Emilio Carnevali At the end of World War II the average ration of food per capita in Italy was 1737 calories, 300 less than the minimum threshold for the maintenance of about 2000 calories per adult. This is the definition of "poverty" in terms of metabolic even before macroeconomic. The Italian people out of the Second World War - in which atrocities had been carried out by the madness of the fascist dictatorship (the one who sent dissidents to "holiday", according to a famous definition of our Prime Minister) - was above all a "hungry people."
The industrial system was on its knees: the steel industry reached only 30% of pre-war production, the cement industry, 80%, mechanics between 60 and 70%. The total income of 1946 was 60% of that of 1938. The unemployed were estimated 750,000 to which are added in the years immediately following the hundreds of thousands of workers made redundant by companies engaged in war production.
This is the bleak picture of the situation at the time, which was added to the labor movement and union certainly not easy conditions within which to develop policy initiatives and struggle. In 1947 the Left was ousted from government in 1948 to triumph in the elections the Christian Democrats and a few months later won trade union unity was shattered with the Charter of Rome on 9 June 1944. The CGIL led by Giuseppe Di Vittorio was in the corner, squeezed between the increasing political polarization triggered by the cold war and an offensive master who did not hesitate to use the weapon to the dismissal of union activists.
needed a "knight move", a term borrowed from chess and dear to a great union leader as Vittorio Foa. An initiative that can pass the motion from the defensive to the offensive, able to force the government to face a challenge in terms of concrete proposals. This move was the great "Plan of Work" launched by Di Vittorio in 1949 and recounted in the book of Mark Gozzellino "Keynes and the economic culture of the CGIL" (Subtitle: An analysis of the plan of work in the perspective of the General Theory, Ediesse, 2010).
The Plan proposed a radical alternative to policies implemented by the first De Gasperi governments, which have a substantial distrust of state intervention in the economy and highly restrictive monetary policies, whose primary focus was the stability price and exchange rate (in fact the levers of economic and monetary policy were all in the hands of narrow compliance with liberal personalities as Luigi Einaudi, Merzagora Caesar, and Piero Giuseppe Pella Malvestiti).
The CGIL, without proposing solutions to be "planned economy" model on the Soviet experience, stressed the need to respond to the structural weakness of aggregate demand by intervening in the three policy areas in the hydroelectric sector, through the construction of new power plants and power management in the private non- able to ensure a reasonable level of investment, in agriculture, through a vast plan of reclamation of arable lands and a real agrarian reform (in those years the primary sector employed more than half of Italian workers), and in social housing (as Vittorio was necessary "to build thousands of homes to bring out some people from the caves and dirt, million unemployed to work doing "). But the leap from theoretical plan was implemented consisting of the idea of \u200b\u200bresorting to deficit spending to finance these measures (the cost of 2,500 billion lire in three years) and thereby breaking down the dogma of a balanced budget which was based on Democrats economic policies of governments.
was the transposition of these Keynesian ideas that had already inspired by experiences such as the New Deal Roosevelt (based on its massive intervention in the energy sector) or the Beveridge Plan implemented by the British Labour Party. Experience well-known economists who worked on the floor of the CGIL: Paolo Sylos Labini and Bruno Trentin, for example, had deepened their studies in the years before the United States. Sylos Labini was the same author in 1946 of a report commissioned by the Ministry of Public Works for the Constituent Assembly in which he wrote that "the policy of public works shall have absolute primacy over that of subsidies" and that "public works are presented even more urgent in view of the increase in total income, the production left to his private. "
Initially, the rejection of the proposed union by the government was clear: "it was true, Mr Di Vittorio, which is enough to have a good plan to build anything! We had we plans. Plans are not missing, missing money, "said a dismissive De Gasperi during a parliamentary debate in November 1949. But, as Mark explains Gozzellino the conclusion of his book, "the fragile majority of the DC in the following years led the government, especially after 1953, followed a similar path," thanks to the sensitive components of the government to intervene settings ( Democrat left in the first place). "However, what the proposed policy clearly different from that in the Plan made by the government was willing to overcome the serious imbalances, both geographically and in the distribution of income, that plagued the economy italiana».Dal punto di vista “culturale”, invece, il Piano del lavoro fu di grande importanza perché rappresentò la prima occasione di incontro fra la teoria keynesiana e la sinistra italiana (allora «strettamente legata ad una lettura marxista dell’economia capitalistica e all’influenza staliniana, secondo cui il capitalismo internazionale era di fronte al bivio tra il collasso e una nuova guerra mondiale»). «La proposta della Cgil», scrive Gozzellino, «ben più dei programmi politici del Pci e del Psi di quegli anni, fu un organico tentativo di rompere l’egemonia del laissez-faire di Einaudi e Costa e di introdurre elementi di intervento statale nell’economia italiana, superando il pregiudizio creatosi in seguito alla lunga esperienza dirigista fascista».
Anche oggi – sebbene in condizioni non paragonabili alla miseria di allora – ci troviamo immersi nelle conseguenze economiche e sociali di una devastante crisi economica. Ed anche oggi una forza sindacale come la Fiom ha avuto il merito di ridare centralità al tema del lavoro in un dibattito politico dominato dai vari casi Ruby (problemi con i quali il buon De Gasperi non ci ha mai costretto a misurarci). Servirebbe ora la famosa «mossa del cavallo», il passaggio dalla strategia difensiva a quella offensiva, tanto cara a Vittorio Foa. Nelle condizioni attuali, tuttavia, il sindacato da solo non può farcela. Occorre a return policy.
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