The Southern Question
The incentive for these notes comes from the publication in the Quarto Stato of September 18th of an article on the southern question, signed Ulenspiegel, to which the editors of the review have added a somewhat ridiculous preface. Ulenspiegel comments, in his article, on a recent book by Guido Dorso (La Rivoluzione Meridionale) and refers to the opinion which Dorso has expressed on our party's position on the question of the South; in their preface the editors of Quarto Stato, who proclaim that they are "young men who are perfectly well acquainted in its general lines (sic) with the southern problem", protest collectively against any "merit" being allowed to the Communist Party. So far so good; the young men of the Quarto Stato type have, at every time and place, sustained on paper their very different opinions and made their protests without the paper rebelling. But then these "young men" add in their text: "We have not forgotten the magic formula of the Turin Communists which was: divide the estates among the rural proletariat. That formula is worlds removed from any sane, realistic view of the southern problem." And so it is necessary to straighten things out, since the only "magic" thing that exists is the effrontery and dilletante superficiality of the "young" writers of the Quarto Stato.
The "magic formula" is a complete invention. And the "young men" of the Quarto Stato must have a very low opinion of their highly intellectual readers if it is their habit to turn truth upside down with such wordy pomposity. Here, indeed, is an extract from Ordine Nuovo for January 3rd, 1920, in which the viewpoint of the Turin Communists is summarised:
"The bourgeoisie of the North has subjected southern Italy and the Islands and reduced them to the status of exploited colonies; the proletariat of the North, in emancipating itself from capitalist enslavement, will emancipate the peasant masses of the South who are chained to the banks and the parasitic industrialism of the North. The economic regeneration of the peasants must not be sought in dividing up the uncultivated and badly cultivated lands, but in solidarity with the industrial proletariat, which needs in its turn the solidarity of the peasants, and which is greatly interested in seeing that capitalism is not reborn economically from landed property, and also that southern Italy and the Islands shall not become a military base for capitalist counter-revolution. In imposing workers' control over industry, the proletariat will direct industry towards the production of agricultural machinery for the peasants, of textiles and shoes for the peasants, and of electrical energy for the peasants; it will prevent industry and the banks carrying out any further exploitation of the peasants and chaining them like slaves to their strongboxes. In breaking up the autocracy in the factories, destroying the oppressive apparatus of the capitalist State, and installing the workers' State, which will subject capitalists to the laws of useful work, the workers will break all the chains which bind the peasant to poverty and despair; in installing the workers' dictatorship, having in its hands industry and the banks, the proletariat will direct the enormous power of state organisation towards helping the peasants in their struggle against the landowners, against nature and against poverty; it will give credit to the peasants, institute co-operatives, guarantee personal security and property against plunderers, and carry out public expenditure for development and irrigation. It will do all this because it is in its own interests to increase agricultural production, to win and conserve the solidarity of the peasant masses, and because it is in its own interest to direct industrial production towards the useful aim of peace and brotherhood between town and country, between North and South."
This was written in January, 1920. Seven years have passed and we are seven years older politically as well; one or two concepts could be expressed better today—the period immediately following the conquest of the State, characterised by simple workers' control over industry, could and should be better distinguished from the later periods. But what is important to note here is that the fundamental concept of the Turin Communists was not the "magic formula" of the division of the estates, but that of the political alliance between the workers of the North and the peasants of the South to overthrow the state power of the bourgeoisie: not only this, but the Turin Communists themselves (who, however, supported the division of the lands as subordinate to united class action) warned against any illusions of miraculous results from the mechanical partition of the estates. The article of January 3rd continues: "What does the poor peasant gain by invading uncultivated or badly cultivated lands? Without machines, without a dwelling on his place of work, without credit with which to await the harvest, without co-operative institutions which might acquire the harvest itself (if he lives to see the harvest without first having hanged himself from the sturdiest tree of the woodlands or the least diseased fig-tree of the uncultivated lands), and save him from the clutches of the usurers, what can a poor peasant gain from the invasion?" And nevertheless we favoured a very realistic and not at all "magic" formula of the land for the peasants; but we wanted it to be realised inside the framework of the general revolutionary action of the two allied classes, under the leadership of the industrial proletariat. The writers of the Quarto Stato have simply invented the "magic formula" which they attribute to the Turin Communists, thus showing that they are about as reliable as hack journalists and as scrupulous as small town intellectuals: even these are political elements who carry some weight.
In the proletariat camp, the Turin Communists have one undeniable "merit": they have brought the southern question to the attention of the vanguard of the working class, formulating it as one of the essential problems of the national policy of the revolutionary proletariat. In this sense they have contributed practically to bringing the southern question out of its indistinct, intellectualistic, so-called "concretist" phase, and made it enter a new phase. The revolutionary workers of Turin and Milan have become the protagonists of the southern question, and no longer Giustino Fortunato, Gaetano Salvemini, Eugenio Azimonti, Arturo Labriola, to mention only the names of the saints dear to the "young men" of the Quarto Stato.
The Turin Communists posed to themselves concretely the question of the "hegemony of the proletariat", in other words, of the social basis of the proletariat dictatorship and the Workers' State. The proletariat can become the leading and ruling class to the extent to which it succeeds in creating a system of class alliances which enables it to mobilise the majority of the working population against capitalism and the bourgeois State; this means, in Italy, in the actual relations existing in Italy, to the extent to which it succeeds in obtaining the consent of the large peasant masses. But the peasant question in Italy is historically determined, and is not "the peasant and agrarian question in general"; in Italy the peasant question has, through the determined Italian tradition, through the determined development of Italian history, assumed two typical and peculiar forms, the southern question and the Vatican question. To conquer the majority of the peasant masses means, therefore, for the Italian proletariat, to make these two questions its own from a social point of view, to understand the class exigencies that they represent, to incorporate these exigencies into its own revolutionary programme of transition, to place these exigencies among its aims in the struggle.
The first problem to be solved, for the Turin Communists, was that of modifying the political orientation and general ideology of the proletariat itself, as a national element which lives inside the complex of the life of the State and undergoes unconsciously the influence of the schools, of the newspapers, of the bourgeois tradition. It is well known what ideology is propagated through the multifarious forms of bourgeois propaganda among the masses of the North: the South is a lead weight which impedes a more rapid civil development of Italy; the southerners are biologically inferior beings, semi-barbarians or complete barbarians by natural destiny; if the South is backward, the fault is not to be found in the capitalist system or in any other historical cause, but is the fault of nature which has made the southerner lazy, incapable, criminal, barbarous, moderating his stepmother's fate by the purely individual outbursts of great geniuses, who are like solitary palms in an arid and sterile desert. The Socialist Party was very largely the vehicle of this bourgeois ideology among the northern proletariat; the Socialist Party gave its blessing to the whole "southernist" literature of the clique of so-called positivist writers like Ferri, Sergi, Niceforo, Orano and their minor followers, who in articles, sketches, stories, novels, books of impressions and memoirs repeated in various forms the same refrain; once again "science" had turned to crushing the wretched and the exploited, but this time it was cloaked in socialist colours, pretending to be the science of the proletariat.
The Turin Communists reacted energetically against this ideology, at Turin itself, where the tales and descriptions of the veterans of the war against "brigandage" in the South and the Islands had most influenced tradition and the popular spirit. They reacted energetically, in practical ways, succeeding in obtaining concrete results of the greatest historical importance, succeeding in creating, actually in Turin, the embryo of what will be the solution of the southern problem.
In fact, already before the war, there had occurred in Turin an episode which potentially contained all the action and propaganda developed in the post-war period by the Communists. When in 1914, through the death of Pilade Gay, Ward IV of the city became vacant and the question of the new candidate was posed, a group of Socialists to which belonged the future editors of Ordine Nuovo, aired the project of presenting Gaetano Salvemini as candidate. Salvemini was then the most advanced spokesman, in a radical sense, of the peasant masses of the South. He was outside the Socialist Party, and was moreover conducting a most lively and dangerous campaign against the Socialist Party, since his assertions and accusations had become among the working masses of the South a cause of hatred not only against Treves, Turati and d'Aragona but against the industrial proletariat as a whole. (Many of the bullets which the royal guards fired in '19, '20, '21, '22 against the workers were cast out of the same lead which had been used to print Salvemini's articles.) Nevertheless the Turin group wanted to make a demonstration around the name of Salvemini, in the sense that was put to Salvemini by Comrade Ottavio Pastore who came to Florence to get his consent for the candidature. "The workers of Turin want to elect a deputy for the Apulian peasants. The workers of Turin know that in the general elections of 1913 the overwhelming majority of peasants of Molfetta and Bitonto supported Salvemini; the administrative pressure of the Giolitti government and the violence of the gangs and the police prevented the Apulian peasants expressing themselves. The workers of Turin do not ask for pledges from Salvemini, neither of Party programme nor of discipline within the Parliamentary group; once elected Salvemini will answer to the Apulian peasants, not to the workers of Turin, who will carry on their propaganda according to their principles and will not be at all committed by the political activity of Salvemini."
Salvemini was unwilling to accept the candidature, although he was shaken and even moved by the proposal (at that time they were not yet talking of Communist "perfidy" and people were behaving honestly and pleasantly); he proposed Mussolini as candidate and pledged himself to come to Turin to help the Socialist Party in the election battle. In fact he held two great meetings at the Camera del Lavoro (the central trade union offices of the city, Trans.), and in the Piazza Statuto, where the masses saw and applauded in him the representative of the southern peasants who were oppressed and exploited in even more bestial and hateful ways than the proletariat of the North.
The orientation, potentially contained in this episode which developed no further only because of Salvemini's decision, was taken up again and applied by the Communists in the post-war period. We wish to recall the most salient and symptomatic facts.
In 1919 the "Young Sardinia" association was formed, the beginning and forerunner of what later became the Sardinian Party of Action. "Young Sardinia" set itself to unite all the Sardinians on the island and the mainland into a regional bloc capable of exercising a useful pressure on the government in order to obtain the fulfilment of the promises made to the soldiers during the war; the organiser of "Young Sardinia" on the mainland was one Professor Nurra, a socialist, who is very likely today one of the "young men" of the Quarto Stato who every week discover a new horizon to explore. Lawyers, professors and functionaries joined with the enthusiasm aroused by every new possibility of fishing for titles and medals. The foundation meeting, called at Turin for Sardinians living in Piedmont, had an imposing success to judge by the number who took part. Poor people were in the majority, common folk without any distinguishing qualifications, factory labourers, small pensioners, ex-carabinieri, ex-prison-guards, ex-customs-officials who carried on various small businesses; all were enthusiastic at the idea of finding themselves among compatriots, of hearing speeches about their country to which they continued to feel tied by innumerable threads of relationship, friendship, memories, suffering and hope—the hope of returning to their country, but to a more prosperous and richer country which offered prospects of livelihood, even though of a modest kind.
The Sardinian Communists, precisely eight in number, went to the meeting, presented their motion to the president, and asked to be allowed to speak to it. After the inflammatory and rhetorical discourse of the official speaker, adorned with all the frills of provincial oratory, after the audience had wept at the memory of past sufferings and of the blood spilt in the war by the Sardinian regiments, and had worked themselves up to a frenzy at the idea of a compact bloc of all the noble sons of Sardinia, it was very difficult to “put across” the opposition motion; the most optimistic prophesies were, if not for a lynching, at least for a walk to the police station after being saved from the consequences of the “noble scorn of the crowd”. This speech, if it aroused enormous surprise, was however, listened to with attention, and once the spell had been broken, rapidly, though methodically, drove home its revolutionary lesson. The dilemma—“Are you poor devils from Sardinia in favour of a bloc with the gentry of Sardinia who have ruined you and are the local overseers of capitalist exploitation, or are you for a bloc with the revolutionary workers of the mainland who want to overthrow all exploitation and emancipate all the oppressed?”—this dilemma was made to penetrate into the brains of those present. The vote was a tremendous success: on the one side a small group of overdressed ladies, high-hatted officials, professional people, all livid from rage or fear, and with about forty policemen forming an outer rim of consent; and on the other side the whole multitude of poor devils and women charming in their Sunday dresses, supporting the tiny group of Communists. One hour later at the Camera del Lavoro the Sardinian Socialist Educational Circle was set up with 256 members; the constitution of “Young Sardinia” was referred back sine die and never came into effect.
This was the political basis of the campaign carried on among the soldiers of the Sassari Brigade, a brigade of almost entirely provincial composition. The Sassari Brigade had taken part in the suppression of the insurrectionary movement at Turin in August, 1917; they were sure that it would never fraternise with the workers, on account of the memories of hatred which every repression leaves with the people even against the material instruments of the repression, and which it leaves with the soldiers, who remember their comrades killed by the insurgents. The Brigade was welcomed by a crowd of ladies and gentlemen who offered flowers, cigars and fruit to the troops. The state of mind of the soldiers is illustrated by this story of a leather worker of Sassari, charged with the first soundings of propaganda: "I approached a bivouac in Piazza X (the Sardinian soldiers in the first days camped in the squares as if in a conquered city), and spoke to a young peasant who had welcomed me cordially because I was from Sassari like him.
"What have you come to do in Turin?"
"We have come to fire on the gentry who are on strike."
"But it is not gentry who are on strike, it is the poor people and the workers."
"Here they are all gentry: they all wear collars and ties; they earn thirty lire a day. I know poor people and how they dress; at Sassari, yes, there are many poor people; all we countryfolk are poor and we earn one and a half lire a day."
" 'But I too am a worker and I am poor.'
"You are poor because you are Sardinian."
"But if I go on strike with the others, will you fire on me?"
"The soldier reflected a little, then putting his hand on my shoulder said: 'Listen, when you go on strike with the others, stay at home!'
The great majority of the Brigade, which only included a small number of mining workers from the Iglesias basin, were in this frame of mind. Still, after a few months, on the eve of the general strike of July 20th-21st, the Brigade was removed far from Turin, the old soldiers were sent on leave and the formation divided into three: a third went to Aosta, a third to Trieste, and a third to Rome. The Brigade was made to leave suddenly, at night; no elegant crowd cheered them at the station; their songs, if they were still martial songs, no longer had the same content as when they arrived.
Were these events without consequence? No, they had results which still persist today and continue to operate in the heart of the masses. In a flash they lit up brains which had never thought in such a way before and which remained impressed and radically changed. Our records have been dispersed, and many papers destroyed by ourselves in order not to provoke arrests and persecutions. But we remember tens of thousands of letters from Sardinia which reached the editors of Avanti; often collective letters, often letters signed by all the ex-combatants of the Sassari from a certain village. Through uncontrolled and uncontrollable ways our political standpoint was propagated; the formation of the Sardinian Party of Action was strongly influenced at the rank and file level, and it would be possible to recall in this connection episodes rich in content and significance.
The last recorded repercussion of this action took place in 1922, when, with the same purpose as the Sassari Brigade, three hundred carabinieri of the Legione di Cagliari were sent to Turin. At the editorial office of Ordine Nuovo we received a declaration of principle signed by a large number of these carabinieri. This echoed entirely our own assessment of the southern problem, it was a decisive proof of the correctness of our line.
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The proletariat had to make this its own line in order to give it political effect: that is understood. No mass action is possible unless the mass itself is convinced of the ends it wants to reach and the methods to be applied. The proletariat, in order to be able to rule as a class, must rid itself of all corporative hangovers, of all syndicalist prejudices and incrustations. What does this mean? That not only must the distinctions which exist between trades and crafts be overcome, but that it is necessary, in order to win the trust and consent of the peasants and of the semi-proletarian categories in the cities, to overcome prejudices and conquer certain egoistic traits which can exist and do exist in the working class as such, even when craft particularism has disappeared from its midst. The metalworkers, the joiners, the builders, etc., must not only think as proletarians and no longer as metalworkers, joiners or builders, but they must take a step forward: they must think as members of a class which aims at leading the peasants and the intellectuals, of a class which can conquer and can build socialism only if aided and followed by the great majority of these social strata. If it does not do this, the proletariat does not become a leading class, and these strata, who in Italy represent the majority of the population, remain under bourgeois leadership, and give the State the possibility of resisting and weakening the proletariat attack.
Well then: what has taken place in the field of the southern question shows that the proletariat has understood these duties. Two events should be recalled: one at Turin, the other at Reggio Emilia; that is to say in the citadel of reformism, of class corporativism, of working-class protectionism quoted as an example by the "Southernists", in their propaganda among the peasants of the South.
After the occupation of the factories the directors of Fiat proposed to the workers that the factory should be carried on as a co-operative. Naturally, the reformists were in favour. An industrial crisis was looming ahead. The prospect of unemployment brought anguish to working-class homes. If Fiat became a co-operative, a certain security of employment could result, especially for the most politically active workers, who were convinced that they were destined to be laid off.
The Socialist organisation, guided by the Communists, took a firm stand. They said to the workers:
"A great co-operative enterprise like Fiat can be taken over by the workers only if the workers have decided to enter into the system of bourgeois political power which today rules Italy. The proposal of the Fiat directors is part of Giolitti's political plan. In what does this plan consist? The bourgeoisie, already before the war, was unable to govern peacefully any more. The insurrection of the Sicilian peasants in 1894 and the insurrection at Milan in 1898 were the experimentum crucis of the Italian bourgeoisie. After the ten bloody years of 1890-1900 the bourgeoisie had to renounce its over-exclusive, over-violent, over-direct dictatorship: the peasants of the South and the workers of the North were rising simultaneously, even if not in a co-ordinated manner, against them. In the new century the ruling class began a new policy, that of class alliances, of political blocs of classes, i.e. of bourgeois democracy. It had to choose: either a rural democracy, that is, an alliance with the southern peasants, a policy of tariff freedom, of universal suffrage, of administrative decentralisation, of low prices for industrial products, or an industrial bloc of capitalists and workers, without universal suffrage, for tariff protection, for the maintenance of state centralisation (the expression of bourgeois rule over the peasants, especially in the South and the Islands), for a reformist policy in wages and freedom for trade unions. Not by chance it chose this second solution; Giolitti embodied the bourgeois rule, the Socialist Party became the instrument of Giolittian policy. If you look into it well you see that in the ten years 1900-1910 there took place the most radical crises in the Socialist and workers movement: the masses reacted spontaneously against the policy of the reformist leaders. Syndicalism was born, which is the instinctive, elementary, primitive but healthy expression of the working-class reaction against the bloc with the bourgeoisie and in favour of a bloc with the peasants, and in the first place with the peasants of the South. Just so: moreover, in a certain sense, syndicalism is a weak attempt by the southern peasants, represented by their most advanced intellectuals, to lead the proletariat. Who constitutes the leading nucleus of Italian syndicalism? What is the essential ideology of Italian syndicalism? The leading nucleus of syndicalism is almost exclusively made up of southerners: Labriola, Leone, Longobardi, Orano. The essential ideology of syndicalism is a new liberalism, more energetic, more aggressive, more pugnacious than traditional liberalism. If you look into it, you see that there are two fundamental questions over which arise the successive crises of syndicalism and the gradual passing over of syndicalist leaders into the bourgeois camp: emigration and free-trade, two subjects closely linked with the South. The phenomenon of emigration gives rise to the conception of the "proletarian nation" of Enrico Corradini; the Libyan war appears to a whole strata of intellectuals as the beginning of the offensive of the "great proletarian nation" against the capitalistic and plutocratic world. A whole group of syndicalists passed over to nationalism, in fact the Nationalist Party was originally constituted of ex-syndicalist intellectuals (Monicelli, Forges-Davanzati, Maraviglia). Labriola's book History of Ten Years (the ten years from 1900 to 1910) is the most typical and characteristic expression of this anti-Giolittian and "southernist" neoliberalism.
"In these ten years capitalism was strengthened and developed, and poured a part of its activity into the Po Valley. A profound change took place among the northern peasants; we saw profound class differentiation occur (the number of farm labourers increased by 50 per cent, according to the figures of the 1911 census), and to this corresponded a re-alignment of political trends and of spiritual standpoints. Christian Democracy and Mussolinism are the two most salient products of the period: the Romagna is the provincial crucible of this new activity; the farm labourer seems to have become the social protagonist in the political battle. Social democracy in its left-wing organisations (the newspaper L'Azione, of Cesena), and even Mussolinism fell rapidly under the control of the "southernists". L'Azione of Cesena was a provincial edition of Gaetano Salvemini's Unità. Avanti directed by Mussolini was slowly but surely transformed into a platform for syndicalist and southernist writers. Fanello, Lanzillo, Panunzio, Ciccoti became its assiduous contributors: Salvemini himself did not hide his sympathies for Mussolini, who also became a favourite with Prezzolini's Voce. Everyone remembers that in effect, when Mussolini left Avanti and the Socialist Party he was surrounded by this cohort of syndicalists and southernists.
"The most noteworthy repercussion of this period in the revolutionary field was the Red Week of June, 1914: the Romagna and the Marches were the centre of Red Week. In the field of bourgeois politics the most noteworthy repercussion was the Gentiloni pact. Since the Socialist Party, through the effect of the agrarian movement on the Po Valley, had returned, after 1910, to intransigent tactics, the industrial bloc, supported and represented by Giolitti, lost its efficacy: Giolitti changed his rifle to the other shoulder; for the alliance between bourgeoisie and workers he substituted the alliance between the bourgeoisie and the Catholics, who represent the peasant masses of Northern and Central Italy. As a result of this alliance the Conservative Party of Sonnino came to be completely destroyed, only preserving its smallest cell in Southern Italy around Antonio Salandra. The war and its aftermath have seen the development of a series of molecular processes of the utmost importance in the bourgeois class. Salandra and Nitti were the first two southerners to head the government (not to mention the Sicilians, naturally, like Crispi, who was the most energetic representative of the bourgeois dictatorship in the nineteenth century), and sought to carry into effect the bourgeois industrialagrarian plan for the South, Salandra in the conservative field, Nitti in the democratic field (both these heads of the government were solidly helped by the Corriere della Sera, i.e. by the Lombardy textile industry). Already before the war, Salandra sought to redirect the technical forces of state organisation in favour of the South, and sought to substitute for the Giolittian personnel of the State a new personnel which would embody the new course of bourgeois policy. You remember the campaign conducted in La Stampa especially in 1917-1918 in favour of close collaboration between the Giolittians and the Socialists in order to prevent the 'Apulianisation' of the State: that campaign was conducted in La Stampa by Francesco Ciccotti; in other words, it was precisely an expression of the existing agreement between Giolitti and the reformists. The question was not a small one and the Giolittians, in their obstinate resistance, reached the point of exceeding the limits allowed to a party of the big bourgeoisie and went as far as those demonstrations of anti-patriotism and defeatism which are in the memory of all. Giolitti is again in power today, the big bourgeoisie is again trusting him, as a result of the panic which seized them in face of the impetuous movement of the popular masses. Giolitti wants to domesticate the workers of Turin. He has defeated them twice: in last April's strike and in the occupation of the factories, both times with the help of the General Confederation of Labour, that is, of corporative reformism. He now thinks that he can bring them into the framework of the bourgeois state system. In fact what will happen if the Fiat workers accept the proposal of the Directors? The present shares will become debentures; the co-operative will have to pay a fixed dividend to the holders of debentures, whatever the state of business. The Fiat concern will be enmeshed in every way by the credit institutions, which remain in the hands of the bourgeoisie, which has an interest in reducing the workers to its will. The workers will necessarily have to tie themselves to the State, which 'will come to the help of the workers' through working-class deputies, through the subordination of the working-class political party to government policy. That is Giolitti's plan in its full application. The Turin proletariat will no longer exist as an independent class but only as an appendage of the bourgeois State. Class co-operation will have triumphed, but the proletariat will have lost its position and its role as leader and guide; it will appear to the mass of poorer workers as a privileged group, it will appear to the peasants as an exploiter like the bourgeoisie, since the bourgeoisie, as it has always done, will present the privileged nucleus of workers to the peasant masses as the sole cause of their sufferings and of their poverty."
The Fiat workers accepted our point of view almost unanimously, and the Directors' proposal was rejected. But this single experiment could not be sufficient. The Turin proletariat, by a whole series of actions, had shown that they had reached a very high level of political maturity and capacity. The technical and supervisory grades and factory clerks, in 1919, were able to better their conditions only because they were supported by the workers. In order to break up the agitation of the higher grades, the industrialists proposed to the workers that they should themselves nominate, by election, new foremen and new superintendents; the workers rejected the proposal, although they had several reasons for conflict with the supervisory grades who had always been an instrument of the bosses for repression and victimisation. Then the newspapers conducted a furious campaign to isolate these grades, drawing attention to their very high salaries which reached up to 7,000 litre a month. The technical workers helped the agitation of the manual workers, who only in this way were able to impose their will: inside the factory all the privileges and exploitation by which the more qualified categories benefited at the cost of the less qualified were swept away. Through this action the proletariat vanguard won for itself the social position of a vanguard: this has been the basis for the development of the Communist Party at Turin. But outside Turin? Very well, we wanted to take the matter outside Turin and precisely to Reggio Emilia, where there used to exist the greatest concentration of reformism and class co-operation.
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Reggio Emilia had always been the target of the "southernists". A phrase of Camillo Prampolini: "Italy is divided into Northerners and filthy Southerners",1 was a most characteristic expression of the violent hatred against the workers of the North among the southerners. At Reggio Emilia a similar question to that at Fiat was presented: a large factory was to pass into the hands of the workers as a co-operative enterprise. The Reggio reformists supported the proposal enthusiastically and trumpeted it around in their newspapers and meetings. A Turin Communist went to Reggio, spoke at a mass meeting in the factory, dealt with the question of the North and the South in all its complexity, and the "miracle" was achieved: the workers by a very large majority rejected the reformist and corporative thesis. It was shown that the reformists did not represent the spirit of the workers of Reggio; they only represented its passive and negative sides. They had succeeded in establishing a political monopoly, in view of the remarkable number of capable organisers and propagandists at their disposal, and therefore in preventing the development and organisation of a revolutionary trend; but the presence of one capable revolutionary was sufficient to put them to flight and reveal that the Reggian workers were brave fighters and not pigs bred on government corn.
In April, 1921, 5,000 revolutionary workers were laid off by Fiat, the Factory Councils were abolished, real wages were reduced. At Reggio Emilia something similar probably happened. The workers, in other words, were defeated. But has their sacrifice been useless? We do not think so: rather are we sure that it has not been useless. It is certainly difficult to draw up a list of mass events to demonstrate the immediate effects of these actions. But as regards the peasants, such lists are always difficult and almost impossible to draw up, especially in the case of the peasant masses of the South.
The South can be described as an area of extreme social disintegration. The peasants who constitute the great majority of the population have no cohesion among themselves. (Naturally it is necessary to make exceptions: Apulia, Sardinia, Sicily, where special conditions exist inside the broad framework of the southern structure.) The society of the South is a great agrarian bloc consisting of three social strata: the large, amorphous, scattered peasant masses; the intellectuals of the petty and middle rural bourgeoisie; the big property owners and the top intellectuals. The southern peasants are in perpetual ferment, but as a mass they are incapable of giving a unified expression to their aspirations and their needs. The middle strata of intellectuals receives from the peasants the impulses for its political and ideological activity. The big property owners in the political field and the top intellectuals in the ideological field hold together and dominate, in the last analysis, all this complex of phenomena. As is natural, it is in the ideological field that centralism shows itself with greatest effect and precision. Giustino Fortunato and Benedetto Croce therefore represent the keystones of the southern system and, in a certain sense, are the two greatest figures of Italian reaction.
The southern intellectuals are among the most interesting and important strata in Italian national life. It is sufficient to remember that three-fifths of the State bureaucracy is composed of southerners to be convinced of this. Now, in order to understand the particular psychology of the southern intellectuals it is necessary to take the following facts into account:
- In every country the stratum of the intellectuals has been radically altered by the development of capitalism. The old type of intellectual was the organising element of a society based predominantly on peasants and artisans; in order to organise the State and to organise trade, the ruling class bred a particular type of intellectual. Industry has introduced a new type of intellectual: the technical organiser, the specialist of applied science. In societies where the economic forces are developed in a capitalist sense to the point of absorbing the major part of national activity, it is this second type of intellectual which has prevailed, with all its characteristics of intellectual order and discipline. But in those countries where agriculture still plays a large and even a preponderant role, the old type has remained prevalent, providing most of the State personnel and locally, in the small towns and rural centres, carrying out the function of intermediary between the peasant and the administration in general. In Southern Italy this type predominates, with all its characteristics: democratic in its peasant face, reactionary when its face is turned towards the big property owner and the government, much given to political intrigue, corrupt, disloyal; one would not understand the traditional character of the southern political parties unless one took into account the character of this social stratum.
- The southern intellectual comes mainly from a class which is still widespread in the South: the rural bourgeois, that is, the small and middle land-owner who is not a peasant, who does not work the land, who would be ashamed to carry on agriculture, but who wishes to extract from the little land he has, let out on lease or in mezzadria semplice,2 enough to live comfortably, to send his sons to the university or the seminary, to provide dowries for his daughters whom he hopes to marry to State officials or civil servants. From this class the intellectuals derive a strong aversion for the peasant labourer whom they look on as a living machine that must be worked to the bone and can easily be replaced in view of over-population: they also inherit an atavistic and instinctive feeling of crazy fear of the peasant and his destructive violence, and hence a habit of refined hypocrisy and a most refined skill in deceiving and breaking in the peasant masses.
Since the clergy belong to the social group of the intellectuals it is necessary to note the differences in character between the southern clergy as a whole and the northern clergy. The northern priest is usually the son of an artisan or a peasant; he has democratic sentiments and closer ties with the peasant masses; he is morally more correct than the southern priest, who often openly co-habits with a woman, and he therefore exercises a more socially complete spiritual office, that is to say, he is the leader of all family activity. In the North the separation of the Church from the State and the expropriation of ecclesiastical property has been more thoroughgoing than in the South, where the parishes and convents have preserved or reconstituted a good deal of both fixed and moveable property. In the South the priest appears to the peasant:
- as a bailiff with whom the peasant comes into conflict over the question of rents;
- as a usurer who demands the highest rates of interest, and plays up religious obligations to secure the payment of rent or interest;
- as a man who is subject to common passions (women and money) and so spiritually inspires no confidence in either his discretion or impartiality.
Confession, therefore, has little significance, and the southern peasant, though often superstitious in a pagan sense, is not priest-ridden. This whole set-up explains why in the South the Popular Party (except in certain zones in Sicily) has comparatively little influence, and possesses no apparatus of institutions and mass organisations. The attitude of the peasant towards the clergy is summed up in the popular saying: "The priest is a priest at the altar; elsewhere he is a man like any other."
The southern peasant is tied to the big landowner through the activity of the intellectual. The peasant movements, in so far as they are not expressed in at least formally autonomous and independent mass organisations (i.e. organisations capable of selecting peasant cadres of peasant origin and of reflecting the differentiations and progress achieved in the movement) always end up by losing themselves in the ordinary forms of the State apparatus—Communes, Provinces, Chamber of Deputies—through the combinations and breaking up of the local parties, which consist of intellectuals but are controlled by the big property owners and their trusted men, like Salandra, Orlando or di Cesaro. The war seemed to introduce a new element into this type of organisation with the ex-servicemen's movement, in which peasant-soldiers and intellectual-officers formed themselves into a more united bloc which was to a certain extent antagonistic to the big landowners. It did not last long and its last remnant is the National Union conceived by Amendola, which still has a glimmer of existence thanks to its antifascism; nevertheless, because there is no tradition of explicit organisation of the democratic intellectuals of the South, even such a grouping as this is significant, since from being a mere trickle it can in different political conditions become a torrent. The only region where the ex-servicemen's movement assumes a clearer outline and is succeeding in creating a more solid social structure is Sardinia. And this is natural: precisely because in Sardinia the class of big landowners is very small, does not carry out any necessary function and does not have the very old cultural and governmental traditions of the mainland South. The pressure from below exercised by the mass of peasants and shepherds is not suffocated by the counterweight of the upper stratum of big proprietors: the leading intellectuals take the whole pressure, and have in some ways moved further forward than the National Union. The Sicilian situation is profoundly different from either Sardinia or the South. The big property-owners there are much more cohesive and resolute than in the mainland South; in addition there exists a certain amount of industry and a highly developed trade (Sicily is the richest region of all the South and is one of the richest in Italy); the upper classes feel strongly their importance in the national life and make it carry weight. Sicily and Piedmont are the two regions which have given the greatest number of political leaders to the Italian State, and are the two regions which have played a prominent role since 1870. The Sicilian masses are more advanced than in the South, but progress there has taken on a typically Sicilian form; a Sicilian mass socialism exists with its own peculiar tradition and development; in the Chamber in 1922 it numbered about twenty—out of the fifty-two deputies elected in the island.
We have said that the southern peasant is tied to the big property-owner through the activity of the intellectual. This tie-up is typical for the whole of the mainland South and Sicily. There has thus been created a monstrous agrarian bloc which as a whole acts as an intermediary and overseer for northern capital and the big banks. Its sole aim is to preserve the status quo. Inside it there is no intellectual light, no programme, no urge towards betterment and progress. If a few ideas and programmes have been put forward, they have had their origin outside the South, in the conservative agrarian political groups, especially in Tuscany, which were the parliamentary partners of the southern agrarian bloc. Sonnino and Franchetti were among the few intelligent bourgeois who saw the southern problem as a national problem and outlined a government plan for its solution. What was the point of view of Sonnino and Franchetti? The necessity of creating in southern Italy an independent middle stratum of such an economic character as would, as they then said, represent "public opinion", on the one hand limiting the arbitrary cruelties of the property-owners and on the other moderating the insurrectionism of the poor peasants. Sonnini and Franchetti were terrified by the popularity of the Bakuninist ideas of the First International in the South. This fear of theirs led them to make mistakes which were often grotesque. In one of their publications, for example, they mentioned that a popular inn in a Calabrian village (I am quoting from memory) was called "The Strikers" (Scioperanti) as proof of the insidious spread of the International's ideas. The fact, if it is a fact (as it must be if one accepts the writer's integrity) is more simply explicable if one recalls how numerous are the Albanian colonies in the South and how the word Skipetari has undergone many stranger and more curious alterations (thus in some documents of the Venetian Republic military formations of S'ciopera are spoken of). Now the trouble in the South was not so much that the theories of Bakunin were widespread, as that the situation itself was such as to have probably suggested his theories to Bakunin: certainly the poor southern peasants' thoughts turned to "ruination" long before Bakunin's brain had thought out the theory of "pandestruction".
The government plan of Sonnino and Franchetti never even got started, nor could it. The keystone of the relations between North and South in the organisation of the national economy and the State, is that the birth of a widespread middle class, in the economic sense (which means the birth of a widespread capitalist bourgeoisie), is rendered almost impossible. All accumulation of capital on the spot, and all accumulation of savings is rendered impossible by the fiscal and tariff system and by the fact that the capitalist owners of businesses do not transform their profit locally into new capital because they are not local people. When in the twentieth century emigration expanded on an enormous scale and the first returns began to flow from America, the liberal economists shouted triumphantly: Sonnino's dream will come true, a silent revolution is taking place in the South, which slowly but surely will change the whole economic and social structure of the country. But the State intervened and the silent revolution was suffocated at birth. The government offered treasury bonds at a certain interest and the emigrants and their families changed from being agents of the silent revolution into agents for giving the State the financial means for subsidising the parasitic industries of the North. Francesco Nitti who, as a democrat formally outside the southern agrarian bloc looked as if he were capable of realising Sonnino's programme, was in fact the best agent of northern capitalism for raking off the last resources of southern savings. The billions swallowed up by the Banca di Sconto came almost entirely from the South: the great majority of the 400,000 creditors were southern savers.
Above the agrarian bloc there functions in the South an intellectual bloc which in practice has up to now served to prevent the splits in the agrarian bloc becoming too dangerous and causing a landslide. The spokesmen of this intellectual bloc are Giustino Fortunato and Benedetto Croce, who for this reason can be regarded as the most industrious reactionaries of the peninsula.
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We have said that Southern Italy is an area of extreme social disintegration. This formula can apply to the intellectuals as well as to the peasants. It is noteworthy that in the South, alongside the biggest properties, there have existed and do exist great accumulations of culture and intelligence in single individuals or in restricted groups of top intellectuals, whereas there exists no organisation of average culture. In the South there is the Laterza publishing house, and the review La Critica, there are the Academies and cultural enterprises of the greatest erudition; but there are no small and medium reviews, there are no publishing houses around which average groups of intellectuals gather. The southerners who have sought to leave the agrarian bloc and pose the southern question in a radical form have grouped themselves around reviews printed outside the South. Moreover it can be said that every cultural enterprise of the middle intellectuals launched in the twentieth century in central and northern Italy has been characterised by “southernism”, since all have been strongly influenced by the southern intellectuals. So be it: the supreme political and intellectual moderators of all these enterprises have been Giustino Fortunato and Benedetto Croce. In far wider circles than the stifling circle of the agrarian bloc they have seen to it that the presentation of the southern problem should not exceed certain limits, should not become revolutionary. Being men of the greatest culture and intelligence, born out of the traditional soil of the South but tied to European and so to world culture, they have had enough talent to give some satisfaction to the intellectual needs of the more honest representatives of the cultured youth of the South, in order to assuage their restless, feeble longing for revolt against existing conditions, and to lead them into the middle way of classical serenity of thought and action. The so-called neo-Protestants or Calvinists have not understood that in Italy, since modern conditions of civilisation make any religious Reformation of the masses impossible, the only historically possible Reformation has taken place with the philosophy of Benedetto Croce: directions and methods of thought have been changed, a new conception of the world has been built up which has superseded Catholicism and every other mythological religion. In this sense Benedetto Croce has fulfilled a supreme “national” function: he has detached the radical intellectuals of the South from the peasant masses, making them share in national and European culture, and by means of this culture he has caused them to be absorbed by the national bourgeoisie and so by the agrarian bloc.
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If in a certain sense Ordine Nuovo and the Turin Communists can be linked with the intellectual formations which we have mentioned, and if therefore they also have suffered the intellectual influence of Giustino Fortunato and Benedetto Croce, they nevertheless represent at the same time a complete break with that tradition and the beginning of a new development which has already yielded and will again yield fruits. As has already been said, they have made the urban proletariat the modern protagonist of Italian history and so of the southern question. Having served as intermediaries between the proletariat and certain strata of left-wing intellectuals, they have succeeded in modifying, if not completely, certainly to a noteworthy extent, the latter's mental orientation. This, if you think about it, is the principal element in the figure of Piero Gobetti. He was not a Communist, and probably would never have become one, but he understood the social and historical position of the proletariat and his thought could no longer be divorced from this element. Gobetti, in his newspaper work with us, had been placed by us in contact with a living world which before he had only known through books. His most outstanding characteristic was his intellectual loyalty and complete absence of any vanity or pettiness: because of this he could not but convince himself of the falsity of a whole series of traditional ideas about the proletariat. What consequences did this contact with the proletariat world have for Gobetti? It afforded the origin and impulse for a conception which we do not wish to discuss and fathom here, a conception which in a great part was linked up with syndicalism and the ways of thought of the syndicalist intellectuals: the principles of liberalism were here raised from the level of individual phenomena to that of mass phenomena. The qualities of excess (eccedenza) and prestige in the life of individuals are transferred into classes, conceived almost as collective individuals. This conception usually leads the intellectuals who share it to pure contemplation and awarding points, to the odious and stupid position of arbiter between the contestants, of a bestower of prizes and punishments. In practice Gobetti fled from this destiny. He showed himself an organiser of culture of extraordinary value and he had in this last period a function which must not be ignored or underestimated by the workers. He dug a trench beyond which those more honest and sincere groups of intellectuals who in 1919-20-21 felt that the proletariat would be superior as a ruling class to the bourgeoisie, did not retreat. Some honestly and in good faith, others dishonestly and in bad faith went around repeating that Gobetti was nothing but a camouflaged Communist, an agent, if not of the Communist Party, at least of the Communist group of Ordine Nuovo. It is not even necessary to repudiate such silly tittle-tattle. The figure of Gobetti and the movement represented by him were spontaneous products of the new historical climate in Italy: in this lies their significance and importance. On some occasions there have been reproaches by Party comrades for not having fought against this "liberal revolutionary" current of ideas; rather, this absence of a struggle seemed the proof of the organic link, of a Machiavellian character (as people used to say), between Gobetti and ourselves. We could not fight against Gobetti because he was developing and represented a movement which should not be fought, at least in principle. Not to understand this means not to understand the question of the intellectuals and the role which they play in the class struggle. In practice Gobetti served us as a link: (1) with the intellectuals born in the field of capitalist technique who had taken up a left-wing position, favourable to the dictatorship of the proletariat, in 1919-1920; (2) with a series of southern intellectuals, who as a result of more complex connections, saw the southern question on a different basis from the traditional one, introducing into it the proletariat of the North: of these intellectuals Guido Dorso is the most complete and interesting figure. Why ought we to have fought against the "Liberal Revolution" movement? Perhaps because it was not composed of pure Communists who had accepted our programme and doctrine from A to Z? This could not be demanded because it would have been politically and historically a paradox.
The intellectuals develop slowly, much more slowly than any other social group, because of their own nature and historical role. They represent the whole cultural tradition of a people, and they wish to recapitulate and synthetise the whole of [its] history: this may be said especially of the old type of intellectual, of the intellectual born on peasant soil. To think it possible that this type can, as a mass, break with the whole of the past in order to place itself wholeheartedly on the side of a new ideology, is absurd. It is absurd for the intellectuals as a mass, and perhaps absurd also for very many intellectuals taken individually, despite all the honest efforts they make and want to make. Now the intellectuals interest us as a mass, and not only as individuals. It is certainly important and useful for the proletariat that one or more intellectuals, individually, adhere to its programme and its doctrine, merge themselves with the proletariat, and become and feel themselves an integral part of it. The proletariat, as a class, is poor in organising elements, does not have and cannot form its own stratum of intellectuals except very slowly, very laboriously and only after the conquest of State power. But it is also important and useful that a break of an organic kind, characterised historically, is caused inside the mass of the intellectuals: that there is formed, as a mass formation, a left-wing tendency, in the modern sense of the word, that is, one which is orientated towards the revolutionary proletariat. The alliance between the proletariat and the peasant masses requires this formation: so much the more does the alliance between the proletariat and the peasant masses of the South require it. The proletariat will destroy the southern agrarian bloc to the extent to which, through its Party, it succeeds in organising ever larger masses of peasants in autonomous and independent formations; but it will succeed to a more or less large extent in this obligatory task according to its capacity to break up the intellectual bloc which forms the flexible but very resistant armour of the agrarian bloc. In carrying out this task the proletariat has been helped by Piero Gobetti and we believe that the friends of the dead man will continue even without his guidance the work which has been undertaken. This work is gigantic and difficult, but precisely because of this it is worthy of every sacrifice (even of life, as it has been in the case of Gobetti) on the part of those intellectuals of the North and the South (and they are many, more than one thinks), who have understood that only two social forces are essentially national and the bearers of the future: the proletariat and the peasants. . . . (Here the MS. is broken off.)