A Civil War (91 page)

The representative of the Veneta works (300 workers, three Communists, thirteen sympathisers) related: ‘When the Fascist commission was set up again

I found myself in it, but the only time I showed up was the first time and that was to hand in my resignation. On that occasion the comrades who were already there approached me so as to get me tied up with the Party.'

The representative of SAER trolley-bus lines (250 workers, seven Communists, thirty-five sympathisers) tells how, at the end of 1944, ‘for firewood (through the usual Fascist commission) something was obtained, but only to the advantage of single individuals'. The new commission that the management wanted to re-establish was to be sabotaged. At Stanga, where there were more Communists (600 workers, twenty-five Communists, 150 sympathisers), the situations appears to have been rather different. In late November 1944 the Fascists, by means of threats, urged people to vote. At the third attempt, one of the shop stewards reports, ‘some of the workers voted not only for the individuals they trusted but for the known Fascists, with the intention of sabotaging them … It is clear that on any question relating to the workers only the clandestine workers' or flying commission is consulted.'

Another shop steward from the same workshop, and the most authoritative
one to boot, who wound up the meeting, added that there were plans for a propaganda campaign to get the Fascist commission to resign, and warned: ‘Anyone who continues to be part of it will be regarded and judged as a traitor to the working class', the significant thing here being the by no means isolated appearance of this specific figure: the betrayer.
³⁰

This reference to clandestine commissions brings us on to the workers' organisms that sprang up in the factories in opposition to the Fascist ones. The downward slide to the Fascist commissions – said one of the speakers at the Padua meeting mentioned just now – was due to the scant understanding of the duties of the agitation commissions. And from Verona it was pointed out that the inadequacy of Communist organisation – ‘the mass has proved to be more advanced than our comrades believed' – had driven the workers to turn to the Fascist commission, which ‘has made promises'.
³¹
Since September 1943
L'Unità
had announced the birth of the clandestine workers' commissions as something that had already come about.
³²
Shortly after, the
Bollettino di partito
(Party Bulletin) had urged its readers to ‘study on their work sites the possibility of both illegal and semi-legal commissions functioning'.
³³
And the ‘Directives for trade union work' issued by the PCI leadership the following November contained the appeal to form ‘secret factory trade union commissions' in the place of the Fascist commissions.
³⁴
L'Italia Libera
as well urged the ‘new organisms of workers created during the anti-Germanic resistance' to lose no time in choosing responsible elected chiefs, and to recognise neither the Badoglian nor the Fascist commissions.
³⁵
Subsequently the agitation committees appeared, at differentiated times and in various cities, where they were active to varying degrees.
³⁶
After the March 1944 strike, the utilisation of the committees, as organs autonomous from the parties, was seen as indicating the Communist Party's readiness ‘to abandon itself trustingly to the spontaneous initiatives of the masses' (‘but one should be under no illusions', added the Action Party leader, Vittorio Foa).
³⁷

What role did the memory of the post–First World War councils play in the workers' creation or taking up of the enjoinders to establish factory organisms? Immediately after the November 1943 strikes this report was issued from Turin: ‘I have said what I think about a certain superficiality on the part of some comrades who think that they can already set up their own stable organisms (internal commissions and even company unions) in the factories and that these organisms can be directed by us.' This is impossible, says the Communist leader who wrote the document, above all for reasons of clandestinity, and also because these organisations would inevitably end up ‘collaborating with the German military authorities for the good order of war production'.
³⁸
For the Communist Party it would have made no sense to go back to the council phase; and then, paradoxical as the prediction might appear of the councils inevitably slipping into collaboration, it did pinpoint a real problem, to which we shall shortly need to return.

The demand for councils had appeared in 1942 in a newspaper whose title and subtitle were themselves very much a remembrance: ‘L' Ardito del Popolo: Organ of the Workers, Peasants and Soldiers'.
³⁹
The ‘Milanese Libertarian Communist Federation' appealed to the provincial CLN, informing them that they had participated ‘with other revolutionary movements in the creation of a movement for the establishment of factory councils, taking up the Turinese idea of the last post-war period', and that they had consequently formed the ‘council brigades', which asked to be able to operate ‘in agreement with those of the CLN'. The
bordighisti
of the international Communist Party also vindicated the councils as an organ of revolution; and in December 1944 their newspaper,
Rivoluzione
, reported the establishment of a league of revolutionary councils.
⁴⁰

The marginality of these groups and the minority position of the Socialists headed by Lelio Basso, who were also in favour of the councils, bear out the view recently expressed by one of the most sensitive among the leading figures most actively involved in those events to the question of the councils. Vittorio Foa has in fact ruled out the idea that the Resistance in fact saw the re-emergence of ‘the revolutionary line of the factory councils', which were, in his view, irreparably defeated in the years immediately following the First World War. The councils of the Resistance period were – and not just in Italy – ‘instruments of class collaboration and of the democratisation of the social system'.
⁴¹
Balder still is the view expressed by another Action Party leader, Leo Valiani, according to whom only ‘in historiography or political journalism could the libertarian character of the post–First World War workers' councils be re-exhumed (I myself did so, in articles and pamphlets published in exile and then in the Resistance), but there was no way of reviving them then'.
⁴²

The autonomistic council–spirit animating one wing of the Action Party centred not so much on the councils as on the CLNs, attributing to these inter-party organs the role of bearers of democratic petitions that would indeed transcend party forms of political action. Foa wrote at the time, in one of his pamphlets, that ‘coherently' the Action Party ‘had become an advocate of the factory councils … The autonomy of the factory councils and the broadening of the working-class basis of the revolution are two aspects of the same reality.'
⁴³

It is in one of Franco Momigliano's writings that we find what is probably the concentrated essence of Action Party philosophy regarding the councils. Co-existing in those pages are political vision and a technical-productionist vision, the opposition between the
sindacato
(union), which represents legality, and the
consiglio
(council), which represents democratic and non-class-based revolution, a desire for conciliation between state planning and company autonomy, criticism of the councils of 1919–20 for having been based only on Turinese experience, and appeals as a precedent to the German and Austrian laws of 1919
(the latter being models which must have meant precious little to the Italian working-class consciousness).
⁴⁴

Prominent space was given to the ‘company council' in the Action Party's ‘Progetto di piano di lavoro' (‘Project for a Labour Plan');
⁴⁵
while
L'Italia Libera
, in demanding the ‘military expropriation of the great Fascist and collaborationist capitalists', also demanded that the companies be entrusted to councils composed of both blue- and white-collar workers.
⁴⁶
The Tuscan CLN, at the proposal of the Action Party, decided that the companies that were to be sequestered be administrated by councils ‘consisting of workers' and office employees' delegates … representing the various political currents existing therein'.
⁴⁷

The institutionalised presence in the council of the various political currents referred to in this document already takes us some way away from the
consiglio
in the strict sense of the word to company CLNs and their relations with the workers' councils or commissions. Again, on the eve of the insurrection, at a meeting with the factory CLNs, a Lombard Communist representative complained that not all his comrades were capable of distinguishing between party work, CLN work, and the work of the agitation committee.
⁴⁸
Mirrored in this difficulty is, on the one hand, the tricky business of keeping together the various motivations and objectives of the struggle, and on the other hand the fact that it was mainly left-wingers, and generally Communists, who were present in the various types of organisms. Thus at the Breda works in Padua – to name but one of many cases – both the agitation committee and the CLN consisted only of ‘comrades and sympathisers'.
⁴⁹

Luigi Longo, in an article published in
Nostra lotta
(Our Struggle), clearly distinguished between agitation committees (organs of class unity in the factory) and company CLNs (organs of national unity).
⁵⁰
Longo had evidently felt it
necessary to give an authoritative interpretation to that passage in the note sent out to the regional and provincial CLNs by the CLNAI on 2 June (when the final showdown was reckoned to be imminent) – which, while making explicit mention, at the request of the Communists themselves, of the ‘factory commissions of the workers, office staff and technicians', tended however to place them under the aegis of the system of the CLNs, one possible embodiment of which was indicated in ‘both factory and village' commissions.
⁵¹
The ‘fear that the working class would be diminished by the existence of the liberation and works commissions', which had been clearly manifested, was deemed by Longo to be a sign of ‘distrust in the working class' and in its capacity to fulfil its national function – a distrust which ‘remains such even when it is cloaked in extremist and classist expressions to which an opportunist practice corresponds'. Longo probably had it in for positions like those expressed by Lelio Basso, according to which the distinction between the two types of commissions was being annulled in favour of the agitation committees, defined as ‘classist organs that guide the masses not only in the war of liberation but also in the struggle against capitalism'.
⁵²

The fact of the matter was that things were rather more complicated, both from Longo's point of view or from Basso's. In the Genoese factories a far from linear relationship was created between the agitation committees and the company CLNs – as well as between the latter, which somehow had been vitalised by the situation in the factory, and the regional CLN. A Genoese Communist Party document of December 1944, in agreement with the Socialists, undertook to show the other parties of the regional CLN – and especially the Liberals, who had declared themselves to be a non-class party – that the committee ‘cannot and must not defend the interests of all, that is to say, put the workers on the same plane as the capitalists'.
⁵³

If the CLNs had followed this line to the letter, they would have been legitimised to issue orders even in the matter of strikes. But on this point it was precisely the PCI that proved recalcitrant. In the Tuscan CLN, all the other parties accused the Communists of having encroached upon a province of the committee itself by issuing a strike order for the streetcar service. The Communist representative did not hit back by claiming that exclusive competence lay with his party and the workers' organisms, but endeavoured to lead the strike back
onto the general direction adopted by the committee. A laborious compromise was reached, which included the principle that the suspension of public services lay within the competence of the CLN.
⁵⁴

In Gallarate, but only on the eve of the Liberation, the PCI was also taken to task by the CLN, and the Communist representative made the following declaration: ‘Our party will do everything to ensure that strikes occur wherever possible and at any moment, so that all the movements are involved in the liberation movement and are therefore useful for it, for which I assume full responsibility. In the event of a general movement arranged by the CLNAI, it would be disciplined.'
⁵⁵

It was a knotty question. The answer given to the Varese provincial CLN on 23 July 1945 by the CLN for Lombardy retrospectively indicates as much: ‘As regards an employer's representative being admitted into the provincial CLNs, this is excluded by the very principles of this organism, which is an expression of the force of the resistance'.
⁵⁶

If from the great political options and ideological options we proceed to take a closer look at their presence in the factory, or at any rate among the workers, we run up against further difficulties and problems. I have already pointed out how the highest aspirations – driving out the Germans and Fascists – could rub uneasy shoulders with immediate demands – a rise in wages. It would certainly be reductive to see this dichotomy in terms of the classic one between economic and trade union struggle on the one hand and political struggle on the other. The urgent need to do something about particularly harsh working and living conditions and the grandiosity of the political objectives, which could furthermore be pursued only by military means, on the one hand made the struggle cruder, and on the other hand swathed it in the conviction, or rather, the intuition that only the re-establishment of a minimum of democratic conditions for everyone (employers included) would guarantee the full exercise of the workers' very identity, from the smaller to the larger demands. This is why it is reductive to see the workers' struggles during the Resistance merely in ‘national' or ‘labour' terms, both of which are, for opposite reasons, hagiographic.