The revolver shots fired by the
obscure Sicilian student, Pellante, on July 14, 1948 at the
Stalinist leader Togliatti set off the broadest movement of the
Italian proletariat since the insurrection of 1945. The gun
shots of Minister of Interior Scelba’s police, which slew two
farm workers in the Apulia region on November 29, 1949, resulted
in a general strike ordered from above which proved to be a
two-thirds failure. The entire evolution of the Italian workers’
movement in the last 18 months is bracketed by these two
incidents.
The general strike of July 14, 1948 came like
a sudden explosion of all the discontent stored up during the
preceding months. The enthusiasm evoked by the launching of the
electoral campaign of the “Democratic Peoples’ Front” and then
squandered by the parliamentary cretinism and the
petty-bourgeois phraseology of its leaders found expression
despite the electoral defeat of April 18, 1948. The victory won
by the bourgeoisie in the April 18 elections had not yet been
translated into a defeat of the proletariat in action. The trade
union movement was still united. The motorized police were still
on the defensive. The employers still hesitated to launch a
frontal assault on the workers in the large industrial centers.
The proletariat in its general strike of July
14 made a magnificent attempt to regain the initiative in the
class struggle. Its failure was not due to any lack of spirit or
courage. On the contrary, for twenty-four hours bourgeois
authority was shaken in the principal centers on the peninsula.
The cynical capitulation of the Stalinist leaders to bourgeois
rule stabbed the workers’ offensive in the back and at the same
time gave rise to an inevitable wave of discouragement and
demoralization among the advanced workers, who felt themselves
betrayed by their own leaders.
The general strike of December 1, 1949 took
place after a lengthy period of working class defeats and of
successes of the bourgeoisie in actions against them. The trade
union movement, first split in 1948 by the formation of the
Christian unions (General Italian Confederation of Free Labor –
LCGIL) was then split again in 1949 by the creation of the
“social democratic” trade unions (Federation of Italian Labor –
FIL). The employers unleashed a full-fledged offensive by laying
off thousands of workers in the factories. A system of
intimidation was instituted in the offices and banks against all
militant elements and even against those who merely held
membership in the CGIL (largest Italian trade union federation
led by the Stalinists).
A series of movements in separate industries
taken up by all the workers with admirable tenacity (farm
workers’ strike at the beginning of June 1949 which lasted six
weeks; bank employees’ strike in September 1949), ended in
complete defeats. These successes, enhanced the boldness and
arrogance of the representatives of the capitalist state. They
began to systematically hurl the police against peaceful
demonstrations, inaugurating a new bloody series of massacres of
workers as in the infamous days of pre-Mussolini “democracy.”
The Southern Proletariat to
the Rescue
It is highly significant that, in
these conditions of rearguard battles carried on by dispersed
ranks of the industrial workers, the farm workers of Southern
Italy came to the rescue. During the last two months their
actions signalized the beginning of a serious resumption of the
workers’ movement in the entire peninsula. These actions are not
to be explained by particularly marked development of the class
consciousness of the Southern masses but by an indescribable
poverty which makes daily existence intolerable.
This miserable mass of day laborers or owners
of tiny parcels of land, with an average annual income
of $150, works about a 100 days a year, lives in
wretched hovels and sees its children permanently undernourished
while immense tracts of land owned by the big landowners lie
fallow. Result: The periodic outbreak of local revolts over
control of the land.
Since the fall of fascism, this development
has been channelized by the formation of peasant
cooperatives which have the right to request the assignment
of fallow land. Although these assignments are supposed to be
made by courts, and although in Southern Italy even more than in
Northern Italy, judicial power is intimately tied to the local
proprietors, the first months after the “liberation” were marked
by a certain flourishing of these cooperatives. The government
sought in this way to legalise land seizures which
occurred in that tumultuous period. As the central power was
strengthened and the state apparatus rebuilt, the cooperatives
isolated within an economy directed by their enemies and lacking
credits, machinery and skilled personnel began to fall apart.
Two months ago a new movement of land
seizures broke out, less spontaneous than the one immediately
after the war, but better prepared and stimulated by the
Confederterra (farm workers’ union under Stalinist
leadership). The movement began in Sicily and Calabria where the
untilled “latifundia” (big estates) was most extensive. The land
seizures were genuine; the peasants immediately sowed the
occupied land.
The government therefore, combining tactical
sagacity with judicious use of armed force, decided upon some
unavoidable concessions. Prime Minister De Gasperri made a trip
to the Sila region, one of the most backward provinces, embraced
the inevitable little boy, delivered the inevitable
“progressive” speech, and legalized the assignment to the
cooperatives of some 30,000 hectares of land. 3.8 million
hectares of land are owned by big landowners, in other words 25%
of all cultivable Italian land is divided among 8 million
agricultural enterprises.
Following this governmental action, the
second stage of the land seizures which occurred in Lucania,
Apulia, Campania and in the vicinity of Rome lost the momentum
of the initial movement. Most of the time, the trade union
movement limited itself to a “symbolic” seizure. The “occupied”
land was not worked. In many areas, notably in Sardinia, the
prefects succeeded in preventing seizures by promising the
peasants to speed up assignments of land by legal methods. It
should be noted that one of the rare concessions made by the
government to the peasants was the transfer of authority to
assign land to the prefects who are considered to be more
“liberal” ...
However it was in the course of this second
stage of the land seizures that there occurred the violent
incidents in Torremaggiore in Apulia which led to the outbreak
of the strike of December 1. Four weeks previously in the
province of Crotona, in Calabria, other bloody incidents had
occurred in Melissa which cost the life of three farm workers,
murdered by “the forces of law and order.” In Torremaggiore, the
De Gasperi government once more clearly demonstrated the kind of
“order” it was preserving, the kind which proscribes trade union
meetings and instructs the police to open fire on a disarmed
crowd gathered to hear a report-on negotiations between the
unions and government authorities.
And, pathetic illustration of the condition
of the braccianti (farm laborers): the agitation which
led to the incidents and the slayings of November 29 did not
even occur over a demand for improving the conditions of the
workers. Its sole aim was to enforce the law of “the labor
quota,” which obliges big landowners to employ workers
numerically proportionate to the size of their estates. Thus the
braccianti had demonstrated in Apulia for the
preservation of their wretched wage of about $25 a
month. And following in the tradition of the Italian clerical
gang, the government gave them lead and gunshot ...
Layoffs in the Big Factories
The urge to defend the very
existence of their wives and children led the farm laborers of
Southern Italy to pick up the gage of battle at the very time
when the combativity of the proletariat had sunk to what seemed
to be the vanishing point. Likewise the brutal attack by Big
Business against the industrial proletariat, which takes the
form of mass layoffs and mounting lockouts, seems to be the
signal for a serious revival of the militancy of the workers of
Northern and Central Italy for the next period.
Italian industry operates at a permanent
deficit. Technological backwardness and the absence of an
adequate internal market renders big Italian industry incapable
of competing on the world markets with the heavy industry of the
advanced capitalist countries. Living and operating solely by
virtue of government orders and credits, the crisis which
industry has experienced since the “liberation” has been
aggravated by the success of the workers in preventing layoffs.
Hence, when the relation of forces was altered
[1] and the employing class
felt itself strong enough in relation to a divided working class,
it everywhere began to repudiate the anti-layoff agreements and
workers by the thousands were thrown into the street. In the
Milan region alone the Caproni plant, employing 6,000 workers,
and the Safar plant were shut down; 5,000 out of 10,000 employed
in the Isotta Fraschini establishment were laid off.
Under conditions of general unemployment at
least 2½ million fully unemployed and several hundred thousand
partially unemployed) a layoff in a big plant actually means the
loss of all possibility of work for many months. That is the
reason the workers do not accept these employer conditions
without putting up a desperate resistance to this condemnation
to poverty. Occupation of factories shut down by the employers
are widespread.
Three typical cases took place at the end of
November: In the Breda factories in Venice, in the OMI factories
in Rome, in the Fonderi Liguri plants in Genoa. The first of
these followed a threat of layoff and a demand by the workers to
inspect the employers’ books. The second case followed the
non-payment of wages, an indirect lockout measure currently used
by the employers. The third occupation was a reply at the time
to layoffs and to the dismantling of the factory by a bankrupt
company.
The Art of the General Strike
How has the bourgeoisie and the
capitalist state reacted to these factory occupations which are
a direct threat to private property in the means of production?
It is not at all surprising that the occupations have produced
an un-excited reaction, one which inclines to allowing the
workers “to go through their own experience” just as they did in
the movement of factory occupation in Turin in 1920. The
employer is content to protest, to refuse to pay wages and in
cases where the workers continue production to shut off the
electric current after a few days. That’s all he need do. What
necessity is there for the intervention of the authorities or
for trying to evacuate the premises by force? He is very well
aware that, left to themselves, the workers occupying the
factories find themselves in a blind alley from which they
emerge sooner or later utterly demoralized and without any
confidence in their trade union organizations ...
The tactic adopted by the Stalinists is right
down the employers’ alley. For many months, the Stalinist
leadership of the CG1L was systematically opposed to any
extended occupation of the factories, limiting themselves to
“symbolic” 24-hour occupations. Under pressure of the workers
affected by the layoffs and prepared for any sacrifice, the
Stalinist leaders were compelled to beat a strategic retreat.
Today they sanction and even discreetly approve of occupation
movements but attempt to limit them and to studiously restrict
them to a single establishment.
The worker occupants first undertake to put
the machinery in working order and to clean up the premises and
then with great difficulty start up production. In the meantime
the trade union leaders organize financial assistance in the
region and in the best case set up a free commissary for the
workers. Then, one, two, three weeks go by and as the employers
refuse to pay the workers, the workers’ meager reserves are soon
exhausted and their families are literally penniless. They
cannot sell the products they have manufactured; the Stalinist
tactic does not permit this transgression of bourgeois law.
There is then nothing for them to do but to pull out defeated,
harboring bitter feelings toward their “leaders.”
It is obvious that this tactic of isolated
movements does not hold out any concrete perspective to workers
threatened with layoffs, and threatens to discredit the strike
weapon as well as the occupation of the factories in the eyes of
the workers. The “war of attrition” chosen by the Stalinists – a
token of their remarkable tactical skill – at the very moment
when the economic interests of the employers require a temporary
cessation of production, can only play into the hands of the
bourgeoisie. They can only be compelled to retreat before a
full-scale attack all along the line.
Partial movements for very limited aims are
of decisive importance only insofar as they enable the working
class to reconstitute the unity of its ranks, only insofar as
such movements revive the workers’ self-confidence. But to
fulfill this function, these isolated and limited movements must
be victorious. However, the Stalinist leaders first
organize limited movements which are doomed to defeat in advance
and then they periodically crown them with “general strike
demonstrations.” like that of December 1, which lead to even
more resounding defeats. So, combining opportunist errors with
disorganized adventurism, the Stalinist leadership continues to
do everything in its power to squander and destroy the reserves
of militancy of the Italian proletariat which is now being
reawakened after 18 months of defeats.
A factory occupation, limited to one plant
and aided only by financial support, is doomed to certain defeat
if the leadership is not prepared to go the limit. To be able to
go the limit, it must act according to a plan – this
term is used in the Bolshevik sense and not in the sense of the
miserable project called “the GIL plan” which is acceptable to
the bourgeoisie and even to that old reactionary politician,
Nitti.
This is what acting according to plan entails:
Choose a key enterprise threatened with lockout, preferably one
whose raw materials are produced in Italy itself; organize a
national agitation around its occupation (it is characteristic
that all the agitations on the factory occupations were limited
by the Stalinist leaders to a regional scale); proceed to the
production and to the sale of the manufactured products
if the employer refuses to pay wages; organize this sale through
workers’ and peasants’ cooperatives in accordance with the needs
of the population; illustrate through these test cases that the
crisis of Italian industry is a crisis of capitalist
industry working for the market, and that the needs
of the population do not call for a closing of plants but for a
tremendous rise in production; organize a
movement of national solidarity with the workers in the occupied
factory, proceeding if necessary to the confiscation of raw
materials by workers or miners in the extractive industries, and
to free transportation by railroad workers of the finished
products.
In other words, confront the employer
with the acting and active solidarity of the working class
orienting through a series of rapid successes to a general
strike for the attainment of a clear and precise program
whose first point should be: Re-open all the closed
factories and operate them at government expense under workers’
control. It is not the responsibility of the workers in bankrupt
factories to shoulder the burden of capitalist bankruptcy. Money
to float these industries should be obtained where it is
plentiful: in the strong-boxes of the banks and Big Business.
Beginning with that, we have the whole
program of the socialist revolution which can be explained
simply and concretely to the masses with the help of
transitional demands combined into a workers’ and peasants’
plan to be realized by a workers’ and peasants’ government.
Such a strategy, avoiding both hopeless and
disorganized struggles, would moreover have the great advantage
of educating the workers on the significance of their
struggle. A defeat which is presented as a stage in the
attainment of an objective leading to the solution of the most
burning problems of the class can serve as a stimulus to the
militancy of the masses. A useless purposeless defeat is a sure
cause of further demoralization. That is why the criminal tactic
pursued by the Stalinist leadership is not only responsible for
the defeats, resulting from the unfavorable relation of forces
confronting the working class, but also for the demoralization
caused by this senseless policy.
The Crisis of the Italian
Communist Party
Organizing proletarian resistance
to capitalist layoffs; preparing and guiding the
counter-offensive to guarantee tolerable conditions of life to
all Italian workers – which is impossible without taking some of
the principal citadels of capital by assault – these are tasks
which are neither desired nor can they be attained by the
present leadership tied to the leading strings of the Kremlin. A
new revolutionary leadership must be created, a
leadership whose first elements have been shaped in the crucible
of the negative experiences of recent years. Its formation can
be considerably accelerated if the revolutionary vanguard
succeeds in regrouping and in organizing the vanguard militants
who, as a result of their own experiences, have already broken
or are on the point of breaking with the CP in the principal
regions of Italy.
The crisis of the CP is still in its initial
stage. The December Central Committee meeting of the CP
indicated an early purge which would rid the party of numerous
“deviationist” elements. It is difficult to forecast the scope
and real significance which the next stages of the crisis will
have. But some of its general characterises can be sketched now.
Let us note first of all that the present
crisis of the CP has a contradictory character-because it
appears at a time when the CP is embarked on a “leftist” policy,
at least verbally. While vanguard militants are breaking away to
the left because they realize that the CP policy is contrary to
the workers’ interests – and that explains the opportunist as
well as the adventurist errors – on its right the CP is losing a
considerable section of those who had joined it on the basis of
its policy of “national unity” and who now condemn its class
phraseology as “antidemocratic.”
This phenomenon is especially important in
intellectual and Catholic circles. It should not be forgotten
that there are many members of the CP in Italy deeply attached
to the Catholic religion who have been struck a heavy blow by
papal excommunication (although the measure has been very
circumspectly applied).
Suffice it to say that the Communist mayor of
Turin, the most important industrial and proletarian center of
Italy, had one of his children married in the church, sent
another child to a religious school, and organized cultural
gatherings addressed by the Catholic ministers of the De Gasperi
cabinet at the expense of the municipality! The opposition of
these circles, which weighs heavily on the party, should not be
confused with that opposition which expresses, however
confusedly, the revolt of proletarian class consciousness
against the acrobatic tactics of the Stalinists.
It should also be pointed out that the
Yugoslav question has sowed confusion in Italian communist
ranks. During the period of the “national unity” policy, the
Italian CP went through some particularly revolting contortions
to harmonize its ultra-chauvinist agitation with its unreserved
support (at least in public) of the “anti-Italian” policy of the
Yugoslavs in Istria and Trieste. The leaders of the party were
not really at ease until the break of the Cominform with Tito
enabled them to take their place in the chorus of the
chauvinistic anti-Tito agitation, long carried on by all
“official” public opinion.
But many militants, who the day before had
had to “swim against the stream” on this particular question,
could not make so sharp a turn and became greatly bewildered.
Many Stalinist cadre elements had also fought as partisans
during the war side by side with the Yugoslav-partisans. Today,
Unità , central organ of the CP, tells them
that the partisan struggle in Slovenia was really organized by
the Gestapo. And it is not easy for them to swallow this new
morsel of Stalinist wisdom.
Some of them have even openly opposed the
anti-Titoist line of the leadership and have agreed to organize
visits to Yugoslavia. They have been expelled for “political
treachery and connections with Trotskyist and Titoist
provocateur elements,” a formula that is repeated in almost
every issue of the main regional CP papers.
Finally, there is a third characteristic
phenomenon of the crisis of the CP: A number of old members,
often founders of the movement, are beginning to break with the
party on the basis of personal experiences, restricted to a
regional or plant-wide scale, after a series of particular
incidents which were too much for them to swallow. Two typical
cases are those of Avico, general secretary of the national oil
workers union and Morelli, former mayor of the important metal
center of Terni. Cases of personal corruption and malodorous
petty intrigues which the cadres have observed in their dealings
with the national leaders have proved decisive in causing their
break with the CP.
This phenomenon occurs much later than in
France. Germany, Great Britain or the United States. Because of
the victory of Fascism in 1922, the ideological evolution of
numerous Italian communist cadre elements had been arrested for
21 years. Thus today there is to be found in the ranks of the
oppositionists – alongside of the young militants whose
experience with Stalinism is of recent date – even founders of
the party whose experience with Stalinism in the mass
movement also does not antedate 1944.
The Crisis of Italian
Socialism
Contrary to what has happened in
most of the countries of western Europe, the serious crisis of
Stalinism has not led in any way to the strengthening of social
democracy, either in members or in votes. On the contrary, at
the very time the crisis of Stalinism is beginning to break out
in the open, Italian social democracy itself is undergoing an
especially serious crisis which is expressed in the existence of
three socialist parties. And the Calvary of Italian social
democracy is far from ended ...
This crisis of Italian social democracy,
joined to that of Stalinism, expresses a fundamentally
healthy development of the Italian workers’ movement. The
combativity of the Italian working class, the sharpening of the
class contradictions, the desire of the militant working class
youth for ideological clarification – all these factors preclude
a retrograde development of the most advanced sections.
Becoming conscious of the betrayals of Stalinism or reformism,
they are seeking a new road to regroupment without returning to
one or another of the two movements of class misleadership.
The crisis of Italian social democracy broke
out the first time in January 1947 when the unified party split
into two fragments. Unfortunately the split did not occur along
clearly demarcated ideological lines (i.e., revolutionary
Marxist tendencies against reformist and collaborationist
tendencies) but “for or against unreserved unity of action with
the CP.” The PSLI (Italian Socialist Labor Party), the new
social democratic party which emerged from the split, comprised
at the time a part of the traditional reformist right wing (Saragat,
Daragona, Simenini), and a part of the extreme left centrist
wing (M. Matteoti, Zagari and the Socialist Youth).
Less than a year after its foundation, this
new party was confronted with a serious crisis when its leaders,
violating their solemn commitments, entered the De Gasperi
government. Most of the centrist elements capitulated to this
flagrant abuse of confidence by the reformist right wing: Only
the cadres of the Socialist Youth broke with the PSLI at its
Naples convention in January 1948. Losing all contact with the
working class, the right wing drew all the logical conclusions
from its purely petty-bourgeois course. It accepted the Marshall
Plan and the Atlantic Pact enthusiastically. It organized the
split in the unions. It came out in favor of an electoral bloc
with completely bourgeois parties like the Republican Party.
[2]
The “left centrist” tendency, eternally
wavering between its oppositionist inclination and its fears of
“the responsibilities of power” in the party – an expression of
its inability to concretely formulate a policy in opposition to
that of the reformist right wing – then sought its salvation in
“socialist unification,” that is, in allies outside the party.
It found them in other groups which had
broken from the PSI (Socialist Party of Italy), after the
January 1947 split, namely in the Silone group (Union of
Socialists) which had no precise political platform but
with a certain reputation for “political honesty” (the scarcity
of this commodity has boosted its price); and the reformist
tendency led by that old political fox and careerist, Romita,
who had broken from the PSI during the year. Its patrons on
Comisco [3] had envisaged a
“genuine” social democratic unification including the PSLI plus
Silone plus Romita. At the last moment, the PSLI right wing, not
having obtained adequate guarantees that it would control the
“unified” party like it now controls its own (through a
“democracy” which mobilizes for conventions thousands of votes
of paper “members”), withdrew from the combination. “Socialist
unification” therefore turned out to be merely another split,
the center and left of the PSLI joining the Silone and Romita
groups at the Florence convention in December 1949 to form the
Unified Socialist Party, PSU. (Let us note in passing that the
right wing of the PSLI, which is so “passionately” attached to
formal democracy, disbanded entire federations and acted more
bureaucratically than the Stalinists ever dared do in Italy.)
The speeches, declarations of principles, and
other feature defining the character of the new party clearly
indicate that it does not intend to differentiate itself in any
way from the PSLI. It is not opposed to collaboration with the
bourgeoisie in the government; it favors such collaboration on
better conditions (it wants at least five portfolios against the
paltry three that Saragat is satisfied with). It is not against
the Atlantic Pact, it is only for its transformation into a
“peace pact.” It is not in favor of the split in the trade
unions; it merely explains that the split is an accomplished
fact ... Under such conditions it is clear that no major
obstacles exists to an eventual fusion between the PSU and the
PSLI provided the “unified” party pursues a strictly Saragat
policy. The unfortunate knight-errants of centrism, who feel as
out of place today in Silone’s house as they did yesterday in
Saragat’s, fervently hope to return to a more familiar
atmosphere in the house of Saragat, Silone and Co. They are
deceiving themselves. Following an eventual fusion, only a split
will open new perspectives for them.
The PSI, the other social democratic
fragment, has not experienced such complicated and bewildering
convolutions as those of the PSLI. There are four tendencies in
its ranks: A pro-Stalinist tendency led by the infamous little
Cominform agent, Pietro Nenni; a “left” tendency led by Lelio
Basso who has been dubbed “the little Lenin of Italy” (although
his only resemblance to Lenin consists of a goatee) and who
systematically refuses to differentiate himself from Nenni; a
right wing tendency, strictly reformist, led by Romita, and
finally a so-called “center” tendency led by former partisan
leaders like Riccardo Lombardi who comes from the Action Party.
This latter tendency is regrouping all the elements within the
party who are vaguely discontented with the Nenni policy.
But unlike its rather politically formless
base, these centrist leaders, who have recently been moving
toward Marxism, are making an honest effort to formulate a
policy which corresponds to the interests of the workers.
The electoral defeat of the “Democratic
People’s Front” on April 18, 1948 was above all a defeat for the
PSI. As in all social democratic parties, it was the signal for
a change in leadership. For more than a year Nenni-Basso allowed
the representatives of the “center” to take the helm. But like
all centrists, they feared nothing so much as applying their own
policy. Placed in the leadership of the party by the masses of
discontented members, these new leaders tried to differentiate
themselves as little as possible from Nenni. They did not offer
the workers any different perspective than that of the Stalinist
policy of defeat. They do not know how to stem the collapse of
the party. The 1949 convention saw the withdrawal of Romita and
gave the majority to Nenni who leads the PSI like a Cominform
party. At the December Central Committee meeting, Nenni attacked
the Yugoslav CP for having gone over to “the imperialist camp.”
(Nenni himself was an ardent supporter of the first and second
imperialist wars!) The discontent in the party has again risen
against this Cominform policy. And again, the “center” is unable
to give the members any concrete policy, besides embarrassed
allusions to a needed decentralization of the workers’ movement.
Toward the Revolutionary
Party
Nevertheless the fact that
Riccardo Lombardi and his friends have never once been
influenced by the comedy of the so-called “socialist
unification” is an excellent sign of their fundamental
orientation. They must now draw the conclusions from their
negative experiences with reformism, Maximalism (left centrism)
and Stalinism.They must find the courage to clearly formulate,
at least for themselves, the perspective of the building of
the new revolutionary party of the Italian proletariat.
Above all they must rid themselves of any inferiority complex
toward Stalinism. There are thousands of workers in the Italian
proletariat and in their own party who understand that
Stalinism is the antithesis and not the continuation of
Leninism.
An evolution on their part in a revolutionary
and internationalist direction, that is, in a Leninist
direction, would rapidly transform them into a pole of
attraction for everything healthy in the left social democracy,
among the followers of the Basso faction in the PSI and the left
wing members of the PSU. They would thus render an important
service to the building of the Italian revolutionary party, to
the regeneration of the European workers’ movement in general.
But whatever the further evolution of the
“center” in the PSI, revolutionary cadres who know their task
already exist in Italy. For most part they have come from the
Socialist Youth and, having assimilated the Leninist program
through their own post war experiences, these cadres have joined
the Fourth International and laid the. first basis for building
the revolutionary party. After having organized the militants
who came from the social democracy, their immediate task now is
to organize the militants and groups who are breaking with the
CP. To bring the Bolshevik program to the broad masses, to
participate in their daily struggles, to enable the vanguard
workers to see in action a new leadership, however embryonic,
that is different from the Stalinists – these are the aims this
cadre will seek to attain in the coming months.
The possibilities of development offered by
the objective situation are excellent. If they know how to
utilize them, they will be able to give a powerful impetus to
the development of the Italian revolutionary movement and –
through their own successes which will be the successes of the
program and organization of the Fourth International – they will
speed up the progressive evolution of oppositionist groups
inside and outside the traditional parties toward the World
Party of the Socialist Revolution.
December 15, 1949
Footnotes
1. Where this change
did not occur, the workers continued to make serious gains. Thus
at the Ansaldo plants in Genoa, they have just won the 24-hour
work week at 40-hour pay.
2. At the Naples convention, Saragat justified participation
in the government by the need of checking the government actions
of the Christian Democrats. At the Milan convention in 1949, he
explained that this collaboration was required because social
democracy and Christian democracy were both “profoundly
democratic and socially animated parties.”
3. Committee for International Socialist Conferences. A
liaison center for Social Democratic Parties in Europe, a kind
of successor to the pre-war Second International. |