talian life. It is thus that
the Fascist loves and accepts life, ignores and disdains suicide;
understands life as a duty, a lifting up, a conquest; something to be
filled in and sustained on a high plane; a thing that has to be lived
through for its own sake, but above all for the sake of others near
and far, present and future.

4. The Demographic Policy and the "Neighbour."

The "demographic" policy of the regime is the result of these
premises. The Fascist also loves his neighbour, but "neighbour" is not
for him a vague and undefinable word: love for his neighbour does not
prevent necessary educational severities. Fascism rejects professions
of universal affection and, though living in the community of
civilised peoples, it watches them and looks at them diffidently. It
follows them in their state of mind and in the transformation of their
interests, but it does not allow itself to be deceived by fallacious
and mutable appearances.

5. Against Historical Materialism and Class-Struggle.

Through this conception of life Fascism becomes the emphatic negation
of that doctrine which constituted the basis of the so-called
scientific Socialism or Marxism: the doctrine of historical
materialism, according to which the story of human civilisation is to
be explained only by the conflict of interests between the various
social groups and by the change of the means and instruments of
production.

That the economic vicissitudes--discovery of prime or raw materials,
new methods of labour, scientific inventions--have their particular
importance, is denied by none, but that they suffice to explain human
history, excluding other factors from it, is absurd: Fascism still
believes in sanctity and in heroism, that is to say in acts in which
no economic motive, immediate or remote, operates.

Fascism having denied historical materialism, by which men are only
puppets in history, appearing and disappearing on the surface of the
tides while in the depths the real directive forces act and labour, it
also denies the immutable and irreparable class warfare, which is the
natural filiation of such an economistic conception of history: and it
denies above all that class warfare is the preponderating agent of
social transformation.

Being defeated on these two capital points of its doctrine, nothing
remains of Socialism save the sentimental aspiration--as old as
humanity--to achieve a community of social life in which the
suffering