Italian Cp Steps up Its Coalition Call

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The banner which hung over the XV Congress of the Italian Communist Partywhich with 1,750,000 members, is the largest CP outside the workers' states-was inscribed:

"A great popular and democratic force to open a new way for Italy and for Europe"

The absence of any mention either of the working class or of socialism set the tone •which the Stalinist leaders wished to give to the Congress.

The decisions of the Congress were very few-but they also reflected the leadership's drive to destroy even the formal socialist and proletarian aspects of the party's identity and turn it into an effective instrument of "historic compromise" with the Italian bourgeoisie.

Abolished

The Congress abolished statute 5 of its constitution, which had obliged its members to "acquire and deepen knowledge of Marxism and apply its teachings to the solution of concrete problems".

Now, under the substituted statute, they are enjoined to do no more "increase their cultural and political knowledge, deepening their study of the history and heritage of ideas of the Italian CP and the whole revolutionary and workers' movement"

The party still refers coyly to a "tradition" which has its 'framework in the thought of Marx and Engels and which was given a historic impulse by the innovatory ideas and the work of Lenin"

But there is no longer even a formal pretence that the Italian CP is a party of Marxists.

Catholics

These concessions were made explicitly to Catholics. And it was only half in irony that party General Secretary, Enrico Berlinguer referred to the CP as "Italy's second Catholic If that was one aspect of his courtship of the unholy Christian Tories of the Christian Democratic Party, the other was to declare the Christian Democrats Italy's third workers' party.

To a handful of delegates who criticised the party's line of collaboration with the Christian Democrats, Berlinguer replied that "their membership does not only consist of conservatives but also the popular middle classes, and, in some areas, the presence of the working class is greater in the Christian Democrat Party than in the Communist Convergence He called for "convergence and meeting between the Socialist, Communist and Catholic masses".

This flattery of the Christian Democracy was part of the central theme of Berlinguer's essentially uncontested line in the Congress-the necessity for a "government of national unity" comprising all the "democratic forces" from the CP to the Christian Democrats.

The tasks of his government, according to Berlinguer, are:

«To save Italy, to save democracy, to put an end to disorder and inefficiency, against violence and privileges, for social justice, it is necessary for the CP to enter the government"

The present function the CP, he added:

'is to unite al forces to save this fatherland of ours according • to the teaching of loolatti. who reaching of Togliatta, not said that the country governed by one class alone nor by one party alone"

With this reactionary demogogy as the line of the leadership, it is appropriate that it no longer expects the membership to be versed in Marxism.

Support for this political line requires the forgetting of every one of the basic principles of Marxism, for which the independent interests and organisation of the working class are paramount.

The Italian Stalinist leadership explicitly rejects any attempt to form an independent workers' government-either alone, or with the other main workers' party, the much smaller Socialist Party.

• There was, however, a good deal of talk from the leaders about the need for a new "unity of the left"

-20.21 specifically with the Socialist Party whose representative at the Congress was given a standing ovation.

Far from being a step towards independent class politics, this turned out to be yet another aspect of the overal! strategy of "historic compromise"

Closer entente between the Communists and Soust be he driving force; sala behind a government of national unity with the Christian Democrats.

Aftermath

The CP's position for the immediate aftermath of the early general election to be held in early June was that it must be given ministries in a coalition government or else it would go into opposition.

The recent experiment whereby the CP became part of the parliamentary majority without being part of the government was from now on completely inacceptable.

"The country ungovernable without the Communists" warned Berlinguer.

And Christian Democrat leader Giulio Andreotti clearly agrees. Last week he Berlinguer arranged to lose by one v vote a confidence motion in parliament (by getting his own supporters to leave the chamber), once it was clear the CP intended. to vote against him.

The Christian Democrats recognise that the fate of capitalism in Italy depends more than anything else on the ability of the Stalinist bureaucrats to hold back the working class.

But the CP leaders no longer feel able to do this without being able to show results in the form of a share in power.

With: this superficially less abject line towards the Christian Democrats, the Stalinist leaders were at least able to stage-manage a congress (or more exactly pre-election rally) which produced a show of unity within the party.

• Ambiguous After a long and carefully ambiguous report by Berlinguer (accepted unanimously); selected leaders were permitted to express a limited amount of divergence to left or rightbut always in the context of agreement: with one or other of Berlinguer's clever ambiguities. Everyone was wildly applauded.

Militant

One long-standing party militant certainly spoke for tens of thousands when he said to a journalist:

"In my time when we asked a federal party leader what he had done in the last year he would say-I've led SO many struggles, or organised so many demonstrations. Today he replies -I've written a beautiful document with the local Christian Democrats'."

A closer alliance with these forces of capitalism and reaction is the very reverse of what is needed by the Italian working class.

And an increasing proportion of the rank and file of the CP are aware of that contradiction.

Berlinguer and his fellow bureaucrats are as always totally unwilling to lead a struggle for the independent interests of the working class which they know could only be successful through a revolutionary struggle for power.

Their counterrevolutionary role requires them to persist with their efforts to tie the working class to political representafives of the capitalist class whether this is by being members of or supporters of a bourgeois government even through what they call "opposition"

Polis

A month after the British general election, Italy 'will go to the polls on June 3 and 4. Although the CP is widely expected to lose some of the record 34% of the poll it got in June 1976, the results are most unlikely to do anything to resolve the semi-permanent crisis of the Italian bourgeoisie.

The elections however, can only bring one step closer the explosion of the political tensions between the counter-revolutionary Stalinist leadership and its working class base which this pre-election Congress tried to hide behind clouds of dem ogogy and ambiguity.

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It was good to see Reg Prentice again, standing up at the Tory Party press conference to relive his, last days at Newham and telling the world how the dreadful extremists had called him a Tory of all things!

Meanwhile back in the paper mache world of Fleet Street the red scare had reached such epidemic proportions it is doubtful whether anything as subtle and moatialt as Lit madmanto no tho Zinoviev letter would have got much of a look in.

It began with the publication of the Communist, Party manifesto. Any similarity between the CP manifesto and the Labour manifesto is purely deliberate, as the Stalinists seek ever more ambiguous ways of refusing to fight for the same non-! existent reforms.

The Express found comfort in this. Heading their front page The Red Face of Labour, the paper' listed 14 points of policy' which could be found in the programmes of both parties. Its prose was a masterpiece of ambiguous inuendo.

""This 'carbon copy' of policies is embarrassing for Mr. James Callaghan, For he has projected his own manifesto as a triumph of moderation...

"In fact it means that Labour and candidates will be campaign ing almost identical manifestos during the General Election, with Mr. Callaghan and Communist President Mr Mick McGahey marching together under IWIn Danners.

The rest of Fleet Street was dutifullv following Prentice in declaring the Labour manifesto would be a time bomb, whose revolutionary explosive would become evident after -the election. It was not the words on the page of course but...

Then came Newham.

For the Express all their birthdays had come at once. With flashbacks to the two other red scares of the week, the paper proclaimed "Forced Out By the Reds"

John Warden, the author of all the Express red scares wrote: "The Red Face of the Labour Party which Mr. James Callaghan has tried to. last nightin a split damaging| Into une to his election chances.

"It happened in Newham North-East, the London seat where Reds ousted ex-Cabinet Minister Mr. Reg Prentice and drove him to be a Tory MP.

"Now they have so sickened the Left-wing successor they chose, Mr. James Dickens, that he has resigned as prospective candidate.

"For the first time the extreme left has taken over from the far left, to the dismay of Labour moderates who warned Mr. Callaghan this week that it could happen...

"Shaken officials were asking themselves last night what had become or the Labour Party when a lifeInno activist of the I.eft like WALS Mr. Dickens could take no more..

The Sunday Telegraph, like the Express, has now come to terms with a carefully graded series of lefts, like contagious diseases, some of which are curable and others of which are not.

"If this is what happens before the revolution, what would it be like afterwards?" , asked the paper's leader column. "Perhaps the constituency should be renamed Tehran North-East":

"Times have indeed changed. In the days of Attlee, -Gaitskell and even Wilson, it was the Tribune group which seemed too left wing for the leadership's comfort. When those three leaders won victories for. moderation they were over the Tribune group. Today wingers are on the side of moderation-and so, no doubt, they are, compared with the Trots"

Telegraph defends Tribune.. There must be a moral there somewhere.

The arrest of Ron McKay, reporter for Time Out, in Glasgow on March .31 on his return to Britain from Northern Ireland, is just one of the many hundreds of arrests that take place under the Prevention of Terrorism Act each year.

But as Mckay himselt has pointed but, the fact that he is a reporter has forced the event into the news and highlighted the way that the Act can be used on almost any pretext.

McKay's charge (if it is eventually brought) is that he failed to fill in, on a landing card in Ireland, the full address of the person he was staying with.

His real "offence". of course was that he was interviewing IRA leaders-a policy which according to the late Airey Neave should be banned by law.

Oppressive

The Prevention of Terrorism Act competes on equal terms with any piece of repressive legislation in any country in the world.

Home Secrett Secretary

Under its provisions the police have unlimited powers of'detention with no obligation of subsequent justification.

Being held for a few hours or days without access to a lawyer is not of course comparable with much of the treatment handed out to republicans in Ireland.

But it is a demonstration that the repression cannot be confined (as the powers of the state would prefer) to the north of Ireland. It inevitably spills over into the south and into Britain.

While the demand for the abolition of. the Prevention of Terrorism Act is suported by a wide variety of radicals in Britain,