Workers' Liberty

Clinging onto the “new united left party”

By Hugh Edwards

For the third time in 15 years Silvio Berlusconi has won a convincing victory in the Italian elections of 13-14 April. His rightwing People of Liberty party, along with his ally Umberto Bossi’s populist and racist Lega Nord (supported in wide areas of the north), has been guaranteed comfortable majorities in both houses of the Italian parliament.

Whilst the participation of Rifondazione Comunista and other parties of the “radical left” in the Prodi government of 2006-08 was clearly a serious mistake and has been belatedly acknowledged as such by Bertinotti himself (see il Manifesto, 6 April 2008), Hugh Edwards is wrong to concentrate his fire on Bertinotti and the PRC

Hugh Edwards reports from Italy

Comrades outside Italy could have been forgiven for thinking, on hearing in January of the fall of the government of Romano Prodi, that finally the forces of the so-called “Radical Left” in his centre-left coalition had said “enough!” to the eighteen-month or so of sustained attacks on the living standards and quality of life of the popular masses of Italy.

By Hugh Edwards

I HAVE been on many picket lines in my time, but until recently they have all taken place in the real world. 27 September saw the first ever strike and picket to take place in virtual reality.

By Martin Thomas

At the Lutte Ouvriere fete, on 26-28 May 2007, near Paris, I talked with Roberto Luzzi of Pagine Marxiste and with Franco Grisolia of McPCL, and attended a forum given by the PdAC.

By Cath Fletcher

The Rifondazione project has failed, and the Italian left now needs to rebuild. More than a year on from the narrow victory of Romano Prodi’s coalition L’Unione, which includes the Rifondazione majority, both major left currents in the party are looking to alternatives. The trade unions, meanwhile, have announced public sector strikes for early June as negotiations over a new national contract falter.

By Antonio Gramsci

The proletarian vanguard, which today is disillusioned and threatened with dissolution, must ask itself whether it is not itself responsible for this situation. It is a fact that in the General Confederation of Labour there is no organised revolutionary opposition, centralised enough to exercise control over the leading offices and capable not only of replacing one man by another, but one method by another, one aim by another and one will by another. This is the real situation, which lamentations, curses and oaths will not change, only tenacious and patient organisation and preparation. It is thus essential that the groups of workers which have been at the head of the masses accept reality as it is, in order to alter it effectively.

One person has died and another 60 have been injured - five seriously - in a crash on Rome's underground.

The restructuring process being forced on Italy's railways by EU railway liberalisation is causing a decay in safety levels, with a rise in often-fatal accidents.

Trade unions are fragmented, and there is a high degree of involvement of the main unions in co-management with the bosses. Many officers and managers of the FS (Ferrovie dello Stato, the state railway) are former trade unionists, mostly from the ‘official’ confederations CGIL, CISL and UIL. Six of the eight rail unions signed the last labour agreement, which unhinged regulations won by years of struggles by drivers, stretching the workday to 10 hours and extending it to part of the night shift.

Italy has the lowest employment rate of the big western European countries: 58% of the working-age population is in work, compared to 72% in Britain.

The turn-out was very high – 83.6%, up from 81.4% last time round. L’Unione’s votes break down as follows:

This peace demonstration was held on Saturday 18 March, just three weeks before the election. The majority of L’Unione — despite its policy to withdraw troops from Iraq — refused to support it.

By Cath Fletcher

The centre-left has scraped into power in Italy. Romano Prodi’s coalition, L’Unione, won April’s election by the barest of margins, beating Silvio Berlusconi’s governing coalition by 25,000 votes to win a majority in the Camera dei Deputati (lower house).

By Cath Fletcher

Italian news has been dominated proposals from Berlusconi’s coalition, the Casa delle Libertà (CdL), to change electoral system. Fearful that they may lose the 2006 election, they have designed a proportional system that gives them all the advantages and the opposition all the disadvantages.

News from working-class struggles around the world...

by Cath F

It’s Friday night in Bologna. In a rare moment of political virtue I’ve decided to forsake the town’s pizzerias, trattorias, wine bars etc. and go to a debate on the 2006 general election and the future for the left. Well, okay, maybe not all that virtuous: the wine at the local Festa di Liberazione (Liberation Festival), organised by Rifondazione Comunista (Communist Refoundation), is only €1 a glass.

A SINISTER WEB

A Right-Wing Conspiracy in Italy 33 Years Ago?

by Alfred Consiglio

It was the kind of news the Italians call a bombshell. Settegiorni magazine reported on 16 April, 1972 that the Defence Ministry had been obliged to dismiss the command of the 3rd Army, stationed on the Eastern border. The formal grounds were “economic and organizational considerations”. Actually, it had come to light that there existed in the 3rd Army “right-wing elements attempting to form an activist nucleus for further action” with a view to “putting democracy in the freezer”.

Cath Fletcher looks at two recent studies of Italy’s Prime Minister, and assesses the direction of Italian politics.

Avec Livio Maitan, le mouvement ouvrier italien et européen vient de perdre l'une des figures les plus marquantes de son histoire dans le second vingtième siècle, celui qui commence en 1945 et se termine en 1989.

• Ciao

• Floods of East Europeans... leave Britain
• Plus ça change...
• Comrade racist?
• Yes, we have bananas

Ciao

For three weeks they drifted in the Mediterranean because no European country was willing to take them in. Then the 37 men - reportedly Sundanese refugees - made it… to the safety of an Italian concrete shed surrounded by barbed wire.

"It is difficult to think of another intellectual who has had such a real and visible effect on the political climate of their country since the war" said Perry Anderson in his 1988 essay on Norberto Bobbio, the Italian democratic socialist and political philosopher who died on 9 January.

A postscript to my review of Steve Wright's Storming Heaven and my article on Autonomist Marxism.

Other material on this site:

Other texts, including the historic ones like Mario Tronti's "Lenin in England": www.geocities.com/cordobakaf/index.html.

Martin Thomas reviews Storming Heaven: class composition and struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, by Steve Wright. Pluto Press.

"Autonomist" Marxism is influential in the new anti-capitalist generation. Quite what it means is hard to tell from its best-selling books, like Toni Negri and Michael Hardt's Empire, or even the practice of its avowed partisans, like Italy's Disobedienti. Steve Wright's book Storming Heaven: class composition and struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (Pluto Press) - readable, critical, but sympathetic - is much more down to earth, tracing the origins of "autonomism" from the "workerist" tradition in Italian Marxism in the 1960s.

By Lucy Clement

Italy’s “moderate” trade unions have scuppered an attempt to extend employment rights to workers in small businesses.

A massive campaign by Rifondazione Comunista and the left-wing trade union CGIL succeeded in forcing a referendum on the extension of Article 18 of Italy’s labour law — which protects workers from unfair dismissal.

Mass protests against jailings

By Olivier Delbeke

Rome, Florence and Naples saw large demonstrations on Saturday 16 November against the police swoop which arrested 20 activists after the European Social Forum in Florence and the huge anti-war demonstration on 9 November in the same city.

On the night of Wednesday 6-Thursday 7 November the No Sweat coach travelling from London to Florence for the European Social Forum gathering was stopped at the Swiss-Italian border for several hours.

Mick Duncan, national secretary of No Sweat was served a notice banning him from entering Italy for one week. Mick was due to speak at the No Sweat ESF Forum, being co-hosted with the Clean Clothes Campaign, which takes place on Friday 8 November.