Communism, Occupation and Resistance in WW2, and Italian Resistance to Fascism & its interpretation

The 2013 publication of an English-language edition of Claudio Pavone’s A Civil War has provided a fresh impulse to debates over the class-struggle aspects of the Italian Resistance. As well as delineating a ‘class wa... more abstractThe 2013 publication of an English-language edition of Claudio Pavone’s A Civil War has provided a fresh impulse to debates over the class-struggle aspects of the Italian Resistance. As well as delineating a ‘class war’ parallel to but distinct from the ‘patriotic’ and ‘civil’ wars in the Italy of 1943–45, Pavone’s work made some tentative steps towards overcoming existing Resistance historiography’s tendency to present class rebellion as a motor to participation in a generic anti-fascist mobilisation, rather than having its own autonomous dynamics. My paper, based on my PhD research, pushes this line of inquiry further still, identifying three different ways of considering the role of class in the Resistance. Firstly, I interrogate the notion of class typical of Resistance historiography, looking beyond the mythology of the Northern industrial proletariat and its ‘bastions’ in order to explore other types of working-class identity and belonging in Fascist-era Italy. This moreover includes a questioning of the extent to which wartime manifestations of working-class rebellion such as strikes, absenteeism, draft-resistance and bread riots can be understood in terms of ‘anti-fascism’ at all. Secondly, I argue that the different political forces of the Resistance were already in wartime divided by their competing social projects for postwar Italy, and that large sections of partisan movement were waging a political class struggle against those forces attempting a conservative renewal of the bourgeois state, and not just opposed to Fascism. Thirdly, I explore the international dimension of the wartime class struggle, particularly focusing on how Italian working-class militants’ understood and critically interpreted what the Western Allies, the USSR and the Yugoslavian partisans were fighting for.

Class, Communism, Occupation and Resistance in WW2, Italy, and History of Communism

Italian Communist Party

Globalization and Labor Movements

Resistenza italiana