The Logic of Fascist Syndicalism and Regime Trade Unionism: The Defense of Capital Pt.2

Trade unions and corporations in the fascist order

Let us now take a look at the actual nature of Corporations and Trade Unions and their legal function. It’s essential to highlight the substantial historical continuity between fascist totalitarian corporatism and democratic collaborationist corporatism.

The final structure of the Corporations was achieves in 1934 with the Law of February 5, which outlined the essential guidelines for the organization and legal arrangement of this organ and the Trade Unions. At the base of the criteria for the establishment of the Corporations is the “major branch of production” articulated on the basis of the production cycle, that is, embracing various production processes (cycles) relating to products that present characteristics of productive affinity (cereals, textiles, chemicals, etc) for which problems arise between them in a closely related and coordinated fashion.

Thus, in each Corporation the various categories spread across the cycles of the various products of the branch, from the production of raw materials to the consumption of the finished product, come to be represented and connected. Thus, for example, the Textile Products Corporation includes sheep husbandry and sericulture, the various textile industries (seeds and silkworms, silk reeling and throwing, rayon industry, flax, hemp, jute, textile dyeing and pressing, etc) and the corresponding product trade enterprises.

Thus, according to this criterion, the 22 constituted Corporations were divided into three major groups, precisely according to the characteristics of the production cycle: 8 were the corporations with agricultural, industrial and commercial production cycle, 8 those with an industrial and commercial cycle, and 6 those for the service industry. At the top they were unified by the National Council of Corporations.

The Corporations were practically in charge of coordinating the production and distribution processes of the entire national economy.

It would take too long to describe their composition in detailed form vertically and horizontally, which, after all, varied greatly according to the type of Corporation. However, it’s important to briefly point out the criteria by which they were organized. Each Corporation included representatives of State administrations, the PNF, capital, and workers, as well as “technical” representatives competent on the field. All groups of homogeneous activities were represented in them, and each group was set on equal representation between capitalists and workers. In the Corporations, therefore, all economic interests of the branch of production were represented, both in the sense of class interests and in the sense of economic relations among the various capitalists or companies operating in the sector into which the life of the Corporation was articulated.

The Corporations were thus structured in such a way as to incorporate the entire national capitalist productive structure under the command economy direction of the State, to compress all the particular drives and interests, of class and of productive sector, in view of the general interest of national capitalism. They constituted the de facto institutionalized encounter between Capital and Labor, class collaboration elevated to a legal principle in a productive function.

Obviously, since capitalist production was impossible to plan and frame seriously toward uniform and harmonious ends, no matter if capitalist ends, those who really suffered all the suffocating weight of the Corporations was the proletariat, nailed by law to the needs of the nation.

However, it’s important to note that Corporation and Trade Union were two distinct organizations, and separate not only formally but also legally. Trade Unions, associations attached to the respective Corporation, became autonomous from the respective Confederation, but continued to adhere to it. In other words, the trade unions did not emanate from the Corporations, but maintained their own life, distinct not only from them but also from the employers’ unions, which also were organizationally independent from the Corporations.

The latter, in fact, had mainly economic regulatory functions, in the sense of regulating relations between all branches of the industries concerned and framed by the Corporation.

As concerns labor relations between workers and employers, the Corporations were vested only with “accessory competence”, that is, they functioned as regulators of the category labor contracts done between workers’ unions and bosses’ associations. In fact, Article l0 of the Law of April 3, 1926, later taken up in full by the regulations of the Decree-Law of 1934, provides that

«the central liaison bodies may establish, after agreement with the employers’ and workers’ representatives, general rules on working conditions in the enterprises to which they refer. Such norms shall have effect with respect to all employers and workers in the category to which the norms refer and which the linked associations represent».

In order to make rules concerning labor relations, the Corporation needed the investiture of the Fascist trade unions and employers’ organizations.

This organizational distinction between Corporations and fascist trade unions is important in that it underlines how Fascism itself, even in its fiercely hierarchical and “authoritarian” conception of social organization by the State, was careful to distinguish between trade union association, in any case reflecting to some extent the particular interests of its members, workers and capitalists, and the State organ of control and coordination of national economic activity, and therefore of subjugation of the proletariat to the interests of capital. The importance of this distinction in Fascism, which is then the same one implemented and continued by the post-fascist democratic-Resistance regime, albeit in different forms, appears even more evident when considered on the legal level, which represents the institutional formalization of the political essence of the two bodies.

It’s interesting in this regard to quote in full the analysis of a jurist of the time, Amleto Di Marcantonio, in his extensive text on the “Nature and Functions of the Corporation”.

«Institutions of a public legal nature can take on, in the State, either the shape of organs or that of public legal persons. The former represent the category of the instruments of direct action, the latter that of the instruments of indirect action; the former are completely inserted into the State organism and serve for the constitution and implementation of the will of the State (and therefore do not have legal personality), the latter have an autarchical nature: that is, they have their own interests and their own capacity to govern them, but since these interests also concern the State, their action must be such as to harmonize their own interests with those of the State (public function). To this end, they have been granted public legal personality, which implicitly contains the responsibility to perform that function. Of the two basic institutions of the corporatist system, the trade union was organized as a public legal person, the corporation among State organs.

“The reason why the corporation has been integrated in the category of State organs rather than as a public legal person can be said to derive from these two elements: a) the purpose for which it was established (unitary discipline and development of production, which is the interest of the state); b) its political and technical economic structure, established to achieve this purpose.

“Even the trade union – it should be noted – which, although it’s not a State organ, ultimately achieves, by its action, the general interest, since such is the equitable regulation of labor relations achieved by the meeting (cooperation) of the wills of associations. But the interests reflected in the union and, as a result, its action, have an entirely particular physiognomy that determines a constitution of the institution such that it is identified as a person having its own will and its own end.

“The trade union comes into being by the will of the members of a category and for the protection of the interests of the category itself, interests which for the most part relate to working conditions or capital, or welfare needs, etc, in other words to a factor of production.

“Thus the institution is presented with that autonomy which is proper to any association which groups individuals carrying on the same activity together (in our case workers or employers), and therefore having common interests which are different and often conflicting with those of other similar associations.

“This autonomy cannot disappear even if the institution is brought to the level of public law. For although most of the union’s interests concern, under the fascist regime, the State as well, they do not cease to be of that category; the State is above it, and since it’s concerned that the interests of antagonistic unions should be harmonized, it achieves this by organizing the unions themselves as public legal persons. It cannot leave them outside the sphere of public law, because it cannot admit that their activities might conflict with the general interest; on the other hand, it couldn’t integrate them among its organs either, because the interests of the State cannot at the same time identify with those of the unions having often conflicting ends among themselves.

“The legal capacity of the union implies that the protective action carried out by this body is at first found to be distinct with respect to the action of the antagonistic union. Collaboration is implemented but later and externally, when with the contract, two declarations of will establish the bridge between the employers’ and workers’ unions. At this moment the new goal achieved by the two unions – through collaboration – comes to coincide with that of the State, but is not identified with it, just as the will of the State is not identified with that of the unions.

“Finally, it should be noted that, although the legal recognition of public law implicitly entails for the union the duty to implement collaboration, it’s nevertheless not excluded, at least theoretically – and precisely because of the characteristic autonomy of the union – that such collaboration doesn’t take place: this is provided, moreover, by the law that has provided the means to reach it by other means (labor judiciary, which can, among other things, dictate labor regulations; corporations, which have a similar function).

“The matter with the corporation is quite different. The purpose for which it’s intended concerns the unitary regulation of productive forces, which stand in manifold relations that have vast and complex repercussions on the whole scale of the economic process. Here the State’s interest is, let us say, more direct and immediate: the State isn’t faced with labor relations, simple and circumscribed, for which a regulation implemented by the unions themselves is sufficient as long as it doesn’t harm general interests: but it’s faced with complex relations, which affect simultaneously employers and workers, technicians and consumers, State and Party, in essence the collectivity, even if the problems are related to a single branch of production. Given the need to regulate these relations in a unified manner, the State creates for this purpose (it does not recognize) an institution – the corporation – into whose core it calls, for a more suitable evaluation of the problems and so that the necessary collaboration can take place, the elements of the categories as well as those of the institutions interested in regulating those relations. It thus happens that in a single institution (college) various elements come together, which consequently do not reflect the interests of one factor of production, but rather the most diverse interests, in other words, the interests of production as a whole, which are general interests; the will of such elements or representatives, unified into a single will, is not a means to an end of its own (the college, precisely as such, has no end of its own). Thus, the physiognomy of the corporation is not the same as that of the trade union, nor that of other public bodies that have their own end, and could not therefore recommend its integration among public legal persons.

“In fact, the various and often conflicting interests reflected in the corporation cause it to lose all particularistic character and make it a direct exponent of general economic interests: let it not be forgotten, related to this, that the State and the Party are not above or even outside the corporation, but are within the corporation, like the blood that circulates in an organ that gives it life. The elements designated by the categories represent the interests of the categories and enforce them within the corporation, but the composition of the various interests, that is, the collaboration, takes place within the institution itself, not outside, at the moment, that is, when the different wills meet and merge into the single will that must manifest itself. The angles are smoothed out below the surface, the various needs are reconciled, interests come to be balanced, and the convergence of ends toward that one end which is constituted by the unitary interest of production is thus reached; there takes place, in other words, an internal operation which results in a unilateral act of will».

Beyond the contrived overall harmony with which the matter is described here, which as always reflects the strident contradiction between the purported rational equilibrium of bourgeois legal expressions and the harsh and quite different reality of the conflicting interests that characterize all social and economic sectors of capitalist society, the role of the trade union as an “instrument of indirect action” of the State is nevertheless highlighted with extreme clarity; that is, in our Marxist language stripped of bourgeois legal fictions, a means which the ruling class uses in an indirect form to enslave the proletariat to the needs of its own economy. The Corporation, on the other hand, is a direct instrument of the State, is finally a real State institution, belongs organically to it, constitutes a structural backbone of its functioning, and, in this sphere, the trade unions carry out their collaborationist function of anti- proletarian direction; but carried out in an autonomous form, inasmuch as formally they represent a precise social class having its own interests antagonistic to those of the institutions properly representing the interests of the bosses.

Fascism characterized the organization of the State thus not by having given birth to mixed unions of workers and bosses, as is often mistakenly believed, organs which were, as we have seen, theorized by Rossonists in the early, heated period of Fascist syndicalism, but which never had nor will ever have any practical possibility of implementation precisely because of the irreconcilability of interests of the two classes, whose natural antagonism can only ever be in some way recognized by any capitalist State, but for giving a precise configuration to collaborationist trade union opportunism, for having, in short, institutionalized its historical role by the force of the organization of the State, for having made it not so much a State organ in the proper sense of the term, but in the improper sense, for having given it the guise of a legal personality of the State, that is, of an organization which, while representing and managing its own interests, carries out its action in such a way as to harmonize its interests with those of the State.

Substantial similarity between fascist and democratic regimes

The question in the post-fascist democratic regime of our times is no different in substance. It has copied and developed the criterion of corporatist societal organization, unfolding it in a form befitting the requirements of democratic deception, which are peculiar to the “pluralistic” organization of the democratic State.

In democracy, too, the classic corporatist triangle of unions-bosses-government is constituted and acted upon. In democracy, as in Fascism, the state is presented as the synthesizer of the social demands proper to the natural antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, whose proper interests are in both regimes represented by their respective trade unions: the tricolor unions for the workers, the Confindustria, Confagricoltura and other employers’ associations for the capitalists. The only difference between the two regimes lies in the legal framework of workers’ unions, to which the democratic regime does not recognize public legal personality, but contemplates them as de facto associations falling under the constraint of private jurisdiction and “public security” laws. But the tricolor trade unions are themselves emanations of the parties that form the political backbone of the regime, and in their statutes absolute allegiance to the laws of the State and the Republican Constitution prevails. In this way their role as “indirect instruments” of the State in its work of squeezing and enslaving the working class to the interests of the national economy is equally guaranteed.

On the contrary, their formal nature as independent organizations not bound by State institutions, together with their outward appeal to the tradition of class unionism on which they were built in the immediate postwar period, and thus their opportunistic influence on the working masses, an influence that the fascist trade unions certainly did not enjoy, constitute the best guarantee toward the State, far more effective than any legal constraint, which would certainly have the effect of driving away from its ranks the layer of proletarians most combative and most sensitive to the defense of the real interests of their class.

The difference between fascist syndicalism and the tricolor unions of the democratic regime appears here in all its evidence as being purely legal in form, befitting the formal differences between the two political regimes but which in no way invests the field of the union’s position as an indirect instrument of the regime, whether fascist or democratic, and thus its nature as a “regime union”.

However, it’s obvious that the two organizations are not exactly the same thing, if only because the unions of the democratic regime enjoy, or at least have enjoyed, a following and credibility certainly not comparable to those of the fascist unions.

It was precisely this consideration, together with taking into account the social situation in the proletarian camp that had come about in the period of postwar reconstruction and the subsequent economic “boom”, that led our party to take a different tactical attitude toward the tricolor CGIL than that followed by the communists toward the fascist unions.

Similar considerations later led us to return toward the attitude of that time.

Let us limit ourselves for now to noting that in recent years the degree of subjugation and collaboration of the tricolor trade union centers has seen them reach levels that the fascist unions themselves could only ever dream of. At no time in the history of bourgeois Italy has the symbiosis between State machinery, government, trade unions, and employers’ associations been expressed in such an accomplished and exquisitely corporatist form as in the present day, and this process of progressive integration of the trade unions into the State apparatus is destined to intensify as the crisis deepens and the final catastrophic solution of the world war approaches.

While it’s true that there are no longer structured Corporations as there were during Fascism, it’s also true that trade unions are included with full representation in all the main institutional bodies of so- called economic planning, such as the CNEL, and in many political-economic institutions at the regional and provincial levels. The adherence of the federal and confederal representations of tricolor trade unionism to the organs of the bourgeois State is a clear inheritance of Fascism and consistently expresses the opportunist and defeatist function of the national trade unions, now true anti-worker organizations in the core of the proletariat, a phenomenon that now characterizes, with different formal nuances, all the main advanced capitalist countries and even the so-called “developing” ones.

At this point it’s obvious that the formal legal recognition of trade unions as entities invested with full public law is of less and less importance for the practical purposes of the role they are called upon to play within capitalist society. It shouldn’t be forgotten that the democratic Constitution itself provides for the legal recognition of trade unions.

The capitulation of the General Confederation of Labor when facing fascism

Going back to the fascist period, it’s appropriate to say a few words about the attitude of the CGL toward fascist syndicalism and, more generally, toward the government.

We’ve already mentioned how the red unions were gradually violently marginalized from the terrain of workers’ representation vis-à-vis the bosses. Faced with the blackshirt offensive, the CGL was unable to put up any serious class resistance. The reformist leadership of the CGL influenced all the action of the class unions toward the fascist government and contributed with the forces of reaction to the complete dismantling of the entire organizational structure built up over more than two decades. Faced with the violence of the blackshirts against the Chambers of Labor and workers’ representation in the factories, the CGL leadership suffered the attack without ever responding on the level of class defense action. The same pacifist and submissive attitude of the socialists and, beyond their words, the maximalists, could not fail to be reflected on the trade union level as well.

Consistent with their collaborationist nature, the CGL high-ups didn’t even hesitate to offer the fascist government their cooperation. Mussolini himself, treasuring his past battles against the reformists in the PSI, was well aware of this spirit of renunciation that has always animated social-reformism, in its action on the daily trade union level, and tried to throw the hook of collaboration from the heights of the Head of Government office to bring the most right-wing part of the CGL closer to fascist syndicalism. It didn’t, in fact, decisively reject it. Although timidly disavowed by the PSU leadership, D’Aragona and Colombino declared themselves open to the appeal. Opposed were the maximalists of the CGL, but it was well known that some of them didn’t hate the possibility of some collaboration, in view of the fact that it had now become difficult for the red unions to carry out any activity among workers’ ranks, and only the offer of consensus to fascist syndicalism could have created a situation of greater tolerance on the part of the latter, and thus give the CGL a greater chance of survival. Instead of openly fighting against the enemy on its own ground, of violence and armed struggle, it preferred to declare itself defeated and beg for understanding in exchange for a bit of cooperation.

Beyond certain resistance, contacts between CGL leaders and representatives of the fascist government continued in 1923 until on July 25 a CGL representation, consisting of D’Aragona, Azimonti, Buozzi, Colombino and Cabrini, was received by Mussolini. The talk was “frank and cordial” as the bourgeois press of those days called it, and after it the collaborationist tendency of the CGL leaders was emphasized. Even in the early stages of the negotiations, some Socialist deputies of trade unionist origin declared:

«We have the impression that the Honorable Mussolini wants to test our souls, to carry out a review among us. Well, we wish to affirm that to the concepts of collaboration we fully adhere on condition that: 1) our forces are not shattered or absorbed by fascist syndicalism; 2) a platform of balance and a lowest common denominator is established between the two trade unionisms on which to collaborate for the resolution of fundamental problems; 3) neither the CGL deputies, nor the CGL, nor the multiple annexed organizations are forced to abandon the Socialist Party, of which they have been and are a unique energy».

D’Aragona then added that the CGL’s task, if anything, should be to lead the Party, so that politics would depend on practical and realistic economic interests, «for the ever-increasing prosperity of the nation of which all of us – Socialists and Fascists, Reds and Whites – are a living and palpitant expression».

Finally Azimonti specified in Battaglie Sindacali that such an attitude «was not only necessary, but indispensable for the defense of labor rights to be carried out directly against the bosses and by means of the CGL delegates in the advisory bodies of the State and in the organs of social security (…) The Confederation is willing to participate directly with all its energies in the elections and in the activity of the parliament or of the national council if the government – as it has repeatedly promised – will decide to establish it».

The collaborationist thrusts continued for a while until the fascist trade unions themselves rose up to stem them, worried that this attitude would eventually overshadow their function before the government. They were joined by almost all the components of Fascism, from the nationalists, who had just joined Fascism at that time, to Farinacci’s ultra-rightists, to the so-called “revisionists”, who were headed by Giuseppe Bottai and the magazine Critica Fascista. They all proclaimed collaboration between fascist unions and “red trade unionists” impossible, so that the ongoing negotiations with the government were practically broken off. It’s thus to be attributed to the forces of Fascism themselves that the CGL was not stained with such infamy.

The affair spoke volumes about the real intentions of the reformist piecards and their willingness to assimilate the concepts of loyalty to the nation and the economy, State and private, flaunted by fascist syndicalism. Devoted by historical vocation to class collaboration, the CGL leaders openly manifested a propensity to collaborate with their own enemies, thus drawing the backbone of future postwar Resistance tricolor unionism along the lines of loyalty to the nation and, in democratic terms, to the “Italian people”.

On the level of action the red unions manifested in full all their weakness. Bound to the Socialists’ policy of aventinist pacifism, at no time, not even in the heat of the struggle, did the CGL trade unions succeed in expressing a class response to the bosses and the natural reluctance of the fascist unions to take sides on the ground of direct confrontation with the capitalists and their State. This is all the more serious when one considers that, despite the persecution of the blackshirts, the influence of the CGL federations in the factories remained very high and in the main points of proletarian deployment, as at FIAT, almost total. Yet even at the moments that would have lent themselves best to action against the fascist unions, the substantial pacifism and collaborationism of the reformist majority prevented a drastic class-based stance, despite the determined battle of the communists in the CGL.

Such was the case with the agitations that, in the fall of 1924, affected the Milanese metalworkers in which both the FIOM and the fascist unions had presented their own demands. After a few meetings between FIOM and industrialists went in vain, suddenly on September 29 the latter stipulated a concordat with the corporations that was far removed in content from even the demands of the fascist unions. The FIOM, under pressure from the Communists, opposed acceptance of the pact, which was spontaneously rejected by the vast majority of workers in the workshops of Milan and the province.

The Catholic union SNOM and the anarchist Italian Syndicalist Union also sided with the FIOM’s positions. But this united proletarian front became immobilized at the decisive moment of action. The Communists were pushing to weld the metalworkers’ action to the other workers’ struggles that were going on at the time, to widen the range of the struggle and give it a political significance as an action of direct attack not only on the bosses but on their fascist government. The FIOM, on the other hand, faithful to the renunciative directives of the CGdL, nipped the agitation in the bud, deeming it not useful, as the usual D’Aragona ruled, “a full-scale struggle that, at this delicate political moment, would frighten the Crown”, in the intervention of which the reformists and all the aventinist parties hoped for to curb the raging of the fascist gangs! The matter dragged on like that wearily for a few weeks without ever taking direct action, until on November 7 the FIOM gave orders to all the workshops in Milan, Sesto S. Giovanni and Monza to suspend work at 4 p.m., recommending that workers leave the factories «in the most perfect order, without demonstrations of any kind, silently. Don’t even stop – it urged – near the workshops and go to your homes. Reject any invitation that has not been issued by your organization». Despite this defeatist appeal, the abstention was overwhelming, but this action was not followed by others and the whole agitation ebbed within a few days.

It resumed with vigor in January 1925 as a result of the drastic increase in the cost of living at that time. We’ve already seen in brief the unfolding of this agitation, which can undoubtedly be considered the most powerful of the fascist period, and the defeatist role that the FIOM played in it. The agitation, called by the fascists under pressure from the most combative rank-and-file workers, was then led by the reformists, pushed by the communists, and then crushed by the FIOM itself when the strike was taking on an impressive scale. In this sense the renunciative and defeatist attitude of the reformists came to coincide with the disruptive and anti-worker action of fascist syndicalism.

Rightly had an Italian delegate said in his speech to the VI Enlarged Executive of the Communist International in March 1926: «The history of fascist syndicalism is also the history of the betrayals of the reformists. The trade union policy of capitulation was the basis of the reformist trade union policy».

The attitude of the Communist Left

The communists fought a fierce battle on the anti-reformist and anti-fascist front, using different tactics toward the CGL depending on the different situation. Faced with the destruction of the union’s organizational structures in the factory and outside, the Communists launched the watchword of “rebuilding the red unions”. In carrying it out, they came up against not only the obvious violent reaction of the blackshirts, but also against the CGL leaders who, beyond the shouts demanding greater freedom of action and an end to blackshirt violence, ended up submitting to the will of the fascists by contributing to the dissolution of peripheral organizations hit by the blackshirts, as in Turin in December 1922, when the CGL dissolved that city’s Chamber of Labor and the local Federation of Metallurgists because its leader, Ferrero, had been killed by the fascists.

As a matter of fact, on several occasions the reformists openly boycotted the rebuilding of the trade unions by the communists, kicking them out of the organization, as in Turin during the elections to the Mutual Fund in the FIAT factories and the elections to the Internal Commissions, when the reformists proceeded to expel numerous communists from the union, guilty of having presented class lists against Fascism, lists which, by the way, won an overwhelming majority.

The reformists then proceeded to dissolve trade union organizations headed by communists, and even disbanded a few headed by maximalists, even though they merely masked their behavior of backing up the classical reformists with empty revolutionary phraseology.

The terrain of trade union action was considered vital by the Communist Left; it was in fact the field of action in which the Communist Party’s ability to carry out with revolutionary coherence and with correctness its indispensable function of guiding and directing the working masses on the move was measured in full. So, naturally, the Left attached great importance to trade union tactics, because they were decisive for the proper functioning of that famous “transmission belt” between the Party and the class that the trade unions were supposed to be. Obviously it would make the attitude to be taken towards the reformist leadership of the CGL a matter of such importance that it would be submitted to the Communist International for scrutiny and discussion.

The Left, as always, in dealing with the question posed the objective analysis of the situation as an indispensable prerequisite to choosing correct tactics. Having posed the exclusion of working in the fascist unions, because they were organs based statutorily and practically on class collaboration and the subjugation of the interests of the proletarians to the “higher interests of the nation”, the problem of the reconstruction of free and class unions, against the hesitation and betrayals of the reformists, was posed. From the Left’s report to the VI Enlarged Executive of the Communist International the question is developed with precise Marxist rigor.

As we’ve seen, the history of fascist syndicalism can be divided into two periods. The first, in which Fascist syndicalism tries in vain to establish itself in competition with the other trade unions; the trade union activity of the CGL is still permitted, although it’s expressed with extreme difficulty in the devastating fury of the blackshirts and the substantial capitulation of the reformists. The second period sees Fascism now the total arbiter of the situation, having failed in its attempt to wrest from the “Reds” the influence and leadership of the urban proletariat in the large factories. With exceptional laws investing the Fascist unions with the exclusive right to represent workers and thus declaring the Internal Commissions dissolved, the activity of the other unions, even though formally the right to their existence was provided for, became impossible.

Two different situations therefore had to be matched by two different tactics, and so the Left, against the centrists who now controlled the Party, placed the question before the Communist International, which was now also controlled by the Stalinists.

The correct approach of the Left regarded the still existing remnants of the old CGL as having a long class-based tradition behind them, and so likely to attract the bulk of the workers to their ranks when a more favorable situation for union work emerged. After the advent of the Exceptional Fascist Laws, the reformists at the head of the Confederation moved more and more toward completely stopping all activity.

Not a year passed in fact, and, in January 1927, the reformists dissolved the CGL altogether, postponing its reconstruction to “better times”. The exit of the Left from the leadership of the Communist Party of Italy, consequent on the final arrangement of the new Stalinist leadership, made the reconstruction of a minimum of class union organization impossible. Free trade union organizations did not reappear until after the military fall of Fascism, but on a completely different basis from the pre- Fascist free trade unions.