Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

There is a consensus in the literature that the campaign should not be seen exclusively from the point of view of agriculture.[24] The major reason for this is probably the obvious role played in it by Companhia União Fabril (CUF), which, with its 6,000 workers, was the biggest chemical conglomerate on the Iberian Peninsula at the time. From 1927 until 1934, Portugal’s production of fertilizers more than doubled, which more than justified the CUF’s financing of demonstration fields and other propaganda actions praising the use of its fertilizers to win the Wheat Campaign.[25] Above, I insisted in the importance of the connections between chemical industry and agriculture for Italian fascism established through Strampelli’s Ardito. In looking at the Portuguese Wheat Campaign, I want to go a step further and delve into the ways new wheat strains contributed to the first institutional forms of the Portuguese fascist corporatist state.[26] As we will see, after the campaign an entire new set of corporatist institutions was created, with the National Federation of Wheat Producers (Federação Nacional de Produtores de Trigo) controlling production and commercialization at the national level, Farmers’ Guilds (Grémios da Lavoura) gathering landowners in regional structures, and Houses of People (Casas do Povo) locally undertaking peasant basic welfare initiatives.[27]

^{Figure 2.2 Artur Pastor, “Threshing Wheat in Alentejo, 1940.”}

^{(Fundo Artur Pastor, Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa)}

The campaign was a first step in the corporatist experiment of organizing society through associations of producers rather than classes, promising a less divisive and more organic form of political representation. It transformed a simple dictatorial regime into a fascist one, combining state corporatism and authoritarianism.[28] By 1933 the 1926 authoritarian military coup had evolved into a full-fledged fascist regime—the New State—with a corporatist constitution that would last until 1974.[29] It replaced any form of liberal mechanisms of representation with ideological nationalism, a one-party state, systematic political repression, and a social and economic corporatism formed by alleged organic social unities, a combination that placed it among the family of European fascist regimes.[30] Amusingly similar to Bolshevik arguments, the ruling elite of the New State considered Portuguese society not yet ready for pure corporatism from below, the state having to assume for the time being the responsibility to build a new social structure based on the alleged harmony of its different organs. Manuel de Lucena, a scholar who has explored the relations between corporatism and fascism in greater depth, maintains that not even in Mussolini’s regime were corporatist organizations so influential.[31] A short glance at the multiplicity of new institutes, boards, commissions, and councils, the so-called organisms of economic coordination, which were created to guarantee the discipline of different economical sectors, confirms the verdict. Every major product or raw material, be it rice, wine, cod, cotton, or wool and industries as disparate as milling, cannery, ceramics, or pharmaceutical, deserved a new rationalizing para-state corporatist institution controlling imports, prices, wages, or quality.[32] The first such corporatist institution to be created was the National Federation of Wheat Producers (FNPT), and it was the direct result of a campaign—in this case, the Wheat Campaign.