Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

The corporatist structure of the FNPT and the regional Guilds was complemented at the local level by a third institution: the Casas do Povo (Houses of the People), designed to promote basic welfare policies among rural workers and replacing any form of labor unionization.[73] The regime hoped to put an end to social unrest in the Portuguese fields by building about 4,000 of these institutions across the country, combining health and social services (retirement and unemployment savings), basic instruction, and local improvements such as roads and sewage works (important in winter, when work in the fields was scarce). If by 1940 about half of the parishes in Alentejo had Casas do Povo encompassing about 150,000 members, that figure would climb to almost 90 percent in 1950, a growth aimed at alleviating the social problems arising from the large wheat estates’ allegedly harmonious political economy.

^{Figure 2.5 Artur Pastor, “Grain Silos, Alentejo, 1940s.”}

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

The Casas do Povo worked as institutions for the social control of the masses of wage laborers and sharecroppers. In order to get social benefits, one had to attend mass, be diligent at work, stop demanding better conditions, and be respectful of social hierarchies.[74] After all, local notable men, meaning large estate owners, also formed the board of directors of the Casas do Povo. In fact, the funds for this primitive form of state welfare, the first to systematically reach Portuguese rural populations, originated from the Farmers’ Guilds and from the FNPT, the upper levels of the hierarchical corporatist structure. As was stated by the regime’s ideologue responsible for the design of the system, “the organic framework of the rural population through the Casas do Povo proclaims clearly and indisputably the intransigent realism of our corporatist structure.”[75]

During the 1930s there was no large-scale social turmoil in the Alentejo region. Sharecroppers cultivated the heaths and received subsidies for expanding wheat acreage, and wage laborers were employed by estates profiting from high wheat prices. But from 1943 until 1962, the rising seasonal unemployment, due to increasing mechanization and the expulsion of sharecroppers from eroded thin schist soils, would transform Alentejo into an area of growing communist resistance to the regime.[76] The corporatist structure integrated every individual into an allegedly organic unit, and those agitating for better wages or other forms of political representation and work unionization outside the state system became objects of violent repression by the National Republican Guard or the Political Police, articulated with a politically controlled judiciary system and concentration camps in the colonies.[77] As one of the grimmest slogans of Salazar’s New State put it, “a place for everyone; each one in its proper place.”[78]

To summarize, the geneticist António Sousa da Câmara was the executive organizer of the Wheat Campaign, and the National Agricultural Experiment Station (EAN) was born directly from the recognition of the importance of his research for food self-sufficiency. The National Federation of Wheat Producers (FNPT) funded much of the work undertaken by the breeding department of the EAN in Elvas. In the opposite direction, the high-yielding seeds of the breeder’s plots of Elvas sustained the extended distribution network of the FNPT. The new strains and their response to chemical fertilizers were crucial in sustaining and enlarging the large wheat estates, the core of the system.