[The following articles outlining the positions of the three major components of the Democrazia Proletaria electoral bloc appeared in the May 28 and May 29-30
The PUP' (which resulted from a fusion between il Manifesto-a split from the PCI: in 1970—and the PSIUP) has been increasingly attracted to the Communist party. In the 1972 legislative elections il Manifesto ran candidates with rather modest results (270,000 votes) in comparison with what it hoped for. It then began to carry out a rapprochement with the CP, a move that was concretized by an ambiguous and gradualist concept of taking power, and by the conviction that revolutionists could persuade the CP to modify its fundamental positions.
At its January 1976 congress, the majority in PdUP (the grouping that came out of il Manifesto) put forward the following concept in its resolution: In the present context in Italy, the CP's coming to power will pave the way for a "transition to the transition," that is, to a phase of prolonged struggle during which the working class will gain the bases of power one by one. We will see a gradual transformation of the bourgeois state institutions as they come under the dominance of the working class. The entire question of dual power in a perspective of revolutionary crisis is simply glided over. A peculiar concept of the restructuring of the workers movement goes along with this orientation: Any possibility of winning the reformist masses to the revolutionary party is excluded. What should be envisioned, Rossana Rossanda explains, is restructuring in the context of the existing workers movement "without a rip in the unitary fabric." If revolutionists intelligently utilize the pressure of mass struggles, the CP will find itself constrained to adopt their revolutionary strategy.
This concept leads to a policy of tail-
1. Partito d'Unità Proletaria (Party of Proletarian Unity).
2. Partito Comunista Italiano (Italian Communist party).
3. Partito Socialista Italiano d'Unità Proletaria (Italian Socialist party of Proletarian Unity).
PdUP-A 'Gradual' Conquest of State Power PdUP-A 'Gradual' Conquest of State Power issues of the French Trotskyist daily Rouge. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
ending the CP and the trade-union leaderships. Accordingly, in the municipalities and regions where the PdUP has deputies, they back the orientation of the CP without differentiating themselves. The same is true in the unions. Members of the PUP, who frequently hold positions at a very high level in the hierarchy, do not differentiate themselves on either forms of struggle or partial demands.
In the view of the PdUP majority, a political line or alliances that risk launching a new tendency to the left of the Communist party are to be avoided. Hence its refusal to unite with Lotta Continua [The Struggle Continues] and its opposition to unification with Avanguardia Operaia [Workers Vanguard].
Following the June 15 [1975] elections, Avanguardia Operaia (Workers Vanguard] took up in a more systematic fashion than any other organization the question of what relations to maintain with the reformist organizations and how to win the reformist masses over to a revolutionary perspective.
In those elections the AO ran, along with the PUP, on the Democrazia Proletaria [Proletarian Democracy] list. The AO explained clearly that there was no possi bility of bypassing the reformist workers movement. A left government (seen as a CP-SP-DP government) would be the result of a modification of the relationship of forces between the classes on the one hand, and a modification of the relationship of forces between the reformists and revolutionists inside the workers movement on the other.
*To sum up the balance sheet of the last few years, it can be said that the general political impact of the revolutionary left was accomplished above all (even if not exclusively) through its capacity to put forward demands and experiences of
AO-For Uniting Reformists and Revolutionists AO-For Uniting Reformists and Revolutionists
There is a strong left-wing tendency in the PdUP (around Foa and Miniati; it won 47 percent of the vote at the last congress), which criticizes the majority's orientation but fails to counterpose a clear strategic alternative.
The two tendencies call publicly for a government of the left, but the Foa tendency has not made clear how it differs from the majority in respect to such a government. For example, in the May 7 issue of il Manifesto, Vittorio Foa said: "A left government, obviously, will be government with progressive intentions in a capitalist framework, in a system in which the enemy holds power. Two suicidal temptations exist-to support such a government unconditionally or to fight it solely because it remains in a capitalist framework. It should be supported to the hilt each time it opposes the centers of capitalist power, and we should put pressure on it, through struggle, each time it accepts these centers of power as unchangeable, or worse, supports them."
In short, the question is posed; but the logic remains that of applying pressure.
struggle in an independent way and with a sharpness that impelled the reformist sector of the workers movement to take them up as their own, thereby transforming them into goals and struggles of the entire movement. If these orientations had not become the unifying heritage of the entire movement, their political influence would have been extremely limited. What emerged in practice from the experience of the last few years, despite what the ideologues say, is a relationship of struggle and unity between revolutionists and reformists in the workers movement." (Politica Comunista, monthly magazine of the AO, February-March 1976.)
In the municipalities where they have won offices, AO's elected candidates have carried out a consistent political line. In Turin they participate in and promote a mass movement to occupy housing (with independent organization of the occupiers, and so forth), and fight to force the "red" (CP-SP) local government to recognize occupations requisitioning empty housing. In Milan, they organized "red markets" (at the time of the big jump in prices in
March), selling produce directly from the producer to the consumer. The success of this action forced the CP and the FLM (the metalworkers federation) to repeat it on a mass scale.
In an editorial in its May 23-24 issue, Quotidiano dei Lavoratori [the newspaper reflecting the views of the AO] explained its call for a left government in the following way: "There is only one force capable of confronting this [the governmental crisis], that of the reformist parties; but as long as they retain their workingclass character it is impossible for the power of the bourgeoisie to be exercised through them. This brings us back to the question of the nature of the reformist parties, of the class interests they represent, of their strategy. But we return with a political subject capable of acting upon this working-class character. This subject is the movement of struggle in all its complexity (relationship of forces, autonomy, organized strength, struggle between the two lines in the unions, and so forth). ...
Thus, the AO makes clear that reformist
LC-Bypass the Reformist
The June 15, 1975, elections posed the question of the left parties taking power. A discussion began inside and among the revolutionary organizations over what stance to take toward a left majority, the demands to be put forward, and the fight to be conducted to win over the reformist masses. We have seen above how Avanand the PdUP apguardia Operaia proached the question.
The way in which Lotta Continua approached the new period opened by the electoral gains of the CP is marked by what remain the continued preoccupations of this organization-encouraging workers autonomy and bypassing the reformist workers movement.
Nonetheless, in the June 15 elections Lotta Continua called for a vote for the CP (while the AO and the PUP ran candidates on the Democrazia Proletaria list). Why this position? LC began with an analysis of the contradictory situation of the workers movement at this stage in Italy: the weakening of the reformists' control over struggles in a number of sectors, combined with the growing political and electoral influence of the Communist party. Lotta Continua on the one hand correctly analyzed the CP vote as a class vote but its slogan "CP in the government" (which was not exempt from ambiguity, since it encompassed the possibility of an SP-CP-DC* government) was aimed at "unmasking the revisionists."
In view of the contradiction between the collaboration cannot proceed without taking into account existing social forces, but also that there will be no automatic break, on the political level, between the reformist masses and their political parties.
Avanguardia Operaia is also carrying out a policy of unity, with a perspective of the unification of revolutionists. For more than a year it has conducted a debate along these lines with the PUP, while systematically following a course in practice to advance unity. This debate implies a firm fight against the gradualist position still held by the PdUP majority (AO does not exclude a split by the right wing of PdUP during unification). But the AO also includes Lotta Continua in its unity plans, in a more long-term perspective: It is necessary to "fight the ultraleft line of Lotta Continua" through joint work in the Democrazia Proletaria support committees and discussion of revolutionary strategy vis-à-vis a left government, with the aim of putting forward, eventually, the bases for a revolutionary party capable of leading the fight to win the reformist masses over to a revolutionary perspective.
Workers Movement
CP's program of capitalist restabilization and the needs of the masses, the latter will increasingly break away from reformist politics, "regaining their automony" with respect to the CP. The road would be open for the "development of workers autonomy." "Increasingly significant forces in the working class will free themselves of dominance by the revisionists and take a resolute stand on the side of class autonomy."
The description Lotta Continua gives of this process indicates that it sees a link between the radicalization of forms of struggle and disaffection from the reformist political project. It thus underestimated the necessity of presenting an alternative strategy to a vanguard that had in fact begun to question reformist perspectives (which would have involved calling for a vote for the AO and the PdUP, and for the CP wherever the AO and the PdUP were not running candidates).
Lotta Continua says today that the slogan "vote CP" was correct for the June 15 elections, but is no longer satisfactory because the situation has changed. In the first place, a "government of the left" is now a "mathematical" possibility, seen as credible and widely discussed on a mass level. The situation of the last few months can be defined in two ways. Either as a situation in which the DC is not yet defeated, or as a situation in which there is already a growing class opposition to a government of the left dominated by revisionism." If one takes the second point of view (which LC does): "An independent electoral effort [by revolutionists] neither negates nor contradicts an institutional stage that we believe remains necessarya government of the left. To the contrary, it implies an initiative that not only ratifies but strengthens the tendency toward autonomy, both in regard to the CP and in the form of a future government of the left."
The Battle for Unity
The change in the relationship of forces between reformists and revolutionists in the workers movement is viewed in a linear and mechanistic fashion: The CP in power fails to satisfy the needs of the masses, who then break from it and join the revolutionists.
In practice, this concept of Lotta Continua is reflected in its direct opposition to the traditional workers movement.
"Lotta
Continua is the only organization in the revolutionary left that has never held illusions in the possibility of winning the reformist trade-union organizations over to a position of class autonomy, nor placed its hopes in the possibility of their undergoing an internal fissure. We know that for class autonomy to assert itself and win, self-organization on the level of both the masses and the party is required, and we have no intention of subordinating the tempo of this process to the gradual extinction of trade-union and revisionist hegemony-to the contrary, we intend to speed up its stages. Our concept of tactics and of winning the majority impels us to look mainly toward the movement and its mass organizational forms as the place where revolutionary leadership and hegemony will become a reality." Lotta Continua's entire orientation is marked by an overestimation of the conscious political level of the masses and an underestimation of their ties to the reformist parties.
LC's political line has put it at odds with the PdUP and the AO this year, isolating the group somewhat in the far left. The discussion that has now opened will encourage Lotta Continua to be more specific about its strategy and its concept of unity among revolutionists.
Following the governmental crisis in January, the possibility of elections being called was discussed by the three organizations. At a February 3 meeting of its Central Committee, Lotta Continua first put forward the idea of a common slate, without programmatic agreement. The violently opposed to any
PdUP was agreement with the LC, proposing instead that the AO and PUP run on the
Democrazia Proletaria slate. Initially, the AO Central Committee proposed that local agreements be worked out between the PdUP, AO, and LC.
Throughout April, considerable pressure for unity came from the ranks of the three organizations and from broader formations. The daily newspapers of the three groups were inundated with joint motions signed by cells of LC, AO, and PUP rankand-filers. Motions were also received from neighborhood committees, tenants committees, and factory councils. Under the combined pressure of this movement for unity, the offensive by the AO, and the battle waged by the PdUP minority, the PdUP agreed to the compromise.
In the beginning of May, Adriano Sofri, the leader of Lotta Continua, explained in an interview in his own newspaper that his organization was prepared to make the sacrifice of running on the Democrazia Proletaria slate, as independent candidates, under conditions put forward by the DP. The AO and the PdUP minority supported this proposal, but the PdUP
majority at first rejected it, by a vote of 65 percent. Finally, under the threat of a split by the minority, Lucio Magri called for a vote on a motion agreeing to a united slate.
Lotta Continua agreed to the conditions set down by the DP: 15 percent of the candidates, little in the way of television time, and no national leader on the slate. It agreed, in part, because it was forced to-it could not run the risk of putting forward its own slate, which would not only appear divisive but leave open the possibility of an electoral defeat. But it also agreed because it was very sensitive to the pressure for unity, which compelled it, in the words of Sofri himself, to temper somewhat its "organizational patriotism." The third reason was the fact that it plans to become involved in the unity process between the AO and the PdUP, hoping to shift its axis to the left.
Accordingly, the agreement is quite limited and points toward the development of two campaigns (a logic strongly supported by the PdUP). But it unleashes an objectively unifying dynamic that should not be underestimated and that has been reflected already in the formation of Democrazia Proletaria support groups (more or less "united," according to the region).
Notes
4. Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democracy).