Working Class Defence Organization,Anti-Fascist Resistance and the Arditi Del Popolo in Turin,1919-22

Abstract

Turin's place in the history of the Arditi del Popolo movement has been almost completely ignored. The communist and socialist parties' denunciation of the ADP had led to suggestions that the ADP in Turin had little impact or was simply a communist movement. This article states that the experience of the ADP in Turin should be seen against the backdrop of antecedent forms of working class defence organization. Through an examination of working class defence organization between 1919 and 1922, the article argues that Turin's response to the ADP was based more on non-sectarian community-based networks of sociability and solidarity, and an instinct for survival at times of crisis, rather than simply political affiliation or ideology. In this way the article recasts the relationship between the organized workers' movement and the wider working class by showing how resistance could be turned against the workers' leaders, particularly when they were held to have misunderstood the situation at the grass-roots level. The article also argues that the popular non-sectarian experience of the ADP in Turin had an important influence on later communist-led anti-fascist organization.