The head office of L’Unità in Milan criticised the Rome edition for not giving ‘the impression that it was a workers’ paper’, nor even the paper of that party ‘which wants to be at the forefront of the war of National Liberation’.58
The Communist position oscillated throughout the lifespan of the Resistance. Pietro Secchia himself, at the 5–7 November 1944 conference of the insurrectional triumvirates, complained that it was a ‘grave weakness’ that the social basis of the party was ‘still almost exclusively working-class’.59 A provincial edition of L’Unità, printed in an area with a dense working-class population, wrote confidently: ‘Take no notice of those who say you must give up the class struggle’ and declared the congruence between ‘proletarian unity’ and the ‘union of the people in the struggle for national liberation’.60 At a party meeting, ‘Albero’ (Alberto Cavallotti), a neophyte intellectual sent from Milan to the 1st Lombardia Aliotta division in the Pavese Oltrepò, ‘explains the reason for the suppression of the class struggle and its transmutation into an insurrectional struggle’.61 The contradiction may go back to that between the demand for a monopoly (or near-monopoly) of working-class representation, in the traditional sense, and the use of the force thereby acquired within the policy of broad national unity.
In the last months above all, declarations were to abound aimed at turning to account the inclusion of honest capitalists in the patriotic front, it being, besides, those very capitalists, honest or dishonest, who would cross over, with increasing resolution, into the CLN camp.
2. WORKERS AND WORKERS’ REPRESENTATION
The events that had led, during Badoglio’s forty-five days of rule, to the birth of the internal commissions are well known.1 The different attitudes to them that the Communist Party and the Action Party had adopted have also been pointed out – differences implying a different vision of the relationship between economics and politics. The Communists had stressed the general political value of the commissions in the ‘struggle for the salvation of the country and for a better future for the workers’.2 The Actionists, on the other hand, had stated the need to make the commissions the expression of a ‘fundamental need’ which linked back to the past but was capable of going beyond ‘the fundamental organ of the democratisation of the factories … in perfect parity with the ceti padronali [master classes]… for the control of the running and economic administration of the company with a view to workers’ profit-sharing’ – that is to say, all this capable too of ‘transcending … the economic aspect of the life of the company’.3 The Social Republic and the German occupying regime inherited the Badoglian commissions. The Germans showed an inclination to keep them alive, guaranteeing them for the Fascists as well, provided, needless to say, that the commissions collaborated in ensuring productive efficiency.4 But initially there was some wavering among the anti-Fascist left as well. In Turin, at the very beginning, the Communist leader Remo Scappini had maintained that the internal commissions had ‘to be supported and turned to account, taking special advantage of the anti-Fascist and anti-German position of many industrialists and in order to conduct a vast propaganda job’. But only a few days later Scappini’s position, in line with party directives, had changed radically.5
Thus another Communist report, this time from Bergamo, complained that, while the commissions were created ‘with great difficulty’ in the Badoglio period (at Dalmine solely through the work of the Action Party), ‘after 8 September the comrades on the commissions did not resign; they thus got themselves into a blind alley: compromised in the eyes of the management, the Fascists, the Germans, and the workers. They were forced to choose: either leave the internal commissions or leave the Party.’6
Again, on 7 November 1944, a document signed ‘Trade Union committee of the province of Varese’ appeared in L’Unità, under the title ‘Basta con le commissioni interni!’ This document stated that the Fascists had not abolished Badoglio’s commissions, mainly because they couldn’t do so ‘without openly antagonising the masses’, and in the second place to obtain hostages in the persons of the best workers. But by now, the document concluded, the workers had understood that ‘the internal commissions are a farce’.
When, moreover, it was the Fascists themselves who wanted to set up internal commissions, the anti-Fascist front, and not just the Communists,7 spoke out against this measure, considering it, together with the socialisation decree that followed it, the last demagogic swindle of Fascism. It is a known fact that the Fascist commissions were essentially a failure.8 Even where the commissions had been set up, as in the Biella area, ‘they had been liquidated by the Fascists themselves’ because, as even a Fascist paper wrote, ‘they did not respect the factory environment’ and had been elected by only a few voters, most of whom were ‘not Fascists’.9 The scant turnout at the elections and the remarks abusive of Fascism and extolling liberty and Communism that abounded on the few ballot papers that were completed, are proof of this failure. In the province of Como abstentions and blank ballot papers reached 100 percent.10 Soon after this, news arrived from Lecco of the successful boycotting of the election, though there had been some cases of incomprehension and two expulsions had proved necessary.11 In one Vicenza plant, out of little more than a thousand voters more than nine hundred ballot papers bore ‘protests against the industriali affamatori (starver industrialists) – against the Germans – long live Stalin – death to the Fascists, etc.’.12 At the Ducati works in Bologna there had been a 50 percent abstention and 25 percent blank ballot papers, while written on ‘the majority of the rest’ there had been: ‘Cut it out, scoundrels, clear out venduti (i.e. you who’ve sold yourselves), enough with hunger, long live Stalin’; and the reprisals had at once begun: dismissals and dispatches to the evacuated factories in the provinces.13
After the March 1944 strikes, Ernesto Marchiandi, the labour commissar of the RSI, ordered that company bosses were no longer to negotiate with the workers’ representative bodies, but only with the Fascist trade unions, which were ignored by the workers even more than the commissions were. Despite the opposition of Hans Leyers, the German general responsible for controlling Italian industry, Marchiandi does not seem to have revoked his order.14
Augusto Spinelli, the RSI Minister of Labour (the new ministry had been set up on 19 January 1945), admitted, in a letter to Mussolini, that the elections at Fiat had been a fiasco; only 30 to 40 percent of the clerical staff and 10 percent of the workers had voted; half the ballot papers had been left blank, while the other half contained votes and various things written on them.15 Even if the figures reported by the minister exceed those recorded on the notes that Under-Secretary Medici Tornaquinci took during his mission to the North – 0.16 percent16 – and to those given by L’Unità – only forty-six voters17 – the fact remains that the blow dealt to the Fascists was unmistakable.
‘The masses refuse to receive anything from us’, wrote Anselmo Vaccari, head of the Fascist Federation of Employees with disconsolate realism, and added: ‘The workers affirm that there will be no socialisation, or if there is, it will continue to reinforce the capitalist classes and to keep labour in a state of subjection … The workers … regard us, wrongly mind you, as the thugs of capital.’18
But the situation described above did not prevent some of the Fascist committees, poorly elected though they were, and moreover often with a larger white-collar than blue-collar representation, from managing to make their presence felt. This is not, as workers’ historiography would ideologically have it, a case of the ‘workers’ using the Fascist trade union’.19 Such a vision of things, whether democratic or Communist, while laying so much emphasis on the working class as to make it into a metaphysical entity which regally chooses what it finds most agreeable in the Fascist arsenal, actually offers an extremely reductive picture of that class, its complexity, its contradictions, and the difficulties it encountered, in that situation, in keeping the three figures of the adversary that it found before it united.
> Above all, at least in several cases, there was the memory of the Communist Party’s past enjoinders to avail oneself of the legal instruments of the Fascist regime. The Milan federal committee felt the need to warn: ‘Today we are no longer in the period of the exploitation of Fascist legality, today we are in a period of extra-legal struggle, of open struggle, of armed struggle.’20 And several times L’Unità reiterated: ‘No internal commissions under an occupying regime.’21
A realistic low-down of the situation and of the difficulties in giving it an unambiguous definition may be found in a December 1943 report from Turin sent by ‘Alfredo’ (Arturo Colombi) to the PCI leadership:
So far we have not managed to prevent the committees from being elected. Even if it is true that in the elections previously promoted by the Fascist republicans 80 percent of the voters abstained and the other 10 percent scribbled insults, in the end a list of avant-garde individuals managed to get elected … The workers set great store by their delegations and don’t understand the danger of them; on the other hand, when tens and tens of thousands of workers are in motion one can no longer direct them anonymously and we have therefore given orders to our comrades not to be too concerned about putting in individuals who see more or less eye to eye with us, but individuals who have energy and who carry out our directives, and know how to talk to workers, know how to spur them to resist and who will resist even when the struggle gets more violent.22
If Colombi’s percentages are exact, it follows that the 10 percent of workers who cast valid votes comprised both the more or less convinced Fascists and those who voted for the ‘elementi d’avangardia’.
There is a very pragmatic explanation of this tendency towards entrismo (that is, working from within) in another Communist report from Turin of the same period. According to this report not only socialist elements ‘or those claiming to be such’ accede to the Fascist manoeuvres, but also some comrades, ‘citing the pressure of the mass, who if it means obtaining provisions are not over-particular, want this participation in order to have individuals of proven honesty and energy in the said commissions’.23 By contrast, a more doctrinaire and generalising line of argument was followed in another report, again from Turin:
We still know that in the bourgeois regime the work of the internal commissions is constantly impeded by the dominant class, especially the Fascists; therefore in my view it would be opportune to boycott them. It is not with a small wage raise that the proletariat will solve the problem of the high cost of living; the vampires, the speculators, the blood-suckers are all ready to annul everything that the workers will have obtained. It is the system that we have to demolish.
The author of the report recalled that ‘the Fascist unions were created to serve the bourgeoisie’, and concluded by swinging back and forth between commissions tout court and Fascist commissions:
We shall agree to be part of the commissions only when we have the opportunity to be of use to the proletariat, when we have expelled the German oppressor and Fascism, in the pay of the bourgeoisie, when we are able by means of our organisations to make a clean sweep of the present regime, then, yes; therefore the duty of true Communists at the present hour is one only, to get rid of this putrescence.24
Indeed, ‘some illusions’ about the Fascist commissions were reported from Emilia.25 And a report about Varese denounced the federal committee for being badly orientated regarding the commissions;26 from Brescia warning comes that ‘it is extremely hard to persuade the internal commissions to desist from their activity’, that some ‘particularly compromised’ comrades have had to be expelled and that, alongside the fear of reprisals, there is the hope that it is possible ‘to do something advantageous for the workers even in the present circumstances’.27 At the De Micheli works in Milan, only at the end of 1944, on the initiative of a group of women, did it prove possible to get the Fascist commission dissolved.28 A Socialist justified his presence on a Lombard factory commission by saying that he intended to keep an eye on the commission itself; but the mere fact of being part of it created difficulty for the PSIUP’s entry into the local CLN.29
A significant case, worth dwelling on by virtue of the analytic documentation of it that survives, is Padua, where as late as the eve of the Liberation the workers could be seen to be having difficulty extricating themselves from the Fascist factory organisms. At a meeting of Communist leaders the representatives of the Rizzato workshops (120 workers, three Communists, eight sympathisers), faced with the management’s initiative, following the intervention of the Fascist unions, of creating shop commissions, reported, ‘we too think that the commission may be able to do something for the workers’. The Breda representative (250 workers, five Communists, thirty sympathisers) tells how, as it was originally composed, at the third attempt the commission had been elected by a hair’s breadth:
When it was set up there were five comrades, including the spokesman. We sabotaged this commission and, seeing that they prevented us from resigning, we started not to work by playing the overseers, which provoked the resentment of management. In March [1944] we went on strike like all the other workers … Now they’ve set up a new commission, this time a truly Fascist one.
The representative of the Veneta works (300 workers, three Communists, thirteen sympathisers) related: ‘When the Fascist commission was set up again
I found myself in it, but the only time I showed up was the first time and that was to hand in my resignation. On that occasion the comrades who were already there approached me so as to get me tied up with the Party.’
The representative of SAER trolley-bus lines (250 workers, seven Communists, thirty-five sympathisers) tells how, at the end of 1944, ‘for firewood (through the usual Fascist commission) something was obtained, but only to the advantage of single individuals’. The new commission that the management wanted to re-establish was to be sabotaged. At Stanga, where there were more Communists (600 workers, twenty-five Communists, 150 sympathisers), the situations appears to have been rather different. In late November 1944 the Fascists, by means of threats, urged people to vote. At the third attempt, one of the shop stewards reports, ‘some of the workers voted not only for the individuals they trusted but for the known Fascists, with the intention of sabotaging them … It is clear that on any question relating to the workers only the clandestine workers’ or flying commission is consulted.’
Another shop steward from the same workshop, and the most authoritative one to boot, who wound up the meeting, added that there were plans for a propaganda campaign to get the Fascist commission to resign, and warned: ‘Anyone who continues to be part of it will be regarded and judged as a traitor to the working class’, the significant thing here being the by no means isolated appearance of this specific figure: the betrayer.30
This reference to clandestine commissions brings us on to the workers’ organisms that sprang up in the factories in opposition to the Fascist ones. The downward slide to the Fascist commissions – said one of the speakers at the Padua meeting mentioned just now – was due to the scant understanding of the duties of the agitation commissions. And from Verona it was pointed out that the inadequacy of Communist organisation – ‘the mass has proved to be more advanced than our comrades believed’ – had driven the workers to turn to the Fascist commission, which ‘has made promises’.31 Since September 1943 L’Unità had announced the birth of the clandestine workers’ commissions as something that had already come about.32 Shortly after, the Bollettino di partito (Party Bulletin) had urged its readers to ‘study on their work sites the possibility of both illegal and semi-legal commissions functioning’.33 And the ‘Directives for trade union work’ issued by the PCI leadership the following November contained the appeal to form ‘secret factory trade union commissions’ in the place of the Fascist commissions.34 L’Italia Libera as well urged the ‘new organisms of workers created during the anti-Germanic resistance’ to lose no time in choosing responsible elected chiefs, and to recognise neither t
he Badoglian nor the Fascist commissions.35 Subsequently the agitation committees appeared, at differentiated times and in various cities, where they were active to varying degrees.36 After the March 1944 strike, the utilisation of the committees, as organs autonomous from the parties, was seen as indicating the Communist Party’s readiness ‘to abandon itself trustingly to the spontaneous initiatives of the masses’ (‘but one should be under no illusions’, added the Action Party leader, Vittorio Foa).37
What role did the memory of the post–First World War councils play in the workers’ creation or taking up of the enjoinders to establish factory organisms? Immediately after the November 1943 strikes this report was issued from Turin: ‘I have said what I think about a certain superficiality on the part of some comrades who think that they can already set up their own stable organisms (internal commissions and even company unions) in the factories and that these organisms can be directed by us.’ This is impossible, says the Communist leader who wrote the document, above all for reasons of clandestinity, and also because these organisations would inevitably end up ‘collaborating with the German military authorities for the good order of war production’.38 For the Communist Party it would have made no sense to go back to the council phase; and then, paradoxical as the prediction might appear of the councils inevitably slipping into collaboration, it did pinpoint a real problem, to which we shall shortly need to return.
The demand for councils had appeared in 1942 in a newspaper whose title and subtitle were themselves very much a remembrance: ‘L’ Ardito del Popolo: Organ of the Workers, Peasants and Soldiers’.39 The ‘Milanese Libertarian Communist Federation’ appealed to the provincial CLN, informing them that they had participated ‘with other revolutionary movements in the creation of a movement for the establishment of factory councils, taking up the Turinese idea of the last post-war period’, and that they had consequently formed the ‘council brigades’, which asked to be able to operate ‘in agreement with those of the CLN’. The bordighisti of the international Communist Party also vindicated the councils as an organ of revolution; and in December 1944 their newspaper, Rivoluzione, reported the establishment of a league of revolutionary councils.40
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