A Civil War (97 page)

Intolerance of the unitary policy and doubts as to its real efficacy, fear that it would end up being a work of Sisyphus for those who were sinking all their energies in it, are further indications of an attitude that did not always succeed in sinking all its ideals and all its hopes in the line of a party, in which it nevertheless rested its faith. The numerous top-level documents which signal these positions of uncertainty did so in order to repress them; but they also had to grant, as ‘Vineis' (Pietro Secchia) did, in answering the complaints of the Veneto insurrectional triumvirate, that ‘you're right not to let anyone tread on your feet and you mustn't let them be trodden on';
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or else they must take care not to interpret the unitary policy too literally, as the ‘responsible comrades' do in the case of the occupation of Alba: ‘We must show a broad unitary spirit, but we mustn't sacrifice all our positions just to achieve it … We mustn't pass from a rigid position to the widest concessions;'
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or again, they feel obliged to remark that ‘among the comrades there's a misunderstanding of the political line of the
party. Many are upset and afraid that the Party will end up following a political line that is closer to the interests of others.'
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News from Belgium and, above all, from Greece, spread disquiet, prompting the leaders to remind their members that ‘the alliance on the international front is no idyll, just as it is no idyll on the national front'.
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The uncertainties and resistance with which the Salerno ‘turning-point' was greeted may be interpreted from the same perspective. They are also linked to generation differences. An ex-partisan, Anna Cinanni, has recalled that ‘the Salerno turning-point was like a betrayal, but, I would say, more so for comrades of a certain age than for the younger ones.'
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Emilio Sereni expressed a similar opinion. A prisoner in the Turin jails at the time, he wasn't the least bit surprised by the turning-point: ‘All the same I don't deny that that initiative did however leave other comrades perplexed, especially those who'd been in prison for years and had inevitably been somewhat detached from the general policy of the party.'
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Within the Communist Party, relations between generations, to which we must necessarily return, took a particular form, above all differentiating the older members. Those who had managed to keep apace with the evolution of the party were programmatically, but not always emotionally, well-disposed towards the young men coming from the Fascist drafts. The others showed the distrust that had developed in the isolation in which they had lived, when the mediating influence of their families had had no way of operating.
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This mixture of trust and suspicion gave rise to a complex web of positions. At the November 1944 conference of insurrectional triumvirates, when membership had risen from the 6,000 of September 1943 to 70,000, almost exclusively workers, the ‘real professional revolutionaries according to Lenin's conception' had on average been party members for twenty-three years, in prison or political exile for eight years and were not more than forty-five years old.
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They were both suspicious of their contemporaries who had not fully adapted, and full of hope in, but also of reticence and caution towards, the young ones.

‘Those who are keen to do everything are the young ones, and this is good,
but somehow or other the older party members are put aside too rigidly as if they could no longer do anything good.'
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If in this report from Piedmont the veterans appear benevolent towards the younger ones, hoping only that they won't overdo things, from the other zones they come in for very severe criticism. ‘Some old party members have held back the actions of the younger ones, even threatening to denounce them if they went ahead' – that is how things stood in Mantua.
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And from Cremona reports came of strong resistance to truly engaging in military work, while having to recognise in those who behaved like this the attenuating circumstance of age, habits and ‘family responsibilities'.
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This reluctance to engage above all in military action is generally classed, in Communist language, as opportunism and, in this case,
attesismo
. At other times, by contrast, but this is not necessarily a contradiction, the older members were accused of sectarianism. A drastic denunciation came from the eastern border, where many things were said to be going well and others badly,

Sometimes extremism and prudence were reported as coexisting in the same person. Thus, in the ‘vecchi compagni' of Aosta a ‘sectarian spirit' and reticence ‘about going ahead with our work' seem to dwell together.
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Among so many contradictory accusations and counter-accusations, a document from the province of Biella grasps a crucial point, independently of ancient class and/or anti-Fascist purity: ‘In the detachments we have marvellous young anti-Fascists. These are ex-Fascists whose moral revolt against Fascism is of great political interest.'
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It would, however, be reductive to equate the veterans with those who kicked against the party line and the young as its enthusiastic followers; and it would also mean relegating to a parenthetical position the difference between sectarianism and extremism. Sectarianism is an attitude that exalts the sense of belonging to the party to the point of impairing the party line itself: it stresses, completely in its own favour, its differences from the other parties, particularly the Socialists and Christian Democrats. The latter, said a Communist worker from the Milanese firm, Pracchi, ‘are never around, and what's more when they do show up it's to be able to say that the Christian Democrats and Socialists have participated in the victory too, but without fighting … But if then, besides not participating in the struggle, they put a spanner in the works, I'm not prepared to have our way blocked.'
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Reprimands against behaviour of this kind, found in both the political and military organisms, were numerous, covered all the geographical zones, and appealed to the demands of the policy of national unity. At times there were more fully articulated judgments, as when it was reported that ‘the socialists are influencing more workers, office employees etc. than might at first sight be thought' by those who let themselves be misled by their scant organisational presence;
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and as when it was said the Christian Democrat workers who sympathised with the Communists were to be considered ‘the vanguard of their party' and not elements to capture.
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Explicit appeals are made to those ‘whose only thought is to occupy towns and cities with partisans, GAPs and SAPs belonging to the party'.
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Sectarianism could even assume the conformist guise of pushing things too far in unitary terms; and criticism of this attitude was useful not least in reassuring the less enthusiastic about that line. Thus at times there was the reminder that ‘nobody is saying we must lose sight, even slightly, of the aims that must fit our action'.
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At other times one's own caution was viewed with self-irony, as in the remark that one must think twice about writing certain articles, otherwise ‘the friends of the CLN … raise a hue and cry against our sectarianism!?!!?!'
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Extremism, on the other hand, went more deeply into the question and
offered different contents and quick results, making the greatness of the objective coincide with the immediate possibility of achieving it. It was not so much a question of childish impatience as of the intensity of the demand.

What was actually happening was that an intricate game of relations between sectarianism and extremism was being played out, giving life to various forms of ‘leftism'. There was a
sinistrismo
that led to
attesismo
in the name of the purity of the class struggle, which had to be preserved against the struggle between Fascism and anti-Fascism and the war between the states. As a French Trotskyist newspaper wrote, ‘against the servants of Roosevelt and Hitler, the Italian Revilution continues'; or, as an Italian
bordighista
paper stated, ‘the proletariat responds to the three stock masks of the class enemy (democracy, Fascism, Sovietism)', by transforming the war into revolution.
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A variant of this attitude was summed up as follows in a Communist document criticising it: ‘Waiting for the struggle between Fascism and anti-Fascism to run its course until the contestants are exhausted. In order then to take up the struggle for proletarian claims.'
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In fact, in the history of Italian socialism and the working class there was nothing new about the working class, or whoever presumed to speak in its name, stepping aside like this, not only from the war but, initially at least, from the conflict between Fascism and anti-Fascism as well. One need only think of the refusal either to adhere or sabotage, and many of the first uncertain reactions to the March on Rome. It would be incorrect therefore to blame all the
attesismo di sinistra
(left-wing waiting game) on
bordighismo
or Trotskyism. During the Resistance, however, such attitudes could only take the form of a stoppered dogmatism. Even Concetto Marchesi was tempted by it when, while still Rector of Padua University, he showed some reticence and incredulity towards the anti-Fascist and anti-German struggle.
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There was also a
sinistrism
that took the form of red hyper-belligerence. This is how a Communist document sums up the opposition between the two stances: ‘opportunism on the one hand and militant sectarianism on the other.'
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The former is criticised for its ideological deviationism, a residue of a past to be put behind one once and for all; the latter, to which we must necessarily return, is criticised above all because of the practical damage that might be done by political miseducation and the crude enthusiasm of the younger generations who above all embraced it. Neither the former nor the latter form of deviationism
need necessarily be viewed as alternative political lines to that of the PCI. On the contrary, they reveal attitudes, moods, and expectations – rife among the militants and, in general, the workers' rank and file.
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Pietro Secchia would not have written his infelicitous letter ‘Il sinistrismo maschera del Gestapo' (‘
Leftism
mask of the Gestapo') if his target had only been the small dissident groups outside the party
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rather than a wider internal ‘danger of dissidence'.
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On the contrary, it may well be that a leader with a certain reputation for being a
sinistro
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should have been the very person expected, in accordance with Third Internationalist custom, to launch so severe and crude an attack. On the other hand, as was pointed out at the time, ‘for the Communist Party dissidence constitutes not only an excellent tactical cover but also an excellent index or thermometer of the radicalism of the masses; from the point of view of the official Communists, if Trotskyism didn't exist it would have to be invented'.
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The Communists randomly bracketed under the label
trockista
– that text goes on to say – left-wing opposition of whatever type it may be:
trockista
had in fact become the most demonising epithet of all.

Actually, the term
livornismo
would have been more in key with the tradition of Italian Communism.
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The
bordighisti
(Internationalist Communist Party) should be considered
livornisti
: their presence in the party was however altogether marginal, even if several alarming traces of them were reported. In Turin it was considered disgraceful that ‘there is not the aversion on the part of the comrades to the worm-eaten sectors of Prometeo and Stella Rossa that there ought to be'.
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One of the first things Togliatti wanted to know as soon
as he landed in Naples, regarded Amadeo Bordiga; and to justify his entry into the second Bonomi government before the party leadership, Togliatti explained that ‘a different solution would have brought about, even within the party, the danger of reinforcing left-wing currents through the excessive development of one aspect of the party's character to the detriment of others'.
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The
bordighisti
, according to whom the USSR was a capitalist state, reduced the immense tragedy that was convulsing the peoples of the whole world to a dogmatic formula, and in that formula they were appeased: ‘Between two imperialisms that are fighting each other in our country, there is no advantage in the proletariat's choosing one way or another.'
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The genuine Trotsykists were around as well. And here too comrades or those presumed to be so ‘are not loath to have contacts and attend meetings and discuss things with such tools of Fascist policy' whereas the ‘little group of Trotskyist riff-raff should have their skulls bashed in'.
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