The 1920 Turin General Strike, remembered in the narrative as the “clock hand strike,” turned a government decision about daylight-saving time into a confrontation over who had the authority to set the terms of working life. At Fiat, the dispute expanded into a ten-day general strike involving 120,000 workers in Turin and its province, including 60,000 who occupied factories. Its scale made the conflict appear to herald revolution, but the hesitation of socialist leaders exposed the distance between workers’ action and the party’s political strategy.

The clock dispute and the strike

At the end of March, the Council of Ministers extended daylight-saving time, which had first been adopted during the war. Fiat workers rejected the change, deciding that they, rather than Senator Giovanni Agnelli, would determine their own time. The industrialists responded with a lockout, and the conflict escalated into a ten-day general strike across Turin and the province.

The numbers gave the dispute its wider force: 120,000 workers took part, and 60,000 occupied factories to resist moving the clock forward by one hour. In the book’s telling, the issue was not simply the clock or the season. Control of time at the factory became a concrete expression of workers’ claim to authority, and the strike was understood as a test of power reaching beyond the immediate change in working hours.

A wider crisis of strikes and revolution

The Turin stoppage formed part of an exceptional wave of labor unrest. Strikes had spread through transport and services as well as industry; railway stations took on the appearance of military encampments, and everyday life in Milan was brought close to a standstill. Turin’s factory occupations thus belonged to a national climate in which labor disputes could be read as signs of a possible revolutionary rupture.

That expectation was not matched by a unified political plan. Socialist leaders again postponed revolution, and many openly condemned the “clock hand strike.” The party’s electoral success had sharpened rather than resolved its divisions: maximalists rejected participation in power, while reformists lacked the resolve to attempt a seizure of power. The workers’ action could therefore reach a formidable scale without producing agreement among the leaders who might have turned it into a broader political offensive.

The party’s interpretation

Claudio Treves, one of the Socialist Party’s most influential leaders, addressed the impasse in Parliament in a speech soon known as the “expiation speech.” He described revolution as something that unfolded over time rather than arriving in a single decisive day: “is an epoch, not a day.” His account cast the process as gradual, with slow erosion and sudden landslides, and anticipated years of change rather than an immediate conclusion.

Treves’s speech did not erase the frustration at the strike’s deferral of revolutionary aims. He acknowledged the strain of a prolonged process: the difficulty lay not in dying for a cause but in being kept from fully living it. Set beside the factory occupations, that formulation reveals the central tension of the Turin strike: workers acted as though the decisive hour had arrived, while party leaders treated revolution as a long historical passage.

Consequences and significance

The strike demonstrated how a seemingly narrow workplace decision could gather wider political meaning. A one-hour change imposed from above prompted mass stoppage and factory occupation; the response showed both the strength of workers’ organization and the limits imposed by divided leadership. The conflict’s significance in the narrative lies in this contrast between collective action on the ground and postponement at the level of party strategy.

Rather than presenting the strike as a completed revolution, the book places it within an unresolved crisis. The stoppage made revolutionary possibility visible, but socialist leaders’ disagreements left that possibility unfulfilled. Treves’s image of revolution as an epoch gave the delay a historical explanation, even as the workers’ direct challenge over time registered the impatience that such delay could not settle.