Beneath the wrapping of national unity, Christian Democrat anti-Communism began to build its foundations in these Resistance stances, which aimed at vying with the Communists for hegemony over the popular masses, including the workers, to whom a leaflet circulated in Tuscany offered ‘the figure and the idea of the worker of Nazareth’ as a model.46 The ‘determined stance against any kind of dictatorial extremism’, the enjoinder not to fall ‘into another dictatorship’, the explicit labelling of the Communists as ‘red Fascists’, to the extent that all the red paper in Domodossola was requisitioned to prevent the town council from printing its bulletin on it – these, and other similar ones (apart from the excessive zeal of the confiscation of paper ordered by commander Di Dio) were the recurrent formulae of the Christian Democrat press, directed against both PCI policy and social subversion.47 The Christian Democrat press was forever engaged in warning the workers against false masters and corrupting doctrines, and at the same time in defending its good name from those who considered it to be dedicated to extremism. An ‘Address to the workers’ published in Il Popolo concludes with the invitation not to read ‘our words’ hastily: ‘Read them this evening in the peace of your poor house, while your wife frugally mends your jacket again and your children rest their heads on the table, overcome by sleep.’48
The fight for physical survival did bring the population together, but at the same time risked fomenting the hostility against the peasants typical of the famished cities. Resentment against peasants who ‘are selling everything on the black market and raking in the money’ is indicated by the reports on the censored correspondence.49 If the memoirs of an Emilian landowner are to be credited, there were, on the other hand, peasants who said: ‘From the point of view of food let’s enjoy these last days of war.’50
The Fascists were the first to attempt ‘more than ever to extol the workers at the expense of the peasants (see the fight against the black market etc.)’,51 and were eager to describe the peasants as ‘selfish, starvers and black-marketeers’,52 thereby provoking, from a peasants’ defence committee, the condemnation of ‘Fascist scheming aimed not only at dividing the workers and peasants, but at setting them against each other’.53 In retaliation against such scheming, the organ of the National Liberation Front of Piedmont wrote: ‘Not the peasants, but the Germans and Fascists are the cause of the present economic hardship of the workers.’54
But the perfidy of the Fascists was not always necessary. As can be seen from many of the incitements to them to behave differently, the workers, both as a class and as city-dwellers, often, of their own initiative, showed hostility towards the peasants or at any rate indifference to their problems. In the emergency situation, the complex web of ancient peasant culture and factory culture running through the history of the workers’ movement was, as it were, stripped of its flesh and taken back to the two extreme poles of invincible distrust among the oppressed, and solidarity. While the former prevailed in the country areas where the partisans were active, in the cities the latter often emerged. A Perugian Communist document complains:
Most of our militants and the leadership itself still appear to have difficulty grasping the problems [of the peasants]. In some cases we have had to fight against the tendencies shown in some strata of the population against the peasants (connected with the present food supply problems and the dominion of the black market) and echoed among some party militants.55
‘Sectarianism’ and ‘incapacity’ regarding the peasants were reported from Terni as well.56 Widespread hostility ‘towards this important category of exploited workers of the land’ was denounced in the province of Forlì, where panzane (tall stories/yarns) of this kind circulate: ‘The peasants are selfish. The peasants are conservative and reactionary. The peasants have not the slightest importance in the revolutionary process for the progress of the human race.’57 In the provinces of Cremona and Mantua there was widespread ‘distrust of the peasant masses, their being branded as having become bourgeois and loafers’; and in particular in Mantua, with a singular loss of historical memory, the causes of attesismo were sought in the ‘absolute prevalence of peasant masses who are slower and more hidebound than the workers’.58 Still more offensive, in intention, is the opinion given of the Bassa Milanese where, it was said, twenty years of Fascism had ‘practically meridionilizzato [southernised] the agricultural worker.’59 By contrast, the Gappist Cicchetti was respectful of the difference of the peasants, to whom it was difficult to speak in the language of the workers.60
The presence in the factories of workers who had not yet altogether severed their peasant roots could produce further incomprehension and distrust. In Turin the commuters, who had fewer food difficulties than those living in the cities, were considered to be taking too much time in becoming proletarianised.61 In Varese the failure of the November 1943 strikes was attributed to the ‘half peasant’ workers who ‘do not lack the essentials’.62 In Bergamo it was deemed that the presence of a ‘working-class workforce coming from the country and living in the country’, though creating ‘favourable objective conditions’ for mutual understanding, in fact does not succeed in eliminating ‘the prejudices of the mass of urban workers: the peasants sell themselves at a low price and eat white bread; they are the servants of the padroni’.63
These were the consequences of a political culture that, though proclaiming the unity of workers and peasants, was incapable of grasping ‘the element of mutual enrichment which rural diversity introduces into the relationship with the worker’s movement [and which] takes unity for uniformity’.64 Appearing indiscriminately in the documents are the expressions ‘workers who live in the country’ and ‘peasants who work in factories’; and these workers from the country often appear to be most in danger of dismissal.65
This ‘war between the poor’ might help explain the subsequent success of Christian Democracy in the country areas,66 despite the great post-war peasant struggles. A ‘Galileo’ worker has recently recalled the decline suffered by the company, ‘where there was a less mature working class … because a huge number of workers from the country areas had been admitted during the period of the war’.67
Among the instances of solidarity that helped counterbalance this phenomenon was that created between the evacuees from the towns and the country-dwellers.68 In these cases the counterbalance was only partial because, for those compelled to remain in the towns, the evacuees were likened to the better-fed and less bombed country folk. A borderline case was Terni, with the ‘exodus of an entire city’ destroyed by the bombings and the ‘reduction to the state of nature’ of its inhabitants who had fled into the country areas.69 City-dwellers’ distrust found an incentive in the tendency of the agricultural areas to withdraw into themselves, fomenting a sort of provincial autarky with a reversion to different forms of bartering. These autarkies, which were sometimes encouraged by the partisan commands, would in their turn have after-effects in the immediate post-war period.70
One would nevertheless be mistaken to think that the hostility to and distrust of the peasants present in some sectors of the working class means that in the country areas during the Resistance there were not, as various studies have highlighted, autonomous forms of class struggle, in some cases linked to the presence of partisan bands and to the individuals of peasant origin serving in them. Certainly, the linear development from the struggle against the stockpiles to that against the landowners and the Germans – a rural version of the superimposition of the three figures of the enemy: the padrone, the Fascist, the German – did not follow the model sketched by L’Unità in an article in which, in typical Communist style, objectives and desires are described as a reality that is already coming about:
The struggle of the urban masses, guided and spurred by the working class is also making its contribution to the very conditions of this struggle which, having begun as a defence against the Fascist agents of the stockpiles and against the Fascist plunderers of human flesh, is now transformed into
an attack against all the self-styled Fascist authorities of the country areas.71
The time taken for Communism to penetrate the country areas was indeed insistently denounced in party documents from Emilia, the Marche, Veneto and Lombardy.72 This raises the question of how much the PCI’s rootedness in agricultural areas like that of Emilia was due to Resistance mobilisation and how much to its capacity to gather the socialist legacy, both maximalist and reformist, along multiple roads. The imperfect and tardy encounter between the Resistance and the peasant world, made still more so by the RSI call-up, is a more general phenomenon.73 It has been justly written that ‘Partisan action to fight Fascism in the country areas had the laborious task of finding a politico-social meaning and of reconciling a series of conflicting interests, as well as procuring the aid and provisions indispensable for military activity in the plain and for the sustenance of all the combatants.’74
The difficulties are signalled by the uncertain nature of the concrete political proposals addressed to the country areas:75 to the ‘silent proletarians of the fields’, as the Communist press put it at times, or to the ‘soul of the dear and hard-working people of the fields’, to use an expression dear to the Christian Democrats.76 But it was the Action Party press that treated the agrarian problems most thoroughly and competently.77
The demands regarding farmhands’ wages and agrarian agreements found support in the memory of 1919–21, which was nevertheless revived in the landowners as well.78 The consigli di cascina (farm councils), born on the wave of the Resistance, were to be violently opposed by the landowners.79 Above all, though, it is the manifestations of perilous solidarity with and assistance given to fleeing soldiers, Jews, partisans, Allied prisoners, deserters and draft-dodgers that give a particular tone to the Resistance as it was experienced in the country areas. In this sense, the Resistance becomes once again a broader category than that of class struggle.
5. CLASS STRUGGLE AND ARMED STRUGGLE
There is … in the Garibaldini the tendency to consider themselves the leaders of the whole political and trade union movement. Comrades and non comrades have to be taught that the partisans have the duty to support the workers’ struggles, but that these struggles are promoted and directed by the appropriate organisms: the Party organisation and the Agitation Committee. The workers need solidarity, not supervision.1
Turin was liberated by the SAPs and the workers. When the partisans arrived, Turin was already free … But Turin practically was liberated by them, the workers.2
Our combatants have to view the agitations of the working class with sympathy, in that they too are directed at the same goal of liberation. The strikes must therefore have the active support of our formations.3
The partisan struggle is welded with that of the workers and peasants to drive out the Germans and exterminate the Fascists.4
I will respond with obedience to an order of the Party. But don’t count on my commitment at the zone command. I remain a Garibaldino in the mountains.5
We [Garibaldini] have taken good care not to take the place of the workers’ commission.6
Three declarations of workers’ and party pride, one contemporary, the others consolidated in memory; an incitement of the unitary military organ; a Communist appeal that takes the customary form of a statement tallying more with ideology than with the facts; a brusque preference for the war in the mountains; an insistence on respect for reciprocal autonomy. These quotations show how complex the relationship between the factory struggle (in town) and the armed struggle (in the mountains) was, with viscous effects in the post-war period too. It has in fact been remarked that while the ‘country partisans’, of the mountains, felt misunderstood and betrayed, the ‘partigiani di città’would prove to be better inserted in both the factory and the parties.7 Pietro Secchia has told of answers, which were mostly just common sense, given to Yugoslav representatives critical of the fact that the workers had not been urged to go over in mass to the partisan formations.8 The impossibility of following the Yugoslav example (for that matter, the Slovene Urban recognised that Italian originality lay precisely in the combination of mass struggle and armed struggle),9 and alongside this the need to avoid fighting two parallel wars,10 in other words, to get around a situation in which, as was noted at the time, ‘the union sector is going its own way, with scant ties with the military movement’,11 created problems for which there was no pat solution. The difficult connection between the struggle in the factory and the armed struggle that was created at the time is well expressed in the verses of Dante Bartolini, a proletarian poet from Terni, about an imaginary episode:
La fabbrica d’armi di Terni
andammo migliaia di operai
fu rotto il cancello
spalancato
prendemmo le armi
una parte
poi si partì per la montagna.12
[To the arms factory of Terni
Thousands of workers we went
The gate was broken
Flung open
Some of the arms
We made off with
Then off to the mountains we went.]
In a quite different situation, with the Red Army beating at the gates, a clear proclamation was made: ‘Our insurrection, our revolution is above all an affair regarding us workers. We know why we’re fighting. We know why we’re dying. Not only for the liberty of the Patria, but also for our social liberation.’13
The Communists had to deal not merely with the organisational problem of how to distribute the quadri (leaders) and the more expert militants between the factories and the mountains. It might even happen that ‘comrades’ initiatives in all the mass organisational fields created in the eyes of the party supporters the impression that everything and everyone was gravitating around the partisan movement’14 – an overstatement that redounded more to the glory of the partisan movement than of the party.
Oscillating and conflicting worries can be recorded in the Communist Party. At times one seems to be confronting reluctance to enter the armed bands: How many Communists, and especially quadri enlisted in the fighting formations?, L’Unità was early to ask itself;15 and a report from Biella related that in order to induce the ‘exhausted comrades’ to enter the formations ‘we had to resort to the question of discipline’.16 At times, instead, fear is expressed that military commitment would overwhelm every other activity (as for example in the province of Vicenza),17 causing, as we have seen, a sort of jealousy in those detailed for political work.18
The ‘Direttive di lavoro’ (‘Work directives’) of 21 October stated that no fewer than 15 percent of the party members were to join the ranks of the partisans.19 Evident in the first phase in fact is the ‘politically and militarily urgent and necessary’ commitment to send workers and Communists into the bands, which had often formed spontaneously.20 In this context ‘Workers and Communists’ are not synonymous but constitute a hendiadys that expresses both faith in the objectivity of class and faith in the subjectivity of politics. In a document from the centre, slightly earlier than the one just quoted, the assertion that the best forces of the party were to join the formations of partisans and snipers is in fact followed by another: ‘The Communists must not leave for the front on their own; they must know how to mobilise the most energetic and combative of the workers, above all of the younger ones.’21
A crucial point was armed support of strikes, requested for example by the Milanese Communist organisation in the light of their experience of the strike of mid-December 1943.22 Again in Milan, during the March 1944 strikes, the workers had high hopes of armed intervention but these hopes were dashed because of the number of Gappists who were arrested.23 In Turin as well the interventions were limited.24 This armed backing of the strikes, which failed to be forthcoming or was limited, were a sort of equivalent of the scant commitment of the city’s organisms to the mountain war so often bemoaned by the partisans.
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