THE ITALIAN FAR LEFT & THE JUNE 20 ELECTION Previous issues of INPRECOR (No.51, May 13, and No.52, May 27) have described the polifical context in which the campaign around the June 20 national elections is unfolding in Italy. We have likewise stressed the importance of the electoral grouping that has been organized for these elections under the designation Democrazia Proletaria (Proletarian Democracy). The formation of this grouping falls within the framework of a complex process of unification, recomposition, and discussion now going on within the Italian "revolutionary left. The electoral campaign being waged by the various components of Democrazia Proletaria indicates the significant audience that has been won by the Italian for left since 1969, The electoral results will certainly confirm this audience. Two poles have taken shape within Democrazia Proletaria itself, one composed of the Organiz-
DOSSIER P zazione Comunista Avanguardia Operaia (Workers Vanguard Communist Organization) and the Partito di Unita Proletaria per il Comunismo (PDUP — Party of Proletarian Unity for Communism, the other constituted by Lotta Continua. In fact, common meetings and actions between these two poles have been rather rare. Democrazia Proletaria was originally founded by Avanguardia Operaia and the PDUP. It was the designation they gave to their common slate in the regional and administrative elections of June 15, 1975. They thus claim the paternity and legitimacy of DP. Lotta Continua, which is presenting its own candidates at the end of the DP slate, has thus placed itself in a position of "conflict-unity" with the two organizations that constitute the backbone of Democrazia Proletaria.
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TALIA The political debate that has gone on in Italy during the electoral campaign is of great importance. It reflects first of all the political evolution undergone by the most significant organizations of what was called several years ago the "extraparliamentary left" in Italy. In addition, this discussion shows that the depth of the social and political crisis in Italy, the potential for an immense response by the working class, the development and internal contradictions of the reformist parties -the Partito Comunista Italiano (PC| - Italian Communist porty) and the Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI -Italian Socialist party) - and the initiative capacity of the organizations now regrouped under the designation Democrazia Proletaria have combined to give rise to a political situation that confronts all these organizations with decisive questions of revolutionary strategy. On many points the discussion taking shape within the Italian far left is not a reproduction of the discussions that have been initiated in France, Spain, or Portugal, but anticipates the sort of political confrontations that will soon develop in these countries. IF only for this reason, an attentive examination and critique of the positions enunciated by these organizafions is of considerable interest. While throwing into relief the value of the strategic responses offered by revolutionary Marxists in the framework of application of their own theoretical heritage (dual power, workers democracy, united front, etc.), such an examination and critique also indicates the necessary precisions that must be advanced in face of the new revolutionary upsurge now tending to develop in southern Europe. Hence, the discussion initiated in Italy must be extended, as broadly and publicly as possible, on an international scale. The publication of the following dossier is an initial, limited step in this direction. While it is not our intention here to make a general critique of the positions now held by the groups of the far left, nevertheless, in order to facilitate the reading of the documents published below and to enable our readers to situate them within the political evolution of these groups, we will try very rapidly to describe the conditions under which the groups arose, their initial positions on some problems, and their present organizational size. We cannot retrace their entire evolufion, which has been linked to the development of the social and political crisis in Italy, but this will have to be done in the future. We will draw the balance-sheet of the election campaign in the next issue of INPRECOR, when we will analyze the results of the vote and their national and International implicatiors. For the moment, we limit ourselves to presenting the political positions that have been developed during the most recent period by the AO-PDUP alliance, AO itself, Lotta Continua, and the Gruppi Comunisti Rivoluzionari (GCR - Revolutionary Communist Groups, the Italian section of the Fourth International). LOTTA CONTINUA The first issue of a journal entitled Lotta Continua (Struggle Continues) appeared on November 1, 1969. The journal began to appear regularly beginning on November 22, 1969. It was produced by the regroupment of a fraction of the Potere Operaia (Workers Power) group in Pisa (the heod of which was Gianni Sofri, presently one of the leading members of LC) and many militants of the student movement in Turin, Trente, the Catholic University of Milan, and the Potere Operaia group in Pavia. Lotta Continua came out of the spontanéist current. In 1969, for example, Sofri wrote: "The workers, students, technicians, and peasants will come to develop a general revolutionary consciousness on the basis of experience in struggle, which they will wage within their closs conditions, and on the basis of their capacity to be the vanguard of this struggle. ... If they lose this capacity, they can learn many things, but they will remain suspended in the void." During the great labor contract battles of the autumn of 1969, Lotta Continua proposed a "cultural revolution in the Italian factories." In the summer of 1970 the group held its first congress. In one of the preparatory documents of this congress, "Workers Independence," Sofri described the meaning of this concept, which occupied a central place in Lotta Continua's general conceptions, in these terms: "Ir (workers independence) is the explicit and rodical rejection of wage labor and the laws that govern it... to damage production, abolish material incentives tending to link the workers to the expansion of production, reject the economic and normative division, reject the measuring of work time and poisonous working conditions, hours, shifts. ... Production is the business of the employers; the crisis of production is a political objective of the workers."
Independence was defined on another terrain as well. It consists of "unmasking the counterrevolutionary role of the trade unions and the parties represented in parliament. The trade union is the essential instrument serving to imprison the class struggle within the rules of the functioning of capitalist development. " The PCI was defined mainly as "the essential instrument for channeling the anticapitalist struggle into rules of the game of bourgeois democracy in order to preserve the system." One of the most significant themes pushed by Lotta Continue af the time was summed up in the formula: "Let's take the city!" Sofri explained its meaning as follows: "This is not an infantile and provocative slogan, It is not an irresponsible invitation to plunder or insurrection. On the contrary, it is a strategic program of formation and consolidation of the proletarian vanguards within the long-term revolutionary process. To take the city means to unite the proletarians beginning from their fundamental needs, to bring them out of their Isolation, out of the poverty to which the employers condemn them, to make them get used to discussing in the struggle, to living as communists. Since that time, LC has experienced an important organizational growth. During its last congress, in January 1975, It claimed 10,000 members. According to one of its leoders, Luigi Bobbio, "after first underestimating the question of party building, we have since arrived at a structure inspired by democratic centralism. " Statutes were adopted during this congress which recognize the "right of tendency," but this is linked to the conception "of the necessity that the organization be affected by real contradictions that exist among the masses. The tendencies must thus reflect these contradictions." LC has a base on a national scale in the major Italian factories (Fiat, Alfa-Romeo, Pirelli, Italsider, the chemical complex of Porto Marghera). In the North it is most strongly represented in Turin, its "city of origin. the South it has a strong base in Naples, where it plays a leading role in the organization of the unemployed. In oddition, LC is growing in Sicily, where the PCI is relatively weak. Since 1972, the organization has had a daily newspaper, also called Lotta Continua, of which it claims to sell 15,000 copies. It has no theoretical review, Its programmatic documents, as well as the main theoretical contributions of its leaders, are published in the daily. Luigi Bobbio explains: "LC is the organization of the new vanguards that have emerged out of struggle and that have discovered politics. LC has above all played a role in those factories that have in turn played a role in breaking from the trade unions and revisionism (the PCI). " Although still marked by its spontanéist origins, LC has gone through a significant political evolution. This has stimulated a process of rethinking both on various theoretical themes linked to the history of the workers movement and on strategic and tactical questions that are posed in Italy today. The documents of Lotta Continua published below express the current positions of the group and allow for grasping the evolution of the organization.
AVANGUARDIA The Organizzazione Comunista Avanguardia Operaia, better known simply as Avanguardia Operaia (AO -Workers Vanguard), arose in 1968 in Milan. A number of its founding members and present leaders came out of the ranks of the Fourth International (Massimo Gorla, Luigi Vinci, Silvio Corvisieri, and others). The organization is linked to an intervention in the Comitati Unitarie di Base (CUB - United Rank-and-File Committees), which arose in 1967-68 in several important factories in northern Italy, especially in the Milan area (the Pirelli factory, among others) . In December 1968 the first issue of the journal Avanguardia Operaia appeared; the second issue was published in May 1969. In 1971 AO brought out a fortnightly, which later became a weekly. By 1973 the weekly conserved the name Avanguardia Operaia, while the theoretical review had taken the name Politica Comunista. The first issue of Avanguardia Operaia in 1968 announced a fusion between Avanguardia Operaia of Milan, the Circolo Lenin of Mestre, and the Circolo Rosa Luxemburg of Venice. Since then, AO, which places itself within the "Leninist ambit, " has adopted a systematic policy of unitary work aimed at Fusion with various local or regional organizations, among them the Centro di Coordinamento Campano and, above all, the Collettivo Lenin of Turin. Although AO's preponderant weight is in the North, in the regions of Milan and Venice among others, it does have a base on a national scale. For the past two years, AO has conducted special unitary work with the DUP, with the perspective of a fusion that is intended to occur in the relatively near future. This year's electoral accord, like the one around the June 1975 elections and the platforms signed jointly by AO and the PDUP, are presented by AO as falling within this perspective. The document below signed by four organizations - AO, PDUP, the Movement of Workers for Socialism, and the League of Communists - reflects the political axis around which the current rapprochement is occurring. With a view toward a "process of unification of revolutionaries, " Lotta Continua has proposed a "constituent congress of revolufionaries." AO has responded as follows: "It is necessary also to see the positive evolution of LC. On more than one occasion we have criticized the difficulty or inability of LC to define its relations with the reformists and above all with the trade unions, not only in terms of struggle, but also in terms of the
ITALY common construction of anticapitalist movements ... • Recently, in the course of the electoral campaign, LC has made a rectification, manifesting a willingness to go into the unions, a comprehension of the political struggle developing within them, and a willingness to adopt an attitude no longer of frontal attack on a possible government of the left, but to instead manifest the will to approach it in a simultaneously critical and unitary fashion. ... Nevertheless, any proposal of a politico-organizational type, if it is not to be demagogic, fragile, and manipulative, requires a clear and definitive response from LC, in practice and not only in words, on the crucial questions of its viewpoint on construction of a revolutionary party really rooted in the working class: the question of the 'mass line,' of the relationship with the movements of struggle on the one hand and with the trade unions and the reformist parties on the other hand. " (Quotidiano dei Lavoratori, June 17, 1976) The place of the debate between AO and LC in the complex process of recomposition of the far left that has been initiated in Italy may well become a decisive one, particularly since the debate runs through the parficipating organizations themselves. As far as the orientation now being worked out is concerned (see the document "The Proletarian and Popular Forces Prepare a Left Way Out of the Italian Crisis"), it is perhaps useful to furnish some points about the original position of AO on the PCI, the unions, and the
CUB. In order not to fall into sectarian schematism, we must note that AO, while claiming to be Maoist and still exhibiting a substantially uncritical position on the
Chinese leadership, has constantly emphasized an effort to develop a comprehensive political line.
The third issue of the AO review (November-December
1969) asserted: "Ar the origin of the crisis of the regime... (lies) the malfunctioning of the institutions that have assured bourgeois hegemony for more than two decades, (hence) the insertion of the PCI into the governmental camp is less and less seen as a solution to the crisis and more and more as an obligatory step on the road to the establishment of a new political regime, a regime less tied to nineteenth century schemas of parliamentary representation and 'party-ocracy"
as they are affirmed in the Italian constitution." In addition, AO then analyzed the crisis of the PCI in a very linear and catastrophist manner, asserting: "Even several years ago, the best elements of the PCI chose the frode-union field as the only possible one for militant action after the party had lost any leading role in the foctories as a result of its electoralist policy. " Or:
"The terrain on which the hegemony of the modern revisionists (the PCI) hod to pay the highest price was that of the class confrontation, which was led by the trade-union organizations according to the method of firemen (that is, with the aim of "extinguishing" the movement for workers demands — INPRECOR)."
AO drew the following conclusion in terms of the construction of the organization: "... the fact that the dynamic growth of the world revolution and the exacerbation of class confrontations in our country makes it ever
6 more clear that revisionism plays the role of agent of the bourgeoisie imposes precise tasks on revolutionary militants, on the workers vanguard: to lead a process of growth of new instruments of struggle and organization that are situated within the perspective of the reconstruction of the party of the proletariat and, simultaneously, that place the class struggle outside bourgeois control and influence and point in a revolutionary direction. . • . The task of Marxists-Leninists is to prevent the dispersion of militants who, individually or in groups, detach themselves from the revisionists; this must be done by offering them conditions for revolutionary militant activity among the masses and a coherent communist organization. " (*Il revisionismo del PCI, origini e sviluppi" - The revisionism of the PCI: Origins and Development, 1972) On the basis of this conception, the CUB were defined as follows: "The CUB, which arose in struggle, are mass organs with their own independence, both organizationally and in terms of line. They are composed of all those workers who recognize them, first spontaneously and later in an increasingly conscious manner, in a clear perspective of defense of class interests both inside and outside the factory, in an anticapitalist and anti-collaborationist manner. The CUB are not organized bureaucratically, but as independent organs they posses broader consciousness. They develop their activity in various forms, through assemblies, leaflets, nighttime meetings.
... It would be easy to ask, 'but should the factory councils and the unions cease to exist?' Let us immediately eliminate this misunderstanding and respond:
No, the factory council and the unions must continue to be present, but we say that the CUB also must not disappear
"The CUB, as democratic mass organs with their own independence, do not want to replace the factory coun be qualified as defenders of the fundamental interests cils. On the contrary, the councils must more and more of the workers and must jettison their collaborationist attitude. ... In relations with the unions, the CUB want to maintain an independence of line precisely be- cause they are convinced of the need to denounce before the workers all the things the unions fail to do, all their capitulations, in order to indicate their responsibilities and also to develop the class orientations that the unions have long since renounced. The function of the CUB must thus be to ever increasingly influence the action of the unions in order that they put forward a real class line in opposition to the present line of collaboration that the unions are odvancing." (January
1972.)
Since 1974 AO has been publishing a daily newspaper, called Quotidiano dei Lavoratori, of which 15, 000-
20,000 are sold. In addition, AO operates two rodio stations, in Milan and Rome. It now claims about 8,000 members. On the politico-organizational level, AO claims allegiance to "democratic centralism, " which nonetheless seems to be quite far from the conception upheld by revolutionary Marxists on the question of internal democracy. - A.U. O