Cp Supports Job and Wage Cuts

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election; and partly to the st arp cutback in the vote of the sma ller capitalist parties, including the Fascist MSI.

The parliamentary situation is, therefore, even more deadlocked than ever. The Christian Democrats have no majority of their own, nor in alliance with the Liberals, Social Democrats and Republicans (the "Centre-Right coalition).

Assuming for now they exclude any accommodation with the fascists, then the only possible majority which excludes the Communist Party is the old centre-left formula of coalition between the DC and the PSI.

But the PSI has stuck to its preciectoral position that, in the words of its leader de Martino, the centre-left is "finished, finished for ever"

The PSI refuses to enter any government with which the PCI is not "'associated"

But this does not exclude some deal whereby the PCI will remain as a "governmental opposition" to a centre-left coalition in exchange for the enactment of some PCI-sponsored 'reforms'.

The Stalinists of the PCI too, are careful not to exclude this _pos sibility, though their priority remains the emergency "national coalition" between all parties except the MSI.

They are, as Party General Secretary Enrico Berlinguer says, "in no hurry" to have the matter settled.

For one thing further revelations about the Lockheed scandal can be expected to weaken the Christian Democrats.

Ex-premier Mariano Rumor (now Foreign Minister) is at present the most deeply implicated.

And, meanwhile, the caretaker Premiership is expected to pass from Aldo Moro (who is likely to become speaker of the Chamber of Deputies) to Sig. Cossiga who is a relative of CP leader Berlinguer.

While the "doctors" argue, the incurable disease of Italian capitalism gets rapidly worse: inflation and unemployment accelerate; the ita holds up uneasily and only through the caretaker government's emergency trade and monetary controls; numerous firms escape bankruptcy only through mounting government subsidies.

And for this and other reasons the deficit in the State budget rockets out of control and is now even higher than the British deficit.

LOANS

It is clear that the Italian government wil have no further access to desperately needed international loans until it implements new economic policies satisfactory to the International Monetary Fund, the Us government and the world's bankers.

•Those policies centre on massive real wage cuts along with tax increases and government spending cuts to reduce the budget deficit.

These are also the policies of the Italian capitalist class and they have been spelled out most starkly in recent statements by Central Bank governor Baffi and Republican Party leader Ugo la Malfa.

La Malfa insists that they cannot be implemented without new legal restrictions on trade unions, including in particular on the right to strike.

These are also the policies of the Italian Communist Party! Like the capitalists, the PCI calls for cutbacks in spending to cure the budget deficit.

SPOKESMAN

PIconomic spokesman, Luciano Barca, says that Baffi's proposals on this are "hard but tealistic"

Like the capitalists, the PCI suppons wage cuts, though, Barca says, they shouk be implemented not through a statutory freeze and anti-strike laws, but through "self-discipline by the trade unions".

Like the capitalists, the PCI wants, as part of "a very intense period of austerity idling scale of Italy's so-called wages".

This limited "sliding scale" was gained in the struggles of the "hot autumn" of 1969. It has offered some, but incomplete, protection of wages against inflation.

And independent PCI candidate, economics expert Luigi Sparenta, has gone along with the demands of the capitalist class that it be severe ly curtailed if not abolished.

Italian capitalists are desperately in need of these economic policies; so is imperialism on a world scale which increasingly sees Italy as the vulnerable "soft underbelly" of European capitalism.

Either in or out of government the Stalinist leaders of the PCI will not only support such policies but propose them independently.

Italy's immediate political crisis not, therefore, about whether the PC leaders will make what they euphemistically call a "historic compromise" with the capitalist parties - that has already been done - but over just what form that compromise should take in the immediate future.

Both sides to this filthy deal, however, will be equally disturbed by a growing realisation that the Italian working class is not prepared to make any such compromise.

OPINION

This was strikingly supported by a public option poll published in the magazine Tempo which showed that the great majority of intending PCI voters wanted major changes in the Italian government.

No more than a quarter of them supported any form of coalition between the PCI and the Christian Democrats.

The Stalinists so-called "parliamentary road to socialism" has thus in practice proved to be the parliamentary road to capitalist polices, i complete detiance of the wishes of their members and supporters.

British Stalinists advocating the paruamentary road must now find new ways of explaining the Italian betrayals to their own members.