A Civil War
Page 65
The memory of 1920–21 in its turn re-soldered the link between class war and civil war. ‘ ’21-type individual … ’21-type lad, that’s it’, is how a worker from the Galileo plant describes a smart youth after recalling the role that the presence of ‘folk who’d done ’21, who’d done ‘22’, elderly people who ‘venian per tradizione di famiglia’ (‘who come out of family tradition’),21 had had in creating a class consciousness in the factory. It was a memory that culminated in the verdict against ‘reformists also called traitors’22 and in the judgment on the 1921 split,23 which was very similar to the one passed by a French Trotskyist paper: ‘The workers of Milan, Turin and Rome have not forgotten the lesson of 1921. This time, they will not relinquish the weapons that the traitors of social democracy made them turn in to Mussolini’.24
The identification of the Fascist regime with the regime of the padroni encouraged the belief that the moment had come for a showdown on the social plane as well. Conversely, and highly favourable to the identification of the working class and Communism, there was the stark dilemma that had been posed for more than twenty years by Fascist propaganda: either Fascism or Communism.
‘In many countries there is no evidence of other political leanings. The division seems to be clear-cut: either Communists or Fascists. The situation only needs to pick up a bit for us to be masters of the situation.’ While this schematic optimism of the Ancona Communist leaders is neither justified nor can it be applied across the board, it does indicate a widespread conviction. The Ancona Communists complete the picture by introducing the connection between the Fascists and the German connection: ‘The local Fascists, especially those from the hinterland, are giving no trouble, on the contrary they are doing their utmost to show their goodwill towards the anti-Fascists: we know, however, that this is due to the fact that the invaders haven’t yet arrived in these zones.’25
‘The enemy is the Nazi German’, declared Avanti!, and only the working classes, it added to square the circle, can wage a struggle that is not only a ‘war against the foreigner who is trampling on the soil of the patria, but it also and above all a war against the scourge of our century, inside and outside Italy, against Fascism’.26 And in another appeal it urged: ‘National insurrection against the Nazi invader; national insurrection against the remains of Fascism … national insurrection against the accomplices of Fascism.’27
Several Action Party–GL documents also ended up affirming the privileged coincidence between working class and nation: ‘Every strata of the population can be activated … never forgetting, obviously, that the working class is the avant-garde class, the politically national class par excellence.’28
In the pages that follow I shall try, within the scenario outlined above, to highlight some elements which, at various levels and in various situations, may be said to come under the category of ‘class war’, in the broadest sense of the term, appearing isolated one moment and at the next, interwoven in various ways with purely anti-Fascist or patriotic impulses and motivations. I shall avoid reopening the discussion, which was useful in its time in calling a halt to Resistance oleography but which had become a dead letter, as to whether the Resistenza rossa could have prevailed over the Resistenza tricolore if it had not been curbed by the Communist party’s unitary policy.
In PCI policy and, partly, in that of the PSIUP – and this is the first point to which it is worth drawing attention – there were several themes which, in their repetitiveness as in their oscillations and contradictions, fostered what can well claim to be ‘class’ attitudes and expectations. This phenomenon has often been called doppia anima (dual soul), ambiguity – winking. What needs emphasising, rather, is that there was a ‘dual soul’ among the leadership and a ‘dual soul’ among the rank and file, and that the latter was partly induced by the former and came to coincide with it, and partly had a physiognomy of its own, which the leadership generally called incomprehension, tardiness, deviation. The efforts to which the leaders went to suppress these attitudes constitute one of the few sources available for approaching the attitudes themselves.
What needs considering above all, as I have already suggested, is the use of adjectives which in the Communist press (and not only there) more often than not accompanied the nouns capitale and capitalisti, when they were indicated as enemies: ‘ “grande” capitale’, ‘capitalisti “collaborazionisti” ’, and the like. In both cases, but above all in the second (in the first case the reference was more ‘objective’ and ‘scientific’, coming to coincide with the categories of monopolistic and financial capital), so much hostility was levelled at the adjective that it inevitably redounded on the noun. Above all the workers to whom the message was addressed could easily take that hostility as being directed at the noun. If anything, there was the question as to whether being ‘grandi’ necessarily coincided, in the case of the capitalists, with being collaborationists. Of the French Communists’ attitude it has been written that ‘[T]rusts, even when they are appointed, appear to belong more of the category of traitors (or foreigners) to the Fatherland than to the class of exploiters and capitalists’.29
This reflection is equally applicable to the Italian Communists. But it can be added that several hendiadys used by the Communist press seem to suggest a coincidence between grandi and collaborazionisti which is the expression at once of theoretical expectation, didactic purpose and political desire. What is almost a telling lapse appears in these words from the top demanding clarity: ‘Today we must regard the industrialists as accomplices of the Germans and Fascists, because they are exploiting the situation created by the latter to make the workers’ conditions worse and worse.’30
More pragmatically, but with equal optimism, an Action Party document, championing nationalisation or at any rate the placing of the monopolistic or almost monopolistic companies under public control, explained, ‘These measures will be immensely facilitated by the fact that the Italian financial-industrial oligarchy has not only benefited greatly from Fascism, but has also collaborated with the German occupying authorities and with the neo-Fascists.’31
There were, in reality, many oscillations, linked not least to the way the situation was evolving. A comment in L’Unità on the November-December 1943 strikes attempted to provide an explanation, in terms that might be called traditional, of the social forces on which the RSI could not help leaning. ‘Financial capital and reactionary groups that are lackeys of the Nazis and Fascists today constitute a bloc opposing the liberation of the country’, and the author hastens to add: ‘Unfortunately this bloc is being supported also by some high-ranking prelates of the Catholic Church, as witness the pastoral releases by the Fascist press, significant among which are those of the cardinals of Milan and Florence.’32 ‘Whatever the attitudes of the chameleons of big industry and high finance’, L’Unità had written on 31 October 1943, ‘in concrete terms Hitlerian Fascists and plutocrats are getting together to ring the neck of the working class.’33
In the days immediately following 8 September, by contrast, numerous distinctions had been made in defining the behaviour of the capitalists. The title of an article in L’Unità had contrasted the ‘representatives of big capital who sided with the invader’, with the ‘vast majority of honest industrialists who with increasing determination are steering in the direction of the struggle against the Germans’.34 A few months later, this opening of credit would be almost reproved by another newspaper, according to which there were capitalists and industrialists about who ‘have already tired of their patriotic poses of the first few days’, have taken to collaborating with the occupier and ‘would rather the patriots didn’t disturb them in their dealings with the enemy’.35
Particularly severe was a stand taken by L’Unità, still at the beginning of 1944:
The great monopolist industrialists will increase their collaborationist zeal to support the German plans for prolonging the war which enables them, by starving out the working class, to secure for themselves the
most handsome profits and to facilitate for the Nazis the availability of cannon and labour fodder: the recent strikes have completely exposed the anti-worker and anti-national spirit of these great industrialists.36
Togliatti himself, speaking at the Brancaccio theatre in Rome of 9 July 1944, starkly contrasted the armed workers with ‘the groups of the plutocracy who have proved to be anti-national, ever ready to betray the country if it means serving their pockets’.37
Often, and particularly from the Communists, there were denunciations naming traitor capitalists, which inevitably acquired particular significance. The 29 September 1943 issue of L’Unità, mentioned already, denounced the henchmen of the Volpi, Pirelli, Donegani and Boccardo works, who did business with the Germans in the name of their masters, who sought to keep a low profile. The Fiat directors – towards whom, in actual fact, attitudes vary – were said to be ‘openly backing Nazi-Fascist action’ and Professor Vittorio Valletta was said to be ‘one of these shady figures, for all his efforts to appear as a friend of the workers, a man sensitive to national interests’.38 The Roman industrialists Peroni and Manzolini come in for severe denunciations in the column entitled ‘La voce dei lavoratori’ (‘The workers’ voice’).39 On 29 December 1943 Alberto Damiani, representative of the CLNAI in Lugano, was sent an ‘urgent note’ to be broadcast by the BBC and Radio New York. ‘The resistance of the industrialists, particularly the small and medium ones, has been notable, while other big industrialists have immediately placed themselves zealously at the service of the Germans’; there then follow the names of the ‘most shameless and active’, including Franco Marinotti of the Snia Viscosa plant and Senator Piero Puricelli.40
The denunciations, whether they were generic or explicitly named names, could be transformed into genuine warnings, again the more effective the more individualised they were. This too was a form of struggle that had been tried out in France, where appeals of this sort had been made ‘Aux Patrons’:
A list is prepared for the bosses who, in collusion with Laval, lend themselves to the systematic exploitation of their factory workers. From this moment on their names are written down. These scaffolds prepared for Laval and his clique will be usable again for the bosses.41
‘We shall remember it at the day of reckoning!’ – this is how ‘the Piedmontese organ of the National Liberation Front’ concluded a Monito agli industriali (Warning to the Industrialists) – and particularly the major ones, ‘with Fiat top of the list’ – who were denounced for having assumed a demeanour which ‘is a far cry from what one should have expected from them’.42 ‘In tomorrow’s Italy there will be no place for anyone who has not given his all to the struggle. The signori industriali would do well to remember this’ is how a severe article condemning the directors of San Giorgio of Sestri Ponente concludes.43 The Communists managed to get a fairly sizable part of their viewpoints into the stances taken by the various CLNs. Thus the ‘decree’ of the Lombard CLN of November 1944 warned the industrialists against carrying out lockouts, since they represented ‘an attempt to suffocate the liberation movement with starvation and deportations, striking at its most efficient and combative sectors’.44
Similar stances were taken by the Savona CLN, which ordered the industrialists to pay their employees three months’ advance wages by 15 December, on pain of being denounced to the ‘police commission or the Military Tribunal’.45 Bitterly, and using populist tones, the Asti CLN addressed the industrialists who were obeying the RSI rather than the Committee itself: with the enormous profits they had accumulated the industrialists were buying farmhouses and precious objects (‘we have a long list of these purchases’) rather than using them for the benefit of their workers. Only a choice of this kind ‘will help make the people view with less aversion your position which has until now been one of absolute privilege’.46 The Piedmontese CLN defied Signor Primera, ‘president of the Milan textile fibers industrial committee’ and ‘all the textile firms of the region of Piedmont’ to commit those ‘out-and-out war crimes’ consisting of drawing up lists of materials to place at the disposal of the Fascists and Germans.47
As for the CLNAI, among the many documents on this count, which were not always issued without internal resistance, we need only recall the ‘Appello agli industriali’ urging them to refuse to collaborate with the Nazi-Fascists, to grant the workers’ requests and pay them for the days of the strike (3 March 1944). This appeal should be read alongside the warning that had been formulated back in November 1943: ‘Let the industrialists remember that their conduct is being carefully followed and will be examined closely and the right punishment will be dealt to those of them who reduce their workers to poverty.’48 When the CLNAI created its economic commission it passed a motion maximalistically forbidding the commission itself and its individual members to have ‘in any circumstances contacts even of a personal or informative character with individuals who were formerly political or economic representatives of the Fascist regime’.49
The industriali – a word that, in the CLN documents, generally appears in the place of capitalisti (padroni is totally absent) – thus appeared as a social group to keep a special eye on. This was an undoubted success not only for the Communists, but for the whole left wing of the anti-Fascist front. To the workers’ ears all this could not fail to sound as an incentive or confirmation of their class sense. But the industrialists were also asked to do their patriotic duty; and, apart from the distinction between big and small industrialists, this invitation could become so broad and general as to call into question their very class assumptions, which were indeed screened and protected by the patriotic ones, but also watered down. The Communist leaders realised as much – above all the northern ones, who, whether from their specific education or from fear of losing contact precisely with the most class-conscious part of the working class, sought to remedy matters. Above all in the first months, when the party line was still being run in, there are numerous interventions along these lines. Criticising the editors of La Fabbrica, the newspaper of the Milanese federation, Pietro Secchia warned that ‘the struggle against the Germans and the Fascists … must not allow us to forget the actual living conditions of the workers and the class struggle’, and considered it ‘somewhat exaggerated’ to devote ‘an entire page out of two to appeal to the industrialists cordially and imploringly to give benefits to the workers who are fighting etc. etc.’.
Even in the matter of saving the factories, which was to become part of Resistance hagiography, Secchia recommended caution: one couldn’t ‘give the impression that today the workers are fighting essentially to save the factories and the industrial patrimony’. And from this political warning, Secchia rose to a sentiment of genuine moral indignation, denouncing that fact that this
is tantamount to saying that the workers are willing to give their blood, their lives to saving the factories and that the industrialists for their part at least will provide the dough, help their families etc. Don’t you feel how undignified this language is, whatever the intention of the writer, and how much it smacks of the reformist and the mercenary?50
The Actionist Vittorio Foa obeyed the dictates of a similarly noble inspiration when he proposed that the Piedmont CLN reject the obolus (or pittance) of 50,000 lire periodically sent by Professor Valletta and instead impose a war tax of a considerably higher sum on Fiat.51
Addressing the industrialists, the Turin paper Grido di Spartaco (The Cry of Spartacus) had written: ‘Those, at this decisive moment, who fail to offer this solidarity, can hope for no remission of their misdeeds and their sins, and will be excluded for ever from the national community and a severe blow will be dealt to their lives and possessions.’ Which brought Luigi Longo’s pungent comment: ‘The language is rather more ecclesiastical than communistic; the punishment is projected rather more into the future and then it is by no means clear how and by whom they will be punished, etc.’52
Around about the same time the party direction was warning:
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br /> The mellifluous and submissive attitude taken by the party towards the industrialists and capitalists in general is not right … Never forget that the present struggle in no way suppresses class conflicts and that we must always defend our actual interests as the exploited against the exploiters. We must not prostrate ourselves at the feet of the capitalists simply because some of them profess to be anti-Fascist (and who knows how sincere they are!) or aid the struggle against the Germans. This aid must not be considered an act of generosity but as a binding duty for all those who possess it.53
Parallel with these interventions were those aimed at giving back to the party a clear and predominant working-class physiognomy, after the all too open-handed admissions made in the Badoglian period: ‘It would be a grave error to forget that the good proletarian composition of the governing organisms is a guarantee of the just political line.’54 From Venice came the complaint that there were no workers in the federal committee; from Pistoia, that the presence of the workers ‘in leading positions is almost non-existent’ and that far too many street cells have been organised’.55 The steering committee of the federation of Trieste reported, almost by way of confirmation, that it had obtained good results by passing from an organisation based exclusively on street cells to a factory-based one.56 ‘Workers who think like workers always understand each other’57 is the moral implicit in these organisational measures, which seem to dig up an old bone of contention between Amadeo Bordiga’s Bordighisti and Antonio Gramsci’s Ordinovisti.