Italian corporatism arose from economic policing needs, not industrial modernisation.

Evidence

Fovel’s greatest weaknesses consist in his having neglected the economic function which the state has always had in Italy because of the diffident attitude of small savers towards the industrialists, and in having neglected the fact that the corporative trend did not originate from the need for changes in the technical conditions of industry, or even from that of a new economic policy, but rather from the need for economic policing, a need which was aggravated by the 1929 crisis which is still going on. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1088

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that corporatism emerged from ‘economic policing’ rather than technical change is a fertile mechanism worth carrying forward — what does economic policing mean concretely, and how does it map onto authoritarian governance?
• SEED: Angle: corporatism as a policing technology rather than an economic program — a genealogy of authoritarian economic control applicable beyond Italy.
• XREF: Links to Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and the state’s role in economic coercion, which later Islamophobia readings on state power can build on.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1088