Many tales have been told of the German interventions in the factories, various in number and diverse in outcome, especially when, in the major cities like Milan and Turin, they were guided by the able General Zimmerman. Here we can recall the case of a small city, Piacenza, where in the Arsenale plant 1,900 workers out of 2,500 had participated in electing the Fascist internal commission, but many had written on their ballot papers: ‘Long live freedom, long live Italy, long live the Soviet Army, long live Stalin, long live communism’. On 2 December 1943, during the strike that some members of the commission had tried to sabotage, the Germans arrived ‘who having learned from the workers that the stoppage was not due to anti-German sentiments, but to the very low wages, promised that they would immediately see to getting their wages increased! And, absurdly, the applause of a group of women workers crowned the Nazi promise. What this lot are interested in is war production.’
The writer of the report, however, did not reproach the workers but the party comrades who were ‘obtuse and sectarian’ and ‘claim that the workers are pig-headed, people who think only of their sordid interests, indifferent to our struggle – hence this step and these heresies’.21
The web of situations and desires outlined so far is particularly evident in the strikes, which were extensive, frequent and incisive in the Italian Resistance. Under the occupying regime and an internal regime which in its history and most profound aspiration prohibited strikes, (a legislative decree of 21 June 1944 introduced the death penalty for organisers of strikes and lock-outs), the strikes exalted their very character as affirmations of collective identity, instruments of liberation, discovery (or rediscovery) of direct action – all elements whose moral value, as we have already suggested, is in no way at odds with their being instruments for satisfying immediate needs which even in those conditions the strike could assume. This does not mean that we should not seek the differences and conflicts manifested in the declared aims given to the strikes and among the strikers themselves, beyond declarations of principle like: ‘the struggle for the defence of the daily bread of the workers is an aspect of the struggle to drive the invader off Italian soil, for the total destruction of every form of Nazism and Fascism’.22
The impossibility of there being the joyful and festive aspect found in strikes that occur in quite different circumstances made the Resistance strike experience a particularly harsh one, accentuating the dramatic nature of the options and consequences involved, including the roundup of laborers and deportations to Germany.23
The interweavings, overlappings, differences in emphasis over workers’ rights or the political objectives, and the latter’s downward slide towards insurrectional, military action traverse the whole Resistance period and, by and large, but not mechanically, follow the evolution of the general politico-military situation. The immediate demands were not just wage-demands, though obviously these figured prominently; they tended to spill over from factory life to life as such, thereby accentuating, by this route as well, the existential and political significance of the agitation. An increase in foodstuffs, the distribution of winter clothing, shoes, and coal, the heating of the units with window-panes shattered by the bombings, the setting up of canteens, an increase in the gas and electricity supply, figure among the requests of this nature.
A powerful egalitarian impulse is often present. For example: a minimum guaranteed wage; specific pay claims for women, young people, and labourers; equal advances on wages for everybody, labourers, women and young people included; still further improvement in conditions for the sick, the laid-off and ‘those unable to work for reasons beyond their control’;24 ‘granting the same treatment as that given to workers in the protected industries’;25 the extension of war indemnity to all workers; the setting up of canteens in every plant, etc.26
Other demands are expressly political, such as a guarantee against the continuous persecutions, arrests and deportations,27 the liberation of hostages and prisoners, an end to the reprisals. But the fundamental political nature lay in the very fact of striking. The passage from one plane to another is clearly traced in a document of the Trieste Communists, which urges the organisation of economic/wage strikes, and adds:
In this case economic action will be transformed into political action, since we’ll find ourselves up against the Germans and Fascists, who will oppose it. We therefore need to see how the internal struggle in the factory can be made to develop into a street struggle. It is through this development of the struggle that the premises will be created for the political development (political strikes) and thence insurrectional development (insurrectional strikes).28
In this document, which belongs to the initial phase of the Resistance and to a zone that was feeling the pressure of the dynamism of the Yugoslavian partisan movement, the passages from one phase to the other are anticipated as being rapid and almost contemporaneous. But in the same period, while the Rome edition of L’Unità was hailing the strike that had occurred in Turin, the Roman leaders were asking their Milanese counterparts whether, in an occupying regime, the watchword ‘political and insurrectional strike’ was ‘possible and realisable’;29 and as in subsequent appeals for a strike in the capital, this one would be called ‘peaceful’, ‘protest’, and ‘demonstrative’.30 In March 1945 experience would teach that, without renouncing the final outcome, ‘a general strike, like for that matter an insurrection, does not materialise overnight, pre-prepared and ready’, and that therefore ‘it would be … a grave error for the individual factories of our province to defer the claims relating to everyday problems in order to present them all in one block at the moment of the general strike’.31
Again at the end of March 1945, a meeting held by the Garibaldini at the Triplex plant in Milan was criticised for having urged the workers ‘not to resume work as long as there are Germans in Milan’; and in mid-April in the two Lombard cities of Busto Arsizio and Gallarate, workers who had come out on a strike that they considered ‘the final blow’, ‘do not want to work again until the liberation’, and branded the Communists leaders who were urging them to return to work as traitors.32
The watershed represented by the March 1944 strikes brings several questions to light.33 ‘With the abandonment of the initial hypotheses of an insurrection’ (linked to the vainly hoped-for effects of the Anzio landing) and the definition of the platform as politico-rivendicativo,34 differences appear in comments hot from the event that mirror the diverse ways in which the strike had been experienced and interpreted.
‘A wrong interpretation … of some of our watchwords, like for example, “let us get ready for the national insurrection” ’, the Communist paper recognises, had led to the illusion that an insurrection was about to break out; but ‘insurrection is no joking matter’, even if the workers ‘understand that there can be no real solution to the impossible conditions of today’s life without having done with Nazi-Fascism’.35 In these words there is once again the clear Communist attempt to square the various aspects of the struggle.
As for the Actionists, alongside their obvious recognition of the value of the strike,36 what we can call an optimistically idealistic comment appears, at odds with the moralistically pessimistic position that they had expressed only a few weeks earlier. An Action Party trade union document had said: ‘The workers are still too uninformed about problems of a general nature; they are too concerned with solving their particular problems; they are still too closely tied to trade union life to be able to see national life with a certain breadth of vision.’37
One might almost say that here the ‘autonomy’ of the working class is interpreted as obtuseness. By contrast, here is Leo Valiani’s comment about the strikes: ‘The workers have asked for nothing because they don’t intend to ask their enemies for anything, because they don’t want to negotiate with their adversaries. No partial and particular demands that could be the subject of negotiations … It is the very problem of the Italian revolution that they have posed.’38
There seems to be less certainty in the opinions expressed by the workers’ rank and file. Perplexities of this sort emerge: ‘Who have we been fighting for? For the British, for the capitalists? By failing to obtain satisfaction for our economic demands, haven’t we lost the strike?’: which was precisely a criticism made by the bordighisti as well.39
The complexity and morality of the workers’ attitude can be gleaned particularly well in the nuances of a testimony made forty years later by a worker deported to Mauthausen: ‘With that general strike, on the pretext, for that matter legitimate, of improving wages and the rations of general foodstuffs, the workers openly manifested their impatience with Fascism, their reaction to the war and to the Nazi reprisals.’40
In counterpoint to this we might recall some comments by the anti-Fascist right-wing, which oscillated between openly declared, duty-bound, satisfaction and embarrassment. Addressing the workers, La Democrazia del Lavoro, the Roman paper of the Democratic Labour party (the demolaboristi), wrote: ‘By virtue of our example, the strike, as an instrument of economic revenge and class struggle transcends this and becomes a means of political struggle, a creator of national liberation.’41 For the monarchist paper Italia Nuova, ‘political’ was too strong a word, as the Fascist press wrote too: the strike was only ‘national, patriotic’.42 Il Risorgimento Liberale saw the strike as a manifestation of interclass national solidarity, which it polemically set against the ‘strike-mongering collusion between Communism and plutocracy’, of which Alessandro Pavolini, following an old Fascist pattern, had spoken in one of his reports to the party directorate.43
And indeed in relations between industrialists and workers one encounters attitudes of solidarity that certainly fit into the vaster framework of national solidarity, but also appear on occasions as the recognition of inalienable cohabitation in the bosom of the company. From the employers’ point of view, this cohabitation entailed physically safeguarding the factory as a whole, machines and men alike. One thus encounters, in the industrialists too, taken as a whole, a plurality and overlapping of policies. This attitude can be seen above all as testifying to ambiguity; but within it genuinely paternalistic attitudes were to be found (protection, one might say, even in the presence of scant and dwindling deference), or, if one prefers, of accepting the challenge, or invitation, to collaborate in the liberation struggle.44 Even a Communist report of the first weeks, while giving pride of place to utility rather than solidarity, gave this assurance: ‘The industrialists, in general, are well-disposed towards the workers; the Germans are taking everything away from them and in the end blowing up their plants … so that the industrialists are thinking of using the workers to defend them etc. That’s why [Fiat owner] Agnelli seems to be prepared to give lots of money to the CLN.’45
In its direct relations with the workers, Fiat showed both severity and ambiguity, as when, during the March 1944 strike, it first declared a lockout, then interpreted it as a holiday and paid the workers for their days off work.46 A comparison could be made between the industrialist class and the Catholic Church as an institution. The industrialists too, frightened though they were, but ultimately sure of the continuity of their function, could allow themselves to remain above the warring parties, biding their time until they found themselves on the winner’s side. Meanwhile, they knew how to accumulate points for good service with the Resistance and maintain, all the while, good relations, particularly business relations, with the powers that be, and above all those who held the real power – the Germans. Again hot from the event, a leading industrialist like Enrico Falck, treasurer of the Christian Democrat party for northern Italy, described the situation of the industrial manager under the Germans as ‘extremely difficult’: ‘On the one hand it was important to ensure that one had the indispensable commodities, on the other hand one needed to manifest apparent good will to avoid the measures that were threatened at every corner to dismantle plants and send machinery and labour to Germany’.
Falck also spoke of the ‘united front assumed by workers and reciprocally by the managers’ and recalled the organisation of the ‘company conferences of San Vincenzo’.47
A Fascist gerarca sent to Turin on a tour of inspection reported that, against the threat of the equipment being transferred to Germany, ‘the agitation was fomented by the Fiat management whose prestige is ever increasing as they are at the head of the only organisation in Turin capable of feeding a large number of people’.48
In short, in the industrialists too, especially the major ones, as in the Church, there was the ambition to perform a stand-in role for the institutions. The intransigent Fascists got irritated, just as they did with the ecclesiastical hierarchs, at what seemed to them to be unjustifiable privileges granted to shifty and ungrateful potentates. Giuseppe Solaro, the provincial party secretary for Turin, wrote angrily: ‘The lower class rebel is imprisoned or shot; Ingegnere De Rossi, who supplied him with arms, is not. The sons and protégés of capitalism don’t go into the army nor into the Servizio del lavoro and are provided with untouchable exemptions; the workers on the contrary bear the brunt of the transport problems, the bombings, the food difficulties.’49
Understandably, Resistance austerity branded the behaviour of a good many industrialists as playing a double game. Vittorio Foa wrote: ‘Certain sectors of big business [note, here too, that limiting formula ‘certain’] are running with the hares and hunting with the hounds,… they serve the Germans, doing very good business, subsidise the Fascists, prepare the white guards, keep in permanent touch with Messe and Badoglio, and give ludicrously small donations to the liberation movement.’50
Foa’s view, which fell on deaf ears, was that these donations should be rejected and replaced by a war tax deliberated by the CLN.51
At the end of 1943, the Rome edition of Avanti! also expressed the view that the industrialists were giving dough only for the purpose of dividing and isolating the proletarian elements, and of tying the bands to a wait-and-see attitude (attesismo).52 The fact was that ‘as the Allies advance, the industrialists are getting jittery and reaching for their wallets; and it’s no bad idea to take advantage of this’.53
The Milan PCI federal committee, in the letter of 19 September 1944 mentioned earlier, in which it advised against being afraid of getting one’s hands dirty by negotiating with the industrialists, placed at the top of the list the need to accept aid from the industrialists ‘in money, provisions, technical instruments, vehicles, arms, etc.’, in full awareness, however, that the industrialists were acting like this for their own future advantage.54
At times, and particularly in the Garibaldi bands, there was the gleeful relish at shaking loose the purse-strings of the frightened capitalists: ‘The answer to your question regarding Donegani is to knock very hard. That fellow is a scoundrel and a millionaire, so the thing to do is to press for a much higher figure than the one you originally had in mind; to save his skin when the time comes, he’ll certainly be obliging now.’55
‘Blackmail’, ‘extortion’ are the terms used by the partisan Tersilla Fenoglio Oppedisano in recalling her exploits in obtaining money from the industrialists (‘they were scared silly!… and I was scared silly too!’). The crudeness of these words – tempered, as far as she personally was concerned, in her other ‘unarmed extortions’ – conveys not so much an idea of the authors as of the targets of these operations, people with whom, one had become convinced, no other language was possible.56 But the borghesi who financed the PCI because they were blackmailed and frightened were contemptuously compared by one of the small Roman underground papers which elsewhere I have called pre-qualunquista, to those who financed Fascism.57
In relations between employers and workers the most subtle piece of blackmailing attempted by the former towards the latter, when they were defending their jobs and struggling for survival, may be summarised as follows. The industrialists would say: in order not to dismiss anyone, we have to keep the factories working; to keep them working
we have to accept the orders that are offered us; the only people who are offering substantial orders today are the Germans. Which leaves us with two options: either we dismiss employees or we work for the Germans. But, if we choose the second, don’t come telling us that we’re collaborationists: if we were, we would at least be so to the extent that you are workers.58
It was no easy thing for the workers to get around this attempt at making national solidarity slip into company complicity. The workers could have replied: ‘That’s your affair.’ This amounted to saying that, for the industrialists, it was ‘objectively’ impossible not to be collaborationists, for which they would in any case be called to account. What actually were pitched against each other, in a dispute of this sort, were the perspectives that the two social classes had on the power relations that would emerge between them at the end of the war. Clearly, if one of the two parties had enjoyed absolute superiority, it could have accused the other of collaborationism, if it saw fit, with no fear of reprisals. But neither party could rest serene in the prospect of its own absolute predominance, whatever its respective hopes and fears.
And in fact there were different and far less straightforward situations. The appeals against dismissals and against working for the Germans were constant and parallel, but could also intersect, producing distinctions and nuances of various kinds. Above all war production could be isolated as an object of the refusal,59 even if it was not that easy to define the boundaries dividing it from peace. One could attempt to separate the fact of working from drawing a salary, by asking the industrialists to use the war profits they had already accumulated to pay the workers even in the absence of orders placed by the Germans. Thus L’Unità could at one and the same time report ‘agitations at Breda against the dismissals’ and denounce ‘the fabulous war profits’ of those companies,60 or write baldly: ‘The Italians workers must not be reduced to poverty and starve to death. There are millions and millions of war profits, of autarkic profits which can feed the workers even if they don’t work, or work little.’61
A Civil War Page 68
