[Fasces]

In the year 1912, Sorel, the well-known revolutionary syndicalist, began his paper L'Indipendance, which was undeniably nationalist. At the same time, two other publications were launched: Les Cahiers du Cercle Proudhon in France, under the watchful eye of Charles Maurras of the Action Française, and ghostwritten in many parts by Sorel himself; and La Lupa, an Italian paper which would grow into the preliminary birth place of national syndicalist thought. It was during this time that Sorel and his contemporaries contrived the synthesis of all the ideas and contemporary trends of thought which had in common the advocacy of revolt against a bourgeois society and all its moral and political values, revolt against the doctrine of natural rights, and revolt against liberalism and democracy.

This included not only revolutionary syndicalism, but the new nationalism, a nationalism now divorced from the ideals of the French revolution, the ideals of capitalism and liberalism, a new nationalism that too produced diatribes against the rich and against economic injustices; that denounced liberal democracy both as a pattern of government and as a socioeconomic system, that demanded that the State take up authoritarian attitudes, and that attacked social injustices in the name of group solidarity.

Syndicalists and nationalists were of one mind; they evaluated the mechanisms of bourgeois society in much the same terms, and both conceived of society as being dominated by a powerful minority, with the apparatus of State serving their will. When material conditions were no longer propitious to one particular minority, then another elite rose to the top, in accordance with a process of continuous rotation of elite groups, each of which stirred up the masses to its own purpose. Each minority advanced a sustaining myth, to act as a goad to rebellion during times of transition from the rule of an established elite to the rule of a contending elite, and as a legitimizing fiction once the contending elite had established its dominance. Behind the facade of representative institutions and parliamentary procedures, the bourgeois government was just such an established elite.

The convergence of revolutionary syndicalism and nationalism is best illustrated by the symptomatic development of Sergio Pannunzio, who later went on to expound the theories that shaped the institutional reforms implemented by the fascists. As a young man, Pannunzio was a syndicalist, but a syndicalist who from the first found himself in agreement with Mosca, and said as much; he combined Italian national themes with ideas borrowed from Sorel. He not only insisted that it was time to leave the outworn traditional liberal State behind but also favoured an assumption which other syndicalists had made before him, that the long-standing hostility between two antagonistic social sectors-bourgeoisie and proletariat-was in fact 'schematic.' He maintained that there existed rather two blocs, one of which was reactionary and conservative, and the other revolutionary. To the second, only militant syndicalists and anarchists belonged, and thus the new concept of anarcho-syndicalism was borne. With it, came the concept of national-syndicalism.