Elements for the history of fascism in the «Wheat Campaign», 1928-1938 (II)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31447/AS00032573.197854.06Keywords:
Portuguese fascism, Wheat Campaign, 1928-1938Abstract
As a contribution to the history of the Portuguese fascism in rural aereas one studied, in a previous article (Análise Social, nº. 46), the antecedents and the economic aspects of the so-called «Wheat Campaign», that took place between 1928 and 1938. In the present article, its political, ideological and institutional aspects are studied. In that previous article, one could already conclude that the
«Wheat Campaign» was part and parcel of a «processus of fascistization». As a matter of fact, through it was, in a first time, just a device for restraining the money outlet and promoting a kind of import-substitution for bread (taking part in the Salazarist programme of «finantial restauration»), «Wheat Campaign», on the other side, made possible to put a series of social and economic elements of first importance under the same flag - the patriotic exaltation of the autarchy: «The wheat of our land is the frontier that protects us best». Thus, appraising what may have been the «Wheat Campaign» either at the economic and social level or at the
institutional and ideological level it seems there is no doubt that it may have rendered possible, not really «to solve the wheat problem» but mainly to become a material support for a very complex «alliance of classes». This alliance - that engaged big holders and manufacturers and big and small farmers, without even putting aside the peasants with no land - was one of the most successful moments of the building of the corporatist regime, either in itself or as a test for other operations of the same kind achieved through the Portuguese social and economic structure. On the other side, the analysis of the «Wheat Campaign» and its multiple political and institutional implications shows how the Portuguese corporatism found its may towards a surprising «fusion» between the political and the economic and the overpassing of the necessary mediations of any representative, liberal or authoritarian system.
