This article takes an unashamedly political line on Italian fascist economic policies, on the grounds that fascism without the politics is barely fascism at all. It attempts to outline what was ‘fascist’ about the running of the Italian economy during the fascist era. The concern throughout is to articulate what fascism's efforts to control the national economy tell people about the nature of fascism, rather than about the nature of Italian economic development. After the First World War, the corporations' job was, under the totalitarian regime's auspices, to bury for good counter-productive and divisive class conflict, by forcing the various human factors of production to cooperate in the national interest of maximizing economic output.