Italy 1943-48: a revolution betrayed

The outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 found Italian imperialism utterly unprepared, either militarily or economically. Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime thus preferred to let its stronger German ally do the fighting, and refrained from entering the war.

[This article was originally published as part of issue 49 of In Defence of Marxism magazine – the quarterly theoretical magazine of the Revolutionary Communist International. Subscribe and get your copy here]

However, the speed with which the German Blitzkrieg swept through the Netherlands, Belgium and Northern France in May 1940, startled Mussolini into a sudden about-face. Believing that the war would be “over by September”, he boasted:

“I need a few thousand dead so that I can attend the peace conference as a man who has fought.”^[1]

On 10 June 1940, he plunged Italy into the war, hoping to buy a seat at the ‘victor’s banquet’.

This proved to be a grave miscalculation. The total number of Italian casualties between 1940 and 1943 was almost 500,000 soldiers. The Russian campaign was catastrophic. The Italian army lost 90,000 men out of some 220,000 deployed, who were sent very poorly equipped to fight in the freezing Russian winter.

Discipline quickly crumbled. After the rout on the Eastern Front, Alpine soldiers shouted, “Down with Mussolini, murderer of the Alpini” (a corps of the army’s infantry) on the trains that repatriated them. Desertion was becoming more and more widespread.

The situation at home was no less desperate. Between 1939 and 1942 prices had doubled. But Mussolini ordered wages to be frozen, because, he said, to increase them would have ignited inflation. Rationing reached unsustainable levels: in 1942 each person was entitled to just 80 grams of beef per week, one egg every 15 days, two kilos of pasta and 1.8 kilos of rice per month.

The fall of Mussolini

Discontent was beginning to grow. At last, the labour movement started to show signs of reawakening, after almost twenty years of dormancy under the jackboot of fascist repression.

The first industrial actions took place as early as the second half of 1942, particularly in Turin, Milan and Genoa. But it was on 5 March 1943 that a strike which started in the Fiat workshops in Turin, quickly spread like wildfire; first to the other factories in Turin, and then to other cities in the north. Soon over 150,000 workers were involved.

The workers' demands were for the ‘192 hours’ (the payment of an additional month’s wages in a year to compensate for the rising cost of living); the sliding scale of wages; the release of anti-fascist political prisoners; and the removal of the fascist militia from the factories. ‘Bandiera Rossa’ (Red Flag) was sung in the course of the struggle.

As the fascist hierarch, Roberto Farinacci, wrote in a note to Mussolini:

“If they tell you that the movement has taken on a purely economic character, they are telling you a lie. On the trams, in the cafes, in the theatres, in the cinemas and in the shelters, everybody rails against the regime.”^[2]

Attempts at repression were ineffective. By the beginning of April, the government had been forced to give in to all the workers' economic demands.

The Italian bourgeoisie began to fear for stability and order, and started to question the 20-year link that bound it to fascism. As has happened many times in history, the ruling class tried to prevent a revolution from below by making changes from above.

It was therefore the entry of the working class that dealt the coup de grâce to the fascist regime.

The landing of the Anglo-American ‘Allies’ in Sicily in early July 1943 met with virtually no resistance, and made clear the imminence of the regime's collapse. Mussolini was then dismissed and arrested at the meeting of the Grand Council of Fascism, on the night of 24-25 July.

In this veritable ‘palace coup’, the king, Victor Emmannuel III, gave the mandate to form a new government to Marshal Pietro Badoglio, Mussolini’s chief of staff until December 1940, who had not spared the use of chemical weapons during the invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935-37.

The removal of Mussolini was the first step towards concluding peace with the Allies. A majority section of the Italian bourgeoisie considered it necessary to place itself under the protection of American and British troops, so as to be able to better contain the alarming rise of the class struggle. The new government was actually an attempt to preserve Italian capitalism through military dictatorship.

To present the illusion of change, the most hated institutions such as the National Fascist Party, the Grand Council of Fascism, and the Chamber of Corporations were dissolved. But the continuity of the state apparatus was assured: power passed into the hands of the military; the fascist ‘Special Court for Political Crimes’ merely changed its name; and the ‘OVRA’ – the political police – continued to operate.

The Badoglio government's immediate concern was to avoid any disturbance of ‘public order’. It issued harsh circulars which included: a state of siege; curfews; censorship; a ban on reconstituting political parties and posting of political bills; the charge of ‘attempted insurrection’ for gatherings of more than three people; and a ban on wearing badges not featuring the Italian flag.

On the day of 26 July alone, the repression by the Carabinieri (military police) and the army resulted in 11 deaths, around 80 wounded and almost 500 arrests. But no repression, however harsh, could stop the enormous demonstrations of celebration for the fall of fascism.

The reawakening of the masses

The insurrectional character of these demonstrations was vividly described by Marxist theoretician Ted Grant in an article written at the time:

“Mass strikes in all the industrial cities, Milan, Turin, Genoa, etc., broke out in 24 hours. The railways in the whole of northern Italy were paralysed within a few days. The jails were stormed by the workers and the political prisoners were set free. The fascist headquarters in the large towns have been sacked and the fascist printing presses seized by the workers in Milan and other areas. Anyone wearing the insignia of fascism in Italy on the day after Mussolini's disappearance stood in danger of being lynched. Fascism vanished overnight. The belated decree dissolving the fascist party merely took cognisance of a fact that had already been irrevocably established by the workers and the soldiers themselves. [...] The attempt to use the soldiers against the demonstrating crowds in Milan has resulted in the soldiers going over to the side of the workers.”^[3]

In the factories, the balance of forces was reversed. The workers reconstituted the internal commissions (shop stewards’ committees) and re-elected their representatives. They rebuilt the trade unions, and threw out factory inspectors and foremen, most of whom were members of the Fascist Party. In short, they were rediscovering the revolutionary traditions of the ‘Biennio Rosso’ (‘two red years’) of 1919-20.

Strikes in the north and land occupations in the south characterised the 45 days of existence of the Badoglio government. Badoglio watched helplessly as the Allies intensified their bombing of the cities, the main aim of which was to terrorise the masses and weaken workers' mobilisations. Meanwhile Hitler massively reinforced his army in the peninsula, doubling its numbers between July and September.

Badoglio could have been overthrown at this stage. But an alliance of all the anti-fascist parties, from the Liberals to the Italian Communist Party (PCI), which would become the Committee of National Liberation (CLN), refused to adopt this position, at the insistence of the Liberals and Christian Democrats. The reformist politician and initiator of this alliance, Ivanoe Bonomi, intended to postpone the beginning of the armed resistance to the Nazis until the arrival of the Allied armies on the peninsula. In the meantime, the Allies were rebuilding the state apparatus in Sicily, relying on the Mafia and the Catholic clergy.

The refusal of the workers’ leadership to give direction to the struggle offered Badoglio sufficient breathing space to make peace with the Allies. The armistice was agreed on 3 September 1943, but kept secret until the 8th. As soon as it was made public by the Americans, the Nazis began their operation to seize control of Italy, and disarm the Italian military.

On the next day, the king, his heir, Badoglio, and the military high command shamefully fled to Brindisi, on the southeastern coast, which was now under the control of the Allies. Meanwhile, the state apparatus, starting with the army, melted away like snow in the sun.

The ruling class, faced with the danger of proletarian revolution, forgot all their rhetoric about the ‘defence of the fatherland’, and left control of a large part of Italy to the Nazis. In several cities senior officers refused to hand over their weapons to the workers to fight against the German army. In Rome, they saw the surrender of the city to the Nazis as the lesser evil.

The Nazis proceeded to free Mussolini in mid-September and placed him at the head of their puppet government: The ‘Italian Social Republic’, more commonly known as the ‘Republic of Salò’, after the town where it was founded. After an initial period of bewilderment, the masses resumed their fight, this time against both the Nazi occupation and its Italian collaborators.

A clear example of the potential for proletarian revolution was the ‘Quattro giornate di Napoli’ (The Four Days of Naples), between 27 and 30 September 1943. The people in arms, with the working class at its head, freed the city from the occupying army with a spontaneous insurrection, without any help from the Allies, and without the support of the CLN. Naples was in fact the first European city to rise victorious against Nazi-Fascism. It showed the way forward for the oppressed masses of Europe.

The Salerno Turn

The autumn of 1943 thus saw Italy divided, occupied by the Allies in the south and by the Nazi-Fascists in the north. The class struggle was on the rise: strikes resumed in the north, and in the south the occupation of land by peasants and agricultural labourers became widespread.

In practice, it became clear that the fight against fascism was inextricably linked to the fight against capitalism. However, the political line proposed by Palmiro Togliatti, then general secretary of the PCI, offered nothing to satisfy the social demands of the masses.

The Badoglio government had no support amongst the workers and peasants. And yet, as early as 10 September, Togliatti declared from Moscow that if the Badoglio government took “into its hands, openly and without hesitation, the banner of the defence of Italy against Hitler's cowardly aggression [...] the people would give it their support”.^[4]

Togliatti thereby fostered illusions in the government, the primary aim of which was to stifle the revolutionary upsurge from below.

Later on 12 January 1944, Togliatti, still in Moscow, further developed the PCI’s line for supporting a new Italian government of ‘national unity’, by stating what was needed was the:

“prompt creation, immediate indeed, of a democratic national government and with the participation of all the anti-fascist parties.”^[5]

According to the diary of Georgi Dimitrov, the former general secretary of the Communist International, a meeting took place between Togliatti and Stalin in Moscow on 3 March. Dimitrov was later informed by Togliatti that Stalin instructed him to enter the Badoglio government upon his return to Italy, and to not demand the immediate abdication of the king. Indeed, the Soviet Union formally recognised the Badoglio government on 10 March, in anticipation of this move.

This position would be reiterated when Togliatti arrived in Italy at the end of March 1944, at a meeting of PCI cadres in the liberated regions. This event would become known as the ‘Salerno Turn’, Salerno being the town just south of Naples where the position was made public.

‘Popular Fronts’

This turning point had not only been announced well in advance by the PCI general secretary, but was totally within the Stalinist policy of forming ‘Popular Fronts’, i.e. alliances with parties of the so-called ‘democratic bourgeoisie’ to stop fascism.

The victory of Hitler in 1933, and the crushing of the German workers’ movement that followed it, provoked panic in Moscow, resulting in a dramatic shift in the policy of the Communist International.

Still from the film Quattro giornate di Napoli (1962) which depicts The Four Days of Naples of 1943 / Image: public domain

According to the position adopted at the International’s Seventh Congress in 1935, the revolution was to be divided into two clearly separate stages, the first of which was to defeat fascism and secure capitalist democracy. This had to be completed before there could be any mention of the workers' own demands for socialism. Supposedly, any attempt by the proletariat to go beyond the limits of capitalism would be premature and fatal. Only later would there be a second, socialist, stage.

This was identical to the policy pursued by the Mensheviks in relation to the Russian Revolution, which Lenin sharply criticised. The application of this policy by the Communist International in the 1930s had catastrophic consequences, as the example of the Popular Front in Spain showed. The Communist Party leaders in Spain did everything to stop the revolutionary movement of the masses, in the name of maintaining their alliance with the ‘anti-fascist bourgeoisie’. The result was Franco's victory in 1939, which further isolated the Soviet Union and made another world war inevitable.

Crucial to understanding this disastrous policy was the fact that, by this time, the leadership of the Communist International had completely abandoned the struggle for world revolution, upon which it had been founded. Instead, it had been converted into an auxiliary tool to facilitate the diplomatic manoeuvres of the Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow.

The turn to the ‘Popular Front’ reflected the shift in Stalin’s priorities towards the normalisation of relations with the ‘democratic’ imperialist countries, which necessarily meant the containment and suppression of revolution across Europe.

The Soviet bureaucracy also sought to defend its power and privileges at home, by any means necessary. Accordingly, it saw any genuine workers’ revolution outside its borders as a mortal danger to its own position. Such a development could have become an alternative point of reference within the international workers’ movement. It could have offered an example of genuine workers’ democracy, opposed to the bureaucratic and repressive regime in the USSR that had usurped the name of socialism and of the October Revolution.

This treacherous policy was maintained throughout the course of the war. As a concrete sign of his goodwill towards his imperialist allies, Stalin would go on to dissolve the Communist International on 15 May 1943, without even the pretence of a congress.

A conference of the foreign ministers of the Soviet Union, the United States and Great Britain, held in Moscow at the end of October 1943, discussed, among other questions, the Italian situation. They approved a joint declaration on the fight against Nazi-Fascism to be pursued with the participation in the Italian government of “those sections of the Italian people who have always opposed fascism”.^[6] Thus, the class-collaborationist line agreed between Stalin and Togliatti was put into practice.

Democratic demands

What position should communists have adopted in the conditions pertaining to Italy at this time? With the Nazi-Fascists occupying most of Italy, and Badoglio’s military dictatorship in the south, should they have ignored the struggle for democratic demands?

As early as 1930, Leon Trotsky took up the question of the character of the future Italian revolution, and the position that communists should take in relation to it, in a letter addressed to three leading members of the PCI who had broken with Stalinism. He explained that in the event of the revolutionary overthrow of the fascist regime by the workers at the head of the oppressed masses, the capitalists would seek to preserve their class rule by establishing a parliamentary state, whilst trying to suppress the revolutionary movement of the working class in the name of the ‘democratic revolution’.

However, the fact that the ruling class and its agents in the workers’ movement would try to use democratic demands to pull the wool over the eyes of the masses did not at all mean that communists should reject all democratic slogans. As Trotsky explained:

“If the revolutionary crisis were to break out [...] the masses of toilers, workers as well as peasants, would certainly follow up their economic demands with democratic slogans (such as freedom of assembly, of press, of trade union organisation, democratic representation in parliament and in the municipalities). Does this mean that the Communist Party should reject these demands? On the contrary. It will have to invest them with the most audacious and resolute character possible. For the proletarian dictatorship cannot be imposed upon the popular masses. It can be realised only by carrying on a battle – a battle in full – for all the transitional demands, requirements, and needs of the masses, and at the head of the masses.”^[7]

In the Transitional Programme, one of the key documents of the Fourth International at its founding congress in 1938, Trotsky wrote an even more concrete formulation of the tasks ahead of communists in the fascist countries:

“Once it breaks through, the revolutionary wave in fascist countries will immediately be a grandiose sweep and under no circumstances will stop short at [...] resuscitating some sort of [bourgeois-democratic regime]. [...]

Of course, this does not mean that the Fourth International rejects democratic slogans as a means of mobilising the masses against fascism. On the contrary, such slogans at certain moments can play a serious role. But the formulae of democracy (freedom of press, the right to unionise, etc.) mean for us only incidental or episodic slogans in the independent movement of the proletariat and not a democratic noose fastened to the neck of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie’s agents (Spain!). As soon as the movement assumes something of a mass character, the democratic slogans will be intertwined with the transitional ones; factory committees, it may be supposed, will appear before the old routinists rush from their chancelleries to organise trade unions; soviets will cover Germany before a new constituent assembly will gather in Weimar. The same applies to Italy and the rest of the totalitarian and semi-totalitarian countries.”^[8]

It is clear that the communists in Italy, while being the most determined fighters against Nazi-Fascism, needed to maintain complete class independence from the bourgeoisie. Under those conditions, it would be correct to champion basic democratic demands, such as the abolition of the monarchy and the convening of a constituent assembly, and to call for the full restoration of democratic freedoms such as the right to assembly, demonstrate, organise in parties and trade unions. In the countryside, they should have fought for genuine agrarian reform, with the expropriation of landed estates and the redistribution of land.

However, these democratic demands should have been combined with demands that brought the question of workers’ power to the forefront, and resonated with the real stage of the movement, such as the expropriation of the capitalists, workers’ control over the factories, and the formation of workers’ councils as organs of struggle.

Indeed, from 1943 to the late 1940s, a mass movement of factory committees developed in the cities, at the same time as a wave of land occupations developed across the country.

Such a programme could therefore have forged an alliance between the working class and the other oppressed layers of Italian society, and the peasantry in particular, winning them to the revolutionary struggle for socialism.

Instead, the line of the PCI led by Togliatti was that of a ‘progressive democracy’; a Popular Front (i.e. bourgeois) regime that would supposedly satisfy the demands of the oppressed masses, in which the constituent assembly (i.e. a bourgeois parliament) represented “the beginning of a deep and radical renewal of the entire life of the country”.^[9]

In keeping with this policy, on 22 April 1944, the PCI entered the Second Badoglio Government, a coalition which included the Italian Socialist Party (PSIUP, as it was known then), the Liberals, Monarchists and Christian Democrats, with Togliatti taking the role of ‘vice-premier’.

This government acted in a decisive manner to stabilise capitalism in Italy, including the reconstruction of the bourgeois state. No serious purges of fascists were implemented, members of the military high command were not prosecuted, and the repressive bodies of the state, starting with the Carabinieri, were strengthened. It was from its inception a government of bourgeois counter-revolution, thinly disguised in a ‘democratic’ form.

The partisan movement begins

Parallel to the bourgeois government, the CLN was set up immediately after the armistice. This body was appointed to lead the partisan formations, with regional and provincial structures.

A Garibaldi Brigade unit from Pavia, 25 April 1945 / Image: Archivio Privato Jonio Salerno

Here too, the PCI followed the Popular Front pattern. The parties that made up the CLN – the PCI, PSIUP, Christian Democracy, and three other minor bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties – had equal representation. This enormously inflated the weight of the bourgeois parties, which otherwise had a tiny minority in the partisan brigades and in society as a whole. Its mechanism of unanimous decision making provided the leaders of the PCI and PSIUP with the excuse to renounce any action deemed ‘too bold’ by the bourgeois components.

The CLN therefore was far from being an embryo of future soviets; instead, it was an instrument with which to hold back the partisan masses. But this raises the question as to how the PCI was able to play this counter-revolutionary role.

Under fascism, the PCI had been able, thanks to its underground apparatus, to hold its own more solidly than the Socialist Party. After the fall of Mussolini, it had become the main party among the working class. Its popularity was based on the fact that it was viewed as the party that had gone down fighting the rise of the fascists, as well as being seen as the direct representative of the Soviet Union.

The overwhelming majority of its activists had recently awakened to politics. It is estimated that at the beginning of 1943, the PCI had around 6,000 members. In 1944 it would rapidly rise to 501,000 and in 1945 reached a colossal 1,770,000.

These workers and youth were imbued with a revolutionary spirit, but they had very little experience.

Faced with criticism and revolutionary outbursts from the rank-and-file, the PCI leadership sometimes cracked down on the members who expressed dissident views, charging them with ‘sectarianism’ or ‘Trotskyism’. Most of the time, however, the leadership focused on deceiving the rank and file regarding the perspectives and tasks of the revolution.

The Menshevik ‘two-stage theory’ was used for this purpose: today's compromises were necessary in view of what would happen tomorrow, when it was promised that they would ‘settle accounts’ with the capitalists and fascists.

At the same time, the myth of Togliatti's ‘duplicity’ was promoted. Any opportunist actions or behaviour of the PCI leadership were presented as clever manoeuvres. The official, moderate line would deceive the adversaries, while, under this cover, they claimed, the party would prepare for the seizure of power as soon as the situation allowed it.

This ‘duplicity’, which was directed not at the ruling class but at the workers and partisans, had the advantage of not opposing the aspirations of the masses head-on, and thereby avoided turning their doubts about the PCI line into a conscious left-wing opposition.

Opposition to the PCI’s line

In addition to the doubts and criticism within the party, there were also organisations and movements outside the PCI that opposed Togliatti’s line.

The banning of the PCI in 1926 had to some extent interrupted the history of the communist movement in Italy. Many activists who resisted throughout the dark years of fascism, and the others who came to communism in those same years, knew little or nothing about the break between Stalin and Trotsky, or the physical elimination of the entire Bolshevik old guard. As they entered the political struggle, however, many rediscovered the ideas of the party's founders, such as Gramsci and Bordiga, and their class intransigence.

These layers criticised the PCI line on its class collaboration, its acceptance of the monarchy, and its lack of internationalism. Many correctly linked the fight against Nazi-Fascism to the revolutionary perspective for transforming society.

These were not insignificant groups. The Rome-based Communist Movement of Italy, better known by the name of its newspaper, Bandiera Rossa (Red Flag), was similar in size to the PCI during the clandestine period, and in 1944 still counted 5,000 activists. Stella Rossa (Red Star), in Turin, had about 2,000 members. The Left Fraction of Italian Communists and Socialists, among whose founders were also the main leaders of the CGL Rossa (Red CGL trade union), had around 10,000 activists across the south in the summer of 1944, including about 1,000 in Naples.

But the Left Fraction was hindered in its further growth by its own sectarian approach. Its denial of the usefulness of democratic slogans, for example, cut it off from a wide layer of the masses, who were awakening to revolutionary struggle through the fight against fascism.

The other organisations to the left of the PCI suffered from their lack of understanding of the nature of the USSR. For them, Stalin was carrying out Lenin's policy; Togliatti and the other PCI leaders were simply betraying the directives of the Soviet Union.

When it was revealed beyond doubt that the PCI's political line was totally shared by Moscow, many of these groups found themselves in a blind alley. Togliatti's authority was linked to the Soviet Union and the Red Army that was dismantling Nazism in Europe, and was therefore unquestionable among Italian workers and youth.

The fundamental problem was that Bandiera Rossa, Stella Rossa, the Left Fraction and others did not really have an alternative theoretical framework to Stalinism. On the other hand, the activists who considered themselves Trotskyists were few and isolated.

Thus, Stalinism emerged for a long historical period as the dominant political tendency within the Italian labour movement.

March 1944: The general strike

With the strikes of March 1943, the dam holding back the working class had finally broken, and worker unrest had continued unabated since then. But the resumption of production under German occupation in autumn 1943, with the aim of supporting the Reich’s war effort, provoked a new stage in the struggle.

After weeks of agitation and clandestine meetings, the Secret Agitation Committee of Piedmont, Lombardy and Liguria – a body promoted by the PCI and PSIUP – published a manifesto calling for a general strike.

At 10 am on 1 March 1944, the anniversary of the 1943 strikes, 300,000 workers in Milan and 50,000 in Turin downed tools. It was not just industrial workers; transport workers and printworkers also joined the action. The strike quickly spread to many other cities across the north of Italy.

It was the biggest strike organised in Nazi-occupied Europe. It is estimated that between 500,000 and 1 million workers came out, ignoring the bosses' lockout and the threats of the Nazi-Fascist authorities.

The platform of the strike had a clear political content: the main slogan was the overthrow of Nazi-Fascism. But the masses also understood that the responsibility for the war and misery lay not only with fascism, but also with the capitalists, who had chosen to lean on the Nazi bayonets to maintain social peace in the factories.

In the course of the struggle, workers boldly put forward their own class demands, even posing the question of workers’ control. For example, a leaflet distributed by the Milan strike committee in the days before the strike contained the following demands:

“Full payment of the cost of living; suspension of all layoffs and reduction of the working week to under 40 hours; release of all partisans, workers or not [...]; workers must no longer be deported to Germany. [...] Let's create strike committees in the workshops! Let’s create workers' defence squads against fascist and Nazi violence!”^[10]

A general strike under military occupation inevitably raised the question of insurrection and the need to arm the working class. The workers had decided to strike with the conviction that the partisan movement would support the action. However, the intervention of the Patriotic Action Groups (the partisan formations active in the cities) was extremely limited.

The absence of substantial armed support prevented the strikers, except in a few cases, from taking to the streets and openly challenging the occupying authorities. Demoralisation thus took hold of the workers and the strike ended on 8 March.

Class struggle and partisan war

The failure of the armed partisan groups to support the strike was no accident.The CLN coalition, including the PCI leadership, insisted that the Resistance should not have a class character, but exclusively one of national liberation.

Striking workers at a factory in Sesto San Giovanni, on the outskirts of Milan, 1944 / Image: public domain

Thus the centre of the conflict was to move from the cities to the mountains. This implied the transfer of cadres and party activists to the countryside, or from the factories to military formations.

In the cities, partisan action was based exclusively on sabotage and individual attacks. The partisans had to operate in complete hiding and were therefore isolated from the mass movement of strikes and demonstrations.

This turn away from the cities did not always go down well with some of the best PCI cadres on the ground, as can be seen from a 27 November 1943 report by Arturo Colombi, who was operating in Turin:

“Our political forces are damnably small: there is a lack of intermediate cadres and the [local] leadership has been weakened by sending away from Turin the best comrades and dedicating the rest to military work. We have only a handful of men who, among other things, are completely new to the environment or have been missing for many years. None of us has ever led large strikes, edited newspapers, etc. You bombard us with incitements to give everything to military work and today we realise that we should have given a little less because the possibility of promoting mass political strikes and the general strike, etc., show how the political mobilisation of the masses in a large centre is of enormous importance to the effects of the general struggle.”^[11]

Under military occupation, the armed struggle of the partisans was absolutely necessary. However, the question that has to be asked is: what strategy was needed to guide the overall military struggle?

What was required was a welding of the workers' struggle to the partisan formations operating in the countryside and in the mountains. The working class needed to be recognised as the leading force of the anti-fascist struggle, given its role in production.

The clandestine committees of agitation should have been transformed into embryonic workers’ councils, through which the working class could lead strikes, organise armed workers’ detachments, and take over the management of production, with the aim of conquering political power.

The potential for building such workers' militias was enormous. In the weeks leading up to the liberation of Rome, Bandiera Rossa called for the establishment of a ‘Red Army’ in the capital. More than 40,000 “comrades of all communist tendencies”, including some senior army officers, responded to this call, and as many as 34 divisions were formed. But the PCI, terrified by such a scenario, put unprecedented political and material pressure on the leaders of Bandiera Rossa, including threats to cut off supplies from the allies. This succeeded in forcing them to desist from carrying out the initiative.

‘National liberation’ vs class war

The spring of 1944 provided an important impetus to the partisan struggle. Decisive in swelling the partisan ranks was the repression following the March 1944 strike, which forced many workers to join partisan brigades to escape deportation to Germany.

Likewise, the ‘Bando Graziani’, the compulsory military conscription of young Italians into the new army of the reconstituted fascist regime in the north, was a key factor. Anyone who did not respond to the fascists’ call to arms would face the death penalty. Of the 180,000 drafted, only a few tens of thousands turned up. All the others deserted, many of whom fled to join the first partisan brigades.

Thus, the partisan militia grew to almost 100,000 fighters by the summer of 1944. The social composition was predominantly proletarian, and the average age was very young. The idea that one was on the eve of armed insurrection was widespread.

The communist-led ‘Garibaldi brigades’ were the most numerous, and made up almost 50 percent of the partisan forces. Radicalisation to the left was increasingly evident.

At this time, the PCI leadership used all its authority to contain the mobilisation. Togliatti was very explicit in one of his directives when he recommended “to always remember that the insurrection we want does not have the aim of imposing social and political transformations in a socialist and communist sense, but has as its aim national liberation and the destruction of fascism.”^[12] (Our emphasis)

The PCI, however, struggled to contain the radicalisation. As historian Claudio Pavone wrote, red was widely present “in the symbolism of headscarves, shirts, stars, hammer and sickles, clenched-fist salutes and songs”.

However, this was not to the liking of the Garibaldi Brigades’ Valtellina command, which ordered:

“Let's get the red stars removed immediately. No badge apart from the fine tricoloured cockade is to be allowed. Likewise for the songs which must not be party songs, but only national in character.”^[13]

The subordination of the CLN to the bourgeois parties had important practical consequences. One was the failure of the partisans to liberate Rome. On 4-5 June 1944, Rome was in fact freed by Allied troops. It was the only major Italian city not to be liberated by the partisans.

The motivation was clear. If the country's capital had been liberated by the youth and workers in arms, who could have stopped a popular uprising throughout the rest of the country? Thus the Christian Democrats and Liberals, on the advice of the Allies and the Vatican, opposed the plans of the PCI and the PSIUP to liberate the ‘Eternal City’ by the partisans.

However, in spite of the conciliatory line adopted by the top leadership, the push for armed insurrection was growing from below. If the PCI had launched the call for insurrection between the summer and autumn of 1944, the 100,000 partisans in the mountains and countryside would have been joined by millions of workers who were only waiting for the signal from the party.

Armed resistance to Nazi-Fascism was not a phenomenon isolated only to Italy. Mass partisan movements existed in Greece, France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Meanwhile, Tito's partisans liberated Belgrade on 20 October 1944. This was the first step towards the liberation of the whole of Yugoslavia.

Public display of the corpses of Mussolini (second from left) and other executed fascists in Milan, 29 April 1945 / Image: public domain

The German army was being pushed back on all fronts, and there were countless incidents of desertion. But it was at this point, on the threshold of victory, that the Allied armies suddenly held back, cutting off the partisans in the north.

On 9 October 1944 in Moscow, Stalin had reassured Churchill that Italy would remain within the orbit of the West. There was thus no longer a need for the Allies to advance as quickly as possible, in order to suppress any moves towards revolution on the part of the partisans. Confident that their ally, Stalin, would hold back the movement, they instead turned their attention towards preparing for the stabilisation of bourgeois rule.

The Allies, in essence, abandoned the partisans to the Nazis. It was in the autumn and early winter of 1944 that the Nazi-Fascists unleashed their fiercest reprisals. Among these were the massacres of civilians in Marzabotto, in the Bolognese Apennines, with 1,830 dead, and in Sant'Anna di Stazzema, in northern Tuscany, with 560 dead.

In the meantime,, the leadership of the CLN signed their total capitulation to imperialism in December 1944. The agreement, proposed by the Allied command and also signed by Pajetta for the PCI, guaranteed the total disarmament of the partisans, when required. Further,  under the agreement the leaders of the anti-fascist parties were to be excluded from the military command of the CLN, to be replaced by Cadorna, a former fascist general.

25 April 1945: Liberation Day

The Allies attempted to replicate the strategy of the liberation of Rome throughout Italy, but the push from below of the working-class and peasant rank and file was too great.

By the spring of 1945, the partisans were 240,000 strong. At the risk of being overwhelmed by the revolutionary fervour of the masses, the PCI tried to contain the upsurge within predetermined tracks. They therefore issued the call to begin the insurrection.

The CLN had issued a coded telegram with the order, which later became famous: “Aldo dice 26x1” (Aldo says 26x1). The ‘X hour’ of the insurrection was supposed to be 1 am on 26 April. But “in practice”, writes Pietro Secchia, one of the PCI leaders in the high command of the Garibaldi brigades, “the partisans rose up almost everywhere before the appointed time.”^[14]

Since Togliatti wanted to give the insurrection a purely ‘national’ character, he envisioned no decisive role for the working class, and for the partisans to act merely as auxiliaries to the advancing Allied troops.

The working masses, however, played a central role. On 18 April the strike began in Turin. Then, between the 21st and 23rd Modena, Bologna, Ferrara, Reggio Emilia and La Spezia rose up. Genoa was liberated between the 23rd and 26th, and Milan on the 25th.

Given the importance of Milan as the main city in northern Italy, this day, 25 April, was later adopted as the symbolic date on which the liberation from Nazi-Fascism is celebrated.

Mussolini fled from Milan that evening, heading north to escape the country. He and 50 other prominent fascists joined a German Luftwaffe column as it retreated towards the Swiss border. Although the subsequent events are disputed, it is widely believed they were intercepted by Communist partisans on the 27th, and executed the following day.

In the region of Piedmont, the order to rise up was only issued on the 26th. But Turin, its key city, was freed by the workers even before the arrival of the partisans.

The historian Guido Quazza, who at the time was a member of the Partito d'Azione, a petty-bourgeois anti-fascist party, describes the situation of dual power that emerged in April 1945:

“Before 25 April, for 10 days, the popular masses wielded real power in northern Italy, the allied troops being still far away, and for some time still they had the enthusiastic support of the majority of the population, control over the factories, and a great peasant surge in many areas.”^[15]

In other words, although the formal power was in the hands of the military, Allies, or Nazi-Fascists; the real power was in the hands of the masses.

All towns and cities in the north were liberated before the arrival of the Allied armies, by the partisans and the working masses. For many of them, the liberation from Nazi-Fascism was only the first act, to be followed by the second: that of the communist revolution. The call for the seizure of power was eagerly awaited. The workers in the cities, and the peasants and farm labourers in the countryside, had drawn up a list of bosses and landlords to be dealt with.

The mood was encapsulated by a Bologna PCI member:

“But we wanted to destroy private property, we wanted work to be everyone’s possession, everyone’s right. We aspired to a society with no exploited nor exploiters, and it seems to me that we are still a very long way off this.”

Likewise, a Reggiane metal worker recalled:

“At that time we were always talking about the development of a socialist society whose model was the Soviet Union. We were convinced that we’d achieve it soon, that we’d construct the new man: committed, hard-working, capable of constructing a world with neither exploited nor exploiters...”^[16]

It is worth remembering here that this ‘next stage’ is what the PCI and PSIUP leaders had promised. This was how the ‘temporary compromises’ had been accepted. This is what so many partisans – men, women and young people – had given their lives for (official figures for the Resistance report 44,700 dead and 22,000 wounded).

Counter-revolution in a democratic form

The bourgeoisie and its parties were too weak to crush this revolutionary upsurge of the masses themselves. They therefore relied upon the ‘CLN government’ that was installed in April 1945 – and the other coalition governments that followed until 1947 – as a necessary transitional phase to restore order, whilst discrediting the leaders of the workers' movement. Meanwhile, they used this breathing space to build a ‘moderate alternative’ around the newly created Christian Democracy (DC) party.

As is often the case in these Popular Front alliances in a revolutionary situation, the representatives of the ruling class prefer not to appear in the open. They send in the recognised leaders of the working class to do their dirty work for them, whilst directing their politics from behind the scenes.

The CLN coalition installed in the aftermath of the liberation had enormous authority in the eyes of the masses. With Ferruccio Parri, one of the best-known partisan commanders, as prime minister, it seemed to many that the Resistance had come to power.

Indeed, the ‘left’ had the most prestigious positions in the new government. Parri was also minister of the interior; the Socialist Nenni was vice-premier with responsibility for the purging of the fascists; while the PCI had Togliatti as minister of justice, Gullo as minister of agriculture, and Scoccimarro as minister of finance.

The CLN government seemed in a truly enviable position to initiate radical change. At the same time, the factories were under workers’ control, and the land was occupied by the peasants and agricultural labourers. The bourgeoisie was in total retreat.

But the communist and socialist leaders had no intention of carrying out a revolution. Instead, they acted like firefighters faced with a wildfire.

Before 25 April, the General Command of the Garibaldi brigades felt compelled to remind their fighters that they “do not carry out expropriations against anyone who is not pro-Nazi”. But it was extremely difficult to find a capitalist in 1945 in Italy who still proclaimed himself a fascist!

The PCI’s slogan of ‘progressive democracy’ was central to the party line. This was supposedly a democracy in which the oppressed masses were to play a leading role, shifting the balance of forces in favour of workers' interests. This formula remained the axis of the party's policy for the following decades.

Strike in Turin, 18 April 1945 / Image: public domain

Fatally, the capitalists’ ownership of the productive forces was to be left intact, within a system of bourgeois democracy. But the entire history of class society shows how it is not possible for two ruling classes to coexist at the same time. One will always prevail over the other, and no class can rule without seizing economic as well as political power.

The bourgeoisie’s aims were fully achieved, with the communists playing a decisive role in the reconstruction of the bourgeois state apparatus after the fall of Mussolini and the liberation from Nazi-Fascism.

The PCI leaders shamefully celebrated this period as a victorious transition from fascism to ‘democracy’. This was precisely the “counter-revolution with a democratic face” predicted by Trotsky in 1930. And yet, after the assassination of Trotsky in 1940, the leadership of the Fourth International mechanically maintained that it would be impossible to restore bourgeois democratic regimes across Europe during this period.

Only Ted Grant correctly analysed the nature of the process as it was unfolding. As he explained at the time:

“[The capitalists] find a ready and willing tool in the shape of the social democratic and Stalinist organisations to dam the revolutionary upsurge of the masses into safe and harmless channels of class collaboration through an even more degenerate form of popular frontism than existed in the past. Thus, they will combine repressions with illusory reforms. Smashing the embryo organs of workers' rule and disarming the masses, while simultaneously proclaiming their desire for 'representative' government and 'democratic' liberties. [...] True, the counter-revolution of capital in its early stages, will, within a short period of time following the establishment of military government, assume a 'democratic' form.”^[17]

The revolution betrayed

The general amnesty issued for the fascists, signed by Togliatti, as the Minister of Justice, let thousands of fascists off the hook for their crimes. By 1946, the state apparatus was brought back under control of the ruling class by removing all the prefects and police commissioners who came from the resistance.

Most disgracefully, the PCI ordered the disarming of the partisan brigades, and the handing back of the occupied factories to their ‘legitimate’ owners.

Giorgio Amendola, a PCI member of parliament from 1948 until his death in 1980, and a key figure of the right wing of the Italian Communist Party, explained in 1962 what the aims of the PCI leaders were in that crucial moment:

"During the days of the insurrection, the bosses […] had abandoned their posts. The workers, the technicians, the white-collar workers, gathered around the National Liberation Committees in the companies [the CLNAs], had taken over the management of the factories.”

He explained, however, that this was “not to establish a class regime with the elimination of the owners, but to ensure their management in the interest of the national community.”

What did Amendola mean by this? He explained that the aim was “to achieve a return of the owners to the factories […] so that they would assume their responsibilities”, and reinvest their “hidden capital in the companies, and accept the control of the management councils”.^[18]

‘Management councils’ had sprung up in many of the abandoned factories. But the PCI leaders insisted that these should only have a ‘consultative role’, while they facilitated the return of the capitalists. What Amendola does not elaborate on is the fact that once these bosses came back to ‘assume their responsibilities’, they very quickly moved to sack those workers who had played a key role in safeguarding the factories from the retreating Nazi forces.

Indeed, at the beginning of 1946, the PCI approved the end of the freeze on sackings, while inflation soared. The land reform, although it became law, was hardly implemented.

In the elections to the Constituent Assembly in June 1946 (which coincided with the referendum on whether to keep the monarchy), the DC came first. The PSIUP was the leading left-wing party in Milan and Turin, and obtained 21 percent nationally. It was closely followed in third place by the PCI with 19 percent of the vote. The ‘left’ had asserted itself in the cities and in the north, but paid for its collaboration in government.

A ‘national unity’ government was formed to head the new Italian Republic. This lasted until Prime Minister De Gasperi, a Christian Democrat, made a trip to the United States in January 1947. Washington guaranteed him their full support, including financial aid under what would become known as the ‘Marshall Plan’, on condition that the PCI and PSIUP were removed from the government – which they were in May.

The same process took place throughout Europe. The coalitions born out of the Resistance came to an end with the ousting of Communists and Socialists. Since the upsurge of the class struggle had peaked, they had exhausted their role for the bourgeoisie.

1948: a last opportunity

The long revolutionary period finally came to an end in 1948. The left was electorally defeated on 18 April, where the united list of PCI-PSIUP received 31 percent of the vote, compared to the DC’s 48 percent.

Photomontage of striking workers in Turin, 1943 / Image: public domain

Despite this setback, a new revolutionary opportunity suddenly arose. On the morning of 14 July, Togliatti was seriously injured by an anti-communist fanatic. Suddenly the whole of Italy came to a standstill. There was hardly a worker, peasant or labourer who did not join the protests.

In Turin all the factories were occupied and patrolled by workers in arms. In Genoa, the workers occupied the squares and streets, and raised barricades. They easily prevailed in the clashes with the police, while radio stations and newspapers were captured by the insurgents.

In Milan hundreds of thousands of workers crowded the Piazza del Duomo. All the factories were occupied. Sesto San Giovanni, the most important industrial town in Lombardy, was in the hands of the workers. Similar situations were repeated in cities across Italy, including in Bologna, Florence, Venice, and Naples. In Rome, clashes with the police occurred in every part of the city.

Once again, the PCI betrayed the revolutionary drive of the masses. “No yielding to insurrectional hypotheses”, decreed the party leadership.

Despite this, in the three days of the general strike that ensued, the working class showed that it was firmly determined to go all the way. The petty bourgeoisie sympathised with the workers, and the bourgeoisie was powerless, at least for the first two days. The police were overwhelmed.

All that was missing was a genuine communist party, a revolutionary vanguard to lead them to the seizure of power. But this, tragically, was the factor that was missing throughout this extraordinary period.

The bourgeoisie recovered from its fear, raised its head again and unleashed a ruthless crackdown, with thousands arrested and tens of thousands sacked.

It took the Italian workers' movement more than twenty years to recover from this historic defeat, with the 'hot autumn' of 1969.

Today, 80 years after the liberation from Nazi-Fascism, there are explosive contradictions in Italy, as in the rest of the world, which are preparing the ground for a new revolutionary situation. This time, however, the strong Communist Party that exercised almost total control over the working masses no longer exists.

There is still a need to build a communist party, a party with a revolutionary programme, that absorbs the lessons of this betrayed revolution and makes them available to the youth and workers. If such a party is built in Italy, the next revolutionary period will see the working class conquer, and sweep away capitalism for good.

References

^[1] P Badoglio, Italy in the Second World War, Oxford University Press, 1948, pg 15

^[2] P Spriano, Storia del Partito Comunista Italiano, Vol. 4, Einaudi, 1973, pg 186, our translation

^[3] T Grant, ‘The Italian revolution and the tasks of British workers’, Workers’ International News, Vol. 5, No. 12, August 1943, pg 2-3

^[4] P Togliatti, Da Radio Milano Libertà, Editori Riuniti, 1974, pg 113, our translation

^[5] ibid., pg 124, our translation

^[6] The Moscow Declarations, quoted in: US Congress State Committee on Foreign Relations (ed.), A Decade of American Foreign Policy, Greenwood Press, 1968, pg 12

^[7] L Trotsky, ‘A Letter on the Italian Revolution’, New International, Vol. 10, No. 7, July 1944, pg 217-218

^[8] L Trotsky, ‘The Transitional Programme’, Classics of Marxism, Vol. 1, Wellred Books, 2013, pg 214

^[9] Quoted in Il comunismo italiano nella seconda guerra mondiale, Editori riuniti, 1963, pg 107, our translation

^[10] Quoted in Città e fabbrica nella Resistenza. Sesto San Giovanni 1943 – 1945. Documenti, Istituto Milanese per la Storia della Resistenza e del Movimento Operaio, 1995, pg 56, our translation

^[11] P Spriano, Storia del Partito Comunista Italiano, Vol. 5, Einaudi, 1975, pg 227, our translation

^[12] P Secchia, Storia della Resistenza, Editori Riuniti, 1965, pg 509, our translation

^[13] C Pavone, A Civil War: A History of the Italian Resistance, Verso, 2014, pg 472

^[14] P Secchia, Storia della Resistenza, Editori Riuniti, 1965, pg 1009, our translation

^[15] G Quazza, Resistenza e storia d’Italia, Feltrinelli, 1976, pg 331, our translation

^[16] C Pavone, A Civil War: A History of the Italian Resistance, Verso, 2014, pg 428

^[17] T Grant, ‘The Changed Relationship of Forces in Europe and the Role of the Fourth International (March 1945)’, Ted Grant Writings, Vol. 2, Wellred Books, 2012, pg 176

^[18] G Amendola, Lotta di classe e sviluppo economico, Editori Riuniti, 1962, pg 30-32, our translation and emphasis