The Po Valley

The Po valley as late as the eleventh century still consisted largely of woods and marsh. “Moving towards the Po from the urban centres (of Bologna, Modena, etc), the landscape became steadily more and more wild in aspect… Adventuring into the marshy areas of the lower Po valley meant exposing oneself to every possible kind of danger”.¹ Even in the upper valley the Lomellina was infested by “woods and wolves” despite long-term settlement.

However, this period of abundant land and forest soon began to draw to a close. By the twelfth century the landowners were already limiting or preventing the cutting of wood in the Mantovano and the Polesine, even to the extent of removing the inhabitants from the formerly wooded areas.² These measures were vital to protect a still semi-natural economy based on hunting, hog herding and small scale arable farming. With the rise of commerce, particularly of the Venetian Republic, wood became an important commodity in boat construction. As early as 1470 the Venetians enacted the Provisio quercurum in consilio Rogatorum creating a reserve of all oak trees on both private and common land for later boat building. “The result was, however, that land owners did not plant oak trees, but tore them up as soon as they sprouted from acorns so as to avoid their registration and thus the requirement to maintain them until maturity, without any return”.³

Thus from the beginning the State could not enforce or maintain a type of production. If the return on oak trees was so little or too slow in forthcoming then oak trees would not be planted. The State itself could of course fill the gap. The ministry of Colbert in France planted huge oak forests to provide timber for the French fleet two hundred years later, by when the iron-clad steam ship had been invented and oak had lost its value.⁴

Girolamo Silvestri writing during the enlightenment spoke of the diminution of wood planting in the Polesine for “natural reasons”, that is “river flooding, stagnant waters and too much heat and aridity, excessive cold” but also “moral reasons” due to men who damage the woods or who avoid planting them because “the fruit has to be awaited too long^“.⁵ The reasons for the “immorality” of man is of course another matter. The enlightenment authors could of course point to the political division of Italy, the Po basin alone being divided among no less than six States, and thus a lack of coherence in hydraulic and reforestation works.

“From the time of the Renaissance to that of the Counter-Reformation, research by great Italians that from Leonardo to Galileo to Torricelli established modern hydraulic science, enlightened and perfected the initiative of great river reorganization and general improvement works which not even war, economic and political decadence and foreign domination totally managed to impair (…) Already around the 1550’s these initiatives were insufficient to deal with the agencies of degradation of the mountain country and the consequent hydraulic disorganization: increasingly chronicles and archive records speak of the improved land reverting to marsh and of rivers overflowing banks and embankments, flooding over the surrounding fields and devastating them”.⁶ Thus the mind was willing (to improve the hydraulic system) but the flesh was weak (and politically divided)?

The enlightenment thus saw “the various eighteenth century authors mainly call for the energetic and better co-ordinated State intervention. Even if few of them went as far as advising the State management of wooded areas or mountains requiring reforestation, (e.g. the Venetian Griselini in 1768, the Casentine Tramontani in 1801, the Trentino Serafino in 1807 and finally the Napoleonic general superintendent of woods Gautieri in 1814) however the State, especially in countries where the enlightenment experience was more advanced, was always seen as the body best suited to handle environmental problems of the mountain areas^“.⁷ And in 1866 there was the unitary State (at least for the Po basin), a unitary capitalist State at the service of an increasingly powerful capitalist class based on industry and modernized agriculture, the two of course requiring public works (railways, ports and hydraulic works).

Laws on hydraulic works were passed in 1877, 1888, 1893, 1911 and 1923 (to cite only the first few). “With the 1877 law (only slightly improved by another in 1888) and in an increasingly marked way in 1893, 1911, 1923, etc the State slackened, deteriorated and depreciated – to the benefit of pre-existing private interests (…) – the functions that rational enlightenment had indicated as its own”. Because “the legislation, which in the first twenty years after unity aimed mainly at hydrographic defence became, at the turn of the century and especially with the enactments of 1919 increasingly interested (leaving defence in second place)… concerns close to the needs of industry”.⁸ This despite the disastrous floods of 1879, 1882, and 1896. Even in Jacini’s Results of the Agrarian Inquiry we find such suggestions: “Regarding drainage works (bonifiche), perhaps it would be the case to introduce private interest (speculazione privata) with the State expropriating marshy areas and granting full concessions to these interests… The restoration of the mature forests however can only be assumed directly by the State^“.⁹ To drain an area (not previously covered by the sea) requires little time in comparison to that for letting a forest grow: the rate of profit is higher in the first case and thus attracts investment of capital. The latter, however is essential too, but must be performed by the “public” body. If, however, the second is not performed, disasters continue and the capitalist investment has to be repaired. Newly planted forests destined to become mature woodland would provide nothing for the present generation, nor even for the succeeding one”.¹⁰

Thus the poverty stricken peasants of the Po valley found no outlet in the reorganization of the hydraulic pattern of the Po valley, afflicted as it was by floods (of water and capitalist development), but merely in migration and “public works”. The revolts of these years and the formation of the early socialist parties were diverted into hymns as to reform and the needs of the nation. Andrea Costa, an early socialist and anti-colonialist could, however, still say “Instead of wasting public money on colonial adventures, let’s [who?] use it to relieve the great misery we have at home.” Later “Why not drain the marshes which cause malaria, why not cultivate our lands, why not turn all our forces to the culture and the agricultural and industrial development of our country? (…) When I think of the Agro Romano, Sardinia and the Marca, I don’t know how to believe the waste of men and money we are making in Africa!”¹¹. Of course fascism could both waste men and money in Africa (Ethiopia) and drain the Pontine marshes at the same time, forty years later. Few socialists spoke like Francesco Ciccotti who “maintained that opposition to the Libyan war should be based not on contingent motives such as the funds diverted from reform works to the war, but on internationalist principles”.¹² National unity would not solve the problem of the rational organization of human life in the Po valley, only the international unity of the proletariat could ensure that.

This ideology of public works which poisoned the socialist movement also invaded the local agricultural proletariat. The organization of vast armies of carriolanti (navvies) employed to repair the breaches after every flood disrupted the normal capitalist exploitation of labour, and left the workers unemployed after the close of the breaches or the season suitable for repair work. Thus continued public works were also “in the interest of the workers“, so much so that it was suggested that many floods were not due to the hand of God but that of man, of navvies who sabotaged works so as to be able to redo them, of a lumpen Keynesianism.¹³

With the “rinascita nazionale” of 1945 we enter the latest period of capitalist development. The war (1941-45) ended, economic and political decadence over (the crash, crisis, fascism), foreign domination finished (the Salo Republic, the German invasion), public works could be initiated on an ever greater scale. Even the major disaster in point, the Polesine in 1951, was a prompt to State action. However it was merely business as usual.

The direct official response to the floods was the Operative Plan for the Systematic Regulation of Natural Water Courses, with a thirty year budget of 1,500 billion lire. However in 1966 there were fresh floods (the Arno) so a new committee was established. “The Interministerial Committee,” which stated that the funding was “so limited that they could not undertake even routine maintenance.” Thus more money, 3,000 to 3,500 billion lire and other works for another 1,800 billion, a budget tripled in twenty years, without the aid of inflation. But “even this plan did not go ahead. There had to be added to the by now accepted evanescence of a responsible political will an unforeseen event: the establishment of the regions and the consequent splitting up of the State’s technical body.”¹⁴

Thus the Po basin was split into five regions as compared with the six pre-unification States. The river in fact forms a boundary between regions, so what if the Red Emilians raise their embankments: do the white Venetians cop the lot at flood time? So while these funds are left unspent, an estimated 50,000 billion lire have been spent on damage repair works, ten times the figure for the necessary programme of maintenance.

Funds for research and defence do not exist. Studies of the Po tributaries Adda, Ticino and Oglio were suspended in 1972. “The State hydrographical service in Milan consists of an engineer who passes by the office between 10 and 11 am once a week.” The Piedmont region has one employee to control 350 measuring apparatuses for the Po. The research laboratory for the Hydrological Protection of the Po basin has 20 researchers and a budget of 148,000 million lire in 1977.¹⁵ Thus the Po continues to be used for other private purposes (extraction of building materials, transport, cooling for power stations) without any plan.

What, however, is happening in the Po valley now? Why have there been serious floods since 1957, in 1994 and 2000 and does this mean that the few measures taken were enough to deal with the problem once and for all?

Not at all. The post-war building boom, that started grosso modo shortly after the Polesine disaster, used millions of tonnes of sand and gravel from the rivers’ beds, lowering some of them substantially – the Po by six meters in Piedmont between 1971 and 1987 alone. Further, many sections were straightened and the meanders cut off. This new canalized river therefore occupied less space than its forerunner. Then millions of gallons of water are removed from the river, particularly in its upper reaches, to form the water supplies for industrial and civilian use and for the generation of hydroelectric supply. Though this water obviously re-enters the river at some lower point, the upper reaches, the ones that most actively erode the valley sides and produce the load that the river carries, have in many cases been cut – the upper Po in fact disappears for several kilometres except at flood time when water supply is greater than demand. The load therefore no longer reaches the lower valley, but is dumped against dams or simply lies in the half abandoned river bed (until it is extracted). The lower stretches at flood time therefore have an excess of energy both because there is a more rapid flow, due to canalization and the increase in gradient, and because less energy is required to carry and form forces of attrition in the diminished load. Add the man-made effort to extract the river’s bed and we have the following result: the river is eroding its own bed and the water level is sinking. Thus too there is a falling tendency for the river to flood low lying areas.

Thus man, nolens volens, has solved the problem and to talk of planning is a waste of time! Not quite. If the threat from the river has fallen, that from the sea has risen.

All estuaries and deltas tend to sink under the weight of the load deposited by the rivers as they slow, lose energy and then enter the sea. For the Quaternary period, the Po delta sank at 1.5 mm per century, something that could easily be covered by the sediments deposited at flood time.

When the dynamics of a river are messed about with, when the load is insufficient because it is blocked by dams (Po, Rhone, Nile, Rhine) or is funnelled out to sea by a tidal scour produced by over-dredging of the bed (Thames, Maas), the delta starts to sink and, if not protected by the hugely costly defence schemes like the Thames barrier or the Dutch Delta scheme – which lasted 30 years and cost 2.3 billion US Dollars – and the Po has no such scheme, the delta recedes.

The delta area at Ravenna is now (1972-77) sinking at 5-6 cm a year compared with only 1-3 cm over the previous 24 years. Adria, in the very centre of the delta, fell 110 cm in the decade 1958-67 and the delta itself has receded by 3 km since 1944.

At this point the capitalist class has thrown up its hands. No enterprise economy is going to make good this loss, just as no one is going to do anything about the soil loss in the equivalent Fenland areas of Britain. There is just one last trick left. The delta can be made into a State Park with the taxpayer footing the usual bill – after all the term “sinking fund” is a State invention.

The legend of the Piave deals with another flood, this time more directly the result of human intervention. Here the meddling in the delicate equilibrium of an avalanche zone caused the disaster. Nature knows many different types of avalanches, from slips to slides, from many periods, some being extinct, dormant or active. In a few cases human settlement has been poorly selected and avalanches cause disasters, but in most there is the help of human agencies. We can recall the case of Aberfan in Wales where mine spoil was dumped for decades over a natural spring, until one day in 1966 heavy rain-fall caused this spring to explode, pouring millions of tonnes of black slurry into the village school, killing hundreds of children. At Stava in 1986 a mud dam holding back the products of mineral washing collapsed and the dredgings covered the entire valley floor, killing further hundreds of people. In both cases the usual who is to blame was used to hide the real culprit: the desire to produce at the lowest cost.

The sinking of the Andrea Doria in 1956, commented on in Weird and wonderful tales of modern social decadence was neither the first nor the last loss of a ship at sea, even if this was particularly worrying. Here a navigational error and collision showed how the structure of the ship itself was inadequate. The lesson was learnt? Ship design, at least for passenger transport, has continued to reduce the dimensions of the hull and to increase that of the superstructure, so as to increase accommodation and to cut costs. The veering of the Herald of Free Enterprise still inside Zeebrugge harbour in 1987 was put down to a technical error – the failure to close the car entrance doors before departure, a measure designed to save time. But one well constructed craft this would have at most have caused a sinking as water entered the hold via the doors. Instead there was a tendency to capsize, evidently the hull being unable when the ship was full of passengers, cars and the usual stocks of duty free to re-establish a correct balance. The ship settled on its side on a sand bank and hundreds died within sight of land. Never mind, the ship can be recovered intact, repainted and renamed, and the captain told to shut the doors properly. A similar disaster took place on the languid Nile: the small cruise shipLuxor was literally bowled over by a gust of wind and a bit of current from the Aswan High Dam. Again the hull was small, the draught had to be reduced to allow the vessel to pass over sand banks, but there would be no cuts in the cabin decks. The survivors were dragged out of the river by fishermen using the boats originally “designed” millennia ago and which the explorer Thor Heyerdal showed could make it all the way across the Atlantic if required.

Poor design is only the tip of the iceberg. The very earliest capitalist enterprises knew that to make a profit they had to run a risk: nothing ventured, nothing gained. Thus the Hanseatic League had their motto of navigare necesse est, non necesse vivere (we have to trade, we don’t have to survive), while the Italian counterparts invented marine insurance, for ships and cargoes, but not for men. Who cares that crews can also go down with their ships. In 1982 alone 402 ships disappeared, in many cases as a nice mise en scene to get the insurance money.

If there is a real risk, the insurance companies soon have the support of the State. It is the State, or its delegates, that provide lifeboats and lighthouses as a rule, while in the exceptional cases of war, like in the case of the Iran-Iraq war, all the States that have ships to send (USA, USSR, UK, France, Italy, Belgium, etc) rush to be the first to guarantee “free navigation”, that of the various Free Enterprises.

In the last two sections, a close examination of Capital is used to demonstrate that all the current developments of the capitalist economy could be foreseen and that there is no need for establishing a new theory of State capitalism to explain the nationalization of economic enterprises. The basis of the society: the exploitation of labour power to set in motion past accumulated labour has remained unchanged and from this one could develop all the interpretations necessary to understand modern trends.

1. Vito Fumigali Terra e società nell’Italia padana: I secoli IX e X (Torino 1976) pp 8-9 ↩︎
2. ibid p 10 and p 21 fn. 29 ↩︎
3. Bruno Vecchio Il bosco negli scrittori italiani del settecento e dell’età napoleonica (Torino, 1974) p 55 ↩︎
4. Ferdinand Braudel The Wheels of Commerce (London 1983) p 240 ↩︎
5. Giornale d’ItaliaVII Dicembre 1770, pp 194-9 and Gennaio 1771 pp 234 et seg. quoted in Vecchio cit. pp 79-80 ↩︎
6. Emiliano Sereni Storia del Paesaggio agrario italiano (Roma-Bari, 1982) p 237 ↩︎
7. Lucio Gambi, introduzione to Vecchio cit. pp xi-xii ↩︎
8. ibid p xii ↩︎
9. Stefano Jacini I Risultati della Inchiesta Agraria (1884) (Torino, 1976) p 162 ↩︎
10. ibid ↩︎
11. Quoted in La Boje: moti contadini e società rurale padana nel secondo ottocento (Mantova, 1984) and in Renato Zangheri Agricoltura e contadini nell storia d’Italia (Torino, 1977) p 268  ↩︎
12. Storia della sinistra comunista I (Milano, 1972) p 52  ↩︎
13. The specific assertion is in La Boje cit. p 66  ↩︎
14. Note by Mario Fabbri to Le catastrofi naturali sono prevedibili by Marcel Roubault (Torino, 1973) p 38  ↩︎
15. Article in La Stampa (Torino) 29.8.84: article in La Repubblica (Roma) 28.2.84; CNR publications.  ↩︎