The Prospects for Italian Communism
CICCOTTI, SIGFRIDO
Industrial workers quit—peasants, unemployed remain The Prospects for Italian Communism By Sigfrido Ciccotti Rome At 3 a.m. on the morning of December 30, after an 11-hour session, the Naples...
...The loss was greater in the industrial centers of the north, for in the south the party managed to hold its ground...
...Committee at the end of the congress, he said, was an outright fraud...
...Through sad experience, the workers learned that the Communist party was not quite what they thought it was, that it was more interested in opposing German rearmament and promoting the Stockholm Peace Appeal than in improving workers' living conditions...
...The election of the Central Sigfrido Ciccotti, an Italian Socialist journalist, was imprisoned for three -years by Mussolini...
...they looked to the Communists only for an immediate change in their plight...
...Its 27,000 inhabitants live, five in a room, in houses built by the municipality or the state...
...From the CP the workers expected a new classless society in the future, and in the present better salaries, decent health and accident insurance, good housing and—most important in a nation with two million unemployed—security of employment...
...The charter including this article had just been approved at the national party congress two weeks earlier...
...Living standards are improving visibly as well as statistically...
...Because not all its life-sources have been attacked, it will continue to hover over the political scene during 1957...
...In 89 major cities where the CP went to the polls alone (in others, it ran on a common ticket with Pietro Nenni's Socialists), the Communists lost about 10 per cent of the votes they had obtained in the 1953 Parliamentary elections...
...Reale, who had played a leading role in reorganizing the party after the fall of Fascism, was considered an outstanding Communist intellectual...
...Industrial workers, gradually recovering from the Communist infection, will reach political maturity within several years and could be the backbone of a healthy, vital democracy...
...Thus Italian Communism has been wounded in recent months...
...During the 1948 election, the Communists sent agents through the countryside with maps showing the landed property of the area...
...Here more than economic measures are required...
...More than 1,500 live in wood-and-tin shacks...
...Evidently, many things have changed...
...Rightly or wrongly, the tenant farmer, small peasant or farm hand feels he has nothing to lose by a change...
...The situation is quite different for the day laborer, the unskilled worker, the farm-hand and tenant farmer...
...The first great sign of change came in 1954, when the CGIL, the Communist-directed labor federation, lost its majority in the FIAT shop committee in Turin...
...On the other hand, the news coming from Eastern Europe (and not from capitalist propaganda sources) increased the widespread suspicion that workers' conditions deteriorate under Communism...
...The peasants did not really believe these promises, but they voted Communist all the same: "How clever these devils are...
...The Communist party helps him fight the landowner...
...don't forget to mark a cross on the head of Garibaldi printed on the ballot...
...These people never worried about the ultimate meaning of a Communist society...
...The middle class, though still under the spell of nationalistic prejudices, is slowly realizing the benefits of the democratic order...
...they distrusted the Social Democratic leaders and voted for the Communists, who seemed most determined to defend them against capitalist exploitation...
...The result is that, because industrial workers now have something to lose, they are abandoning the CP step by step...
...on the morning of December 30, after an 11-hour session, the Naples directorate of the Communist party expelled Senator Eugenio Reale, former Italian Ambassador to Poland and member of the Constituent Assembly...
...Nevertheless, despite these conditions (which are to a large extent inherited from the tragic past), the general condition of Italy has improved substantially in the last decade...
...Other factory elections in the Milan-Turin-Genoa industrial triangle revealed the same trend...
...After World War II...
...The following year, the pro-Communist vote among the FIAT workers dwindled to 25 per cent...
...It is obvious that these people have nothing to lose, come what may...
...The Italian peasant does not own the land he tills and cannot acquire it after years of hard work...
...Another denunciation also led to Realo's expulsion...
...Agrarian reform has already made some dent into the problem of landless peasants...
...The question was answered to some degree by nationwide local elections in May 1956...
...For by 1957 Italian industrial workers had attained a living standard which they want to improve, but which they also consider a conquest worth defending...
...Togliatti was 60 at the time, the girl 28...
...when one family gets an apartment in the public housing project, another moves from somewhere to occupy the abandoned hut...
...After showing the peasant the land he was tilling, the agent registered his name in a book along with the acreage of the farm, details on the composition of the family and so on: "This land will be yours if the Popular Front wins the election...
...In the last elections, the Communist bloc won 58 per cent of the votes, the neo-Fascists 16, the four democratic parties a total of 26 per cent...
...if such reforms are pursued even more energetically in the future, the results will be most salutary...
...The Communists were clearly losing ground among the workers...
...In this district, there is only one school and one doctor...
...Over two decades, Mussolini gave them little bread but many circuses against the picturesque backdrop of the balcony empire...
...It was the well-known electoral system of Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin...
...he helps the party with his vote...
...The time of reckoning had arrived: The worker began to realize not only that he had little to gain from the Communists, but also that in a Communist society he had something to lose...
...This feeling is even stronger among the unemployed, the unskilled workers, the whole great heterogeneous multitude that swarms in the outskirts of the great cities without trade, craft or calling...
...The electoral commission had omitted the name of Leonildo lotli from the ticket...
...Italy's recent history demonstrates that freedom and social justice must go together, or neither will prevail...
...Most Italian industrial workers still adhere to the socialist tradition and its ideal of a classless society...
...Some 41 per cent of Italians live on agriculture, and of these less than a third own the land they till...
...The Naples directorate condemned Reale for "false and slanderous judgments" given in declarations and interviews with the "bourgeois and reactionary press...
...The peasant, with his deep conservative instincts and lack of ideological interest, has never been concerned with the victory of Communism...
...It should be no surprise that Communist propaganda thrives among landless peasants...
...National income is rising at an annual rate of 5 per cent, a rate second in Europe only to West Germany...
...Reale immediately declared that he had not been permitted to state his case to the Naples directorate— despite Article 49 of the Party Charter which says that "a comrade under a disciplinary proceeding has the right to be notified of the charge against him, to defend himself and to be present at the meeting of the board...
...it was hastily added at the congress by distributing a "second edition" of the ticket...
...The immediate question was: Would the trend of factory elections be repeated in political elections...
...It also must be kept in mind that the ostentatious luxury of a small minority is an insult to the poverty of the majority, a roadblock on the democratic path...
...He has only one love, the land, and only one enemy, the padrone (land owner...
...In the Quarticciolo, a typical center of this Lumpenproletariat in the suburbs of Rome, there is poverty, filth, unemployment, lack of communications...
...Reale had attacked the last party congress (December 8-14) as a frameup staged by the group around Palmiro Togli-atti...
...But with the experiences of the last few years, a greater number of progressive democrats know the weapons which can destroy it...
...De-Stalinization, even Hungary, does not alter this situation...
...To return to Reale, who has since come out for a united Socialist party-based on democracy, how is it that this man—who saw "people's democracy" at work in Poland in 1946-47, who reads the newspapers, and who did not say a word when the 1950 party congress chose its Central Committee by acclamation—suddenly woke up in December 1956 to discover that "there is no democracy" in the Communist party...
...Leonildo Iotti is the former secretary of Togliatti whom he married in Moscow in 1950, a year after repudiating his wife, an old-guard Communist...
...These are the plebs who in ancient times clamored for panern et circenses...
...The unemployed and the Lumpen-proletariat represent the thorniest problem, one which can only be dealt with by an aggressive social policy...
...He edited Italia Libera in Buenos Aires until 1946, when he went back to Italy...
...Then came the crumbling of Stalinist mythology, the amazing address by Khrushchev, the Poznan strike, Gomulka, the Hungarian Revolution...
...But we'll vote for them: It's good medicine for the padrone...
...Interestingly enough, the party's vice-secretary also recently divorced his wife—in San Marino—and married his young secretary...
...Even a Communist regime, he feels, cannot be worse than present conditions...
...This, of course, was true: The party directorate had selected an electoral commission, the electoral commission had selected 80 names for the Central Committee, and this list was submitted to the delegates—who had no right to substitute other names...
...All evidence since last May indicates that this workers' march away from Communism is continuing...
Vol. 40 • January 1957 • No. 3
