A Civil War (88 page)

A Turinese
resistente
and Communist militant, when they wanted to give her the [Bulgarian] ‘diploma Alexander', said: ‘I don't want foreigners' stuff; I'd take it if it came from Italians.'
¹³

One of the first problems, then, lies in the coexistence of these distinct motivations in the same individuals or, conversely, their being split between different individuals. First of all, there was the fact that not all employers, industrial or agrarian, were collaborationists, nor were they all Fascists, or at any rate still Fascists. And, mirroring this, there was also the fact that, if we set aside the different collective stance towards Fascism, not all workers were, strictly speaking,
resistenti
; which means that the oft-used hendiadys that the Resistance was essentially the work of the partisans and workers, needs examining, as does the relationship between these two main protagonists of the Resistance movement.

In fact in the consciousness of the
resistenti
there were distinctions and preferences that led to the three enemy-figures being isolated or combined in various ways. Thus, the insistence on casting the
padroni
in a hostile light contributed to that different way of viewing the Germans, not as a pure incarnation of the Devil, which I have already mentioned.

A February 1944 leaflet, distributed in Cittadella in the province of Padua, after enjoining its readers to hide wheat and to feed British prisoners and German deserters, concluded: ‘Don't hate the Germans. Let us hate the Italian exploiters, the false prophets, the traitors. Let us hate the
arristograzie
[
sic
, misspelling], let us draw up a blacklist'.
¹⁴
A case of class consciousness sublimated in politico-ideological consciousness may be encountered in that ‘organizzatore del lavoro militare' (‘organiser of military work') in the province of Novara who asked ‘how it was possible to shoot at a German who, for all one knew, was a Communist'.
¹⁵

The clandestine
L'Unità
always bore the subheading ‘Proletari di tutti i paesi unitevi!' (‘Workers of the world unite!'). On 30 April 1945 this had already disappeared from the Milan edition. The Rome edition of the clandestine
Avanti!
placed that motto next to the other one in its half-title: ‘The first duty of the proletariat is to achieve democracy: Marx-Engels.' In the period of armed struggle, the internationalist appeal, dear to the workers' hearts, represented a kind
of ideal pole, a natural but remote premise, to offset the policy of national unity, but only in rare cases was it made explicit and argued autonomously, rather than as part of the exaltation of the international role of the Soviet Union. One such case can be found, for example, in an ‘ora politica' (‘political hour') held at the 1
^st
Garibaldi-Osoppo division (in the brief period when the formations fighting on the eastern border were unified), when it was explained that ‘the concept of class goes beyond that of the nation, since individuals belonging to different nations belong to the same class', and are driven to fight against each other by the ruling classes: only the creation of a single state, therefore, will prevent ‘the frequent repetition of fratricidal wars'.
¹⁶

In July 1943 a French Trotskyist newspaper had spoken out against Gaullist and Stalinist propaganda that talked of ‘dirty Krauts' and ‘despicable macaronis.'
¹⁷
I mention this only to point out how the traditional formulae identifying class consciousness and internationalism were compelled to contend with a reality characterised not so much by the opposition as ‘the contiguity of consciences between the struggle between classes and the struggle between nations',
¹⁸
and where ‘partisan internationalism', mentioned in the previous chapter, took priority over proletarian internationalism.

In the case of Italy the presence of autochthonous Fascism made the picture yet more complex and gave a particularly strong sense to the objective of ‘achieving democracy'. If the day of reckoning was to be truly decisive, it had to go beyond the dismal epigones of Salò and strike at the very roots of Fascism, which indeed everyone was proclaiming that they wanted to sever. Intransigence in the struggle against the Fascists, who were doomed to defeat, was thus coming to be like the mark of this wish to go beyond Fascism itself. A pamphlet dedicated ‘to the glory of the national hero Dante Di Nanni, a twenty-year-old Garibaldino who fell fighting in Turin on 18 May 1944', says that in Di Nanni instinctive repugnance for Fascism, generated by his coming from a working-class family, had been transformed into the realisation that ‘one needed to dismantle and destroy the whole social system that had generated and perpetrated this oppression' and the conviction that the Italian Communist Party (PCI) was ‘the revolutionary party, the only party capable of defending the interests of the working class'. After 8 September, Di Nanni had dreamed of seeing ‘the armed proletariat at the head of all true patriots'.
¹⁹

The coincidence between armed proletariat and true patriot had moreover to be constantly verified, even in the area influenced by the PCI. This we shall see more clearly presently. But mention can be made even now of one of the first Forlì mountain bands, where the class spirit did not so much evolve in a patriotic direction as violently generate manifestations of social hate, thereby giving rise to a particularly strong link between class war and civil war and leaving the patriotic war in the background. The behaviour of this band has been described as follows in a Communist-inspired book:

The commander of this band, Libero, was a captain (Riccardo Fedel), a veteran from Yugoslavia, where he was said to have fought with the partisans. He was blamed for having obtained ‘the consensus of his command and the sympathy of many partisans precisely by supporting the mistaken tendencies just described'. A Garibaldi document came down very severely against Libero, and even considered his physical liquidation, if only to bring the formation back to its senses. Demoted to chief of staff, Libero was to desert during the great roundup of April 1944, and after the Liberation his name would figure on the lists of the OVRA (Opera Vigilanza Repressione Anti-fascista). Thus, what was alarming in the social revolt of ‘farmhands and workers in general' could be laid at the door of a traitor.
²⁰

The memory of 1920–21 in its turn re-soldered the link between class war
and civil war. ‘ '21-type individual … '21-type lad, that's it', is how a worker from the Galileo plant describes a smart youth after recalling the role that the presence of ‘folk who'd done '21, who'd done ‘22', elderly people who ‘venian per tradizione di famiglia' (‘who come out of family tradition'),
²¹
had had in creating a class consciousness in the factory. It was a memory that culminated in the verdict against ‘reformists also called traitors'
²²
and in the judgment on the 1921 split,
²³
which was very similar to the one passed by a French Trotskyist paper: ‘The workers of Milan, Turin and Rome have not forgotten the lesson of 1921. This time, they will not relinquish the weapons that the traitors of social democracy made them turn in to Mussolini'.
²⁴

The identification of the Fascist regime with the regime of the
padroni
encouraged the belief that the moment had come for a showdown on the social plane as well. Conversely, and highly favourable to the identification of the working class and Communism, there was the stark dilemma that had been posed for more than twenty years by Fascist propaganda: either Fascism or Communism.

‘In many countries there is no evidence of other political leanings. The division seems to be clear-cut: either Communists or Fascists. The situation only needs to pick up a bit for us to be masters of the situation.' While this schematic optimism of the Ancona Communist leaders is neither justified nor can it be applied across the board, it does indicate a widespread conviction. The Ancona Communists complete the picture by introducing the connection between the Fascists and the German connection: ‘The local Fascists, especially those from the hinterland, are giving no trouble, on the contrary they are doing their utmost to show their goodwill towards the anti-Fascists: we know, however, that this is due to the fact that the invaders haven't yet arrived in these zones.'
²⁵

‘The enemy is the Nazi German', declared
Avanti!
, and only the working classes, it added to square the circle, can wage a struggle that is not only a ‘war against the foreigner who is trampling on the soil of the
patria
, but it also and above all a war against the scourge of our century, inside and outside Italy, against Fascism'.
²⁶
And in another appeal it urged: ‘National insurrection against the
Nazi invader; national insurrection against the remains of Fascism … national insurrection against the accomplices of Fascism.'
²⁷

Several Action Party–GL documents also ended up affirming the privileged coincidence between working class and nation: ‘Every strata of the population can be activated … never forgetting, obviously, that the working class is the avant-garde class, the politically national class par excellence.'
²⁸

In the pages that follow I shall try, within the scenario outlined above, to highlight some elements which, at various levels and in various situations, may be said to come under the category of ‘class war', in the broadest sense of the term, appearing isolated one moment and at the next, interwoven in various ways with purely anti-Fascist or patriotic impulses and motivations. I shall avoid reopening the discussion, which was useful in its time in calling a halt to Resistance oleography but which had become a dead letter, as to whether the
Resistenza rossa
could have prevailed over the
Resistenza tricolore
if it had not been curbed by the Communist party's unitary policy.

In PCI policy and, partly, in that of the PSIUP – and this is the first point to which it is worth drawing attention – there were several themes which, in their repetitiveness as in their oscillations and contradictions, fostered what can well claim to be ‘class' attitudes and expectations. This phenomenon has often been called
doppia anima
(dual soul), ambiguity – winking. What needs emphasising, rather, is that there was a ‘dual soul' among the leadership and a ‘dual soul' among the rank and file, and that the latter was partly induced by the former and came to coincide with it, and partly had a physiognomy of its own, which the leadership generally called incomprehension, tardiness, deviation. The efforts to which the leaders went to suppress these attitudes constitute one of the few sources available for approaching the attitudes themselves.

What needs considering above all, as I have already suggested, is the use of adjectives which in the Communist press (and not only there) more often than not accompanied the nouns
capitale
and
capitalisti
, when they were indicated as enemies: ‘ “
grande
”
capitale
', ‘
capitalisti
“
collaborazionisti
” ', and the like. In both cases, but above all in the second (in the first case the reference was more ‘objective' and ‘scientific', coming to coincide with the categories of monopolistic and financial capital), so much hostility was levelled at the adjective that it inevitably redounded on the noun. Above all the workers to whom the message was addressed could easily take that hostility as being directed at the noun. If anything, there was the question as to whether being ‘grandi' necessarily coincided, in the case of the capitalists, with being collaborationists. Of the French Communists' attitude it has been written that ‘[T]rusts, even when they are
appointed, appear to belong more of the category of traitors (or foreigners) to the Fatherland than to the class of exploiters and capitalists'.
²⁹