Minders of the Clock and Starvers of the People: Everyday Fascism and the Grassroots Logic of Revolutionary Defascistization in Monfalcone,Italy,1922–1946

Abstract

Although much is known about the political and legal contours of post-dictatorial transitions in twentieth-century Southern Europe, less is known about the process of resolving contradictory purge aspirations at the national and local levels, let alone how new social imaginaries emerged at the grassroots level informed by the everyday experiences of dictatorship. This article provides a bottom-up account of defascistization in the Italian town of Monfalcone, where a distinctly social-revolutionary logic of defascistization emerged independent of Marxism and tied to the town's everyday experiences of dictatorship. Twenty years of everyday antagonism between non-Fascist residents and local Fascists who headed workplace and marketplace power structures led to a conflation of Fascism with workplace and marketplace power structures in their entirety. Residents understood defascistization as a project to dismantle both political Fascism and local power structures that instantiated ‘everyday Fascism’. This clashed with the logic of defascistization brought to Monfalcone by Italy's post-war Allied Military Government, and incompatibilities between local and external logics concretely undermined defascistization efforts with profound political effects. As defascistization faltered, the Communist Party articulated Marxism-Leninism within the language of popular purge aspirations, fuelling a campaign for Tito's Yugoslavia to annex much of northeastern Italy, Monfalcone included. Residents participated in this battle to realize their expansive vision of defascistization and to weed out authoritarian structures characteristic of ‘Fascist’ life. The study suggests a great potential for everyday-historical approaches to uncover still-buried dynamics of post-dictatorial transitions in and beyond Southern Europe.