Italy 1920
When workers seized the factories
September marks the 90th
anniversary of a mass movement of factory occupations in Italy which put
the continuation of capitalism in question. Yet the September movement
failed to overthrow the capitalists’ rule and its demise paved the way
for the rise of fascism. CHRISTINE THOMAS writes.
"IN SEPTEMBER 1920 the
working class of Italy had, in effect, gained control of the state, of
society, of factories, plants and enterprises… In essence the working
class had already conquered or virtually conquered". Leon Trotsky, at
the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, November 1922.
Armed workers were occupying
the factories and peasants were seizing the land. The Italian Socialist
Party (PSI) was 200,000 strong. In the words of Lenin, the PSI had been
"the happy exception" of the parties affiliated to the Second
International in opposing the first world war. In March 1919 it voted to
affiliate to the Communist International and support the ‘dictatorship
of the proletariat’. And yet, the September movement, which marked the
final stage of the biennio rosso (two red years), failed to
overthrow the capitalists’ rule, and its defeat paved the way for the
rise of fascism.
Today this movement is in
danger of becoming the ‘forgotten revolution’, including within Italy
itself. Mass political organisations like the PSI are no longer in
existence and Marxists are faced with the difficult task of building new
parties with roots in the working class. But the prolonged crisis of
capitalism now underway and the struggles it will unleash will
inevitably throw up new political forces, with reformism and centrism
once more assuming a mass form. It is for this reason that, 90 years on,
the Italian revolution deserves the same attention as other more
familiar ‘failed’ revolutions.
The September movement, in
fact, began as an economic struggle over wages in the engineering /metal
working sector. Prices were escalating – in June 1920 they were 20%
higher than three months earlier. The bosses had accumulated enormous
profits during the war but, in a move which will strike a chord with
workers today, were looking to offload the post-war economic crisis onto
the working class. Not only did the engineering bosses refuse to concede
the 40% wage rise demanded by the metalworkers’ union FIOM (an
autonomous section of the main union federation CGL), but when
negotiations broke down and the workers implemented a ‘go slow’ they
were locked out of the factories, beginning with 2,000 at the Romeo
plant in Milan.
The FIOM responded by
immediately calling for the occupation of 300 Milanese factories. This
was seen by the union leaders as a purely defensive move which would be
cheaper than organising a strike. They were completely taken aback by
the extent of the struggle which ensued. Accumulated anger exploded.
Factories were seized in the industrial heartlands of Turin and Genova,
and beyond in Florence, Rome, Naples and Palermo. From engineering the
tidal wave of occupations engulfed chemicals, rubber, footwear,
textiles, mining and countless other industries. Eventually half a
million workers were involved, both unionised and unorganised. Red
(socialist) and black (anarchist) flags flew over the occupied
factories. Armed ‘Red Guards’ controlled who could enter and leave.
Workers themselves maintained order, banning alcohol and punishing
workers who broke discipline.
The movement went furthest in
Turin, Italy’s ‘Petrograd’, becoming a popular mass movement involving
150,000 workers. At Fiat Centro (or ‘Fiat soviet’ as it was known)
workshop ‘commissars’ controlled defence, transport and raw materials.
Workers in Turin were organised in factory councils coordinated through
the camere di lavoro (a kind of trades council) and workers’
committees took responsibility for production, credit and the buying and
selling of goods and raw materials.
Formally the capitalists and
their political representatives in the government were in command, but
in reality they were paralysed. As the national newspaper Corriere
della Sera bluntly put it, the workers had complete control of the
factories. Here was a clear example of the ‘dual power’ stage of a
revolutionary process: where who controls society is in the balance and
will be decided either by the potentially revolutionary forces
completing the revolution and overthrowing the old regime, or by the
formerly dominant class defeating the movement and re-establishing its
control.
The Turin factory councils movement
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT can only
be understood in the context of earlier developments, particularly in
the immediate post-war period. The employers had deliberately provoked
the September movement, consciously locking out the engineering workers
with a view to dealing a decisive blow to the working class. "There will
be no concessions", said the bosses’ representative to Bruno Buozzi,
leader of the FIOM. "Since the end of the war, we’ve done nothing but
drop our pants. Now it’s your turn. Now we’re going to start on you".
(1)
As had been the case in many
European countries, the war, and the victory of workers and peasants in
overthrowing capitalism and landlordism in Russia, had given rise to an
explosive situation in Italy. In 1917, semi-insurrectionary movements
shook the north of the country and peasants and land labourers were
rebelling in the south. But it was in 1919 that the movement intensified
and became more generalised. The first major battle of the biennio
rosso was fought by the metalworkers, who in the spring of 1919 took
strike action and won the eight-hour day. In June and July, soaring
price rises provoked another insurrectionary movement in the north. In
many areas citizens committees (embryo soviets) had complete control
over prices. In the spring of 1920, the temperature of struggle was
rising further with spontaneous strikes breaking out over unbearable
economic and social conditions. The curve of strike action was
inexorably rising – in 1918 there were 600,000 strikes, in 1919 fourteen
million and in 1920 sixteen million.
Industrially, Turin was the
most important Italian city and it was here that, from the capitalists’
point of view, the most dangerous movement developed. In the factories,
workers were organised in commissioni interne. These were
contradictory bodies which began life in 1906 as grievance committees
concerned with disciplinary and arbitration matters. They were dominated
by union officials and viewed by sections of the capitalist class as
organs for class collaboration – a means of drawing workers into
participating in decisions regarding their own exploitation in the
workplace.
But during the war, the commisioni
exploded and became the focus of a battle between rank and file workers
and the employers over who exercised control in the factories. A crucial
role in this movement was played by l’Ordine Nuovo, a newspaper
founded in Turin in May 1919 by Antonio Gramsci and three other
socialists. Inspired by the Russian Revolution, l’Ordine Nuovo
called for the democratisation of the commissioni interne and the
establishment of consigli di fabbrica (workers’ councils) elected
by all workers, not just those who were unionised. The workers’ councils
would not only exert workers’ control in the workplaces but would become
organs for workers’ power in society as a whole.
The idea of workers’ councils
spread like wildfire throughout the city. All over Turin, in every major
industry, elections took place for ‘workshop commissars’ – at its peak
the council movement involved 150,000 workers in the city. The
capitalists, however, were clearly not going to sit back and accept
indefinitely what had in effect become permanent dual power in the
factories. "There can be only one authority in the factories", stated
the manifesto of the Turin Industrial League. "The workers’ councils in
Turin must be implacably crushed", declared leading Italian
industrialist Gino Olivetti.
In March 1920, as elections
were taking place in every workplace to renew the commissioni
interne, the employers took the offensive, announcing a city-wide
engineering lockout. A battle ensued, not over economic grievances but
over workers’ control and recognition of the factory councils. In April,
the strike by metalworkers spread to chemicals, printing, building and
other sectors with half a million workers, virtually the whole of the
Turin working class, involved. Four days later the movement went beyond
the confines of the city to the Piedmont region. Spontaneous solidarity
was organised in Livorno, Florence, Genova and Bologna, but the union
leaderships refused to extend the strikes and, like the Paris Commune in
1871, the Turin factory council movement remained isolated, cut off from
the rest of the country. Unlike the collapse of the Paris Commune,
thousands of workers did not lose their lives but the agreement which
ended the strike was in effect a defeat. Whilst formally recognising the
consigli di fabbrica, it deprived them of any real control in the
workplaces.
After the ‘April days’ the
employers were emboldened to go further onto the offensive and take the
workers on. It was pay-back time. Eleven thousand industrialists from 72
associations were organised in a centralised body, the Confindustria,
which held its first national conference that year. They were united in
opposing the workers’ demands. But as the scope of the September
occupations and their revolutionary potential became clear huge fissures
erupted in the capitalists’ united front facade. The ‘hawks’, who
included Agnelli the owner of Fiat, pushed for the government to take a
tough line and smash the occupations by force. Another wing, however,
feared that if the army and state forces were used against the workers
in the factories this would further inflame the situation and threaten
to engulf the whole capitalist system. The prime minister Giolitti, who
had been elected three months previously, took the line of the ‘doves’,
choosing to stay in his holiday home in Bardonecchia and, as Gramsci
warned, wait in the hope of wearing down the working class "to the point
where it will itself fall to its knees". (2)
When Agnelli went to ask for
government intervention Giolitti offered to bombard Fiat and "free it
from the occupiers". "No, no", cried Agnelli. Giolitti himself clearly
explained the ruling class’s dilemma: "How could I stop the occupation?
It is a question of 600 factories in the metallurgical industry. I would
have had to put a garrison in each of them... To occupy the factories I
would have had to use all the forces at my disposal! And who would
exercise surveillance over the 500,000 workers outside the factories?...
It would have been civil war". (3) The ruling class was impotent, the
ball was now in the workers’ court.
Attacking with words…
THE EFFECT OF the post-war
radicalisation on the workers’ organisations had been as explosive as
the movement itself. At the end of the war, the CGL (the union linked to
the PSI) had around 250,000 members – two years later two million
workers were enrolled in its ranks. By the summer of 1920, the
anarcho-syndicalist union USI (which rejected ‘politics’) could claim
800,000 members, and the Catholic trade union CIL went from 162,000 in
1918 to one million in 1920. The growth of the PSI was no less
spectacular: 24,000 members in 1918, 87,000 in 1919, and 200,000 in
1920. In November 1919, the party scored a stunning electoral victory
winning over 1.8 million votes and, with 156 MPs, became the strongest
parliamentary force. It also controlled 2,000 local councils (nearly a
quarter of the total).
Giolitti was gambling on the
trade union leaders being able to hold back the tidal wave of
occupations and prevent a revolutionary insurrection. In April, the
national leadership of the CGL and the FIOM had been hostile to the
factory council movement, which represented a threat to their control
over the working class, and they resisted any attempts to spread the
struggle beyond Turin. In September, their main preoccupation was to
maintain control of the movement, limit the demands of the occupation to
economic ones, and prevent any challenge to who actually controlled
society.
What about the PSI? The party
declared itself in favour of the revolution and correctly described the
period as ‘revolutionary’. The workers controlled the factories, not the
capitalists; the ruling class was riven with divisions and the state was
paralysed. This was a struggle for power. But whereas revolutionary
movements often begin spontaneously without any clear direction,
carrying the revolution through to its conclusion – to the working class
(and peasants) taking power from the ruling capitalist class and
building a democratic workers’ state – requires a conscious movement
guided by a revolutionary party with a clear programme, strategy and
tactics. This the Bolsheviks had clearly demonstrated just three years
before.
Hundreds of factories were
occupied but the workers, especially in Turin, were calling for the
factory councils to be extended. Initiatives developed from below but in
many areas each factory occupation was separate and workers concerned
only with their own ‘local’ issues. The rural workers and peasants were
also in ferment, rising up, striking, demonstrating and seizing land and
the landowners’ estates: in 1920, 900,000 rural workers joined the CGL.
However, these uprisings were mostly in isolation from the workers in
the factories. There was a burning need for the occupations to be spread
to every industry, and for the workers’ councils to be broadened out
beyond individual workplaces, and coordinated on a local, regional and
national level. At the same time, the formation of committees of
peasants and rural labourers (Italy was still overwhelmingly a rural
country) linked to the workers’ councils could lay the basis for a
revolutionary government of workers’ and peasants.
The PSI wrote rousing
articles in its press about plans for the formation of soviets; it
issued revolutionary declarations exhorting peasants to support the
strikers, and it called on the ‘proletarians in uniform’ to join the
workers’ struggle and resist orders from their superior officers. At the
Second Congress of the Communist International – held during July-August
1920 – the party’s representatives talked about the imminent revolution.
On 10 September, the PSI’s national directorate announced it intended to
"assume responsibility and the leadership of the movement to extend it
to the whole country and the entire proletarian mass". (5) On paper, a
revolutionary programme, but one that was never taken beyond the printed
word into action. The national leadership of the PSI was what Lenin
termed ‘centrist’, revolutionary in words, but unable or unwilling to
draw the necessary practical conclusions from their revolutionary
phraseology.
Gramsci explained that the
whole of the PSI had joined the Communist Third International but
without really understanding what it was doing. Much of the party was
still dominated by the reformists or ‘minimalists’, so-called because
they adhered to the party’s ‘minimum programme’ of immediate and
democratic demands, while ignoring or paying lip-service to the ‘maximum
programme’ of the socialist revolution. The very existence of a
‘minimum’ and ‘maximum’ programme with no bridge between the two helps
to explain why the PSI reacted the way it did in September. Led by
Turati and Treves, the minimalists were overwhelmingly concerned with
gaining electoral support and positions in parliament and local
councils. Reforms for the working class were to be secured through
parliament rather than through class struggle, which, when it did occur,
was to be restricted to ‘safe’ economic channels which posed no threat
to the capitalist system. The reformists main base was, unsurprisingly,
in the parliamentary party and in the CGL which had been set up by the
PSI in 1906.
Alongside the reformists, and
in a majority in the leadership of the party, were the ‘maximalists’ led
by Serrati. They defended the maximum programme of socialist revolution,
but in typical centrist fashion, Serrati’s main consideration was to
maintain party unity at all costs ‘for the revolution’, even if this
meant making concessions to the minimalists. So, he and the other
centrist leaders ignored Lenin’s advice to expel the reformists and
constitute a unified party around a clearly defined communist programme.
In addition, there were the communists grouped mainly around Amadeo
Bordiga, and the supporters of Gramsci.
Another characteristic of
centrism is prevarication and indecision. During the ‘April days’, the
leadership had passively sat back allowing the factory council movement
to be isolated in Turin and consequently defeated. This in turn gave
confidence to the ‘minimalist’ wing inside the party, and lead to an
increase in support for the anarchists outside. The PSI’s immobilism
during April was a foretaste of what was to happen in September. It was
entirely unprepared for the storm which raged across the country. As
Trotsky explained, the organisation most frightened and paralysed by the
September events was the PSI itself. (5)
"The central organisation of
the party has not thought it worthwhile so far, to express a single
opinion or launch a single slogan", wrote Gramsci in August. (6) In
fact, despite its numbers the PSI had no real organised base in the
factories. In 1918, the party had signed a ‘Pact of Alliance’ with the
CGL, marking out two artificially separate spheres of influence. The PSI
was to lead ‘political strikes’ and the CGL ‘economic strikes’. Of
course, as the September occupation clearly showed, there is no clear
distinction between the two, with a strike which begins over an economic
issue (in this case wages) rapidly assuming a generalised and political
character. But this false strategy meant that the party was on the
side-lines, a spectator and cheerleader for the occupations rather than
a revolutionary party guiding the movement towards the conquest of power
as the Bolsheviks had done. The PSI could print abstract proclamations
and manifestos calling for soviets, but concretely it was doing nothing
to promote them amongst the workers themselves, and therefore allowing
the reformist trade union leaders, who were doing everything possible to
derail the revolution, to hold sway.
This abstract propagandist
approach was also evident in the party’s attitude to the peasants and
rural workers. In rousing revolutionary rhetoric it called on them to
support the workers in the factories: "If tomorrow the hour of decisive
struggle strikes, the battle against all the bosses, you, too, rally!
Take over the communes, the lands, disarm the carabinieri, form
your battalions in unity with the workers, march on the great cities,
take your stand with the people in arms against the hireling thugs of
the bourgeoisie! For the day of justice and liberty is perhaps at hand".
(7)
But the party’s influence in
the rural areas, particularly the south, was minimal. Serrati had
effectively accepted that workers were ‘socialist’ and peasants
‘Catholic’, making no real attempt to recruit the radicalised rural
southern masses. At its second Congress, he rejected the Communist
International’s agrarian policy on the grounds that it was not relevant
to Italy. A journalist for Corriere della Sera summed up the
PSI’s approach when he wrote that "the socialist leaders want to attack
the regime only with words". (8)
… when concrete action was needed
BY THE SECOND week in
September the occupations were spontaneously spreading but sections of
urban workers were becoming tired and impatient, waiting in vain for
someone to take action and give a lead. The situation of dual power
could not continue indefinitely, the time for decisive action had been
reached. On 9 September the directive council of the CGL met with some
of the leaders of the PSI. At that meeting the leader of the CGL,
D’Aragona asked the Turin socialists point blank "are you ready to move
to the attack, yourselves in the van, where to attack means precisely to
start a movement of armed insurrection?" "No" replied Togliatti ( a
future leader of the Italian Communist Party). (9) The workers occupying
the factories were armed, and in Turin a military committee had been
organising since April. But, the workers were for the most part in
isolated fortresses, separated from each other and, as Togliatti himself
pointed out, the military preparations that were taking place were
purely defensive.
In October 1917, the armed
insurrection – the taking control of strategic positions such as
telecommunications and transport, and of key state institutions and
forces – was prepared as a defensive struggle, in defence of the
revolution against the counter revolutionary forces. But, as Trotsky
explained, the mass insurrection itself, "which lies above a revolution
like a peak on a mountain chain of events", is an offensive act which
can be "foreseen, prepared and organised in advance" under the direction
of the party. An insurrection can be spontaneous and overthrow an old
power but taking power "needs a suitable organisation, it needs a plan".
(10) The first task is to win over the troops, which the Bolsheviks had
managed to do before the insurrection, which explains its almost
bloodless nature.
In Italy in September 1920,
the PSI wrote in radical language about the hour of ‘decisive struggle’
being near, but did absolutely nothing to prepare for it: there was no
coordination of the arming of the workers; no concrete approaches to the
rank and file of the armed forces to form their own democratic
committees and support the revolution; just lofty pronouncements, and,
of course, no plans for the formation of an alternative, workers’
government.
As has already been
mentioned, on 10th September the national directorate of the
PSI voted to extend the movement. That same evening the CGL leaders
called the PSI leadership’s bluff. At a joint meeting of the two
organisations they resigned and D’Aragona offered to hand control of the
movement to the party: "You believe that this is the moment for
revolution", he said. "Very well, then. You must assume the
responsibility… We submit our resignation… you take the leadership of
the whole movement". (11) And what did the PSI leaders do? In a tragic
game of revolutionary ‘pass the parcel’ they referred the issue to the
national council of the CGL! "When the comrades who led the CGL
submitted their resignation", said Umberto Terracini, a co-founder with
Gramsci and Angelo Tasca of Ordine Nuovo, "the party leadership
could neither replace them nor hope to replace them. It was Dugoni,
D’Aragona, Buozzi, who led the CGL; they were at all times the
representatives of the mass". (12) And so, the centrists, who hours
earlier were supposedly preparing to extend the revolution, in reality
were clueless about what to do next. With no clear programme, strategy
and tactics they inevitably capitulated and handed total control to the
reformists who did have a plan – to avoid revolution at all costs.
"The party directorate had
lost months preaching the revolution", wrote Tasca, but "it had foreseen
nothing, prepared nothing. When the vote in Milan gave the majority to
the CGL theses, the party leaders heaved a sigh of relief. Liberated now
from all responsibility, they could complain at the tops of their voices
about the CGL’s betrayal. Thus they had something to offer the masses
whom they had abandoned at the decisive moment, happy in the epilogue
which allowed them to save their face". (13)
The CGL resolution, which
turned a revolutionary struggle into a purely trade union one, won the
vote at the national council. It called for union control to be
recognised and a joint commission of employer and trade union
representatives was set up to look into the question. When the FIOM
organised a referendum to vote on the final agreement to end the
occupations it was overwhelmingly accepted, with no opposition organised
within the union against it.
Capitalist reaction was
mixed. Agnelli was so depressed by the whole affair that he offered to
turn FIAT into a co-operative, saying "how can you build anything with
25,000 enemies?". (14) The union leaders refused his offer. A section of
the capitalists, however, were up in arms about the issue of workers’
control. But the ‘moderates’ understood that after nearly a month of
occupations the workers would not accept anything less. As the
journalist Einaudi succinctly put it, "reason and sentiment counsel the
industrialists to give way on control, to put an end to a ‘state of
affairs’ which cannot long continue without the state decomposing and
disintegrating". (15) The commission, in fact, never issued a single
proposal and ‘workers’ control’ was buried as economic crisis gripped
Italy the following year and tens of thousands of workers lost their
jobs, including many of the militants who had been most active in the
occupations.
The agreement which ended the
occupations was not initially viewed as a defeat by many sections of
workers (and was not presented as such the trade union and PSI leaders).
The economic gains – substantial wage rises, paid holidays etc – were
impressive for a trade union struggle. But, of course, the movement had
the potential to be much more than that, and it was only over the next
few months, as the economic crisis began to bite and the fascist gangs
were mobilised against the workers, that the full extent of the defeat
hit home.
Dire consequences
COULD THE COMMUNISTS have
done more to shape events? The Second Congress of the Communist
International, which actually met as the movement was underway, had very
scant information about what was going on Italy. It was only on the 21
September, as the occupations were about to be demobilised, that the
International issued a manifesto calling for the formation of councils
of workers and soldiers, and for armed insurrection for the seizure of
power. Gramsci was not present at the Congress, but Lenin praised his
document for the renewal of the PSI as the best on the Italian
situation. Yet, by September Gramsci had little influence within the
party and over the movement. The Ordine Nuovo group, which had
always been politically heterogeneous, had disintegrated in the summer
and Gramsci was now isolated. Looking back some time later he was to
write of the serious mistakes that he had made, and paid for. In
particular, the failure to form an organised current in the party with
support in the whole of the country. The group, in fact, never really
developed any roots outside of Turin, and when the Italian Communist
Party was finally formed in January 1921, the ideas of Bordiga
overwhelmingly dominated those of Gramsci.
Bordiga’s group was national
and much better organised, but politically ultra-left. It campaigned for
the formation of a ‘pure’, rigid, disciplined communist party, and, in
an over-reaction to the electoral opportunism of the reformists in the
PSI, advocated astensionismo, the non-participation of the party
in elections. The fact that in September the Bordigists’ paper Il
Soviet did not carry a single editorial on the occupations speaks
volumes for its abstract and sectarian approach to Marxism which Lenin
attacked in his pamphlet, Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder.
After the September events, Bordiga formally renounced abstentionism
and, along with Gramsci, supported the building of a mass communist
party. However, his ultra-leftism and sectarianism – his opposition ‘on
principle’, for example, to the tactic of the united front – continued
to permeate the young Communist Party of Italy, particularly in its
attitude to the PSI (which maintained the support of the majority of
delegates when the party split) and the Arditi del Popolo,
popular militias set up to fight the fascists.
Within a few weeks of the
occupations ending the landowners were unleashing the fascist
squadristi in Emilia. The September revolution and the onset of
severe economic crisis had convinced a section of the capitalist class
that they could not go on as before. They could no longer rely on the
capitalist state in its existing form and the workers’ resistance had to
be crushed. With the working class weakened and demoralised after the
defeat of the movement, big business and finance capital began to
finance the fascist thugs who, in the two years before Mussolini’s
eventual call to power in October 1922, launched a brutal offensive
against the working class, involving violent attacks on workers’
organisations and the murder of activists. The Italian workers were to
pay an extremely high price for the mistakes of their leaders in the
biennio rosso, with fascist rule lasting for 20 years.
Today in Italy, following the
transformation of the Communist Party into a ‘New Labour’-type
capitalist party in the early 1990s and the subsequent decline of
Rifondazione Comunista over the last decade, there is no mass left. But
many of the political characteristics of the period 1919-1920 still
remain. The false division between industrial and political struggle;
the predominance of electoralism over mass struggle; abstract
propagandism and an inability to connect directly with the working
class. An understanding of this critical period in Italian history will
be useful for a new generation of fighters not just in Italy but
internationally.
Notes
(1) Gwyn A Williams,
Proletarian Order, Pluto Press,1975 p238
(2) Paolo Spriano, The
Occupation of the Factories, Pluto Press, 1975 p72
(3) Paolo Spriano op cit p56
(4) Gwyn A Williams op cit
p257
(5) Lev Trotsky, Scritti
sull’Italia, Controcorrente, 1990 p29
(6) Paolo Spriano op cit p34
(7) Gwyn A Williams op cit
p251
(8) Paolo Spriano op cit p93
(9) Gwyn A Williams op cit
p256
(10) Leon Trotsky, History of
the Russian Revolution, volume three, chapter six, The Art of
Insurrection
(11) Paolo Spriano op cit p90
(12) Gwyn A Williams op cit
p258
(13) Paolo Spriano op cit p93
(14) Gwyn A Williams op cit
p267
(15) Paolo Spriano op cit
p110
