(A report despatched in July 1920 to the Executive Committee of the Communist International)
One of the members of the Italian delegation that has just returned from Soviet Russia reported to the workers of Turin that the platform set up to welcome the delegates at Kronstadt bore the following inscription: "Long live the April 1920 general strike in Turin". It was with great pleasure and satisfaction that the workers greeted this piece of news. The majority of the members of the Italian delegation to Russia had been opposed to the April general strike. In their articles against the strike, they maintained that the Turin workers had been suffering under an illusion and had over-estimated the importance of the strike. So the Turin workers were very pleased to hear of the sympathetic action of the Kronstadt comrades, and they said to themselves: "Our Russian Communist comrades have a better understanding and estimation of the importance of the April strike than the Italian opportunists, and in this way have taught them a good lesson."
The April movement in Turin was in fact a glorious chapter in the history, not only of the Italian, but of the European proletariat - and even, one might claim, in the history of the world-wide proletariat. In fact, this was the first time in history that a proletariat engaged in struggle for control over production, without being driven into action through the privations and sacrifices involved, carried the struggle through to its conclusion. The metal-workers struck for one month; the other categories of workers struck for ten days. In its last ten days, the general strike encompassed the whole of Piedmont, mobilizing about half a million industrial and agricultural workers; this means that it involved about four million of the population.
The Italian capitalists exerted every effort to stifle the Turin workers' movement. All the means of the bourgeois State were placed at their disposal, while the workers had to fight on their own, without any assistance whatsoever either from the leadership of the Socialist Party or from the Geijeral Confederation of Labour. Indeed, the leaders of the Party. and the Confederation spurned the Turin workers, and did all in their power to prevent the workers and peasants of Italy from taking any revolutionary action that might have enabled them to demonstrate their solidarity with their Turin brothers and give them some effective assistance. But the Turin workers did not lose heart. They bore the whole brunt of the capitalist reaction, but observed discipline right up to the very last moment. And even after the defeat, they remained faithful to the banner of communism and world revolution.
The propaganda issued by the anarchists and syndicalists against Party discipline and the dictatorship of the proletariat had no influence over the masses, even after the betrayal of the leaders caused the strike to end in a defeat. In fact the Turin workers swore to step up their revolutionary struggle and to wage it on two fronts: on the one hand' against the victorious bourgeoisie, and on the other against their own treacherous leaders. The revolutionary consciousness and discipline which the Turin masses demonstrated have their historical roots in the economic and political conditions in which the class struggle developed in Turin.
This city is a purely industrial centre. Nearly three quarters of the population, which numbers half a million inhabitants, is made up of workers - petty-bourgeois elements are insignificant in number. Furthermore, there is a solid mass of clerks and technicians in Turin, all of whom are organized in unions and affiliated to the Chamber of Labour. During all the major strikes they stood by the workers, with the result that, if not all of them, then at least a majority have acquired the mentality of a true proletarian, struggling against capital to achieve the revolution and communism.
Viewed from outside, the process of production in Turin is perfectly centralized and homogeneous. The engineering industry, which employs about 50,000 shop-floor workers and 10,000 clerks and technicians, is the most important. The FIAT plants alone employ 35,000 workers, clerks and technicians; in this firm's principal plants, 16,000 workers are employed producing motor vehicles of every kind, using the most modern and advanced techniques. The production of motor vehicles is the characteristic feature of the Turin engineering industry. The greater part of the work-force is made up of skilled workers and technicians; these do not, however, share the pettybourgeois mentality of skilled workers of some other countries - for example, England. Motor vehicle production, which is the dominant feature of the engineering industry, has subordinated other branches of production to itself: for example, the wood-working and rubber industries. The metal-workers form the vanguard of the Turin proletariat. Given the characteristics of this industry, every time the metal-workers take action they spark off a general mass movement that takes on political and revolutionary overtones, even if it began in the pursuit of merely trade-union objectives.
Turin possesses a single important trade-union organization, the Chamber of Labour, which has 90,000 workers affiliated to it. The existing anarchist and syndicalist groups have virtually no influence whatsoever over the mass of workers, who opt firmly and decisively for the Socialist Party section, which in turn is made up for the most part of communist workers. The communist movement has the following battle organizations at its command: the Party section with 1,500 members, 28 clubs with 10,000 members and 23 youth organizations with 2,000 members. There is a permanent and autonomous communist grouping within every one of these organizations. The individual groupings are combined, by area, into ward groupings, which in turn are represented in a steering committee within the Party section. This committee concentrates the whole of the city's communist movement in its hands, as well as the leadership of the mass of the workers.
Before the bourgeois revolution which created the present order in Italy, Turin was the capital of a small state, comprising Piedmont, Liguria and Sardinia. At that time, commerce and light industry predominated in the city. After the unification of the Kingdom of Italy and the transfer of the capital to Rome, it seemed that Turin stood in danger of losing its importance. But the city soon recovered from its economic crisis and became one of the most important industrial centres in Italy. One can say that Italy now has three capitals: Rome, as administrative centre for the bourgeois State; Milan, as the country's commercial and financial centre (all the banks, commercial offices and finance houses are concentrated in Milan); and finally Turin, as industrial centre. It is in Turin that industrial production has attained its maximum level of development. When the capital was transferred to Rome, the whole of the intellectual petty and middle bourgeoisie emigrated from Turin and furnished the new bourgeois State with the administrative personnel it needed to function. On the other hand, the development of heavy industry in Turin attracted the cream of the Italian working, class to that city. The process of development of Turin as a city, both from the point of view of Italian history and from that of the Italian proletarian revolution, is fascinating.
This was how the Turin proletariat came to assume the spiritual leadership of the Italian working masses, who are bound to the city by family ties, ties of history and tradition, as well as intellectual bonds (it is the ideal of every Italian worker to be able to work in Turin). All this explains why the working masses from one end of Italy to the other wanted to demonstrate their solidarity with the general strike in Turin, even at the cost of going against the will of their leaders. They view this city as the centre, as the capital of the communist revolution - the Petrograd of the proletarian revolution in Italy.
During the 1914-18 Imperialist War, Turin witnessed two armed insurrections. The first, which broke out in May 1915, had as its aim the prevention of Italy's intervention in the war against Germany (on this occasion the Casa del Popolo was sacked). The second, in August 1917, took on the character of a large-scale revolutionary struggle.
The news of the March revolution in Russia was greeted in Turin with indescribable joy. The workers wept with emotion when they heard that the Tsar's regime had been overthrown by the workers of Petrograd. But the Turin workers did not allow themselves to be taken in by the demagogic rhetoric of Kerensky and the Mensheviks. When the mission sent to Western Europe by the Petrograd Soviet arrived in Turin in July 1917, the delegates Smirnov and Goldenberg, who appeared before a crowd of 50,000 workers, were greeted by deafening shouts of "Long live Lenin! Long live the Bolsheviks!" Goldenberg was none too pleased with this reception - he could not fathom how Comrade Lenin had acquired such popularity amongst the workers of Turin. Nor should it be forgotten that this episode occurred after the suppression of the Bolshevik revolt in July, and at a time when the bourgeois press in Italy was raging against Lenin and the Bolsheviks, denouncing them as bandits, intriguers, agents and spies of German Imperialism. From the date of Italy's entry into the war (24 May 1915), the Turin proletariat had held no mass demonstration.
The impressive gathering that had been organized in honour of the delegates from the Petrograd Soviet signalled the beginning of a new wave of mass movements. Not a month had passed before the workers of Turin rose in arms against Italian Imperialism and militarism. The insurrection broke out on 23 August 1917. For five days the workers fought in the streets of the city. With rifles, grenades and machine-guns at their disposal, the insurgents even managed to occupy several quarters of the city and to make three or four attempts to gain control of the centre, where the government institutions and military command posts were situated.
But two years of war and reaction had weakened the formerly powerful organization of the proletariat, and the workers, with their inferior supply of arms, were defeated. In vain they counted on support from the soldiers - but these latter had allowed themselves to be taken in by insinuations that the revolt had been staged by the Germans. The people erected barricades, dug trenches, and surrounded some of the districts with electrified barbed-wire entanglements. For five days they repulsed all attacks from the troops and police. Over 500 workers were killed and a further 2,000 seriously injured. After this defeat, the best elements were arrested and sent away, and the proletarian movement lost its revolutionary drive. Nevertheless, the communist sympathies of the Turin proletariat were not extinguished.
Evidence of this can be found in the following episode. A short time after the August insurrection, elections were held for the Administrative Council of the Turin Co-operative Alliance (TCA), a vast organization that supplies the basic needs for a quarter of the people of Turin.
The TCA is made up of the Railwaymen's Co-operative and the General Association of Workers. For many years the Socialist section in the city had controlled the Administrative Council, but now it no longer had the capacity to carry out any effective agitation amongst the working masses. The capital of the Alliance was made up for the most part of shares in the Railwaymen's Co-operative owned by the railwaymen and their families. The growth registered by the Alliance had increased the value of the shares from 50 to 700 Lire. Nevertheless, the Party succeeded in persuading the shareholders that the aim of a workers' co-operative is not to secure a profit for its individual members, but to strengthen the means of revolutionary struggle; so the shareholders contented themselves with a dividend of 3.5 per cent on the nominal value of 50 Lire rather than on the real value of 700 Lire. After the August insurrection, a committee of railwaymen was formed, with the support of the police and the bourgeois and reformist press, to put an end to Socialist Party control of the Administrative Council. Shareholders were promised immediate liquidation of the 650 Lire difference between the nominal and current value of every share. Railwaymen were promised especially favourable treatment in the supply of foodstuffs. The reformist traitors and the bourgeois press wheeled out every means of propaganda and agitation in order to transform the Co-operative from a workers' organization into a commercial business run along petty -.bourgeois lines. The working class was exposed to all manner of persecutions. Censorship drowned the voice of the Socialist section. And yet, in spite of all these persecutions and brutalities, the Socialists - who had never at any time abandoned their point of view concerning the workers' Co-operative - i.e. that it was a weapon to be used in the class struggle - obtained a majority once again within the Co-operative Alliance. The Socialist Party received 700 out of 800 votes, despite the fact that most of the electors were white-collar railway workers and might have been expected, after the defeat of the August insurrection, to have wavered in their loyalties and even to have shown reactionary tendencies.
After the close of the Imperialist War, the proletarian movement made rapid advances. The working masses of Turin were well aware that the historical period opened up by the war was profoundly different from the pre-war epoch. The Turin working class was quick to perceive the nature of the IIIrd International as a body of the world proletariat, with the role of directing the civil war, seizing political power, setting up the proletarian dictatorship and establishing a new order in economic and social relations. In all the workers' Assemblies, it was the economic and political problems of the revolution that formed the subject of discussion. The best elements in the workingclass vanguard combined to produce a weekly newspaper of communist tendency, L'Ordine Nuovo. The columns of this weekly were devoted to discussion of the various problems of the revolution: what sort of revolutionary organization was needed by the masses who had to win the unions for the communist cause; how to shift tradeunion struggle out of its narrowly reformist and corporatist framework up to the level of revolutionary struggle, control over production and proletarian dictatorship. The question of Factory Councils too was placed on the agenda.
Small committees of workers were already in existence inside the Turin factories: they were recognized by the capitalists and some of them had already launched a campaign against the bureaucratism, reformist spirit and constitutional tendencies of the unions. But for the most part these committees were nothing more than creatures of the unions. The lists of candidates for the committees (the Internal Commissions) were drawn up by the trade-union hierarchies, who showed a preference for workers of opportunist tendency; workers who would give no trouble to the bosses and would stifle any mass action before it could start. What the followers of L'Ordine Nuovo emphasized most in their propaganda was the transformation of the Internal Commissions. They stressed that the lists of candidates should be drawn up by the working masses themselves and not by the upper echelons of the trade-union bureaucracy. The tasks they assigned to the Factory Councils were control over production, the arming and military preparation of the masses, and their political and technical preparation. They were no longer to play their former role of watchdogs protecting the interests of the dominant class, or to hold back the masses in their actions against the capitalist order.
Propaganda in support of the Factory Councils was enthusiastically received by the masses. Within six months, Factory Councils had been set up in all the engineering factories and workshops, and communists had won a majority in the metalworkers' union. The principle of Factory Councils and control over production was approved and accepted by the majority of delegates at congress, and by most of the unions belonging to the Chamber of Labour. The organization of the Factory Councils is based on the following principles: every single factory and workshop establishes its own organism, on a representative basis (and not on a bureaucratic basis, as in the previous system). This organism translates the proletariat's strength into reality; it struggles against the capitalist order, or exercises control over production, by educating the whole of the working masses for revolutionary struggle and the creation of a workers' State. The Factory Council has to be formed in accordance with the principle of organization by industry."' In the eyes of the working class, it must represent a model of communist society, which will be attained via the dictatorship of the proletariat. In this society, class divisions will be a thing of the past: all social relations will be regulated in accordance with the technical requirements of production and its corresponding organization, and will not be subordinate to an organized State power. It is vital that the working class should see the full beauty and nobility of the ideal for which it is struggling and making so many sacrifices. It must realize that to attain this ideal, several stages must first be passed through. It must recognize the necessity for revolutionary discipline and dictatorship.
Every factory is subdivided into workshops and every workshop into crews with different skills; every crew carries out a particular part of the work-process. The workers in each crew elect one of their number as delegate, giving him an authoritative and revocable mandate. The assembly of delegates from the entire factory makes up a Council, and this Council elects an executive committee from its own ranks. The assembly of political secretaries of the various executive committees forms in turn a central committee of the Councils, and this central committee elects from its own number an education committee for the whole city, with the task of organizing propaganda, drawing up work plans, approving projects and proposals from individual factories and even individual workers, and finally giving general leadership to the whole movement.
Some of the functions of the Factory Council have a purely technical and even industrial character: for example, control over technical personnel, dismissal of employees who show themselves to be enemies of the working class, the struggle with management to win rights and freedoms and control over the factory's production and financial operations. The Factory Councils soon took root. The masses greeted this form of communist organization with enthusiasm; they aligned themselves with the executive committees and energetically supported the struggle against capitalist autocracy. Despite the fact that neither the industrialists nor the trade-union bureaucracy were willing to recognize the Councils and committees, they nevertheless obtained some notable successes: they threw out the capitalists' agents and spies; they forged links with the office workers and technicians to get hold of financial and industrial information. In the affairs of the factory, they concentrated disciplinary power in their own hands and showed the disunited and fragmented masses what direct control by workers in industry means.
The activity of the Councils and Internal Commissions was demonstrated most clearly during strikes. Strikes lost their impulsive, fortuitous character and became an expression of the conscious activity of the revolutionary masses. The technical organization and capacity for action of the Councils and Internal Commissions was perfected to such a degree that it was possible within five minutes to get 16,000 workers scattered throughout 42 departments at FIAT to down tools. On 3 December 1919 the Factory Councils provided tangible evidence of their capacity to lead mass movements on a grand scale. Acting on orders from the Socialist section, which held control over the whole of the mass movement in its hands, and without any preparation whatsoever, the Factory Councils were able to mobilize 120,000 workers, called out factory by factory, in the course of just one hour. This armed proletariat was launched like an avalanche into the city centre and soon cleared the streets and squares of all the nationalist and militarist riff-raff.
At the head of the movement to form Factory Councils were the communists belonging to the Socialist section and the trade-union organizations. Anarchists took part as well, seeking to counterpose their pompous rhetoric to the clear and precise language of the Marxist communists. However, the movement encountered determined resistance from the trade-union officials and from the leadership of the Socialist Party and Avanti!. These people based their polemical assertions on the difference between the concept of a Factory Council and a Soviet. Their conclusions were of a purely theoretical, abstract and bureaucratic character. Behind their high-flown phrases was concealed their desire to prevent the masses from participating directly in the revolutionary struggle; their desire to maintain the unions' hold over the masses. The members of the Party leadership repeatedly refused to take the initiative in launching revolutionary activity, prior to the drawing-up of a co-ordinated plan of action - but they never made the slightest effort to prepare and elaborate this plan.
So the movement did not succeed in establishing itself outside Turin, for the whole machinery of the trade unions was set in motion to prevent the working masses in other parts of Italy from following the Turin lead. The Turin movement was derided, jeered at, insulted and criticized in every possible manner. The bitter criticisms of the union organizations and the Socialist Party leadership provided the capitalists with fresh encouragement and gave them a free rein in their struggle against the Turin proletariat and the Factory Councils. The meeting of industrialists that was held in Milan in March 1920 drew up a plan of attack. But the "guardians of the working class", its economic and political organizations, ignored these activities. Abandoned on all sides, the Turin proletariat was forced to confront the nation's capitalists and the power of the State entirely on its own, with its own resources. Turin was invaded by an army of police; around the city, cannon and machine-guns were placed at strategic points. And when all this military apparatus was ready, the capitalists set about provoking the proletariat. It is true that in face of these extremely adverse battle conditions, the proletariat hesitated in taking up the challenge. But when it was seen that a clash was inevitable, the working class came out boldly from its reserve positions, determined to carry the struggle through to a victorious conclusion.
The metalworkers struck for a whole month and the other categories of workers for ten days. Industry was at a standstill all over the province and communications paralysed. But the Turin proletariat was isolated from the rest of Italy. The central organs did nothing to assist it: they did not even publish a single manifesto to explain the importance of the Turin workers' struggle to the Italian people. Avanti! refused to publish the manifesto of the Party's Turin section. The Turin comrades had the labels "anarchist" and "adventurist" hurled at them from all sides. At that time the Party's National Council was due to be held in Turin; however, its venue was transferred to Milan, for a city "in the grip of a general strike" was not thought to be a suitable theatre for socialist discussion.
On this occasion, the bankruptcy of the men who were supposed to be leading the Party was displayed to its full extent. While in the city of Turin the workers were courageously defending the Factory Councils - the first organizations to be based on workers' democracy and embodying proletarian power - in Milan the leaders were chatting about theoretical projects and methods for creating Councils as a form of political power to be won by the proletariat. There were discussions on how to systematize conquests not yet won, while the Turin proletariat was abandoned to its fate and the bourgeoisie given the opportunity of destroying whatever power the workers had already won. The Italian proletarian masses demonstrated their solidarity with the Turin comrades in various ways: the railwaymen of Pisa, Livorno and Florence refused to transport troops bound for Turin, and the dockworkers and sailors of Livorno and Genoa sabotaged transport of materials through the ports. In many cities, the proletariat came out on strike in defiance of their union's orders.
The Turin and Piedmont general strike clashed head-on with the sabotage and resistance of the trade-union organizations and even the Party itself. Nevertheless, it had great educational significance, in that it demonstrated that a union between workers and peasants is possible in practice. Moreover, it highlighted the urgent need to combat the whole bureaucratic mechanism of the trade-union organs, which form the most solid bulwark for the opportunist activities of the parliamentarists and reformists who aim to stifle every revolutionary initiative on the part of the working masses.
Published for the first time in Russian, German and French in Communist International, 1920, No. 14.
Republished in Italian, unsigned, in the daily edition of L'Ordine Nuovo, 14 March 192 1, Vol. 1, No. 7 3.