A Civil War (96 page)

By contrast, ‘later, under the guidance of leaders who have come from the common people [not the daddy's boys but the best] perhaps the most severe too, because the more competent they are the more demanding they are … we shall have to work more intensely', each person will be paid according to his ability, and it is ridiculous to think of ‘an age of plenty in which by then work will be done by others … In God's name, who are the others?'
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A textile worker deported to various concentration camps considered it an intolerable humiliation – ‘to be humiliated on that score too!' – to see Polish civilians take only a quarter of an hour over a job that would have required a whole day for the convicts.
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Primo Levi speaks for cases of this kind, of the dignity – ‘a rough-and-ready ascesis' – that could be found even in the forced labour at Auschwitz. But he specifies:

Levi's conclusion is that ‘love for a job well done is a deeply ambiguous virtue'.
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It is this basic ‘ambiguity' that the following warning seeks to exorcise: ‘If there are comrades who work punctually and work well for the war production, these comrades are not Communists.'
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This problem seems to have been solved in the period of reconstruction, when the will to survive combined with faith in the advent of socialism and ‘political ideology absorbed … the previous labour cultures'.
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At that time there was the widespread conviction that by now one was working for oneself, by virtue of the force gained through the Resistance movement by the working class and its party: ‘There was this conviction that by now [the factory] had become theirs. It was marvellous, there was a truly moving harmony … Work
was in full swing, and even if there are always black sheep, isn't that so? It was his work-mate who said to the other, “Eh, see that you work because things ain't as before!” '
¹³¹

Some workers even offered free overtime hours for the reconstruction of the factories; while a group of company CLNs declared on the one hand that ‘only in work lies the reconstruction of the Patria that has been torn to pieces by Fascism', and on the other hand asked in the same breath for the dismissal of all the Fascists who had adhered to the Social Republic and ‘for 75 percent of workers' representation in the running and management of the companies to be devolved to the workers and 25 percent to the owners'.
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For a worker from La Spezia it went without saying that, since the aim of the Resistance was to bring down Fascism, the destruction of capitalism would follow on from that:

That it was not just desirable but impossible for reconstruction to come about if it was not ‘on completely new bases', socialist ones, was argued in a rather scholarly fashion by the Socialist press as well.
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In the period of reconstruction,
the hope in a tomorrow that is already almost today, was to give birth to a ‘grande tensione ideale' (‘great ideological tension') which for several years was to outlive the ‘illusion of revolution'.
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This climate in the period immediately following the Resistance cannot be explained if we fail to identify the expectations created among the workers during the Resistance, when, though failing to settle into a coherent programmatic picture within or without the mediation of the parties, those expectations give us a glimpse of ‘a rationality that does not deny desire':
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– where that ‘but' (
ma
) contains the disillusion underlying these words.

A worker from the Reggio Emilia area, a long-standing anti-Fascist but not a partisan, the son of a socialist worker who would have liked him to join the PSI and not the PCI, has recounted:

In the PCI leaders themselves there was the longing for Communism, and bald manifestations of hatred for the rival class that was not fully dissolved in the politics of national and democratic unity, however sincerely it might be affirmed.
L'Unità
therefore gave a reductive interpretation of reality when it affirmed: ‘The political line is only known to the leaders of our basic organisations, but it is not sufficiently assimilated by the great mass of party members.'
¹³⁹
It was not, in fact, just a question of getting to know the party line at more or less the opportune moment, but of even the middle-ranking leaders experiencing a situation according to their own fundamental inspirations. Riccardo, inspector in the Pavese Oltrepò, an old party official, an emigrant, and a combatant in Spain, as severe with himself as he was demanding with others, solid and loyal, wrote in a letter: ‘We're democratic, but we don't forget that we have a blacksmith's hammer under our jackets.'
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Stefano, an inspector operating in Lazio, didn't mince his words in denouncing the traces of extremism that he encountered; but at Paliano, in order to activate comrades, he said: ‘The policy of the Party is nothing other than that of the revolver in one's hand.'
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The political commissar Due, speaking to the Communists of the Ravenna (Liguria) detachment, who were ‘indignant' at American and British behaviour towards the USSR, assured them that, once the objective of the defeat of the Germans and Fascists had been achieved, ‘other more arduous ones await us', that the ‘war of liberation' is also a war ‘for the destruction of capitalism' and that the government will have to be ‘the expression of the working and peasant class itself'.
¹⁴²

‘We are living in a full revolutionary climate', an old militant who had known Gramsci and Togliatti felt he could write of the Republic of Montefiorino;
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that the ‘Italian people are well and truly decided to fight to the end for the proletarian cause' is the assurance given in a message sent to commander Bülow in Ravenna.
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The shape of things just after the war was charged with great revolutionary potentiality: witness some Milanese workers who, ‘though accepting the line of the party', distrust the British (‘look at Greece and Belgium') and ‘think that a civil war is indispensable to achieve our goal'.
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There was the conviction that Europe was inevitably heading towards Communism
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and that ‘socialism
is in the hearts and minds of everybody', the only remaining obstacles to demolish being Nazi-Fascism and Prussian militarism.
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In their biography of Potente (Aligi Barducci), commander of the Arno Garibaldi division, Emirene and Gino Varlecchi wrote, hot from the event, that, ‘Sure, he was fighting against the Nazi-Fascist enemy, but in his blazing red shirt he was considered, and rightly so, the combatant of a “greater war”, that of all the oppressed against the oppressors, of poverty against wealth, of injustice against injustice.'
¹⁴⁸

Potente himself, in a short piece that he wrote in March-April 1944, had expressed the conviction that the battle of the Resistance and of national unity was simply a ‘tactical battle' on the road to revolution, which he defined as the ‘subversion of the existing order of values and interests'. Timpanaro's comment on this is appropriate when he says that, while one should not go so far as to describe declarations of this kind as ‘heretical', they nonetheless expressed a profoundly Communist aspiration.
¹⁴⁹
A similar aspiration can be found in the testimonies of workers who recount that they had been attracted by Communism insofar as it was a new type of society.
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The intrinsic and altogether natural fusion between the Resistance impulse and the proletarian cause that could occur in the minds of the Communists is candidly revealed by the words addressed by Gina (Pasqualina Rossi Battistini), a leader of working-class origin, to a young Turinese Jewish intellectual: ‘And yet a lad like you should become Communist; you're too intelligent not to be one and you've given too much proof of idealism by coming to fight without anyone obliging you to.'
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The same position was expressed in another way by those who died before the firing squad shouting ‘Viva il comunismo!' or, since they were Communists, refusing the last rites.
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Demands for greater clarification and explanation about the party's programme, which bespoke an eye turned powerfully towards the future – ‘we eagerly discuss what will happen tomorrow'
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– generally met with little success. The replies restated the party line caption-style and/or referred inquirers to the supreme principles of Marxism-Leninism, the ultimate guarantee. But ordinary
party members demanded to know more about these as well.
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As prominent a leader as Mauro Scoccimarro wrote from Rome:

A party leader answered Potente's piece, mentioned above, as follows: ‘We mustn't forget the political line of our party today. It's useless talking about what the party will have to do tomorrow.'
¹⁵⁶

The Garibaldi paper
Tre Vedette
had written: ‘I want to fight against the fascist traitors today and tomorrow I'll fight against their capitalist friends to obtain equality and liberty'. Then comes this reprimand:

‘Some valorous comrades' from the province of Faenza, who ‘pride themselves on being an integrally Communist detachment' and ‘are proud to wear a red handkerchief around their necks with the emblems of the proletarian revolution', had asked ‘for the Party to explain what the programme of action will be tomorrow', maintaining ‘that such an explanation is supremely useful
for the purpose of winning over the working masses to the struggle'. The reply to this was that the objective was certainly the creation of a socialist society: ‘that [objective] remains clear to the eyes of the avant-garde of the proletariat', who yet have difficulty understanding the intermediate objectives, the only ones however which ‘interest the vast mass of workers whose minds are still closed to our ideology'. From this sort of incommunicability between initiated and uninitiated springs the moral of the discourse: ‘How can one pretend from a party such as ours a clear-cut definition of the tactic to be pursued some time in the future?'
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A local (Asti) issue of
L'Unità
, and as such closer, presumably, to the mood of the rank and file, published one of the few explicit and simple expositions of the aims of Communism, including the non-denominational state, liberty for all religions, education for everyone and not only ‘for the sons of the
signori
, even if they are of poor intellect', parity between men and women: ‘No parasite must pretend any longer, as has always happened and is still happening today, that others work for him. The scandalous bourgeois system of kicking the workers around and the monstrous fascist pretension that forces the workers to work and keep quiet must be cancelled from the face of the earth.'
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