Significant lessons from an insignificant crisis

By Peter Schwarz

Following the crisis of October, the Italian head of government Romano Prodi has now integrated Rifondazione Comunista (Communist Refoundation) even more firmly into his austerity policies.

Prime Minister Prodi resigned on October 9 after just 17 months in office. The reason: the refusal by Rifondazione Comunista's parliamentary deputies, on whose votes Prodi depends, to support his 1998 budget. This contained cuts of 25 trillion Lire (£8.5 billion) which were to be partly achieved by an increase in the retirement age.

Five days later Prodi was back in office. Rifondazione's deputies assured him of their support and voted for his budget. And Prodi had hardly made them any concessions. Of the 25 trillion Lire budget some 500 million (£172 million) will now be saved through means other than those originally planned. The retirement age will still be raised. The health service will also be fundamentally reorganised. Despite this, Rifondazione not only abandoned their opposition to the austerity measures but also pledged to support the government for another full year in parliament.

The stock exchanges were relieved. And so were the European governments and Brussels. The press wrote that "humble pie had been eaten". "Many an Italian politician", reports German finance paper Das Handelsblatt", "has come to look at the crisis as something beneficial, an industrial accident through which the Old-style Communists have been put in their place". And someone who should know what they are talking about wrote: "The balance sheet of the crisis is undoubtedly positive for Prodi who has saved his coalition. It is now certain that his budget will be approved by both houses of parliament, and he can continue his European policy without major obstacles". The author of these lines is Livio Maitan, a leading member of the Pabloite United Secretariat and a member of the national executive of Rifondazione.

The single concession Prodi granted Rifondazione was to agree a reduction of the working week from 40 to 35 hours by the year 2002. But this is no more than a symbolic gesture. The reduction of working hours is supposed to happen in agreement with employers' associations and the trade unions, which have both spoken against it being implemented through legal regulations. It amounts, in effect, to flexibilisation and substantial wage cuts.

Was the government crisis therefore meaningless, a Comedia dell'Arte in typical Italian fashion, a piece of theatre at the end of which, after the most convoluted plots, everybody falls happily into each others arms? At least that is how most commentators saw it. By doing so, however, they miss out the sharp social tensions which exist beneath the surface of Italian society. In the last instance, it is these which determine the intrigues, the crises and the political moves, even if they are seldom mentioned openly.

Poverty for millions

The reduction of pensions is a basic precondition for bringing Italian state finances into line with the requirements of the European Monetary Union (EMU). It means utmost poverty for millions and will therefore meet with bitter resistance. Numerous governments have failed when confronting this task. The political conflicts of the last years have centred mainly around the question of which mechanism is best used to break resistance to these measures. "Centre-left, centre-right, technocratic or grand coalition, it hardly matters", explained the Financial Times bluntly. "If the government is too weak to manage the conflicts triggered by the downsizing of the welfare state, EMU will not work".

The governments led by the Christian Democrats and the Socialists in the late 1980s were too paralysed by inner conflicts to be able to deal a decisive blow to the welfare state. The coalition of neo-fascists, separatists and Berlusconi supporters which came into office in the spring of 1994 tried a frontal attack -- and had to recognise that they did not yet have the means to win such a confrontation. In October of that year 5 million people took to the streets to oppose social cuts; two months later Berlusconi resigned.

The Dini government which followed proposed measures to increase the retirement age. However, this government of "technocrats" not based on any party, and which depended on the parliamentary support of the PDS and Rifondazione, proved to be too unwieldy to carry them out.

For the first time since 1947, when the Communist Party (PCI) was thrown out of the government, the idea now matured in bourgeois circles that the PDS, successor to the PCI, could be entrusted with government responsibilities. That is how the Prodi government came into existence: a coalition made up of the PDS and some bourgeois splinter parties gathered under the label "Olive Tree". The main posts in this government are still in the hands of unconditional defenders of capital -- Prime Minister Prodi was a Christian Democratic minister and for a long time head of the state-run trust IRI, Ciampi, the Minister for Finance and Economy was head of the Italian central bank and Foreign Minister Dini held a leading position in the IMF for 30 years. Only some non-essential posts and the Ministry of the Interior, responsible for law and order, are administered by the PDS.

Prodi is now regarded as the most successful "restructurer" in Europe. The cuts in public spending which he has carried out since he has taken office, mainly at the expense of the socially weak, amount to approximately £35 billion. He has brought down the new debts contained in next year's state budget from 6% to 2.7% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and thereby surpassed the Maastricht criteria of 3%. This "success" is mainly thanks to the slavish support given to him by the PDS but also by Rifondazione.

This party has undertaken the difficult task of organising the extra-parliamentary resistance to the government while supporting Prodi in parliament. Rifondazione does not belong to the "Olive Tree" alliance but the government needs their votes in parliament, and in all critical situations it has always received them.

Rifondazione claims that in this way they can put the government under pressure and force them to make concessions in favour of those "without a voice" -- all those who are not represented by official politics. The recent crisis has shown that this is not true. Rifondazione is not only unable to oppose the ongoing social devastation, it is a decisive cog in the political mechanism by which this is imposed against the resistance of its victims.

The role of Rifondazione

On the one hand, Rifondazione is used by the government as an early-warning device to assess the mood of the masses, which calls on them to demonstrate and protest on the streets every now and then. On the other hand, it helps the government divert the resistance against social devastation into a dead end by spreading the illusion that Prodi could be forced to carry out policies in the interest of workers. By doing so they prevent the resistance from taking an independent political direction and condemn it to remain powerless.

By their decision to support the "Olive Tree" in parliament, Rifondazione has long since made itself a hostage to the government. It is easy for Prodi to denounce their occasional resistance as sabotage which only serves the right wing. During this last crisis he used every trick going to manipulate public opinion, in order to make Rifondazione see reason: the press was foaming with rage, the television was incensed, the offices of Rifondazione were inundated with letters, even workers' delegations demonstrated in front of their headquarters. "Not since the darkest years of the cold war had Italian Communists faced such a climate," writes Livio Maitan. In reality Rifondazione's climb-down plays into the hands of the right wing, who are cleverly using outrage at the government's measures to their own ends.

Given the history of Rifondazione, their present role as government supporters comes as no surprise. The party was founded in 1991 by those members of the PCI who resisted its transformation into the left democratic PDS. For this reason the party is often referred to as being "old-style communist" but this label is deceiving. Decades before, the PCI had already broken with communist ideas, in the original Marxist sense. At the end of the Second World War its leadership comprised loyal followers of Stalin. Far from wanting a communist Italy, they did everything in their power to save and consolidate the bourgeois state. Throughout the post-war period the PCI, with its two million members and its third of the votes in elections, constituted the actual backbone of the state. It restrained workers' traditional combativeness and made it possible for the feuding bourgeoisie to stay in power undamaged, despite more than fifty changes of government and constant crises.

It is only in this sense that Rifondazione embodies the traditions of the PCI. Its founders have not stuck to communist symbols out of faith to communist ideas (they still retain the hammer and sickle as the party logo) but because they feared that the right wing turn of the PCI would leave an uncontrollable political vacuum.

Since its foundation, Rifondazione has absorbed most of the radical groups which came out of the protest movement of the 1960s and which had opposed the PCI for its loyalty to the Italian state. Some of these ex-radicals formed a left faction within Rifondazione which until the recent crisis held 7 out the 47 posts in the leadership; two having resigned during these events, they now have only five. One of these five is the above-mentioned Livio Maitan, long standing co-thinker of Ernest Mandel and a leading representative of the United Secretariat.

Left fig-leaf

This left fraction opposes collaboration with Prodi but nevertheless remains within Rifondazione. Thus their position inside Rifondazione mirrors that of the party as a whole towards the "Olive Tree" -- that of a left fig-leaf. What unites them is they reject any possibility of an independent political movement of the working class. They can only envisage left wing politics in the form of putting pressure onto another party; even one as degenerated as Rifondazione.

This question is of great importance since many organisations throughout Europe take Rifondazione, and especially its left fraction, as a model. In Britain, groups such as the Socialist Party (formerly Militant Labour) cite Rifondazione as an example to follow in building up new mass socialist parties. Rifondazione also sent a fraternal delegate to the launch conference of Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour Party.

The quite insignificant government crisis in Italy thus contains a significant lesson: it demonstrates the sterility of a policy which contents itself with putting the mainstream parties under pressure. Increasing social polarisation in Europe will inevitably push the working class into sharp conflicts with the present governments but these struggles can only have a positive outcome if they find an independent political expression. They require the building of a new party with a genuine socialist programme. This path might be a difficult one but it is the only realistic one, while the realpolitik of a party like Rifondazione leads only from one disaster to the next.

See also: Political Parties in Italy

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