Revolutionaries (6 page)

What changes this has implied in its revolutionary role and perspective is a question that may be hotly debated. However, there can be no doubt that the party has been incomparably more important in national politics since the war than it ever was before, and that it has not only maintained but strengthened its position for a generation.

Those who write history by extrapolation may be tempted to project this rising curve of communist influence backwards, but this is to miss the point. What is really interesting about the
history of the Italian
CP
is the startling contrast between its extreme weakness for most of the fascist period and its astonishing expansion during and after the Resistance; or alternatively between the remarkable continuity of an unusually able party leadership, whose quality was internationally recognized, and the enormous difference between the party which was regarded by the Comintern as notoriously feeble and disappointing, and that which, in 1947, was one of the only two non-governmental parties to be invited to join the Cominform.

How great that difference was can now be established from Paolo Spriano's
Storia del Partito Comunista Italiano
, written with full access to the archives of state and
CP
, but not to those of the Communist International, which are only slowly being made available to extremely official researchers.
³
In May 1934, shortly before the reorientation of international communist policy, the Italian party had, according to the Comintern, 2,400 members in all, less than the British
CP
at its lowest point in this period. The bulk of its leading cadres was in jail, the apparently inevitable destination of relays of brave and devoted militants sent into Italy during the past seven years. Its activities in the country were minimal. The fascist regime was sufficiently self-confident to include several hundred communist prisoners in the amnesty with which Mussolini celebrated the tenth anniversary of the March on Rome.

This catastrophic situation could no doubt be blamed to some extent on the lunacies of Comintern policy during the notorious so-called ‘Third Period' (1927–34), when the communist movement in Europe was reduced to its lowest ebb. They are
sufficiently well known: the obligation to see social democracy as the
main
enemy (‘social-fascism') and the left wing of social democracy as the most dangerous part of it, the wilful blindness not only to the rise but also to the triumph of Hitler, and so on. They reached a climax of unreality in the eighteen months after his advent to power. The party's (i.e. the Comintern's) line did not change until July 1934. It cannot have been easy for a communist historian to record Italian party leaders trying desperately to retain a faint element of realism in their analysis (‘We cannot say that in Italy social-democracy is the main support of the bourgeoisie') and obliged the next day to make a public recantation – and this ten years after the March on Rome.

Nevertheless, even after the Comintern adopted the line of anti-fascist unity (with the enthusiastic support of Togliatti, who joined Dimitrov in the leadership of the International) the Italian party failed to advance. This was all the more surprising since the new line was both eminently sensible and uniquely designed to improve the prospects of the communist parties, virtually all of which gained substantial ground in this period. So, of course, did the Italians, in a modest way. Moreover, they remained by far the largest, most active and most serious of the illegal or emigrant anti-fascist organizations. In 1936 there were among the Italian emigration in France some four to five thousand organized Communists, about six hundred members of the Socialist Party and a hundred or so anarchists. Still, it is worth remembering that, according to the
CP'S
own estimates, there were at this time almost half a million Italian workers in that country, of whom the largest and broadest mass organization of the
CP
did not capture more than fifteen thousand.

The most genuine and publicized achievement of the party also demonstrates its weakness: its intervention in the Spanish Civil War. Italian communists occupied posts of the highest responsibility in this, the last and perhaps greatest of the undertakings
of a genuinely international communist movement: Togliatti, Longo, Vidali. The Garibaldi Brigades played a notably heroic and effective part; not only in the defence of Spain but – as the non-communist
Giustizia e Libertà
was, it must be admitted, quicker to see than the
CP
– in restoring the self-confidence of the Italian left.
⁴
Yet what we now know is, that the effort of mobilizing the first Italian volunteer force exhausted the resources of the anti-fascist emigration. Of the 3,354 Italians in the International Brigades the dates of arrival of roughly two thousand are known. Approximately a thousand of these arrived in the second half of 1936, four hundred in the first, a little more than three hundred in the second half of 1937, rather less than three hundred in 1938. (Incidentally, of the 2,600 whose immediate provenance can be established, 2,000 came from the French emigration and only 223 directly from Italy.)
⁵
Since the casualties were heavy, they simply could not be filled, in spite of the party's efforts to step up recruitment: by November 1937 only 20 per cent of the Garibaldi Brigade consisted of Italians. In a word, the anti-fascist emigration mobilized itself, and when it had done this it had nobody left to mobilize.

This is the background to another phenomenon that has not been sufficiently well known until Paolo Spriano's work: the apparently persistent campaign of the International against the Italian
CP
throughout the 1930s. Like so much in the last years of the Comintern, this is a very obscure subject; for as the International was brought under the direct supervision of the
Soviet secret police apparatus – Yezhov himself, the head of the purges, joined the executive at the Seventh Congress and Trilisser-Moskvin, another policeman, the actual secretariat
⁶
– its activities became increasingly shadowy, in so far as they did not atrophy altogether. (After 1936 it becomes impossible even to identify the leading committees of the International and their membership from published sources.) Togliatti's prominence in the International, Longo's in the International Brigades, have tended to divert attention from the fact that the
CI'S
criticisms became progressively more severe, until the point was reached where the Central Committee of the party was dissolved by Moscow in 1938, the financial aid on which it depended almost wholly was drastically cut in early 1939, and that there was talk of yet further reorganizations of the leadership until well into the war.

No doubt personal animosities and byzantine court intrigues played their part in all this, but the major reason for the
CI'S
dissatisfaction was rational enough: the total failure of the Italian party to make any effective contact with, let alone measurable progress in, Italy itself It remained what it had long been, a group of a few hundred political emigrants, wholly dependent on the material support of Moscow, plus a large number of prisoners in Mussolini's jails, or in forced residence. In some respects the situation in the first year of Italy's war was even more disastrous than in 1929–35, for then there had been a coherent body of leaders, whereas the Spanish war, the fall of France, and other events had now dispersed even this ‘external centre'.

This failure cannot be blamed on ‘orders from Moscow' in any literal sense, however plausible this explanation may seem for the period 1927–34. (Even so it underestimates the genuine support which ultra-sectarianism had within the Italian party,
especially among the youth whose spokesman was Luigi Longo.) Nor can it be entirely blamed on the errors of the Italian party, whether these were their own or part of a general trend among communists. They themselves failed to see fascism as a general phenomenon, and still tended (when not forced into the official formulae of Moscow) to analyze it as a special problem of one particular rather backward capitalism. And of course, in spite of Gramsci's attempts to think out this problem, they shared the difficulty of all communists in adjusting themselves to a situation so different from the revolutionary world crisis in which they had been formed. Nevertheless, the main reasons for the failure of the
PCI
were probably objective, and the Comintern underestimated them, because, in spite of its long experience of illegality, fascism had no real precedent.

The powers of the modern state determined to suppress opposition regardless of law and constitution, are enormous, and modern mass labour movements, which cannot function without some sort of legality, are unusually vulnerable to it. The
PCI
itself had been taken by surprise: how else explain that the fascist raids of late 1926 caught no less than one-third of its effective membership, including its leader Gramsci? Whatever the ideological and propagandist top-dressing, the essence of both the fascist and later the Nazi policy towards the labour movements was not to convert them but to pulverize them. Their organizations were to be dissolved, their leaders and cadres down to local and works level were to be eliminated, and they were to be left, as Trotsky was later to put it ‘in an amorphous state'. So long as ‘any independent crystallization of the proletariat' (or any other class) was to be prevented, it did not much matter what the workers thought.

But what could an illegal movement do once decapitation and pulverization had been successful? It could maintain – or rather re-establish – contact with existing groups of loyal supporters, and perhaps with luck form some new ones. This became progressively
more difficult. The Comintern was quite correct in urging illegal parties to establish an ‘internal centre' as the essential base for effective national activity, but the mere attempt to contact surviving members, easily threatened and kept under surveillance, almost automatically led the police to the emissaries of the ‘external centre'. And what, in any case, could the illegal organization do? Practically all activities of a labour movement imply some kind of public appearance, which is precisely what they could not permit themselves. On the margins of modern society, or where the state power does not or cannot maintain intensive control, they might maintain themselves better: in the isolated oral and secret universe of villages, in small closed communities where outsiders, including agents of the state, can be more readily isolated. It is probably no accident that as organization in the industrial north collapsed, the centre of the illegal party in the late 1920s and early 1930s shifted to central Italy, which by then had twice as many known members as the north. But in the short run, what difference did this make? When fascism fell, we hear of several touching cases of individuals and groups, out of touch with their party for years, who paid up all their back dues, which they had carefully saved up through the long internal exile of fascism. We know that the militants of the Sicilian village of Piana degli Albanesi took pride in never once omitting to send at least a token demonstration on May Day to the remote mountain glen where the founder of socialism in their region, the noble Nicola Barbato, had addressed them in 1893 and where the bandit Giuliano was to massacre them in 1947. But such examples, however moving, prove the efficacy of the fascist policy. It cut off the party even from its most persistent supporters and prevented effective expression of their loyalty.

What could an illegal movement do under such circumstances? The then familiar refuge of weak illegal oppositions, individual terrorism, was unacceptable to marxists, the experience of tsarist Russia having proved to their satisfaction that it
was ineffective.
⁷
The milder forms of dramatic propaganda by action, such as dropping leaflets from aeroplanes over Milan, favoured by the liberal
Giustizia e Libertà
, did not look very effective either. At this period guerrilla insurrection of the Maoist or Guevarist kind was not yet fashionable. In any case the record of such activity in the nineteenth century, both by Mazzini's followers and by the anarchists, hardly recommended it to communists. To wait passively for a process of internal disintegration to set in, or for some crisis – whether economic or, as it turned out, military – which would once again provide a means to set the masses in action, was equally unacceptable. Communists could hope for such a crisis, and mistakenly thought either the slump or the Abyssinian war might bring it about, but they could not do much to precipitate it. All the International could think of was to urge the
PCI
to get back into Italy among the masses at all costs, and there was not much else the
PCI
could think of either. And this task seemed impossible.

We can now see in retrospect that the basis of its subsequent success nevertheless existed or was being established. In the first place, the mass of anti-fascist Italians remained unreconciled. The mass basis of Italian fascism remained narrower than that of Nazism. Secondly, the collapse of anarchism and the passivity of the Socialist Party transferred a substantial body of worker and peasant support at least potentially to communism. To this extent the party's persistent presence, and the fascists' own attitude to communism, established it as the major nucleus of anti-fascist opposition. That there was such a transfer of loyalties in Italy, unlike Germany, was probably due to the very different structure of the left movement in the two countries. There was not in Italy the fatal polarization of the labour movement between mutually hostile parties of very different social structures. The Italian ‘red' movement of the early 1920s was still a
spectrum of overlapping tendencies and groups. Between the reformist Unitarians at one end and the Communists and anarchists on the other, stood the Maximalists, whose frustrated desire to affiliate to the Comintern together with the
PCI'S
serious plans to reunite with them, demonstrate the common ground between them. Just as it was to prove easier for socialists and communists to establish a working united front in 1934, so it was easier for former socialists to emerge as communists after fascism.