A Civil War (153 page)

The Actionist Giorgio Diena declared that ‘a classless society would certainly be the best guarantee of liberty', and that the enormous power of the ‘state as manager of the economy' need not ‘necessarily be handled in bureaucratic forms'. But he was equally convinced that, when it came down to it, things would end up being anti-libertarian: ‘Stalin is therefore the logic of the revolution and is its saviour.'
⁶⁵
Another Actionist, Leo Aldi (Franco Venturi), shifted the discourse to the terrain of political institutions: ‘an economic critique of socialism' he wrote, ‘leaves this central problem unanswered', and does not succeed in being truly anti-totalitarian.
⁶⁶

On several occasions
Avanti!
polemicised against those who saw the socialist state as necessarily centralising, despotic and bureaucratic: on the contrary, the socialist state would allow a vast range of solutions, from nationalisation to
cooperatives, to small family ownership, especially in agriculture.
⁶⁷
In many texts cooperatives are indicated as the most valid institution for achieving the difficult goal of squaring the circle. The Actionists rejoiced when they found some ‘Communist but not governmentalist', in other words a champion of cooperatives.
⁶⁸
A Tuscan Action Party document spoke of cooperatives as the rule, from which nationalised and individual firms should be only the exceptions: thus the factory would become the ‘autonomous cell of public life'.
⁶⁹
Even the ‘extremists' of the Communist Movement of Italy demanded the transfer to the state of all means of production, and in order to achieve this to ‘cooperatives or other collective associations'.
⁷⁰
In presenting his decrees on the occupation of uncultivated land, the Communist minister of agriculture, Fausto Gallo, who probably did find himself not isolated within his own party on this point alone, spoke of ‘collective forms of managing the land', namely cooperatives, the ‘cell of future organisation'.
⁷¹
The flowering immediately after the war of many cooperatives, which were soon to wither, should be seen in relation to this aspiration, albeit vague, among workers, often ex partisans, to ‘run things by themselves',
⁷²
to do it themselves, with neither private nor public masters.
⁷³

There are clear connections between the polemic against, or even quite simply distrust of, state-controlled running of the economy and the stances taken against totalitarianism. Certainly, this category was to enjoy wide circulation above all in the years of the Cold War, and the Communists or Communist-oriented left-wing factions would look on it with suspicion. But the idea was very much present among the
resistenti
, to the extent that anti-totalitarianism could be regarded as an essential feature of the Resistance throughout Europe.
⁷⁴
A brake was, however, put on the explicit and generalised use of the opposing couple totalitarianism–anti-totalitarianism by the presence of the USSR among the major Allies, and by the fundamental contribution that the Communists
made to the Resistance movements. To reduce the democratic significance of this contribution to a fallacy, or worse still a deception, would be not so much to oversimplify as to parody history. From 22 June 1941, just as the USSR kept mum about the capitalistic nature of Great Britain and the USA, so the two Anglo-Saxon countries did likewise about the totalitarian nature of the Soviet state. In the shadow of this mutual discretion, the Communists of the individual countries enjoyed remarkable autonomy, which should be identified more in the profound significance acquired by their conduct than in their clearly expressed ideological dissent from the leading state.

Within this general scenario explicit stances were taken against totalitarianism as such, and not all of these were expressed with the delicacy that Ettore Passerin d'Entrèves was to use in 1965 when, speaking of the Resistance as an ‘anti-totalitarian revolution', he added: ‘even if many germs of totalitarianism are still fermenting on the banks of various rivers'.
⁷⁵
Il Risorgimento Liberale
undoubtedly considered Communism a new version of totalitarianism, though conceding that Russia was ‘run by an enlightened dictatorship'.
⁷⁶
The Catholics, some from excessive insouciance, some out of genuine democratic sentiments, played down the seeds of ‘Christian totalitarianism' present in their political culture,
⁷⁷
but eagerly spoke out against totalitarianism ‘of any leaning'. The radical and explicit anti-totalitarianism of the Action Party was neither restorative, like the Liberal version, nor ambiguous, like the Catholic one. The ‘democratic revolution' could not be other than anti-totalitarian as well. Foa spoke of the ‘totalitarianism innate in every exclusivistic approach to the proletarian initiative.'
⁷⁸
The document written by the Action Party of the North on the Salerno ‘turning-point' says: ‘Certainly we are not turning a blind eye to the totalitarian aspects of modern mass tendencies'; it was therefore necessary to overcome ‘the Marxist class concept of politics, anarchism, and bureaucratic reformism', in order to achieve an ‘anti-totalitarian socialism'.
⁷⁹

An argument not frequently encountered occurs in another Action Party pamphlet, clearly written with the memory of the consequences of the First World War still fresh in the author's mind: namely that ‘the economics of war, the very technique of war have a profound tendency to drive even those forces that least want it down the road of totalitarianism'.
⁸⁰
This was a realistic appeal
to guard against the structural drives making for totalitarianism that were set in motion by war itself – even by that war which was being won against it.

And it is perhaps in the alarm against that fragmentation of man which foreshadows his authoritarian recomposition, whatever weight is given to its economic structures, that we should seek the intrinsically anti-totalitarian motif which, in different forms, to different degrees and at different levels of awareness, traverses much of the shared mentality of the Resistance, regardless of the political or military side one belonged to.

On receiving the news of the Liberation of Paris, Ada Gobetti recalled the suffering experienced four years before at the time of the fall of the city, but was tormented by the thought that the world that collapsed then would never again be reborn:

The use of the formula ‘new order' – the very same one that the Nazis used to designate the Europe they wanted – bespeaks a profound anxiety, and prompts the confident optimism manifested on so many occasions by Gobetti to reckon with that culture of crisis that had had one of its centres precisely in Paris, and in which the radical criticism of the existing era contained a thread of nostalgia for at least certain aspects of the past. Fascism, by freezing some elements of that culture, had kept Italy outside a full awareness of the crisis, precipitating it rather into the flaccid optimism of which events had duly demonstrated the utter vacuity. Anti-Fascism was thus, by and large, insensitive to the ambiguities of twentieth-century culture, even if some of its exponents sensed its disquieting presence.
²
The anti-Fascists had before them, at least initially, an enemy with clear and well-marked features. The ‘tension that anti-Fascism introduced into moral life'
³
concealed the ambiguities of the culture of crisis,
and bestowed nobility on certain archaic features that belonged to anti-Fascism itself. By blaming all, or almost all, of the disasters brought about by contemporary society on Fascism, the anti-Fascists and the
resistenti
, on the one hand, were held back from analysing the society from which the crisis had sprung, and on the other bequeathed to post-Fascist society a faith – perhaps a trifle ingenuous, but certainly solid – in the future of democracy. This process was favoured by the fact that, to bring oneself finally to the level of the advanced countries, whose image was optimistically simplified, was considered an objective worthy of a long, hard and all-absorbing commitment by the whole Italian people. As often happens with ‘latecomers', the future as the present of others held back the planning of the future as a radical innovation.
⁴

The Catholics had their own specific position on this point. In them one encounters a bipolarity between their adoption as an apologetic argument of the culture of crisis and prophecies of the collapse of civilisation and a realism that sketches out the future by making itself the interpreter of the average situations and aspirations of the present. Since the nineteenth century, the Jesuit fathers had preached that those who have sown the wind shall reap the whirlwind. Now that the whirlwind, provoked by the de-Christianisation of society – or better, by its turning away from the teaching of the Catholic Church – had well and truly been unleashed, all that remained was to take stock of its consequences and seek to govern them, without ever tiring of denouncing their causes. This appeared the only way to ‘contend with the Communists for the future city'; otherwise all that would remain would be black ‘pessimism about the future'.
⁵
The tragedy that had befallen the modern world could thus be resolved in the triumph of the truth improvidently violated and ‘in the design to elaborate a genuinely “Catholic solution” ' to the crisis of civilisation.
⁶

‘Without needing to appeal to the apocalyptic and woolly Spengler, we consider that in this century we are witnessing the end of a cycle of civilisation': hence, wrote a Catholic broadsheet of the Resistance period, ‘the religious duty, the obligation of conscience' to unite in a party, to organise oneself politically in order to impose an honest political order on the country.
⁷
While the Church was guaranteeing the essential and final fruits of the ‘Catholic solution', a wide
space was opening up for immediate action by Catholics present in society and engaged in the political struggle. The triumphant apocalyptics and the re-emergent empiricists thus protected each other, both fronts reiterating Catholic ‘diversity'. The realism of the politicians, their supple adherence to the creases and contradictions of Italian society, were favoured by the fact that it was not so much a question of changing society as of ‘saving it' by continuing the work of re-conquest that had been proceeding since 1929 under the protective wing of the Fascist regime.

In 1897 Gaetano Salvemini had identified the strength of the ‘neo-Guelph' party as lying in the fact that it knew how to stamp the hallmark of ‘order' on its criticism of liberal and capitalistic society.
⁸
In 1933 Sergio Paronetto, one of the interlocutors to whom De Gasperi paid most heed, spoke critically of the New Deal and the dangers that it involved, and predicted its failure if it were not detached from the optimistic–rationalistic model of the lay democracies and did not assimilate the model of ‘Latin equilibrium and measure, and still more of the primacy of the spirit and of Christian realism'.
⁹

The capacity of the soaring spirit to coexist with a realism that observes and mingles with the world was to be the basis of the political success of the Italian Catholics, who were ready to proclaim the maximum faith in man but at the same time never to lose sight of the weaknesses and depths of human nature that bore the wound of original sin. The soaring flight rediscovered man's equality before God; the low-flying one observed, to quote
Il Popolo
, ‘the social distinctions and qualifications of wealth, work and culture', attributing to them a ‘trivial importance before simple humanity', and thus reducing them to a ‘purely technical value'.
¹⁰

In order to put a brake on aspirations to ‘make it all new', Don Moretti, the priest who organised the Osoppo formations, said that he preferred ‘the new patch to the old suit':
¹¹
it was after all a suit you reckoned to know well, and whose durability you could vouch for. Thus, having kept the Utopian aspiration as it were suspended, it was possible to get down to programmes with no Utopia, at times irritating those Catholic
resistenti
who, engaged in action and even critical of the maximalism of the young men reared in Catholic Action, considered the programmatic preoccupations of the Christian Democrat politicians as often mistaken or less useful to immediate ends.
¹²
A like degree of irritation was probably kindled in the Catholic partisans, for its one-sidedness, by the thanks given to providence for having sent ‘this period of inner preparation, of concentration,
of whetting one's energies for tomorrow's activity'.
¹³
‘Faith in man' and ‘acting in the real world … for Christian civilisation' were the two central exhortations of another article in
Il Popolo
.
¹⁴
The objection raised to the Communists' project for the unitary organisation of the young (the ‘Youth Front') is telling: the proposal did not seem to the Christian Democrats to ‘correspond with the reality of things'.
¹⁵
The ductility of this realism did not exclude the unity represented by the CLN;
¹⁶
indeed it bent it to its own ends, and at the same time paved the way for that degree of innovation that would have come about in any case, being, to a considerable extent, the work of those who had felt its allure and urgency least intensely.