By 1920, when the CGdL led some 800 of these cooperatives, there was seething unease among the country's economic establishment. Even in their gradualism, the extent and political infl uence of these noncapitalist organizations was a menace to the status quo. Economists like Maff eo Pantaleoni branded them “Bolshevik associations” [associazioni bolsceviche] or “red cooperatives” [cooperative rosse], organizations that were “destroying the bourgeoisie who had created all the existing enterprises” (Pantaleoni 1922, viii).

Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, loc. 430