Italy's Stalinists Help to Design Police State

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fascists?"

"Because they already have an agreement with the Communist Party"

The quip contains much more than a grain of truth. In undignified haste to use the political breathing space provided to them by the wake the police powers of the state.

Unprecedented

What is unprecedented is that this is being done with the active cooperation and support of the Communist Party, whose own militants are destined to be among the victims of the apparatus of repression they are busy refurbishing.

The Italian Stalinist leadership are now lashing out, politically, exclusively to their left.

Their behaviour through the Moro crisis provides a clear signal of the paths which the other 'eurocommunist' parties of western Europe are preparing to tread.

The Party's specialist on internal 'security', , Senator Ugo Pecchioli is presently offering detailed advice (which he is doubtless well qualified to give) on how the bourgeois forces of 'order" should best be reorganised to attack the left.

"The police", he proposes, "should be immersed in society SO that they know the population better and so that the people are better able to collaborate with them"

Pecchioli and the Party leadership arè also right at the centre of discussions on the reorganisation of the intelligence service (SID), which is to be split to provide a separate body devoted to internal spying and repression.

Luciano Lama The reorganisation followsvery belatedly-the sacking and are General Vito Miceli, for conspiring with fascists for a coup d'etat.

Efficiency

Pecchioli, however, is concerned not about dangers to the working class, but only about the efficiency of this most reactionary arm. of the state.

SID, he says, must be "rebuilt completely".

"All its members were clearly not criminals" • (An opinion for which there is very little evidence). 'We must use the experience they have acquired"

The support offered by the CP to the extreme right in the state apparatus is truly unprecedented.

It is as though the American CP were to volunteer its help in streamlining the CIA and FBI. The main difference is that no director of the CIA has (yet) been arrested for plotting a coup in America itself!

In addition, the Italian Stalinists have voted in Parliament to give the government carte blanche with other means of repression.

There is to be a national 'information bank' to enable the various police and paramilitary forces to combine their files.

New powers They have also given full parliamentary backing to. the 'Reale law'-new legislation to give the police much wider powers of search, arrest and interrogration, and to make a wider range of crimes subject to summary trial.

The only parliamentary opposition to the Reale law (which the Stalinists themselves opposed when it was first put forward almost two years ago), has come from the small Radical Party, and the fascists.

The Stalinists and Socialists are, however, embarrassed by the prospect that if the law is too long delayed in Parliament it may go to a referendum, which would involve them in campaigning for a mass vote for it if they were to fulfil their commitment to the Christian Democratic government.

Taking advantage of the kidnapping of Moro by the Red Brigade, the existing police apparatus has been and is being used to the full.

The police have demonstrated their wide and longstanding spying and surveillance of the left and labour movement by thousands upon thousands of. arrests and searches. contrary they have reacted violently to try and suppress any resistance within the labour movement.

They have attacked workers and students taking protest action against the witch-hunts. And they have used their control of many trade union bodies to launch their own bureaucratic purge of left critics.

As Luciano Lama, Stalinist boss of the CGIL, Italy's biggest trade union federation put it:

"Those who support the slogan "Neither with the state nor with the Red Brigades" cannot be part of a united trade union. Either they go or they must be put out"

Members of the centrist party 'Proletarian Democracy', which has adopted this line have already been expelled in Trento and Calabria.

Cudgels

The cudgels which the CP leaders are so enthusiastically handing the Christian Democratic leadership will be used for their own backs.

It was, of course, the political right and the traditional centre-the Christian Democrats and Socialists, not the Stalinists, who gained in the recent round of local elections.

The resignation of Interior Minister Cossiga after Moro's death was a concession to the fascists, who had singled him out for attack as part of their campaign for a full police state.

One episode reveals the trap into which Italy's 'eurocommunists' are leading their members and themselves.

Shortly after Moro's body was found, Lama, along with other leading trade union officials, arrived hotfoot at the Christian Democratic headquarters in Rome to offer their

CP leader Berlinguer

condolences.

On the way to the door they were jostled and booed. When they got to it the book in which official visitors were to sign their respects was lying on a national: flag, which had embroidered on it "Remember Reggio Emilia, 1955"

The reference was to the killing of some Christian Democrats in the town in Italy's 'Red Belt'-a killing which was never cleared up but which was blamed by the right on the Communist Party.

Lemons

Thus Lama and his fellowbureaucrats, just as they knelt at their most obsequious, were publicly and arrogantly insulted by the political chiefs of the ruling class.

At the moment the Stalinist lemons are being squeezed. But when they have yielded up all their juice, when the 'historical compromise' has served its purpose to the capitalist state, they, too, will be tossed aside without a 'thank you' Jamaican workers are to be handed the bill presented by the International Monetary Fund to the Jamaican Government as the condition for granting a three year $240 million loan.

Sharp increases in the price of petrol, tobacco, beer and other alcoholic drinks, and a 15% devaluation of the currency were announced by Finance Minister Eric Bell in the House of Representatives on May 9th.

This latest devaluation is the fourth in 15 months and

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for Moro, Andreotti's govern- ment are greatly strengthening

-Jamaica prices dn