Stalled negotiations over forming a new government; another murderous outrage in Gorizia, where a bomb was planted in a police car; and the threat of a coup d'etat by the fascist leader Almirante dominated the Italian papers in the first two weeks of June. But besides their news value, these events offered important indications of the tendencies in the Italian situation. I don't know, and I am not overly concerned about finding out, how much of a conscious link there was among these developments. The important thing was that in their objective result they all pointed in the same general direction. They favored a rightward shift preparing the gound for a return to reactionary policies.
The negotiations over forming the first cabinet of the new legislature have been carried out in a way clearly calculated to wear out the patience of the people and thereby force them to accept a shift to the right virtually through sheer exhaustion. From the start, the Christian Democrats opted for a rightward course, even though the May 7 election results left only very narrow margins for such a solution. If this line runs into difficulty in fairly short order, even in terms of getting a working parliamentary majority, the response will come on two levels. On the one hand, the bourgeoisie will try to force the Socialist party to capitulate entirely or try to provoke a new split in its ranks. On the other, they will launch a renewed and stepped-up campaign on the theme that the country is "ungovernable" in the present political and constitutional framework. The outcome, then, in the fairly near future will be a crisis of the regime.
That the actions of the fascists help to promote this right turn is self-evident. Thus, there is a two-pronged attack. The conservatives and moderates operate on the parliamentary and electoral level. The fascist goon squads try to intimidate people and deter them from engaging in present or future social struggles. There is no contradiction. Almirante must be regarded as an able and energetic opponent and not just a second-rate swindler.
While making its weight felt in parliament, the so-called Destra Nazionale
[National Right, a coalition of fascists and monarchists] has tried and will continue to try to accentuate the conservative trend, and thus to sharpen the confrontation with the mass movement (which the reformist policy aimed at avoiding), by organizing direct action to intimidate and repress the masses. It is seeking and will continue to seek conditions favoring an outcome beneficial to the ruling class and the most reactionary political forces.
A number of events since the May 7 elections have shown irrefutably that there is increasing complicity with the fascist policy in wide sectors of the state apparatus. (Such cooperation, it must not be forgotten, is necessary for even a partial success of the operation; and, as we all know, it was decisive for the victory of fascism fifty years ago.)
The apparent third element in the reactionary strategy has been the subject of the most violent arguments and the most widely varying hypotheses. No one can say with absolute certainty who is responsible for a chain of criminal acts whose latest link, for the time being, is the car bombing near Gorizia. No one can be sure whether they are part of a single plan. Irrational acts, of course, may be committed by individual persons or groups operating independently of any definite political forces. Historical research has been unable to determine the instigators or motives of many crimes.
However, it is hard to believe that the series of crimes that stretches from the Piazza Fontana to Gorizia were all the result of chance. All of these outrages have been openly exploited to give grist to the mill of the most reactionary forces. Furthermore, the bombings and murders have always come at a time when the right and extreme right could legitimately think that it could profit from such acts or that it had particular need of them.
There is another piece of evidence. In none of these cases have the socalled authorities been able to find the culprit. In the case of the Piazza Fontana bombing they did bring charges against one person. Buteverybody knows he had nothing to do with it. This is so obvious that the government is reluctant to start a trial that would inevitably bring down their whole house of cards.
It is hard to believe that all these crimes do not depend on a heavy mea- 758
sure of complicity at various levels. It seems incredible that they are not based on a desire to maintain an atmosphere of tension and uncertainty. The minimum objective must be to give a dramatic demonstration of the impotence not just of "specific" institutions but of the regime as a whole, and thus to promote or accelerate a general political crisis.
In fact, if the grim trail of outrages continues, we would have to say that this was the main method of promoting a crisis of the regime. The technique of indiscriminate bombings; political murders apt to provoke special reactions, which are quickly instigated and magnified to the extreme by the bourgeois press; and the impunity of those responsible can whip up an atmosphere of unrest, indignation, exasperation, and distrust of parliamentary democracy. These methods result without accomplish this arousing a revolutionary mobilization for a much more genuine kind of democracy. Thus, they can only have the effect of promoting a crisis of the regime aimed toward a right-wing solution.
Furthermore, it is worthwhile to refer to the experience of the not too distant past. Many episodes in the Italian political struggle in this period are reminiscent of similar developments under the so-called Weimar republic, that is, bourgeois-democratic Germany in the period following the first world war. It is all the more legitimate to draw the parallel when we consider other factors, which are often cited in today's discussions, as cause for at least relative optimism. From a bourgeois-democratic point of view, the Weimar constitution was rather advanced, in some respects more advanced than the present Italian one, and the workers' movement could rely on powerful political and trade-union organizations, in particular a strong Communist party. But the crisis of the Weimar republic culminated in the victory of Hitlerite fascism.
All these facts must be considered, not to raise any false alarms nor to justify the attitudes of those people who, now that the great euphoria is over, are screaming before they have really been hit. Nor must they be studied simply for the purposes of analysis. The problem is how to act and react to confront a grave situation and block the plans that the reactionaries are trying more and more openly every day to carry out.
In this connection it is not necessary to repeat here the fundamental importance of the bargaining campaign that has opened up over the renewal of contracts for the major categories of workers. In the present context, this struggle assumes even more clearly the dimensions of a political fight of the working class as a whole.
The essential thing is to revive the theme of unity in action in order to repel the attacks of the ruling class in all their ramifications. What is needed is unity on a class basis — not some vague, general "democratic" antifascism that would also appeal to the bourgeois parties or tendencies within them. We need unity of the working class, of all the working people, and the students and intellectuals who stand on the positions of the working class. In more precise political terms, this means that we need a united front including the revolutionary left organizations as well as the traditional reformist ones. The basis of such a front, of course, must be a common class platform.
I realize all too well that achieving this objective is far from easy. Sectarianism and infantile ultraleftism continue to reign in the revolutionary left (Lenin's phrase about the "infantile disease of left communism" retains all its validity). Too many say that they want nothing to do with the detested revisionists (except to vote for them on the quiet), because the traditional organizations think they can escape by denouncing the misdeeds of the "grouplets" and loudly taking their distance from them.
Underlying both attitudes there is a grave political shortsightedness. Both the ultraleftists and the reformists fail to understand that unless there is a truly united mobilization of the class and its allies based on a platform making no concessions to the bourgeoisie, the crucial battle in progress and those to follow will be lost in essence.
Let me draw the analogy with Weimar Germany once again. There the need for a united front was denied by the big workers' organizations and advanced only by Trotsky, "the prophet unarmed." The result was that Hitler won, sweeping away the Social Democrats, the Stalinists, and the revolutionists. Let us reflect on this lesson, which, despite all the differences to be seen in the present situation, retains all of its timeliness.