ABSTRACT
Fascism was something more than a movement made up of a "ragbag of futurists, anarchists, communists, syndicalists, republicans, Catholics, nationalists and liberals of various kinds". The First World War exacerbated that crisis, and created the furious young men who would make up the membership of the armed squads that both defeated socialism and destroyed the credibility of parliamentary government on the Italian peninsula, preparing the way for Mussolini's accession to power. The syndicalists, driven by a passion to shake Italians out of their lethargy, conscious of the absence of a revolutionary "Marxist theory of collective psychology", proceeded to put one together out of the available materials. By 1919, nationalism, syndicalism and Futurism had come together in a synthesis that made up the political and economic program of the first Fascism.
