CHAPTER 9
THE COMMUNIST PARTY IN THE RESISTANCE
[…] Nobody has so far tried to provide a history of the
Communist Party in Turin in the period following the big strikes of March 1943
and the Liberation. This topic has an intrinsic importance:
The organisation of the Party
What was the state of the Communist Party’s
organisation in
As regards the nature and strength of the Communist
Party’s presence in the factories, actual members numbered a few hundred. There
were about 80 communists in Mirafiori, 30 in Lancia,
60 or so at Viberti, and around 70 at Aeronautica. These figures are tiny, when you bear in mind
that
In addition, the composition of the working class had
changed a lot since the period 1921-26. On the one hand, the older
worker-cadres who had led the struggles of that period had, for the most part,
disappeared. Those who had not been forced to emigrate to escape the repression
and who had managed to escape prison or internment (confino)
were discriminated against or blacklisted on the job market, and were forced
either into unemployment, or, if they were lucky, into boite
– small factories, with very few workers, operating on the margins of the
capitalist cycle of production. On the other hand, following the
“rationalisation” of the 1930s and the introduction of assembly-line
production, the figure of the highly qualified skilled worker, who had
traditionally been the hub of the Communist Party’s factory organisation, had
been ousted from the large plants – particularly in FIAT – by a new intake of
young workers, who had no experience of struggle and organisation, and who were
relatively integrated through the fascist unions. Thus the communist presence,
while it remained fairly strong in the small and medium-sized factories, was
proportionately weaker in the large plants.
Beside the factory cells, there were also created, in
late 1942, street cells, bringing together Party members on a geographical
basis. In these, as in the factory cells, strict conspiratorial discipline was
maintained. Comrades only had contact with other comrades if it was absolutely
necessary – in other words, as a rule, with one organiser
and with two people then organised by themselves.
In Turin there were also a considerable number of
working-class base groups which had no contact with the “centre”, and were made
up of old militants who had renewed their clandestine activity and young (and
very young) people with no political experience, but forged through the harsh
conditions of the struggle at that time. These groups proudly defined
themselves as “communists”, and periodically managed, with the aid of
rudimentary means such as duplicators, to produce propaganda material. [...]
At the same time, the Communist Party’s efforts were
being directed to making stable contacts with the other anti-fascist forces: in
fact, in June 1942, they reached agreement with the Turin Socialists on the
basis of the unified appeal launched from
A programme of action for the strike movement
So, by the second half of 1942, the Communist Party was
beginning to reap the fruits of its factory work, where discontent with
worsening living standards was reaching breaking point. Spontaneous episodes of
struggle had already erupted in August and September, in
“Put forward the demands which are most important at
this moment: 1) generous and continuing assistance for evacuees; 2) financial
assistance for workers left without work as a result of the bombings; 3)
categorical refusal to permit transfer of workers to Germany; transfers within
Italy only to be accepted if higher pay, housing etc are guaranteed; 4) work to
cease during air raid alerts, and to be paid as normal working hours; 5)
refusal to work more than 8-9 hours; ensure that this action is collective, and
force the fascist unions to take up the issue and resolve it favourably. All this propaganda and agitation must have the
aim of: stoppages of work in the factories; solidarity stoppages with workers
in other departments of the factory or in other factories; demonstrations at
factory gates; street demonstrations seeking support from the civilian and
military populations; all this with one aim: to bring the mass of workers to
demonstrate in front of the Town Hall in each Italian city, and to shout at the
tops of our voices that we want Peace, Peace, Peace.”
Ermes Bazzanini
has written:
“By mid-February (1943) we were well organised in all
the factories. No work bench was without our leaflets. The Party leadership
then told us to increase our activities in the areas where we were strongest,
and then move on to small protest stoppages, to test the resistance. The
objectives of the stoppages were to be demands for food, means of transport,
safety measures, etc. Many stoppages of this sort happened – e.g. at Mirafiori,
Spa, Lancia, Materiale Ferroviario, etc. This test enabled us to improve our links
with the masses and make the preparations for a strike whose objectives were
economic, but with political slogans.”
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[INSERT
PICTURE]
Photo:
Per dove parte questo treno allegro?
Sono
uomini e donne di tutte le regioni dell’Italia settentrionale. Il 5 dicembre
sono partiti da Verona con destinazione la Germania.
Loro
avevano capito che lavorare in Germania significava: stare bene e poter
mantenere decorosamente i loro cari in Patria!
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[INSERT
PICTURE]
Photo:
Gli
operai italiani – non lavorino per gli assassini tedeschi. Essi non producano
per prolungare la vita del moribondo mostro hitleriano.
Si
rifiutino di andare in Germania, dove troveranno soltanto fame, schiavitu,
morte sotto i bombardamenti.
Difendino
il loro pane con la lotta.
Esigano
il pagamento del 75% agli operai disoccupati, la cessazione dei llcenziamenti.
Sabotlno
la produzione per I tedeschi.
TO BE TRANSLATED
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This economic/political strike movement, linking the
demand for the 192 hours (i.e. the evacuation indemnity) for all, and for a
cost-of-living bonus, together with slogans calling for Mussolini to go, and
for peace, effectively began on 5 March, when, at 10.00am, FIAT-Mirafiori came
to a complete standstill. Within a few days, the movement had spread to
practically every other factory in
Reaction and repression: the Party caught off guard
The
The wave of reaction and arrests (37 communists,
including Leo Lanfranco were brought before Special
Tribunals) was a serious blow to the Party, but it did not stop its activities,
nor did it block the process of radicalisation of the
inevitably increased its prestige in the
eyes of the other anti-fascist currents. However, there was undoubtedly a
slowdown in the Party’s capacity to take initiatives and to expand: for
example, the call from the national leadership for a May. Day mobilisation in
the factories went almost unheeded. [...]
This slowdown of activity was noted with some alarm by
the national leadership. In a document of April 1943, produced from internment
by Mauro Scoccimaro, one reads:
“But the crisis of Fascism is not yet being matched by
the rise of a political force capable of setting up a counterposition
and opening the way to a struggle to defeat it. Fascism's break-up is not
matched by an adequate and efficient organisation of the anti-fascist forces.
We still lack a power-centre capable of polarising
the multiple anti-fascist currents and tendencies into a single front of struggle,
capable of overcoming their dispersion and lack of organisation, and
transforming them into an effective and efficient political force.” […]
Thus, in Turin too, the fall of Fascism and the
formation of the Badoglio government caught the Party, in part, in a state of
unpreparedness, and in the first few days it was almost dragged along by
events, split as it was between the necessity of maintaining at any cost their
leadership of the insurrectionary movement (which meant not falling behind the
hectic and often confused thrust of the masses) and the necessity of posing
itself as a central hegemonic force within the anti-fascist coalition, in its
position as a large and respected national political party. In the first
feverish days after the fall of Mussolini, the Communists in
“One of the most relevant aspects of the Party's
fortunes in those weeks was a swelling of its ranks, an increase in membership,
a growth of contacts which are more the result of having a historical presence
in a decisive moment of the country's history, rather than a result of an
organisational directive."
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[INSERT PICTURE]
Photo:
[INSERT PICTURE]
Photo: War Production
; Mussolini Visits the Factories
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It was hard to channel, make use of, and coordinate all
the new energies that were being attracted to the Party: this explains why,
during the demonstrations that followed the fall of Fascism on 26 and 27 July,
one saw the emergence of numbers of different centres of initiative, some of
which were not directly connected with the official communist organisation. […]
With the passing of the first few enthusiastic days,
the openly reactionary and anti working-class nature of the Badoglio regime
became clear, and the anti-fascist committees began to revise, slowly and
unsurely, the earlier policy of “wait-and-see” that they had adopted towards
the Marshal. In
Regrouping against the Nazis: The National Action Front
In this situation, with a growing radicalisation
of the masses, the question of the trade unions became increasingly important –
i.e. the problem of enabling the old anti-fascist trade union leadership to be
taken into the leadership positions of the ex-fascist unions, in order to liberalise and de-bureaucratise
them. […]
While discussions were going on about how to approach
the union elections, political activity was being directed more and more
clearly to agitation for peace and against the German threat. The dreadful new
wave of bombings of 3, 13 and 16 August 1943 (which killed 1,175 people,
wounded 1,615 and rendered 37% of
The events of August 1943 had one important result,
among others: they speeded the release of the political prisoners still held in
jail. Many old working-class militants and trade union organisers began to turn
to the Communist Party, which then found itself with the problem of how to
absorb them into the organisation. […]
At the same time, having no illusions about the
intentions of the Germans once it came to the armistice that was presently
being aired, the PCI set about forming a combat organisation, made up of groups
of armed workers.
In the dramatic events of 8-10 September 1943, the
Communist Party organisation in
The PCI now turned all its energies in this direction,
but it was greatly hampered by the “wait-and-see” attitude adopted by the
moderate parties, and also by a large section of the socialists. Furthermore,
within its own ranks, there were signs of political disorientation and
organisational shortcomings: in the public meeting that was held on 10
September in front of the Camera del Lavoro, the Party was not able to give
precise directives, and the mass of workers that attended the meeting
(estimated at 11,000 people) went home with no clear indications of how to
struggle. A call for a general strike was only issued later, on 13 September;
furthermore, its content was not particularly clarificatory
(it called for workers to start sabotaging and even destroying factories). [...]
The Communist Party organisation in
However, the reconstruction of the Party’s
organisational network faced severe difficulties, not only in Turin, but in
Italy as a whole. Ernesto Ragionieri has described
them well:
“In a period of just a few months, the communists had
to set about reconstructing, in each province of occupied Italy, leadership
bodies which, alone, would permit the development and realisation
of a policy of mass mobilisation in the struggle against the Germans and the fascists;
and also arrange to send many of their best elements into the mountains, in
order to lead the beginnings of the partisan war. This difficult situation
revealed a dangerous disproportion between the availability of cadres and the
requirements of political action, which demanded simultaneous development at
the level both of mass struggle and armed struggle. At this level, the after-effects
of a long period of illegality began to make themselves
felt.” […]
____________
[INSERT PICTURE]
Photo: FIAT-Mirafiori being bombed,
photographed from above.
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CAPTION: DAYLIGHT RAID ON
ALLIED FORCES H.Q., NORTH AFRICA Nov. 8 –
“Decentralisation” at FIAT
The FIAT Company in Turin, in their annual report
issued yesterday, and quoted by the German wireless, stated that “during the
air raids and the resulting decentralisation of the Fiat workshops” the company’s
staff gave proof of high discipline. The annual profit has sunk to 38,000,000
million lire compared with 59,000,000 in the previous year. The firm is,
however, still paying a 10 per cent, dividend out of the profits made in
earlier years.
– Reuter, 1944.
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PHOTO: The Lingotto
factory after the bombing
______________
[In this period, communists were involved] in the
organisation of armed struggle in
A document from the national leadership which reached
the Turin communists around 8 November 1943, clarified the tasks of these
organisations, described as secret “factory trade union committees”, and the
role to be played within them by communist militants. […]
The strikes of November-December 1943 reflected at one
and the same time the influence that the Communist Party exercised on the
working class, and the limits of its organised strength. Again, Arturo Colombi:
“Our political forces are damnably small: we lack
middle-range cadres, and our leadership has been impoverished by removing the
best comrades from
A trial of strength: German troops intervene
At the end of December, in a circular to militants, Colombi described the shortcomings that had become apparent
in the preceding weeks: the Party was caught unawares by the situation and
found itself left behind; it was not able to stress sufficiently the link
between trade union and economic struggles, and the struggle against the
Germans; also, the coordination between the workers’ action in the factories
and the action of the GAP and partisan fighting forces in the Resistance was
wholly inadequate.
These shortcomings had serious effects on the
development of the strikes, which were split into 3 successive waves,
uncoordinated and lacking a unified leadership. Nevertheless, at the level of
demands, considerable gains were won. Also, it was precisely the strikes in
November-December, which had begun as the least politicised,
which for the first time saw the direct intervention of German occupying
troops. The result was that the working class identified increasingly clearly
the enemy to be fought, as well as a further loss of space for fascist
demagogy, and the increasingly close bond between the questions of class
struggle and of national liberation.
January and February 1944 saw a strengthening and
ramification of the Communist Party’s organisation in
The communists were effectively able to lead the
movement during its preparatory phases too. It is true that there were sporadic
protests in individual sections, when workers’ discontent at their mistreatment
by management exploded uncontrollably, but these spontaneous struggles did not
spread fast, as had happened in November. The workers persuaded themselves to concentrate
all their energies for the pre-arranged day of March 1st. At the decisive
moment, the slogans with which the strike was announced were very clear:
“Germans out of
“The intervention of the patriotic armed forces,” in
the words of a March 15th report on military activity in Piedmont during the
course of the strike,“ has given a new tone and colouring to the struggle of the working masses; it has
enthused the workers and the broad masses of the population, who have commented
and approved each action by the partisans and the GAP. With each announcement
of the occupation of a village by the partisans, of meetings, of attacks
carried out by patriots in the city, etc, one has noticed a strengthening of
the will to fight among the masses, as well as favourable comments and hopes
for great events to come.”
From 1944 to the Liberation
The strikes of March 1944 were the highest and most
conscious point of the first phase of the Resistance in occupied Italy; but,
precisely during this phase of development, the actions of the anti-fascist
parties in liberated Italy ran aground in an exhausting debate on the
institutional question, which risked paralysing the
action by the CLN and its capacity for initiative in relation to the Badoglio
government. If the situation had continued in this vein for long, it would
certainly have had an effect on the resistance movement in the North.
It was in this situation that Togliatti, returning to
Italy, took the initiative which has become known as the “Salerno turn”: in
other words, he aligned himself in favour of the anti-fascist forces
participating in the Badoglio government, on the basis of a programme which
would subordinate everything to an intensification of the war against the
Germans. […]
The picture in Turin by this time was, in general,
similar to that in the rest of the country. However, in
“The organisation in Turin, as a whole, has not
assimilated the present policies of the Party, and the national front policy,
as well as the policies regarding the Liberation Committee and the patriotic war,
are tolerated rather than accepted.”
The
The problem of the political line was always of prime
importance in Turin. Thus one can say that the concept of the “new party”,
precisely because it was not simply accepted as an unconditional act of faith
in the national leadership of the Party, but was discussed in depth and even
argued against, was finally accepted in
Furthermore, the problem of building the “new party”
meant coming to terms openly with the organised groups who were expressing
political positions counter to the Party’s own positions. In Turin, the
question was posed in a particularly delicate manner: late Autumn 1943 had seen
the formation of an organisation called Stella Rossa [Red
Star], made up in large part of communist factory workers, who criticised what they saw as the excessively “soft” line
taken by the Party leadership, its excessively free interpretation of a policy
of alliance with the forces of the anti-fascist bourgeoisie, and the phenomenon
of “corporatism” in the internal life of the Party. Towards May 1944, the
dissidence of this group was increasing, and it was growing in organised
strength. However, the thrust of the working class around the PCI as a mass
party, and the work of explaining the political turn taken by the communist
leadership, meant that, already in September, this dissent was being
reabsorbed. The militants of Stella Rossa came back
into the PCI. This fact is not merely to be explained by conspiratorial motives
(although these too undoubtedly played a part); rather it meant that the
construction of the “new party”, albeit encountering many difficulties,
exercised a polarising and attracting function for
all the anti-fascist forces involved in the class struggle.
Armed struggle: actions of the SAP and GAP
But this unificatory thrust
was apparent above all in terms of concrete events, in the tensions of the
daily struggle in the factories. With the early days of June 1944, after the
Liberation of Rome, the opening of the Second Front and the advance of the Red
Army, the decisive moment seemed near. Furthermore, the German occupation and
the progress of the War had further worsened the living conditions of the
working class. After the success of the March strikes, communist organisation
in the factories had run into a period of difficulties and organisational
standstill. As Colombi noted, in a report of 4 May:
“From March to the present day we have lost many
hundreds of vanguard workers from the factories (52 from Spa alone, taking into
account those who have been deported, those who have gone underground and
joined the partisan formations, and three who have been shot). The lack of
energetic members is felt sorely.”
The demonstrations called for May 1st succeeded only
partially. However, the PCI continued to promote very energetically the
formation and the consolidation of agitation committees committees
in all the factories, unified bodies, which were, however, not paritetic, and which were to reflect the existing balance
of forces between the various anti-fascist currents inside each factory.
Within a short period, these bodies began to develop
throughout the city; rank and file Communist Party militants tended to
predominate in them, and were able to act effectively as a stimulus and a focus
of struggle against “wait-and-see” attitudes.
The agitation committees with which the factory CLN
committees began to align themselves were the principal structure and driving
force behind the big new strikes in June, which broke out when the Germans
attempted to transfer machines from No. 17 Shop at Mirafiori, to
Giovanni Nicola, member of the insurrectional three-man
committee for
“The events of the past ten days […] show that we are
capable agitators and organisers, but that we still lack that degree of
audacity and initiative in action which is necessary in order to defend and to
attack. […] The posting and distribution of leaflets, and slogan-writing on
walls, is well and good, but it is not enough. We must intensify our
disarmament activities, attacking the slave-drivers when they come to search
working-class communities, organising ourselves so that every evening we have
defence-squads capable of providing armed protection, carrying out acts of
sabotage, and destroying lorries.” […]
This posed explicitly the problem of the
inter-relationship between the factory struggle (which had broken down into
hundreds of isolated actions based on extremely diverse demands, and was not to
regain a sense of continuity until the Liberation), and the development of
urban guerrilla warfare: it was essential to strengthen the GAP and to break
their isolation. In the most acute phase of the struggle, beginning in May, the
GAP had been extremely active, but they had suffered very heavy losses,
including, on 18 May, Dante di Nanni.
As of that moment, the Communist Party had directed that Communist Party
political organisations should only exist inasmuch as they created within
themselves a body for armed struggle; but it was only in July that the concrete
steps were taken to set up the Patriotic Action Squads (SAP).
Expanding organisation: liberation and insurrection
The SAP were the
organisational means which enabled armed struggle in the city to be transformed
into mass struggle. Compared with the GAP, which remained more highly selected
and trained vanguards (formed, so to speak, of “professionals”), the SAP were
intended to draw on a broader range of energies, and to carry the struggle
against the Germans and the fascists into every community, into every street.
As from July 1944, armed struggle and street fighting was becoming more active
by the day.
The summer of 1944 was a period of feverish preparation
and great hopes for the communist movement in
The developing military situation and the delayed
advance by the Allies posed serious problems, but, as we shall see, they did
nothing to affect the growing expansion of communist organisation: Colombi wrote, in a report dated 27 October 1944:
“The slowness of military operations on the Appenines is creating a delicate situation for us, both
within the Party organisation and within the partisan formations. The
intensification of agitation in the factories, plus our economic and political
agitation, have ended by legitimating many of our
activities. The atmosphere in the factories has become democratised;
people meet, discuss, and strike, and all this is now done in the open, and it
would be impossible to do otherwise. Now, while from a political point of view
this is a great success, the factor which has allowed us to increase the
federation's effective membership to something like 10,000, also means that we
are now offering an extremely broad surface, vulnerable to attacks by the
police. In the recent period, our casualties have been increasing at a rather
alarming rate, particularly among the SAPs that have
gone into action, but also within the political organisation”. […]
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PHOTO: Italian workers taken
prisoner by the Nazis
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In Autumn 1944, a difficult period opens: repression by
the Germans increased, while in the factories one saw an increased employers’
offensive, which directly threatened the victories won by the workers in the
struggles of the preceding months; it was inevitable that within the population
as a whole and the working class itself, there should be a degree of
disheartenment, and this was shown in the increase in “wait-and-see” attitudes
of the moderate parties. However, it was precisely during these months that the
PCI saw the largest expansion in its organisation, reaching 14,600 members by
January 1945. How are we to explain this organisational boom, taking place in a
winter of extreme difficulties for the Resistance, and in a period when,
because of the progress of the war, the prospects for insurrection appeared to
recede into the distance? Obviously, the factors are many-fold. Undoubtedly the
successes of the Red Army played their part, increasing the mythical aura which
surrounded Stalin and the
One result of enlarging the base of the CLN was to
provide a fertile ground for what was later christened the “insurrectional
intake”, and which allowed the PCI to attain a membership of 90,000 in occupied
Italy as a whole by the end of 1944.
Invigorated by the influx of these new energies, the
Party in
The conditions of struggle in those last months of that
terrible winter of 1945 were becoming increasingly difficult. Within the
factories, basic trade union activity continued incessantly, and came to comprise
a decisive factor in the preparation of the insurrection, as well as the best
antidote for any “wait-and-see” attitude:
PHOTO: Front cover of L’Unità newspaper – 8
October 1944
“In no other city like Turin did the inter-relationship
of trade union struggle in the factory, armed struggle, and political
initiative, appear so clear and direct; here the phrase 'hegemony of the
working class’ took on a concrete and physical character.”
The Nazi-Fascists reacted by alternating terroristic
repression (the number of executions in January and February ran into dozens)
with demagogic manoeuvring. In March, elections were
held at FIAT for “experts” to examine the programme of socialisation.
These elections were a resounding failure for the fascists (only 405 valid
papers out of a total of 32,620 voters), but this did not discourage the fascists
from enormous attempts to involve workers’ shop stewards in a direct
relationship with their puppet trade union organisations. […]
In this period, Amendola
wrote that: “With a political mobilising campaign of
the whole Party, with a broad mass agitation, and in particular by immediately
intensifying all the forms of armed and mass struggle” it would be possible to
break out of this phase of partial stagnation. To this end, he re-proposed the
decision, which had initially been opposed within the PCI itself, to prepare a
new general strike “against hunger and against Nazi-Fascist terror”, a strike
which was effectively called by the Piedmont region CLN on 18 April, only 7
days prior to the insurrection.
“The results”, wrote Amendola,
two days after the strike, “have exceeded all our hopes. The older comrades say
that such successful strikes in
On 26 April, the insurrection began. The Allies,
fearful of its possible political consequences, tried to the last to postpone
its beginning, citing the delay with which their troops would have reached the
Piedmont capital, and they attempted to reduce the movement to a few actions
and disturbances under their direct control. However, the battle flared up as
soon as the Anglo-American forces had just passed
On 28 April 1945,
[Translated from I comunisti a Torino 1919-1972, ed. E. Ragionieri,
Editori Riuniti, Roma, 1974]
]
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PHOTO: CLN supporters on lorry
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_______________________________________
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