The marginality of these groups and the minority position of the Socialists headed by Lelio Basso, who were also in favour of the councils, bear out the view recently expressed by one of the most sensitive among the leading figures most actively involved in those events to the question of the councils. Vittorio Foa has in fact ruled out the idea that the Resistance in fact saw the re-emergence of ‘the revolutionary line of the factory councils’, which were, in his view, irreparably defeated in the years immediately following the First World War. The councils of the Resistance period were – and not just in Italy – ‘instruments of class collaboration and of the democratisation of the social system’.41 Balder still is the view expressed by another Action Party leader, Leo Valiani, according to whom only ‘in historiography or political journalism could the libertarian character of the post–First World War workers’ councils be re-exhumed (I myself did so, in articles and pamphlets published in exile and then in the Resistance), but there was no way of reviving them then’.42
The autonomistic council–spirit animating one wing of the Action Party centred not so much on the councils as on the CLNs, attributing to these inter-party organs the role of bearers of democratic petitions that would indeed transcend party forms of political action. Foa wrote at the time, in one of his pamphlets, that ‘coherently’ the Action Party ‘had become an advocate of the factory councils … The autonomy of the factory councils and the broadening of the working-class basis of the revolution are two aspects of the same reality.’43
It is in one of Franco Momigliano’s writings that we find what is probably the concentrated essence of Action Party philosophy regarding the councils. Co-existing in those pages are political vision and a technical-productionist vision, the opposition between the sindacato (union), which represents legality, and the consiglio (council), which represents democratic and non-class-based revolution, a desire for conciliation between state planning and company autonomy, criticism of the councils of 1919–20 for having been based only on Turinese experience, and appeals as a precedent to the German and Austrian laws of 1919 (the latter being models which must have meant precious little to the Italian working-class consciousness).44
Prominent space was given to the ‘company council’ in the Action Party’s ‘Progetto di piano di lavoro’ (‘Project for a Labour Plan’);45 while L’Italia Libera, in demanding the ‘military expropriation of the great Fascist and collaborationist capitalists’, also demanded that the companies be entrusted to councils composed of both blue- and white-collar workers.46 The Tuscan CLN, at the proposal of the Action Party, decided that the companies that were to be sequestered be administrated by councils ‘consisting of workers’ and office employees’ delegates … representing the various political currents existing therein’.47
The institutionalised presence in the council of the various political currents referred to in this document already takes us some way away from the consiglio in the strict sense of the word to company CLNs and their relations with the workers’ councils or commissions. Again, on the eve of the insurrection, at a meeting with the factory CLNs, a Lombard Communist representative complained that not all his comrades were capable of distinguishing between party work, CLN work, and the work of the agitation committee.48 Mirrored in this difficulty is, on the one hand, the tricky business of keeping together the various motivations and objectives of the struggle, and on the other hand the fact that it was mainly left-wingers, and generally Communists, who were present in the various types of organisms. Thus at the Breda works in Padua – to name but one of many cases – both the agitation committee and the CLN consisted only of ‘comrades and sympathisers’.49
Luigi Longo, in an article published in Nostra lotta (Our Struggle), clearly distinguished between agitation committees (organs of class unity in the factory) and company CLNs (organs of national unity).50 Longo had evidently felt it necessary to give an authoritative interpretation to that passage in the note sent out to the regional and provincial CLNs by the CLNAI on 2 June (when the final showdown was reckoned to be imminent) – which, while making explicit mention, at the request of the Communists themselves, of the ‘factory commissions of the workers, office staff and technicians’, tended however to place them under the aegis of the system of the CLNs, one possible embodiment of which was indicated in ‘both factory and village’ commissions.51 The ‘fear that the working class would be diminished by the existence of the liberation and works commissions’, which had been clearly manifested, was deemed by Longo to be a sign of ‘distrust in the working class’ and in its capacity to fulfil its national function – a distrust which ‘remains such even when it is cloaked in extremist and classist expressions to which an opportunist practice corresponds’. Longo probably had it in for positions like those expressed by Lelio Basso, according to which the distinction between the two types of commissions was being annulled in favour of the agitation committees, defined as ‘classist organs that guide the masses not only in the war of liberation but also in the struggle against capitalism’.52
The fact of the matter was that things were rather more complicated, both from Longo’s point of view or from Basso’s. In the Genoese factories a far from linear relationship was created between the agitation committees and the company CLNs – as well as between the latter, which somehow had been vitalised by the situation in the factory, and the regional CLN. A Genoese Communist Party document of December 1944, in agreement with the Socialists, undertook to show the other parties of the regional CLN – and especially the Liberals, who had declared themselves to be a non-class party – that the committee ‘cannot and must not defend the interests of all, that is to say, put the workers on the same plane as the capitalists’.53
If the CLNs had followed this line to the letter, they would have been legitimised to issue orders even in the matter of strikes. But on this point it was precisely the PCI that proved recalcitrant. In the Tuscan CLN, all the other parties accused the Communists of having encroached upon a province of the committee itself by issuing a strike order for the streetcar service. The Communist representative did not hit back by claiming that exclusive competence lay with his party and the workers’ organisms, but endeavoured to lead the strike back onto the general direction adopted by the committee. A laborious compromise was reached, which included the principle that the suspension of public services lay within the competence of the CLN.54
In Gallarate, but only on the eve of the Liberation, the PCI was also taken to task by the CLN, and the Communist representative made the following declaration: ‘Our party will do everything to ensure that strikes occur wherever possible and at any moment, so that all the movements are involved in the liberation movement and are therefore useful for it, for which I assume full responsibility. In the event of a general movement arranged by the CLNAI, it would be disciplined.’55
It was a knotty question. The answer given to the Varese provincial CLN on 23 July 1945 by the CLN for Lombardy retrospectively indicates as much: ‘As regards an employer’s representative being admitted into the provincial CLNs, this is excluded by the very principles of this organism, which is an expression of the force of the resistance’.56
3. POLITICAL STRUGGLES AND ECONOMIC STRUGGLES
If from the great political options and ideological options we proceed to take a closer look at their presence in the factory, or at any rate among the workers, we run up against further difficulties and problems. I have already pointed out how the highest aspirations – driving out the Germans and Fascists – could rub uneasy shoulders with immediate demands – a rise in wages. It would certainly be reductive to see this dichotomy in terms of the classic one between economic and trade union struggle on the one hand and political struggle on the other. The urgent need to do something about particularly harsh working and living conditions and the grandiosity of the political objectives, which could furthermore be pursued only by military means, on the one hand made the struggle cruder, and on the other hand swathed it in
the conviction, or rather, the intuition that only the re-establishment of a minimum of democratic conditions for everyone (employers included) would guarantee the full exercise of the workers’ very identity, from the smaller to the larger demands. This is why it is reductive to see the workers’ struggles during the Resistance merely in ‘national’ or ‘labour’ terms, both of which are, for opposite reasons, hagiographic.
One of the foremost leaders of the PCI, Pietro Secchia, wrote in a letter from Milan to his Roman comrades: ‘Even if the working class is facing far more important tasks, nevertheless day after day the workers have to face and struggle with these problems of daily life … We have to make sure that we link the immediate demands of the working class to the more general and political ones of the struggle against the Germans and Fascists.’1
At the middle-ranking level, the Genoese Communist leaders warned that ‘it would be a gross error to set the struggle for essential, immediate, vital demands against the insurrectional struggle’ and denounced the ‘rash and superficial extremism’ of those who proclaimed: ‘Enough with economic agitations; there’s nothing more we can do on the economic score, we must strike once and for all: either the strike of insurrection or nothing!’2
More passionately a leaflet urged:
Workers of Romagna! In putting forward your demands you cannot help protesting about all the sorrows of our country … The workers and their families are cold, hungry, they have no wood, they have no shoes, they have the lowest possible wages, their padroni are in cahoots with the enemies of the country, looming over them are the dangers of bombings, pillaging, deportation to Germany. Must they keep quiet?… Must they continue to tolerate the bloodthirsty prostitution of the padroni and of the Fascist scum?3
An attempt was made to get around the problem of the relationship between the general situation and immediate demands by stressing the political character that those demands easily acquired. Thus the PCI leadership asked the Turin federal committee to see whether there were ‘other demands which were partially political in character’ that ‘can be united with the economic ones’, the examples given being the watchword: ‘Don’t negotiate with the Germans and refuse the Fascist intermediaries’ and the demand for the abolition of the curfew and the removal of the Germans from the factories and the city.4
The coupling of economic claims and political demands – at times argued in depth, at times stated more schematically – was in the tradition of left-wing anti-Fascism. Shortly before the turning-point marked by the Resistance, in the Communist newspaper L’Azione, the first number of which appeared in the Biella area on 1 November 1942, said ‘the watchwords of the struggle against Fascism find … their just mediation in grasping a situation that the working class was living every day in the factory’.5 A manifesto preceding 25 July, signed by ‘a group of young men’, began by denouncing the repudiation ‘of all the dead and disabled of the 1914–18 war’, went on to exalt the Russians, ‘intensely loyal to their country and their government’, and concluded by demanding the ‘abolition of ration cards (an antechamber to indemnity)’.6 But whereas before 8 September the most current watchword was peace, from that day on it became armed struggle. Those who continued to demand ‘bread, peace and liberty’ received this answer: ‘Bread and liberty, fine. But why peace? You should be saying: we want the war of liberation’.7
This line was not taken only by the Communists. Avanti! also followed it, though at times giving the impression of bringing it back under the old dualist umbrella of a maximum programme and a minimum programme. Announcing the revival of the glorious ‘Tribuna dei ferrovieri’ (‘Railroad workers’ tribune’), the paper charted the programme of the re-established National Group of Socialist railroad workers, the first point being the struggle for national liberation; then, listed among the ‘class vindications’ are: ‘regularisation of the position of casual labourers, revision of wage scales, adoption of the eight-hour working day, etc.’.8
The Catholic paper Conquiste sindacali, printed in Rome, devoted a great deal of space to ‘interessi di categoria’, but made no specific reference to the political and military struggle that was taking place.9 In the stances taken by the Action Party over the economic struggles, which it sometimes prided itself on having triggered, the connection with the greater struggle in progress is there;10 and on one occasion Gian Carlo Pajetta was compelled to acknowledge that, in commenting on the strikes, the Action Party paper had been quicker off the mark than Il Grido di Spartaco.11 If anything, it might be said that alongside its great historic affirmations – for example that the first thing Fascism did was to cut wages12 – the Action Party press, even on labour issues, displayed the greater capacity for analytic planning that characterised that party. Thus the pamphlet entitled ‘Occupation of the factories and direct running of the companies’ raises the question of how to ensure the smooth running of the occupied factories in a phase of transition ‘from capitalistic management to direct workers’ management’. It recalls that ‘too often in capitalist-run industries the wages system is fixed to ensure the minimum administrative difficulty’, and declares the need for ‘new systems of retribution and planning, which must necessarily be more elastic and more in tune with the performance of each individual factory’.13
Making demands relating to labour relations and factory life in general implied the need to identify an interlocutor. Here the facts themselves revived the problem of the convergence, or separation, between padrone, Fascist and German. The latter two figures were explicit enemies; and we have seen how contacts and negotiations with them, on the political and military plane, were considered as amounting to treason. The padrone, by contrast, was an ambiguous figure. It is not surprising therefore that, generally speaking, the Communist directives dug their heels in, indicating the employer as the interlocutor in the factory. An intervention by the Milan federal committee is particularly clear on this point: it recommends against refusing contacts with the industrialists ‘for fear of being contaminated and compromised’, because by so refusing ‘we do not show strength; on the contrary, we show that we are weak, that we are afraid, in other words, that we are not sure of ourselves’.14 A year earlier, at the time of the strikes, L’Unità had made its position clear: ‘We must exclude in the most determined way every Fascist (and even more so German) representative; we must negotiate directly with the padrone.’15
Several of the objectives of the struggle declared by the same issue of the Communist paper were such however that even the best-intentioned employers could not have fulfilled them alone: for example the ‘doubling of basic foodstuffs’, the ‘distribution of clothing and fuel’, ‘housing for the casualties and adequate means of transport at reduced prices’, but above all the ‘liberation of workers who had been arrested for having defended the interests of the working class’ and, still more, the ‘return to the normality of civilian life, with the lifting of the curfew and the withdrawal of the Germans from the plants’. Indeed, that same issue of L’Unità indicated the Fascists, the Germans, and the ‘great profiteer industrialists in their service’ as the adversaries against whom the strike was directed.
Two days later L’Unità was denouncing ‘the underhand maneuvers of the industrialists’, who first pretend to give way on certain points, then say ‘We can’t do anything about it. Go to the Germans’.16 The Breda workers, stated a report written at the time, had refused to take up an enjoinder of this sort.17
During those very days a ‘Letter from the Directorate to the Organization of Turin’ was sent to explain why the Germans were not to be negotiated with:
It is not only a question of principle. It is evident that if we were fighting for demands that depend on the Germans, it will be difficult, if the struggle has to be concluded, not to negotiate with the Germans. But, in this particular case – the letter hastens to explain – the Germans don’t come into it. It is a question of a labour contract involving only the workers and the employers: the intervention of
the Germans can only have an intimidating character and for this reason we must reject it. For the same reason we must reject any intervention by the Fascists: neither one or other of them have anything to do with workers’ affairs; if they intervene, they intervene only to give a strong hand to the employers, which is why we want to deal directly with the employers, as equals.18
This letter readopted and, one might say, gave order to the arguments used on 13 December to criticise the Turin Communists for their contradictory behaviour during the strike: in a first leaflet they had not indicated the Germans as enemies of the country; in a second leaflet they had, but had then gone to negotiate with them.19 A note about this from Turin had in fact presented the situation with remarkable realism:
It is not that members of the illegal internal commissions negotiating with them [the Germans] are inspired to collaborate, but it is the constant pressure from the mass that wants its action to achieve concrete results at all costs. This was how some ‘comrades’ negotiated with the enemies of the proletariat, not for want of political conscience, but dragged into doing so by the desire not to come short of the trust that the mass placed in them … We must recognise that the action, in terms of every union relationship, was in itself dignified, since while it negotiated economic questions with the real padroni of the country, it refused to have any contact with the Fascists.20
A Civil War Page 67
