‘Some valorous comrades’ from the province of Faenza, who ‘pride themselves on being an integrally Communist detachment’ and ‘are proud to wear a red handkerchief around their necks with the emblems of the proletarian revolution’, had asked ‘for the Party to explain what the programme of action will be tomorrow’, maintaining ‘that such an explanation is supremely useful for the purpose of winning over the working masses to the struggle’. The reply to this was that the objective was certainly the creation of a socialist society: ‘that [objective] remains clear to the eyes of the avant-garde of the proletariat’, who yet have difficulty understanding the intermediate objectives, the only ones however which ‘interest the vast mass of workers whose minds are still closed to our ideology’. From this sort of incommunicability between initiated and uninitiated springs the moral of the discourse: ‘How can one pretend from a party such as ours a clear-cut definition of the tactic to be pursued some time in the future?’158
A local (Asti) issue of L’Unità, and as such closer, presumably, to the mood of the rank and file, published one of the few explicit and simple expositions of the aims of Communism, including the non-denominational state, liberty for all religions, education for everyone and not only ‘for the sons of the signori, even if they are of poor intellect’, parity between men and women: ‘No parasite must pretend any longer, as has always happened and is still happening today, that others work for him. The scandalous bourgeois system of kicking the workers around and the monstrous fascist pretension that forces the workers to work and keep quiet must be cancelled from the face of the earth.’159
Intolerance of the unitary policy and doubts as to its real efficacy, fear that it would end up being a work of Sisyphus for those who were sinking all their energies in it, are further indications of an attitude that did not always succeed in sinking all its ideals and all its hopes in the line of a party, in which it nevertheless rested its faith. The numerous top-level documents which signal these positions of uncertainty did so in order to repress them; but they also had to grant, as ‘Vineis’ (Pietro Secchia) did, in answering the complaints of the Veneto insurrectional triumvirate, that ‘you’re right not to let anyone tread on your feet and you mustn’t let them be trodden on’;160 or else they must take care not to interpret the unitary policy too literally, as the ‘responsible comrades’ do in the case of the occupation of Alba: ‘We must show a broad unitary spirit, but we mustn’t sacrifice all our positions just to achieve it … We mustn’t pass from a rigid position to the widest concessions;’161 or again, they feel obliged to remark that ‘among the comrades there’s a misunderstanding of the political line of the party. Many are upset and afraid that the Party will end up following a political line that is closer to the interests of others.’162
News from Belgium and, above all, from Greece, spread disquiet, prompting the leaders to remind their members that ‘the alliance on the international front is no idyll, just as it is no idyll on the national front’.163
The uncertainties and resistance with which the Salerno ‘turning-point’ was greeted may be interpreted from the same perspective. They are also linked to generation differences. An ex-partisan, Anna Cinanni, has recalled that ‘the Salerno turning-point was like a betrayal, but, I would say, more so for comrades of a certain age than for the younger ones.’164 Emilio Sereni expressed a similar opinion. A prisoner in the Turin jails at the time, he wasn’t the least bit surprised by the turning-point: ‘All the same I don’t deny that that initiative did however leave other comrades perplexed, especially those who’d been in prison for years and had inevitably been somewhat detached from the general policy of the party.’165
Within the Communist Party, relations between generations, to which we must necessarily return, took a particular form, above all differentiating the older members. Those who had managed to keep apace with the evolution of the party were programmatically, but not always emotionally, well-disposed towards the young men coming from the Fascist drafts. The others showed the distrust that had developed in the isolation in which they had lived, when the mediating influence of their families had had no way of operating.166 This mixture of trust and suspicion gave rise to a complex web of positions. At the November 1944 conference of insurrectional triumvirates, when membership had risen from the 6,000 of September 1943 to 70,000, almost exclusively workers, the ‘real professional revolutionaries according to Lenin’s conception’ had on average been party members for twenty-three years, in prison or political exile for eight years and were not more than forty-five years old.167 They were both suspicious of their contemporaries who had not fully adapted, and full of hope in, but also of reticence and caution towards, the young ones.
‘Those who are keen to do everything are the young ones, and this is good, but somehow or other the older party members are put aside too rigidly as if they could no longer do anything good.’168 If in this report from Piedmont the veterans appear benevolent towards the younger ones, hoping only that they won’t overdo things, from the other zones they come in for very severe criticism. ‘Some old party members have held back the actions of the younger ones, even threatening to denounce them if they went ahead’ – that is how things stood in Mantua.169 And from Cremona reports came of strong resistance to truly engaging in military work, while having to recognise in those who behaved like this the attenuating circumstance of age, habits and ‘family responsibilities’.170
This reluctance to engage above all in military action is generally classed, in Communist language, as opportunism and, in this case, attesismo. At other times, by contrast, but this is not necessarily a contradiction, the older members were accused of sectarianism. A drastic denunciation came from the eastern border, where many things were said to be going well and others badly,
but above all there’s the obstacle of the ‘old comrades’ who with their 25 years of party membership haven’t a frigging clue (sorry) about the far-reaching policy that we’re practising today. Sectarianism, superiority, the clenched fist salute, the red star, integral policy, distrust and criticism of everything, especially of individuals from the past regime or ex-carabinieri or fascists who have moved into line only today. It’s a terrible effort working with them. We’d do better to dig a 1,000-meter hole and chuck them all in it, since if they haven’t understood today they’ll never understand.171
Sometimes extremism and prudence were reported as coexisting in the same person. Thus, in the ‘vecchi compagni’ of Aosta a ‘sectarian spirit’ and reticence ‘about going ahead with our work’ seem to dwell together.172 Among so many contradictory accusations and counter-accusations, a document from the province of Biella grasps a crucial point, independently of ancient class and/or anti-Fascist purity: ‘In the detachments we have marvellous young anti-Fascists. These are ex-Fascists whose moral revolt against Fascism is of great political interest.’173
It would, however, be reductive to equate the veterans with those who kicked against the party line and the young as its enthusiastic followers; and it would also mean relegating to a parenthetical position the difference between sectarianism and extremism. Sectarianism is an attitude that exalts the sense of belonging to the party to the point of impairing the party line itself: it stresses, completely in its own favour, its differences from the other parties, particularly the Socialists and Christian Democrats. The latter, said a Communist worker from the Milanese firm, Pracchi, ‘are never around, and what’s more when they do show up it’s to be able to say that the Christian Democrats and Socialists have participated in the victory too, but without fighting … But if then, besides not participating in the struggle, they put a spanner in the works, I’m not prepared to have our way blocked.’174
Reprimands against behaviour of this kind, found in both the political and military organisms, were numerous, covered all the geographical zones, and appealed to the demands of the policy of national unity. At times there were more fully articulated judgments, as when it was reported that ‘the
socialists are influencing more workers, office employees etc. than might at first sight be thought’ by those who let themselves be misled by their scant organisational presence;175 and as when it was said the Christian Democrat workers who sympathised with the Communists were to be considered ‘the vanguard of their party’ and not elements to capture.176 Explicit appeals are made to those ‘whose only thought is to occupy towns and cities with partisans, GAPs and SAPs belonging to the party’.177 Sectarianism could even assume the conformist guise of pushing things too far in unitary terms; and criticism of this attitude was useful not least in reassuring the less enthusiastic about that line. Thus at times there was the reminder that ‘nobody is saying we must lose sight, even slightly, of the aims that must fit our action’.178 At other times one’s own caution was viewed with self-irony, as in the remark that one must think twice about writing certain articles, otherwise ‘the friends of the CLN … raise a hue and cry against our sectarianism!?!!?!’179
Extremism, on the other hand, went more deeply into the question and offered different contents and quick results, making the greatness of the objective coincide with the immediate possibility of achieving it. It was not so much a question of childish impatience as of the intensity of the demand.
What was actually happening was that an intricate game of relations between sectarianism and extremism was being played out, giving life to various forms of ‘leftism’. There was a sinistrismo that led to attesismo in the name of the purity of the class struggle, which had to be preserved against the struggle between Fascism and anti-Fascism and the war between the states. As a French Trotskyist newspaper wrote, ‘against the servants of Roosevelt and Hitler, the Italian Revilution continues’; or, as an Italian bordighista paper stated, ‘the proletariat responds to the three stock masks of the class enemy (democracy, Fascism, Sovietism)’, by transforming the war into revolution.180
A variant of this attitude was summed up as follows in a Communist document criticising it: ‘Waiting for the struggle between Fascism and anti-Fascism to run its course until the contestants are exhausted. In order then to take up the struggle for proletarian claims.’181
In fact, in the history of Italian socialism and the working class there was nothing new about the working class, or whoever presumed to speak in its name, stepping aside like this, not only from the war but, initially at least, from the conflict between Fascism and anti-Fascism as well. One need only think of the refusal either to adhere or sabotage, and many of the first uncertain reactions to the March on Rome. It would be incorrect therefore to blame all the attesismo di sinistra (left-wing waiting game) on bordighismo or Trotskyism. During the Resistance, however, such attitudes could only take the form of a stoppered dogmatism. Even Concetto Marchesi was tempted by it when, while still Rector of Padua University, he showed some reticence and incredulity towards the anti-Fascist and anti-German struggle.182
There was also a sinistrism that took the form of red hyper-belligerence. This is how a Communist document sums up the opposition between the two stances: ‘opportunism on the one hand and militant sectarianism on the other.’183 The former is criticised for its ideological deviationism, a residue of a past to be put behind one once and for all; the latter, to which we must necessarily return, is criticised above all because of the practical damage that might be done by political miseducation and the crude enthusiasm of the younger generations who above all embraced it. Neither the former nor the latter form of deviationism need necessarily be viewed as alternative political lines to that of the PCI. On the contrary, they reveal attitudes, moods, and expectations – rife among the militants and, in general, the workers’ rank and file.184 Pietro Secchia would not have written his infelicitous letter ‘Il sinistrismo maschera del Gestapo’ (‘Leftism mask of the Gestapo’) if his target had only been the small dissident groups outside the party185 rather than a wider internal ‘danger of dissidence’.186 On the contrary, it may well be that a leader with a certain reputation for being a sinistro187 should have been the very person expected, in accordance with Third Internationalist custom, to launch so severe and crude an attack. On the other hand, as was pointed out at the time, ‘for the Communist Party dissidence constitutes not only an excellent tactical cover but also an excellent index or thermometer of the radicalism of the masses; from the point of view of the official Communists, if Trotskyism didn’t exist it would have to be invented’.188
The Communists randomly bracketed under the label trockista – that text goes on to say – left-wing opposition of whatever type it may be: trockista had in fact become the most demonising epithet of all.
Actually, the term livornismo would have been more in key with the tradition of Italian Communism.189 The bordighisti (Internationalist Communist Party) should be considered livornisti: their presence in the party was however altogether marginal, even if several alarming traces of them were reported. In Turin it was considered disgraceful that ‘there is not the aversion on the part of the comrades to the worm-eaten sectors of Prometeo and Stella Rossa that there ought to be’.190 One of the first things Togliatti wanted to know as soon as he landed in Naples, regarded Amadeo Bordiga; and to justify his entry into the second Bonomi government before the party leadership, Togliatti explained that ‘a different solution would have brought about, even within the party, the danger of reinforcing left-wing currents through the excessive development of one aspect of the party’s character to the detriment of others’.191
The bordighisti, according to whom the USSR was a capitalist state, reduced the immense tragedy that was convulsing the peoples of the whole world to a dogmatic formula, and in that formula they were appeased: ‘Between two imperialisms that are fighting each other in our country, there is no advantage in the proletariat’s choosing one way or another.’192 The genuine Trotsykists were around as well. And here too comrades or those presumed to be so ‘are not loath to have contacts and attend meetings and discuss things with such tools of Fascist policy’ whereas the ‘little group of Trotskyist riff-raff should have their skulls bashed in’.193
The Trotskyists’ total condemnation of Stalin and Stalinism – ‘Of course! They’re Stalinist cadres!’, wrote a French Trotskyist about the collaborationist Vlasov194 – and their opinion of the USSR, as a socialist state maybe, but a degenerate one, could only stoke the Communist leaders’ hate, also given the international network that the Trotskyists, unlike the bordighisti, had at their disposal. Individuals with Trotskyist sympathies were reported among the Garibaldini of the Valsesia and the Ossola brigades. Two of the four Trotskyists, in good faith, who arrived in a band were said to have been rehabilitated and the other two, in bad faith, had been ‘treated as they deserved’, and hadn’t shown their faces again. Naturally, in evaluating these reports we need to bear in mind the extreme suspiciousness of those who made them and the fears shown towards, for example, ‘one of those eternal grumblers who at the moment is very much under the influence of the Trotskyists’.195 There is the curious case, governed, it would seem, by the law of ‘an eye for an eye’, of the Turinese Socialist leader, a foreman, who, when accused by the Communists of having sabotaged a strike, replied that he had been afraid of playing the Trotskyists’ game.196
Trotskyists and bordighisti were ‘historic’ embodiments of dissidence, and drew prestige from this quality, but a heavy legacy of hatred and bloodshed as well. The anarchici and libertari, who had re-appeared in the zones that had been their traditional hunting-grounds, like the Carrara area, where they established their own partisan bands and entered the CLNs,197 fell more into the category of historic diversity than of dissidence. But anarchic diversity, though it had been tragically shattered in the Spanish war, belonged in Italy to what was by now distant history and did not prevent a Communist partisan from recalling Errico Malatesta as ‘a marvellous, truly exceptional man, whom I don’t know why the party has isolated’.198
Rather more interesting, by virtue of their novelty, were the groups that were f
ormed in those months. Though coming under the influence above all of the Trotskyists, they were in fact adjacent to the PCI, reabsorbable by and to a great extent reabsorbed into it. The absence of anti-Sovietism and, indeed, the frequent exaltation of the USSR and of Stalin favoured this process. This undoubtedly was ‘a spitting image Stalinist policy’;199 but this observation could equally well apply to many of the Communist rank-and-file. The appeal of these groups, in the eyes of their critics, was the ‘diciannovista’ (1919) jargon that is such a favourite with the radicalised but politically immature masses: for example, the watchword ‘peace against capital, against the patria’, etc.200 A PCI leader wrote of Stella Rossa (an integral Communist party) – a Turin group, but present elsewhere as well, as far as Padua201 – that it was inspired by the criterion of ‘class against class’ and that ‘the workers rather like its classicism [sic]’.202 What they probably liked was the presence in the group of a seventy-year-old – who was given the name of Kurtimes – ‘who says he was with Lenin in Switzerland’ and of a fiery Russian student who went under the name of Arnault.203 An important role in getting re-absorption of the group under way was played by the ‘Lettera aperta ai compagni di Stella Rossa’ (‘Open letter to the comrades of Stella Rossa’), which appeared in the 10 September 1944 issue of Il Grido di Spartaco. The letter was utterly weighted in a ‘Bolshevik’ and anti-centrist direction (though obviously condemning opportunism from the opposite side); it rejected accusations of Machiavellianism and stressed the principle that outside the Communist Party, nulla salus (nothing is healthy).204
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