THE RISE AND FALL OF MAXIMALISM 75
Chambers of Labour in Bologna and Turin decided that
employees should not pay, and the workers at the Bianchi
factory in Milan went so far as to call a strike in protest.
So began a crisis of authority inside the labour movement,
parallel to that in the state, of which the second was to be
solved first.
As soon as he took office Giolitti stifled the Ancona revolt1
and decided to withdraw the Italian forces from Albania,
In this way he began the task of settling the bourgeois crisis,
which in September brought him up agianst the alarming
occupation of factories by workers all over the country. In
May the Federation of Metallurgical Workers (F.I.O.M,2)
had begun discussing a collective wage agreement with the
employers, who were determined to make no concessions.
fi Until now we have always given way ', they said. e Now
things are going to be different, and we shall begin with
you.3 This attitude showed that there was some change in
the situation. On its side the F.I.O.M., which had already
had to carry on long strikes to settle local agreements, did
not wish to face a new strike which might last many months,
exhaust the workers, and bring victory no nearer. A
substitute for this blunted weapon had to be found, while,
as the increasing symptoms of crisis showed, the field of
battle was getting more restricted. It was then that the
strategists of the Federation, who all belonged to the right
wing of the Socialist Party, decided to combat the persistent
and clumsy stubbornness of the employers with a stay-in
strike. The employers were prepared to meet obstructionism
with lock-outs, so as to drive the workers into the ordinary
strike they now wanted to avoid. On August 30 the manage-
ment of Alfa-Romeo cleared out its workshops in Milan
and shut its doors in order to suppress a lightning strike.
The Federation ordered its members to occupy the factories,
thus snatching their most formidable weapon from the
employers' hands by forestalling and preventing a lock-
out. This occupation of factories, often represented as some
critical stage of revolutionary fever, was in its inception
simply a substitute for a strike which had become too
1 P. 68.
2 Federazione Italiana Operai Metallurgies