"socialist" Fills Italian Breach
Socialist Press1978 1978-07-19Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 2 →
Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: expect misread words, and now and then a caption or a line from a neighbouring story. For anything you quote, read the scan.
Scan page 2
The curtain has been dropped at the end of yet another farcical scene in the black comedy of, Italian parliamentary politics.
When President Leone was forced to resign because of the massive bribery and corruption scandals, the bourgeoisie was at a loss.
the running, unfortunately detained in some region of the afterlife, pending trial.
After no less than fifteen ballots of the electoral college, still no stand-in could be agreed on to fill this attractive role.
But at the sixteenth attempt, Sandro Pertini emerged as the most satisfactory specimen on the list of available understudies.
Respectable
An aged veteran of the Socialist Party, Pertini has a suitably respectable history of opposition to fascism followed by long immersion in the Chamber of Deputies.
This career gives him ideal credentials to preside over the 'historic compromise' between the Christian Democrats and the But this savage farce has been mounted at the expense of the Italian working class.
The presidential crisis has been merely a grotesque reflection of the entire political crisis of Italian society-the inability of the bourgeoisie to maintain their 'democratic' dictatorship without the support of the labour leaders, and the determination of •those traitors to attack the working class in order to defend the capitalist 'order'.
A 'socialist' President of the bourgeois state will not bring any advance for workers in Italy, but act rather as a screen to cover the growing battery of repressive measures that the capitalist class will need if they are to preserve their ability to rule and exploit the proletariat for their own profit.
Pertini National Guardsmen are being lined up to scab on a strike of 600 firemen in Louisville, Kentucky. The firemen are fighting for a wage claim and have only been offered 5.5%.
In another strike of municipal workers in Philadelphia, 19,600 blue collar, clerical and professional workers are out over pay and lay-offs.
The background to both these strikes is the attempt to cut back on state expenditure as a measure to help solve the economic crisis of US capitalism. This will be the subject of an extensive article in the next issue of Socialist Press.