Fascism followed the defeat of workers, not ruling-class desperation

Evidence

It would be utterly mistaken to portray fascism as a desperate last resort of a threatened ruling class. On the contrary, it was only after the defeat of the working class in 1920 that the big industrialists (and Giolitti) decided that the moment had come to replace the velvet glove by the iron fist, and gave financial support and tacit approval respectively to the fascist squads. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 86

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the hegemony toolkit: fascism emerges from a confident, consolidated capitalism after hegemony over the working class holds, contradicting the reflex that fascism is defensive weakness. — connects to: Interwar capitalist powers succeeded against labor even where they failed among themselves — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 671
• DEFINE: Clarifies the relationship between ruling-class confidence and fascist violence — a mechanism later Islamophobia scholarship reuses for state repression after movements are already defeated.