A Civil War (95 page)

The case of this engineer prompts one to discuss the physiognomy of the Fascist as seen by the factory. In the Fascist there was a fusion of the figure of the
padrone
and that of the superior: a manager of the Galileo works makes this plain, in explaining adherence to Communism as ‘rebellion against the
padrone
as superior, and their being superior in that they are part of the class of
padroni
'.
⁹⁰
But the employer was often absent; while the arrogant boss and the slave-driving overseer were visible daily. From this point of view, the re-born Fascists of the Social Republic appeared as the epitome of the Fascist
qua
class enemy. When the black-shirted Fascists showed their faces at the factory ‘they were greeted with hisses and told to beat it; which did not happen in the case of the Germans' – this is what is written about the Milan strikes of December 1943:
⁹¹

This is the factory Fascist as he had remained fixed in the memory of the Galileo workers.
⁹²
The
gerarchia
in the factory, a Terni worker recalls, ‘was a
gerarchia
of charge hands, it wasn't a technical
gerarchia
'.
⁹³
To have liberated oneself from the bullying of the corporals and overseers – ‘the liberation struggle was necessary to eliminate this affront to the workers represented by the searches et cetera'
⁹⁴
– was to remain in the workers' memory as one of the most tangible signs of the change that came about with the Liberation.

Hatred of the henchman-Fascist could be so intense as to blur that of the
padrone
-Fascist. Another Galileo worker says of his father, a horse-broker and veteran of the Scandicci barricades: ‘He didn't realise that behind these Fascists
there was the
padrone
, he hated those littl'uns, but wasn't keen on the idea of striking the big'uns. Eh, anarchoide …' and then expressed in eloquent and effective words the pride of the generation that had become Communist: ‘Such a personal hatred: and little by little it turned into organisation.'
⁹⁵
This is, as it were, the other, more sanguine face of the proletarian virtue of sacrifice which leads in its turn to organisation.
⁹⁶

The ‘organisation' itself, by dealing a blow to the general and symbolic aspect of Fascism, appeared to be moved both by hatred of individuals and by collective conscience. The Genoa trade union committee's request that the regional CLN for Palazzo Patrone, seat of the PFR (
Partito fascista repubblicano
), in Piazza Corridoni in the city centre, be allocated to the
Camera del Lavoro
seems significant: ‘Because it would be symptomatic of and a source of obvious satisfaction for the working masses to use premises that housed their uniformed [
sic
] oppressors as the seat of the class organisms'.
⁹⁷

The meaning that the workers attributed to the word
fascista
can be seen particularly clearly in the criteria used for weeding out Fascists in the factory, suggested, and when possible applied, by the rank and file. The first manifestation of this phenomenon had been during the forty-five days of Badoglio's rule,
⁹⁸
when, however, essentially magnanimous attitudes to the Fascists in general, already recorded, had prevailed in the factory too.

‘Since 25 July I ain't taken off me ‘at to anyone', recounts a Galileo worker who had previously been persecuted by the regime, ‘I've saluted and that's all, I've kept them at a distance like the plague': at the most the ‘
fascisti fascisti
' had been jostled a bit, spat in the face once or twice, escorted to the gate: ‘What ‘appened outside I dunno'.
⁹⁹
Later, even this magnanimity in the factory came to be regretted. For example, the director of the Turin firm, Aeronautica Italia, would be defined as a swine who was mistakenly spared after 25 July.
¹⁰⁰

Reasons are frequently given, during and after the Resistance, for expulsions from the factory: ‘because disliked by the working class' (thus, for example, in Genoa);
¹⁰¹
or ‘scorners of the working class, bloodhounds and persecutors of the workers'. These expressions, in a peripheral zone like the Garfagnana, appear
among the reasons of ‘moral unworthiness' that are kept distinct from ‘political reasons'.
¹⁰²

This is how the
stato di accusa
(committal for trial) against an industrialist from Abbiategrasso was worded: ‘A jackal grown rich to the order of many hundreds of millions during twenty years of fascism, when a workers' committee asked for assistance for the needy and the patriots, with a handsome gesture, offered 5,000 lire to divide among 105 employees. He is held up to the contempt of the workers.'
¹⁰³

The comment on a series of interviews with workers from the Piombino steelworks read:

Togliatti was to sharply condemn this radical aspect of workers' morality, when it shifted from mere henchmen to technicians. Speaking at the congress of the provincial federation of Turin, the leader complained that ‘some twelve hundred technical experts have been removed, and not under the accusation of atrocities and collaborationism, but simply because they are disliked by the mass. This is a grave error; here political motives go by the board and the old trade union rivalries between technicians and workers come into play.'
¹⁰⁵

With these words Togliatti put his finger on a real problem, but his reading of the worker's attitude is reductive. The workers' distrust of the factory managers, indicated several times during the Resistance, did not tally with the party line, but was rooted in a strong sense of social differentiation, which was not eliminated by the general reduction of hunger. At times this reduction was invoked as the unifying element,
¹⁰⁶
in the hope of seeing in a contingent fact the
final realisation of the long looked forward to proletarianisation of the
ceti medi
(middle classes). These contradictory attitudes were not to be found only among the Communists. On one occasion the trade union committee of the Action Party, a party, that is, deeply engaged on the middle class front, distributed this outraged leaflet: ‘Mirafiori employees! Your behaviour during the lock-out was scandalous!'
¹⁰⁷

For their part, the CLNs, when they hadn't preferred to equivocate, as the Ligurian one did, had chiefly concerned themselves with preparing criteria and norms for purging the company executives.
¹⁰⁸
The economic commission of the CLNAI deemed that those norms had to be interpreted with extreme prudence,
¹⁰⁹
concerned as they were that the executives, who were not guaranteed ‘a minimum of personal physical safety' would abandon their posts, thereby throwing production into chaos.
¹¹⁰
The resolve to deal a blow to the industrialists who had financed Fascism from the beginning and were now doing roaring trade with the Germans appeared clear and linear.
¹¹¹
But to individualise, that is to say transform into subjective responsibility, the historic responsibilities of the industrialist class for the role they had had in bringing about Fascism and then keeping it in power was an objective that the failure of the purge would reveal to be, at least in those conditions, unattainable.
¹¹²
Presumably, the workers sensed that the achievement of so grandiose an enterprise could only be entrusted to the overall force of the class and its political and trade union representative bodies. But meanwhile the workers did not want to continue to see the most odious faces in the factory.

The powerful sense of workers' dignity underlying these attitudes is manifested in a variegated range of positions and incitements. Some workers who had gone to a Fascist scoundrel about certain problems of theirs received the following reproof: ‘Let the feckless reflect well and think of the future if they want to enter the free unions with heads held high alongside their comrades.'
¹¹³
A worker
got the Fascists to give him money and then handed it on to a Communist to distribute; but the latter refused to do so because ‘accepting meant receiving alms', as well as ‘lending oneself to a demagogic manoeuvre by the fascists'.
¹¹⁴
Another worker, who was offered the chance of being re-employed at Fiat as a white-collar worker told his interviewer many years later: ‘But I hadn't fought in the Resistance to become a clerk at Fiat.'
¹¹⁵

Shortly after the Liberation, a reconstruction committee set up in Sesto Fiorentino would give this reply to a reprimand from the prefect: ‘But it should be borne in mind that there exist other laws over and above those that the state issues: the laws of conscience, violated by the industrialists'; and in the Tuscan CLN the Christian Democrat representative would record that very often ‘when people who had been expelled turned up for work again with a certificate from the local Committee, they were thrown out'.
¹¹⁶

As I have already underlined more than once, anti-institutional animosity and a desire for better institutions, traverse much Resistance conduct, and remained as one of the Resistance's most tenacious legacies but also one of the hardest to administer. Among the workers they set in motion both egalitarian and solidaristic drives. ‘Solidarity, a moral thing, the sharpened tool of struggle', is the title that the Catholic Communists in Rome gave to one of their articles, urging their readers, after so much
arrivismo personale
(personal self-seeking) ‘to identify their lot with the lot of everybody'.
¹¹⁷
These appeals for universal brotherhood acquired particular connotations when they appeared as incitement to workers' solidarity. An appeal by the railroad workers agitation committee to condemn failure to participate in the current struggle punctually recalls the sad memory of blacklegging: ‘The old system of the past struggle, where even blacklegs always ended up receiving the same benefits wrested by the strikers, is over for good.'
¹¹⁸

Solidarity appeared to be intrinsic to a work ethic, which had in no way been submerged by the exceptional circumstances of those months, about which it makes no sense to talk in terms of workers' absenteeism.
¹¹⁹
If anything, the sheer fatigue of labour served, yet again, as a reagent against Fascist heroics.
Speaking about his early development, the Gappist Elio Cicchetti recalls the effect it had on him seeing these words of Mussolini's daubed on the walls: ‘We are against the easy life!': ‘To earn my living I'd started working even before I finished elementary school: frankly I didn't like that motto one little bit.' On another page Cicchetti again writes of a Communist worker, arrested under the regime, who had been a kind of master to him, and whom he met up with again after 8 September: ‘In the factory they had taught me that work is a serious business, to be done with precision, participation and dignity; only in this way can one firmly claim a decent living wage.'
¹²⁰

‘I couldn't be faulted at work' is one of the recurrent expressions in a collection of testimonies of women's political participation. Or again: ‘I always worked. I was capable of doing anything.'
¹²¹
The old Galileo worker, a manager recalls, ‘even when he was athirst for Communism was still proud of being part of Galileo'.
¹²²

The passage from the work ethic – ‘we were those Communists who liked to do our duty first and then claim our rights', declares another Galileo worker
¹²³
– to company pride could be a short one. And there could even be a borderline case like that of the Mirafiori works committee which asked for ‘the honour of giving the name Fiat to an assault brigade, undertaking to maintain it with men and equipment'.
¹²⁴
A woman worker from the same plant was to declare many years later: ‘I feel myself to be a real worker because I'm from Terni and my mum's dad worked in the factory; they always made me see the factory as a place where there's satisfaction.'
¹²⁵

Numerous other testimonies of this kind could be accumulated, and projected onto the ethics of reconstruction, which might in turn be a useful way of understanding many aspects of the ethics of the Resistance. It seems, however, that much can be learned by setting an at once rigid and radiant formulation of the ethics of future socialist labour alongside the doubts of those who were at that time feeling the sting of forced labour.
Il Nostro Avvenire
, ‘spokesman of the Italians of the Litorale who adhered to the movement for the new Yugoslavia'
denounced the erroneous opinion rife among the workers according to which ‘We'll work less, everybody will receive the same pay, there won't be the hated “capi” in the units and the works, there'll be no discipline, each person will be able to do as he pleases without fear of comments, fines, punishments or dismissals.'