Italy

on the World Today

THE juniors of Roman society have taken to under-water swimming and the spearing of fish with “frog-man” attachments. Rome is full of sleek custom-built supcrpowered cars, and shopwindows feature lawn equipment reminiscent o( Abercrombie Fitch. Fleets of shiny new yellow trucks sail through the cities carrying the gospel of Coca-Cola.

The May Festival in Florence was carried off in splendor, with Trail us and Cressida given with line Renaissance pageantry. Luchino Visconti, who directed it, had the impish idea of dressing up his Greeks and Trojans as Guelphs and Ghibellincs, and the supers beat up each other with unexpected realism. The Festival had already provided unexpected comic relief. As its advertising posters bore Bolticelli’s Venus, police authorities confiscated them as obscene and started looking for ihe artist. Having been called on the carpet for this and other more disturbing moves of censorship, Police Minister Seelba declared in Parliament that an administration which has the Truth cares nothing for “lay cullural claptrap.”

The Italians find this rather funny, and refuse to gel excited ov er an all ton familiar type of authoritarian rule whose bark is worse than its bite. They incline to think il is nobody’s fault in particular, but rather the Nature of Things, if they cannot make both ends meet in their wretched private budgets.

The summer was lightened by one or two favorable and memorable omens. Oil spouted most mercifully in the Po valley, and with it a better certified wealth of natural gas. People took to looking into their back yards with a wild surmise. Then the “supermen of the road,” Coppi and Bartali, again faced the grueling Tour dc France, and for two weeks the whole nation had no thought of anything else but their winning. Rut not long after came the grim news of ihe cuts in the ECA allotments, which filled public opinion with somber forebodings.

Against ibis checkered backdrop, Italian production has been slowly progressing towards pre-war levels and Italy even has creditor accounts with most European nations — partly blocked, as usual. Our ECA officials have learned how to gear their work to the methods of Italian technicians, with whom they are on ihe best of terms; but they are still too polite and helpless against high-level administrative evasion. Although a very positive program of production and land reclamation is under way, little is being done about ihe reorganization of industries, the breaking of the electric power bottleneck, or land reform. The result is absurdly high prices and a festering labor situation.

Early last summer hundreds of thousands of farm laborers, feeling abandoned by the government in their intolerable conditions, decided to strike. The landowners urged the government to a showdown, in the hope of breaking the Red labor front. Ihe decision proved unpolitical, because it revealed the weakness of the so-called independent unions, once they are used as strikebreakers. After weeks of bitter struggle, the slrikers won. The second test came with the maritime workers, and it also went against the government.

But meanwhile nothing is being done about the even more desperate plight of the farm laborers in the South. Said a harassed prefect after many vain appeals to the higher-ups: “We never trouble about (he South because wc think it’s lead, but it may 1 urn out in time to be plutonium.” The predicament is mirrored in the slow but steady growth in Communist membership, which has passed the 2-million mark.

Chronic overpopulation

It may be said that there is no clear answer to the problem of overpopulation which leaves Italy with 2 million chronically unemployed, while emigration, which has reached the figure of 300,000 this year — mostly seasonal migrants — docs not even cope with the annual increase. But the hard fact of masses of miserable men begging for work while so much waits to be done that is not done (even according to conservative business opinion) is no help to public morale.

It may also be said that it is nobody’s fault it the East-West tension has pushed most of the Left beyond the pale and left the worker unrepresented in the political game. But the logical result is that the ruling party forgets its responsibility and is led more and more to rely upon sheer police force.

Local authorities are bitter about the way Scelba and his jeep-mounted cohorts take the law into their own hands. This is a situation which cannot but bear bitter fruit in the long run. Prime Minister De Gasperi, although a well-meaning democrat himself, has made it clear that he may need eventually more repression (and more money) in order to “save civilization.”

Catholic Action

The Vatican has been quietly drawing its conclusions and is dissociating itself from the Christian Democratic Party, throwing the whole weight of its support to Catholic Action, which it can control more directly. But even this well-knit organization does not seem to have paid off.

The mood is far from optimistic in Vatican circles. One hears bitter recriminations against the State Department, which did not live up to Vatican expectations, whatever these may have been. But it is only human to find fault with U.S. authorities if things look difficult; for the leaders of the Church are undoubtedly facing hard times in the dramatic religious struggle with the Communists. The Pope has seen himself compelled by the danger of a Catholic schism to use the major weapon of excommunication by bell, book, and candle. Although this may help stiffen resistance in the East, it is felt to be a doubtful commitment in the West.

While the Church has no doubt strengthened its influence on the middle classes, it knows it has not made much headway among the workers, whose Catholicism is largely nominal, and who feel they have long since made their adjustment between their religion and their political unionism. When a worker says he is a Red, most of the time he means he intends to fight with the only weapons at his command for better -wages or for a job, and he cannot be made to feel very wrong or impious about that.

Many of the clergy arc in a quandary. Spellbinding evangelists like Lombardi, of whose crusading capacities much had been made, have proved strangely “inadequate” in confronting the Communists, for fear of being considered the enemies of the poor. The great religious orders have no longer their traditional compactness, and in each there is a Left wing trying not to know what the Right wing is doing. This disruption is in itself a sign of receptiveness to social realities, but it carries with it much bewilderment, and a slightly inconsistent wish that America had provided more positive leadership.

American dissatisfaction

The American authorities, on their side, have taken a long hard look at what the Christian Democratic government has been doing with ECA funds, and have proclaimed themselves less than satisfied. As one American put it, “The way we understood the Marshall Plan, it was to provide airplane cover while economy shifted to new prepared positions. We have sent our planes in waves, and now we find those boys still sitting in the old dugouts.”

Mr. Hoffman’s official Country Study for 1948 takes to task Italian authorities for their backwardness in public investment, and for building up a “deflationary surplus” at the expense of the productive machinery. An “aggressive and whole-hearted” investment policy would be needed, it states, in order to utilize fully the capacity of Italian economy, but “because of the timidity of private investment in Italy and the need for extensive public works as well as the degree of state ownership of industrial facilities, a large proportion of investment must necessarily be public investment.”

It must be understood that Italian industry is in large part not so much nationalized as stalefinanced. The government “merely provides a certain amount of financial backing and risk-taking while participating passively or scarcely at all in managerial decisions. In a large number of such enterprises little effort is being made by the government to achieve greater efficiency through modernization and reorganization. Quasi-nationalized industries” (e.g. the Terni electrochemical complex) “are not used as pace-setters for privatelyowned establishments . . . but now rather serve to aggravate the rigidities which plague the Italian economy . . . as they have ceased to develop or develop only at a snail’s pace.”

Italian businessmen who used gratefully the raw materials provided by fhe first part of the Plan are less enthusiastic about the second, or re-equipment, phase. They do not like to ha ve dangerous quest ions of efficiency brought up, and to be told that the time of real international competition has come, when one must sink or swim on his own.

To a Franco-Italian mutual reduction of tariffs they oppose a resistance which is cordially reciprocated on the other side of the Alps. They want a stable internal market, not even an expanding one, for they are constitutionally unable to understand mass production, and prefer custom-built production for the few. They would like the international market situation to be clarified, before they embark on capital expenditure,

The British crisis is certainly an awful warning, and rising German exports a fearful specter. Thus there is a tendency among many Italian industrialists to crawl back into the good old cocoon of government orders and cost-plus contracts. Otherwise, they say, how can we keep on those padded payrolls that government requests of us?

The scramble for competitive exports in Europe, for which we had pressed so strongly, while being unwilling to lower tariff walls ourselves, seems to be coming to an impasse; but then, so long as the U.S. has not provided a working system for internal ional exchanges and markets in the Atlantic sphere, the Marshall Plan as a whole will be in an impasse, and this is a point that the Communists are hammering home with enthusiasm. It is up to us to show them wrong.

Meanwhile, as an American expert put it, after a review of the favorable changes in Italian production and trade balance: “It must be admitted that none of these, except land reclamation, are any contribution to the long-term objectives.”

One understands why forwardlooking Italian economist s are in favor of diverting state financing from several branches of industry to land reclamation, which in the long run will at least provide more food for the people. There again, however, a serious land reform would be an essential feature and nothing of the kind can be expected from the present administration, which is in no condition to disturb vested interests.

All in all, as the American observers put it, the Italian administration is not a business-minded one. Their leaders will find it easier to ask for more dollars and more repressive powers in order to “save civilization and the danger is that many of our diplomats will find it easier to connive with them than to show them how to spend our money in a constructive way.