The New Generation

Fascism's Labor Day came & went in Italy last week with scarcely a ripple of celebration. Duce Mussolini, who in bet ter days was wont to show himself barechested, building walls in the former Pontine Marshes, was chest-deep in other, less healthy labor. For the second time in a fortnight he shook up his Party leader ship. Tunisia was on his mind. So was his slowly crumbling Blackshirt State. A new generation of resistance was gathering its strength in Italy:

> In Milan, when official administration collapsed in the confusion of British bombing raids, Fascist administrators joined the general flight from the city. At highway crossroads, little groups of work ers stopped all passers, examined identification papers, forced Fascist Party mem bers to return and restore order.

> In Turin, when repeated air raids broke down the food-rationing system, workers' organizations without official authority established iron control over food administration for two days, straightened out the snarls. Then they handed food distribution back to the Fascist officials.

> In 40 Lombard and Piedmontese factories last month a sudden wave of simultaneous demonstrations broke down production schedules. This month the strikes ceased--after Mussolini granted a wage increase to war workers.

The Long Road. These manifestations were not spontaneous. They were the work of three well-disciplined underground movements, organized on a national scale, with astonishingly large followings among Italian workers. Last March representatives of these organizations--the liberal Partita d'Azione, the socialist and the communist parties--met to discuss a united underground front, later established a "Committee of Action for the Union of the Italian People."

The parties still have their differences, but they have agreed on at least two aims: nationalization of heavy industry, and a democratic state to succeed Mussolini's Fascist state. Said the liberal party's newspaper Italia Libera: "Although our ultimate goals differ, there is a long road along which we shall travel together."

The "Committee of Action" publishes underground newspapers in Italy, France and Yugoslavia. In Italy these papers are so widely read that the police no longer arrest persons found reading them, but merely confiscate the copies with a warning. A clandestine mimeopaper, La Parola del Soldato (The Soldier's Word), is circulated among Italian occupation troops in France in collaboration with the French underground. Its aim: "union of action of all Italians ... for an immediate separate peace and for the restitution ... of freedom and independence against the Hitlero-Mussolinian oppressor."

At the End of the Road? Italy's underground organizations rely on Allied support. But they feel that Allied statesmen and propagandists have ignored them, even fear that the Allies may dicker with Fascists when Italy is invaded. Wrote the socialist underground La Terza Fronte (The Third Front):

"Cordell Hull on Dec. 1 predicted explosive events in Italy. Since then there have been important manifestations proving that Italy's population is indeed against the war. But they have not taken the form predicted by the American Secretary of State. The explanation is not to be found in the weakness of anti-Fascist opposition . . . but in United Nations policy toward that opposition."

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