The Context

At the end of the First World War, Europe was hit by a serious economic crisis. During the war, the "sharks" of industries, especially the metallurgical one, had made enormous gains with minimal risk: the State acted both as a supplier, procuring raw materials and coal at controlled prices, and as a customer, purchasing the products needed to fuel the war. It acted as an overseer, militarizing the factories as well as imposing strict discipline on the workers.

After the war, while the proletariat was excited by the Russian Revolution, the economic crisis led to layoffs and factory closures. The class struggle, in this peculiar context, found itself fighting with different rules: the economic strike was no longer an effective weapon, so much so that the capitalists often stifled the movement by imposing a lockout.

Thus already in the early months of 1920 and in particular in September in the industrial centers of all of Italy, over half a million workers, seeing the strike weapon insufficient, began to occupy factories.

The great movement started from Milan, on August 30, when the Officine Romeo & C. Company decided to lock out. The workers responded by occupying the factories. On September 1, when the National Federation of Industrialists decided to close the factories, the movement extended to Turin and all of northern Italy, up to Campania and across other industrial sectors. From an economic/wage standpoint, the movement had taken on a clear political significance. At the same time land was occupied here and there in the countryside. During the war, many farm laborers had became redundant because of the introduction of new agricultural machinery. Veterans who knew the massacres of previous wars were still in the army. And while awaiting stand down they followed proletarian actions with interest. Officers had almost lost authority over these soldiers, so their rifles were taken.

Occupied Factories and Armed Proletarians

The situation was incandescent. “At every moment in which external events caused violent emotions (massacres, the beginning of riots in some region, etc.) the masses had no clear idea of ​​what should be done, they had no framework on which to support the action. Hence the need to gather to understand each other, to look for the leaders, to receive passwords. Through the soldiers, due to the abundance of badly guarded war materials, the hasty liquidation of war remnants, the proletariat individually armed itself. But the efficiency of this armament was not organic" (Internal document of the Communist Party of Italy on the civil war in Italy in the years 1919 - 22, Il Partito Comunista, 41-43, 1978).

"It was, in the history of the labor movement in Italy, the first case of its kind [...] In all departments, in addition to normal work, weapons were manufactured and repaired. Adjusters repaired revolvers and rifles: turners mass-produced hand grenades; while the smiths made swords, styli for rods etc. [...] The trucks were armored [...] and machine guns were repaired, etc. because it was believed to seriously and definitively end it with capital" (Prometeo, n.63, 8 November 1931).

Production management was conducted by Internal Commissions made up of workers. "An internal newspaper entitled ‘The Sidewalk’ was drafted [...] The first task was to take possession of the archives. It was thus possible to see with what shrewdness the owners of the workshops followed the internal events of the proletarian organization and how they were well informed [...] The defense was perfectly organized [...] One night a patrol of Red Guards kidnapped four individuals who were near the workshop, took them inside the factory and managed, after a long interrogation, to ascertain that they were four former officers who had come on patrol to organize a coup against the workers. The punishment decided consisted in the obligation to work in the furnaces (to put the coal in them) for twenty-four hours. Imagine those daddy children who had never worked!" (Prometeo, n.7, 1 October 1928).

Not a Proletarian Offensive - Not a Bourgeois Offensive

"The occupation of the factory was a great moral factor of the workers’ action, a good basis for the armed struggle [...] The criterion that guided the workers was to defend the factory. Each factory had barbed wire, sentries, militia and commanders […]"
     "The State followed an even more restricted criterion of defensive [...] Some industrial districts of the major centers were completely left in the hands of the workers, for the whole time of the occupation [...] The new state of affairs was such that it was necessary to consider the Army as unusable in many dangerous cases [...] A small army was organized in the Army for public safety [...] The student officers, at the schools, were ordered to form groups of under 50 the command of the most senior in rank, and always consider himself at the disposal of the local Military Command. Machine guns were permanently placed in secure bourgeois houses [...] Even militarily the bourgeoisie applied the principle, waiting to be strong for revenge, to give the land to the masses, to retreat to the very last lines, to stall, to prepare the counterattack".
     "Giolitti, old fox [...] intelligent man, from the first day of the conflict there was the conviction that "there is no way out between the two evils, we must decide for the lesser evil, the one that does not represent a mortal risk and leaves the essential members of the organism to subsist, that is, it does not kill the most sacred institutions with the proletarian dictatorship (Corriere della Sera, November 19)" (L’Ordine Nuovo, October 2, 1920).

Faced with the accusations of not using the public force to prevent the occupation of the factories, Giolitti’s attitude was marked by an apparent neutrality, but one carefully evaluated on the basis of political factors, in collaboration with the union leaders, and with the specific goal of avoiding a civil war. Later the union Pie Cards will have claimed credit for not having caused the revolution to break out.

In "Memoirs of My Life" Giolitti recalls:
     "The occupation of the factories, in the way it had taken place, presented the government with a whole series of problems, both immediate and distant; from those of simple police to those of social policy".
     “The workers who had carried out the occupation, in every part of Italy, but mainly in the industrial zone of Lombardy, Piedmont and Liguria, were no less than six hundred thousand; and the occupation, provoked by an untimely threat of lockout on the part of some industrialists, who had not properly measured the situation and its dangers, was based on the concept that the mass of workers could manage and operate the factories without interventions by capitalists and bosses.
     "I had, from the first moment, the clear and precise conviction that the experiment could not [do] without demonstrating to the workers the impossibility of achieving that goal, as they lacked capital, technical education and commercial organization, especially for the purchase of raw materials and for the sale of products that they had managed to manufacture.
     “In this respect, therefore, this episode represented for me, in other forms and conditions, the repetition of the famous experiment of the general strike of 1904, which had produced so much fright, only to prove its inanity; and I was firmly convinced that the government should conduct itself again this time as it had been then; that is, to allow the experiment to take place up to a certain point so that the workers would have the opportunity to convince themselves of the impracticability of their intentions, and that the bosses would be deprived of the way to shift the responsibility for the failure onto others.
     "This wider and more distant political convenience coincided, moreover, with the immediate convenience of the police.
     "I was then accused of not having resorted to the use of public force to enforce the law and prevent the violation of private law; to have, in short, neither prevented the occupation of the factories by the workers, nor proceeded to drive them out in any way after the occupation had taken place.
     "But even assuming that I had managed to occupy the factories before the workers, which would have been at least very difficult given the breadth and universality of the movement, I would then have found myself in the very uncomfortable position of having almost the totality of the public force: police, Royal Guards and Carabinieri, closed in factories; without therefore the means of maintaining order outside the factories, that is, in the streets and squares where the workers would have overthrown, and in this way I would have played precisely into the hands of the revolutionaries, who would have asked for nothing better.
     "If then, later, I had resorted to public force to force the workers to leave the occupied factories, a vast and bloody conflict would have arisen, and in all likelihood the working masses who occupied them, before giving them up to the public force, would have devastated [the workshops]. Therefore, for both political and economic reasons, and for immediate and future conveniences, events would have coincided so that I should recommend the line of conduct that I then followed.”

What a beautiful lesson for revolutionaries!

The government supervised from the outside (inside no damage was intended to be inflicted on the occupants of the factories), and it did not hinder the passage of workers coming to and from work. [Giolitti?] was not impressed by the defensive systems prepared by the workers at the entrance and on the roofs of the factories: he knew well that behind those barricades, those bags of sand and fences and Friesland horses there was a mass of workers voluntarily made prisoner.

Guaranteed Reformism

The government worked toward the movement deflating on its own.

“The economic situation of many families was beginning to worsen. It was then that the Internal Commission decided to break through the safes in order to meet the needs of the workers. The funds found were limited and were soon distributed. The production of automobiles was still sold in order to face all the difficulties and the needs of families” (Prometeo, n.7, 1 October 1928).

But this kind of remedy could not last long. The growing weakness of the movement and the disorientation of the masses made the situation on the ground favorable for opportunism. "Through their agents the bourgeoisie injected the poison of reformism into the Italian workers’ organizations, especially the trade unions […] The reformists who headed the Italian trade unions carried out the slogan of commissions made up of representatives of the" leaders " workers and capitalists on an equal basis to elaborate the principles and methods of controlling production. This was the luxurious funeral arranged by the reformists” (Appeal of the Executive Committee of the Communist International to all members of the PSI and of the Italian trade unions of November 1920, in Communism, n.30).

Also in L’Ordine Nuovo of 2 October 1920 we can read a condemnation of reformism: "No ‘state socialism,’ no socialization born of Giolitti or the Confederation" on the ground of legality "will move us from the concept expressed also by the majority of the Commission of socialization in Germany that "an isolated nationalization of the mines that allows the capitalist economy to persist in other branches of the economy cannot be considered socialization, but would only mean the replacement of one entrepreneur for another. ‘And this could be repeated in our case as well, if all the metallurgical plants were ever taken over by the state. As long as the proletariat does not hold power in its hands, with all the means of production and exchange, it is necessary to be a reformist and to speak of "socialization, greater production, etc.’”

When the betrayal of the D’Aragona and the Buozzi was complete, Giolitti himself would clarify and claim his defensive maneuver. We report from Communist Action, September 11, 1921 the speech he gave to the Senate on September 26, 1920 as president of the council of ministers: "Should I have the factories evacuated by force? Evidently I had to start the fight, the battle, the civil war in short. And this after the General Confederation of Labor had solemnly declared that it excluded any political concept from the movement, that this movement had to be kept within the limits of an economic contest. The General Confederation of Labor, in which I had confidence at the time, has shown that it deserves it because the great mass of workers approved his proposals.”

However, we must not forget that the real traitor was the Socialist Party which, in declaring itself “in favor of the revolution,” agreed to put it to the vote, ensuring that the agenda of Aragon had a majority. What was missing was a revolutionary party to give the working masses under attack the right direction for revolutionary action.

We cannot fail to resume the evaluation of the phenomenon of the occupation of factories, and the address of the Communist Abstentionist Fraction:

“[The workers] have understood, and with their action of taking over the factory and continuing to work rather than strike, they want to show that it is not that they don’t want to work, but that they don’t want to work under the bosses direction. They… no longer want to be exploited. They want to work on their own, that is, in the interest only of the workforce. This state of mind that is becoming more and more precise must be taken into the utmost account; we just wouldn’t want them to be misled by false assessments…
     “We would not like the conviction that by developing the institution of factory councils it is certainly possible to take over the factories and eliminate the capitalists. This would be the most damaging of illusions. The factory will be conquered by the working class – and not only by the respective workers [in each factory], which would be too sparse and non-communist – but only after the whole working class has seized political power.”

Without this conquest, the royal guards, the carabinieri, etc., will take care of dispelling all illusions, i.e., the mechanism of oppression and force available to the bourgeoisie, its political apparatus of power, reveals itself.

“It would be better if these endless and useless adventures that are daily exhausting the working masses were all channeled, merged and organized into one great, comprehensive upsurge aimed directly at the heart of the enemy bourgeoisie.
     “Only a communist party should and would be able to carry out such an undertaking. At this time, such a party should and would have no other task than that of directing all its activity towards making the working masses increasingly conscious of the need for this grand political attack – the only more or less direct route to the take-over of the factory, which if any other route is taken may never fall into their hands at all ("To take the factory or to take power?", Il Soviet, February 22, 1920).

After the Betrayal of Social Democracy

Just as it written in our weekly paper, the defeat of the factory occupations was inevitable. Giolitti was happy that the workers had voluntarily locked themselves up inside the factories, leaving him, with the public force at hand, control of the streets, squares and institutions.

The defeat of the occupation of the factories and the unrest of that period allowed the formation of the fascists. Having made the working class retreat once again by intrigue, Giolitti and the bourgeois government, fearing a revolutionary renewal of the class struggle, welcomed the deployment of the White Guard corps that the capitalists demanded, providing for their armament and military education.

The Duke of Aosta, certainly for personal reasons as well, was the zealous master of these developing nuclei. He undertook a tour of local victory celebrations of the Piave and each of these, methodically prepared, consecrated a fascist handful by handing them a pennant.

We quote the manifesto launched on September 2, 1921 by the Communist Party of Italy, titled: “On the Anniversary of the Occupation of Factories: the Lessons”.

“Thousands of workers and peasants massacred by the police and the white guard; hundreds and hundreds of Chambers of Labor, People’s Houses, Cooperatives, sections of the Communist Party and the Socialist Party looted and destroyed; dozens of communist, socialist, republican and popular newspapers burned down; tens of thousands of workers and peasants beaten to blood, tortured, maimed; entire regions, inhabited by millions and millions of agricultural workers and poor peasants, Emilia, Tuscany, Umbria, Polesine, Lomellina, permanently subjected to a barbaric regime of white terror; thousands of workers and peasants banished from their homes, forced to abandon their old people, their women, their children in desperation and misery and to wander, half mad by torture, in the national territory, without asylum, without resources, without guarantees of personal freedom and security; the overflowing prisons of the best elements of the working class, of the generous ones who had offered everything to the cause of popular emancipation; half a million unemployed as a result of the accelerated process of decomposition of the capitalist economy.
     "Here is the sad balance of this year which has passed since the day of the occupation of the factories... The official leaders of the proletarian movement retreated from the struggle. They feared a ‘slaughter’; they feared a crisis in production; they feared the foreign blockade and the need for war. Today even the most backward, most ignorant worker is able to judge, to understand the events. The political conception of the reformists has clearly shown itself unable to dominate the development of events; it has proved absurd; it has proved to be a danger, the most threatening danger for the future of the working class.”

After a Hundred Years

The workers’ defeat came at the hands of reformism even before fascism. During the occupation of the factories, “the glorious party of the flag that never folded,” the Italian Socialist Party, represented a colorless jumble of inept leaders and corrupt parliamentarians who did not understand and could not understand the laws of class struggle.

Today, although the big opportunist parties have largely disappeared, the plague of reformism and collaborationism persists. It domination plagues the proletarian movement. The leaders of the trade union organizations remain servants of the bourgeoisie. As long as the proletarians allow themselves to be guided by opportunistic trade unionists and ambitious politicians, who dream of finding spaces for dialogue in bourgeois institutions, they will always be defeated.

It is not without importance that in the referendum of the capitulation, 100 years ago, the Chambers of Labor voted for Communist measures, while the representatives of the Federations and the trade union bureaucracy voted against. This fact confirms the correct approach of our trade union work today. Today, as yesterday, we claim the importance of organizing the proletarians on a territorial basis as in the old Chambers of Labor. As before, we remain intransigent in conducting a struggle inside trade unions to denounce operational decisions unrelated to the base and to the members, imposed by local, regional or national leaders, as well as by an apparatus of salaried workers who live off the union. Today, as yesterday, we denounce the use of trade union referendums in which the vote of a scab has the same weight as that of those who sacrifice themselves for collective struggle.

The union bureaucracy of 100 years ago tried to circumscribe the proletarian forces so that they remained, according to the union leaders, on the level of demands made only within the framework of legality and bourgeois respectability. The Communists attacked this syndicalism which only wanted to be economic and not political, a position, however, which unmasked a purely political position: bourgeois and opportunist collaboration.

Today, 100 years later, in full counter-revolution, and with a trade union movement reduced to historical lows, they accuse us of being “economists” – of setting union work only on the level of demands – without the slightest hint of irony. But these political unionists, what policy are they professing in claiming the right to be involved in industrial planning? What policy do they make their own when they claim the inheritance and nationalization of industries in crisis? It is the same policy that the Buozzi and D’Aragones of the time wanted to pass off as an economic struggle!

The Communist Party must point out, as the Abstentionist Communist Fraction did long ago, that the occupation of the factories as such was doomed to defeat.

Fundamentally it was a Councilist error, an ideology widespread in Piedmont at the time, according to which the proletariat, having conquered and defended the factory with weapons, could free itself from the “exploitation” of the bosses and manage production autonomously, creating islands of socialism in a capitalist economic and political regime.

The workers prepared for an armed defense of the occupied factories. In his “Memoirs” Giolitti continues: “After the occupation, many of the occupied factories were seized throughout the country. Several thousand rifles, revolvers, hand grenades and sidearms of all kinds were confiscated as well as one hundred tons of cheddite and nitroglycerin. Since it must be assumed that a large part of the weapons and explosives were taken away in the evacuation, which was carried out by the workers voluntarily and without conflict, that considerable residue so abandoned can give the measure of the size.”

The crucial error lies in the conception of the factory to be “defended” as an occupied fort. Giolitti had seen well: “The situation could not continue, and the workers’ leaders themselves took the initiative and took steps to find a solution, with the evacuation of the occupied factories. Negotiations for this purpose were conducted between the representatives of the Confederation of Labor on the one hand, and those of the Confederation of Industrialists on the other; and they were initiated in Turin personally by me … and were then concluded in Rome.”

The real betrayal was made by the Socialist Party, with a “revolutionary” leadership which had also joined the Third International. He did not fail to launch revolutionary declarations to the workers and peasants to “be ready” as needed, or to threaten to pass from the “occupation” to the “invasion” of factories. But, apart from the empty declarations, he wanted nothing to do with a mass proletarian movement that had the potential for a revolutionary direction and outlet.

Between the Socialist Party and the Confederation of Labor there was a debate as to whether it was an “economic” or “political” movement and who should have taken the lead. The Maximalist leaders were happy to conclude that it was essentially a movement “of a trade union nature,” and that therefore it should be led by the Confederation.

A “revolutionary” party that admits that it is unable to establish a genuine proletarian movement and needs the opinion of the union Pie Cards! And asks the union for permission to make the revolution!

The truth is that the Socialist Party was happy to hand over the management of the movement to the union pie cards.

On 19 September, Giolitti convened the trade union and industrial confederations in Rome. The latter not only accepted the trade union proposal not to punish or dismiss the participants of the occupation, but forged the famous agreement on “workers’ control in factories.”

Following the referendum called by FIOM between September 25-30, the factories were returned to their legal owners. On the subject of the return we hear a memory of Luigi Longo’s: “When it came to clearing the factories there was, by the Works Council, a regular delivery not only of the building, of the offices, of the machinery, but also of the production that it was inventoried and paid to the workers.” He goes on that “[t]he delivery to Fiat took place with a certain solemnity, by Parodi, president of the Works Council, to Giovanni Agnelli, president of the company’s board of directors, with an exchange of even brief speeches. In his, Agnelli had words of appreciation for the order maintained in the wards” (L. Longo, Between Reaction and Revolution).

But that famous “workers’ control,” which naturally remained a dead letter. Even if it had been realized, what would it have actually represented? The union Pie Cards conceived of it as a more advanced form of class collaboration, so much so that Giolitti himself then proposed it as a solution to the dispute. The industrialists had no difficulty in accepting it, confident that nothing truly dangerous would come from it.