In a discussion with their employers some Turin workers are said to have asked the Lancia managers for ‘the necessary wage to cope with the cost of living, and don’t oblige us to produce it; that way the Nazi padroni will have precious little to take away from Italy to fuel this war of imperialism and famine. Remember, traitors of the Italian people are to be shot.’62
Dismissals were rejected also because they put at the Germans’ disposal a mass of human beings to enlist in the Todt organisation or deport to Germany. Appeals of this kind were numerous and resolute: the industrialists who do not go over directly to serving the Germans, wrote L’Unità, ‘are going about dismissing their workers, thereby preparing on the market so much good human flesh for Todt’s and Sauckel’s slave-drivers’.63 The agitation committee of a Milanese factory warned management against letting the German Command have a list of the people they had dismissed, and enjoined them to make a public recantation with a notice to be posted for at least a fortnight.64 In the Genoese factories it was believed that if the Germans shifted responsibility for the deportations onto the industrialists, then they must have had some reason for doing so.65 In Modena it was the Fascist authorities who ‘made every effort to carry out Ernst Sauckel’s programme’.66 ‘Directives for the struggle against deportations’ were issued by the General Command of the Garibaldi brigades on 27 June 1944.67
If the dismissals made the men idle, beyond a certain limit they made the machines idle too, and therefore also subject to transference to Germany. Slogans like ‘Not a man nor a machine for the Nazi slave-traders and plunderers’68 were intended as an alert against the dual threat arising from the German concern about not managing to use the considerable productive possibilities of Italian industry in loco.69 On the other hand, sabotage (‘work but sabotage’), which hit Germans and employers alike, if taken all the way, conflicted with the objective of saving installations: a Garibaldi formation reminded a GL formation of this after a sabotage operation carried out by the latter.70 However, sabotage could create risks for the occupiers analogous to those produced by the idleness of the factories. Hence, appeals like ‘Act! Sabotage! Destroy! Prevent the Germans from taking possession. What they take away from us we’ll feel the lack of, and it will be used against us. It’s more necessary than ever to act immediately! Burn everything!’ met with criticisms from above and perplexity from below. This would be seen when the partisans, showing that they had taken the appeal literally, burned down three factories which, like for that matter all the others in the zone, were working for the Germans.71 Total sabotage could be admissible only as an extrema ratio when faced with deportation to Germany: ‘Rather than that, wreck the machines and make them unusable’ said an appeal by L’Unità.72 On the other hand, it was insinuated even by Fascist propaganda that closure of the factories was playing the industrialists’ game.73
The most level-headed words written about this messy question, which was both political and moral, appeared in the Action Party press. The pamphlet La guerra di liberazione of December 1943, stated with analytic clarity that it was proving difficult to achieve what was emphasised by the Communist appeals:
The industrialist who accepts orders from the Germans is betraying his country. If the consequence of his refusal to serve them is the total unemployment of the workers, or worse still the firm’s passing under enemy control, he can agree to produce for the latter, but he shall make the execution of the contract vain by means of the most energetic and determined obstructionism.
A few days later Italia Libera was compelled to recognise that, with the continuance of the occupation, ‘it was difficult to avoid a minimum of collaboration’. The workers, the Action Party paper went on to say, by striking and sabotaging, redeem the sin of working in factories producing goods for the Germans. But when it came to the employers, ‘there has been one sole example of an industrialist shutting up shop, paying his employers a few months’ salary and taking to helping the partisans; but one example is not enough to save the mass’. As for the industrialists who were indeed making tidy sums out of the German orders, the article concluded, referring to future power relations (and also the good functioning of the economic laws), ‘their industries – if essential – will be saved, but not them, nor the fortunes they have accumulated with the greed of the speculator and dishonesty to the patria’.74
An atypical solution, but one which signals a pressing problem for the free zones, was practised for some time by the 50th Garibaldi brigade commanded by Francesco Moranino. How was one to prevent the free zone that had come into being in the Biella area from dying without selling the Germans the cloth produced with raw materials supplied by the Germans themselves? In October 1944, Moranino proposed that in exchange for the supplies received they sell the Germans the finished product, but not more than a fifth. Despite the severe reprimand of the higher Commands, for whom there could be no exceptions to the rule about not dealing with the enemy, the agreement worked for a couple of months until it was swept away by the roundups at the beginning of 1945.75
In the occupied zones south of what was to be the Gothic line, there is the striking case of Galileo, the Florentine firm, where almost all the workers (around 80 percent) refused to follow the machinery which, as agreed between the Germans and management, was mostly being sent to the North. Again on 25 July 1945 the Tuscan CLN had to intervene to make sure that these workers, and those who chose to behave in a like manner, were treated at least as well as the workers returning from the North, ‘in view not least of [the Committee’s] responsibility, since in the period of clandestinity it always urged the workers to refuse to go to the North’.76
How much of a backward turn things would take in a matter of two years is proven by the fact that the minister of Labour, the old Socialist Ludovico D’Aragona, was compelled by the third legislative commission of the Constituent Assembly to withdraw the measure for re-employing workers who had dodged work during the German occupation: Christian Democrats, Liberals and Monarchists had opposed it, and the left-wing parties had taken the matter no further, showing that they were sensitive to what would befall those who had been employed in their place, who would probably risk dismissal.77
The imprint given by the great political forces to class relations, as outlined above, was also the result of their mediating role regarding initiatives arising from those relations. Some of the moods of the rank and file can actually be seen through the top-level documents, when they report the rents showing in the declared political warp. Particularly in the first few months, the Communist leaders lamented at times the disproportion between the organisational deficiencies of the party and the influence it exerted among the masses.78 At other times they reached ‘the truly sad recognition that the proletarian avant-garde is marching at the tail of the masses.79 Or else they took cold comfort from observing that ‘the working class is more advanced than the Party’, with the other observation that it ‘recognises our Party as its Party’.80 There existed a vast area of the working class that contaminated the party’s slogans and watchwords, sometimes concealing the contradictions within them, at other times highlighting them.
Of the hope that with the fall of Fascism capitalism too would be swept away only a scholarly, doom-laden and Third Internationalist version existed, explicit formulations of which can also be found in the PSIUP and clear traces in the Action Party. Giorgio Diena, for example, was of the opinion that capitalism had transformed itself ‘from the instrument of production’ ‘into an obstacle to and brake on the forces of production.81 Another version of this hope was experienced through the pat identification of the Fascist with the employer and hope in a new world of Socialism and Communism. (The distinction between the two terms, while clear-cut on the party and pragmatic plane, blurred to the point of dissolving on the plane of ideological principles.) At the same time, the tactical caution of the Communist Party could intersect with the workers’ demands for immediate and ‘reformist’ improvements. If for the Party mediati
on lay in Togliatti’s elaborate policy of progressive democracy, for at least part of the rank and file workers mediation or, if one prefers, the overcoming of contradictions, rested heavily, as will presently become clearer, on the myth of the USSR and hope in the arrival of Barbisun or Baffone (Stalin), however one wished to call him. Myth and expectations in turn often coexisted with the demand for the re-establishment of the elementary conditions of democracy, inside and outside the factory. At work here was the historical memory of the fact that the padrone’s authoritarianism in the factory, reinforced during the 1915-18 war, had offered Fascism a model.82
Explicit manifestations of unadulterated class hatred made their way into the close-weft fabric of anti-Fascist national unity, not only on the part of the workers, but also, if less patently and leaving few traces – on that of the employers. In Turin Cavaliere Viberti alternated between paternalistic tones (‘you’re like sons …’) and tongue-lashing the workers for having clapped ‘every time a Fascist gerarca showed up’ with scoffing and provocative declarations: ‘Whatever turn the war takes, under whatever sky or flag, remember that I will always be better than you’.83 A Paduan woman landowner protested to Farinacci and the local capo di provincia because ‘our managers … favour … that class … which most ferociously hates Fascism and which already counseled, and organised dispersal, rebelliousness … those ferocious rurali, with no country and no honour … they only hate, hate, hate us’84 – and it is worth noting here that the reassuring word rurali, used so much by the Fascists, is turned on its head by the blind fury of this landowner into a blanket term for her class enemies. An Emilian landowner felt himself to be under attack from the ‘Gruppi armati proletari’ (‘Proletarian armed groups’) and the ‘Squadre di azione proletarie’ (‘Proletarian action squads’) (preferring to shake the initials GAP and SAP out into their full forms).85
The arrogance of the landowners, or at least of some of them, comes across as being greater than that of the industrialists: in this respect, the Fascism of the RSI had well and truly returned to its origins. This time too, the industrialists found themselves caught up in a wider game and a wider perspective.
From the opposite side, testimonies of class hatred abound. ‘There are insistent rumours that if the strike isn’t settled by the 16th, responsibility will be laid chiefly on them (the padroni) and that four or five of them will be shot. (A good thing too)’ – so runs a report from the Breda works in December 1943.86
An able and ambiguous figure like Professor Valletta is the object of fiery denunciations. Voce Operaio, the Catholic Communist paper, wrote: ‘This shady slave of the Germans contemptuously dismisses workers, threatening them with the Nazi firing squad.’87 On 26 November 1944 the provincial agitation committee of Turin denounced the entire Fiat management to the CLN for collaborationism, defining Valletta as a ‘traditore della patria’. At the suggestion of the Action Party representative (Mario Andreis) the denunciation was transmitted to the comitato per l’epurazione (purging committee), whence began a long and complicated process which would peter out at the beginning of 1946. A further denunciation, to the agitation committee of the fourth sector, still during the period of clandestinity, gave the initiative a more clearly classist imprint: ‘The workers of Fiat have not forgotten and … will not forget the abuses of power and outrages and the exploitation suffered at the hands of this management and its cops’.88
‘There’s the dictatorship of the padrone. Because that was Fascist property’, is what is said of the Terni company. And it is recalled that ‘to get the work done’ an engineer from the same firm ‘was prepared to get himself killed … And he went around with a riding whip, saying ‘Forza! Forza!’ (‘Come on! Come on!’). The partisan movement deemed C’s excessive zeal to be culpable, and he was sentenced to death’.89
The case of this engineer prompts one to discuss the physiognomy of the Fascist as seen by the factory. In the Fascist there was a fusion of the figure of the padrone and that of the superior: a manager of the Galileo works makes this plain, in explaining adherence to Communism as ‘rebellion against the padrone as superior, and their being superior in that they are part of the class of padroni’.90 But the employer was often absent; while the arrogant boss and the slave-driving overseer were visible daily. From this point of view, the re-born Fascists of the Social Republic appeared as the epitome of the Fascist qua class enemy. When the black-shirted Fascists showed their faces at the factory ‘they were greeted with hisses and told to beat it; which did not happen in the case of the Germans’ – this is what is written about the Milan strikes of December 1943:91
The padrone had no need to be present because there were the Fascists. The Fascists hit people. They were among the workers, among the workers themselves … there were people who’d been put there in the factory because there they had to report what it was doing. In the factory the Fascist workers … in short they were isolated because they were a small minority, they were factious … they were the least able of many,… they were the least intelligent, they weren’t great kicks at work.
This is the factory Fascist as he had remained fixed in the memory of the Galileo workers.92 The gerarchia in the factory, a Terni worker recalls, ‘was a gerarchia of charge hands, it wasn’t a technical gerarchia’.93 To have liberated oneself from the bullying of the corporals and overseers – ‘the liberation struggle was necessary to eliminate this affront to the workers represented by the searches et cetera’94 – was to remain in the workers’ memory as one of the most tangible signs of the change that came about with the Liberation.
Hatred of the henchman-Fascist could be so intense as to blur that of the padrone-Fascist. Another Galileo worker says of his father, a horse-broker and veteran of the Scandicci barricades: ‘He didn’t realise that behind these Fascists there was the padrone, he hated those littl’uns, but wasn’t keen on the idea of striking the big’uns. Eh, anarchoide …’ and then expressed in eloquent and effective words the pride of the generation that had become Communist: ‘Such a personal hatred: and little by little it turned into organisation.’95 This is, as it were, the other, more sanguine face of the proletarian virtue of sacrifice which leads in its turn to organisation.96
The ‘organisation’ itself, by dealing a blow to the general and symbolic aspect of Fascism, appeared to be moved both by hatred of individuals and by collective conscience. The Genoa trade union committee’s request that the regional CLN for Palazzo Patrone, seat of the PFR (Partito fascista repubblicano), in Piazza Corridoni in the city centre, be allocated to the Camera del Lavoro seems significant: ‘Because it would be symptomatic of and a source of obvious satisfaction for the working masses to use premises that housed their uniformed [sic] oppressors as the seat of the class organisms’.97
The meaning that the workers attributed to the word fascista can be seen particularly clearly in the criteria used for weeding out Fascists in the factory, suggested, and when possible applied, by the rank and file. The first manifestation of this phenomenon had been during the forty-five days of Badoglio’s rule,98 when, however, essentially magnanimous attitudes to the Fascists in general, already recorded, had prevailed in the factory too.
‘Since 25 July I ain’t taken off me ‘at to anyone’, recounts a Galileo worker who had previously been persecuted by the regime, ‘I’ve saluted and that’s all, I’ve kept them at a distance like the plague’: at the most the ‘fascisti fascisti’ had been jostled a bit, spat in the face once or twice, escorted to the gate: ‘What ‘appened outside I dunno’.99 Later, even this magnanimity in the factory came to be regretted. For example, the director of the Turin firm, Aeronautica Italia, would be defined as a swine who was mistakenly spared after 25 July.100
Reasons are frequently given, during and after the Resistance, for expulsions from the factory: ‘because disliked by the working class’ (thus, for example, in Genoa);101 or ‘scorners of the working class, bloodhounds and persecutors of the workers’. These expressions, in a
peripheral zone like the Garfagnana, appear among the reasons of ‘moral unworthiness’ that are kept distinct from ‘political reasons’.102
This is how the stato di accusa (committal for trial) against an industrialist from Abbiategrasso was worded: ‘A jackal grown rich to the order of many hundreds of millions during twenty years of fascism, when a workers’ committee asked for assistance for the needy and the patriots, with a handsome gesture, offered 5,000 lire to divide among 105 employees. He is held up to the contempt of the workers.’103
The comment on a series of interviews with workers from the Piombino steelworks read:
Fiercely negative judgments were expressed about the director of the plant and his managers, but also a certain respect. The injustice of their initiative seems implicit in the role they occupy, and not in themselves as persons. Implicit in their judgments there seems to be the view that after all each was playing his own game, to the end; this ‘extenuating circumstance’ is not conceded to the [internal] guards. They are simply defined as ‘ruffians’, or ‘errand boys’.104
Togliatti was to sharply condemn this radical aspect of workers’ morality, when it shifted from mere henchmen to technicians. Speaking at the congress of the provincial federation of Turin, the leader complained that ‘some twelve hundred technical experts have been removed, and not under the accusation of atrocities and collaborationism, but simply because they are disliked by the mass. This is a grave error; here political motives go by the board and the old trade union rivalries between technicians and workers come into play.’105
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