A Civil War (90 page)

The Communist position oscillated throughout the lifespan of the Resistance. Pietro Secchia himself, at the 5–7 November 1944 conference of the insurrectional triumvirates, complained that it was a ‘grave weakness' that the social basis of the party was ‘still almost exclusively working-class'.
⁵⁹
A provincial edition of
L'Unità
, printed in an area with a dense working-class population, wrote confidently: ‘Take no notice of those who say you must give up the class struggle' and declared the congruence between ‘proletarian unity' and the ‘union of the people in the struggle for national liberation'.
⁶⁰
At a party meeting, ‘Albero' (Alberto Cavallotti), a neophyte intellectual sent from Milan to the 1
^st
Lombardia Aliotta division in the Pavese Oltrepò, ‘explains the reason for the suppression of the class struggle and its transmutation into an insurrectional struggle'.
⁶¹
The contradiction may go back to that between the demand for a monopoly (or near-monopoly) of working-class representation, in the traditional sense, and the use of the force thereby acquired within the policy of broad national unity.

In the last months above all, declarations were to abound aimed at turning to account the inclusion of honest capitalists in the patriotic front, it being, besides, those very capitalists, honest or dishonest, who would cross over, with increasing resolution, into the CLN camp.

The events that had led, during Badoglio's forty-five days of rule, to the birth of the internal commissions are well known.
¹
The different attitudes to them that the Communist Party and the Action Party had adopted have also been pointed out – differences implying a different vision of the relationship between economics and politics. The Communists had stressed the general political value of the commissions in the ‘struggle for the salvation of the country and for a better future for the workers'.
²
The Actionists, on the other hand, had stated the need to make the commissions the expression of a ‘fundamental need' which linked back to the past but was capable of going beyond ‘the fundamental organ of the democratisation of the factories … in perfect parity with the
ceti padronali
[master classes]… for the control of the running and economic administration of the company with a view to workers' profit-sharing' – that is to say, all this capable too of ‘transcending … the economic aspect of the life of the company'.
³
The Social Republic and the German occupying regime inherited the Badoglian commissions. The Germans showed an inclination to keep them alive, guaranteeing them for the Fascists as well, provided, needless to say, that the commissions collaborated in ensuring productive efficiency.
⁴
But initially there was some wavering among the anti-Fascist left as well. In Turin, at the very beginning, the Communist leader Remo Scappini had maintained that the internal commissions had ‘to be supported and turned to account, taking special advantage of the anti-Fascist and anti-German position of many industrialists and in order to conduct a vast propaganda job'. But only a few days later Scappini's position, in line with party directives, had changed radically.
⁵

Thus another Communist report, this time from Bergamo, complained that, while the commissions were created ‘with great difficulty' in the Badoglio period (at Dalmine solely through the work of the Action Party), ‘after 8 September the comrades on the commissions did not resign; they thus got themselves into a blind alley: compromised in the eyes of the management, the Fascists, the Germans, and the workers. They were forced to choose: either leave the internal commissions or leave the Party.'
⁶

Again, on 7 November 1944, a document signed ‘Trade Union committee of the province of Varese' appeared in
L'Unità
, under the title ‘Basta con le commissioni interni!' This document stated that the Fascists had not abolished Badoglio's commissions, mainly because they couldn't do so ‘without openly antagonising the masses', and in the second place to obtain hostages in the persons of the best workers. But by now, the document concluded, the workers had understood that ‘the internal commissions are a farce'.

When, moreover, it was the Fascists themselves who wanted to set up internal commissions, the anti-Fascist front, and not just the Communists,
⁷
spoke out against this measure, considering it, together with the socialisation decree that followed it, the last demagogic swindle of Fascism. It is a known fact that the Fascist commissions were essentially a failure.
⁸
Even where the commissions had been set up, as in the Biella area, ‘they had been liquidated by the Fascists themselves' because, as even a Fascist paper wrote, ‘they did not respect the factory environment' and had been elected by only a few voters, most of whom were ‘not Fascists'.
⁹
The scant turnout at the elections and the remarks abusive of Fascism and extolling liberty and Communism that abounded on the few ballot papers that were completed, are proof of this failure. In the province of Como abstentions and blank ballot papers reached 100 percent.
¹⁰
Soon after this, news arrived from Lecco of the successful boycotting of the election, though there had been some cases of incomprehension and two expulsions had proved necessary.
¹¹
In one Vicenza plant, out of little more than a thousand voters more than nine hundred ballot papers bore ‘protests against the
industriali affamatori
(starver
industrialists) – against the Germans – long live Stalin – death to the Fascists, etc.'.
¹²
At the Ducati works in Bologna there had been a 50 percent abstention and 25 percent blank ballot papers, while written on ‘the majority of the rest' there had been: ‘Cut it out, scoundrels, clear out
venduti
(i.e. you who've sold yourselves), enough with hunger, long live Stalin'; and the reprisals had at once begun: dismissals and dispatches to the evacuated factories in the provinces.
¹³

After the March 1944 strikes, Ernesto Marchiandi, the labour commissar of the RSI, ordered that company bosses were no longer to negotiate with the workers' representative bodies, but only with the Fascist trade unions, which were ignored by the workers even more than the commissions were. Despite the opposition of Hans Leyers, the German general responsible for controlling Italian industry, Marchiandi does not seem to have revoked his order.
¹⁴

Augusto Spinelli, the RSI Minister of Labour (the new ministry had been set up on 19 January 1945), admitted, in a letter to Mussolini, that the elections at Fiat had been a fiasco; only 30 to 40 percent of the clerical staff and 10 percent of the workers had voted; half the ballot papers had been left blank, while the other half contained votes and various things written on them.
¹⁵
Even if the figures reported by the minister exceed those recorded on the notes that Under-Secretary Medici Tornaquinci took during his mission to the North – 0.16 percent
¹⁶
– and to those given by
L'Unità
– only forty-six voters
¹⁷
– the fact remains that the blow dealt to the Fascists was unmistakable.

‘The masses refuse to receive anything from us', wrote Anselmo Vaccari, head of the Fascist Federation of Employees with disconsolate realism, and added: ‘The workers affirm that there will be no socialisation, or if there is, it will continue to reinforce the capitalist classes and to keep labour in a state of subjection … The workers … regard us, wrongly mind you, as the thugs of capital.'
¹⁸

But the situation described above did not prevent some of the Fascist committees, poorly elected though they were, and moreover often with a larger white-collar than blue-collar representation, from managing to make their presence felt. This is not, as workers' historiography would ideologically have it, a
case of the ‘workers' using the Fascist trade union'.
¹⁹
Such a vision of things, whether democratic or Communist, while laying so much emphasis on the working class as to make it into a metaphysical entity which regally chooses what it finds most agreeable in the Fascist arsenal, actually offers an extremely reductive picture of that class, its complexity, its contradictions, and the difficulties it encountered, in that situation, in keeping the three figures of the adversary that it found before it united.

Above all, at least in several cases, there was the memory of the Communist Party's past enjoinders to avail oneself of the legal instruments of the Fascist regime. The Milan federal committee felt the need to warn: ‘Today we are no longer in the period of the exploitation of Fascist legality, today we are in a period of extra-legal struggle, of open struggle, of armed struggle.'
²⁰
And several times
L'Unità
reiterated: ‘No internal commissions under an occupying regime.'
²¹

A realistic low-down of the situation and of the difficulties in giving it an unambiguous definition may be found in a December 1943 report from Turin sent by ‘Alfredo' (Arturo Colombi) to the PCI leadership:

If Colombi's percentages are exact, it follows that the 10 percent of workers who cast valid votes comprised both the more or less convinced Fascists and those who voted for the ‘elementi d'avangardia'.

There is a very pragmatic explanation of this tendency towards
entrismo
(that is, working from within) in another Communist report from Turin of the same period. According to this report not only socialist elements ‘or those claiming to be such' accede to the Fascist manoeuvres, but also some comrades,
‘citing the pressure of the mass, who if it means obtaining provisions are not over-particular, want this participation in order to have individuals of proven honesty and energy in the said commissions'.
²³
By contrast, a more doctrinaire and generalising line of argument was followed in another report, again from Turin:

We still know that in the bourgeois regime the work of the internal commissions is constantly impeded by the dominant class, especially the Fascists; therefore in my view it would be opportune to boycott them. It is not with a small wage raise that the proletariat will solve the problem of the high cost of living; the vampires, the speculators, the blood-suckers are all ready to annul everything that the workers will have obtained. It is the system that we have to demolish.

The author of the report recalled that ‘the Fascist unions were created to serve the bourgeoisie', and concluded by swinging back and forth between commissions
tout court
and Fascist commissions:

Indeed, ‘some illusions' about the Fascist commissions were reported from Emilia.
²⁵
And a report about Varese denounced the federal committee for being badly orientated regarding the commissions;
²⁶
from Brescia warning comes that ‘it is extremely hard to persuade the internal commissions to desist from their activity', that some ‘particularly compromised' comrades have had to be expelled and that, alongside the fear of reprisals, there is the hope that it is possible ‘to do something advantageous for the workers even in the present circumstances'.
²⁷
At the De Micheli works in Milan, only at the end of 1944, on the initiative of a group of women, did it prove possible to get the Fascist commission dissolved.
²⁸
A Socialist justified his presence on a Lombard factory commission by saying that he intended to keep an eye on the commission itself; but the
mere fact of being part of it created difficulty for the PSIUP's entry into the local CLN.
²⁹

A significant case, worth dwelling on by virtue of the analytic documentation of it that survives, is Padua, where as late as the eve of the Liberation the workers could be seen to be having difficulty extricating themselves from the Fascist factory organisms. At a meeting of Communist leaders the representatives of the Rizzato workshops (120 workers, three Communists, eight sympathisers), faced with the management's initiative, following the intervention of the Fascist unions, of creating shop commissions, reported, ‘we too think that the commission may be able to do something for the workers'. The Breda representative (250 workers, five Communists, thirty sympathisers) tells how, as it was originally composed, at the third attempt the commission had been elected by a hair's breadth: