The 1919 elections, then, destroyed the axiomatic liberal control of parliament and dramatically ended the isolation of parliament from the nation, though not necessarily in a way that strengthened parliamentary institutions or facilitated stable parliamentary government. Italy anyway faced a post-war crisis of such dimensions in the so-called biennio rosso or
‘Red Two Years’ of 1919–20 that it would have tested the resilience of any political system.
The biennio rosso was a period of intense, widespread and almost continuous political, social and economic unrest in both town and coun-tryside from spring 1919 until late 1920, peaking during the spring to the autumn of 1920. It was only from the autumn of 1920 that Fascism
began to emerge as a mass movement, and the significance of this juncture can scarcely be overestimated.
The unrest of 1919–20 overlapped with and to an extent was caused by a post-war economic crisis, the effects of which were felt well into 1922. This crisis sprang from the economic strains imposed on a relatively poor country by the waging of a prolonged and expensive war which Italy quite literally could not afford to fight. As a result, the war was financed in ways which both mortgaged the country’s economic future, postponing to the end of the war painful decisions about how its costs were to be met, and transferred national wealth unfairly.
Government indebtedness increased to staggering proportions, both towards its own citizens who had loaned money to the government through wartime Treasury bonds, and towards the richer Allies, particularly the United States, who had supplied on credit the food, fuel and raw materials on which the country’s economy relied also into the post-war period.
A production-at-any-cost mentality fuelled largely uncontrolled and ever-increasing expenditure of public funds on wartime economic mobilisation. The government paid for it by printing money, a charac-teristic device for financing growth without the means to do so. The inevitable outcome of expanding wartime demand and an increase in note circulation was an inflationary spiral which sustained a mainly artificial and speculative industrial boom. This favoured the rise of a few giant combines such as Fiat, Ansaldo and Ilva to the positions of prominence in the war economy. The war manufacturers’ quick and high profits were speedily reinvested not only in new plants but also in buying shares in other companies, as they created unwieldy horizontal and vertical industrial empires covering mining, shipping and trans-portation, electricity generation, engineering and heavy industries.
The inflationary spiral continued through 1919 until mid to late 1920, fed by rising prices for post-war food and raw material imports and the declining value of the Italian currency abroad, as Allied war credits and support for the lira ended. Wartime and post-war inflation had mixed social effects. It certainly hit urban and rural property owners who lived from rent, especially when rental and leasing contracts were frozen for the duration of the war, and those with savings or fixed incomes, and all consumers. However, for those who owed money or wanted to borrow money – and this included the government of course – inflation constantly reduced the value of the debt. People who had given their savings as well as their sons to support the war effort undoubtedly
resented the impact of inflation. It gave a cutting edge to the widespread sense of middle-class grievance against those who had apparently exploited their patriotic sacrifice, the ‘sharks’ and the ‘shirkers’. These were the war profiteers and the industrial workers, perceived to be the beneficiaries of an economy of high prices and correspondingly high wages. This is perhaps the point to keep in mind when looking at the effect of post-war inflation on the discontent behind the ‘Red Two Years’. A particularly sharp rise in food prices precipitated the strikes and popular demonstrations of July 1919. But generally, union agitation in 1919 and at least in the first half of 1920 for better pay, improved work conditions and fringe benefits was contained within the inflationary cycle, their costs passed on by the employers in higher prices.
Much of the agitation of 1919–20 was of such a conventionally reformist and defensive character, to put up hedges against inflation.
But this was not necessarily how it was perceived by either side, because of the feverish climate of ‘1919-ism’, of great expectation of change gen-erated by the war and European revolution. Economic disputes were often given a political and revolutionary aura, certainly by the Anarchists and Anarcho-syndicalists, where they were influential in the labour move-ment in Liguria, Tuscany and the Marche, and also by the PSI, if only as a competitive reflex. Some of the major incidents of the biennio rosso had a definite though passing insurrectionary feel, such as the food riots of July 1919, the general strike in Turin and Piedmont in April 1920, and the June 1920 army mutiny in Ancona against transfer to Albania, which was supported by a general working-class mobilisation in the region remi-niscent of ‘Red Week’ in 1914. Expectations were being raised beyond the demand for higher wages or the eight-hour day or social insurance schemes, all working-class gains of 1919–20, to the transformation of society. The aims and conduct as well as the revolutionary rhetoric of some of the agitation bore this out.
The unrest of the biennio rosso took different forms in the rural south and the islands than it did in the industrial towns and cities and the countryside of northern and central Italy. In the south, it had a tradi-tional shape: occupations of the latifundia. Spreading initially from Lazio in the spring to the autumn of 1919, coinciding with the demobilisation of Italy’s peasant army, land occupations resumed in spring 1920 and were particularly intense in the autumn of 1920, affecting parts of Sardinia, Sicily, Calabria, Campania and Apulia.
The Socialists, who were weak or non-existent in most of the south, did not usually lead or organise the occupations, except in Lazio and
Apulia. Instead, the occupations were sometimes led by Catholic peasant leagues and more often by men belonging to the local ex-servicemen’s associations. They were recently demobilised peasants taking action themselves to realise the wartime promises of land. The occupations of 1919–20 were rolled back or contained effectively enough by the com-bined repressive and mediating actions of the police and prefects. Their action was facilitated by the readiness to negotiate and compromise of the improvised veterans’ co-operatives. This stance reflected the PPI’s inter-class approach and composition, and the continuing hold of the old clientelistic relationship between landlord and peasant. In general, land occupations in the south resulted in peasant co-operatives accepting rental and lease agreements rather than confiscation, division and ownership, and ironically contributed to the absorption of ex-servicemen’s associations into the clientelistic fabric of local southern politics.
In the agricultural areas of the north and the centre, and exceptionally in the southern region of Apulia, Socialist, and sometimes also Catholic, labour and peasant organisations led often extended and bitter cam-paigns against landowners and employers for better wages and tenancy agreements. The Catholic peasant leagues affiliated to the ‘white’ union federation, the CIL (Confederazione Italiana del Lavoro), founded in 1919, had 1.25 million members in 1920, recruiting mainly among waged work-ers on contract, sharecroppwork-ers, and small proprietors and tenant farmwork-ers of Liguria, Lombardy and Venetia. Even more dramatically, the socialist agricultural union federation, Federterra, had nearly doubled its pre-war membership to almost half a million by the autumn of 1919 and had 900 000 members in 1920. It not only expanded in its traditional areas of strength among the braccianti or landless labourers of Emilia and Apulia, but also attracted previously unorganised and quiescent rural groups, such as the mezzadri or sharecroppers in Tuscany and Umbria.
It is important to realise that the immediate post-war agrarian disputes were most intense in the areas of commercialised or capitalist farming in Apulia, the Po basin provinces of Lombardy, Venetia and Emilia, and central Tuscany. With the exception of Tuscany, the struggles of the biennio rosso were a culmination of nearly two decades of class conflict engaging entrepreneurial farmers, landowners and organised labour.
In Tuscany, the post-war outbreak of peasant discontent shocked landowners by its novelty and scale. The idealised cosy and co-operative relationship between landowner and mezzadro, harmoniously sharing both the costs and proceeds of the farm’s production, had steadily disinte-grated since the late nineteenth century. Landowners produced for the
market and in the effort to maximise profits, strained the sharecropping system to its social and economic limits, by throwing more of the expenses of production onto their peasant tenants and by squeezing their share of the produce. The wartime and post-war promises of land and social justice completed the radicalisation of the sharecroppers: a massive agricultural strike ending in July 1920 and involving half a million of the 710 000 peasants in the region won a new mezzadria contract. This agreement gave an above half share of the proceeds to the tenant, and transferred a higher proportion of production costs onto the landlord, who felt that this destroyed the very viability of the commercialised sharecropping system. Worse still for the landowner was that tenants’
security of tenure and a voice in farm management could be construed as an erosion of his rights of ownership.
This was the real point at issue in the prolonged and vicious labour disputes in the Po Valley provinces and Apulia, which again concluded in victories for the peasant leagues in the summer and the autumn of 1920.
Drainage and land reclamation schemes, and high investment in the Po Valley from the 1880s had helped to create a productive capitalistic agriculture. This was, typically, medium-sized livestock and dairy leaseholding farms in Cremona and Mantua, and large estates leased or owned by commercial farmers, who employed an army of landless proletarians for the harvesting of wheat and increasingly important industrial crops such as hemp, tomatoes and sugar beet, in Ferrara, Bologna, Rovigo, Padua and parts of Brescia. The farming system of Bari and Foggia in Apulia was different in that it was monocultural and unmodernised, based on the extensive cultivation of wheat for market, which made even higher wages a direct threat to relatively low profit-ability. But otherwise, the working of the estates by landless agricultural labourers enrolled in combative socialist leagues, the only labour organ-isations of any substance in the south, gave the same pattern and tempo to class conflict here as in the Po Valley.
Employers in these commercialised farming zones were reluctantly prepared to concede higher wages and a shorter working day, at least as long as the inflationary spiral continued. But what they bitterly resisted and resented was Federterra’s demand to control the supply of labour and employment, and the Catholic leagues’ call for peasant co-management of farms and even the right to buy out farmers. They saw these claims as an unacceptable challenge to property and management rights.
Control of labour was the key in the braccianti zones of the Po Valley, because there were always too many labourers chasing too little work.
Rural overpopulation had created structural underemployment. A surplus of labour allowed employers to drive down wage levels and restrict workers to alternating periods of activity during sowing and harvest, and enforced idleness particularly during the winter months. The braccianti contracts, including the important Paglia–Caldo agreement concluded in Bologna in October 1920, invariably obliged employers to recognise the employment offices run by Federterra as the exclusive source of the supply of labour and imposed year-round employment quotas on all farmers, large and small, the number of workers usually being related to farm size. The labour quotas not only guaranteed the allocation of work for the union’s members. They were Federterra’s wedge into farm man-agement, because the farmer’s loss of control over the number of men he might want to employ and the duration of their employment affected other decisions about the amount of land to cultivate, the use of machinery, even the type of crop.
Federterra tried to organise a single peasant union, including share-croppers and small tenant farmers as well as braccianti, and gained a much improved mezzadria contract also in 1920. But the interests of the agricul-tural proletariat remained the most important in the leagues. These were expressed not only in Federterra’s aim to ‘socialise’ land and have it worked on collective tenancies by co-operatives of agricultural labourers, but also in the shape of the unitary union organisation itself. An absolute labour monopoly was so crucial yet so precarious in the overpopulated countryside, that it could only be maintained by the discipline and con-trol of the whole agricultural sector, including small peasants who had to be prevented from exchanging labour and thereby avoiding the quota. The system had to be watertight to function at all. This accounted for the coercive aspects of the leagues’ attempt to secure and retain the labour monopoly through fining, boycotting, and sabotaging the crops, livestock and property of those farmers employing non-union labour and those ‘blackleg’ workers who agreed to work for them.
The agricultural employers’ economic defeats coincided and dove-tailed with damaging setbacks in the autumn 1920 local elections, after which the PSI ran nearly one-third of all communal and almost a half of all provincial councils in Italy. Anti-Socialist coalitions won most of the major cities. But the real political damage was done in the provincial capitals and small towns of northern and central Italy, where the Socialist rural vote swept away the liberal and centrist politicians who usually represented landholding interests. In Siena province, 30 of 36 local councils went Socialist, as did 149 of 290 communes in Tuscany as a
whole. In Emilia, the cradle of rural socialism, the PSI won control of a staggering 223 of 280 municipal councils, and in the province of Bologna alone, 54 out of 61.
The PSI had campaigned on a revolutionary platform, saying that they intended to take over the local sources of power of the bourgeois state and convert them into instruments of proletarian control, to enact a series of parochial revolutions. The Socialist town hall projected itself as a class administration waging the class war. The economic power of Federterra was now buttressed and complemented by the PSI’s political control of the local seats of government. Socialist councils used their powers to raise taxes on wealth and property, increased spending on public services and works, favoured workers’ co-operatives in municipal contracts and subsidised consumer co-operatives to undercut the private retail and distribution trades. A whole swathe of middle-class interests in town and country, from farmers to manufacturers, builders, landlords, professional men, shopkeepers and tradesmen, felt under attack from these municipal ‘dictatorships of the proletariat’. ‘There are occasions when I don’t know whether I’m in Russia or in Italy’,10 complained a large commercial farmer to his Bolognese agrarian association in the spring of 1920. In retrospect, such fears seemed exaggerated, and many historians have challenged the ‘myth’ that Fascism ‘saved Italy from Bolshevism’. But in late 1920, after the propertied classes had suffered disastrous economic and political defeats in north and central Italy, this was exactly the perception of recent events. At a local and provincial level the Socialist revolution was being inaugurated; it was already under way.
In the industrial centres, what alarmed employers most was the way working-class agitation sometimes went beyond wage demands to pose a challenge to ownership and managerial authority on the shop floor.
By far the most significant and revolutionary development was the fact-ory council movement in the mechanical and automobile plants of Turin.
Building on the experience of wartime elective factory grievance commit-tees, the factory councils were elevated as the Italian equivalent of the soviets by the group of young Socialist (later Communist) intellectuals and labour organisers whose mouthpiece was Gramsci’s review L’Ordine Nuovo (New Order). The councils were organs of factory demo-cracy which wanted far more than a say in plant management. Sharing the revolutionary syndicalist belief that through organising themselves workers acquired discipline, expertise and responsibility, the councils were seen both as executives of revolution and embryos of the post-revolutionary proletarian management of modern industry.
It was no wonder that industrialists resisted so intransigently the recognition of these factory councils, which was the real issue behind the general strike in Piedmont in April 1920. The council movement explicitly rejected both the reformism of the union federation, the CGL, and of the metallurgical workers’ union, the FIOM, and the phony revolutionary position of the PSI maximalists, who in Gramsci’s view were failing to exploit the ‘revolutionary situation’ of the biennio rosso. The councils operated at plant level, representing both union and non-unionised workers, and challenged the writ of the FIOM as much as the employers. This probably explained why the CGL and PSI leader-ship isolated the movement by refusing to extend the regional strike into a national one.
While workers’ discontent touched the foundations of property and management, the government’s attitude to it sharpened employers’
perception of a crisis of capitalism. Nitti had come to government in June 1919 with the intention of effecting the transition from war to peace as rapidly as possible and governing through a liberal reformism in the pre-war Giolittian mould. Bringing the war to a definite end linked both domestic and foreign policies. The speedy conclusion of a peace settlement would help to secure continuing economic aid from the other ex-Allied powers, without which Nitti thought Italy could not survive economically, let alone recover. It would also justify and make possible the quick demobilisation of the troops and of the war economy, relieving the state of some of the enormous costs incurred in fighting the war.
Nitti inherited a disastrous international situation from the previous liberal government led by Vittorio Emanuele Orlando and Salandra. At the Versailles Peace Conference they had isolated Italy by adopting a policy that was both contradictory and self-defeating. Effectively taking up the Nationalist position on war aims, they demanded the fulfilment of the terms of the Treaty of London and in addition the annexation to Italy of the Adriatic industrial port of Fiume, which had a mixed Italian and Croat population and was occupied by Italian troops at the end of the war. By dubiously invoking the principle of national self-determination for Fiume and simultaneously denying it in the name of national power
Nitti inherited a disastrous international situation from the previous liberal government led by Vittorio Emanuele Orlando and Salandra. At the Versailles Peace Conference they had isolated Italy by adopting a policy that was both contradictory and self-defeating. Effectively taking up the Nationalist position on war aims, they demanded the fulfilment of the terms of the Treaty of London and in addition the annexation to Italy of the Adriatic industrial port of Fiume, which had a mixed Italian and Croat population and was occupied by Italian troops at the end of the war. By dubiously invoking the principle of national self-determination for Fiume and simultaneously denying it in the name of national power