The First World War and Workers' Control in Italy.

This article focuses on the workers' control movement in Italy during World War II. The workers' control movement in Italy was essentially a product of the rapid and intensive development of the main industrial centres. The war made Fiat the leading vehicle producer in Europe, doubled the population of Turin, and transformed the city into an almost exclusively industrial centre. In these conditions, popular discontent in the industrial centres was endemic and evidence is provided by a study of the Turin bread riots of August 1917. There were two important political consequences of this discontent the Italian Socialist Party's adoption of the role of spokesman for anti-war feeling, which strengthened the maximalist left wing of the party as well as guaranteeing popular Support; and resentment of the collaborationist role played by official union leaders in the Industrial Mobilization system. Thus in addition to producing a very high degree of economic and industrial concentration in the main industrial centres, the war also produced a serious split in the Italian Labor movement between the revolutionary intransigeance of the Socialist Party.