Clampdown in Italy

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The general' election to take place in Italy on June 3 will do so, as will its British counterpart on May 3, under the omnipresent armed supervision of the Immediately after the declaration of the election date, the Italian police unleashed a wave of repression directed primarily against the "autonomists"-groups of students, intellectuals and sometimes workers who represent a growing tendency to the left of the Italian Communist Party.

The "autonomists" are not a centralised movement and comprise many different currents.

Many have publicly defended the individual terrorism of the Red Brigades, and the bourgeois politicians and press have conducted a campaign to identify the two.

CP leader Berlinguer Others represent adventurist, anarchist factions of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia.

An increasing number of "autonomists" however, have appeared in the ranks of Italy's vast army of unemployed workers and in the trade unions themselves.

In the unions, although lamentably refusing to challenge the Stalinist leadership head on, the "autonomists" have nonetheless been able, as a result of the increasingly monstrous Stalinist betrayals, to gain support of militant workers and produce some alarm in the CP leadership, fearful more than anything else of the rise of a mass political alternative to its left.

Arrests

The new wave of arrests carried out by the police includes two of the leading intellectual figures of the "autonomist" movement (Toni Negri and Oreste Scalzone) and thirteen more of its leading advocates.

Attempts are now being made-with the public support of the CP leaders as well as the Christian Democrats-to pin the murder of kidnapped exPremier Aldo Moro on the arrested "autonomists"

It is vital that the labour movement, not only in Italy but elsewhere in Europe, should demand the freeing of these political prisoners who now face a trial like that of the anarchist Valpreda who was imprisoned in 1970 on the basis of evidence which was later proved to have falsified by the state.

The campaign against terrorism and the "autonomists" is being used by the Italian ruling class and its Stalinist allies to impose controls on all mass political action as Italy goes into an election which is incapable of solving its deep political crisis.

It is also being used to distract the attention of the masses from the real material and political problems which face them and which the Stalinists and the Italian Catholic Tories conspire to worsen in the interests of capitalism.

*Immediate freedóm for Negri and autonomists and other political prisoners in Italy!

*Repeal all reactionary "anti-terrorist" legislation.

*Smash the CP's "historic compromise" with the capitalist class and its main party, the Christian Democrats!

*For. a CP-SP government without capitalist ministers!

*Build a Trotskyist party in Italy to fight for a programme of independent action on wages, jobs and democratic rights. vies