy and tradition. Dignitaries, EUR Agency directors and personnel in fascist uniform attended the first concert of the polyphonic Choir of Factory Workers in August 1939.Footnote 64 The Choir was such a success that it was invited back for an encore performance later that year, at which time it would perform ‘a nice folkloristic programme’.Footnote 65 ‘The offer on the part of the president to the philharmonic was received with jubilation by our workers’, wrote the EUR Agency.Footnote 66 When the encore performance of the ‘Choir of Factory Workers’ took place in the Worker Village, LUCE filmed the performance for a newsreel, calling it ‘a concert of regional songs’.Footnote 67 Workers in this way were to experience the semblance of real participation in Italian tradition, a reconstituted ‘direct voice’ that existed in lieu of direct input over their labour conditions, banned by fascist law.
The Breakdown of the ‘Novus Ordo’
After the Fascist Party's consolidation of power in 1925 the Syndical Law was passed, banning the right of workers to unionise and strike.Footnote 68 The law placed worker representation in the hands of regime-approved fascist syndicates, making the state the legally bound arbitrator in disputes between business interests and a single state sanctioned body.Footnote 69 In the ensuing years independent organised labour organisations in Italy were effectively dissolved. Workers experienced extreme wage reductions in 1927 and subsequent cuts in 1930 and 1934. In this context, labour managers within the EUR Agency were able to exude greater influence in policy and control over workers in the construction of the EUR, where members of the working class and vulnerable subproletariat laboured en masse.
To truly demonstrate that fascism had consummated an Italian labour practice laudable for method, speed and discipline, the new EUR city was to be completed in less than half the time as fairgrounds for similar events in other nations. Thus, Italian workers were tied to the demands of increasing productivity in the field of construction, where – even those within the regime had noted – such advancements were most lacking.Footnote 70 To ensure productivity and to maintain a watchful eye over the EUR workforce, the EUR Agency created its own security guard corps, (which the reader might recall had employed Jacopo Comin's fictional Vincenzo). Guards were engaged in efforts to prevent individual workers from congregating in groups and to apprehend day labourers drifting about the zone in search of employment.Footnote 71 A mix of controls was put in place to keep individuals without special permission from entering the work zone.
The Agency determined that the best way to prevent trespassing, sabotage and theft was by instituting tight surveillance around a 12 kilometre long EUR perimeter fence. With security patrols around the perimeter fence thwarting illicit entry, access to the site was provided through seven tightly guarded checkpoints.Footnote 72 Guards at the checkpoints were ordered to ‘stop all workers and make them show their ID cards’, ‘turn away those without identification’ and ‘direct those in search of work to the Worker Village’.Footnote 73 In July 1938 an identification card system was instituted to prevent workers from drifting about the site and to better regulate individuals, commerce and supplies entering and exiting the zone. The identification card system became a cause of tension between guards and workers. In response to the strict checkpoint regulations workers regularly cut holes in the barbed wire perimeter fence, allowing for more direct access to the worksite.Footnote 74 This also prevented workers from having to walk great distances to one of the seven regulated entry points. Despite efforts to the contrary, frequent damage to the fence could not be deterred. Illicit entry continued with such great regularity that guards often temporarily detained workers, only to let them walk free without charges.Footnote 75
Notwithstanding such moments of ‘fraternity’, records show frequent antagonistic interactions between guards and workers, resulting in instances of outright disobedience. In August 1939 security guards Poggiaroni and Schiavetta were driving in the worksite when they stopped the car of Romeo Basilici, driver for the Giovannetti Construction Firm. Poggiaroni, a devout fascist,Footnote 76 reported that Basilici had failed to give him the Roman salute. The guards demanded that the driver and his passenger ‘obey fascist salute regulations’. The worker in the passenger seat, Salvatore Ricciardi, reportedly turned to the guards and said, ‘screw you, we are our own bosses, you are too picky!’Footnote 77 Ricciardi was denounced to the state police, which could have led to strict economic sanctions.Footnote 78
As daily life became more difficult discontent between guards and workers grew. An October 1939 dispatch to the EUR Agency from the Fratelli Sgaravatti Piante company of Padua complained of continual ‘disorder and unrest’ in the Worker Village. ‘A series of thefts has occurred, each more serious than the prior one’, the company wrote. ‘They are inconceivable if one considers that every dormitory has a stationed guard who should be responsible for [items] left in their custody by workers during the workday, and aggravated by the fact that theft is generally achieved by lock picking the lockers in broad daylight’.Footnote 79 The company suggested that the crimes in the Worker Village were either directly carried out by EUR Agency guards or facilitated by their ‘wilful’ ignorance. These crimes, wrote the company, had ‘effects that are contrary to the measures being pursued in the construction of the Village, such as cleanliness, theft prevention and public security’. In other words, the crimes, conducted by or with knowledge of the on-duty security guard, ran counter to the regime's own rhetoric on the Worker Village and its relation to the reconstitution of fascist morality. The EUR Agency responded by saying that the presence of 1,200 workers placed limits on the quality of surveillance exercised by security personnel. In response to the firm's request to have its own guard posted in the dormitory, the EUR Agency replied that it didn't ‘seem opportune to concede to this request, with the rationale that we must avoid internal divisions’.Footnote 80
Unrest in Italy grew during 1940. Amid sharp inflation the state declared wages frozen for the duration of the war.Footnote 81 Records show that wartime conditions of scarcity generated an increase in anxiety and disorder around the E 42 worksite, as the ranks of the desperate surged until the regime's collapse in July 1943. Though the 1942 World's Fair was cancelled with the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, construction on the site did continue, albeit at a reduced pace, with many workers – and worksite security guards – having been called to perform military duty in the expanding war.Footnote 82 Crime increased due to more limited security and shortages of provisions in the wartime economy. Hundreds of police reports reference looting and theft in the EUR zone.Footnote 83 The grey economy thrived, as workers lacking proper documentation peddled goods in and around the Worker Village. Some of the thousands of trees planted in parks and along the avenues for 1942 were illicitly chopped down for firewood. As the worksite was progressively abandoned, an earlier type of labour made an ironic return in the form of shepherds, who unlawfully and in open disregard for the enclosure led flocks of sheep to feast on the lush green lawns planted for the cosmopolitan World's Fair crowds.Footnote 84
In early 1941 an office inside the Worker Village issued booklets of soup vouchers to lodged workers.Footnote 85 In November 1941 the distribution of foodstuffs was progressively tightened, with bread rationed at 200 grams a day per worker.Footnote 86 Also in 1941 – with soldiers in new anti-aircraft installations looking skyward – a police station was constructed in the heart of the Worker Village to better observe the 1,300 workers still residing there for signs of disturbance.Footnote 87 With a 50 per cent reduction in bread rations, police closely monitored workers and recorded minute changes in affect. And what better place to observe ‘public opinion’ on food rationing than right in the laboratory of the Worker Village mess hall! In a strictly confidential memorandum to the EUR Agency Chief of Staff on 28 September 1941, police commander Alfredo Chiti wrote that the rationing of bread by half ‘was received by the workers in the Village with a sense of ill-concealed consternation. In fact, some of them expressed a desire to return home to their villages.’Footnote 88 Chiti continued: ‘keeping in mind that the greater quantity of bread would be given to workers in heavy industry, it is the general sentiment that even this augmented quantity would clearly be insufficient’.
To provide workers with more calories, members of the OND began to participate in the cultivation of potatoes and grain on newly designated lands within the worksite.Footnote 89 Meanwhile, Chiti had overheard workers in the mess hall grumbling, ‘now they want us to scratch and claw at the earth for food’.Footnote 90 The police were searching for the agitators who, it was claimed, had spread such discontent to incite workers. Two weeks later, Commander Chiti wrote again on his investigations. ‘Following from the preceding communication, I correspond that in this Worker Village, the rationing of bread has created a sense of slight unease that is becoming habit forming’.Footnote 91 Workers were said to submerge their spoons into their soup bowls and play with the broth ‘as if to make a statement about the quantity of liquid and the reduction of pasta in the soup, with an expression of sad irony’. The police commander was unable to detect whether workers were discreetly criticising the quantity of food or genuinely trying to remain cheerful. ‘Some of them, in good or bad faith, comment favourably on the quantity of provisions’, stated Chiti. Others abstained from any discussion, ‘bearing an estrangement typical of immigrant workers. Assiduous vigilance will be maintained.’ Through a mix of surveillance and material deprivation, the fascists had apparently overcome labour conviviality to an extent that the guard no longer recognised the exhibited range of emotions as ‘Italian’.
By the end of 1943 Nazi forces (and later the Allies) discovered that the EUR structures, built of reinforced concrete, travertine and marble, designed to last millennia, provided stout defence against bombardment.Footnote 92 While the ‘permanent’ EUR fortresses did suffer notable damage during the war, they proved largely impervious to annihilation, much like the fascism that had motivated their construction. Meanwhile, the tasks of the hitherto forbidding fascist police were relegated to the passive monitoring of these occupying soldiers from afar. With Italy's surrender to the Allies on 8 September 1943, German forces were rapidly deployed throughout the peninsula. Between 9–11 September, the EUR was the site of the first military engagement between new enemies Italy and Germany.Footnote 93 For the duration of the fighting and German advance onto the worksite, desperate local civilians looted the EUR buildings.Footnote 94
Within the first three months of German occupation, the Italian police unit tasked with protecting the EUR experienced a 70 per cent desertion rateFootnote 95 The remaining policemen wrote reports that illustrate their lack of power to impose even minimal security. On 6 June 1944 EUR Agency General Secretary Valentini described the scene of the Nazi retreat: Italians charged with forced labour for the Todt Organisation, under the Italian Command of the Nazi SS (Einsatzgruppen Italien), were set free in the abandoned worksite.Footnote 96 ‘The freed workers plundered all they could find while the officers were not able to maintain order or safeguard property’.Footnote 97 The remaining on-duty officers fled, leaving Officer Giudice alone to fend off an attack by the discharged Todt workers. Giudice's efforts were in vain, and he was injured by the crowd as it forced entry into the EUR offices. Another dispatch by Marshall Vincenzo Carlei on 16 August 1944 stated that ‘today at around 3 p.m., American soldiers carried away 42 1.4-meter-long by 30-centimetre-wide slabs of marble’.Footnote 98 The soldiers handed ‘vouchers’ to the observing officer. Instead of accommodating the spectacles of the new homo fascistus and the World's Fair of 1942, the Esposizione Universale di Roma soon became, against all intentions, a place to experience a total breakdown in the fascist Novus Ordo.
Conclusion
To provide fresh insight into fascist subjectification during the period 1937–43, this article began with an examination of the fascist social imaginary, with the worker mediating the regime's calibrated embodiments of productivism and anti-modernism based upon a selective notion of Italian cultural tradition at the World's Fair. Then, through a glimpse of the ‘everyday’ practices of workers and security guards within the space of the EUR, it established the limits of fascism's ability to generalise a new ‘interiority’ of Italian Being. Nevertheless, fascist tactics appear to have been successful in confining these oppositions to the realm of petty crimes or ‘uncivil’ disobedience, acts of individual frustration that finally seep out (or explode) after prolonged repression.Footnote 99 Thus, while the new mode of worker subjectivity was never quite achieved in the way envisioned by the fascists, the regime's discourses had sweeping effects, grounding cultural norms and generating a symbolic order in which other forms of thought and action must enter as deviant or insurgent.
In the exhibition of labour around the E 42, the regime's gesture toward permanence took the substance of hand-picked ‘authentic’ traditions based on sacrifice and adherence to a social order posited as true to ‘Italian’ origins, down to its apocryphal Roman elements. With fascists mobilising the category of ‘labour’ to generate meaning and to fulfil political aims, the idea of a new labouring subject emerges, shown as fixed within a ‘natural’ hierarchy of familial and honorific work relations and bound by heroic sacrifice to those structures of ‘traditional’ authority. Both the documentary film and dramatic screenplay under review here, along with visits to the EUR worksite for dignitaries, have indicated the pivotal role that the display of labouring activities was to hold for the regime. Each film in its own way shows fascist hierarchies as indelible and beyond reproach, with the regime having modernised Italy while resolving the class based divisions of the liberal West and foundational class solidarity of the Bolshevik East by reference to the traditions of Italy's ‘ancient’ past. While in the documentary the emotional compensation for the hardships of manual labour is the promise of Italian modernization, Comin's Vincenzo on the other hand provides the filmic prototype of sacrifice, which ensures social stability, the reconstitution of tradition and the future of fascism amidst said transformations. Even though the regime harkened to ‘preindustrial’, hidebound modes of labour solidarity, the fascists did not actually want to reconstitute medieval or guild-like processes of production, only the affective modalities associated with them, as demonstrated by such efforts to shape the ‘new labouring subject’ in the Worker Village. The regime had in essence endeavoured to craft ‘proletarians’ without a Proletariat.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to express sincere gratitude to Leora Auslander, Robin Bates, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Moishe Postone, William H. Sewell Jr. and Lisa Simeone for very thoughtful comments on drafts of this work.
