AFTER THE ELECTIONS
IL POPOLO LITALIA HA SCELTO LA DEMOCRAZIA Vittoria by LIVIO MAITAN The results of the Italian elections of June 20 provoked immediate reactions of disappointment on one side and relief on the other. Disappointment in the far left, which had counted on the workers parties" receiving the absolute majority of the vote, among militants the Partito Comunista Italiano (PC| - Italian Communist party), who had hoped to overtake the Democrazia Cristiana (DC - Christian Democracy) as the party with the largest vate, and among Socialists, who lost ground. Relief among all the bourgeoisie, both in Italy and throughout the world, who had feared a new defeat of the DC and the advent of a government of the left. In fact, the major bourgeois party gave proof of an incontestable power of recovery; once again it represents the pole of crystallization of all the conservative forces. Consequently, the battle of the working class for an alternative at the government level will have to overcome additional obstacles, and mass struggles during the period now opening will unfold under relatively less favorable conditions than those generally hoped for a few weeks ago. Nevertheless, one must avoid drawing false conclusions. Overall, the formations adhering to the workers movement made further progress, especially the PCI, amplifying the spectacular success of last year's regional elections. The phenomenon of polarization that incontestably took shape went hand in hand with an evolution of the relationship of forces in favor of the workers movement. That is the essential Feature that must not be overlooked or underestimated. This is especially true in that the DC held it ground essentially at the expense of the other parties of the center or center-right, especially the PSDI (Democratic Socialist party) and the PLI (Liberals), and only to a very limited extent at the expense of the far right (MSI - Italian Social Movement), which did not lose much compared with 1975. It follows that the formation of a new government will not be an easy task. The center majority that used to exist has now disappeared; a center-right majority is also impossible. On paper, the center-left could be l'UnitÃ
Settamente poetati a sinistra I rapporti di forsa nel Parlamenite ascite dalle clezini del 20 givene Nuova impetuosa avanzata reconstructed. But the PSI (Socialist party), which has paid a heavy price for its participation in the government and the parliamentary majority, has reiterated its decision not to participate in any government in which the PCI does not also participate, whether directly or not. Obviously, the historic compromise (the PCI's proposal for a bloc between the PCI and the Christian Democracy) would have an overwhelming majority, but the DC has waged a virulent campaign against this solution and would have great difficulty ascepting it, at least in the immediate future. in coming days, when the new Chamber of Deputies is convened, Rome will be the scene of quite a number of maneuvers, intrigues, and bluffs. The evolution of the economic situation will not help matters. It is true that production is rising again in most sectors. But the problems of the balance of payments deficit and the deficits of the state and local administrative budgets remain dramatic. The rate of inflation is rising again after the decline of 1975, and if there is no change during coming months, the 1976 inflation rate threatens to break all postwar records. At the same time, up to now there has been no real prospect of reducing unemployment. In other words, once again the bourgeoisie will have to deal with extremely grave problems without having resolved its crisis of leadership. As for the reformist leaderships, it will not be easy for them to find a concrete basis for compromise, regardless of their desire to collaborate in priming the economy and stabilizing the political situation. Even if some form of the historic compromise is realized in the last instance, it would occur in a very unstable context laden with explosive conflicts. That is a major difficulty that all the tactical astuteness of Berlinguer and Company will be unable to easily surmount. The vote won by the far left will undoubtedly be one of the major subjects of discussion in Italy and elsewhere during comong months. As is shown in the documents we are publishing below, the 1.5 percent of the vote won by Democrazia Proletaria (DP - Proletarian Democracy) was generally considered a failure. The
document of the Italian revolutionary Marxists, large excerpts of which are published below, analyzes the reasons for this failure, partially admitted by other components of DP. In addition to the incontestable obiective factors, the form in which the unity agreement was reached and the conditions bureaucratically imposed by the Partito di Unità Proletaria per il Comunismo (PDUP - Party of Proletarian Unity for Communism) and Avanguardia Operaia (AO - Workers Vanguard) represented serious obstacles to extending the influence of the far left toward the masses under the hegemony of the traditional parties, notably the PCI. The DP committees, which were sometimes presented as the vehicles of the campaign, were built only on a modest scale, and most often they were instruments func tioning within the logic of special collaboration between the PDUP and AO, discriminating against all the other components. In spite of this, the agreement on a united slate of the far left was the product of a rather strong sentiment for unity among the broad vanguard; and it is nevertheless important that the unitary framework for the far left was built through a crucial political battle. This gain must not be lost. This means that a serious effort must be made to maintain this unitary framework, with the aim both of achieving unity in action in the struggles now shaping up and of developing the necessary confrontation between the various organizations around the problems that were brought to light and defined more sharply by the electoral campaign (the problems of the nature of the transitional phase, of the paths to the seizure of power, of the conception and role of the revolutionary party). As far as government perspectives are concerned, the revolutionary left must correct certain electoralist deviations. The perspective of a PCI-PSI government must not be linked exclusively to the conquest of 51 percent of the vote. Even after June 20, it must serve as the essential axis of orientation, independent of all questions of emphasis and rhythm that are posed at each moment. At the same time, a clarification is necessary on the very content of the formula "govemment of the left." In fact, there is now a tendency within the centrist organizations to include both the PSDI (Democratic Socialist party, a right-wing split from the Socialist party) and the PRI (Republicans) in such a government. More particularly, Manifesto (daily of the PDUP) and Quotidiano dei Lavoratori (daily of AO) have asserted that the left commands a majority in the Rome municipal council, explicitly counting the seats of Saragat's PSDI and the PRI in this majority. We must struggle against such conceptions, giving no concessions. The PRI particularly is a bourgeois party in the strictest sense of the term, directly linked to industrialists and financiers. Collaboration with such a party would thus be nothing but a form of class collaboration. It was not within that perspective that the battle for June 20 was waged, July 2, 1976
Evolution of the Electoral Relationship of Forces It is not possible here to present an in-depth analysis of the