This paper, presented at the Fighting Inequality (LAWCHA/WSA) conference in Georgetown in May 201... more This paper, presented at the Fighting Inequality (LAWCHA/WSA) conference in Georgetown in May 2015, focuses upon the factionalism in the United Electrical . . . Workers of America in the 1940s and '50s, which was led by ousted president James Carey and powerfully abetted by president Philip Murray of the CIO and many religious, labor, political, media and other corporate forces. In addition to the impact upon the UE, the paper examines the effect of the splitting of US labor over political correctness upon the CIO, upon electrical manufacturing workers, and upon local Industrial Union Council strength in the USA.
THE ITALIAN WORKING-CLASS LEFT
AND RESISTANCE TO WAR, 1911-1915
James A. Young
D... more THE ITALIAN WORKING-CLASS LEFT AND RESISTANCE TO WAR, 1911-1915
James A. Young
Developments within the Italian working-class Left prior to Italy’s intervention in the Great War anticipate both the divisiveness and the radicalization characteristic of the better known wartime and postwar periods. Nowhere is this more evident than in the posture assumed toward war. For, while anti-war activities consumed only a portion of the energies of working-class leftists during this period, they reflect the concerns and directions taken by organized workers. From opposition to the Tripolitan (Libyan) War of 1911 against the Turks through the neutralist campaigns of 1914-15, working-class groups made war and militarism a chief focus of their critique of the established order and assumed a leading role among anti-war forces. The accomplishments and the failures of the workers’ anti-war efforts reflect, then, the strengths and weaknesses and the divisions within the movement in 1911 as in 1915 and, for that matter, in 1919-22. In 1911 reformists controlled both the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and the Socialist-founded-and-affiliated General Confederation of Labor (CGL). Yet, important differences remained between them, despite their Accord of Firenza of 1908, which assigned political matters to the PSI and economic concerns to the CGL. In 1908 and again in 1911, rightist reformists in the CGL threatened to break with the PSI, even as recently organized revolutionary dissidents tugged from the other side at both the party and the labor federation. And, if these revolutionaries could derive some encouragement from the CGL’s call in March 1911 for a national demonstration against increased military spending and inflation, and in favor of universal manhood suffrage, they endured another reformist victory at the third national congress of the CGL in May. However, the return of Giovanni Giolitti as Italy’s premier and the course that he set toward war with the Ottoman Turks over Libya created a new crisis for the working-class Left. As war with the Turks approached, the CGL’s Directive Council voted to stage a vigorous demonstration against Premier Giolitti’s venture. As a result, leaders of the CGL, the PSI, and the latter’s Socialist Parliamentary Group (GPS) called on September 27 for a general strike against the war.2 The move underscored the grave importance of the moment, for the reformists had roundly condemned the general strike, along with the Syndicalists with whom the tactic was chiefly identified. Subsequently, the young revolutionary Benito Mussolini, Pietro Nenni, and others created some railway disruptions on a regional scale and were jailed, but the general strike failed. The Giolitti government then conducted war with little further opposition, except in Turin where anti-war agitation continued into mid-1913.3 The general strike of 1911 failed because of a combination of political and economic factors. The CGL leaders had intended the strike to be only a symbolic protest against the war, and the PSI leaders agreed, for neither group was afflicted with the enchantment with violence perpetrated on the Left by anarchists and Syndicalists. Moreover the PSI’s support of the strike had been diluted by the latest version of Giolittian trasformismo: War for the Right, near-universal manhood suffrage for the Left. Some of the right-wing reformists of the PSI even approved of financial credits for the war.4 Faced by such ambivalence among their leaders at a time of high unemployment, workers refused to expose themselves to reprisals. They went to work.5 The very failure of the anti-war strike radicalized large segments of working class organizations. The PSI’s Modena Congress of October 1911 produced gains for the Left, gathered around the newspaper La Soffitta, and at Reggio Emilia in 1912 they constituted a majority. The party, meanwhile, suffered censure by the executive organ of the Second International, the International Socialist Bureau (ISB). Since PSI secretary Pompeo Ciotti earlier had assured the ISB of vigorous opposition to any Giolittian war, the Bureau expressed grave disappointment in the party. Italian Socialist leaders replied that they had fulfilled their duty by protesting the war, but they had been discredited in the eyes of many, both at home and abroad.6 Partly because of this embarrassment, the Congress of Reggio Emilia acted on Mussolini’s motion and expelled Leonida Bissolati, Ivone Bonomi, Angelo Cabrini, and Guido Podrecca, whose right-wing reformism and tacit support of the war had compromised them and who then formed the Reformed Socialist Party.7 Movement did not occur so rapidly within the CGL, where the initial effect of the failed general strike reinforced the leaders’ reformism. Consequently, they refused to support the Syndicalists’ anti-colonial demonstration of March 1912 in Parma. Moreover, a current of the CGL led by general secretary Rinaldo Rigola remained uncomfortable with CGL-PSI ties and favored the formation of a Labor Party that would take on solely workers’ economic issues, which in their eyes did not include suffrage. Yet, the “armed peace” among the Great Powers and the Balkan wars of 1912-13 apparently made an impression: A meeting of the National Council of the CGL in April 1912 muted the usual reformist animosity toward the Syndicalists; and, for May Day 1913 the CGL issued a manifesto urging workers to dedicate the holiday to the struggle against rearmament and threatened revolutionary action if the government should initiate a move toward war.8 While CGL leaders’ renewed opposition to the general strike tactic detracted from the credibility of such bellicose rhetoric, those leaders did display awareness that the Confederation’s focus must be broadened. In 1913 they still represented only 327,000 people, under five percent of Italian workers. At the Fourth Congress in May 1914, Felice Quaglino forcefully advocated widening the CGL’s economic program to include more agricultural concerns, and Enrico Dugoni followed with an anti-imperialist resolution. A short time later the Turinese section of the PSI similarly widened its horizons as it offered the nomination for a parliamentary seat to Gaetano Salvemini, chief exponent of Southern peasants’ interests.9 Meanwhile, 1913 had seen a rising tide of rank-and-file militancy, as evidenced by the strike actions of more workers (385,000) than ever before and the increase of the Young Socialists’ membership by over 12.5 percent over 1911 numbers. 10 Yet, just as such activity seemed to indicate a growing working-class cohesion, the Syndicalists departed along a separate path. Syndicalists broke with the CGL in 1912, ending years of uncomfortable affiliation. The Italian Syndicalist Union (USI) of about 100,000 members set up offices in Parma. Their strength derived from Parma and Bologna, from the braccianti (agricultural laborers) of Emilia, among Genoese seamen, and from railway workers. Additional pockets of Syndicalist strength survived in areas of the South, such as Naples. If at this time the formation of the USI seemed to signal a further move to the left, all was not as it appeared. Although Alceste DeAmbris, a vigorous opponent of war in 1911, became USI general secretary and won a parliamentary seat in 1913, the influence of southern intellectuals such as Arturo Labriola continued. In 1911 Labriola had supported war against the Ottoman Turks with the argument that “A people that does not know how to make war will never make a revolution.”11 Still, in the months before the Great War the Left remained identified with anti-war sentiment, and the Left seemed to be on the offensive. The cooperation of the revolutionary Socialist Benito Mussolini with Milanese Sydicalists and anarchists appeared to reflect merely a growing solidarity among revolutionaries.12 II Antonio Salandra replaced Giolitti as premier in April 1914. Salandra stood firmly on the Right. He had risen as a protégé of Baron Sidney Sonnino, who had led paternalistic conservatives in opposition to Giolitti’s moderate reformism. Accordingly, Salandra had served in the regime of would-be dictator Luigi Pelloux in the 1890s. By 1912 Salandra began to drift from paternalism toward a more activist agenda that resembled that of the Italian Nationalist Association and that later generations could recognize as proto-Fascist or neo-conservative. From this perspective Salandra had seen the war against the Turks as a chance to weld the country together in the crucible of combat. And, like the Nationalists, Salandra had taken offense at Giolitti’s refusal to seize that opportunity. Given favorable circumstances, then, Salandra would be tempted to effect a revival of the Right and the healing of Italy’s social unrest through war.13 Three factors gave Salandra the chance to initiate his “National Policy.” The first was a backlash against the militant Left among petite bourgeois elements that had previously favored the Left. Secondly, the July Crisis and the ensuing war blocked Giolitti’s return to power and provided the time to bolster the Right through a military venture. Finally, the anti-war forces in general and the working-class Left in particular suffered divisions that prevented concerted action against Italy’s intervention in the war. Italian leftist militancy in 1914 peaked with the great general strike in June known as Red Week. The strike erupted following the killing on June 7 of demonstrators protesting in Ancona against militarism and nationalism. The workers’ swift response arose from the belief that the Ancona incident epitomized the brutal methods commonly employed by employers, the army, and police against working people who challenged the status quo. CGL leaders had earlier warned the government against further testing the workers tolerance of officials’ violence....
YOUNG PSSU HISTORY is a pre-publication copy of the early history of this SEIU#668 union local, t... more YOUNG PSSU HISTORY is a pre-publication copy of the early history of this SEIU#668 union local, the PA Social Services Union
This paper, presented at the Fighting Inequality (LAWCHA/WSA) conference in Georgetown in May 201... more This paper, presented at the Fighting Inequality (LAWCHA/WSA) conference in Georgetown in May 2015, focuses upon the factionalism in the United Electrical . . . Workers of America in the 1940s and '50s, which was led by ousted president James Carey and powerfully abetted by president Philip Murray of the CIO and many religious, labor, political, media and other corporate forces. In addition to the impact upon the UE, the paper examines the effect of the splitting of US labor over political correctness upon the CIO, upon electrical manufacturing workers, and upon local Industrial Union Council strength in the USA.
THE ITALIAN WORKING-CLASS LEFT
AND RESISTANCE TO WAR, 1911-1915
James A. Young
D... more THE ITALIAN WORKING-CLASS LEFT AND RESISTANCE TO WAR, 1911-1915
James A. Young
Developments within the Italian working-class Left prior to Italy’s intervention in the Great War anticipate both the divisiveness and the radicalization characteristic of the better known wartime and postwar periods. Nowhere is this more evident than in the posture assumed toward war. For, while anti-war activities consumed only a portion of the energies of working-class leftists during this period, they reflect the concerns and directions taken by organized workers. From opposition to the Tripolitan (Libyan) War of 1911 against the Turks through the neutralist campaigns of 1914-15, working-class groups made war and militarism a chief focus of their critique of the established order and assumed a leading role among anti-war forces. The accomplishments and the failures of the workers’ anti-war efforts reflect, then, the strengths and weaknesses and the divisions within the movement in 1911 as in 1915 and, for that matter, in 1919-22. In 1911 reformists controlled both the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and the Socialist-founded-and-affiliated General Confederation of Labor (CGL). Yet, important differences remained between them, despite their Accord of Firenza of 1908, which assigned political matters to the PSI and economic concerns to the CGL. In 1908 and again in 1911, rightist reformists in the CGL threatened to break with the PSI, even as recently organized revolutionary dissidents tugged from the other side at both the party and the labor federation. And, if these revolutionaries could derive some encouragement from the CGL’s call in March 1911 for a national demonstration against increased military spending and inflation, and in favor of universal manhood suffrage, they endured another reformist victory at the third national congress of the CGL in May. However, the return of Giovanni Giolitti as Italy’s premier and the course that he set toward war with the Ottoman Turks over Libya created a new crisis for the working-class Left. As war with the Turks approached, the CGL’s Directive Council voted to stage a vigorous demonstration against Premier Giolitti’s venture. As a result, leaders of the CGL, the PSI, and the latter’s Socialist Parliamentary Group (GPS) called on September 27 for a general strike against the war.2 The move underscored the grave importance of the moment, for the reformists had roundly condemned the general strike, along with the Syndicalists with whom the tactic was chiefly identified. Subsequently, the young revolutionary Benito Mussolini, Pietro Nenni, and others created some railway disruptions on a regional scale and were jailed, but the general strike failed. The Giolitti government then conducted war with little further opposition, except in Turin where anti-war agitation continued into mid-1913.3 The general strike of 1911 failed because of a combination of political and economic factors. The CGL leaders had intended the strike to be only a symbolic protest against the war, and the PSI leaders agreed, for neither group was afflicted with the enchantment with violence perpetrated on the Left by anarchists and Syndicalists. Moreover the PSI’s support of the strike had been diluted by the latest version of Giolittian trasformismo: War for the Right, near-universal manhood suffrage for the Left. Some of the right-wing reformists of the PSI even approved of financial credits for the war.4 Faced by such ambivalence among their leaders at a time of high unemployment, workers refused to expose themselves to reprisals. They went to work.5 The very failure of the anti-war strike radicalized large segments of working class organizations. The PSI’s Modena Congress of October 1911 produced gains for the Left, gathered around the newspaper La Soffitta, and at Reggio Emilia in 1912 they constituted a majority. The party, meanwhile, suffered censure by the executive organ of the Second International, the International Socialist Bureau (ISB). Since PSI secretary Pompeo Ciotti earlier had assured the ISB of vigorous opposition to any Giolittian war, the Bureau expressed grave disappointment in the party. Italian Socialist leaders replied that they had fulfilled their duty by protesting the war, but they had been discredited in the eyes of many, both at home and abroad.6 Partly because of this embarrassment, the Congress of Reggio Emilia acted on Mussolini’s motion and expelled Leonida Bissolati, Ivone Bonomi, Angelo Cabrini, and Guido Podrecca, whose right-wing reformism and tacit support of the war had compromised them and who then formed the Reformed Socialist Party.7 Movement did not occur so rapidly within the CGL, where the initial effect of the failed general strike reinforced the leaders’ reformism. Consequently, they refused to support the Syndicalists’ anti-colonial demonstration of March 1912 in Parma. Moreover, a current of the CGL led by general secretary Rinaldo Rigola remained uncomfortable with CGL-PSI ties and favored the formation of a Labor Party that would take on solely workers’ economic issues, which in their eyes did not include suffrage. Yet, the “armed peace” among the Great Powers and the Balkan wars of 1912-13 apparently made an impression: A meeting of the National Council of the CGL in April 1912 muted the usual reformist animosity toward the Syndicalists; and, for May Day 1913 the CGL issued a manifesto urging workers to dedicate the holiday to the struggle against rearmament and threatened revolutionary action if the government should initiate a move toward war.8 While CGL leaders’ renewed opposition to the general strike tactic detracted from the credibility of such bellicose rhetoric, those leaders did display awareness that the Confederation’s focus must be broadened. In 1913 they still represented only 327,000 people, under five percent of Italian workers. At the Fourth Congress in May 1914, Felice Quaglino forcefully advocated widening the CGL’s economic program to include more agricultural concerns, and Enrico Dugoni followed with an anti-imperialist resolution. A short time later the Turinese section of the PSI similarly widened its horizons as it offered the nomination for a parliamentary seat to Gaetano Salvemini, chief exponent of Southern peasants’ interests.9 Meanwhile, 1913 had seen a rising tide of rank-and-file militancy, as evidenced by the strike actions of more workers (385,000) than ever before and the increase of the Young Socialists’ membership by over 12.5 percent over 1911 numbers. 10 Yet, just as such activity seemed to indicate a growing working-class cohesion, the Syndicalists departed along a separate path. Syndicalists broke with the CGL in 1912, ending years of uncomfortable affiliation. The Italian Syndicalist Union (USI) of about 100,000 members set up offices in Parma. Their strength derived from Parma and Bologna, from the braccianti (agricultural laborers) of Emilia, among Genoese seamen, and from railway workers. Additional pockets of Syndicalist strength survived in areas of the South, such as Naples. If at this time the formation of the USI seemed to signal a further move to the left, all was not as it appeared. Although Alceste DeAmbris, a vigorous opponent of war in 1911, became USI general secretary and won a parliamentary seat in 1913, the influence of southern intellectuals such as Arturo Labriola continued. In 1911 Labriola had supported war against the Ottoman Turks with the argument that “A people that does not know how to make war will never make a revolution.”11 Still, in the months before the Great War the Left remained identified with anti-war sentiment, and the Left seemed to be on the offensive. The cooperation of the revolutionary Socialist Benito Mussolini with Milanese Sydicalists and anarchists appeared to reflect merely a growing solidarity among revolutionaries.12 II Antonio Salandra replaced Giolitti as premier in April 1914. Salandra stood firmly on the Right. He had risen as a protégé of Baron Sidney Sonnino, who had led paternalistic conservatives in opposition to Giolitti’s moderate reformism. Accordingly, Salandra had served in the regime of would-be dictator Luigi Pelloux in the 1890s. By 1912 Salandra began to drift from paternalism toward a more activist agenda that resembled that of the Italian Nationalist Association and that later generations could recognize as proto-Fascist or neo-conservative. From this perspective Salandra had seen the war against the Turks as a chance to weld the country together in the crucible of combat. And, like the Nationalists, Salandra had taken offense at Giolitti’s refusal to seize that opportunity. Given favorable circumstances, then, Salandra would be tempted to effect a revival of the Right and the healing of Italy’s social unrest through war.13 Three factors gave Salandra the chance to initiate his “National Policy.” The first was a backlash against the militant Left among petite bourgeois elements that had previously favored the Left. Secondly, the July Crisis and the ensuing war blocked Giolitti’s return to power and provided the time to bolster the Right through a military venture. Finally, the anti-war forces in general and the working-class Left in particular suffered divisions that prevented concerted action against Italy’s intervention in the war. Italian leftist militancy in 1914 peaked with the great general strike in June known as Red Week. The strike erupted following the killing on June 7 of demonstrators protesting in Ancona against militarism and nationalism. The workers’ swift response arose from the belief that the Ancona incident epitomized the brutal methods commonly employed by employers, the army, and police against working people who challenged the status quo. CGL leaders had earlier warned the government against further testing the workers tolerance of officials’ violence....
YOUNG PSSU HISTORY is a pre-publication copy of the early history of this SEIU#668 union local, t... more YOUNG PSSU HISTORY is a pre-publication copy of the early history of this SEIU#668 union local, the PA Social Services Union
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Papers by James A Young
AND RESISTANCE TO WAR, 1911-1915
James A. Young
Developments within the Italian working-class Left prior to Italy’s intervention in the Great War anticipate both the divisiveness and the radicalization characteristic of the
better known wartime and postwar periods. Nowhere is this more evident than in the posture assumed toward war. For, while anti-war activities consumed only a portion of the energies of working-class leftists during this period, they reflect the concerns and directions taken by organized workers. From opposition to the Tripolitan (Libyan) War of 1911 against the Turks through the neutralist campaigns of 1914-15, working-class groups made war and militarism a chief focus of their critique of the established order and assumed a leading role among anti-war forces. The accomplishments and the failures of the workers’ anti-war efforts reflect, then, the strengths and weaknesses and the divisions within the movement in 1911 as in 1915 and, for that matter, in 1919-22.
In 1911 reformists controlled both the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and the Socialist-founded-and-affiliated General Confederation of Labor (CGL). Yet, important differences remained between them, despite their Accord of Firenza of 1908, which assigned political matters to the PSI and economic concerns to the CGL. In 1908 and again in 1911, rightist reformists in the CGL threatened to break with the PSI, even as recently organized revolutionary dissidents tugged from the other side at both the party and the labor federation. And, if these revolutionaries could derive some encouragement from the CGL’s call in March 1911 for a national demonstration against increased military spending and inflation, and in favor of universal manhood suffrage, they endured another reformist victory at the third national congress of the CGL in May. However, the return of Giovanni Giolitti as Italy’s premier and the course that he set toward war with the Ottoman Turks over Libya created a new crisis for the working-class Left.
As war with the Turks approached, the CGL’s Directive Council voted to stage a vigorous demonstration against Premier Giolitti’s venture. As a result, leaders of the CGL, the PSI, and the latter’s Socialist Parliamentary Group (GPS) called on September 27 for a general strike against the war.2 The move underscored the grave importance of the moment, for the reformists had roundly condemned the general strike, along with the Syndicalists with whom the tactic was chiefly identified. Subsequently, the young revolutionary Benito Mussolini, Pietro Nenni, and others created some railway disruptions on a regional scale and were jailed, but the general strike failed. The Giolitti government then conducted war with little further opposition, except in Turin where anti-war agitation continued into mid-1913.3
The general strike of 1911 failed because of a combination of political and economic factors. The CGL leaders had intended the strike to be only a symbolic protest against the war, and the PSI leaders agreed, for neither group was afflicted with the enchantment with violence perpetrated on the Left by anarchists and Syndicalists. Moreover the PSI’s support of the strike had been diluted by the latest version of Giolittian trasformismo: War for the Right, near-universal manhood suffrage for the Left. Some of the right-wing reformists of the PSI even approved of financial credits for the war.4 Faced by such ambivalence among their leaders at a time of high unemployment, workers refused to expose themselves to reprisals. They went to work.5
The very failure of the anti-war strike radicalized large segments of working class organizations. The PSI’s Modena Congress of October 1911 produced gains for the Left, gathered around the newspaper La Soffitta, and at Reggio Emilia in 1912 they constituted a majority. The party, meanwhile, suffered censure by the executive organ of the Second International, the International Socialist Bureau (ISB). Since PSI secretary Pompeo Ciotti earlier had assured the ISB of vigorous opposition to any Giolittian war, the Bureau expressed grave disappointment in the party. Italian Socialist leaders replied that they had fulfilled their duty by protesting the war, but they had been discredited in the eyes of many, both at home and abroad.6 Partly because of this embarrassment, the Congress of Reggio Emilia acted on Mussolini’s motion and expelled Leonida Bissolati, Ivone Bonomi, Angelo Cabrini, and Guido Podrecca, whose right-wing reformism and tacit support of the war had compromised them and who then formed the Reformed Socialist Party.7
Movement did not occur so rapidly within the CGL, where the initial effect of the failed general strike reinforced the leaders’ reformism. Consequently, they refused to support the Syndicalists’ anti-colonial demonstration of March 1912 in Parma. Moreover, a current of the CGL led by general secretary Rinaldo Rigola remained uncomfortable with CGL-PSI ties and favored the formation of a Labor Party that would take on solely workers’ economic issues, which in their eyes did not include suffrage. Yet, the “armed peace” among the Great Powers and the Balkan wars of 1912-13 apparently made an impression: A meeting of the National Council of the CGL in April 1912 muted the usual reformist animosity toward the Syndicalists; and, for May Day 1913 the CGL issued a manifesto urging workers to dedicate the holiday to the struggle against rearmament and threatened revolutionary action if the government should initiate a move toward war.8
While CGL leaders’ renewed opposition to the general strike tactic detracted from the credibility of such bellicose rhetoric, those leaders did display awareness that the Confederation’s focus must be broadened. In 1913 they still represented only 327,000 people, under five percent of Italian workers. At the Fourth Congress in May 1914, Felice Quaglino forcefully advocated widening the CGL’s economic program to include more agricultural concerns, and Enrico Dugoni followed with an anti-imperialist resolution. A short time later the Turinese section of the PSI similarly widened its horizons as it offered the nomination for a parliamentary seat to Gaetano Salvemini, chief exponent of Southern peasants’ interests.9 Meanwhile, 1913 had seen a rising tide of rank-and-file militancy, as evidenced by the strike actions of more workers (385,000) than ever before and the increase of the Young Socialists’ membership by over 12.5 percent over 1911 numbers. 10 Yet, just as such activity seemed to indicate a growing working-class cohesion, the Syndicalists departed along a separate path.
Syndicalists broke with the CGL in 1912, ending years of uncomfortable affiliation. The Italian Syndicalist Union (USI) of about 100,000 members set up offices in Parma. Their strength derived from Parma and Bologna, from the braccianti (agricultural laborers) of Emilia, among Genoese seamen, and from railway workers. Additional pockets of Syndicalist strength survived in areas of the South, such as Naples.
If at this time the formation of the USI seemed to signal a further move to the left, all was not as it appeared. Although Alceste DeAmbris, a vigorous opponent of war in 1911, became USI general secretary and won a parliamentary seat in 1913, the influence of southern intellectuals such as Arturo Labriola continued. In 1911 Labriola had supported war against the Ottoman Turks with the argument that “A people that does not know how to make war will never make a revolution.”11 Still, in the months before the Great War the Left remained identified with anti-war sentiment, and the Left seemed to be on the offensive. The cooperation of the revolutionary Socialist Benito Mussolini with Milanese Sydicalists and anarchists appeared to reflect merely a growing solidarity among revolutionaries.12
II
Antonio Salandra replaced Giolitti as premier in April 1914. Salandra stood firmly on the Right. He had risen as a protégé of Baron Sidney Sonnino, who had led paternalistic conservatives in opposition to Giolitti’s moderate reformism. Accordingly, Salandra had served in the regime of would-be dictator Luigi Pelloux in the 1890s. By 1912 Salandra began to drift from paternalism toward a more activist agenda that resembled that of the Italian Nationalist Association and that later generations could recognize as proto-Fascist or neo-conservative. From this perspective Salandra had seen the war against the Turks as a chance to weld the country together in the crucible of combat. And, like the Nationalists, Salandra had taken offense at Giolitti’s refusal to seize that opportunity. Given favorable circumstances, then, Salandra would be tempted to effect a revival of the Right and the healing of Italy’s social unrest through war.13
Three factors gave Salandra the chance to initiate his “National Policy.” The first was a backlash against the militant Left among petite bourgeois elements that had previously favored the Left. Secondly, the July Crisis and the ensuing war blocked Giolitti’s return to power and provided the time to bolster the Right through a military venture. Finally, the anti-war forces in general and the working-class Left in particular suffered divisions that prevented concerted action against Italy’s intervention in the war.
Italian leftist militancy in 1914 peaked with the great general strike in June known as Red Week. The strike erupted following the killing on June 7 of demonstrators protesting in Ancona against militarism and nationalism. The workers’ swift response arose from the belief that the Ancona incident epitomized the brutal methods commonly employed by employers, the army, and police against working people who challenged the status quo. CGL leaders had earlier warned the government against further testing the workers tolerance of officials’ violence....
Books by James A Young
Drafts by James A Young
AND RESISTANCE TO WAR, 1911-1915
James A. Young
Developments within the Italian working-class Left prior to Italy’s intervention in the Great War anticipate both the divisiveness and the radicalization characteristic of the
better known wartime and postwar periods. Nowhere is this more evident than in the posture assumed toward war. For, while anti-war activities consumed only a portion of the energies of working-class leftists during this period, they reflect the concerns and directions taken by organized workers. From opposition to the Tripolitan (Libyan) War of 1911 against the Turks through the neutralist campaigns of 1914-15, working-class groups made war and militarism a chief focus of their critique of the established order and assumed a leading role among anti-war forces. The accomplishments and the failures of the workers’ anti-war efforts reflect, then, the strengths and weaknesses and the divisions within the movement in 1911 as in 1915 and, for that matter, in 1919-22.
In 1911 reformists controlled both the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and the Socialist-founded-and-affiliated General Confederation of Labor (CGL). Yet, important differences remained between them, despite their Accord of Firenza of 1908, which assigned political matters to the PSI and economic concerns to the CGL. In 1908 and again in 1911, rightist reformists in the CGL threatened to break with the PSI, even as recently organized revolutionary dissidents tugged from the other side at both the party and the labor federation. And, if these revolutionaries could derive some encouragement from the CGL’s call in March 1911 for a national demonstration against increased military spending and inflation, and in favor of universal manhood suffrage, they endured another reformist victory at the third national congress of the CGL in May. However, the return of Giovanni Giolitti as Italy’s premier and the course that he set toward war with the Ottoman Turks over Libya created a new crisis for the working-class Left.
As war with the Turks approached, the CGL’s Directive Council voted to stage a vigorous demonstration against Premier Giolitti’s venture. As a result, leaders of the CGL, the PSI, and the latter’s Socialist Parliamentary Group (GPS) called on September 27 for a general strike against the war.2 The move underscored the grave importance of the moment, for the reformists had roundly condemned the general strike, along with the Syndicalists with whom the tactic was chiefly identified. Subsequently, the young revolutionary Benito Mussolini, Pietro Nenni, and others created some railway disruptions on a regional scale and were jailed, but the general strike failed. The Giolitti government then conducted war with little further opposition, except in Turin where anti-war agitation continued into mid-1913.3
The general strike of 1911 failed because of a combination of political and economic factors. The CGL leaders had intended the strike to be only a symbolic protest against the war, and the PSI leaders agreed, for neither group was afflicted with the enchantment with violence perpetrated on the Left by anarchists and Syndicalists. Moreover the PSI’s support of the strike had been diluted by the latest version of Giolittian trasformismo: War for the Right, near-universal manhood suffrage for the Left. Some of the right-wing reformists of the PSI even approved of financial credits for the war.4 Faced by such ambivalence among their leaders at a time of high unemployment, workers refused to expose themselves to reprisals. They went to work.5
The very failure of the anti-war strike radicalized large segments of working class organizations. The PSI’s Modena Congress of October 1911 produced gains for the Left, gathered around the newspaper La Soffitta, and at Reggio Emilia in 1912 they constituted a majority. The party, meanwhile, suffered censure by the executive organ of the Second International, the International Socialist Bureau (ISB). Since PSI secretary Pompeo Ciotti earlier had assured the ISB of vigorous opposition to any Giolittian war, the Bureau expressed grave disappointment in the party. Italian Socialist leaders replied that they had fulfilled their duty by protesting the war, but they had been discredited in the eyes of many, both at home and abroad.6 Partly because of this embarrassment, the Congress of Reggio Emilia acted on Mussolini’s motion and expelled Leonida Bissolati, Ivone Bonomi, Angelo Cabrini, and Guido Podrecca, whose right-wing reformism and tacit support of the war had compromised them and who then formed the Reformed Socialist Party.7
Movement did not occur so rapidly within the CGL, where the initial effect of the failed general strike reinforced the leaders’ reformism. Consequently, they refused to support the Syndicalists’ anti-colonial demonstration of March 1912 in Parma. Moreover, a current of the CGL led by general secretary Rinaldo Rigola remained uncomfortable with CGL-PSI ties and favored the formation of a Labor Party that would take on solely workers’ economic issues, which in their eyes did not include suffrage. Yet, the “armed peace” among the Great Powers and the Balkan wars of 1912-13 apparently made an impression: A meeting of the National Council of the CGL in April 1912 muted the usual reformist animosity toward the Syndicalists; and, for May Day 1913 the CGL issued a manifesto urging workers to dedicate the holiday to the struggle against rearmament and threatened revolutionary action if the government should initiate a move toward war.8
While CGL leaders’ renewed opposition to the general strike tactic detracted from the credibility of such bellicose rhetoric, those leaders did display awareness that the Confederation’s focus must be broadened. In 1913 they still represented only 327,000 people, under five percent of Italian workers. At the Fourth Congress in May 1914, Felice Quaglino forcefully advocated widening the CGL’s economic program to include more agricultural concerns, and Enrico Dugoni followed with an anti-imperialist resolution. A short time later the Turinese section of the PSI similarly widened its horizons as it offered the nomination for a parliamentary seat to Gaetano Salvemini, chief exponent of Southern peasants’ interests.9 Meanwhile, 1913 had seen a rising tide of rank-and-file militancy, as evidenced by the strike actions of more workers (385,000) than ever before and the increase of the Young Socialists’ membership by over 12.5 percent over 1911 numbers. 10 Yet, just as such activity seemed to indicate a growing working-class cohesion, the Syndicalists departed along a separate path.
Syndicalists broke with the CGL in 1912, ending years of uncomfortable affiliation. The Italian Syndicalist Union (USI) of about 100,000 members set up offices in Parma. Their strength derived from Parma and Bologna, from the braccianti (agricultural laborers) of Emilia, among Genoese seamen, and from railway workers. Additional pockets of Syndicalist strength survived in areas of the South, such as Naples.
If at this time the formation of the USI seemed to signal a further move to the left, all was not as it appeared. Although Alceste DeAmbris, a vigorous opponent of war in 1911, became USI general secretary and won a parliamentary seat in 1913, the influence of southern intellectuals such as Arturo Labriola continued. In 1911 Labriola had supported war against the Ottoman Turks with the argument that “A people that does not know how to make war will never make a revolution.”11 Still, in the months before the Great War the Left remained identified with anti-war sentiment, and the Left seemed to be on the offensive. The cooperation of the revolutionary Socialist Benito Mussolini with Milanese Sydicalists and anarchists appeared to reflect merely a growing solidarity among revolutionaries.12
II
Antonio Salandra replaced Giolitti as premier in April 1914. Salandra stood firmly on the Right. He had risen as a protégé of Baron Sidney Sonnino, who had led paternalistic conservatives in opposition to Giolitti’s moderate reformism. Accordingly, Salandra had served in the regime of would-be dictator Luigi Pelloux in the 1890s. By 1912 Salandra began to drift from paternalism toward a more activist agenda that resembled that of the Italian Nationalist Association and that later generations could recognize as proto-Fascist or neo-conservative. From this perspective Salandra had seen the war against the Turks as a chance to weld the country together in the crucible of combat. And, like the Nationalists, Salandra had taken offense at Giolitti’s refusal to seize that opportunity. Given favorable circumstances, then, Salandra would be tempted to effect a revival of the Right and the healing of Italy’s social unrest through war.13
Three factors gave Salandra the chance to initiate his “National Policy.” The first was a backlash against the militant Left among petite bourgeois elements that had previously favored the Left. Secondly, the July Crisis and the ensuing war blocked Giolitti’s return to power and provided the time to bolster the Right through a military venture. Finally, the anti-war forces in general and the working-class Left in particular suffered divisions that prevented concerted action against Italy’s intervention in the war.
Italian leftist militancy in 1914 peaked with the great general strike in June known as Red Week. The strike erupted following the killing on June 7 of demonstrators protesting in Ancona against militarism and nationalism. The workers’ swift response arose from the belief that the Ancona incident epitomized the brutal methods commonly employed by employers, the army, and police against working people who challenged the status quo. CGL leaders had earlier warned the government against further testing the workers tolerance of officials’ violence....