Chapter Two
What forces were there for starting again, at the end of the 1940s? At the beginning of that road, you could count the core groups on the fingers of one hand: Genoa, its Sestri Ponente district, Savona, Rome. Of course, there were also Turin, Vicenza, Bologna, Milan, Bolzano, Trieste, Livorno, and a few sympathisers down South, but that was all it amounted to. Although there were periodic attempts at ‘linking up’ along the whole length of the peninsula, apart from the three Ligurian groups and the Tuscany-Lazio one, there wasn’t much more than a network of individual sympathisers.
The Savona group
Arrigo Cervetto, founder of Lotta Comunista and its undisputed leader until his death in 1995, was born in Buenos Aires in 1927, to a family who had emigrated from Savona. Returning to Liguria, he started work when still a boy, and in 1943 was taken on as an apprentice at the Ilva steel-making plant in Savona. The party archives contain a biographical sketch by Cervetto detailing the principal stages of his theoretical and political battle.10 Parts of this appeared in the 2005 collection Ricerche e scritti (Notes and Researches),11 which he wrote on the history of Savona and on the partisan struggle:
I worked at Ilva, on the night shift. The first night it seemed to me a real inferno, with all those machines that never stopped and the flows of steel that filled the factory with parks. I was afraid of falling asleep, because a lad who did had been struck by a steel bar that had slipped off one of the cars without his noticing. Another boy, from my neighbourhood, had been crushed to death by a casting ladle.
The experience of life in the foundry was the first decisive factor in shaping Cervetto, and the real inspiration for his historical research during the 1950s. It was to remain a sideline to his political thought: nevertheless it clearly reflects the ‘moral factor’ at the root of his political passion. What moved him was the idea of giving a voice to that anonymous army of producers who used up their existence within the walls of the foundry – the idea that was to become the militant battle for that class to have a revolutionary theory, to organise.
Years later, when I wrote one of the first accounts of workers’ struggles since 1861, I highlighted that the first spontaneous strike at the steel-making industry was one of protest and solidarity after a fatal industrial accident. Usually work was resumed after the dead were taken away, but on that occasion the workers downed tools. The bishop’s secretary, who was an expert in local history, told me that I had recorded historical testimony of a strike that had not taken place for economic reasons, but in the spirit of a precious Christian tradition. I replied that in this case solidarity was an antagonistic value, because it had been expressed for someone, but also against someone. In any case, I was well aware of all this, since I had lived it. Another time the historians of the Feltrinelli Library wrote to me because they found in my writing a class spirit that was missing from other, perhaps more scholarly, writings on the same subject.
The secret was simple: those pages contained what I had lived through. The dead boy, covered in the red dust of the foundry; my grandfather, seriously injured in the rolling-mill; the iron bar that took off one of my toenails; those freezing-cold mornings when even the sea seemed to be evaporating and those hot summer afternoons at Ilva. At last all the things of which official history takes no account and those workers who would never have a name or a voice would be able to make themselves heard through the thoughts of my brain and the words written by my hand. So many fragments of reality mingling in the dust of a million lives, scattered on the wind of time only to take form in my brain, take shape in my writing. I tried to be rational. I had no need of passion: their passion shone through it all. It was and is all my pride to be an instrument of revenge for all those fated to anonymity, all those alone in the material civilisation of a world which extols the individual only so that those few who matter will stand out. If, in this world, we remain only isolated individuals, we will never understand that we are the result of those millions who have gone before us, and that what we eat and wear, everything we use, is the fruit of collective work that has been going on for centuries.
Walk on the pavement and on the road; go up the stairs; switch on the light; make a telephone call; watch the television; listen to music: you are using not only the product of millions of workers at this moment in time but far more – you are using what has been produced by the millions who no longer exist. These people have left their souls in their work. The priest looks for the spirit in heaven, preventing us from seeing it here on earth, in the pavement under the soles of our shoes. What human beings make by their labour is immortal, and their immortality lies in what they have made. When the body decomposes, when the physical material of which it is made breaks down, human beings survive in what they have made, and this can never break down and disappear, because those who come after them need and use what this labour has produced. Without realising what they are doing, they carry it onwards, just as without being aware of it they carry within them genes millions of years old, and every one of their cells can only produce the new if the old makes it possible.
The labour of only a very few individuals is acknowledged and recognised. To only a very few is it granted to be remembered. The rest –almost all– ends up in the great communal grave of the human species. Yet, history is the past of that great communal grave. History, says Marx, is the story of class struggle. If we don’t look into the great cemetery, we cannot know what really happened. We will gaze only at the most ostentatious tombs, and never see the immense cemetery of the past. Who can know those billions of people who speak only through what they have made? And how can we hear their voices if we can’t listen to the beating heart of the productive forces?
I didn’t know all these things when, in that long-ago 1943, I worked the night shift at Ilva. But I felt them: they were part of my nature, of my life as a human being. Perhaps it was because there was so much of the animal in me that I succeeded in being to some small extent a human being. When, by reading a few Marxist texts and many history books I came to understand the material, I managed to give logical expression to what I had previously expressed in passionate confusion. Pages of the history of class struggle flowed over me like cool water. I felt as if I had lived them. I would walk along the street mentally addressing the thousand unknown characters in those pages. In the library I plunged into old newspapers and went on talking to all those who had made the street on which I was walking. After many years, I found my grandfather again. I had no money, but I was living the richest days of my youth. I was young amidst the old of the past and I was old amidst the youth of the present. And when I drew the first conclusions from that research, passion and reason fused into the pleasure of finally giving a voice to those who had had no voice in life. I was convinced they spoke through me.
The first «communist group» in which Cervetto found himself was entirely spontaneous: a group in the Villapiana neighbourhood of Savona, meeting at the local bar and boxing club. At work, impatience with the regime and the call to communism of the old PCI militants transmitted the first elements of politics to the youth of the neighbourhood.
Working at Ilva also meant being in touch with how the mood against the war and Fascism was gathering momentum. Along with this mood went the ideas of a vaguely understood communism. None of this was new to me. You could hear this mood expressed in the bars, it was quite usual, but it never took on any more exact political tone. People played cards and pool like they always did. As always in bars, the mood was mainly directed at how the game was going, but it was quite usual for those players who were Fascists to let comments that touched on politics pass with indifference. Basically, not many of us younger ones talked about politics for long. Along with a few others, I’d got together a communist group that had no contact with any other organisation; a restricted group, without any possibility of expansion, since it was based exclusively on friendship. I remember those young friends and comrades of mine, but some of them from a long way away because they didn’t survive; they fell on the hills of the Langhe*. Elia, Bruno and Pietro will never again feel the spring sun that warmed me during those days, the sun that today touches my memory of them. But I had years ahead of me to know Piero and Nino, to remember them more clearly. I’m one of the few still left alive of that young group who wanted to rebel against the world. But if you don’t have a lever to move the world, the world rolls over you, and we didn’t have the lever. We didn’t even think we needed one. We put our heads down and drove on with the force of a simple idea of communism – that of the songs of protest, equality, liberty.
Piero and Nino were Piero Parisotto and Antonio Bogliani, Cervetto’s first comrades in the true political sense. Parisotto, ‘commandant Moose’ in the partisan struggle, had been a member of the PCI Youth Front from 1943; in 1946 he left the party to move on, along with Cervetto and Bogliani, to libertarian communism. He became involved in the activities of GAAP, but proved unable to bear the harshness and disillusions of the postwar period, and committed suicide in 1953. Bogliani – partisan codename ‘Shadow’, Cervetto’s close friend and contemporary – was later to work at Servettaz-Basevi, a firm manufacturing ship-unloading systems, and would remain a militant revolutionary until his early death in 1973. Cervetto has left a vivid picture of him in his ‘Notebooks’:
One evening, in the spring of 1942, Nino and I were wandering along the main street of the city. The black-out was on. Suddenly, amid the silence of the few passers-by, bedlam broke out. Fascist shouts threatened truncheon blows**. Two men ran past us and slipped into a sidestreet, then stopped and began to sing Bandiera Rossa. Nino and I were a few steps away from them, so we joined in the chorus. Today it would be just a case of making a din late at night. At that time it was a challenge: a childish challenge, but not one that arose out of boredom. Voices and threats proliferated in the darkness, and the shoes of those eager to teach us a lesson started to run in our direction. Of course we took off, and when we rounded the corner one of the men was waiting for us. He patted us happily on the shoulder. We were even happier than he was [...] We went to Nino’s house, laughing in reckless stupidity. Nino had no parents: he lived with his grandfather, a retired dock worker. When we ran away from home to join the partisans in the hills, we had no money for the train fare to Ceva***. Nino ran back home and took half the stuffing out of his grandfathers mattress. We sold the wool to a lame money-lender.
“The poor old soul – his bones will feel it when he gets in bed”, I told Nino, and he started to laugh. Whenever we remembered that episode, we used to burst out laughing, even if years had gone by. Now I’m laughing alone. The old man died just after the war ended. I saw Nino die in hospital, and with him went a friend, a brother, a comrade, part of our shared adolescence, of a youth during which we bad shared the same difficulties, the same struggles, the same ideals.
It’s hard for me to recall this friendship without becoming emotional [...] It’s hard to understand how one forms a friendship that defies time. It’s even more difficult to understand what sort of emotion friendship is. Although maybe our friendship wasn’t so hard to understand. We were two boys on our own, with no money and no chance of getting any. When we had no cigarettes, Nino used to pick up cigarette ends, swearing, and roll me a cigarette. I was embarrassed, but I’d make fun of him; then he would grumble. He’d be critical of me, but then, as always, we’d start to laugh together. When be ended up in prison for a couple of years because of some loose ends from his partisan days, as soon as I got my first pay packet I bought tobacco and a jacket and sent them to him at the prison of Alessandria. I didn’t exactly leave myself without cigarettes, but I certainly smoked less for a while. I’d have picked up cigarette ends myself, that time.
When he got out, we used to go to an open-air dance hall, more to drink than to dance. There was a girl who was a friend of my sister’s, and he talked about her so much that I made a sort of proposal on his behalf. A little later they got married.
Nino was impulsive, a bit of a muddler, a strong and cheerful man in his private life. Only someone with his nature could have come unscathed through so many hardships and stayed an optimist with a hint of naivety. On first appearances he didn’t seem like that because he was a great grumbler, but then immediately he would tell some risqué joke. Basically earnest and loyal, he remained the boy who had helped me live through those hard years. We understood each other because we knew each other well. We loved each other because in struggle, amid ironies, illusions and hopes, we had grown up together. Those years have passed, and my friend is no longer with me.
Of the three young friends who fell in the partisan struggle, we can be certain of the identity of only one: Elia Sola, junior boxing champion, member of an autonomous partisan brigade, taken prisoner by the Fascists and shot in Carrù, Piedmont, in February 1945. Not much else is known about the young group from Villapiana, except that being part of the partisan struggle was as crucial for them as their experience of working life in the factory.
At least one other of this trio was either killed in combat or executed. Cervetto was wounded in July 1944. Parisotto was to commit suicide a few years later. Bogliani would spend two years in prison due to the convoluted events that followed the liberation of Italy on 25th April 1945. Those years were scarred by disillusion, even desperation, and painful attempts to make sense of all that had happened. Largely because of his links with workplace politics, Cervetto was the natural leader of this group.
Because of my readings, I was the politician of the group, and for years Piero and Nino continued to see me as such, with a boundless faith that was their most precious gift to me. They continued to see me as they had during those days of struggle, when trust was put in the man rather than in what he was saying – “Arrigo said so”. I was probably just stating the obvious, but this didn’t matter to them; they had faith in what I was doing, what I was saying followed on from that. When you’re risking your life, political relations get reduced to their essence. Everything depends on how you work together, everything comes out of what you think of each other. It’s hard to imagine just how much this sort of judgement is decisive, at times to the exclusion of everything else. In politics you pay for your mistakes during times of normality, but not with your life: faith can’t be as intense as it is in exceptional moments. Yet it’s precisely during these moments that character is forged, and becomes a permanent part of personality. Certain features become exaggerated. If you’re afraid, there’s no escape; if you’re indecisive, there’s no loophole; if you pull back, you can’t explain it away – you’ve pulled back. At that level of risk, when politics becomes action, relationships become hypersensitive and take on an almost animal instinct. Faith and mistrust are the two sides of this instinct. There are times when your instinct can let you down, but if you manage to survive it means that it’s been more or less useful – and anyway, you can’t rid yourself of it.
When the exceptional moments have passed, politics becomes rational, but even the most rational politics will appeal to the passions the more its struggle becomes out of the ordinary. In the political struggle there always comes a time when you pull out all your resources. This applies to the classes and their class parties.
Cervetto considered 25th July 1943 to have been his true political baptism. His close comrades remember the summer of 1993 and a toast – somewhat short on rhetoric – to fifty years of militancy: the plastic cups, the detached irony, and the simple gaiety of that anniversary contrasting with the parliamentary political catastrophes that were wending to their end in those months that ran between the fall of the USSR and Tangentopoli****.
Cervetto recalled 1943, in the contradiction between the instinctive passion driving forward the struggle and the impossibility of understanding the world events in which they were caught up.
I’d come off shift at Ilva and report the discussions Id heard and the informal contacts I’d had with older communist workers. For everyone, Russia was a mythical place, it was the dream. Nino, who exonerated everything, used to say that in that ‘paradise’ even the children belonged to the whole of society, not to the family. Poor Nino: he was an orphan. And after an hour’s dreaming we’d start to play pool or go spar with each other in the gym. So the evenings would pass, and sometimes even the nights, listening to American music or Radio London [...]
It didn’t take much for us to take to the streets on 25th July. From the Fascist militia barracks shots rang out. One woman fell dead, others were wounded. Guidocaught a bullet in the leg. It seemed as if everything was ending, but really it was just beginning. We were still waving leaflets. Soon, we would be wielding weapons. On 8th September the barracks were sacked; people ran to take away blankets, uniforms, boots, sacks of pasta and sugar. They looked like ants. The Germans watched us and laughed. We found rifles and ammunition. We were as happy as if we’d found the treasure of Mompracem*****. We thought we were equipping a rebel army, but what we got was a thousand excuses: nobody wanted them. So, amid tears of disillusion, my true political apprenticeship began. The dream lost part of its innocence and reality forced itself on me in all its brutality. We cursed everyone; we distrusted everyone. Those were black days of anger and isolation. Then they were over. Consciousness, and the recklessness of our youth, took over. We started to make light of things again, to convince ourselves that in the end it was better this way. We were a small group, we knew each other well and we felt ourselves to be strong. In fact, the only strength we had was our willpower. That was how we started to challenge the Fascists.
When I think about it now it seems unreal. If I hadn’t lived it I’d have a hard time believing it, because there was no logic to it. Yet during those months and in that working-class neighbourhood, a group of young men took it into their heads to challenge the Fascists, who’d go mad, shooting into the night and shouting “owards! Show your faces!” We’d laugh, thinking how the local butcher would find his shutters riddled with bullet-holes [...]
Ignorant of the real nature of that imperialist war, clinging to the myths that the dialectic of opposition for its own sake effortlessly produces, we were only leaves in the violent winds that were blowing throughout the world. With us or without us, those winds would have continued to blow. But passion, even if It’s just a leaf, endures. Passion is in the nature of humanity. Properly directed, it is a powerful political factor. Politics isn’t an academic exercise: politics is struggle. People don’t risk their lives for a mere political hypothesis. Only passion pushes you to risk all. Ultimately, passion is what wins the day. Petty politicians, with their scepticism and their intrigues, judging everyone by themselves, incapable of imagining that passion can move others, are destined to be swept away by the very phenomena they underestimate and deride. As long as burning social and political struggles exist, passion will drive the most active among the young into the night, onto the darkened streets of a working-class neighbourhood in an industrial city. When the dawn breaks, they must never again find themselves asking why the day is so different from what they had expected, and lose years of their lives in desperate study, as happened then. Since that time I have dedicated my life to providing this passion – the passion of my own generation and that of the generations to come – with political reasoning, strategy, and order-of-battle calculations.
Passion disciplined by reason
We can draw two conclusions from these first steps taken by the Savona group – a literal «baptism of fire» in the tragic and exceptional circumstances of war, the fall of the Fascist regime, the Resistance, and the bitter disillusion of the hopes that had nurtured such radical choices. Cervetto’s final words on his understanding of that crucial, transitory period refer to the dialectic between «disillusioned passion» and «passion armed with reason». He describes the next five years as a tortured period, indeed of «desperation», spent in search of answers. The key to all these years was passion, to the point that Cervetto writes of preferring those who act, even out of the confusion of imperfectly-understood aspiration, to the intellectual cynicism that preaches to others of their duties. Passion armed with reason, disciplined by and anchored to theory, was also the key to the commitment to keep on keeping on that was so necessary to a militant in the long times of imperialist development.
The issue was to be publicly aired in 1957 with the clash over the ‘Theses’, rejected by the Movement of the Communist Left, the umbrella group to which GAAP had adhered, grouped around the newspaper Azione Comunista. The ‘1957 Theses’ foresaw that the «counterrevolutionary phase would last a long time»: it was essential to take account of the passions grafted onto a political tradition that proved unable to move away from fantasies of immediate revolutionary liberation, and did not want to hear that such fantasies, which misinterpreted reality, were damaging the revolutionary movement. Disconnected from strategy, passion became a blind alley leading to an ineffectual maximalism. Within the discipline of the strategy-party, it could become consciousness, and motivate a militancy that would work upon the long times of the counter-revolutionary phase. This is the thorny issue of psychological time, which Cervetto, reflecting on Leon Trotsky, was to resolve in his theoretical writings of the 1980s, and which during the postwar period was part of his political apprenticeship.
Five years to redeem the disillusioned passion of partisan militancy; five years that were not only the transition from revolutionary instinct to disciplined effort, but were also an initial reckoning of the why of the disillusion that had cost Parisotto his life. Cervetto notes that: the collapse of the myths intersected with a laborious theoretical and political search for why it had happened, and why the world appeared as a world of imperialist powers
.
Never again a tool in the hands of others
This tells us about another fundamental trait of Cervetto’s psychology: the determination that matured within him never again to be used by others because he had failed to understand the nature of the game. Cervetto had nearly lost his life in the partisan struggle, and others really had lost it, aspiring to a ‘communism’ that had revealed itself to be a travesty of Russian imperialism. For his young group, this was the ignominy of Yalta, a small but real drama amid a colossal tragedy for the international proletariat.
The idea of passion armed with reason, which matured over a decade within the concept of a party that would include a ‘scientific laboratory’ – a strategyparty – had a second meaning, which Cervetto drew from his own experience and from that of his little group: it was a symbol of class defeat but also of potential liberation. Never again to be a tool in the hands of others: only materialist theory, Marxist science and Leninist organisation could establish this strategic independence for a group of militants.
Masini, attempting with alleged realism to avoid ‘small groupism’ by remaining set in the anarchist tradition, on the one hand conjured up a picture of a real movement that did not exist, and on the other ignored the actual forces – political forces in Italy, imperialist forces on an international scale – that were competing for influence over the working class. Masini was to fall by the wayside, while Cervetto would continue along his path, grasping Marxism and Leninist organisation as the handholds that would lead to autonomy.
In evaluating the partisan struggle, Cervetto was to reject the notion of the Resistance betrayed, partly due to having thought it through theoretically, partly as a result of his own direct experiences. One could speak of aspirations betrayed12 in the sense of those generically understood communist ideas that had motivated so many of the partisans. The objective reasons for the underground movement had to be understood, although such a movement had become inevitable – an elementary class defence – after the 1943/1944 strikes, the Fascist repression and the Nazi deportations. But it was also necessary to understand relations between classes, and international relations between the powers, in the imperialist war that had made the Resistance into the prisoner of Yalta.
Cervetto’s Ricerche e Scritti (Notes and Researches’) provides further material on this theme. Here we have limited ourselves to recounting the first steps taken by the ‘Savona Group’ a few months after 25th April 1945. The USSR mythology had even induced Cervetto to pick ‘Stalin’ as his codename in the Resistance: now, along with Parisotto and Bogliani, he turned his search to libertarian communism. In Savona the anarchist movement possessed a prestigious figure in Umberto Marzocchi, who under Fascism had been forced into political exile in France. He had fought in Spain, and then with the French Resistance. With the group ‘No gods no masters’ Cervetto, Parisotto and Bogliani would for a time be part of the FAI, the Italian Anarchists’ Federation, ‘Marzocchi’s lads’.
The Genoa group
The central figure of the Genoa group was Lorenzo Parodi. Born in 1926, he worked at Ansaldo Engineering and was co-founder of the party with Arrigo Cervetto. Parodi died in July 2011, after leading the «fortunate life»13 of a long-time militant.
Parodi too left documentation14 that helps us put together the history of the party; considerations on the first steps into libertarian communism also open Cronache Operaie15 (Workers’ Chronicles) his collection of experiences of factory life in the 1950s. The essence of these initial notes appeared in a commemorative article published as a foreword to L. Parodi The Suez Canal Company (Marxist Study Centre publications – 2011).
His* professional apprenticeship preceded his political novitiate by a year. It began at the Ansaldo Engineering works in Sampierdarena** in the summer of 1942, when the last push of the war was churning out the biggest batch of working-class hands. Bartolomeo Parodi, blacksmith’s mate in the forging section, tells his family about the demand for extra hands: his son turns up to fill in the Job application form that includes the question “Who is recommending you?” Answer: “My father”. Having been taken on, he leaves the little nuts and bolts workshop in Nervi*** where he has worked since the age of fourteen, and enters Ansaldo’s small machinery sector.
In the spring of 1943, for the first time, the apprentice hears talk of strikes. He is part of that moment of working-class spontaneity, involved in the discussions that take place regarding the role and the functions of the ‘shop stewards’**** [...] The problems of tying to combine the Fascist union officials’ ‘democratic recovery’ with the spontaneous outburst of the workers’ long-repressed rage become evident at the political crossroads of 23th July. At Ansaldo, the ‘shop stewards’ and the timekeepers are seen as class enemies, and are chased off the shop floor. The timekeepers’ worktable flies out of a window [...] It’s then that [...] the writer learns of a communism that’s ‘different’ from the Stalinism of the Muscovite church: libertarian communism.
After ‘8th September’ we find ourselves between the anvil of American bombardments, which cause the deaths of a number of my workmates at Ansaldo, and the hammer of the German raids to round up labour. One afternoon in the spring of 1944, the writer arrives at Sampierdarena for the two-to-ten shift to be warned by friends that the German dragnet has reached Ansaldo and is hauling in workers to send to Germany. Instant decision: to get back on the tram, return to Nervi and went to underground.16
War, factory life, the 1943 strikes, the road to the clandestine life in order to avoid deportation: all these were objective factors in the situation of a large part of that young working-class generation, during those years of exceptional historical circumstances. But to rebel against that situation, to choose struggle and class militancy lay in the character, the tenacity and revolutionary passion of those who chose not to submit. In the introduction to Workers’ Chronicles which Parodi initially produced as a collection of 1950s factory-life articles for Il Libertario and for Prometeo, he mentions his first steps in political life, from his early investigations into communist anarchism to his final political home: Marxism and the Leninist concept of the party.
Forced to go underground, in 1944 Parodi joined a group of comrades who had had to make a political choice
– rejecting the line of national collaboration
laid down by Togliatti as soon as he landed at Salerno from political exile in the USSR. The choice was libertarian and internationalist communism
as opposed to the Stalinist obedience of the PCI line.
In Parodi’s words:
There is a libertarian and anarchist trade-union tradition in Genoa that goes back to the beginnings of the working-class movement, the peculiarities of the First International in Italy, the spontaneous reactions to the corrupted nature of the Second International, and from there to the characteristics of the ‘Red’ movement in the post-World War I period, when an important trade union centre such as that of Sestri Ponente was headed by the anarchist tendency.17
Parodi’s choice was linked to those traditions, but above all it «affirmed his rejection of Togliatti’s opportunism» along with the as yet confused notion of salvaging what could be salvaged
of the class energies that had sprung from the Resistance:
The writer of these ‘chronicles’ had started with the idea of focusing on the positive experiences of the working-class movements various elements, and on the way realised that the first necessary element was the theoretical consistency of the science of revolution. He realised that since Marx had taken twenty years to write Capital, not much less time would be needed to completely assimilate and understand it. Finally, within a collective educational process, he was able to ascertain that, if Lenin bad had to employ the energies of an entire generation of revolutionaries to free Marxism from the mystifications of social-democracy, the same use of energies would be required from more than one generation to solve the same problem: to free Leninism from the mystifications of Stalinism.18
While working at Ansaldo, Parodi had become involved with libertarian communism through Vero Grassini, son of a historic figure in the Genoa anarchist movement, Emilio Grassini. When, in 1944, in Genoa Nervi, Parodi’s evasion of the German dragnet left him with no choice but to go underground, this led to a decisive meeting with Antonio Pittaluga, a joiner who from the ‘Bazarin’ after-work employees club had organised the first PCI underground cell at Nervi. Parodi recounts how:
He later broke with the party at the time of the Salerno turnaround. That wasn’t the road he intended to go down, Pittaluga told party emissaries: his compass was set for communism, not for some transformist landfall at the port of historic compromise with the bourgeoisie.
At his home in Nervi, Pittaluga organised a little centre of conspiracy that promoted that ‘different’ communism of which Vero Grassini had spoken at Ansaldo. When he left the PCI, Pittaluga got in touch with the Genoa headquarters of the anarchist movement. He already knew Emilio Grassini, who along with Vincenzo Toccafondo, a self-educated worker from Sampierdarena and a good talker in charge of liaison, he had invited to speak to the younger workers at a meeting at the ‘Bazarin’. The Nervi libertarians met in the evenings at Pittaluga’s home. They held group reading sessions (memorably Peter Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread) and drafted The Seed, a little magazine typed on an ancient Remington with a right-hand margin that always had to be set manually [...]
The average age of the Nervi group was pretty low. In 1944 the oldest member was Pittaluga himself, at 31; the youngest was Parodi, at 18.19
Every member – six in all – of this group was committed to a basic work of conversion: «every member was committed to engage a circle of friends, and Pittaluga carried this out at the ‘Bazarin’ despite police searches». The group established relations with anarchists of the pre-Fascist era.
Antonio Pittaluga was killed in an assault on a German roadblock on 24th April 1945, and the rest of the group, also part of that action, were taken prisoner. They were released two days later, when the German forces surrendered in Genoa. Lorenzo Parodi was to remain the most active of the young Nervi group, along with Agostino Sessarego, employed at Aura, a company in the food sector in Nervi, and subsequently Mario Vignale, who worked at the Olcese cotton mill in Lavagna and later in the construction industry. These comrades were to be part of Lotta Comunista’s founding group, and would remain committed to revolutionary militancy for the rest of their lives.
An article in the anarchist weekly Umanità Nova in September 1948 brought Parodi into contact with Pier Carlo Masini. Within a few months Parodi had taken on responsibility for the political direction of tactics within the trade unions and the workplace activities of the group that would later form GAAP; in these commitments the distinction between the Genoa and the Sestri Ponente groups would vanish. In his recall of the party’s history, Parodi writes:
[...] Beginning in 1949 industriai restructuring with its epicentre in Liguria, swept over the country. Thousands lost their jobs. Business and industry intended to free themselves from the additional workers it had been necessary to take on for war-time output and move to new time-and-motion production systems on which to base wages. Genoa was in the grip of the ‘Sinigaglia plan’ for an iron-and-steel industry working according to an integrated cycle. The dangers of constructing an industrial site on the sea that this system required left in its wake a trail of dead workers. Who can ever forget the dead worker pushed through the streets of Cornigliano and Sampierdarena in a handcart in sign of protest. Both ILVA and Ansaldo were downsizing and our comrades who worked there were directly affected [...]. The nucleus of our organisation, which was just taking shape, was predominantly working-class, and active in trade-union issues. However, our organisation’s political action could not focus only on the extreme protests originating from the trade union activity within the CGIL.20
In 1951 it was the political clash with Stalinism, rather than the trade-union struggle, that led to the constitution of the Ansaldo Sampierdarena GAAP group. This process also consolidated the political relationship between Parodi and Aldo Pressato, who today is a leader of Lotta Comunista’s:
[...] we started to apply our tactics within the trade unions from about -. We developed this through the system of shop floor representation, standing for election to workplace councils and as departmental shop stewards, who were then known as trade union ‘experts’. During the shop steward elections at Ansaldo Sampierdarena, we were directly involved in a real political battle in our department with the PCI candidate. The result of the vote, 60 to 60, was an unpleasant surprise for the PCI activists, who had thought their party members would automatically vote for the PCI candidate, and who had bullied and tried to isolate us. The outcome was that the PCI cell had to acknowledge our representative. This was when our workplace GAAP group took shape, thanks to the contribution of our comrade Aldo Pressato and others mentioned in L’Impulso in 1951 as members of the ‘Third Front’ campaign. Over time, this nucleus was destined for important political developments as the forerunner of Lotta Comunista.21
The Sestri Ponente group
In the postwar period the anarchist tradition was perhaps most firmly established in Sestri Ponente, a strongly working-class district of Genoa. The anarchist-led trade unions were big in a number of factories including Ansaldo Fossati (munitions), and libertarian communism had played an important part in the partisan struggle. According to Ettore Ricci, at the time a youthful militant, membership of the anarchist movement ran in families, thanks to the tales of the veterans of the 1920s, when the anarchists controlled the CGIL regional headquarters; and was later reinforced by the return of those who had fought in the Spanish Civil War or who had been exiled by the Fascists*. The memory of these experiences and of the partisan struggle was the main factor influencing membership in the immediate postwar period: as that emotional link grew weaker with time, contact with the movement decreased, with some sinking into passivity and others joining the PCI.22
The young Aldo Vinazza (-) worked at Ansaldo Fossati (munitions) where a group of revolutionary trade unionists was active. The most committed of the Sestri youth, Vinazza had an important role in GAAP’s core work of organisation and correspondence. In June 1950 he gave this account of how an area of influence previously considered to be solid and widespread was in fact rapidly crumbling.
In 1945 groups run by comrades of the older generation flourished throughout Liguria. The name ‘Libertarian Communism’ attracted many elements who were complete strangers to anarchist ideas. Personal respect for the main figures of the movement in Liguria was also an influence. There was intense verbal and media propaganda, with thousands of newspapers and pamphlets sold. Externally a lot of good work was done that was not subsequently developed properly by the movement, perhaps through a lack of capacity on the part of some comrades. The movement began to haemorrhage members.
At Sestri Ponente 100 young people and some 6 to 7,000 older ones were left at a loose end, their ideological certainties evaporating, with the euphoric activity of the first months falling off. Many began to move towards the PCI: the most active were the first to go.
In 1945 the Sestri group had between 600 and 800 members: by 1947 it had 325 adults and about 30 in the youth section: in 1948, 240, with 20 of these youth section: in 1949 184, and in 1950 126 all told. Numbers in the Voltri, Pra and Pegli** groups also only reached the hundreds, a good many of them in the youth section, and this was the case in the whole of Genoa and for all the other groups. In - there was a split in the Sestri group: around 20 revolutionary trade unionists led by Giovanni Mariani (subsequently to become secretary of the CGIL Sestri branch) formed a group that was later absorbed into the PCI. Those of the youth section who remained, and who had a reasonable level of political experience, began to acquire critical sense, to oppose the bureaucratic approach of the older members and the deliberations of the directive, their centrist positions and their paternalism, and began to work independently.
There were moments of bitter confrontation at Sestri between the older anarchists and the new generation Masini and Cervetto were addressing. But in terms of what influence their and other local internationalist groups could command in the postwar period, it’s worth remembering that during the times of underground struggle, and just after 25th April, the strength of the Stalinist PCI was too well-organised to be seriously challenged, as can be seen from Vinazza’s statistics on libertarian communism in Sestri Ponente. Such a rapid falling back on the prevailing Stalinism demonstrates the devastating damage inflicted on the revolutionary movement by the party’s historic delay
i.e. the lack of an organised force which in that moment would have had the strategic and political clarity required to defend and consolidate a consistent working-class position. Even a network of cadres, had it been united by strategy, would have made a difference. By February 1951, when it joined GAAP, the Sestri group had shrunk to a handful from the youth section, and this was also true of the Savona, Genoa Nervi and Tuscany-Lazio groups.
The groups in Rome and Tuscany
Pier Carlo Masini was born at Cerbaia Val di Pesa in 1923, making him three to four years older than Cervetto and Parodi. At first this was an important point: in 1948, when the young anarchist movement was drawing its first breath its members, most of them aged around twenty, came into contact with Masini as a twenty-five-year-old conference speaker and editor of Umanità Nova.
When in 1941 he began his studies at the ‘Cesare Alfieri’ Political Sciences Faculty of Florence University, Masini was attracted to the liberal-socialist group led by Tristano Codignola and Aldo Capitini. In January 1942 most of this group was arrested, and although Masini, then little more than a boy, made a number of admissions, these seem simply to have confirmed what the Fascist police already knew. Masini was later to write of this episode that his spell in Murate* had provided the political maturity
he had hitherto lacked.23 Following his release from a sentence of political confinement, Masini joined the PCI and was politically active in Florence and in San Casciano Val di Pesa, his home town, where he represented the party in the CLN (Committee for National Liberation). His break with the party came at the time of the ‘Salerno turnaround’: Masini declared himself opposed to the Togliatti line, sent a letter of resignation, and was subsequently expelled from the party.24 He then joined the youth section of FAI, representing Florence at the Young Anarchists Convention at Faenza in 1946, becoming editor of the monthly Gioventù Anarchica (Young Anarchist) in - and then of Umanità Nova from 1948 to the beginning of 1950. The idea of a libertarian party as a working-class force with a political direction was clashing with traditional anarchism and its ‘anti-organisation’ currents.
Cervetto almost certainly met Masini for the first time in 1948, at a May Day rally in Savona, and met Parodi in the October of that year. In the ‘Notebooks’ he kept on the party’s history, Cervetto describes his relationship with Masini at the time of its politically consolidation, in the June of 1950, at the outbreak of the Korean War:
PCM [Pier Carlo Masini n.d.r.] and I had great plans, as we sat at an outdoor table of a bar In the public gardens. The mar in Korea had just begun. In the heat of the June afternoon PCM read out an editorial that hinged on the slogan ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow’. I liked that.
He told me that even a small group of young workers like myself could play a decisive role in the troubled future ahead, since the older generations had used up their energies on ideologies that mould crumble in the violent events of the real world.
We recalled historical precedents, particularly the 1914 watershed. There are times, said PCM, when a decided and strong-willed group with clear ideas can see better than most how much others are influenced by a thousand traditions and political habits. We have to work to get such a group together.
Cervetto is generous in his assessment of Masini, honestly recognising just how central his contribution was during those years: it was Masini’s knowledge of history that allowed that band of comrades to grasp Amadeo Bordiga’s theory and analysis without remaining stuck in the superficial inadequacy of his concept of political action:
Many years have gone by. PCM is now an acclaimed historian with a collection of prizes, a ‘bestseller’ – and we aren’t, as I joked to LP [Lorenzo Parodi n.d.r.]. PCM is a liberal democrat now. It’s been necessary for me to attack him politically, but I’ve never criticised him on the personal level, even when others were doing so.
In that long-ago 1950, he was undoubtedly the one who grasped the essence of my character, my level of experience, my determination. He didn’t flatter or encourage me: he often criticised me, as I criticised him. In a rational way, he drove onwards with all that should or could be directed towards a practical, concrete objective that might otherwise have never come to pass. I was urged on by his knowledge of history, which he expounded not along grand lines, like Bordiga, but in the detail – at times even biographical – that I asked for in order to be able to compare it with the history I knew.
I was clear that the world was dominated by unitary imperialism. Vercesi** and Bordiga presented it as a totalitarian monster, and I couldn’t see any way to get at something so powerful. Maybe you just had to wait until it collapsed under its own weight, I thought, but this prospect didn’t much satisfy my reason, and certainly not my passion. PCM said that Bordiga’s was the most acute analysis that the working-class movement had ever produced, but also the most ‘nihilist’ as far as action was concerned. We should take hold of that analysis as a weapon in our hands and go stubbornly on, with will-power and determination. History would teach us how to translate it into the real movement.
As PCM went deeper into the detail of his examples from history, I would come back down to earth from the clouds of theory. After all, eightyears ago I had started off in the same way. It had been a society of smoke and mirrors that a band of unready boys had been able to challenge: the same society – its foundations now undermined – that a youthful group armed with five years of thinking was getting ready to challenge again.
When we parted at the station, it was with a feeling of satisfaction.
In Cervetto’s ‘Notebooks’ comments on the meeting at Pontedecimo, we also find a personal and political sketch of Ugo Scattoni, militant leader of the Rome libertarian communists. Born into the working class in 1906, Scattoni was head of the Central Rome group, which at the end of 1949 joined Masini in the Tuscany-Lazio Inter-regional Committee.
There were around twenty of us at Pontedecimo, and most of us were just over twenty years old. The only exception was Ugo Scattoni, who was nearly forty. His Roman accent reminded me that the struggle wasn’t confined to the industrial cities of the North. He didn’t speak much, but when he did he brought practical sense into the discussion. I found everything he said worthy of consideration.
As the years went by we often found ourselves working politically side by side, and I had the chance to get to know him better and to understand why he had spontaneously won my respect.
At lunchtime I used to go to the trattoria he favoured in Via Ostiense and we’d eat together. We would sit among the workers in their overalls and order fettuccine and steak. Scattoni invariably cut his piece of meat in half, eating one half and making up a sandwich with the other half, which he would carefully wrap up in a paper napkin. He never spoke about his private life: he was very reserved and didn’t confide in anyone. At times I’d make him laugh by recountingfunny stories about political events or people. I was curious about this rationing of the slice of meat, and one day I asked him why. He replied that the second half was bis evening meal. He worked half the day in an artisan’s workshop, so as to be able to devote the rest of his time to political and trade union activities. On a half day’s pay, he couldn’t afford to buy a lot of food. Since I was used to this sort of thing myself I couldn’t really call it a lesson, but it was a practical insight into the life of a professional revolutionary. Scattoni was a workers’ delegate: you might find him on a day towards the end of February, on the outskirts of Valpolcevera*** hanging about with PCM, our only intellectual. Scattoni was truly worthy to represent the revolutionary workers of Rome. It was only from some comrades that I learnt his brother had been shot by the Germans in the Ardeatine Caves**** as a militant of the Bandiera Rossa partisan unit***** with which Scattoni himself had fought. fust before he died, Scattoni sent me a letter joining with our 25th anniversary celebration of the Pontedecimo meeting. He was ill, and couldn’t attend, but he wished us good work. I wrote the obituary for this friend and comrade of so many hopes and battles, and I thought of that trattoria by Ostiense Station and what this militant revolutionary, this member of the FIOM’s Central Committee and of our organisation’s National Committee, used to eat for his supper.
Although less detailed than the description of Sestri Ponente, an account dated February 1950 gives some idea of the Roman group. The attempt to start up a focused, federated movement
had around a hundred sympathisers in the whole of the Lazio region. After 1947 serious tensions developed in the Rome-Central group as the exponents of the individualist, anti-organisation
tradition rejected the activist, propagandising
stance of the younger members. In an environment long used to a merely formal political adherence, the latter were feared because of their age and their ideas about anarchism
: they looked to Masini, who arrived in Rome in 1948 as editor of Umanità Nova. But there were difficulties: from 1950 they had no headquarters they could use for political meetings and for organising propaganda.25
The strength of GAAP: ‘only a handful’
An examination of the available information on correspondence, meetings, and newspaper sales gives some idea of the dimensions of GAAP’s organisational strength and the extent of its sphere of influence.
Il Libertario had been founded in Milan by Mario Mantovani, long-time exponent of anarchist communism, persecuted for his politics under Fascism and a political leader in the libertarian units during the partisan struggle.
At the beginning of 1950 a collaborative agreement was reached under which Cervetto, Parodi and Masini wrote more than a hundred articles over three years for the paper: it’s estimated that by 1951 it was selling between five and six thousand copies per week.
Although GAAP promoted and distributed Il Libertario, it was not their paper. In the spectrum of anarchist positions, Mario Mantovani in Milan, like Umberto Marzocchi in Savona, embodied a ‘centrist’ area calculated to avoid a split with the Italian Anarchist Federation. In the activities of GAAP, Mantovani and Marzocchi saw the possibility for reviving the anarchist movement: conversely, the focused, federated movement of Masini and Cervetto worked towards separating the «historic centre» from the anti-organisational currents such as Volontà and the Adunata dei refrattari [Resisters] in an attempt to use the former network of relationships to reinforce GAAP.
In this sense Il Libertario’s 5,000 copies, rather than being a feature of a wide sphere of influence, indicated the circles towards which Masini directed his activities, with his notion of combing the anarchist movement for possible additions to the strength of his organisation.
The first number of the monthly L’Impulso sold 1,000 copies. From March 1951 it was published as the newspaper of the Anarchist Groups for Proletarian Action
; in 1953 its format changed, and from being an internal bulletin it became a newspaper in the true sense, replacing Il Libertario, which in the interim had ceased publication. In 1955 L’Impulso was selling around 1,500 copies, with 400 subscriptions: around a thousand of the total being sold within the major political groups. The subscriptions are a good indicator of a tighter circle of sympathisers: towards the end of 1955 there were around thirty in Rome and Savona, and nearly forty in Genoa. There were also around twenty in Vicenza, Torino, Bologna and Milan, but this did not approach the organised activity of the four main groups above.
A further piece of information regards those who in one way or another came into contact with GAAP, whether as activists, supporters, or as those the activists tried to engage – around 500 people, a number not far from the total of subscriptions. From a sample analysis, the estimate is that nearly 60% were wage earners: 45% of these manual or industrial workers, 12% other.
Finally, there was the closest circle of all: the militants, the activists, those who always came to meetings. After 1951, this consisted of five or six people in Savona, around fifteen in Genoa, six to eight in Rome, about thirty in each of the four major groups: fifty to seventy in total over the course of a year. This statistic slightly underestimates those not mentioned in written sources, but not by much. Around 1951 a dozen people had formed the nucleus at the centre of activity and internal circulars were typed and carbon-copied fifteen at a time; at the second National Conference, held in Florence in 1952, there was talk of the organisation’s frame of reference amounting to about one hundred individuals.
5,000 – Il Libertario’s widest sphere of influence: 1,000 to 1,500 copies – the organised sales of L’Impulso: 400 to 500 – the closest circle of sympathisers and subscribers: between 50 and 70 activists: no more than 10 to 15 militants driving the organisation. There were just over twenty at Genoa, Pontedecimo, in February 1951. Those who chose to start again were only a handful.
Above: those who took part in GAAP’s third National Conference, held at Livorno in September 1953. There is no photographic record of the first two national conferences, held at Genoa Pontedecimo in 1951 and at Florence in 1952. At the back, standing, from left to right: Sirio del Nista (wearing a white shirt), Luciano Arrighetti, Achille Ferrario (jacket and tie), Aldo Navolini (obscuring unidentified participant), Pasquale Borgese, Marco Giacomelli, unidentified, Antonio Bogliani (in jacket and tie, under the word ‘Livorno’), Pier Carlo Masini, unidentified, Vanda Làzzari, Ugo Scattoni (in white shirt with braces), Vittor Ugo Bistorti, Lorenzo Parodi (jacket and tie), unidentified. Seated, extreme right, Alfonso Failla. The participant standing in front of him and wearing a check shirt has not been identified. Seated at the table in the middle, from left to right: Aldo Vinazza (in white shirt), Claudio Micco, Mario Filosofo and Arrigo Cervetto. Front row, seated, from left to right: Lorenzo Gamba, two unidentified participants, Aldo Vignale (centre, wearing jacket), unidentified, Piero Pagano.
Right: Sestri Ponente. The symbol of the libertarian communists, a yellow torch against a red and black back ground, it appears on a plaque situated at the entrance to the town hall to commemorate those who fell in the partisan struggle.