6th  CONGRESS

COMMUNIST REFOUNDATION PARTY

Venice, 3rd – 6th March 2005

DOCUMENT n. 2:   “BEING COMMUNISTS”

First signatory: Claudio Grassi

(Member of the national Secretariat of the Communist Refoundation Party

and area coordinator of the Ernesto)

REASONS FOR THIS DOCUMENT.  PRELIMINARY REMARKS

The 6th Conference of the Communist Refoundation Party takes place in a difficult period for our country and the whole planet.  Italy is at the crossroads between the opportunity to stop the

“Berlusconian” season  and the too often underestimated risk to suffer the damages caused by the centre-right government for another term of the legislature.  The world is facing a serious crisis because of US governmental politics, and Bush’s re-election to the White House let us foresee that the war strategy of the American superpower will go on, nourishing the risk of generalizing the armed conflict.

Political elections are drawing near in our Country. Elections will be crucial because the damage provoked by the centre-right coalition to the social and productive system, constitutional cadres and social fabric of the country are inumerable.  Therefore it is particularly necessary that left wing and democratic forces win and concentrate on reversing the trend of the last decade, characterized by war and neo-liberalist disasters.

Six years after the 1998 split, Communist Refoundation Party has come in the center of the Italian political scene and today it is considered as a decisive force for the shift in political stability of the Country.    We all agree with the importance of such a goal, we are asked to discuss how to pursue it.  The political issue - exactly the governmental problem- is the core of our Conference.

This is clearly the talking point. Because the decisions to be taken are very important as well as the risks they carry.  Therefore, it is necessary to promote a fairer and more sincere confrontation, give the whole party the opportunity to take part in choices that will redefine its position and at the same time could stake its reason for existence.

Differences, trend pluralities are not obstacles but resources: they provide instruments, not difficulties.

For this reason we think that a conference about documents with amendable thesis would have been necessary.  That hasn’t been possible, so we give our contribution to the conference discussion by means of this motion, starting to put into evidence five main issues in the preliminary  remarks.

BEING IN GOVERNMENT ONLY ON SPECIFIC CONDITIONS

Being sure about the binding necessity to unify all our forces to the ones of the opposition parties in order to get rid of Berlusconi away, we wonder about the conditions of our possible turnout for the government in case of victory of the present opposition forces.  We are aware of the importance Communist Refoundation Party may have in a coalition government with an advanced program.

We think that our Party would be able to give a substantial contribution for qualifying in ascending sense the policy platform of the future government.

The present political frame doesn’t encourage  great optimism: even with contradictions, the forces that have imposed “open market” policies remain dominant in all the capitalistic world; neo-liberalist ideology still exerts a strong influence on the trends of democratic and soft left forces in our Country and, as already said, Bush’s confirmation as President of the US let us foresee that in the next future the strategy of “pre-emptive war”  will go on inspiring the political agenda of the superpower and its allies.

We can’t forget all the risks such a state of affairs produces.  Combining their own forces, the left wing parties and Communist Refoundation Party  can be successful in the next elections.  Nevertheless, it’s not sure that next government will take charge of what we consider priorities: occupation defense against precariousness; defense of salaries and pensions harshly hit by inflation and political economies of all the governments in the last decade; abrogation of Berlusconi’s  “shameful laws”;  defense  of  the  Constitution  born  from  the  antifascist  Resistance;  banishment  of  war -declared by anybody- and end  of any  military  occupation.

If that doesn’t take place, a possible participation of Communist Refoundation Party  to the government with some of its ministers should have serious consequences upon our Party, activists, society  and movement sectors that today entrust on us.  For this reason  -and also for the fact that a clear program calculating effective answers to our people’s needs represents an important preamble to motivate “left people” to fight an election against the right sides-  we think that before

deciding if joining next government or not, the Party must claim specific guarantees for protecting the subjects it intends to represent, avoiding in this way  “to sign blank bills”.

Firstly the programs, secondly the alignments: this principle, that has always leaded the political choices of  Communist Refoundation Party, represent today our compass.

WORKER’S RIGHTS, CRUCIAL ISSUE

A decisive field in our program is constituted by the defense and recovery of occupation rights, hit by the attack  of employers and governments during the last two decades of the Twentieth century (particularly violent during the ‘90s).

Even if the field of waged occupation went on expanding in Italy and in the world, the thesis

-also left is-  of “the end of occupation” ravaged for years.  Such an ideology was useful to divert attention from the social massacre suffered by the working classes.  In the meanwhile  working conditions has become unbearable.  Salaries and wages are destroyed by a real inflation much higher than the programmed one.  Precariousness and flexibility have become a custom.  Someone would get through national collective agreements.  Enterprises draw almost exclusively  on “atypical”  relationships, that’s to say fixed term contracts without protection .  Safety standards are systematically  evaded   (Italy has almost ranked first in statistics on mortal accidents at work, with more than 1400 victims a year).  The pension reform has harshly  hit  the  social security system, changing the coming of pension age into a mirage and reducing millions of retired people to poverty.  All this happens in a Republic whose first article of the Constitution  declares “founded on occupation”.  It is necessary to take such a declaration into serious account, because the real source of wealth in a Country is occupation -not a capital increasing on its exploitation.  It is necessary to react against the dogmas of “enterprise centrality” that in Italy has produced any investment or industrial development but privatization of public resources, gratuities to a parasitical middle class,  profit and revenue accumulation. It is also necessary to unmask the competition and market rhetoric that -far from meaning dismantlement of oligopolies-  has only served to justify concentrations of capital and strengthening of position incomes.

These criteria are to be changed with others, of opposite sign: full occupation and stable job; defense of salaries (by means of a new “sliding scale”); defense of the national collective agreement

and trade union democracy; revitalization of economic planning and public intervention, starting from sectors with immediate low profitability (infrastructures, research, training); strengthening of

social services.  That’s not enough.  It’s time to take seriously  what the Constitution establishes as to the social function of the economic private initiative, foreseeing forms of control “from below” over enterprise plans, organization of occupation, environmental impact of the productions and the use of public financing received.

The defense of occupation and its rights  is the basis for a real democracy and the core of Communist people worries.  Given up for dead, the contradiction capital-occupation is in reality  dominant.

Dependent occupation remains, in its different forms, the core of the social block able to accomplish the changing of the present state of affairs.

IRAQI PEOPLE ARE RESISTING

The tragedy of Iraqi war is at the center of the international scene since more than one year and a half.  The imperialist attack against  a sovereign State from the US, Great Britain and their closest  allies (unfortunately Italy is one of them, too) has caused up to now the death of more than 100

thousand innocent civilians: a massacre weighing like a rock upon men and governments who put into practice such an infamous war enterprise, so it is strictly  necessary  the immediate withdrawal of all the occupation troops from Iraq, starting from the Italian ones.

But things are not going the way Bush, Blair and Berlusconi expected.  War would have come to an end in little more than one month but it is still lasting and all this prevents the US -at least for the moment-  from new aggressions, already planned, to the detriment of other sovereign States (starting from the so-called “rogue States”: Iran, Syria, North Korea and Cuba).  The most well-trained war machine in the world is not able to overcome a destroyed Country and an exhausted population.  That’s why Iraqi people has answered the military occupation with extraordinary pride and courage, ordering up a widespread armed  Resistance that the continuous bombing and ground attacks of the Anglo-American troops aren’t still able to weaken.

Such people’s Resistance must be recognized and supported as an expression of Iraqi people’s legitimate ambition to independence and autonomous determination of its own future.  For this reason we disagree with those who -in complicity with the media-  evoke an alleged “war-terrorism spiral”. This formula doesn’t cancel only Iraqi Resistance from the scene but also suggests an unacceptable equivalence of responsabilities.

Being sure about the cleanest condemnation of terrorism, we think instead that the responsibility for this criminal war is to be completely attributed to Bush and his allies who have provoked the Iraqi attack for other reasons (control of energy resources; geopolitical competition with China, Russia and European Union; enormous profits linked to the military expense and “rebuilding” business etc.).  Nobel prize Pérez Esquivel is right when he says that the most dangerous terrorist today is Bush.  In our opinion is that any speech about Iraqi war must start from this point.

OUR HISTORY IS A  HERITAGE, NOT A PROBLEM

Being Communist today is difficult, also because the attack against our ideas, aspirations and history is more and more violent.  The historical revisionism, that aims at criminalizing the same idea of class struggle, upsets the whole experience of the working and communist revolutionary movement showing it as a sequence of violence and failures. Such a kind of thesis recently emerges  also from the left side. Important intellectuals have represented the heritage of last century as a heap of rubble. Summary procedures with final decision have been brought against proletarian revolutions and the same antifascist Resistance. All the greatest Communist leaders of the Twentieth century have finally  been declared politically  dead.

We don’t acknowledge ourselves in these stocks, we consider them as historically and politically wrong.  The Communist movement has given power to the main right  demanding of the working classes and has always supported peace and social justice against war.  The teaching of its greatest leaders of the Twentieth century  -from Lenin to Gramsci-  still represents a precious contribution to the critical analysis of capitalistic society.  The great revolutions which followed one another after 1917 have given immense people masses freedom and started a new historical age, where our Communist experience lies. The antifascist Resistance - where Communist partisans were in the front row- allowed our country to win dignity and democracy back after the infamous event of fascism, its racist laws and its war by Hitler’s side.

We are proud of this history. We don’t forget limits and dark pages, but we don’t share such attitudes.  We think it is useful to go on in the research and considerations.

But rivisiting history doesn’t mean take it away. We don’t share the assumption of nonviolence theory as a new identifying feature of the Communist Refoundation Party.  The forms of struggle depend on the context they are practiced: in Italy  today  it is possible to practice a pacific struggle also because yesterday the armed partisans have defeated the fascism; on the other hand, after an illegal war and occupation, Iraqi people are also obliged to create an armed resistance to defeat the invaders.

The same idea that Communist people don’t fight for gaining power is foreign as well as unintelligible to our history.   Being in a government with some ministers doesn’t mean “corrupting” with the power?  In reality there’s never a lack of power. Losing sight of this field for remaining pure and uncontaminated would mean to abandon the political struggle and would make impractical the aim for the transformation of the society in a socialist sense.

THE PARTY: A FUNDAMENTAL INSTRUMENT

The extraordinary engagements to be performed call for devoting  particular care to the Party, its organizational strengthening, its social and territorial settlement.

A Communist Party able to organize struggles, promote conflicts, develop movements, firmly rooted in the society and occupation world, culturally autonomous from the dominant ideologies is necessary:  in the last analysis, a Party allowing the prospect of capitalism exceeding.

The necessity for an organizational politics, in particular aimed at training cadres and activists, strengthening and revitalization of basic structures, is at the forefront.  Either the territorial or the working place circles  suffer today from a scarce participation in the elaboration of the Party political lines.  All this provokes  a sense of disorientation, that sometimes produces cases of passivity, disaffection and declining in militancy.

For all these reasons we ask for a correction of line in respect to the “innovations” introduced in the Vth  Conference that, accentuating such a process, have gone in the direction of creating a “soft” and “mediatic” Party.  The declining in memberships, and the recent scarce participation in our last national demonstration backs up the situation: all opposing trends in respect to the development of important movements that have occurred during these years.

We need a clear reversal trend allowing the making up of the serious delays in the discussion about the state of organization, recognizing in this way the Party and its organized power as a fundamental instrument for the changing of society.

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THESES

1

For a capitalism exceeding

The aim at a capitalism exceeding towards socialism and communism is not simply an aspiration: it comes from the same ancient and new contradictions that capitalism is not able to solve.

Capitalism has come in the third millennium bringing deeper and deeper contradictions. 

In spite of dynamism and opulence also expressed in significant fields, capitalism is incapable of offering a decorous life to the majority of the planet inhabitants.  Hundreds of millions of human beings  are deprived of the most basic rights.  Adults and children die of starvation and thirst.  Epidemics and wars scourge a great part of the world’s population, while old wounds  -such as war,

racism, slavery, illiteracy, child labour that sometimes have deluded ourselves about a redevelopment or reduction-  have reopened again.  In the same most developed capitalistic countries wars and despotic temptations have come back again and, as usual, the weakest categories of the population (proletarians, young and old people, immigrants) are the ones who pay the highest price for regression.  The wide spreading of old and new ways of exploitation, poverty and isolation in the same core of the capitalistic West means that the system is not able to link the immense potentials of the scientific progress to the social one and the humanization of relationships among human beings.

It’s not fault of a “cynical and cheater fate”, but the same processes of the capitalistic system, based upon an indiscriminate profit research, plunder of natural resources and exploitation of labour-force of immense human masses to the benefit of few banks and multinationals of the “free West” capitalistic countries.   In addition, we have to remember that since 1989 the state of war represents an important characteristic of the international pattern.

It deals with a tendency that doesn’t disappear but Bush’s re-election let us foresee a return.  While the reasons given to justify the Iraqi massacre -connivance with terrorism, possession of weapons for mass destruction-  have turned out to be wrong, the real purpose of war becomes more and more evident every day: taking the richest energy resource region in the world under tight control and militarily colonizing an important area in order to hold the most dangerous competitors of US superpower  -particularly China-  under threat of missiles.  Afghanistan and Iraq (as well as the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia) are regions where the US are settling important military  bases.

The scenario is that of a competition for the world hegemony of the XXIst century.  The US choose a “permanent” and “pre-emptive” war in order to win the global competition on a military basis, where they are still the strongest, while at the same time they show economic difficulties, a foreign debt estimated the highest in the world, a coming out of new economic, geopolitical and currency areas that threaten their world supremacy.

2

 The theory of the empire has proved false

The capitalistic globalization contradicts the argument about the resetting of the State roles, putting rather into evidence two trends: from one side, the existence of stronger and stronger States, at the top of the world; on the other side, the reality of weak or decaying States.  Wars and imperialistic aggressions carried out in the last decade have put this process into evidence: important examples are the division of the former Yugoslavia and the existing attempts to dismember the Russian Federation. Strong States dismember and draw within their own “influence areas”.  This is part of the persisting tendency to constitute capitalistic and imperialistic centers in competition among them, where the single States organize themselves  -even if showing internal contradictions-  in order to get an optimal dimension for standing with international competition.  The present capitalistic hierarchy restructures around such continental entities and the main State and inter-State

bodies that constitute them (The US, the European Union with the French-Germany axis, Japan).

So the State remains a key element and this confirms the complete actuality of the “imperialistic” notion.  Even if enthusiastically welcomed by large sectors of the “critical left-wing”, the theory of the “Empire” (according to which national governments have been replaced by a sort of world executive board composed of the US, China, Russia and Japan) has proved completely groundless.  The same international organisms (Monetary Fund, World Bank, WTO, etc.) represent the direct expression of the guiding States and each capitalistic center tries to protect its own transnational enterprises arranging (using diplomacy instruments and, if necessary, war) the most favorable conditions for their development.  Relations between the US and Europe are so strained that we can foresee, within the European Union, a contrast among pro-American people and supporters of a greater  European autonomy in the transatlantic relationships that is destined to deepen.

Emerging victorious from the Cold War, the US have staked their all on the conservation of their status of unique world superpower, and for this reason they try to hamper the coming out of possible competitors. This inevitably  drives them to a growing rivalry towards the emerging regional powers, and above all, the Chinese giant, whose dizzy  economic growth considerably

worry the US leadership. It’s no accident that  -for its political management, too-  China is considered today as the most dangerous antagonist for the next decades by the White House.

3

The movement against war and neo-liberalism,

and the anti- imperialist resistance of the nations

A big mass movement coming from the protest of the economic and political leaders in the most important capitalistic powers has been able to widespread the awareness of destructiveness in the present developing model.  World social forums in Seattle, Porto Alegre, Bombay  and Cancun have represented extraordinary  meetings where a critical “common feeling” against capitalism violence, hunger, wars and environmental devastation has little by little strengthened.

This spontaneous and firm mobilization represents a precious resource for the mass fight against

neo-liberalism capitalism and war.

The Anglo-American aggression against Iraq has obliged  about tens of millions of men and women to take to the streets in order to demonstrate their own peace will.  Even if it wasn’t able to stop war, the massive mobilization  of the peace people (in Italy it has gained vigour from the coming back of the working unrest and its growth) has contributed in a decisive way to the growing ethical as well as political delegitimization of the military action.

The world movement against neo-liberalism and war is not the only positive element upon which

you can invest against Bush’s war policy.

The American superpower has been placed in a difficult situation in Iraq because of an unexpected and effective action of Resistance.  Without the Iraqi Resistance (that 30 years after the end of the Vietnam war confirms that the Us technological superiority  is not enough to weaken a population) we would witness new wars, and the difficulties for those who oppose the aggression of the Anglo-American  imperialism would be greater.

That means that it is wrong to surround these events in the expression “war-terrorism spiral”.  The

point at issue is not the fact that the terroristic phenomenon (Communist people have always expressed a clear and unappealable condemnation against it) can have an autonomous political project.  Some episodes apart (starting from September, 11th) remain dark while other arguments are under question and to be reasserted vigorously.

Today the most serious responsibility for violence in Middle East hangs over Bush and Sharon’s war terrorism.  And it is to be clearly underlined that the armed resistance against the invader is not terrorism.  Yesterday  that was valid for the populations  that had to draw their weapons against colonialism, fascism, nazism and imperialistic aggressions  of every type, and it is true today  for the Iraqi Resistance fighters, Palestinian Intifada, Columbian guerrilla warfare and any other people or anti-imperialistic struggle.

Those who reduce such realities within a uniform context of terror really  denies the legitimacy of any  form of armed resistance to the violent oppression of populations and classes.  On the contrary,

it is necessary  to express complete solidarity to the resistance of attacked people, starting today from the Iraqi one.

4

By the side of people fighting against imperialism

Other than the support to Iraqi Resistance, the agenda of international initiative contains other important commitments.

Supporting the Palestinian Resistance against Sharon’s  State terrorism as well as the Zionist neocolonialist project is very important.

It is necessary to press the international community (Europe in particular) in order to be involved itself with the restauration of the territories occupied by  Israel in 1967 by the Palestinian people

(East Jerusalem included), with the creation  of their sovereign and independent State and with the release  of all the political prisoners in Israeli prisons.  The immediate demolition of the “shame wall” wanted by Israeli government is to be requested.

It is very important to support Cuba that, together with its own sovereignty, defends the conquests of its own revolution  -among  different difficulties and in spite of severities imposed by   an infamous embargo.  Supporting the Cuban revolution also means developing a social and political model able to represent for lots of countries an alternative to the devastations of capitalism.

The level reached by Cuba as to health service, education, life expectation, children’s protection is beyond comparison in the whole Latin and Central America.  It must be added (without denying the difficulties) that Cuba may furtherly improve the life level of its own population and invest more in international solidarity, but it is obliged to defend itself from the continuous military, terroristic and economic aggression of the US.

The experience started by the Venezuelan government and the victory of Frente Amplio in Uruguay are equally important for a Latin America autonomous from the US.  The same government Lula

-in spite of some criticizable choices in economic policy-  confirms that awakening of the Latin-American continent in its whole.   In this scenario we can insert initiatives for the extension of the co-operation and economic integration  pact among Latin-American Countries (MERCOSUR), who try  to run ways different from the Alca ones, the pact of free trade strongly pursued by the US.

We are also behind people and progressive Afro-Asian countries’ struggles, starting from the emblematic ones carried out by workers and South African, Nigerian, non-aligned Indian, socialist Vietnam populations.

5

  Against war, out of  NATO

It is necessary to develop an intransigent initiative apt to avoid further violation of the Article 11 of the Constitution. Italy  will never have to take part in military interventions (neither under UNO

cover, nor indirectly through the concession of military bases, air spaces, logistic structures) but in defense of its own territory  from a foreign invasion.  Such an initiative (even more urgent because of Bush’s re-election) must interact with all the powers that oppose the rearmament projects linked to the project of a European army, supported by some countries of the Union.

It is furthermore necessary to reassert the importance of dismantling all the NATO and US military bases present in Italy.  Such aim  -on the agenda after the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact-  has become binding after the transformation of the Atlantic Pact into an alliance with even more expressly offensive purposes.  As a matter of fact (as already  verified also in Italy, on the occasion of war against Yugoslavia) the new NATO can today make interventions in every part of the world, without any formal decision of the Parliaments of the involved countries.  The pacifist battle asks for an active presence of the Communist people in the world movement for peace.

It is necessary to be aware that the results of the commitment taken in every continent by the governments, populations, political, social, trade union and religious forces who fight against war mostly depend on the vitality of this movement.  It is important  that this movement strengthens its

bonds to the organizations of the working movement. Nothing is more urgent today  than the recomposition of different sectors of movement  and the construction of unitary fight platforms against war and neo-liberalism, starting from the fight for disarmament, the dismantling of all the foreign military bases and the international Treaty of non-proliferation banishing and destroying all the extermination weapons, starting from the arsenals of the countries which possess them.

6

  For another Europe

In the last three decades the countries of the European Union have had to face the general crisis of the accumulation process. The “treatment” prescribed by the economic authorities of the Union has proved worse than the illness.  The “stability and growth Pact” has imposed the dogma of the budget balance, hampering expansion policies and making inevitable drastic cuts in public expenses.  In  a scenario that doesn’t call the continuous growth in profits and large incomes into question (hampering in this way  a redistributing usage of the fiscal incentive), the only incentives compatible with such a structuring are the service and big public enterprise privatization as well as the tax reduction (to rich people’s benefit).  The effects of these choices are really evident: drastic reorganization of the social state, privatization of sectors of public interest, stagnation and destruction of wider and wider segments of productive activity, unemployment growth and increase in disparities.  The liberalization of the occupation market and its precariousness are sweeping through.  National contracts and all the working conquests (starting from the working hours) are under attack.  The recent decision to widen the Union to ten former-socialist countries has furtherly exacerbated the competition dynamics internal to the European working classes.

A joint action of all the democratic and left social and political forces, destined to affirm an economic policy opposed to the one experienced in the Community, is necessary against this state of affairs.  It’s time to carry out  economic choices with social order purposes, such as full occupation, effective elimination of poor areas, reconstruction of effective public welfare systems, guarantee of housing for everybody, a public revitalization policy of depressed areas and a practical commitment in the fight against illiteracy and for a widespread  increase in compulsory  schools.

Such a Europe characterized by peace and social justice would necessitate an authentic Constitution, completely  different from the constitutional Treaty recently  approved.  The reasons why this must be rejected are many and serious: the absence of a democratic itinerary on the basis of its elaboration, the refusal of any policy of market regulation, the attribution of functions simply residual to the public intervention, the encouragement of mechanisms of internal competition about the working cost and the lack of a clear word against war.  The struggle for a united, autonomous, democratic and pacific political Europe will necessarily pass through a Constitution completely

contrary to war, turning around the defense of the working rights and promoting expansive economic policies.

Those who want a Europe really  autonomous from the US and their model of society, must have an alternative plan, including all the Countries of the continent beyond the present European Union and the neo-liberalist, transatlantic and neo-imperialist bases upon which it has being formed.

It’s true that today French-German imperialism is less dangerous for the world peace than the US one and sometimes it can act as an obstacle for more aggressive boosts.  But it should be wrong to consider it an encouragement for the rearmament of the European Union: the working movement and the European populations, as well as any plan of social and democratic Europe, would be hit by a policy of continent militarization upon neo-imperialistic bases.  It would stimulate a rearmament chase at international level, and the cost of military  expenses  -according to a sky-high growth,

in a neo-liberal Europe where still today the living and working conditions of the popular classes are hit-  would destroy what remains of the European social State.

More generally, the illusion that a European Union under the hegemony of the great capital can represent a progress alternative to the US imperialism must be hindered.  And that the integration processes into action in Europe, in their basic axes, are a kind of neutral container that can be, as to the cases, filled with right or left contents, and not instead  -as in reality they are-  a strategic plan coherent in capitalistic and neo-imperialistic integration.

7

Communists in Europe and in the world

We agree in supporting all those initiatives which favour, in Europe and in the world – with the full respect of the autonomy of each party – an incisive and structural unity of action of the communist and anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist left forces.

The stronger and stronger convergence of those who fight against war and imperialism today represents an objective for which the communist and revolutionary forces must be engaged. From this point of view the world and continental social Forums are important places which can favour this process.

The consciousness that the national ground is important to give mass basis to each initiative doesn’t push us to give up working for the international ground. On the contrary. Our criticism of the way in which the European Left Party was born concerns its political and organizational proposal, and they aren’t inspired by a project of self-sufficient closure. The platform for the setting up of the European Left Party lacks in a class and anti-capitalistic connotation; it proposes an identity and a project which are only generically of left. Our reservations were and are caused by the concern for the insufficient ability of aggregation of this new subject, of which actually many communist parties and many anti-capitalistic left parties didn’t take part.

There is still the exigency of overcoming these limits of the setting up of the European Left Party. It is just the consciousness of the importance of the European ground with the need of involving all the forces which stand to the left of social democracy that persuades us to confirm the necessity of building up a Forum or a permanent and structured coordination (like that of São Paulo, Brazil), that is able to include the whole communist, anti-capitalistic and anti-imperialistic left of Europe, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Urals.

8

Our Unitarian engagement to defeat the right and Mr. Berlusconi

Even if weakened by the disastrous effects of its economical policy and even if the recent electoral results have left their mark on it, Berlusconi’s government continues its anti-popular policy, also thanks to the weakness of the opposition forces. A further support to the government in office comes from the international situation: the re-election of President Bush reinforces a strong conservative tendency. The Country goes on suffering the heavy consequences of that mixture of populism, authoritarianism and profiteering which make up the essence of “berlusconism”. Both for the social and economical policies (“legge 30”, reform of the pensions, Bossi-Fini, privatisation) and for the institutional policies (devolution, presidentialism, Moratti’s laws) the right has systematically taken advantage from the faults made by the centre left governments in the 90s, taking its anti-popularity to extremes.

Today, while the choice of going along with the USA in the foreign policy and involving Italy in the Iraqi war is not brought into question, in the interior policies the offensive against the workers’ rights and the attack against the Constitution, the law and the unity of the country go on. They promulgate constitutional reforms having a P2 (Masonic lodge) mark, aimed to give all the decision-making power to the Prime Minister. They pass regulations which damage civil rights and individual’s rights. And while Berlusconi’s control on the informative system doesn’t diminish, new measures to cancel any bond which could guarantee the pluralism in the electoral campaign (par condicio) are foretold. We haven’t won yet the struggle to drive away the right from the government of the Country. It is and remains our main objective, to realize together. For this reason, it would be a serious mistake to think of it as if it was a real datum. There are positive signs: the unity of all the opposition forces, the persistence of the movements, the electoral approvals for the left of alternative. But this is not enough to reverse the situation and to change in the whole the social and political relations, as the lack of a programmatic confrontation and an inadequate mobilization against the reactionary initiatives of the government demonstrate.

9

The economical and social difficulties of the Country

Since the beginning of 2001, Italian economy has stopped. Since the 80s, a progressive reorganization of the big business has been under way. The businessmen prefer to choose flexibility or delocalization. In a word, it has been chosen the “low way” of development, based on the control of the costs: low wages and flexibility. For this reason we run the abyss: they do not enhance the value of the strategic industrial sectors and they do not reply either to the worker’s need or to their rights.

The social repercussions of these choices are serious, in particular in the South. The buying power of wages and pensions diminishes (-2.6% in the period 2000-2002, compared to an increase of 4.5% of the buying power of the income of businessmen and professionals); poverty grows, expanding itself in the world of work; the matter of the houses – with rise in rents and evictions – becomes more and more serious because of the failure of the so called “pacts in dispensation”.

Employment loses quality: the work is precarious, disqualified and underpaid (particularly that of women, who suffer more the repercussions of the decline of the production in the country and of the dismantling of the welfare). For the supply of services, the public service (quite dismantled) is substituted by social cooperatives, which, denying the rhetoric of the so called “social private”, force their employees to work in conditions of extreme exploitation and without either rights or guarantees. In such a contest, the concrete rise of wages, salaries and pensions will be the subject on which the political and social forces that will substitute the right in the government of the country will focus their attention.

The young are those who are more hit, because they haven’t either guarantees or rights on the place of work, and because they have been expropriated of a public and mass education which becomes goods at the service of the companies. In general, the condition of the weakest subjects is not an exception, but the signal of the present tendency to regression. The foreign citizens recently immigrated in our Country – who now are an important element of the world of work – are object of systematic and unconstitutional discriminations, they are exposed to the will of the police authorities, they are deprived of the right of asylum, they are segregated in imprisonment camps whose institution is one of the gravest responsibilities of the last centre left governments. The prisoners of the Italian jails (mostly migrants and drug addicts, many of whom suffering from AIDS) suffer from the chronic diseases of an overcrowded penitentiary system, whose buildings are often falling and without the essential services: in this situation any references to the re-educational aim of the imprisonment cannot be proposed.

It is necessary an intervention in order to offer the perspective of a change for the Country: in order to allow it to follow the “high way” of development, based on the investment on the non-precarious work and on the innovation (of production processes and products), on the equity of redistribution, on the investment for the research and for public planning. A key role in the relaunching of the production system of the country must be given to public intervention, which will have not only functions of planning, but also of initiative in strategic fields (infrastructures, transports, energy, etc.) and in the direct management of great enterprises (starting from FIAT) which are vital for the whole economy of the Country.

As concerning in particular the rights of workers, they are necessary some initiatives dealing with the questions of the democratic economical planning and of the company democracy, to achieve the recognition of the workers’ right to take part in the decisions concerning their work relation, to be consulted through their organizations about the changes in production trends and about the adoption of new production methods and of new arrangement of the organization of work. For these objectives, the opposition forces have the duty of developing a strong unitarian initiative, able to hinder the plans of the right by the mobilization inside the Country and the institutions.

10

Youth, school and work

In this situation of economic and social regression, the young question is not simply a generational question. Being young in Italy today means being particularly exposed to the attack of the new laissez-faire policies, that produces uncertainty, precariousness, commercialization of every aspect of a young’s life.

This is why, by expressing their total refusal of the breakdowns produced by the new laissez-faireism, the young, inside the movements, are the bearers of a radical criticism against an objectively intolerable model of society.

This is the case of the students (who suffer the repercussions of the violent offensive taken by the government against state schools and universities) and especially of the workers, in particular those precarious, whose claiming force has already found some important opportunities of visibility, such as on the occasion of the public transport workers’ strike, of the “May Day” organized last 1st May in Milan, and of the demonstration on last 6th November in Rome. This is why we need to move on two grounds, strictly connected one another.

On the one hand, it s necessary to give back centrality to the work conflicts: the purpose must be that of joining together the old and the new forms of exploitation in a struggle against the precariousness and the moonlighting and in favour of the steady and qualified employment for young people, urgently needed above all in the South. On the other hand, it is necessary to provoke a mass initiative in defence of the right to study, by undertaking to carry out a reform that gives back the school to its social function, and by fighting against the school based on the class-selection  and against the devastation of the state university. The mobilization for the right to study is in itself critic of the precariousness, and at the same time lays the basis for a binding intervention of the communists and the left wing on the ground of the education and of the knowledge.

We have the duty of starting with urgency a new season of conflict that has its priority in the struggle against the precariousness of work and education. It becomes possible if the Party, by means of its local groups and together with the Young Communists, is able to be related to the growing material and moral young’s uneasiness, starting from it to develop, a strong political initiative against the new laissez-faireism.

11

The picture of the opposition forces

The necessary unitarian initiative of the opposition forces runs into a serious obstacle in the divergences that remain between the two souls of the centre left: the moderate area (majority of DS, Margherita, SDI and Udeur) and the left components (left DS, PdCI, Verdi).

There are several and often opposed interpretations of the picture of the opposition forces. We do not find correct, unfortunately, the assessment according with which the majority component of the centre left has moved left. Even in the presence of critical second thoughts about some choices taken during the last decade, there has not been any caesura towards the policies carried out in the second half of the 90s. This is true in relation with all the qualificant grounds: the economic policies (privatizations and Stability and Growth Pact), the welfare policies (pensions) and those regarding the work (flexibility and precariousness), the institutional matters (first-past-the-post electoral system and presidentialism), the foreign policy (“humanitarian wars”, Atlanticism and fidelity to NATO), the tendency to the historical revisionism (“foibe” and “young of Salò”) and a substantial moving back of the culture and custom (familist approach and restriction of the women’s rights and of the civil freedoms). It’s not a case that such a moderate attitude found an occasion of electoral clot with the presentation of the list named “Uniti nell’Ulivo”, in view of a more ambitious and organic project of setting-up a reformist party.

On the other hand, the more radical component of the centre left has been assuming, during the last years, more advanced positions. Let’s think to the repeated convergences in the parliamentary vote against the war; to the participation to the demonstrations of the movement for peace; to the support to the referendum about the article 18 of the Statute of the Workers; to the several social initiatives with the FIOM, the Trade Unions and the CGIL. The positive results of the last European elections have reaped the first rewards of this work, and they tell us of the existence of a solid political area of left of alternative with a strong programmatic convergence.

12

The “new FIOM” and the resumption of the workers’ struggle

A determinant role in the awakening of the antagonist and class subjectivity has been carried out by the mechanics’ Union. The national strikes called by the FIOM already in the spring 2001 – when the CGIL still hesitated to recognize the damages provoked by the plan – have shaken the whole movement of workers, demonstrating that the struggles were possible, that they could resist to the arrogance of the owners, exalted by the return of the right wing to the government of the country, and even to win again (has it happened in Melfi).

The extraconfederal unionism also – although it hasn’t been able to present itself as a general representation of the world of work – has offered an important contribution to the organization of the conflict, in particular in the sectors of school, services and public employment.

These struggles have contributed to reopen the workers’ question, today more urgent than ever. The crisis of the capability of the unions of representing and defending the workers is the essential point. This datum is sufficient: in Italy, in 1972, the shares of earned income built up around half the GDP, while today they are around 40%. This means that in the last thirty years, around 10% of the national wealth has been transferred from wages and pensions to unearned income and profits. On the basis of this situation there is also the subordination of the union, ratified by the agreement of 1993.

With the FIAT dispute and the Melfi and Fincantieri agreements, the FIOM has broken off this tendency to the compliancy, and it has reopened the way to give back to the union the role of autonomous subject of the negotiation. The recovering of a practice of workers’ struggle has been in itself a victory, as well as a first important reply to the need of protagonism and autonomy of the working masses – widespread but for a long time now ignored. In the last three years, an intense work of reconstruction of experiences of mobilization and elaboration of more and more advanced claiming platforms has followed.

The mechanics’ struggles for the wages and the working hours, for democracy in the places of work, and against flexibility, precariousness and dismissals gave a new start to the involvement of the CGIL in the struggle, which reached its highest point with the great mobilization in defence of the article 18 of the Statue of Workers. Those elements of a positive evolution of the CGIL are confirmed by the fact that it is inside the great mass movements against the war and the new laissez-faireism; nevertheless, these positive elements stand beside questionable choices (and here is the contradiction), such as signing contracts which are characterized by contents far from advanced, and still keeping some temptations towards the plan. So that this tendency doesn’t come up again (even pressed by the new presidency of Confindustria, by the moderate left and by CISL and UIL), it is important that the FIOM keep its current positions. It is as much important that the unionists left of the CGIL, in all its articulations, keep this objective as its priority. The policy of the plan not only demonstrates that it isn’t able to defend the workers, but it presupposes a union which is the opposite of what we work for, that is a union founded on the conflict, autonomous from the governments and legitimated exclusively by a democratic relationship with the workers.

The resumption of the conflict in those years and the systematic attack of the owners and the government against the union rights has put forward again the persistent centrality of the contradiction capital-work (refusing the thesis of the “end of the work” largely accepted even by the left), and, together with this, the still decisive function of the workers’ struggle for an effective movement of transformation of the existent social order. It comes from this a further incentive also to our Party, which for several reasons – that we have to investigate with urgency and severity – still finds it hard to be adequately present in the confederal and local unions and in that world of work that should be its main settlement. 

13

The building of the left of alternative

This state of affairs makes urgent and at the same time concrete the perspective of a unity of political and programmatic action and of an efficient coordination of the left of alternative, that is the whole political, social and union forces that found their action on the opposition to the war and to the new laissez-faireism. In particular, the connection among the diverse movements which have occupied the political scene of the Country and which have favoured the relaunching of the social conflict in these years is a prior objective for the cultural and political growth of these subjects.

We consider the autonomy of the Party a value which cannot be abandoned. This is why we don’t propose either the setting up of a new Party or the assembling of the political and union ruling groups, which would put at risk the autonomy of the subjects involved and which would cause the exclusion of significant parts of the left of alternative, starting from the left DS. What we do propose to set up, together with all the helpful forces, is a place for a permanent, open and flexible discussion and for a unitarian action in which everyone – parties and political groups, unions and union trends, movements, associations and newspapers – can contribute to a Unitarian movement of the left of alternative: a movement founded on the action, oriented to build up initiative and conflict, and involved in the elaboration of a programmatic platform common to all these forces, that is able not only to hinder the attractive force that it could exert over some components of the left itself, but also to favour the growth of a critical and class culture in the Country.

Only a left of alternative conceived in these terms has mass potentialities and, at the same time, does not contradict the autonomy and the reinforcement of an independent Communist Party based on the masses that is and remains one of our strategic objectives since the birth of Communist Refoundation.

14

The matter of the alliances and of the government

The exigency of building in short times the unity of the left of alternative comes from the need of making it possible for the opposition forces of today not only to overcome the centre right in the next parliamentary elections, but also to influence the programme of the new government avoiding that the same policies carried out by the centre left in the 90s come up again.

If the alliance against Berlusconi’s government wins the elections, the real problem will be trying to repair the damages provoked by this government and those which came before.

It is necessary, in particular, to avoid that the costs of the crisis and of the redevelopment are paid by the working classes and the poorer classes. We will fight against this eventuality, also because we are aware that if this happened with the joint responsibility of Communist Refoundation, our Party would run the risk of being overwhelmed by the resentment and the disappointment (as it happened several times to the French Communist Party when it was in the government). Not only: together with our Party, the same possibility of building a communist party based on the masses in Italy would run the risk of being dismissed – for an historical cycle of unpredictable length. Today, the matter come into play doesn’t regard only the composition of the future government and its political agenda, but the same possibility of keeping open the communist question in our Country.

First with the “Bolognina” and then with the introduction of the first-past-the-post electoral system, they tried to build up a bipolar system based on the alternation of two alliances that, even being opposed to each other, would remain inside the capitalist system.

The presence of an independent communist force, as Communist Refoundation has been, prevented the realization of this project; in order to keep open this perspective we have to avoid that the necessary unitarian policy becomes loss of autonomy.

It follows the exigency of qualifying in socially and politically advanced terms the general programmatic platform of the future centre left government, by involving in the elaboration of the programme all the movements, unions and associations willing to a practice of participation. Among the matters that we will necessarily deal with, the defence of the rights of work and the relaunching of the production machinery and of the economy of the Country are particularly important. The centrality of the wage matter, the defence of the national collective agreement and of the guarantees of the permanent job, and a deep revision of the Stability and Growth Pact are necessary. On the institutional ground, it will be necessary the introduction of efficient measures in order to guarantee the maximum representativeness of the political system and the defence of the Country against the risk of an authoritarian regression (that is far from being warded off). We are thinking in particular of the introduction of a proportional representation system, of the dismantling of the institutional counter-reformation (devolution, presidentialism and new legal system), and of the defence of the Constitution.

On the international ground, the priority is the immediate withdrawal of all the Italian soldiers abroad, starting from those who are in Iraq. As we said before, we are against the NATO. Then, among the objectives of Communist Refoundation there is also a policy that aims to move away from Italy all the weapons of destruction (starting from the nuclear ones)  and to dismantle progressively all the USA and NATO bases (following the example of France, that doesn’t have either troops or foreign bases on its territory, or of Denmark, that doesn’t accept on its ground either nuclear or destruction weapons). Moreover, we know that the majority of the centre left forces are subordinate to the Atlantic tie. But it is necessary at least to make some significant corrections to the Atlantic choice. First, it is necessary to make known to all the Italian citizens the secret agreements between the past governments and those of the USA and the NATO. Secondly, we think that the requirement of the regional council of Sardinia and of the president of the regional government of Tuscany, who want to convert for civil use some military bases present on their territory, such as Camp Derby and La Maddalena, should be supported by the national government. This becomes far more urgent because the last choices of the NATO involve more our Country. Site of the headquarter of the NATO Response Force, Italy runs the risk of becoming the main springboard for the USA offensive projection to East (Eurasia and China) and South (Middle East and Africa). A government in which our Party was present, should act with determination to stop such a drift, that is incompatible with the pacifist spirit of the Constitution and of the large majority of our people.

15
The programmatic conditions for the participation

of Communist Refoundation to the government

We think that the fact that the participation of Communist Refoundation to the next centre left government has been taken for granted – with several interviews – before starting the discussion about the programme has been an error. And we consider equally wrong that it has been said that Communist Refoundation would accept to submit to a tie of the majority about the war, if it was decided by a referendum. We are contrary to the “primaries”, because they are included in a perverse tendency to render personalized and spectacular the politics, following the USA model they are taken from: a tendency that we have always rejected because it is incompatible with a real practice of the democratic participation. Finally, we consider an error the fact of having taken part to the GAD (“Great Democratic Alliance”) without a previous discussion inside the Party, and before the definition of and the agreement on a shared programme.

It is absolutely urgent the correction of this situation: we have to make clear the political conditions which can make possible the participation of Communist Refoundation to a coalition government formed by the forces that now are at the opposition. Not to identify some programmatic discriminants, beyond which the necessary unitarian contribution – without any reservations – for the defeat of Mr. Berlusconi can’t be automatically changed into a participation of Communist Refoundation to the government, would be equivalent to sign a blank cheque, far more dangerous if we consider the serious economical and political problems the government which will come after that of Mr. Berlusconi will face up to.

For our part, we consider essential some conditions for the participation of Communist Refoundation to the government:

• the formal promise for the refusal of the war (except as action of defence against a foreign invasion), whoever promotes it, included the UN; and the refusal, in case of war, to provide military bases, airspaces, logistic supports to the war operations;
• the abrogation of the most reactionary laws passed by the right wing (“legge 30”, Bossi-Fini, reform of the pensions, Moratti’s laws, laws ad personam, medically assisted procreation);
• the introduction of a mechanism of recovery of wages, salaries and pensions that is automatic for law, and the struggle against tax evasion (by fixing measurable and progressive objectives for the recovery of the evaded yield);
• a law in favour of the representativeness and the democracy in the places of work, which gives back to the workers the final word about the decisions in which they are concerned;
• the institution of an “agency for work” which collects resources in part previously destined to unsustainable objectives (such as, for instance, the Bridge upon the Straits of Messina), in part found in the EU, and which aims them at the productive investments to increase the rate of employment (permanent job) and to reduce that of unemployment, in particular in the South.

In the case of an unsatisfactory outcome of the confrontation, we think that other ways, which guarantee in any case to the “people of left” the achievement of an electoral arrangement which consents to defeat Mr. Berlusconi, even without communist ministers in the future government cannot be precluded a priori. Certainly, it isn’t that our hope. Nevertheless, as the political situation appears extremely fluid, any other methodology can’t be adopted, supposing that the principle first the programmes, then the alliances is still applicable. This line, which has always been that of the Party, must be reconfirmed.

16

The “Southern Matter” today and the relaunching of the South

The subject of the South has a specific importance in the qualifying objectives of the action of the new centre left government. Any programmatic and cultural confrontation about the present and the future of Italy cannot find one of its main themes in the southern matter, considered as a great national matter.

The southern matter has been cancelled from the political agenda in these last years because of the weakness of the democratic forces and the aggressiveness of the conservative coalition, which, although its many differences inside regarding the social and territorial interests, tends to be united under the anti-southern incentive of the Lega Nord. Such a removal coincides – paradoxically – with the continuous worsening (during the last decade) of that economical and social gap between the North and the South of the Country, that if is in itself an original characteristic of the Italian capitalistic development, today it overloads itself with far more explosive distinguishing marks. On the one hand, actually, to achieve their objectives, the forces now at the government appear even disposed to divide the Country; on the other hand, having uncritically accepted the thesis of the end of the National State, most of the left seems to underestimate the gravity of the dangers that follow.

The strategy of those forces – which are expression of a new strongly laissez-faireist and classist bloc – gives the South the role of an area of “unbalanced modernity”, of flexibility, precariousness, high rates of unemployment and widespread illegality. As confirmation of this, the present government and the ruling economical forces think of the south as a territory in which they can apply the speculative policy of the great public works, whose exemplary proof is the huge project of the Bridge upon the Straits of Messina. In this model of government, an important role – of control and military support to the local ruling groups – has been given to the Mafia and the organized crime. Against them it is necessary to carry out a fight which must be considered a national matter, because in the southern regions the defeat of the Mafia, of the Camorra, of the ‘Ndrangheta and of the Sacra Corona Unita is essential to break the bloc of the ruling power and to support democracy and development. Finally, it becomes more and more decisive the role of Europe that, with its policies inspired by the Stability and Growth Pact, penalizes the weakest areas of the entire continent (starting from the farm workers of the South of our Country).

Against the conservative bloc and its choices, which risk to marginalize definitively the southern regions from the processes of development of the Country, it is duty of the communists today to detect the new specificities of the South: not only noticing its lateness and highlighting its new function of laboratory of experimentation of the most savage new laissez-faireism, but also giving prominence to its needs and potentialities.

As far as the southern matter is concerned, it is necessary to relaunch the “Sardinian question”, by the recognition of the identity of a people and of its petition of self-government.

It is necessary to enhance the value of the existent resources (tourism, culture, environment), but there is above all the need of great investments for the development of the South, in the struggle against the mass unemployment and in the fields of industrial, agricultural (by developing the biological cultivations), infrastructural policies, and in those of the research and technological innovation, of the credit, of education and culture. The intervention of the State – which has to be central again but different from the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno (a development fund for the South) – has to be aimed to the overcoming of any backwardness that risk to become more and more dramatic in the next years, when the Mediterranean Sea become an area of free trade. the South need public works able to free it from its dependence; let’s think of the backwardness of the motorways, of the bad conditions of the railways, of the lack of water supplies in the great cities, where there are definite interests of the politics and of Mafia. For the rebirth of the South it is necessary to create a strong alliance of political and social forces and of movements, with the aim of a deep transformation of the southern society, starting from the workers’ and popular mobilizations in Termini Imerese, Melfi, Scanzano, Rapolla and Acerra (even different to each other, but all signs of a new consciousness of the interests and rights of the South).

17

For a Communist Party based on the masses

The importance of the duties of Communist Refoundation in this difficult political stage gives importance to the need of reinforcing the structures and the social and territorial rootedness of the Party. The main premise of this reinforcement consists in keeping its distinctive and symbolic elements (starting from the name and symbol with hammer and sickle), which are important points of reference for the whole militants and electorate. Although in those years important movements have developed and the votes have increased, there aren’t been either a growth or a reinforcement of the Party. On the one hand the approvals for Communist Refoundation increase, on the other hand the members diminish (dozens of thousands in the last years). The Party runs the risk of becoming more and more an opinion party attentive to the image, an electoral and propagandistic machinery, and less and less an organized party involved in the struggles and with deep roots of militancy in the territory and in the places of social conflicts. The decisions are taken by a restricted group, while the political line is often known through TV and press interviews. These conditions are worsened by negative events, such as, for instance, the temporary receivership of the whole regional committee of Calabria or the lack of pluralism in the national and European parliamentary representativeness, where almost half the political cultures of the Party aren’t represented: a circumstance that doesn’t have any parallels in any other political force and that must not happen again.

Therefore, it is necessary a pure democratic regeneration of the Party, which exalt the joint and unitarian nature of the political line. Unity, joint nature, democracy, respect of the diversities and search for the synthesis are values to follow both in the culture and in the practice of the Party; this presupposes a real participation of the militants of the party to the elaboration of its line (that is far different from a formal ratification a posteriori). The local groups must become again not only the main places for the political initiative on the territory, but also the place where the main decisions taken by the Party are discussed.

It is right not to accept the internal divisions, but it is necessary to know that they are a consequence of the refusal of the unitarian synthesis: a refusal which, exacerbating the internal quarrels, provokes a big waste of political experiences and abilities. We have to give back their value to the local groups and federations, by motivating and involving them more in the elaboration of the political decisions, and giving them the necessary resources.

On this subject it is emblematic the progressive giving up of the organizational support to the foreign federations of the Party, that are places of political and cultural participation of the Italian communists abroad. If we don’t want that the necessary rootedness of the Party in the places of work and study remains a slogan without confirmation, it is necessary to channel all our energies and resources into this objectives. This is also in part the aim of the membership drive, too often viewed as a bureaucratic routine delegated to restricted groups, and not as an occasion to be linked to the society and to its dynamic and fighting petitions emerging from the social and class conflict.

It is necessary to revise those choices that in the last Conference, in the name of an ineffectual “innovation”, caused a reorganization of all what was concerned with the organization: let’s think of the emblematic abolition of the National Department for the Organization (which had always been reinforced), or of the choice of taking the treasurer off the secretaryship, at every level, with a consequent political loss of value of the strategic function of the self-financing. The Party has significant resources: since 1991 there haven’t ever been any law about the public financing as “generous” as the present one. These resources must be more decentralized, in order to let the local groups and federations reinforce the setting up of the party in the society, where the real people live and work. A party is as much more democratic inside, as stronger and more influent the local groups are. It is necessary to define a part of public financing to be invested every year for the strengthening of every local group and federation of the Party, because this is also a way to increase the self-financing, now still inadequate.

Financial autonomy means strategic autonomy: it would be compromised by the excessive dependence from method of self-financing deriving from a political and institutional situation ruled by the middle-class parties.

It is needed to invest in the political education, without which every discourse about the reinforcement of the Party is destined to go unheeded. We can’t forget that one of the conditions that contributed to the “genetic modification” of the PCI was the growth, in the party and in its ruling organisms, of the hegemony of the middle classes and of their ideologies, and the progressive marginalization of the communist and class cadres who were more tied to the production.

The necessary support to Liberazione will be bigger if every militant will consider it as a means of information of all the Party. This presupposes that also in the newspaper there is a joint editorship. Giving more information about the work and about the communist and revolutionary forces all around the world, besides being formative and extending the knowledge beside the local affairs, would contribute to full a lack of information concerning almost the whole Italian press and it could be considered interesting also outside the Party.

18

Our relationship with our history, and the battle against revisionism

The time is ripe also for a renewed kind of relationship with the political and cultural history of the workers’ and communist movement. The plurality of cultural references can become a wealth for the Party. But so that it happens, it is necessary to avoid both uncritical defences and liquidating attitudes.

It is necessary to check the historical revisionism which for a long time now has extended left, which cancels or reduces the guilts of the middle-classes and of capitalism and criminalizes the history of the workers’ and communist movement. As long as the historical revisionism is hegemonic, capitalism will be able to hide its responsibilities for the majority of the darkest pages of modern and contemporary history (the slave trade, the misery of proletarian masses, the genocides of colonialism, the world wars, the nazifascism and – today – the preventive and permanent war).

What we need is a critical assessment of the history of the workers’ movement during 150 years of struggles. The definite criticism of the faults and of the degenerative processes which tarnished some events of the history of the communist movement and of the “real socialism” is irreversibly part of our cultural, political and moral heritage. We are aware of their importance and of the serious consequences derived also for those who did not desert the struggle in the name of Communism. We feel daily the exigency of understanding better what happened, what didn’t work, what finally determined the defeat of great historical experiences.

But the necessary recognition of the dark pages of the history of the workers’ movement does not prevent us understanding that today the worst danger is to exit this history. We answer to this risk by claiming the history of the workers’ and communist movement, by recognizing it as our history. Remembering its limits doesn’t mean to deny its successes. The Bolshevik October and the construction of the USSR, the Chinese, the Vietnamese and the Cuban Revolutions – to list only some of the most important experiences of the communist movement – allowed the liberation of immense masses of women and men from conditions of hunger and misery, and represented the attempt of building up society which were alternative to capitalism and oriented to socialism. The importance of these experiences hasn’t finished, moreover, inside the Countries in which these revolutionary processes took place.

After all, for who doubted about the prevalent aspect of the revolutionary experience of the communist movement, it should be enough thinking of the world consequences of the disappearance of the Soviet Union. During these 15 years from the fall of the Berlin wall, the international and ethnical conflicts have become more and more radical, and the world has seen the return of the war in the daily news, the recolonization of entire Countries, the overflowing of the devastating social consequences (poverty, slavery, juvenile work, precariousness, epidemics) of a wild and without rules capitalism, the moving back of the workers’ movement in the whole Occidental world and the worsening of the life and work conditions of women. The history of humanity would have been at a backward stage today if there haven’t been the socialist revolutions of the 20th century in large areas of the world.

19

The Resistance, the Italian workers’ movement and the PCI

An important chapter of the history of the workers’ and communist movement consists in the struggle against fascism, carried on in secret nature during the dictatorship and culminating in the partisan struggles of resistance and in the liberation, whose 60th anniversary falls this year (April 25th). These popular struggles, which cost too many victims, were an example for the European democracies born during the post-war period, in particular in our Country, where the communist and socialist constituents were able to introduce in the Constitution of the rising Republic the spirit of the Resistance and its values of equality, social justice and freedom. We find unfounded the criticism according to which we have sweetened the image of the Resistance. The recent attack to the ANPI (National Association of Italian Partisans) by Berlusconi’s government shows how – taking advantage from the inclinations to revisionism of the moderate left – the right doesn’t give up attacking the partisan struggle, which, instead, we must defend strongly.

In Italy, since the elaboration of the republican Constitution, the organization of the workers’ movement – in particular the CGIL (Unions) and the Italian Communist Party (PCI) – gave a determinant contribution so that the young Italian democracy had socially and politically advanced characteristics. After being the pillar of the liberation of the Country from fascism and the breeding ground of a democratic mass conscience, the PCI was able to impose the centrality of the workers’ rights and of the social rights, preventing that the fast modernization of the Country had enormous social costs, and integrating the highest results of the middle class civilization (the recognition of the civil and political freedom, the defence of the legal guarantees) with the values of equality, participation and self-government of the popular masses. The process of gradual change in a social democratic sense which marked the last stage of the history of the PCI, does not cancel the general historical merits of the experience of the Italian communism. This is why the responsibilities of the ruling groups which favoured the dissolution of the PCI are extremely heavy.

We recognize the importance of the contribution of the unions and of the critical cultures of the anti-capitalistic and class left before and after 1968. The struggle experiences which prepared and went with the students’ and workers’ struggles in the last 60s and in the 70s contributed particularly to the cultural growth of the workers’ movement, promoting the recognition of  new requests, the incorporation of new subjects and the opening up of new critical horizons (feminism, environmentalism, analysis of the class character of the scientific and technological development) which have strengthened the class criticism of the capitalistic exploitation.

20

Our cultural references

It is necessary to give value to the great heritage of ideas, theoretical intuitions, scientific analysis that during the last 150 years have given seriousness and effectiveness to the class analysis, to the criticism of capitalism and to the revolutionary practice of the workers’ and communist movement.

For this reason, we consider fundamental the analysis of the capitalistic method of production developed by Marx and Engels, which has allowed to change the consciousness of the social injustice into a force of political mutation; the theoretical contribution of Lenin, to whom we also owe the enlargement of the critical view to the whole world and an analysis of colonialism and imperialism that is important still today to judge the international conflicts; the observations of Gramsci, who taught us on the one hand to confront ourselves with the complexity of  the social contexts (and with the particular articulation of the revolutionary struggle in Occident), on the other hand to conceive the communist Party as a ruling and active community that lives of internal democracy and participation. But if the strategic references cannot be numerous, innumerable are the internal and external contributions to the history of the workers’ movement from which we took – and are taking – advices, knowledge and ideas for further reflections. In our concrete political practice, we do everything to give value in the best way to the contributions coming from the cultures and the critical experiences coming from the left – from feminism to environmentalism, from the mobilization against the capitalistic globalization and the new laissez-faireism to the movement for peace – in which we see a contribution to the criticism of capitalism which cannot be abandoned.

The last repercussions of the industrialization (and also the gigantic environmental impact caused by the use of more and more sophisticated armaments) impose now the adoption of far more rigorous criteria. The question is no more to stay into the limits of the environmental “sustainability” of the growth, but to reconsider radically the development model – by examining again its aims and objectives – in accordance with ecological standards: that is recognizing in the natural ecosystem not a bond but a functional model from which we can take useful elements for the configuration of the economical and social systems.

As regarding the women’s thought and political practice, their contribution to the class movement is not limited to the conflicts about work, in which women have a long experience of the new kinds of capitalistic exploitation (precariousness, professional disqualification, black work, lack of distinction between the working time and the life time). Particularly important are also the contributions of the feminine elaboration to the struggles for peace, freedom and social justice, for which women and the feminist movements produced irreversible cultural innovations: from the recognition of the unavoidability of a reflection on the difference of genre, to the consciousness of the links between social rights and civil freedom; from the criticism of the serious regressive effects of the mono-sexual political representativeness, to the understanding of the structural mechanisms of the sexist subordination and of its analogies with the racial discrimination.

We try to make use of these contributions for what remains the main objective of our research: the continuous dialectic development of a communist theory and practice which is equal to these times, able to orient the analysis on the world and national ground and to find the best instrument for the struggle for moving on from capitalism and the construction of socialism.

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Our commitment to Innovation

We are aware of the need to continually update our cultural baggage and theoretic instrumentation. This is not why we share a fear of declaring suspected breaks and discontinuities at every opportunity. In recent years the repeated attempts at “innovation” have brought about the revival of the oldest and most worn ideologies of the workers’ movement. We have helped the recovery of the proudhonian approximation, the utopian socialists and the anarcho-syndicalist adventurism. We have listened to the sermons on the wickedness of the modern world to those who embody Gramsci's criticism of reactionary Catholicism that as history progresses, man becomes more perfect. Lastly - the theme of the order of the day is almost the self-criticism of the workers' movement and not the criticism of capitalism and the new forms of exploitation and domination - we have heard moralistic appeals for non-violence, which discredits our own historic memory (and forgets that communists are born voting against war and live fighting against the systematic violence of capitalism) and bundles aggression, resistance and defence together in an indistinct, confused group. We have watched the re-emergence of an improbable criticism of power that sees oppression everywhere and ignores the problem of the nature of the ruling political class, from the government in stages of transformation to the defence of their results. It does not seem to us that these kinds of "innovations" help our fight. We have and propose a different concept of innovation. One that does not prescribe solutions from upon high but survives on collective work. One that doesn't include the rejection of the historic experience of the communist movement, but that recognises that renewal has allowed communists to make a decisive contribution to the proletarian fight all over the world. The real innovation consists of the difficult task of facing up to new theoretic and cultural points of view without breaking with the class war against capitalism and the solidarity with the fights for resistance and liberation of peoples; in living the experiences of the movement with maximum commitment while at the same time pursuing the objective of the re-composition of class; in knowing how to value, without sectarianism, every contribution to ideas and experience that can help the building of a "possible new world".

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Our Battle for Socialism: "Possible new world"