The spider unravels its web
International Viewpoint #244 April 1993 the level of the Russian Federation. These conceptions can differ — from economic ones in Karelia to national-civic ones (plus oil) in Tatarstan. But they do exist."
While the People's Congress was a major media event both in Russia and abroad, most Russians ignored it or rejected it as irrelevant and harmful to the country.
The prevailing disillusion was aptly framed by one newspaper commentator: "The credit of confidence which the president and
EVENTS at the beginning of 1993 have brought Italy's crisis to a climax.
the parliament had one and a half years ago came to an end together with the Russians'
The political system set up after the fall of fascism is collapsing. There is a reserves of food for difficult times. When widespread view both in Italy and elsewhere that this crisis is a specific will they understand this?
product of Italy's history. But this is a half-truth. In fact, the tendencies at
Because of the general absence of social work in Italy today can be seen in all the developed capitalist countries.
movements, the left has found itself observing the latest events rather than influencing
What is special about Italy is that the general tendencies have reached a them. The prevailing feeling on the left is higher and more explosive level than elsewhere.
that the congress did not fundamentally alter the relationship of forces and did not open up any important new possibilities for socialists.
Developments around the Russian Communist party could however lead to new regroupments on the left — as most of the post-CPSU groups which have not broken with bureaucratic traditions have gravitated towards this organization. This in turn could open the way for a realignment of non-Stalinist currents on the left that won't join the new party.
Workers movement at low ebb
Meanwhile the workers' movement remains at a low ebb. The Independent
Miners Union (NPG) — which only organizes a minority of miners — is increasingly acting as Yeltsin's "pocket union", obediently threatening strike action if the congress does not give in to Yeltsin's demands. On the opposite wing, a workers' conference against privatization called by the conservative Union of Workers of Moscow is scheduled for the end of this month. But the bulk of workers' collectives and unions remain silent.
However, no matter what manoeuvres
Yeltsin, the parliament or the regional leaders try to pull off in the coming period, they will not suffice to overcome the fundamental crisis of bureaucratic rule and the projects for capitalist restoration in Russia. None of the competing bureaucratic factions offers a viable way out of the quagmire. The political and social crisis will not simply disappear, and in time this can give other forces, in the workers' movement and on the left, a possibility to develop perspectives independent of the different bureaucratic interests and win a mass following for them. *
7. Nezavisimaya Gazeta, March 16, 1993.
8. Rabochaya Tribuna, March 16, 1993.
9. Nezavisimaya Gazeta, March 17, 1993.
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LIVIO MAITAN - March 18, 1993
T is clear to everybody that in all or almost all the countries of the EEC, as in North America and Japan, there is a crisis of leadership and of political institutions. One aspect of this crisis is the "discovery" of all kinds of scandals in which governments, political parties, state officials, local administrations, economic leaders, trade unionists and heads of cooperatives are implicated.
Italy's scandals seem more numerous and more widespread and plunge the political scene into turmoil on a daily basis. But we have to ask why all this is coming to the surface now. Why have the peninsula's judges, who have hardly raised an eyebrow for decades, suddenly sprung to life and noticed the innumerable trails of complicity which are almost universal among Italy's political class and business circles?
The fact is that the context in which the judges have been working for decades has undergone a change. There is a powerful economic squeeze, reducing the room for manoeuvre while the political structures in the broad sense were becoming increasingly discredited even before the scandals broke out.
Another important factor is that the Italian political regime has remained more or less the same for 40 years - in which time contradictions have steadily breakdown made all the more painful by the absence of any apparent alternative.
Secondly, the economic crisis has gone from bad to worse at all levels, with the coming together of prolonged stagnation, which set in during the 1970s, and a very sharp cyclical downturn that is affecting all sectors of the economy. Unemployment has been rising constantly and the outlook for the rest of this year is gloomy. It is likely that hundreds of thousands of workers will lose their jobs.
The state budget deficit has reached huge proportions and all the austerity measures proclaimed by the governments) have had little noticeable effect on it.
### Away from Maastricht
Italy has conformed to the economic prescriptions of the Maastricht Treaty on European union even less than other EEC countries, and last autumn the lira was devalued and had to leave the European Monetary System.
This is the backdrop to a growing tendency that we have remarked on befo re — the structural weakening of the bourgeoisie as a social layer and the increasing difficulties it is meeting in exercising its hegemony. The more and more direct intervention of the Cofindustria employers' federation and other business representatives in politics does not disprove this tendency. On the contrary, this intervention is the result of the increasing uselessness and collapsing credibility of the political structures; it is
LEI NON PUÓ
CRIMINALIZZARE
COSÍ UN'INTERA
International Viewpoint #244 April 1993 a product of a situation where the "normal" mechanisms through which hegemony is exercised no longer work.
Thirdly, our epoch is witnessing a
I LADRI
SONO
LADRI!
clear trend to a spreading crisis of the tra- CATEGORIA! ditional national states. But, from this point of view also, Italy is out in front among the developed capitalist countries. On the one hand, the Italian state continues to be defied by organized crime — the mafia, the camorra and the rest — which control different regions in the south of the country. On the other, in the north we have seen the rise of the Leagues which are putting forward federalist solutions that come close to seces-
Since its formation in the last century, the Italian state has never faced so many attacks which, while coming from different directions, have the same effect - that of aggravating an already grave
AL74N.
crisis.
- Thieves are all thieves!
Finally, the experience of capitalist
— You mustn't criminalize a whole group like that! Europe in recent years has shown that workers, or at least broad sections of the working class, retain the means to mount significant resistance to attacks by governments and employers.
Once again, this is especially clear in Italy, thanks, above other things, to the inheritance of the very powerful and prolonged struggles of the end of the 1960s and start of the 1970s and the preservation of the political and organizational gains of that period by a significant number of cadres and militants.
### Downpour of arrests
For the moment, each day seems to bring a new downpour of arrests and charges against officials and even top level leaders of all the parties, parliamentarians, local and regional administrators and managers of big firms, whether private or in state hands.! The Amato government has succeeded in pushing through all the main measures it has been putting forward since the signing of the July 31, 1992, agreement with the employers and unions, which included the definitive abolition of the indexation of wages.
However, it is completely unable to establish medium term goals and lives from day to day. It continues to exist mainly because the coalition parties — Christian democrats, socialists, social democrats and liberals — as well as the parties of mild opposition - the PDS (Democratic Party of the Left - ex-CPI) and the Republicans (PRI) - fear a governmental crisis which might be impossible to resolve. This would mean new elections before the implementation of the reform of the electoral law in the direction of replacing proportional representation in which so much hope is being placed by so many.
However even the country's president, Oscar Scalfaro, a conservative Christian democrat, is taking his distance from the government, as is shown by his refusal to approve a government decree limiting punishments for violations of the law on the financing of political parties, which would have saved a number of leaders currently facing charges over this.
Unpredictable events aside, everyone seems to be awaiting April 18 when there will be votes in a series of referendums for which different political forces have gained the necessary 500,000 signatures.? The most significant of these referendums are those on the repeal of the law on the financing of parties, which will almost certainly be passed by a big majority and on the electoral system, one on local elections, the other on the election
Having failed to change the electoral system by a vote in parliament, the solution of this problem is now in the hands of the voters. To avoid complicating matters we will leave aside the referendum on local elections. If the reform of the electoral law for selecting senators is passed, this will mean that the Senate will cease to be elected by proportional representation - and in Italy the Senate has the same powers as the lower house, the
But this will not solve the problem, since the Chamber of Deputies will still be elected by proportional representation. The partisans of a first-past-the-post system hope that getting their way on the Senate will persuade parliament to swiftly change the electoral law for the lower house as well - an assumption that gains weight from the fact that most of the parties want to see the end of the proportional system. Then, perhaps after a final effort to amend the 1947 constitution in an authoritarian direction, new legislative elections will be called in the hope that a radical change in the make-up of parliament will provide a new beginning — a launching pad for the "Second
However, there are many obstacles on the road to the completion of this operation. Firstly, it is possible that the supporters of the single candidate, simple majority voting, system will not win the referendum on April 18. The Communist Refoundation Party (PRC) and the Rete ("Network") on one side and the neo-fascists of the Italian Social Movement (MSI) on the other can mobilize significant forces to oppose the change.3 1. Among those charged are the Socialist leader Craxi and his anointed successor La Malfa, the head of the Liberal Party Altissimo and many Christian Democrat leaders. 2. There will ten referendums on April 18. The most important are those on the electoral laws for the Senate and local councils; the repeal of the law on the financing of political parties; and the repeal of a repressive law on drug use. 3. The PRC is campaigning for legislative elections before any institutional or electoral reform, explaining that the present parliament, a hundred of whose members are facing criminal charges, does not have the legitimacy to adopt any such reforms.
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International Viewpoint #244 April 1993
Furthermore, the members and voters of the other parties may not follow the advice of their leaders. Indeed, the "democratic communists" - the current inside the PDS led by Ingrao — have already come out for a "no" and some Christian democrats and Socialists may follow their example.
And secondly, Homeric quarrels will inevitably break out as soon as it becomes necessary to move on to the details of the new electoral system and define the constituencies. The present agreements could easily break under the strain and all kinds of unexpected combinations come into being, putting at risk long-term alliances.
Furthermore, no one is at present able to predict, even in broad outline, the results of an election under a new system. The relationship of forces between the traditional parties, all of whom have been fraying at the edges to one degree or another, could change substantially. Some could even disappear, at least from the parliamentary stage, and new realignments emerge. This type of shake-up is what the partisans of electoral reform are hoping for.
Some, including the main protagonist of the referendum battle, the Christian Democrat Mario Segni, are hoping that systematically organized parties with their own mass base will disappear or wither away, leaving the field open for self-styled independent notables with "personal" links to their electors (whose number will fall with the adoption of a uninominal system). In the best of cases, we would see the rise of a conservative democracy in which economic magnates would be able to more openly and directly exercise their influence.
Others, such as Occhetto and the majority of the PDS leadership are hoping to facilitate the emergence, at least on the electoral terrain, of two basic realignments, one bringing together "progressives" and the other the conservatives which could alternate in power in the framework of a revamped constitution.
Both views rest on the illusion that the ever-deepening contradictions of Italian society can be lessened and finally overcome through tinkering with the institutions, essentially parliament. They are thus overlooking a question which may have to be faced sooner rather than later: how to deal with a situation where the present unstable balance of forces persists after new elections and constitutional reform or where, because of the uninominal system, the parliamentary majority does not correspond to the poli12 tical and social alignments in Italian society.
Since no one wants to address this question now, wishtul thinking is in vogue. The disarray and uncertainty rampant among the ruling classes is a product of their awareness of the extreme precariousness of the present situation and the very great difficulty of imagining solutions not only under the present institutional set up but in any imaginable new one and of the absence of any real room for manoeuvre for a radical change in an authoritarian direction.
This, as someone will no doubt point out, sets the ideal stage for the appearance of a Bonapartist regime. This is true in principle. But there is no willing candidate for the post and it is hard to see who could be a pretender for such a role in the Italy of 1993.
Furthermore, the minimum force needed to launch a Bonaparte is also absent at least in the short and medium term. And this is another source of the fundamental impasse above and beyond current vicissitudes. Obstruction by union leaders
As we have already mentioned, the wave of social struggles has not run out of steam after the great onrush of last autumn. It is true that that wave ended in failure insofar as Prime Minister Guilio Amato was able to get his anti-worker measures approved - largely due to outright obstruction by union leaderships who were absolutely opposed to bringing about the fall of the government.
However, after a few weeks respite, broad sections of workers have begun once again to mobilize both against the impact of the government measures and the complete abolition of wage indexation on their living standards and against layoffs and plant closures as well as for more sectoral demands.
Often these mobilizations have taken the form of huge demonstrations in many towns and the adoption of dramatic methods of struggle - for example, the blocking of big rail lines and motor-
The leaders of the union confederations have continued to dither, striving to limit and compartmentalize struggles, while even the left opposition in the CGIL confederation, Essere sindacato ("to be a unionist") has lost dynamism owing to the hesitations of some of its representatives, often far more moderate than the current's main leader Fausto Bertinotti.4
In this situation, the movement known as the workers' councils movement, which has a degree of representativeness, took the initiative to call a national demonstration in Rome on February 27.5 Supported on a personal basis by many CGIL leaders, by the Union of Self-Organized Workers (SLA) whose backbone is the Alfa Romeo COBAS and by the PRC and PDS, the march brought out more than 100,000, raising the demand for a general strike.
This success was largely due to the efforts of the PRC whose banners dominated three quarters of the march while the PDS had brought out much smaller numbers. The question of what to do after this demonstration has since been at the centre of debate both in the unions and parties
Is the council movement able to relaunch a new wave of generalized struggles and take independent initiatives if the confederation leaderships maintain their present attitude? There are differing views on this.
Some consider that the council movement should limit itself to putting pressure on the union confederations, which might lead to it losing its own momentum while others insist that the outcome cannot be predicted in advance and that, in any case, the councils are the only force with the will to mobilize hundreds of thousands of workers.
### General strike called
The union leaders have already given their answer. Unable to ignore the February 27 demonstration they have called a general strike for April 2, the same day as the strike called by the European unions. But the strike will be limited to four hours and there is to be no national demonstration. If things rest there, the result is predictable: very likely, the strike will be a success but nothing will change thereafter (all the more in that the bureaucrats have repeated that they do not wish to overthrow the government).
There is truly nothing new under the sun. If the ruling classes still have hope it is above all because those who should be their adversaries are once again offering a helping hand. * 4. Bertinotti is still formally a member of the PDS but his positions are usually closer to those of the PRC 5. The workers councils that still exist are but a pale reflection of what they were in the 1970s. Most have not been reelected for a long time. However, they retain a democratic credibility that is lacking in the extremely bureaucratized official union structures. 6. On March 5 to 7 the PRC organized a Workers Assembly in Turin in which almost 700 delegates took part.
Dossier: WOrLD ECONOMY