[The following article was published in the May 10 issue of Bandiera Rossa, the weekly newspaper of the Gruppi Comunisti Rivoluzionari (GCR-Revolutionary Communist Groups), the Italian section of the Fourth International. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
These last two months of discussion among the vanguard, consisting of revolutionary forces and centrist organizations, have seen not only the strong emergence of the aspiration for unity. They have also seen the development of an unexpectedly broad debate on some fundamental ques. tions involving the analysis of the political stage we are in and the perspectives for the immediate and relatively near future.
At first in a confused way, and then with greater clarity, the various organizations have begun to confront each other-to test their positions against those of the other groups and against reality. This is occurring, moreover, not just on the level of positions taken by the national leaderships. Rank-and-file activists, the vanguard in the factories, have-often with considerable clear-sightedness-linked up the proposed unity with an analysis of the situation, with defining the prospects and tasks of the revolutionists.
This development is not accidental. It was not without reason that we have been saying since last fall that a process of political ripening and thoughtful reflection is going on in the vanguard, above all the vanguard in the factories.
For the first time since 1969 the union leaderships' line for new contract negotiations has been challenged and there has been an embryonic regroupment around alternative objectives.
This process, which resulted from the concrete experience of the miserable results of the reformist line on the question of wages and jobs, and which began to extend into a national conflict over new contracts, has now been transferred to the general political arena. It is the acceleration of the capitalist crisis in its manifold aspects (economic, social, and political) that has posed new demands and new questions for the vanguard.
Questions are being asked today about the meaning of the phase we are going through, about the perspective of a government of the left, about the program revolutionists should offer the masses in this election campaign and afterward, about the process of building a revolutionary party.
A Government of the Left
All of us agree, obviously, that the Christian Democratic regime (that is, the specific form the bourgeois government has taken in Italy over the last thirty years) is in a grave crisis, and that there is a definite possibility a new majority can emerge from these elections, a majority that will enable the left parties to come into the government. But to proceed from noting this fact to agitating for a "government of the left" as a slogan, as a general objective of the masses counterposed to the "historic compromise," requires careful thought.
Up to now, total confusion has reigned on this question; and the confusion has been promoted in particular by Lotta Continua (LC-The Struggle Continues) with its ambiguous call for the "CP in the bed gover government." This slogan fails to clarify the nature of the proposed government of the left. Moreover, the LC let it be understood at times that revolutionists should favor collaboration on the governmental level between the CP and at least a part of the DC [Democrazia Cristiana- Christian Democracy], once the latter breaks up. Things are now becoming clearer.
In a document dated April 10-11, which was published in the April 13 issue of its paper, Quotidiano dei Lavoratori, the Central Committee of Avanguardia Operaia [AO-Workers Vanguard, a Maoist group] introduced an essentially correct distinction. A government of the left, AO said, could go toward one of two "poles." It could take the form of "what could be characterized as a government following an anticapitalist course," carrying out some major reforms in combination with "a rise of workers and people's control from below." Or "it could take the form of a class-collaborationist government taking on the job of pushing the economic measures the bourgeoisie wants." In the latter case, such a government would open the road to a restoration of reaction. Which one of these "poles" prevailed "would depend largely on the relationship of forces between the pressure of the bourgeoisie and the pressure of the mass movement that will be brought to bear on such a government."
This distinction is essentially correct, along with the conclusion that (with some ambiguities) is drawn from it. That is, a CP-SP government (which would not necessarily be an anticapitalist government but which would be much more susceptible to mass pressure) has a different perspective and logic than a coalition government including the CP. SP, and smaller bourgeois formations (for example, the PSDI and the PRI', even if they might try to exclude the DC from the government. In this latter case, the presence of bourgeois parties, along with the CP's demonstrated willingness to "flirt" with the various "La Malfa proposals," would give the government a clearly classcollaborationist character.
The de that ve lead,
The idea that we should call not for a more precisely for a CP-SP government seems to be gaining ground. Even several representatives of Lotta Continua have used a formula of this type in the preelection debates that have been held in a number of cities (although nothing of the sort has ever appeared in the L's official documents).
The LC, for its part, is trying to go beyond this question and define the framework of the contradictions that would be faced by a government of the left. The document submitted by the Preparations Committee to the April 19 National Assembly of the LC (published in the April
14 Lotta Continua) talks about a "double defeat for revisionism" (i.e., the CP), that is, rejection by the masses and by the bourgeoisie whom it addresses. IC repeats its view of the CP as a party with "two faces," a bourgeois face and a workingclass face. "The apparent and parasitic strength of the revisionist party" is the expression of a genuine weakness, the weakness of the capitalist state's traditional representative system, and a genuine strength, one that still lacks its own full expression, the strength of the working class."
The LC therefore predicts that in the first phase of a government of the left, which according to them would be marked by a series of measures against the people, contradictions would arise between the CP's line and a maximalist one. The maximalist line "in itself will not be able seriously to challenge the hegemony of the revisionists." But it could yield quite different results as a basis for the "initiative and hegemony of a revolutionary party" in every area, among the masses and at the level of institutions.
Obviously we are witnessing new attempts-in part, novel ones-by the centrist organizations to analyze more fully the nature of the reformist workers parties and to work up tactical perspectives for the movement that take into account the experience yet to be gained by the masses with these parties in power.
In this discussion, it is clear that the PUP? stands to the right in an isolated position. By going through the experience of a government of the left (until recently, it was by going through the experience of a "new opposition"), the left as a whole, the PUP hopes, will be "remolded." In this process there is also room for regeneration, if only partially, of the reformist parties. Thus recently (in an article published April 28) Magri appealed in substance for not complicating the difficult work of a left government that would be called on to manage a desperate economic situation until a "new force" of the left could be created (that is, a fusion of AO and PdUP) able to prevent the polarization of a right opposition to the government of the left.
But in these attempts by the centrist organizations to improve their analysis and work up tactics, AO and LC are blocked both by their failure to understand fully the features and potential of the present phase and by their still too schematic analysis of the nature of the CP and the union leaderships and the relationship between these formations and the masses. While Lotta Continua, for example, seems on many occasions to overestimate the role of the mass movement and the rate at which the masses are breaking with the reformist leaderships, AO seems to fall into the opposite fault, that is, failing to grasp the revolutionary potential of the present phase. We see this clearly in their position on the relationship between the unions and the program.
The Union Struggle and the Transitional Program
On this question, AO's formulation in its April 10-11 Central Committee document is symbolic. This document talks about the "battle to establish a class-struggle line in the unions." This is a correct objective and one that we have always fought for, too. But, according to AO, the struggle is supposed to "begin with giving the tradeunion left a new start on clear political bases."
What trade-union left are they talking about? Do they mean the leadership of the dei Lavoratori
FLM [Federazione Metalmeccanici-Metalworkers
Federation, led by PdUP]? AO keeps making eyes at them. For example, it hailed the FLM leadership's position as "courageous and intransigent" (in an article April 16 by
2. Partito d'Unità Proletaria (Party of Proletarian Unity), a fusion of the il Manifesto, a vaguely pro-Peking split from the CP, and the section of the centrist Italian Socialist party of Proletarian Unity that did not join the CP when this formation collapsed. The Italian Socialist party of Proletarian Unity originated in a split from the SP of Pietro Nenni when it ended its postwar alliance with the CP and entered the center-left government.-IP
Vittorio Rieser) only two weeks before this leadership signed a sellout contract.
If we take the FLM leadership as the pivot of the fight for establishing a classstruggle line in the unions, then we fear we will have to wait forever. The trade-union left, from Carniti to Trentin to Lettieri, is an organic component of the bureaucratic reformist leadership of the unions. At every critical turn, it serves as a left cover for this leadership.
The fight for workers democracy within the unions, for winning the unions to the position of defending the interests of the working class (an objective for which we have always fought consistently and tenaciously and whose importance LC grossly underrates), is quite a different thing from cozying up to the left bureaucrats.
In fact, if AO fully appreciated the features of this phase, from the broad area of dissent among the masses over the contracts proposed by the unions in the fall, to the massive vote against the chemical workers union contract in recent days, it would understand the possibilities for working for a real alternative line within the unions and among the masses. It would understand what could be achieved if it really pushed such a line and did not get lost in petty maneuvers and a policy of always asking just a little bit more than the reformists.
The essence of AO's position seems to come out in an article by Luigi Vinci published April 24 and addressed to LC. "A program of revolutionary objectives, and more precisely 'transitional' objectives," Vinci says, "cannot leap over the immediate dimensions of a struggle when this struggle is being conducted within an overall relationship of class forces different from that of a revolutionary phase. In a nonrevolutionary phase, the 'transitional' program is for general propaganda and not for immediate mobilization."
The reasoning here seems to us to be a little too schematic. It is not enough just to ask yourself whether the present phase is revolutionary, decide that it is not, and then go on along the familiar ground of giving critical support to the contract proposals of the union leaderships, of campaigning for "democratic transformation" of the armed forces, and so on, following a minimalist line. The problem is more complex. We have to see whether the situation is evolving rapidly toward a revolutionary or prerevolutionary phase, assess the potential of the mass movement, the state of the discussion in the vanguard, and then, on this basis, decide which objectives in the transitional program should be raised in agitation today and which should be postponed.
At this point, we would like to repeat once again, briefly, the main lines of our analysis and the proposals we have made based on these. We would like to make this the starting point for a discussion with all the left and vanguard forces. We think that the possibility (only the possibility, we repeat) of a revolutionary crisis in our country is opened up by the convergence of the following processes: the economic crisis (the general world capitalist crisis and the specific acute crisis we are experiencing in Italy); the political crisis (which is taking the form of a breakup of the DC and of a paralysis of the institutions of bourgeois rule and thus becoming a crisis of the system of government); and the continuing mobilization of the working class, along with the development of anticapitalist movements in other sectors of the masses.
We maintain that a gap has begun to develop between the fundamental, and even the immediate, demands of the masses and the line of the reformist parties. This is still an embryonic process that is expressed today in the contradiction between the confidence the broad masses continue to place in the strength of the reformist parties and their capacity to bring about changes in the situation in the country, and the skepticism, disinterest, and even open opposition, in some cases, which the broad masses are showing toward the political line of these parties, and in particular, toward the proposed "historic compromise."
We maintain that the reformist leaderships, particularly the CP leadership, must take account of this process because of their nature as working-class bureaucra cies (that is, as the expression of a counterrevolutionary line in the working class and not simply as bourgeois political forces dominating the workers movement). This process is a threat to them, inasmuch as the bourgeoisie will accept them as a governmental alternative only if they demonstrate that they can control the mass movement.
We think, therefore, that these parties will do everything possible to find a bridge between the mass upsurge and their political line, which 1s inevitably classcollaborationist. We think it is going to get harder and harder to find such a bridge as the crisis advances. Even in the immediate future, the crisis threatens to produce an irreconcilable conflict between the interests of the workers and the interests of the capitalists. This is shown by the outcome of the recent union contract negotiations.
The conclusion we draw from all this is not simply that the revolutionists must do everything possible to make sure that the masses go through the experience of seeing the reformists run the government, that is, that we must call for a CP-SP government based on the unions and the mass organizations. We also think the revolutionists will be unable to exploit the contradictions between the reformist leaderships and the masses unless they have an instrument with which to approach the masses and bring out these contradictions, and that instrument is a revolutionary program, a transitional program.
Of course, the rate at which the revolu tionary process develops in Italy and the forms it takes, the timing and concrete ways in which the political consciousness of the vanguard elements and of the masses advances in this process, are largely determined by the policy of the reformists. Among other things, this creates an unevenness in thinking on various questions. For example, this results in the fact that certain transitional objectives (such as the reduction of the workweek, the "sliding scale of wages and hours") have already been taken over by broad sections of the masses, and in the coming period are destined to rapidly gain a wider acceptance, while others (for example, workers militias and the arming of the proletariat) have not yet advanced in the consciousness of the masses.
Our election program, therefore, is not the transitional program, it is not a program "for the dictatorship of the proletariat." It is a more limited one, calling for a government of the left that will take an anticapitalist course. But to fail to include in this program the essential elements of the transitional program that are being discussed among the masses, that already today represent the standpoint of the vanguard, or of important sections of it, in the name of the "immediate dimensions of the struggle," would mean paving the way for new and more serious capitulations.
Notes
1. Partito Socialista Democratico Italiano (Italian Democratic Socialist party), a right-wing split from the SP; Partito Repubblicano Italiano (Italian Republican party), the bourgeois nonclericalist party led by Ugo La Malfa.—IP