(This is the first of a series of six articles that appeared in Rouge, a revolutionary communist daily published in Paris. We plan to publish the six articles in two installments.
[The translation is by Intercontinental Press.J
In the daily press of the Italian revolutionary left, there is scarcely an article on the far-left groups that does not go into extensive detail about their acute political and organizational crisis. There are hardly any members of these organizations who do not recognize the political weaknesses that have been sharply exposed over the last six months, in the course of the general "crisis of perspectives" plaguing the Italian far left. A series of events, seen by everyone, have confirmed both the existence and the deep-going nature of the crisis. These enclude the mass resignations of women members of Lotta Continua [the Struggle Continues] and the PdUP [Partito d'Unita Proletaria-Party of Proletarian Unity] the Lotta Continua congress last September, and the multiple splits recently suffered by the PdUP and Avanguardia Operiaia [Workers Vanguard].
However, because we consider the existence of organizations to the left of the PCI [Partito Comunista Italiano-Italian Communist party], with thousands of members and with significant influence among sections of the working class, to be one of the net gains of the class struggle in Italy over the last eight years-despite our political differences with these organizations-we cannot be content to stand aside and observe the situation complacently.
The experience of the Italian revolutionary left is rich in lessons for our own work; the problems it is facing are our problems, too, and, in light of the events currently taking place in Italy, and those that are on the horizon in France, the need for a discussion, which is long overdue, appears all the more urgent.
It is customary to date the outbreak of the crisis in the revolutionary left from the June 20, 1976 legislative elections, in which the Democrazia Proletaria [Proletarian Democracy] slate got only 1.5 percent of the votes. To be sure, the crisis accelerated after this date; however, June 20 was more a demonstration of aspects of the crisis than a cause of it.
The fact of having obtained 1.5 percent of the vote—-which was not an insignificant proportion, for that matter, in view of the political polarization that surrounded the elections-threw cold water on the traditional triumphalism of the far left. With the DC [Democrazia Cristiana- Christian Democracy] winning 38 percent of the vote, the PCI 34.4 percent, and the PSI [Partito Socialista Italiano-Italian Socialist party] 9.6 percent, the overall vote maintained the position of the bourgeois party, as well as registering a gain for the reformists. This was stinging rebuff to the far left's linear view of the development of the class struggle.
The following paralysis of the political situation resulting from the PCI's abstentionist attitude revealed the political inadequacy and programmatic backwardness of the organizations to its left. To these political weaknesses was added a profound "crisis of perspectives," linked to the atmosphere of demoralization. In the women's movement and among the youth, tendencies to "live for yourself from now on," along with an implicit and sometimes explicit rejection of any revolutionary perspective, began to develop. At the Lotta Continua congress, one comrade explained that for years she had adapted herself to "other people's schedules and needs" because she thought that the revolution was right around the corner, but seeing that this was not the case, she was no longer willing to sacrifice "her own schedule and her own needs."
From a purely numerical standpoint, this crisis has been reflected in the loss of members, which has taken on epidemic proportions. At its recent congress, Avanguardia Operaia admitted to having lost a third of its membership; in the PaUP, it was the entire women's liberation division, which left the organization last November. As for Lotta Continua, it should be more properly called a "current" than an organization nowadays.
Still and all, the situation is very contradictory. It should be seen as a remolding, rather than a disintegration, of the revolutionary left, as an attempt to redefine its political and organizational axes.
If the June 20 elections revealed the weakness of the revolutionary left, what they revealed was its inability to offer a political alternative to the reformists, rather than a diminishing of its influence in the plants. Six months after Democrazia Proletaria got 1.5 percent of the vote in the legislative elections, candidates running on the DP platform got between 20 and 25 percent of the vote in the elections for shop stewards in the big Milan plants. This unevenness reflects the deeply rooted economism that has been the trademark of the Italian far left since its inception.
"Our status as a minority is not linked to the way we intervene in struggles (our proposals have often won a majority of the class), but to the fact of delegating political, social and organizational responsibility for these struggles to the PCI," the outgoing Political Bureau's report to the recent AO congress admitted.
In its initial phase, the Italian far left as a whole was characterized by the kind of spontanéism that grew out of the great student and working-class struggles of 1968-69, struggles which seemed to "sweep aside" the old reformist organizations. On the basis of this impression, the various currents quickly developed a theory. And yet, by early 1970, it was the trade-union organizations that emerged greatly strengthened from the struggles and that appeared as the leaders of key struggles (with the campaign "for reforms").
Similarly, in the 1972 legislative elections, the far left had to learn that, beyond the area of concern to the "movement," there was a broader area of "political" struggle, and that, in this area, the influence of the reformists was growing, at the same time that large sections of the working class were becoming aware of the need for political change.
The far left, having no overall perspective to counterpose to the reformists, could not help but wind up adapting to them politically. The recognition of this situa tion led the various organizations to "retreat into the plants," relegating the political battles to the reformist organizations, especially the PCI, with all the forms of adaptation that this entailed.
Beginning in late 1973—after the experience of the defeat in Chile, which also prompted the PCI to put forward the famous "historic compromise" —the far-left organizations began to try to define their relationship to the reformist organizations, and to spell out their conception of the struggle for power, and their attitude toward the possibility of a government of the left.
From then on, Il Manifesto amplified its "gradualist" view of the struggle for power, and of a "way out," rather than a breakup of the system. For Avanguardia Operaia, the central error of the MIR [Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria-Movement of the Revolutionary Left] was to have not entered the Unidad Popular, in order to transform it from within. For Lotta Continua, the only group to preserve a deepgoing spontanéist framework, it was necessary to force the PCI into the government, after which would compell
"working-class autonomy"
it to adopt a working-class program.
The three major organizations put forward a very parliamentary and institutionalized conception of a government of the left parties, without posing the problem of what the mass movement's own goals should be, and what program could express the anticapitalist demands of the masses. This was a conception which would lead to the errors and ambiguities of the June 1976 electoral campaign, and the demoralization of the post-election period.
In making a critical evaluation of their past, each of the three organizations has taken a different direction. The PdUP has returned to the political and programmatic orbit of the PCI. Lotta Continua, taking its spontanéism to extremes, has dissolved into the "movement"; only Avanguardia Operaia is making an effort to redefine, with difficulty, its strategic axes, taking into account both the deep roots of the traditional organizations among the working class, and the need to confront them with an overall political alternative.
all and primarily within the framework of its organizations-unions and councils, a stinging rebuff to Sofri's theories. This was enough to disorient more than a few activists.
As for "integration into the movements," this was carried out to the letter where these movements existed, to the point of dismembering Lotta Continua as an organization.
The women who had refused representation on the organization's leadership bodies at the Rimini congress all went off
2. Lotta Continua: 'Live With an Earthquake'?
At the close of a stormy congress, Adriano Sofri called on his comrades to "learn to live with an earthquake." In his own colorful way, he was expressing the choice that the leadership of Lotta Continua had made: not to confront the centrifugal forces that had become visible during the congress-from the women to the worker comrades and from the youth to the marshals-but to allow them to run their course, while at the same time sending all the most experienced cadres out to rebuild Lotta Continua "from the ground up."
Evoking the need for the leading group to get back in touch with the masses, he said: "Of course, people will tell me that Beethoven was deaf, and yet he managed to compose magnificent symphonies. But Beethoven was a genius!"
The choice was meant to be well calculated; in view of Lotta Continua's present situation, it would appear that the risks were grossly underestimated.
Today, Lotta Continua no longer exists as an organization. Last June in Turin, where it at one time had 1,000 members, the LC comrades considered it a victory to be able to get fifty persons to a meeting. Sofri, who had chosen to reintegrate himself into the ranks in the working-class stronghold of Turin, got kicked out a few months later by the "workerist workers." In the other large cities similar things have happened. This is not to deny that many activists in the student, youth, and women's movements still identify themselves as members of Lotta Continua. But, in essence, this has more to do with a sentimental attachment to the organization that best represented the various "movements" over the past eight years than political conviction.
Paradoxically, sales of the daily newspaper, which had dropped to a low of 6,000 copies at the beginning of the school year, jumped fantastically to 20,000 copies during the student upsurge of the last two months. However, as "the voice of the movement," its lifespan will be only as long as that of the movement, to which it has explicitly refused to give any political leadership.
The organizational choice made by the Lotta Continua leadership flowed directly from its analysis of the situation in the aftermath of June 20. "The general pattern of the international crisis has taken the lead over the particular pattern of the crisis in Italy. From this point of view, it is not the Andreotti government as such, but the basic agreement between the DC and the PCI on which it is based, that makes for long-term stability. As a result, the only way a crisis can be generated is through the sharpening of the social contradictions," Viale explained to the congress.
Having concluded that the PCI had been transformed once and for all into an arm of the government and the social order, and the unions into "appendages of the state apparatus," the leadership of Lotta Continua went back to their original aim, which they had never departed from theoretically, of building a new workers movement.
In this context, it was necessary to rebuild Lotta Continua from the ground up, while extablishing close ties with the incipient forms of counter-authority that were developing independently, as a reaction against the stabilization of the political situation and the antipopular attacks of the DC and the PCI. The party had to be transformed by dissolving into these movements.
Sofri came close to contradicting himself when he confessed, during one of the long self-criticism sessions at the congress: *The fact is that while I myself have always been a stern critic of Comrade Lenin's theory of the 'external' vanguard, I have never in my life managed to be part of the 'internal' vanguard of anything." While Sofri could afford to make jokes about it, for many members of the organization this realization was the starting point for demoralization and inactivity.
What really happened in Italy during the autumn of austerity did not actually correspond in the least to the picture that the Lotta Continua leadership had drawn. In an atmosphere permeated with a waitand-see attitude, there was no eruption of "working-class autonomy" against the apparatuses when workers returned to work in September. And when labor opposition did begin to surface in a consistent way this spring, it did so above into the women's movement. When the student movement erupted, members and former members of Lotta Continua took former members of Lotta Continua took part in it in massive numbers, embracing its apolitical character and "antiorganization" orientation with a purely suicidal logic.
This reached such a point that the leading core of LC, which expresses its views in the newspaper from time to time, was forced to intervene and explain that it was important not to confuse the autonomy of the movement with a prohibition against political organizations putting forward their own point of view. But this appeal had little impact, even among those students who identified with LC.
There is also the risk that the "current" identifying with LC will turn the conception of "two societies" put forward by the PCI inside out (counterposing the workers, ready for sacrifices, to the "marginal" layers-students, youth, women-ready for any corporatist revolt).
The report presented to the last LC Central Committee meeting tried to warn the student movement, and beyond it, the LC current, about this danger: "The novement has defended its own independence, against all attempts to conceive of the relationship with the workers as a relationship with the institutions of the workers movement, even when these institutions appear in the guise of the trade-union left,' the FLM [Federazione dei Lavoratori Metalmeccanici- Metalworkers Federation], or the plant councils. However, this does not mean that the movement should not seek relations with the autonomous vanguard of the working class. This is why we must combat these theories, that appear to be the opposite side of the coin of the revisionist talk about two societies,' which, considering the 'socially conscious worker' (i.e., the unemployed, the youth, and so on —Ed.) as the mass vanguard of the proletariat in the crisis, then tend to identify the factory worker with the institutional representatives of the workers movement, and so come to the conclusion that the worker-mass can only be won to revolutionary struggle on an individual basis."
While correctly debunking the theories about the integration of the working class into the system, the reporter puts forward no other perspective than that of ties with fictitious "autonomous" structures, giving the membership absolutely no means of understanding the roots of the working class's attachment to its mass organizations, and of understanding phenomena such as the assembly of opposition plant councils at Lirico in Milan, the better to intervene in it.
Apparently, the LC leadership has realized, somewhat belatedly, the suicidal consequences for their organization of the choice made at Rimini. The abovementioned report to the Central Committee ended by saying: "I think that the 'movement-itis' of so many comrades in Lotta Continua reflects this need to 'continue the congress, this correct understanding that the nucleus of a revolutionary party can only be rebuilt from within the movement; but it also often reflects an unresolved dilemma over how to pose the problem of political intervention, of leadership, of the role of the vanguard, and an often passive, fatalistic expectation that the movement is capable of offering solutions to these problems.
But this conclusion has the ring of a cry in the wilderness. To be sure, the "Lotta Continua current" will continue to exist, as long as there is no major political downturn; but in the present political conjuncture, to be able to envision the reconstitution of the organization would mean having to swim against the stream.
always retort that nowadays, Giovanni lines up with AO, but he got his training in the ranks of the PdUP.)
In the hall were the trade-union cadres, who at most had tactical differences with the orientation of the leaderships. On the buses arriving from the Milan industrial area were the shop stewards, who wanted to express the opposition of working-class vanguard sectors to the austerity policy.
In the political context created by the PCI's abstentionism and its support for the austerity policy, these differences could only intensify. For Magri, the line of reforming the PCI is more valid than ever. In view of the bankruptey of the historie compromise, the disagreements inside the PCI are going to deepen, strengthening the chances of winning it over to making a left
3. The PdUP: Critical Conscience of the PCI
"Without destruction, there can be no construction." This quotation from Mao Tsetung hangs in the place of honor on the wall of the Rome headquarters of the PdUP, under a full-length portrait of the organization's patron saint.
It seems that Lucio Magri has taken to heart this somewhat mechanical formula of the Great Helmsman. On February 27, he decided to set in motion a split in his party's Central Committee by virtually expelling the minority with no appeal, a split that was ratified without consulting the membership. This says a great deal about the leadership's methods, which were confirmed by the publication of the famous "Document of 62" that constituted the political basis for the split.
This document was drawn up and signed by thirty-two members of the PdUP
Central Committee and thirty members of the Central Committee of Avanguardia Operaia, without informing the rest of the two organizations. Regardless of the fact that the document contains several pertinent critical observations, this method of operation was responsible for the split.
In fact, the split took place along the lines of the two components that came together to form the PUP in February 1976—the old Manifesto group, and a spinoff from the old PSIUP [Partito Socialista Italiano d'Unità Proletaria—-Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unityl. The basis for the split was the political differences that had surfaced at that congress (see Critique Communiste, September- October 1976).
The major difference concerned the nature of the PCI. For the group that had come out of Il Manifesto, the PCI represents the interests of the working class as a whole, including its vanguard; it contains the seeds of the revolutionary party.
Therefore, the task of revolutionists is to serve as an external pole to aid in the development of the party's left wing, to win this wing to the program of Il Manifesto, and to win the party as a whole to the positions of the left wing. The point is to work toward a "reconstitution of the workers movement without tearing it apart," or to "make the PCI's 3,400,000 feet march to the rhythm of Il Manifesto," as Rossana Rossanda puts it.
For the wing led by Foa, formerly of the PSIUP, which includes the party's tradecadres, it is necessary, on the union contrary, to build an alternative to the PCI. This alternative must be consistent in order to serve as a reference point for the trade-union left, and it must be built by uniting the revolutionary left. (The Foa wing, for that matter, does not differentiate itself from the gradualist strategy for the conquest of power upheld by Magri; see Critique Communiste.)
The direct consequence of the Magri group's orientation of reforming the PCI is to not put forward an alternative to the line of the PCI, and to not challenge its leadership of the mass movement, especially of the trade-union movement.
Over the last year, the PUP has barely served as a gadfly to the union leaderships. But the party's lack of political homogeneity at the time of its founding congress has led to a lack of uniformity in its practice. Rossana Rossanda, speaking of the PUP's intervention into the January meeting of shop stewards in Rome, described it this way: "There was one line at the podium, another one in the hall, and still a third one in the buses of the dissidents."
At the podium were the trade-union cadres affiliated to the PdUP (Letieri, secretary of the FLM [Federazione dei Lavoratori Metalmeccanici-Metalworkers Federation], and Giovanni, secretary of the CGIL [Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro-Italian General Confederation of Labor]), who defend the line of the tradeunion bureaucracy. (Giovanni, for example, voted to approve the recent decree
"so as not undermining the sliding scale, to disrupt the unity of the union leadership." Of course, the Magri group can turn. Therefore, it is important not to do anything that might injure this prospect.
The consequences of this analysis are clearly apparent in the orientation that Magri proposes. It is necessary to accept austerity as an accomplished fact; the opposition to this line, which has arisen in the plants, and recently during the meeting of the Lirico plant committee, is characterized as "corporatist"; what is necessary is not to fight for an end to the PCI's abstentionism, but to demand that the PC and the PS present an emergency program to the DC, which the latter will have to take a position on.
Any proposal that is counterposed to the above is characterized as maximalist. In his report to the Central Committee meeting where the split took place, Magri argued that it was necessary to build an organization "capable of proposing and implementing unity of the entire left, and of pushing the traditional organizations to make a turn. ... If, on the other hand, a force or a grouping of forces forms to the left of the PCI which seeks to express itself by riding the wave of anger and protest in a direct form, using them outside any strategic context as a weapon against the 'political cadre' and thus opening up a frontal breach inside the workers movement, a maximalist force acting as the parasitic reflection and guilty conscience of social extremism-such a force would not only be inadequate in relation to the present tasks, but, in the name of the most just causes, could act as an objective ally of the class enemy, hastening the arrival and worsening the impact of a historic defeat."
One would be at a loss to say whether the speaker is Berlinguer or Magri! From this it can be seen that, in view of the depth of the differences, Magri chose to cut short the PUP's existence and the process of unification with AO, even at the risk of losing several hundred trade-union cadres, who were what had given "credibility" to the organization.
Magri had believed, up until the last minute, that he would be in the majority in the unified organization, and this is why, only a few weeks ago, he seemed to be a staunch supporter of the fusion with AO. It was only when he understood that the thirty AO Central Committee members who had signed the "Document of 62" would only be followed by a very small portion of the ranks, and that their action, seen as a "splitting"
move by the majority of AO, had reinforced the organization's cohesiveness, that he interrupted the unity negotiations-and, in fact, only 400 AO
From Salazar to Soares members left with Campi.
The Magri splinter of the PdUP, which is more and more being called Il Manifesto again, will thus be preserved mainly as a current of opinion. Its daily paper is fairly well distributed (selling from 25-30,000 copies) and widely read by members of the traditional left organizations and tradeunion cadres.
In the aftermath of the split, the PCI's In the aftermath of the split, the antly d instantiv favorable articles appeared in L'Unità, an interview with Communist party leaders appeared in Il Manifesto, and so on. It is clear that, in the context of the difficult phase the PCI is going through, and the questions that many of its members are asking, Il Manifesto will in effect be able to play a certain role as the critical conscience of the PCI. But it will not be able to go beyond this.
[To be continued]