Workers' Resistance Smashes Stalinists' Squalid Compromise

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cé' trip flops It now looks almost inevitablé that the Italian political parties will have to face a general election more than two years earlier than it is due.

For 3 years since the June 1976 general eleçtion, the Christian Democratic Party (Italy's catholic Tories) under Premier Andreotti have ruled Italy in. various degrees of alliance with the Italian Communist Party.

First of all the CP abstained in parliamentary votes of confidence to keep Andreotti's reactionary bourgeois government in power.

Then one year ago it reached closer agreement with the archenemies of the working class and, along with the Socialist, Social Democratic and Republican parties became part of the "parliamentary majority" without actually having ministers in the government.

Embrace

With each tighter squeeze of. this unprincipled embrace-with the CP leaders increasingly taking public responsibility for wage cuts, public spending cuts, repression of democratic rights and pro-imperialist foreign policies-sections of the Stalinists' rank and file members begain to revolt.

A survey carried out by a political research institute and publised last week showed that already one fifth of the CP's rank and file membership lof some 1½ million) are completely opposed to the whole strategic orientation of Enrico Berlinguer and the Stalinist leaders-the so-called "historic compromise" with the capitalist class in the political shape of the Christian Democrats.

And the evidence is beginning to suggest that this fifth of outright opponents of the compromise have a much larger relative weight among the active members of the party-and the majority of members are inactive.

Major threat

This is a major threat to the Berlinguer leadership. But so are those who have accepted the "historic compromise".

This has always been presented to them by the leadership not as the cringing endorsement of the Christian Democrats by a party with no share in the offices of state-such as has happened over the last 2½ years.

Rather, the "historic compromise" has been justified by its defence as an aggressive policy to force the hated Christian Democrats to concede a share of political power in the state, in particular ministers in the Cabinet and a "fair share" of offices in the bourgeois state bureaucracy and the nationalised industries.

Both sides, therefore, of Berlinguer's almost daily vacillation between insistent demands for ministers in the government and demagogic declaration of "oppositions" reflect the pressure of the rank and file.

The CP leaders for this reason are now unable to return to the position that existed before they precipitated the present crisis.

The Christian Democrats however are unwilling to admit them into the government.

Blame

And the opportunist Socialist Party is unwilling to join a government with the Christian Democrats without the CP.

This would concentrate all the blame for the government's savagely anti-working class policies on them.

The situation has all the elements of an impasse which can only result in general elections which are unlikely to solve the government crisis but wil! simply, reflect the lack of options.

Socialist Party President Pertini has continued to search for every possibility of comprmise, however minute.

Two weeks ago he asked Republican Party leader Ugo la Malfa to try to form a government.

The most recent desperate efforts by Turkish Prime Minister Ecevit to obtain the promised loan from leading imperialist countries seem to have fallen on deaf ears.

So do his loud complaints about the lack of any concrete steps on the part of the Western countries to help solve the chronic problems of Turkish capitalism.

Ecevit has attacked the preconditions for any loans laid down by the West through the OECD. These include the requirement that the Turkish Ecevit This was the first time that a non-Christian Democratic politician had been designated Premier since the downfall of Mussolini.

That fact itself is a measure of the extent to which the Italian ruling class has lost any stable parliamentary governmental option either on the various post-war models or of any other feasible kind.

But, within a week of even te suote an the task of reconciling the Communist rank and file with the Christian Democratic leadership.

Now, in what must surely be a last attempt, President Pertini has returned to Italian capitalism's now very tarnished saviour Giulio Andreotti.

Coalition

At the end of last week, as a final variation, Pertini tried simultaneously to designate not only a Christian Democratic Prime Minister but also a Republican (la Malfa again) and Social Democrat deputy premier (Saragat), thus insisting that the only possible new government will have to be a formal coalition.

At first sight this looked like yovernment impose a fresh round of austerity measures including a large devaluation of the Turkish lira, along lines proposed by the IMF.

The imperialist powers have clearly made up their minds that if the IMF measures are not introduced at once, they will not put in the money needed to prop up Turkish capitalism.

Negotiations on allowing Turkey to draw a third amount under a $450 million stand-by agreement signed last April have been suspended.

It was the Iranian revolution which prompted the recent talk of emergency financial aid for Turkey. But should the new Bazargan-Khomeini government succeed in temporarily stabilising the situation and imposing military and fascist attacks on the Turkish working class.

Unlike Iran, where the Shah's, military apparatus was isolated from any mass reactionary movement, the imperialists and the Turkish bourgeoisie have successfully sponsored a mass fascist movement.

The right wing opposition to Ecevit is now stepping up its opposition to his government, with both the fascist National Action Party and the right wing Justice Party calling on the Turkish people to overturn the They demand a government that will give free rein to the military in the implementation a revival of the centre left formula of the 1960s.

• But the Social Democratsresponding to Socialist Party pressure- would not accept this formula.

They insisted as a condition that "independents" known to be sympathetic to the CP included in the Cabinet.

The CP leadership would probably have accepted this as the only alternative to elections.

But, according to our latest information, the Christian Democrats have completely rejected it.

Berlinguer of total. martial law. They accuse Ecevit of restraining this through the martial law committee on which he, some of his ministers, and a group of generals sit.

Chief of Staff Evren however has spoken up in Ecevit's defence, accusing the right wing opposition of forcing the military to take anti-democratic measures to curb "anarchy"

The right wing's response to this was to say that army leaders "should not be involved in Meanwhile the fascist terror campaign designed to extend the martial law measures has intensified in areas not already The precipitous visit of chief imperialist organiser Jimmy Carter to the Middle East this week has been motivated by one thing above all-fear that the Iranian mass movement are desperately organising to hold together his allies in the area.

Zionist-in-chief Begin was first brought to the US and compelled to agree to at:

This makes elections a virtual certainty within the next two or three months.

Only a last minute cave-in by the Stalinist leadership can now avoid them and that doesn't seem probable.

Fundamentally the CP leadership would like to avoid elections or anything else which might bring it to account to its working class base.

But the irony is that if there are to be elections then this for the CP leaders is the best time.

Because they face another call to account in the form of the Fifteenth Congress of the Italian CP due to begin in a week's time.

Of course, all the usual Stalinist techniques have been used for weeks to make sure that any serious debate in the Congress is smothered more or less at birth.

• Obvious anger Nonethelesss the anger of many sections of the rank and file is obvious and the Berlinguer leadership could use an impendding election to make demagogic calls for unity and turn the Congress into a public election rally.

But Berlinguer will rant from the platform haunted by covered by direct army rule.

Financed by major sections of the Turkish bourgeoisie, the fascists are attempting to create conditions for imposing the kind of measures demanded by the IMF-by smashing the organised strength of the Turkish working class.

. In the face of this threat of a historic defeat, the reformist and Stalinist leaders of the Turkish labour movement offer no perspective whatever.

Still peddling the illusion that bourgeois leader Ecevit offers a "progressive", "democratic" alternative to fascism, rather than providing the fascists with the time and scope trip reast some withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula and some formula for 'autonomy for the Palestinians'.

These paper concessions on which neither the Palestinians not anyone else have been consulted were then put to the Egyptian government with the accompaniment of the full panoply of a state visit.

Every effort is being made to bolster the pro-imperialist Sadat regime, which surely looks much less stable now than the Shah did a year ago. knowledge that the proletarian forces whom it is his political role to hold in check are increasingly hostile to . his policies.

He may publicly rejoice in the research institute's discovery that 80% of nis members supported the "historic compromise";

He will not, however, be trumpeting the simultaneous discovery that the overwhelming majority of this 80% regard the 'historic compromise' as a short-term tactic for the present parliamentary situation and not, as it has become in the hands of the Stalinist leaders a long-term strategy for abject class collaboration.

Well over 70% of the CP members interviewed said they supported either a government workers' parties, Communist government or the dictatorship of the proletariat.

This shows how important today in Italy is the slogan for a CP-SP government, the rejection of all deals and compromise with the bourgeois parties and tor a programme of. r. socialist policies for such a government of workers' parties to pursue.

Revolutionaries who fight effectively for those demands today will be helping to set off an explosion within Italy's enormous Communist Party. to organise, they continue give him full political support.

And they have made not the slightest move to defend the workers' movement against mounting fascist violence through the establishment of armed workers defence squads.

Yet the Iranian events have shown unmistakeably the power and tenacity of the working class.

There must be a complete political break from Ecevit and a struggle for a workers and peasants government in Turkey.

*Form a united front of workers' organisations in the struggle against fascist gangs: build armed workers militias!

Sadat has already been taking over some of the jobs of the Shah, by sending troops to support the bloodthirsty British puppet Sultan Qabus of Oman.

designed to put pressure on the Zionists to allow Sadat to gain something from the treaty.

Whatever is • agreed between the imperialists, and their friends the last word will come from the Palestinians and the Egyptian masses.

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their reactionary rule, there would be a renewed threat of

will spread elsewhere. Carter's many minions

Carter's visit, whatever the precise outcome, was