The refusal to return to 1922 could signify two very different things. It could contain an invitation not to revert to the ‘reformist and bureaucratic tendency’ and not to let oneself be attracted by ‘pseudo-revolutionary maximalism’45 – these words, written by a Liberal, might however just as easily have appeared in the Communist press, due care being taken to conceal their origin. But this refusal could also be a warning against the ‘haunting and unjustified fear of Bolshevism’,46 as well as a severe admonition ‘to those who appeal to the positions of 1922, an absurd and anti-historical principle that would reward those very people who in these twenty years have done nothing’.47 Here there is an eye to the power relations between the anti-Fascist parties, in the hope that they will mirror the intensity of the commitment given to combating Fascism.
At the same time, the ‘lesson’ imparted by Fascism came in for different readings as well. The old idea of Fascism as a destroyer of the illusions placed in bourgeois democracy and reformism could never again be advanced, except by the historic left-wing dissident groups. Polemicising with the ‘Centro interno socialista’, Angelo Tasca had written early on: ‘The “great illusion” is precisely that of a Fascism as destroyer of democratic “illusions”, a simplifier of our tasks, an accelerator of the revolutionary process, the matrix of our socialism.’48 In some manifestations of Resistance socialist maximalism, this illusion took the form of an objective prediction: capitalism, after having inevitably led to war, was ‘marching rapidly towards its ruin everywhere and in Italy in particular’.49 The prospect of the collapse of capitalism was so fully incorporated in the Third Internationalist line that the PCI scarcely felt the need to mention it again explicitly: it constituted the presupposition of the conviction that history would carry the final game into Communist hands.
Settling accounts with Fascism in one way or another, and at the same time with the various anti-Fascist currents, implied the question as to whether anti-Fascism would survive Fascism. During the Resistance, this problem was rarely formulated explicitly. Anti-Fascism was making ready to enjoy its victory and to experience it as the natural assumption of every different current within it.50 To foresee its own demise along with that of the defeated enemy seemed tantamount to putting itself almost on the same plane, even if in this fear anti-Fascism as a political subject and anti-Fascism as the humus of new Italian democracy became confused. Those who thought that the defeat of Fascism was not the be-all and end-all felt it their duty to keep their eyes peeled against the rebirth, in whatever form, of that barbarous phenomenon, which was always a possibility as long as its roots were not completely severed. But the greater the originality granted to Fascism as a phenomenon that had had its day, the more powerful was the tendency to consider that it would not be long before anti-Fascism became a thing of the past as well. Historic anti-Fascism might thus die together with Fascism, but survive it as a field of imprescriptible values. It is no accident that this tendency appeared precisely in the most intrinsically anti-Fascist of the parties, the Action Party. Foa clearly envisaged that the Fascism/anti-Fascism antithesis would be superseded.51 Aldo Capitini expressed a similar view, with just one word of caution: ‘Antifascista might one day become a useless and tiresome word in people’s memories, like fascista. Save in the case of one thing happening – that the residues of Fascism reappeared alongside or within the new political alignments.’52
The need to put the Fascism/anti-Fascism antithesis behind one was vehemently emphasised by some young people who had lived through the Fascist period. Giaime Pintor had noted in his diary: ‘The Fascism/anti-Fascism antithesis and its transcendence allowed us to establish an extremely wide range of values, and in that field we were well and truly more mature than the others’.53 Another youth, Raimondo Musatti, had written more angrily that the young could not help being revolutionary because they had learned from Fascism ‘the sense of the “totalitarity” of life’, only to turn it against Fascism, reinvigorated by the ‘primacy of human liberty’:
We have learned that there can be no absenteeism before any aspect of life … We now know that political struggle is part of the struggle for life itself, an essential element of it … To be no more than anti-Fascist is of hardly any concern to us. The very word ‘anti-Fascism’ smacks of sectarianism, which disenchants us; it seems to us to drag with it a weight from the past, which is not relevant to us. Our field of action … is above all to remake the Italians, starting with ourselves.54
The desire to liberate oneself from the past and its protractions could take the form, in those who were not Communist, of an aspiration to take the ‘terza via’ (the ‘third way’) between Liberalism and Socialism, between capitalism and Communism. This amounted to taking up the challenge of Fascism, which had itself wished to present itself as a third way and which, by claiming to do so, had fed the high moments of its international prestige, attracting political fringes which would subsequently be encountered among the collaborationist movements of the various countries. There was consequently a powerful commitment, not just in Italy, to sketch out a democratic and anti-Fascist third way. A French underground newspaper wrote, shortly after the defeat of France:
Indeed, on the one hand capitalism could barely survive, on the other hand the proletariat was not capable of being its ‘gravedigger’ and replacing it. It is a phenomenon of the reciprocal decline of the role of the two antagonistic classes that gave birth to social evolution.55
Several versions of the third way were given in the anti-Fascist camp. The first was dynamic and aggressive; it had behind it Carlo Rosselli’s theoretical elaboration and the experience of GL, and was incarnated, in the Action Party, in the prospect of ‘democratic revolution’ as the only alternative to a return to the pre-Fascist status quo, new reactionary exploits and the Communist and totalitarian way out of the European crisis. Without indulging in a pat anti-Communism, Foa stated that the PCI had not understood Fascism well and that the only serious criticism of Communism was the political line of the Action Party.56 The liberal socialism of Guido Calogero, so disliked by Benedetto Croce, was in its turn a formulation of the third way.57
The quest for a third way wholly within the socialist and classist tradition, and consequently never called by that name, was that attempted by the groups headed by Rodolfo Morandi and Lelio Basso, who were committed to getting beyond both the old reformism and the old maximalism. Albeit with their mutual differences and suspicions, the two groups aimed at the rebirth of a Socialist party that was different from the pre-Fascist one and capable of absorbing the novelties brought by Communism, yet still remaining distinct from it: thus, if the fusion of the two parties was to come about, from it a truly new body would be born.58
But the third way also lent itself to interpretation not as an ambitious innovative project but rather as conciliation and a middle way within the existing one, as a smoothing out of its contradictions. In this sense, whatever the formulae adopted, it ended up becoming an honourable watchword of middle and moderate anti-Fascism. As early as April 1943, Ricostruzione was writing:
Pure laissez-faire and integral collectivism are abstract ideals and hypotheses. Reality is always a combination of individual initiative and state intervention. [Wilhelm] Röpke announces the third way. The Fascists respond: ‘We’re the ones who found it!’ No, the regime has combined the defects of the two systems, it has not eliminated them in a synthesis that supersedes them. Only a new, anti-Fascist order, which has a profound sense of the values of justice and liberty, will be able to do that.59
The prospect of a tranquilising and safe third way, imbued with nostalgia for the past, belonged to that vast area of Catholic society that reverted to the corporatism of the Christian Socialist school, which insisted on its difference from the Fascist brand.60
In what I earlier called the non-Communist Resistance senso comune (but many Communists also participated in it), the idea of a socialisation of the economy that differed from nationalisation and bur
eaucratisation was widely current. This theme had traversed the entire history of the workers’ movement from the First to the Second International, and then to the ‘second and a half’; in Italy alone, from Andrea Costa61 and Antonio Labriola. It is no accident that a long quotation from the latter appeared in a Liberal pamphlet:
We need to insist on the expression of democratic socialisation of the means of production because the other form, collective ownership, besides containing a certain theoretical error insofar as it takes the juridical exponent for the real state of the economy, gets confused in many people’s minds with the increase of monopolies, with the growing stratification of public services and with all the other phantasmagoria of eternally renascent state socialism, whose secret is to increase the economic means of oppression in the hands of the class of the oppressors.62
The author of the pamphlet, Guido Carli, deduced from this that, whatever formulae and stratagems were used, collective ownership would inevitably fall into the hands of the state, when it was, on the contrary, the state’s task to ensure the correct functioning of the free market. A lot of journalism, intent on differentiating itself from both Communism and Fascism, made every effort to give concrete form to the socialising but not nationalising third way. PENTAD (five anonymous authors) had already spoken of the ‘transference of the ownership of the means of production to the workers (not to the state)’ and of a ‘system of non-bureaucratic planning’.63 In France the exile Silvio Trentin’s newspaper Libérer et Fédérer had echoed this, from the Proudhonian comments, mentioned earlier, which pleaded the case for ‘fédérations de services’ aimed at bringing together all the ‘communautés de producteurs’, and the expropriation of the large enterprises in favour of the ‘communautés de travail’: these measures should, it was explained, be implemented in the ambit of a planned economy.64 But how that plan, the autonomy of the community of producers and the market could combine was a point that remained obscure in all the expressions of this inspiration (nor, for that matter, would things be made any clearer by the historical experience of the ensuing decades).
The Actionist Giorgio Diena declared that ‘a classless society would certainly be the best guarantee of liberty’, and that the enormous power of the ‘state as manager of the economy’ need not ‘necessarily be handled in bureaucratic forms’. But he was equally convinced that, when it came down to it, things would end up being anti-libertarian: ‘Stalin is therefore the logic of the revolution and is its saviour.’65 Another Actionist, Leo Aldi (Franco Venturi), shifted the discourse to the terrain of political institutions: ‘an economic critique of socialism’ he wrote, ‘leaves this central problem unanswered’, and does not succeed in being truly anti-totalitarian.66
On several occasions Avanti! polemicised against those who saw the socialist state as necessarily centralising, despotic and bureaucratic: on the contrary, the socialist state would allow a vast range of solutions, from nationalisation to cooperatives, to small family ownership, especially in agriculture.67 In many texts cooperatives are indicated as the most valid institution for achieving the difficult goal of squaring the circle. The Actionists rejoiced when they found some ‘Communist but not governmentalist’, in other words a champion of cooperatives.68 A Tuscan Action Party document spoke of cooperatives as the rule, from which nationalised and individual firms should be only the exceptions: thus the factory would become the ‘autonomous cell of public life’.69 Even the ‘extremists’ of the Communist Movement of Italy demanded the transfer to the state of all means of production, and in order to achieve this to ‘cooperatives or other collective associations’.70 In presenting his decrees on the occupation of uncultivated land, the Communist minister of agriculture, Fausto Gallo, who probably did find himself not isolated within his own party on this point alone, spoke of ‘collective forms of managing the land’, namely cooperatives, the ‘cell of future organisation’.71 The flowering immediately after the war of many cooperatives, which were soon to wither, should be seen in relation to this aspiration, albeit vague, among workers, often ex partisans, to ‘run things by themselves’,72 to do it themselves, with neither private nor public masters.73
There are clear connections between the polemic against, or even quite simply distrust of, state-controlled running of the economy and the stances taken against totalitarianism. Certainly, this category was to enjoy wide circulation above all in the years of the Cold War, and the Communists or Communist-oriented left-wing factions would look on it with suspicion. But the idea was very much present among the resistenti, to the extent that anti-totalitarianism could be regarded as an essential feature of the Resistance throughout Europe.74 A brake was, however, put on the explicit and generalised use of the opposing couple totalitarianism–anti-totalitarianism by the presence of the USSR among the major Allies, and by the fundamental contribution that the Communists made to the Resistance movements. To reduce the democratic significance of this contribution to a fallacy, or worse still a deception, would be not so much to oversimplify as to parody history. From 22 June 1941, just as the USSR kept mum about the capitalistic nature of Great Britain and the USA, so the two Anglo-Saxon countries did likewise about the totalitarian nature of the Soviet state. In the shadow of this mutual discretion, the Communists of the individual countries enjoyed remarkable autonomy, which should be identified more in the profound significance acquired by their conduct than in their clearly expressed ideological dissent from the leading state.
Within this general scenario explicit stances were taken against totalitarianism as such, and not all of these were expressed with the delicacy that Ettore Passerin d’Entrèves was to use in 1965 when, speaking of the Resistance as an ‘anti-totalitarian revolution’, he added: ‘even if many germs of totalitarianism are still fermenting on the banks of various rivers’.75 Il Risorgimento Liberale undoubtedly considered Communism a new version of totalitarianism, though conceding that Russia was ‘run by an enlightened dictatorship’.76 The Catholics, some from excessive insouciance, some out of genuine democratic sentiments, played down the seeds of ‘Christian totalitarianism’ present in their political culture,77 but eagerly spoke out against totalitarianism ‘of any leaning’. The radical and explicit anti-totalitarianism of the Action Party was neither restorative, like the Liberal version, nor ambiguous, like the Catholic one. The ‘democratic revolution’ could not be other than anti-totalitarian as well. Foa spoke of the ‘totalitarianism innate in every exclusivistic approach to the proletarian initiative.’78 The document written by the Action Party of the North on the Salerno ‘turning-point’ says: ‘Certainly we are not turning a blind eye to the totalitarian aspects of modern mass tendencies’; it was therefore necessary to overcome ‘the Marxist class concept of politics, anarchism, and bureaucratic reformism’, in order to achieve an ‘anti-totalitarian socialism’.79
An argument not frequently encountered occurs in another Action Party pamphlet, clearly written with the memory of the consequences of the First World War still fresh in the author’s mind: namely that ‘the economics of war, the very technique of war have a profound tendency to drive even those forces that least want it down the road of totalitarianism’.80 This was a realistic appeal to guard against the structural drives making for totalitarianism that were set in motion by war itself – even by that war which was being won against it.
And it is perhaps in the alarm against that fragmentation of man which foreshadows his authoritarian recomposition, whatever weight is given to its economic structures, that we should seek the intrinsically anti-totalitarian motif which, in different forms, to different degrees and at different levels of awareness, traverses much of the shared mentality of the Resistance, regardless of the political or military side one belonged to.
5. THE SENSE OF THE FUTURE
On receiving the news of the Liberation of Paris, Ada Gobetti recalled the suffering experienced four years before at the time of the fall of the city, but was tormented by the thought that the world that c
ollapsed then would never again be reborn:
What will Paris be like, or rather what will the world that will come out of the torment of today be? I fear this tomorrow that will be so different, so hostile possibly to too many things I have believed in. I realise that that is how it must be; I am ready to give my life to ensure that it will be like that; but will I have the strength to live in it, in this ‘new order’ of tomorrow?1
The use of the formula ‘new order’ – the very same one that the Nazis used to designate the Europe they wanted – bespeaks a profound anxiety, and prompts the confident optimism manifested on so many occasions by Gobetti to reckon with that culture of crisis that had had one of its centres precisely in Paris, and in which the radical criticism of the existing era contained a thread of nostalgia for at least certain aspects of the past. Fascism, by freezing some elements of that culture, had kept Italy outside a full awareness of the crisis, precipitating it rather into the flaccid optimism of which events had duly demonstrated the utter vacuity. Anti-Fascism was thus, by and large, insensitive to the ambiguities of twentieth-century culture, even if some of its exponents sensed its disquieting presence.2 The anti-Fascists had before them, at least initially, an enemy with clear and well-marked features. The ‘tension that anti-Fascism introduced into moral life’3 concealed the ambiguities of the culture of crisis, and bestowed nobility on certain archaic features that belonged to anti-Fascism itself. By blaming all, or almost all, of the disasters brought about by contemporary society on Fascism, the anti-Fascists and the resistenti, on the one hand, were held back from analysing the society from which the crisis had sprung, and on the other bequeathed to post-Fascist society a faith – perhaps a trifle ingenuous, but certainly solid – in the future of democracy. This process was favoured by the fact that, to bring oneself finally to the level of the advanced countries, whose image was optimistically simplified, was considered an objective worthy of a long, hard and all-absorbing commitment by the whole Italian people. As often happens with ‘latecomers’, the future as the present of others held back the planning of the future as a radical innovation.4
A Civil War Page 110
