Pasta prices are surging in Italy, up 17.5 percent in March and 16.5 percent in April. Sellers say that this is simply a reflection of higher costs due to the war in Ukraine, but Italian consumer rights groups aren’t buying it. The Italian National Association of Public Service Users, Assoutenti, blames corporate profiteering, and has called for a consumer “pasta strike” for fifteen days, or until companies lower prices. Assoutenti’s president Furio Truzzi points out that wheat prices are down significantly from their peak in March 2022, at their lowest level since July 2021. Today’s high pasta prices, according to Truzzi, are due to other factors than high production costs: namely, corporate profiteering.

Can ordinary people fight price gouging? Assoutenti’s call echoes an earlier, successful effort to resist price gouging, led in 1914 by the Providence, Rhode Island Italian Socialist Club, documented well by the historian Joseph Sullivan. Then, as is now the case in Italy, pasta prices skyrocketed. Then, as now, war was the factor merchants blamed for high prices. And then, as now, capital’s defenders exonerated business elites for playing any role in the price increases: the Providence mayor commissioned a study that found no price gouging was taking place.

However, Providence in the early 1900s was blessed with strong organized labor and socialist movements. The Labor Advocate newspaper, aligned with the Industrial Workers of the World, denounced the mayor’s study as a “whitewash,” and singled out the local monopolist, “Macaroni King” Frank Ventrone, for profiteering. (Ventrone had already been caught passing off Long Island–made counterfeit pasta dyed yellow to look like real semolina pasta. While centrist economists like to ridicule anyone concerned with quality products as an urban hipster, these working-class Italian immigrants valued the real thing.)