Italy ( 2 )

[Adam Rose <adam@xxxxxxxx>]

This is a resend - sorry if you get it twice / not at all etc.


[ Friday : My car has broken down and I'm waiting for the AA to pick me up.
I would have been home for 4.30, it's 5pm already, and the AA may not
even arrive until 7pm . . . ].

It's quite hard to summarise the events in 1919 - 1920 without simply
copying out whole tracts of Duncan Hallas's book, because the story is
already pretty compressed.

Basically, a centrist ( ie a Marxist talking reformist acting ) party, with left
and right minorities, despite its Marxist rhetoric, failed to take advantage
of a revolutionary situation.

"The outcome was disastrous. The thoroughly frightened but still intact
ruling class began to turn to fascism. Mussolini's movement, weak and
negligible before September 1920, grew with extraordinary rapidity in the
last three months of the year".

[ First, DH establishes that the movement was indeed a revolutionary movement ]

Italy ended WWI the weakest of the "victors". Italy was in debt, there were
1/2 million dead. The cost of living had sixfold.

Workers in both town + county flooded into the trade unions. The socialist
union went from 250,000 to 2,000,000. Catholic and syndicalist unions
mushroomed. "During 1919 wave after wave of strikes, lad occupations,
demos, street actions, conflict, broke over the country". In June + July 1919
nationwide demonstrations over food prices reached insurrectionary proportions
in a number of areas. There was a widely supported two day national strike
in solidarity with Soviet Russia. In the great industrial centre of Turin,
engineering workers began forming factory councils.

In the South . . . peasants, often led by ex soldiers, occupied the land.
In the army there were a number of mutinies. In the general election of
November 1919 the Commintern affiliated PSI took nearly 1/3 of the votes.

The strike wave rolled on into 1920, reaching a new high point in April
when 1/2 a million workers workers in the Turin region struck in defence
of their workers councils.


[ Then, DH quotes the centrist leader Serrati on the nature of the situation,
just in case you don't want to take DH's word for it. ]

"Thus the political and economic conditions in Italy are such that they
inevitably drive towards revolution. The party is so powerful that it may be
said that the Italian proletariat is almost ready to seize power".

[ Given the objectively revolutionary situation, DH now charts the reasons
for its failure, which in a few years led to Mussolini's takeover ].

The PSI, however, had no plans for any such thing. They refused to support
the peasant land seizures ( as did the ultra lefts ). They had condemned the
factory council movement as "the realm of aberation". They tolerated the out
and out reformists in the PSI, who had stood idly by in April when the Turin
workers had struck in defence of their factory councils.

The real test for the PSI came in September 1920. A metalworkers pay claim 
escalated,
On 30 August, one Milan employer locked out his workers. Immediately, all Milan
factories were occupied. The employers  made the lockout nationwide - and by 4
September, half a million metalworkers had occupied their factories.

[ DH doesn't say so explicitly, but I think the CGL leadership were responsible
for the employers confidence in September, because in April, they had seen that 
the
union leaders, PSI members, were not prepared to take steps in defence of their
members if those steps led to revolution ].

Factory councils occupied their plants. Red guards defended them. The occupying 
workers
continued production, often supplied with deliveries by the railworkers union. 
The
occupations started to spread to neighbouring gas workers and chemical plants.

DH quotes the following telephone conversation between a transport company rep
and the occupying workers :

"Hello. Who's there ?"
"This is the FIAT soviet".
"Ah! . . . Pardon . . . I'll ring back . . .".


The mood during the "occupation of the factories" owed much to the propaganda of
the Maximalists over the previous years.

DH quotes Trotsky : "Everything written in Avanti and everything uttered by the
spokesmen of the Socialist Party was taken by the masses as a summons to
proletarian revolution"

But : "The PSI verbally conducted a revolutionary policy, without ever taking 
into
account any of its consequences. Everybody knows that during the September 
events
no other organisation so lost its head and became so paralysed by fear as the 
PSI".

The precise details of the debacle follow in the next post.

Adam.


[ I eventually got in on Friday night at 9.40pm. After spending Saturday morning
dealing with the anarchy of capitalist production, I finally got the correct
replacement part fitted. I had managed to calm down by about 3pm Saturday ].



Adam Rose
SWP
Manchester
UK


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