CHAPTER 5
THE “AGITATION COMMITTEES” IN TURIN
Interview with Battista Santhia
PREFACE: The article in Chapter
1 covers the broad history of FIAT from its beginnings to the outbreak of World
War II. It gives some coverage of the workers’ forms of organisation and
struggle during the fascist period. The following article takes that
description a stage further. It is edited and translated from Mezzosecolo, Annals, Vol. 1, 1975, published by the
Institute for the History of the Resistance in Piedmont, Centro Pietro Gobetti, Turin), The first section consists of excerpts from an
interview with Battista Santhia, in which he stresses
particularly the history of the Agitation Committees in Turin. The interview
was recorded in January 1974, when Santhia, a
Communist Party member with a lifetime’s history in the struggle, was 76 years
old.
We have translated only parts of the
interview – mainly the story of the historic struggles of 1943-5, at the end of
the War, but also a reference to the struggles of 1924-5. This reference is
then taken up in a piece rewritten from an article written by Marco Revelli, which tells some of the history of those
struggles.
________________
Battista Santhia: The phenomenon of the
Agitation Committee was not something that suddenly sprang up out of the blue.
Its origins go back a long way, in fact to the period preceding World War I,
and these committees continued throughout the War, until the Internal
Commissions gained recognition (1915-18) The Internal Commissions were active until
the fascists came to power, whereupon they were abolished.
But later on, they were to
re-emerge, in 1924-5, the period when Giacomo Matteotti was assassinated. This was a period of major
working class struggles in Turin, and I have never understood why they have not
been sufficiently documented by historians of the labour movement. Other
periods have been studied, but why is there so little estimation of that period
of great working class struggles, when the workers and their representatives
were really putting their heads on the block, because the fascists weren’t
joking in those days. Also, part of the value of that period lay in the fact
that once again workers were calling for the Internal Commissions to be
re-established, and once again it was the Agitation Committees that took up the
leadership of the movement. Because, when the question of the Internal
Commissions was brought up, the employers’ minds went straight back to the
period prior to 1922 – i.e. to the period of the occupation of the factories,
and the Factory Councils, and they put up a tremendous resistance. However, the
pressure from within the working class was so strong that they were forced to discuss
and negotiate, even though they were not willing to recognise the Internal
Commissions. So, we began with the Agitation Committees. As soon as L’Unità started publication, in one of the
earliest numbers, possibly even the first, there was an article written by
myself in which we called for Agitation Committees to force the employers to
recognise the Internal Commissions. In the meantime, workers’ actions were
continuing, and at a certain point the employers gave in – but they still tried
to limit their functions, put strings on them…
In the period leading up
to the introduction of the Special Laws [leggi
eccezionali] at the end of May 1927, there was a
series of strikes and demonstrations at FIAT. These were followed by the
definitive abolition of the Internal Commissions, a wave of sackings such as
had already occurred in 1921 and subsequently, and effectively the third
purging of Communist Party members from Turin’s factories. When people used to
criticise the behaviour of the Turin workers, and FIAT workers in particular,
in the 1930s, they didn’t take this fact into account. It wasn’t that the Turin
workers’ movement had fallen prey to apathy or lack of confidence in this
period; rather, it had suffered too many setbacks, and it had exposed itself in
too many hard-fought struggles where it had not been followed and supported by
others.
In 1927 we were in clandestinity, but I was in Turin, and together with Chan-So-Lin
[t.n. nom de guerre of G.Li
Causi, named after a well-known Chinese communist] we
organised a secret conference; we continued with our political and trade union
organising activity – although we had to abolish card membership, because there
was too much risk of endangering a lot of people. Turin in this period became
the de facto headquarters of the Communist Party’s Central Committee (what was
left of it) and of the national Political Office. […] For a while our
clandestine organisation held up, because the fascist police were not yet very
efficient. Then they got organised, and we collapsed. The last political
activity in which I took part in Turin in that period was
a conference that we held in the Valle di Susa, and
which went quite well, leaving aside the fact that I was brought up
before a Special Tribunal and accused of having organised a meeting of the
Central Committee of the Communist Party […]
After that, I left Turin. I went
through various things, living the life of an emigré. I returned to Italy to undertake clandestine activity, and was arrested
in 1931. I was imprisoned, and
then sent into confino [t.n. internment]. I returned after the
fall of Fascism. […]
Since I was in rather poor health (my
lung wound had reopened, and I was pretty cracked up), they left me alone in
Turin for a month or so. Then I became active again. I went onto the Federation
secretariat, under Giovanni Nicola, together with Vittorio
Flecchia. The regional Party secretary at that time
was Arturo Colombi. The position of the Turin
comrades was as follows: “Listen, Santhia, here we
are weak in the factories, and we need to intensify our agitational
work if we're going to have any effect as regards sabotage and reducing output
(this was the problem at that time). You’re to involve yourself with mass work,
but particularly with setting up Agitation Committees.” […]
We set about building a network of
Agitation Committees in every factory and for every sector of workers. We
published duplicated news sheets which were the mouthpiece of the Committee in
each factory and each sector. Even the Town Hall had its own newspaper, The
Bell, where they made fun of the mayor. The news sheets contained mainly
workers’ demands and suchlike, which ranged from the detailed
problems of
working class family life, such as the lack of water, to the sabotage of
production. We were able to reduce industrial output from the big factories by
about 8%, a fact which amazed the Anglo-American delegation which visited the
factories after the Liberation. Every tiny pretext was seized in order to stop
work, to slow the arrival of material in the factories, not to mention the
stuff that we were producing ourselves, such as the armoured cars that were
being produced in the SPA workshops. This was not so much to the credit of the
Party, but more to the strength and the organisation of the working class; only
the working class could do some of these things, not us. [...]
THE 18 APRIL 1945 STRIKE
Now I would like to go back for a
moment, to tell you about the strike of 18 April 1945, because I think that
Turin has never seen a strike like it, and I think it should be known about.
That strike involved every sector of. workers, from
the factories to the banks, to civil servants, magistrates and
students. Imagine it: the railway station was occupied by the Germans. Then, at
ten o’clock, the clerks closed their ticket windows, saying "Gentlemen, we
are on strike". In the courts, law cases were suspended because of the
strike action, not to mention the factories. A workers’ demonstration from Borgo San Paolo marched right to the prisons, an indescribable
moment, with the fascists terrified, taking off their uniforms and running
away. Then, of course, came the repression. Four
comrades were executed the day after. [...]
Question: When were the Agitational
Committees actually set up, organizationally? Did they already exist during
the strike of March 1944, or were they set up afterwards?
Battista Santhia: They first took concrete form in early 1944; there were
already one or two in existence in the March strikes, because as I have said,
the idea was already in the air. There was also the problem of how we were
going to get rid of the Internal Commissions. We didn’t succeed in this
everywhere, because the fascists had kept them alive and tried to extend them,
and we had to oppose this because they were becoming instruments of
collaboration, and not of struggle against the Germans and the fascists. So we
tried to replace them with Agitation Committees – not without difficulty,
because not everyone was in agreement. But the big events of that period were bringing
the situation to a head, and when Mirafiori was
bombed (l think it was June or July of that year), to stop the Germans
transferring the machinery to Germany, there was a strike against the Germans’
attempts to dismantle the machinery, and they were unable to do what they
intended. This struggle was under the leadership of the Agitation Committee.
This was an important chapter in the struggle against the Germans, the struggle
to save out industrial heritage by stopping them dismantling machinery and
carrying it away.
The railway workers gave invaluable
help, because not only did they sabotage the machinery transporters, but they
also managed to conceal a large number of locomotives from the Germans’ raids,
and they were able to save millions, hundreds of millions of lire of industrial
equipment. The railway workers were very organised.
Their Agitation Committee was one of the most efficient. I remember that I was
responsible for maintaining links with their committee, which contained
comrades, but also elements from all the other political tendencies, and even
some managers. The railway workers’ organisation contained not only the various
political tendencies, but also non-political trade unionists, who were a left-over from anarcho-syndicalism. [...]
Question: You said that in Turin the
Communist Party was weak in factory organisation. […] Were the Agitation
Committees in fact a vehicle for recruiting into the Communist Party, which was
in the process of strengthening its organisation?
Santhia: Even though we were
organisationally weak, the Party could always rely on there being a groups of people, or even an individual who would do
something. That one, or ten, or twenty, were always able to give take
initiatives at the political or trade union level. It wasn’t that the Party substituted
for the trade union, or vice, versa. One cannot substitute for the other. But
for a thousand reasons, you have elements from whom you’ll never get anything
in terms of Party activity, but who will be mobilised on trade union issues.
And there is always a relationship between these two kinds of activity.
The fact is,
the reality of the factory is a dynamic reality which is constantly changing,
and within it takes place the process of formation and transformation of the
worker. In the 1920s we had the problem of transforming the workers from the South,
or from the Piedmont countryside, into class-conscious workers. We got to the
point of putting forward representatives from Southern Italy, or from the Piedmont
countryside, for the elections to the Factory Councils, and these were not
decisions that were taken on high… they came out of the nature of things, and
they were a way of winning the majority of the working class in the factory to
the policies of the Factory Council.
But then that was the function of
the party and the trade union in those days. It wasn’t a matter of winning the
working class to this or that party, but of winning them to class
consciousness. This is what we were all involved in. Because nowadays, a worker
comes into the factory and gets his trade union card; then you have the job of
turning him from a trade unionist into a communist. In. the same way, in those
days you had to transform him from any-old-worker into a class conscious
worker, with an awareness, a direction and a
collective conception
of things. So, during the First World War, I remember workers being brought
into the factory, and the noise from the machinery would frighten them so much
that they’d run away. These people were still influenced by the priests, and to
talk of strikes, agitation, joining the union etc gave them the horrors – so
the process of their transformation took a long time – but it got there in the
end. Today everyone talks about “debate”… I don’t like the word, because all it
means really is discussion. Well, if anyone has ever given, in practice, a
demonstration and a lesson in how to act democratically, it was us, even if
nowadays they call us Stalinists. In Turin we built up the Communist Party
inside factory mass meetings, where workers of all political persuasions were
present, from anarchists to social democrats and socialists. In the course of
these meetings there was always lively debate, and that is how we built up the
Communist Party.”
[Recorded in Borghetto S. Spirito, 1 January
1974]
[Edited and translated
from Mezzosecolo No. 1, 1975]
_______________________________________
Translated by Ed Emery
Extracted from: THE BOOK OF FIAT: Insurrection,
insubordination, occupation and revolutionary politics at the FIAT motor
company – 1907-1982
Published: Red Notes / May Day
Rooms
First published in 2020