A Civil War (93 page)

Other demands are expressly political, such as a guarantee against the continuous persecutions, arrests and deportations,
²⁷
the liberation of hostages and
prisoners, an end to the reprisals. But the fundamental political nature lay in the very fact of striking. The passage from one plane to another is clearly traced in a document of the Trieste Communists, which urges the organisation of economic/wage strikes, and adds:

In this document, which belongs to the initial phase of the Resistance and to a zone that was feeling the pressure of the dynamism of the Yugoslavian partisan movement, the passages from one phase to the other are anticipated as being rapid and almost contemporaneous. But in the same period, while the Rome edition of
L'Unità
was hailing the strike that had occurred in Turin, the Roman leaders were asking their Milanese counterparts whether, in an occupying regime, the watchword ‘political and insurrectional strike' was ‘possible and realisable';
²⁹
and as in subsequent appeals for a strike in the capital, this one would be called ‘peaceful', ‘protest', and ‘demonstrative'.
³⁰
In March 1945 experience would teach that, without renouncing the final outcome, ‘a general strike, like for that matter an insurrection, does not materialise overnight, pre-prepared and ready', and that therefore ‘it would be … a grave error for the individual factories of our province to defer the claims relating to everyday problems in order to present them all in one block at the moment of the general strike'.
³¹

Again at the end of March 1945, a meeting held by the Garibaldini at the Triplex plant in Milan was criticised for having urged the workers ‘not to resume work as long as there are Germans in Milan'; and in mid-April in the two Lombard cities of Busto Arsizio and Gallarate, workers who had come out on a strike that they considered ‘the final blow', ‘do not want to work again until
the liberation', and branded the Communists leaders who were urging them to return to work as traitors.
³²

The watershed represented by the March 1944 strikes brings several questions to light.
³³
‘With the abandonment of the initial hypotheses of an insurrection' (linked to the vainly hoped-for effects of the Anzio landing) and the definition of the platform as
politico-rivendicativo
,
³⁴
differences appear in comments hot from the event that mirror the diverse ways in which the strike had been experienced and interpreted.

‘A wrong interpretation … of some of our watchwords, like for example, “let us get ready for the national insurrection” ', the Communist paper recognises, had led to the illusion that an insurrection was about to break out; but ‘insurrection is no joking matter', even if the workers ‘understand that there can be no real solution to the impossible conditions of today's life without having done with Nazi-Fascism'.
³⁵
In these words there is once again the clear Communist attempt to square the various aspects of the struggle.

As for the Actionists, alongside their obvious recognition of the value of the strike,
³⁶
what we can call an optimistically idealistic comment appears, at odds with the moralistically pessimistic position that they had expressed only a few weeks earlier. An Action Party trade union document had said: ‘The workers are still too uninformed about problems of a general nature; they are too concerned with solving their particular problems; they are still too closely tied to trade union life to be able to see national life with a certain breadth of vision.'
³⁷

One might almost say that here the ‘autonomy' of the working class is interpreted as obtuseness. By contrast, here is Leo Valiani's comment about the strikes: ‘The workers have asked for nothing because they don't intend to ask their enemies for anything, because they don't want to negotiate with their adversaries. No partial and particular demands that could be the subject of negotiations … It is the very problem of the Italian revolution that they have posed.'
³⁸

There seems to be less certainty in the opinions expressed by the workers' rank and file. Perplexities of this sort emerge: ‘Who have we been fighting for? For the British, for the capitalists? By failing to obtain satisfaction for our economic demands, haven't we lost the strike?': which was precisely a criticism made by the
bordighisti
as well.
³⁹

The complexity and morality of the workers' attitude can be gleaned particularly well in the nuances of a testimony made forty years later by a worker deported to Mauthausen: ‘With that general strike, on the pretext, for that matter legitimate, of improving wages and the rations of general foodstuffs, the workers openly manifested their impatience with Fascism, their reaction to the war and to the Nazi reprisals.'
⁴⁰

In counterpoint to this we might recall some comments by the anti-Fascist right-wing, which oscillated between openly declared, duty-bound, satisfaction and embarrassment. Addressing the workers,
La Democrazia del Lavoro
, the Roman paper of the Democratic Labour party (the
demolaboristi
), wrote: ‘By virtue of our example, the strike, as an instrument of economic revenge and class struggle transcends this and becomes a means of political struggle, a creator of national liberation.'
⁴¹
For the monarchist paper
Italia Nuova
, ‘political' was too strong a word, as the Fascist press wrote too: the strike was only ‘national, patriotic'.
⁴²
Il Risorgimento Liberale
saw the strike as a manifestation of interclass national solidarity, which it polemically set against the ‘strike-mongering collusion between Communism and plutocracy', of which Alessandro Pavolini, following an old Fascist pattern, had spoken in one of his reports to the party directorate.
⁴³

And indeed in relations between industrialists and workers one encounters attitudes of solidarity that certainly fit into the vaster framework of national solidarity, but also appear on occasions as the recognition of inalienable cohabitation in the bosom of the company. From the employers' point of view, this cohabitation entailed physically safeguarding the factory as a whole, machines and men alike. One thus encounters, in the industrialists too, taken as a whole, a plurality and overlapping of policies. This attitude can be seen above all as testifying to ambiguity; but within it genuinely paternalistic attitudes were to be found (protection, one might say, even in the presence of scant and dwindling deference), or, if one prefers, of accepting the challenge, or invitation, to collaborate
in the liberation struggle.
⁴⁴
Even a Communist report of the first weeks, while giving pride of place to utility rather than solidarity, gave this assurance: ‘The industrialists, in general, are well-disposed towards the workers; the Germans are taking everything away from them and in the end blowing up their plants … so that the industrialists are thinking of using the workers to defend them etc. That's why [Fiat owner] Agnelli seems to be prepared to give lots of money to the CLN.'
⁴⁵

In its direct relations with the workers, Fiat showed both severity and ambiguity, as when, during the March 1944 strike, it first declared a lockout, then interpreted it as a holiday and paid the workers for their days off work.
⁴⁶
A comparison could be made between the industrialist class and the Catholic Church as an institution. The industrialists too, frightened though they were, but ultimately sure of the continuity of their function, could allow themselves to remain above the warring parties, biding their time until they found themselves on the winner's side. Meanwhile, they knew how to accumulate points for good service with the Resistance and maintain, all the while, good relations, particularly business relations, with the powers that be, and above all those who held the real power – the Germans. Again hot from the event, a leading industrialist like Enrico Falck, treasurer of the Christian Democrat party for northern Italy, described the situation of the industrial manager under the Germans as ‘extremely difficult': ‘On the one hand it was important to ensure that one had the indispensable commodities, on the other hand one needed to manifest apparent good will to avoid the measures that were threatened at every corner to dismantle plants and send machinery and labour to Germany'.

Falck also spoke of the ‘united front assumed by workers and reciprocally by the managers' and recalled the organisation of the ‘company conferences of San Vincenzo'.
⁴⁷

A Fascist
gerarca
sent to Turin on a tour of inspection reported that, against the threat of the equipment being transferred to Germany, ‘the agitation was fomented by the Fiat management whose prestige is ever increasing as they are at the head of the only organisation in Turin capable of feeding a large number of people'.
⁴⁸

In short, in the industrialists too, especially the major ones, as in the Church, there was the ambition to perform a stand-in role for the institutions. The
intransigent Fascists got irritated, just as they did with the ecclesiastical hierarchs, at what seemed to them to be unjustifiable privileges granted to shifty and ungrateful potentates. Giuseppe Solaro, the provincial party secretary for Turin, wrote angrily: ‘The lower class rebel is imprisoned or shot; Ingegnere De Rossi, who supplied him with arms, is not. The sons and protégés of capitalism don't go into the army nor into the
Servizio del lavoro
and are provided with untouchable exemptions; the workers on the contrary bear the brunt of the transport problems, the bombings, the food difficulties.'
⁴⁹

Understandably, Resistance austerity branded the behaviour of a good many industrialists as playing a double game. Vittorio Foa wrote: ‘Certain sectors of big business [note, here too, that limiting formula ‘certain'] are running with the hares and hunting with the hounds,… they serve the Germans, doing very good business, subsidise the Fascists, prepare the white guards, keep in permanent touch with Messe and Badoglio, and give ludicrously small donations to the liberation movement.'
⁵⁰

Foa's view, which fell on deaf ears, was that these donations should be rejected and replaced by a war tax deliberated by the CLN.
⁵¹

At the end of 1943, the Rome edition of
Avanti!
also expressed the view that the industrialists were giving dough only for the purpose of dividing and isolating the proletarian elements, and of tying the bands to a wait-and-see attitude (
attesismo
).
⁵²
The fact was that ‘as the Allies advance, the industrialists are getting jittery and reaching for their wallets; and it's no bad idea to take advantage of this'.
⁵³

The Milan PCI federal committee, in the letter of 19 September 1944 mentioned earlier, in which it advised against being afraid of getting one's hands dirty by negotiating with the industrialists, placed at the top of the list the need to accept aid from the industrialists ‘in money, provisions, technical instruments, vehicles, arms, etc.', in full awareness, however, that the industrialists were acting like this for their own future advantage.
⁵⁴

At times, and particularly in the Garibaldi bands, there was the gleeful relish at shaking loose the purse-strings of the frightened capitalists: ‘The answer to your question regarding Donegani is to knock very hard. That fellow is a scoundrel and a millionaire, so the thing to do is to press for a much higher figure than the one you originally had in mind; to save his skin when the time comes, he'll certainly be obliging now.'
⁵⁵

‘Blackmail', ‘extortion' are the terms used by the partisan Tersilla Fenoglio Oppedisano in recalling her exploits in obtaining money from the industrialists (‘they were scared silly!… and I was scared silly too!'). The crudeness of these words – tempered, as far as she personally was concerned, in her other ‘unarmed extortions' – conveys not so much an idea of the authors as of the targets of these operations, people with whom, one had become convinced, no other language was possible.
⁵⁶
But the
borghesi
who financed the PCI because they were blackmailed and frightened were contemptuously compared by one of the small Roman underground papers which elsewhere I have called
pre-qualunquista
, to those who financed Fascism.
⁵⁷

In relations between employers and workers the most subtle piece of blackmailing attempted by the former towards the latter, when they were defending their jobs and struggling for survival, may be summarised as follows. The industrialists would say: in order not to dismiss anyone, we have to keep the factories working; to keep them working we have to accept the orders that are offered us; the only people who are offering substantial orders today are the Germans. Which leaves us with two options: either we dismiss employees or we work for the Germans. But, if we choose the second, don't come telling us that we're collaborationists: if we were, we would at least be so to the extent that you are workers.
⁵⁸

It was no easy thing for the workers to get around this attempt at making national solidarity slip into company complicity. The workers could have replied: ‘That's your affair.' This amounted to saying that, for the industrialists, it was ‘objectively' impossible not to be collaborationists, for which they would in any case be called to account. What actually were pitched against each other, in a dispute of this sort, were the perspectives that the two social classes had on the power relations that would emerge between them at the end of the war. Clearly, if one of the two parties had enjoyed absolute superiority, it could have accused
the other of collaborationism, if it saw fit, with no fear of reprisals. But neither party could rest serene in the prospect of its own absolute predominance, whatever its respective hopes and fears.