Week 140

 

Entering Summer season again – albeit almost one year (and one hundred) late – I suppose we all can sympathize with the need for affordable refreshments in the otherwise implacable urban heat.

For the information of Milanese consumers, and to provide some consolation to the owners of bars and coffee-shops – explained the Milanese page of the Popolo d'Italia on August 1^st – who keep complaining about selling their goods at a loss and [asking] for a favorable revision of the current price regulations, we have chosen to reproduce a table of the current prices in Genoa, followed by vendors and enforced by consumers.

Here in Milan one can't find any kind of refreshment for less than one Lira during the present heat wave […]

• | prime - bar | prime – table | second – bar | second – table --|---------------|------------------|-----------------|----------------- Syrups with water | 0.30 | 0.45 | 0.25 | 0.35 Syrups with seltz | 0.35 | 0.50 | 0.30 | 0.40 Champagnino with water | 0.35 | 0.50 | 0.30 | 0.40 Champagnino with seltz | 0.40 | 0.55 | 0.35 | 0.45 Aranciata with water | 0.35 | 0.50 | 0.30 | 0.40 Aranciata with seltz | 0.45 | 0.55 | 0.35 | 0.45 Bomba | 0.35 | 0.45 | 0.30 | 0.40 FINE WINES|---------------|------------------|-----------------|----------------- Vermouth | 0.35 | 0.50 | 0.30 | 0.40 Vermouth with seltz | 0.40 | 0.55 | 0.35 | 0.45 Vermouth Carpano | 0.45 | 0.60 | 0.40 | 0.50 id. with seltz | 0.50 | 0.65 | 0.45 | 0.55 Marsala | 0.35 | 0.50 | 0.30 | 0.40 Marsala with seltz | 0.40 | 0.55 | 0.35 | 0.45 Marsala S.O.M. | 0.45 | 0.60 | 0.40 | 0.50 Americano seltz | 0.40 | 0.55 | 0.35 | 0.45 Dry white wine | 0.35 | 0.50 | 0.30 | 0.40 Barbera and Freisa | 0.40 | 0.50 | 0.40 | 0.45 Moscato | 0.50 | 0.60 | 0.45 | 0.50 SELTZ COCKTAILS|---------------|------------------|-----------------|----------------- Cedro cognac seltz | 0.70 | 0.75 | 0.60 | 0.70 Cedro mint seltz | 0.70 | 0.75 | 0.60 | 0.70 Mixed seltz | 0.70 | 0.75 | 0.60 | 0.70 National bitters seltz | 0.70 | 0.75 | 0.60 | 0.70 National bitters plain | 0.50 | 0.65 | 0.50 | 0.60 GELATI |---------------|------------------|-----------------|----------------- Gelati | - | 0.90 | - | 0.70 Granite different flavors | - | 0.90 | - | 0.70 Frappe | 0.60 | 0.75 | 0.50 | 0.65 Lemonade foam | 0.40 | 0.55 | 0.35 | 0.45 Iced serving | 0.60 | 0.75 | 0.50 | 0.65

 

In the meantime, as the Milanese city dwellers remained concerned with the price of their refreshments, a delegation of the Unione Sindacale Milanese (Bacchi, Galbiati, Carmassi and Salmoiraghi) – after voicing their grievances for being left out of the concert table between the unions, the Ministry and the Milanese Industrial Consortium, with regards to the ongoing controversy “of the minimum wage for steelworkers” – had managed to obtain an interview with the Minister of Industry and Trade, Dante Ferraris, together with Edmondo Rossoni, secretary of the Chamber of Labor of Rome.

In the first meeting the Minister had informed them that the industrialists […] had deliberated not to make any further concessions after those already agreed upon by the Milanese Consortium.

The representatives of the workers insisted that, given the ongoing strike, it was necessary for the industrialists to display an increased conciliatory attitude. They insisted especially for a proportional increase of piecework in correspondence to the quotas of price-adjustment introduced in their wages.

In today's meeting – concluded the Popolo d'Italia on August 1^st – the industrialists informed that they had agreed to the demands of the Unione Sindacale […]

 

In the meantime, the Popolo d'Italia felt better to to add a new chapter to its thorough examination of “The aftermath of the big flop”, by offering its readers some insight on “the thoughts of the Republican Party” as well as on those “of the Unione Socialista Italiana”.

The Iniziativa, the official outlet of the Republican Party, provides the following commentary to the failure of the “scioperissimo”.

“The defeat of the Partito Socialista Ufficiale is full and complete; impossible to mitigate.

The Direction of the P.S.U. had let believe at first that it was their intention to commit the proletariat to a decisive action. Backed into a corner by the Railway Workers, the Direction balked, than admitted that it was all about nothing, and postponed the expropriation strike until further notice. […]

It is time to set things straight, draw a line […] and speak a clear word: the one affecting the P.S.U. isn't a crisis of men, but one of methods, of program. The general strike wasn't the failure of a movement, but of a conceit. It isn't therefore just a verdict against Bolshevism […] but a sentence of the whole attitude of the P.S.U. during the war. One can't lie, deceive... generous masses which had supinely accepted for four years the most damaging doctrinal distortions, the most extravagant political articulations, without expecting to suffer any repercussions .

The P.S.U. is paying now, and will pay at even higher cost in the future, the fundamental error committed in 1914, when it choose to commit, deeply and pregiudicially, to neutrality.

That day, the P.S.U. decreed its detachment from the Country, and therefore also from the working class. The P.S.U. was then able to take advantage of the special circumstances of the war, to speculate on both the dead and the living, on poverty and misery, but its action was ultimately a sterile, and also an abject one. Helping the Pope and the Government in provoking Caporetto and consequently in extending the war can't certainly be held as a badge of honor. Absolute neutrality and defeat could not constitute a program and, in fact, the Country, victorious on the Piave and at Vittorio Veneto, with its virile reaction, forced the P.S.U. to lay down its arms.

But, then came the Russian Revolution, and with it Bolshevism.

The P.S.U., searching in its anguish for an excuse and for a program, desperately clung to Bolshevism.

It failed to understand, or wished not to, that Bolshevism was not only a local phenomenon, but a genuine product of defeat, of desperation; turned it into a weapon, and by inciting hatred and unreasonable expectations, threatened and blackmailed the Government, the bourgeoisie, the Country, without having a shred of revolutionary spirit, of revolutionary design, of revolutionary means, without a plan, without a goal. By such methods, we had come to the point where the P.S.U., after unconsciously serving the designs of the Consulta [the Foreign Office] and of the Court during the war, blindly going against the Country in the pursuit of a “policy of defeat”, after the conclusion of peace, the same Party consciously favored the return of Giolittismo (conveniently embodied by Nitti's Ministry) despite pretending to be preparing a revolution!

But the charade could not last too long, and the days of the 20^th and 21^st have definitively ended it.

Now the working classes are called to pass their judgment. The Country wanted and wants to renovate. A Party which truly cared about the interests of the proletariat would have offered its collaboration for this renovation.

It would not have sowed social hatred instead of fruitful seeds, it would not have created divides within the working classes with the attribution of an absolute confessional character to labor organizations, it would not have threatened and stupidly antagonized all social groups, not split and frustrated with frivolous particularities the different revolutionary currents.