A Civil War (152 page)

The pragmatic value and expansive force of this position are evident. Detached from its ideological presuppositions, it can be found in minority groups, such as the Armata garibaldina di Roma and the Ligurian-Piedmontese Unitarian Movement for Italian Renewal (MURI).
³²
An echo of this can be gleaned also in an article that appeared in the newspaper of the young Christian Democrats, which was highly polemical against those who claimed that the Italian people would never be capable of governing by themselves, and was bitterly critical of the royal and Badoglian manoeuvre bent on ensuring that ‘the paternal and commodious dictatorship of consortiums, monopolies and financings could continue, for all one knew with a general in charge'.
³³

The more strictly working-class tradition jibbed at this tendency to dissolve class differences in the general idea of the people, in order to redeem it, thereby throwing out a lifeline to the bourgeoisie. Let the bourgeoisie make no mistake, wrote
Avanti!
: ‘It is too late', let it be made clear, ‘to make amends, to redeem oneself. A clean sweep must be made, once and for all, of the whole ruling class, and not just its Fascist vanguard.'
³⁴
Before 25 July a nascent youth movement had written that the people, who had ‘at the very least endured Fascism and the war against liberty' should not be flattered and urged to disclaim all responsibility. Later that same group was to absolve the people, who had however to be subjected to re-education, because they had been dragged into error by trickery, while ‘the young have no need for justification and absolution': in fact ‘it is the ruling class, taken as a whole, that is responsible for this state of affairs'.
³⁵

It is in some Action Party writings that the greatest efforts were made to marry historical and moral condemnation, the elitist spirit and faith in the people. GL and Action Party political thought prided itself on having been quick to recognise the importance and originality of Fascism, and this pride was nourished by that of a group which felt itself to be a ruling class in the making, in contrast to the one that had had so gravely failed.
³⁶
The Actionists were keen to present the result of their analysis of things as true realism, to be inseminated with determination. The root of this attitude lay in the fact that the Action Party, as Rodolfo Morandi had already polemically written about GL, assumed the form of ‘absolute anti-Fascism'.
³⁷
This view was similar to the one that Altiero Spinelli expressed while a prisoner at Ventotene, when he remarked that ‘perhaps only the democrats of Giustizia e Libertà were direct adversaries of Fascism': for Communists and anarchists, ‘Fascism had, so to speak, concealed the real adversary'.
³⁸
The truth of these claims thus explains the rapid disappearance of the Action Party, as it does the way that the ‘spirito azionista' has persisted down to our own times.
³⁹

Soul-searching as to one's own personal relationship with Fascism meant asking oneself a similar question about anti-Fascism and its claim to represent the true Italy.
⁴⁰
The link between anti-Fascism and the struggle taking place at the time was obviously taken for granted;
⁴¹
but this recognition concealed widely diverse positions, just as it concealed the affirmation, which was also very widespread, that it was not possible to return to pre-Fascism. ‘Fascism is intimately linked with the past: breaking with Fascism therefore means breaking with the past', wrote Emilio Lussu.
⁴²

The thesis of ‘Fascism as a parenthesis' circulated more as a simplistic commonplace, nostalgia for less harrowing times, than as a fully-fledged stance. Even the ‘Guizots of an Italian restoration'
⁴³
presented themselves in the form of novelty. A Liberal pamphlet said that the PLI was ‘in certain respects a new party … it is not a simple continuation of the liberal currents of the first twenty years of the century. We don't refuse to acknowledge the value of the past but we don't feel nostalgia for it.'
⁴⁴

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':

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:

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:

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 bureaucratisation 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 Costa
⁶¹
and Antonio Labriola. It is no accident that a long quotation from the latter appeared in a Liberal pamphlet:

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).