A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  With these words Togliatti put his finger on a real problem, but his reading of the worker’s attitude is reductive. The workers’ distrust of the factory managers, indicated several times during the Resistance, did not tally with the party line, but was rooted in a strong sense of social differentiation, which was not eliminated by the general reduction of hunger. At times this reduction was invoked as the unifying element,106 in the hope of seeing in a contingent fact the final realisation of the long looked forward to proletarianisation of the ceti medi (middle classes). These contradictory attitudes were not to be found only among the Communists. On one occasion the trade union committee of the Action Party, a party, that is, deeply engaged on the middle class front, distributed this outraged leaflet: ‘Mirafiori employees! Your behaviour during the lock-out was scandalous!’107

  For their part, the CLNs, when they hadn’t preferred to equivocate, as the Ligurian one did, had chiefly concerned themselves with preparing criteria and norms for purging the company executives.108 The economic commission of the CLNAI deemed that those norms had to be interpreted with extreme prudence,109 concerned as they were that the executives, who were not guaranteed ‘a minimum of personal physical safety’ would abandon their posts, thereby throwing production into chaos.110 The resolve to deal a blow to the industrialists who had financed Fascism from the beginning and were now doing roaring trade with the Germans appeared clear and linear.111 But to individualise, that is to say transform into subjective responsibility, the historic responsibilities of the industrialist class for the role they had had in bringing about Fascism and then keeping it in power was an objective that the failure of the purge would reveal to be, at least in those conditions, unattainable.112 Presumably, the workers sensed that the achievement of so grandiose an enterprise could only be entrusted to the overall force of the class and its political and trade union representative bodies. But meanwhile the workers did not want to continue to see the most odious faces in the factory.

  The powerful sense of workers’ dignity underlying these attitudes is manifested in a variegated range of positions and incitements. Some workers who had gone to a Fascist scoundrel about certain problems of theirs received the following reproof: ‘Let the feckless reflect well and think of the future if they want to enter the free unions with heads held high alongside their comrades.’113 A worker got the Fascists to give him money and then handed it on to a Communist to distribute; but the latter refused to do so because ‘accepting meant receiving alms’, as well as ‘lending oneself to a demagogic manoeuvre by the fascists’.114 Another worker, who was offered the chance of being re-employed at Fiat as a white-collar worker told his interviewer many years later: ‘But I hadn’t fought in the Resistance to become a clerk at Fiat.’115

  Shortly after the Liberation, a reconstruction committee set up in Sesto Fiorentino would give this reply to a reprimand from the prefect: ‘But it should be borne in mind that there exist other laws over and above those that the state issues: the laws of conscience, violated by the industrialists’; and in the Tuscan CLN the Christian Democrat representative would record that very often ‘when people who had been expelled turned up for work again with a certificate from the local Committee, they were thrown out’.116

  As I have already underlined more than once, anti-institutional animosity and a desire for better institutions, traverse much Resistance conduct, and remained as one of the Resistance’s most tenacious legacies but also one of the hardest to administer. Among the workers they set in motion both egalitarian and solidaristic drives. ‘Solidarity, a moral thing, the sharpened tool of struggle’, is the title that the Catholic Communists in Rome gave to one of their articles, urging their readers, after so much arrivismo personale (personal self-seeking) ‘to identify their lot with the lot of everybody’.117 These appeals for universal brotherhood acquired particular connotations when they appeared as incitement to workers’ solidarity. An appeal by the railroad workers agitation committee to condemn failure to participate in the current struggle punctually recalls the sad memory of blacklegging: ‘The old system of the past struggle, where even blacklegs always ended up receiving the same benefits wrested by the strikers, is over for good.’118

  Solidarity appeared to be intrinsic to a work ethic, which had in no way been submerged by the exceptional circumstances of those months, about which it makes no sense to talk in terms of workers’ absenteeism.119 If anything, the sheer fatigue of labour served, yet again, as a reagent against Fascist heroics. Speaking about his early development, the Gappist Elio Cicchetti recalls the effect it had on him seeing these words of Mussolini’s daubed on the walls: ‘We are against the easy life!’: ‘To earn my living I’d started working even before I finished elementary school: frankly I didn’t like that motto one little bit.’ On another page Cicchetti again writes of a Communist worker, arrested under the regime, who had been a kind of master to him, and whom he met up with again after 8 September: ‘In the factory they had taught me that work is a serious business, to be done with precision, participation and dignity; only in this way can one firmly claim a decent living wage.’120

  ‘I couldn’t be faulted at work’ is one of the recurrent expressions in a collection of testimonies of women’s political participation. Or again: ‘I always worked. I was capable of doing anything.’121 The old Galileo worker, a manager recalls, ‘even when he was athirst for Communism was still proud of being part of Galileo’.122

  The passage from the work ethic – ‘we were those Communists who liked to do our duty first and then claim our rights’, declares another Galileo worker123 – to company pride could be a short one. And there could even be a borderline case like that of the Mirafiori works committee which asked for ‘the honour of giving the name Fiat to an assault brigade, undertaking to maintain it with men and equipment’.124 A woman worker from the same plant was to declare many years later: ‘I feel myself to be a real worker because I’m from Terni and my mum’s dad worked in the factory; they always made me see the factory as a place where there’s satisfaction.’125

  Numerous other testimonies of this kind could be accumulated, and projected onto the ethics of reconstruction, which might in turn be a useful way of understanding many aspects of the ethics of the Resistance. It seems, however, that much can be learned by setting an at once rigid and radiant formulation of the ethics of future socialist labour alongside the doubts of those who were at that time feeling the sting of forced labour. Il Nostro Avvenire, ‘spokesman of the Italians of the Litorale who adhered to the movement for the new Yugoslavia’ denounced the erroneous opinion rife among the workers according to which ‘We’ll work less, everybody will receive the same pay, there won’t be the hated “capi” in the units and the works, there’ll be no discipline, each person will be able to do as he pleases without fear of comments, fines, punishments or dismissals.’

  By contrast, ‘later, under the guidance of leaders who have come from the common people [not the daddy’s boys but the best] perhaps the most severe too, because the more competent they are the more demanding they are … we shall have to work more intensely’, each person will be paid according to his ability, and it is ridiculous to think of ‘an age of plenty in which by then work will be done by others … In God’s name, who are the others?’126

  A textile worker deported to various concentration camps considered it an intolerable humiliation – ‘to be humiliated on that score too!’ – to see Polish civilians take only a quarter of an hour over a job that would have required a whole day for the convicts.127 Primo Levi speaks for cases of this kind, of the dignity – ‘a rough-and-ready ascesis’ – that could be found even in the forced labour at Auschwitz. But he specifies:

  I frequently noticed in some of my companions (sometimes even in myself) a curious phenomenon: the ambition of ‘a job well done’ is so deeply rooted as to compel one to ‘do well’ even enemy jobs, harmful to your people and your side, so that a conscious effort is necessary to do them ‘
badly’. The sabotage of Nazi work, besides being dangerous, also meant overcoming atavistic inner resistances.

  Levi’s conclusion is that ‘love for a job well done is a deeply ambiguous virtue’.128 It is this basic ‘ambiguity’ that the following warning seeks to exorcise: ‘If there are comrades who work punctually and work well for the war production, these comrades are not Communists.’129

  This problem seems to have been solved in the period of reconstruction, when the will to survive combined with faith in the advent of socialism and ‘political ideology absorbed … the previous labour cultures’.130 At that time there was the widespread conviction that by now one was working for oneself, by virtue of the force gained through the Resistance movement by the working class and its party: ‘There was this conviction that by now [the factory] had become theirs. It was marvellous, there was a truly moving harmony … Work was in full swing, and even if there are always black sheep, isn’t that so? It was his work-mate who said to the other, “Eh, see that you work because things ain’t as before!” ’131

  Some workers even offered free overtime hours for the reconstruction of the factories; while a group of company CLNs declared on the one hand that ‘only in work lies the reconstruction of the Patria that has been torn to pieces by Fascism’, and on the other hand asked in the same breath for the dismissal of all the Fascists who had adhered to the Social Republic and ‘for 75 percent of workers’ representation in the running and management of the companies to be devolved to the workers and 25 percent to the owners’.132 For a worker from La Spezia it went without saying that, since the aim of the Resistance was to bring down Fascism, the destruction of capitalism would follow on from that:

  We had a socialist prefect and a communist questore, we had the power centres in our hands, things being like this, it was logical to think: well, comrades, let’s get down to the job of reconstruction because now it’s we who are in the power. Given our situation, we thought that Socialism was here, when we had our meetings in the evening, we spoke about how to build a socialist society, about communism, about nothing else.133

  That it was not just desirable but impossible for reconstruction to come about if it was not ‘on completely new bases’, socialist ones, was argued in a rather scholarly fashion by the Socialist press as well.134 In the period of reconstruction, the hope in a tomorrow that is already almost today, was to give birth to a ‘grande tensione ideale’ (‘great ideological tension’) which for several years was to outlive the ‘illusion of revolution’.135

  This climate in the period immediately following the Resistance cannot be explained if we fail to identify the expectations created among the workers during the Resistance, when, though failing to settle into a coherent programmatic picture within or without the mediation of the parties, those expectations give us a glimpse of ‘a rationality that does not deny desire’:136

  We were fighting to change the world, and I think I fully did my duty to attempt to change things. It seems to me that, to an extent, there have been changes … But we wanted to destroy private property, we wanted work to be everyone’s possession, everyone’s right. We aspired to a society with no exploited nor exploiters, and it seems to me that we’re still a very long way off this. Certainly, in fighting we wanted a different future. First of all we fought to drive the Germans out of our country and the Fascists who were their servants … then we fought to create a democratic Italy, but a new Italy …137

  – where that ‘but’ (ma) contains the disillusion underlying these words.

  A worker from the Reggio Emilia area, a long-standing anti-Fascist but not a partisan, the son of a socialist worker who would have liked him to join the PSI and not the PCI, has recounted:

  At that time we were always talking about the development of a socialist society whose model was the Soviet Union. We were convinced that we’d achieve it soon, that we’d construct the new man: committed, hard-working, capable of constructing a world with neither exploited nor exploiters; and this discussion was nourished by the fact that ‘inside yourself the deep conviction had been created that the movement demanded a total commitment and you couldn’t refuse it, otherwise it was a sort of betrayal’.138

  In the PCI leaders themselves there was the longing for Communism, and bald manifestations of hatred for the rival class that was not fully dissolved in the politics of national and democratic unity, however sincerely it might be affirmed. L’Unità therefore gave a reductive interpretation of reality when it affirmed: ‘The political line is only known to the leaders of our basic organisations, but it is not sufficiently assimilated by the great mass of party members.’139 It was not, in fact, just a question of getting to know the party line at more or less the opportune moment, but of even the middle-ranking leaders experiencing a situation according to their own fundamental inspirations. Riccardo, inspector in the Pavese Oltrepò, an old party official, an emigrant, and a combatant in Spain, as severe with himself as he was demanding with others, solid and loyal, wrote in a letter: ‘We’re democratic, but we don’t forget that we have a blacksmith’s hammer under our jackets.’140

  Stefano, an inspector operating in Lazio, didn’t mince his words in denouncing the traces of extremism that he encountered; but at Paliano, in order to activate comrades, he said: ‘The policy of the Party is nothing other than that of the revolver in one’s hand.’141 The political commissar Due, speaking to the Communists of the Ravenna (Liguria) detachment, who were ‘indignant’ at American and British behaviour towards the USSR, assured them that, once the objective of the defeat of the Germans and Fascists had been achieved, ‘other more arduous ones await us’, that the ‘war of liberation’ is also a war ‘for the destruction of capitalism’ and that the government will have to be ‘the expression of the working and peasant class itself’.142

  ‘We are living in a full revolutionary climate’, an old militant who had known Gramsci and Togliatti felt he could write of the Republic of Montefiorino;143 that the ‘Italian people are well and truly decided to fight to the end for the proletarian cause’ is the assurance given in a message sent to commander Bülow in Ravenna.144 The shape of things just after the war was charged with great revolutionary potentiality: witness some Milanese workers who, ‘though accepting the line of the party’, distrust the British (‘look at Greece and Belgium’) and ‘think that a civil war is indispensable to achieve our goal’.145 There was the conviction that Europe was inevitably heading towards Communism146 and that ‘socialism is in the hearts and minds of everybody’, the only remaining obstacles to demolish being Nazi-Fascism and Prussian militarism.147

  In their biography of Potente (Aligi Barducci), commander of the Arno Garibaldi division, Emirene and Gino Varlecchi wrote, hot from the event, that, ‘Sure, he was fighting against the Nazi-Fascist enemy, but in his blazing red shirt he was considered, and rightly so, the combatant of a “greater war”, that of all the oppressed against the oppressors, of poverty against wealth, of injustice against injustice.’148

  Potente himself, in a short piece that he wrote in March-April 1944, had expressed the conviction that the battle of the Resistance and of national unity was simply a ‘tactical battle’ on the road to revolution, which he defined as the ‘subversion of the existing order of values and interests’. Timpanaro’s comment on this is appropriate when he says that, while one should not go so far as to describe declarations of this kind as ‘heretical’, they nonetheless expressed a profoundly Communist aspiration.149 A similar aspiration can be found in the testimonies of workers who recount that they had been attracted by Communism insofar as it was a new type of society.150

  The intrinsic and altogether natural fusion between the Resistance impulse and the proletarian cause that could occur in the minds of the Communists is candidly revealed by the words addressed by Gina (Pasqualina Rossi Battistini), a leader of working-class origin, to a young Turinese Jewish intellectual: ‘And yet a lad like you should become Communist; you’re too intelligent not to
be one and you’ve given too much proof of idealism by coming to fight without anyone obliging you to.’151 The same position was expressed in another way by those who died before the firing squad shouting ‘Viva il comunismo!’ or, since they were Communists, refusing the last rites.152

  Demands for greater clarification and explanation about the party’s programme, which bespoke an eye turned powerfully towards the future – ‘we eagerly discuss what will happen tomorrow’153 – generally met with little success. The replies restated the party line caption-style and/or referred inquirers to the supreme principles of Marxism-Leninism, the ultimate guarantee. But ordinary party members demanded to know more about these as well.154 As prominent a leader as Mauro Scoccimarro wrote from Rome:

  We’ve been asked by some comrades to draw up a party programme, that is an up-to-date programme. For the time being we’ll start publishing articles about reconstruction in L’Unità, but a genuine programme might even be inopportune at this moment. Our fundamental programme now is war against the Germans and the destruction of Fascism and we wouldn’t like to formulate programmes of economic and social reforms that might upset the unity of the national front.155

  A party leader answered Potente’s piece, mentioned above, as follows: ‘We mustn’t forget the political line of our party today. It’s useless talking about what the party will have to do tomorrow.’156

  The Garibaldi paper Tre Vedette had written: ‘I want to fight against the fascist traitors today and tomorrow I’ll fight against their capitalist friends to obtain equality and liberty’. Then comes this reprimand:

  Today the communists are fighting the Nazi-fascists and tomorrow they’ll fight for Italy to be reconstructed, sparing the Italian People further sufferings. The communists … are not fighting today [the word ‘oggi’ is added in pencil] for the proletarian revolution but for the liberation of the Nation. Tomorrow’s problems are to be decided by the Communist Party tomorrow, that is when the country, liberated from the Nazi-Fascists, is able to freely express its will.157