[GM93] An Excellent Party Meeting in Cortona

1st – 2nd October, 2005.

The party meeting was held in Camucia, a village lying at the foot of the hill of Cortona, and was conducted in the spacious and tranquil surroundings of a meeting hall booked by comrades belonging to the local section.

In attendance was a good cross-section of our groups, some arriving on Friday, and others on the Saturday morning and afternoon. As is our custom, the Saturday morning was dedicated to reviewing what has been achieved and what is still to be done.

In the two sessions on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning we listened, in an orderly and attentive way, to a number of reports, all of which covered extremely difficult topics. These will be published in future issues of Comunismo, but due to the to give precedence, for continuity’s sake, to what has already been covered (for the sake of absent comrades as well as for those who follow our work) we will, as usual, provide a brief summary here.

Our activity at present, which through force majeure consists mainly of study, issuing publications and making ourselves known by means of leaflets and posters, is directed towards keeping alive the genetic heritage of the Communist Party; a party which is different from bourgeois and opportunist parties not only because of its distinct body of doctrine, which is opposed to all other parties, but also because of its unique way of functioning internally. It is very important to maintain the thread of this continuity, and we cannot afford to lose it.

The form which our small party takes has been determined, directly and indirectly, by the events of the class struggle, and by need to prevail over and resist the enemy. Its modus operandi was neither invented nor decided on by anybody and neither does it claim to be conforming to some ideal, preconceived standard. It is an asset which was discovered by the party in a spontaneous way whilst carrying out its collective functions. Now refined by long years of experience, the party’s ’shape’ has proved well adapted to its ’internal nature’ and the tasks it has to perform.

The party is an ’organ of work’, which has a science and a tradition of its own which it can call on. It is the party’s consistent work which forms its bedrock, and which dictates the form it takes.

In this spirit – only too well aware of the difficult times we live in, only too well aware that success isn’t just around the corner – we hold our frequent general meetings; meetings in which we join together to co-ordinate our battle and tackle the not always easy task of building up a picture of the current balance of forces.
 

Antimilitarism and the Workers’ Movement

Previous reports presented in the ongoing work on anti-militarism have taken us from the birth of the unitary State in Italy to the outbreak of the 1^st Inter-imperialist War. This chapter, although still on the theme of anti-militarism, took us out of the chronological sequence followed so far.

The current report is derived from further researches into the 1911 archive document published in Comunismo, no 57 (December 2004), entitled The Italian-Austrian-Hungarian Proletariat against Militarism and against War.

When we republished the document, we weren’t in a position to supply a detailed presentation. We knew neither about the long and exhausting struggle which had preceded it, nor who the promoters of the international convention referred to in the document were, who, animated by an authentic class and internationalist spirit, would struggle for years for the fraternisation of the proletariat above races and nations and, above all, who would fight with alacrity against militarism. With remarkable consistency, even after the outbreak of the European massacre they were able to keep apart from the generalised betrayal of the Second international parties.

From 1904 until the outbreak of the war, significant work in defence of the above positions was carried out by a small but dedicated group of comrades. They are completely unknown today having been ignored in the official historical accounts. But to this small socialist party, based in the Istrian peninsular, we can give the credit for initiating, co-ordinating, and actively promulgating, the need to fight for an international socialist policy which rejected all forms of chauvinism, racism and irredentism.

Certainly the fact that such a rigorously left position was adopted by this group is due in part to the particular historico-geographical setting in which it arose: Istria, and Venezia Giulia, have always been perceived as a bridge between the Italian peninsular and the Balkans. In the age-old history of human migration this region has always been a point where different people’s and civilizations, different cultural and linguistic currents from East and West, South and North and vice versa have met and merged.

Here the modern working class had to struggle simultaneously against the Hapsburg central power, against the local economic power, which was essentially Italian, against the Slavic priesthood and against the rising indigenous bourgeoisie. In this complex and difficult but nevertheless instructive situation, Istrian-Triestine socialism was ready to immediately embrace the theoretical assumptions of left socialism, which it resolutely put into practice.

At the very moment of its inception in 1894, the Social-Democratic League (Lega Sociale-Democratica) gave proof of its left credentials, especially in its introductory manifesto aimed at the Triestine and Istrian proletariat. The League, which immediately joined the Social Democratic Party of Austria, later became denominated as the Sezione Italiana Adriatica del Partito Operaio Socialista in Austria.

However, due to their radical and classist positions, it wasn’t long before the Venezia Giulia and Dalmatian sections (both Italian and Slav) clearly distinguished themselves from Austrian social-democracy, which was inspired by a program which was reformist on the terrain of class struggle and was simply autonomist with regard to the national question (’austro-marxism’ as it was known). In Vienna the program ratified by the 1901 congress spoke only of “evolution”, declaring the purpose of the party to be: “organising the proletariat, permeating it with the realisation of its condition and its task, making it and keeping it intellectually and physically capable of struggle, availing itself of every appropriate means corresponding to the natural rights of the people”. In Trieste, they adopted a very different position: “the Socialist Party is the vanguard of the proletarian army, it awakens the proletariat’s class consciousness, organises the proletariat, instructs it, endeavours to strengthen it. The proletariat, once it has embarked on the path of social change, will not be able to stop, and it will have to avail itself of every possible means in pursuit of its goals (…) The socialist Party isn’t a law-abiding party (…) the greater or lesser resistance of the enemy classes will determine whether legal or violent means are used”.

Still in early 1914 the Adriatic socialists were doing all they could to prevent the network of international socialist relations which they had helped to build up from being abandoned. The outbreak of war thwarted the latest plan, of resuming the dialogue started back in 1904, and subjected the declared internationalism and anti-militarism of the Second International parties to a drastic process of verification.

Against this tragic and critically important background, the 15 August edition of Il Lavoratore of Trieste gave its unequivocal reaction to the social-patriotism which was invading the columns of the party’s Viennese organ: “when talking about the current war, L’Arbeiter Zeitung puts on an air of being able to speak for all socialists (…) Everywhere, after the war broke out, party representatives generally started to interpret things differently (…) abandoning the viewpoint they had previously been able to, and had needed to, subscribe to for so many years”. On the other hand it praised the behaviour of the PSI: “The Italian socialists are fighting strenuously for neutrality against the nationalists, who are plotting war”.

But the pressure exerted by the German and Austrian socialists, who raised the spectre of the “pan-slavist menace”, would come to nothing.

For the Istrians, along with all the other left socialists in Europe and Russia, the ignoble demise of the Second International at the outbreak of the war marked the failure of their attempts to get it to readopt the platform of communism. One of them, Vallentino Pittoni, wrote to his brother: “It is the infatuation with struggle which keeps us going along, with the deep conviction that the cause is just and that it is worthwhile being one of its instruments (since the older and more experienced you become, the more you know that rather than ’creating’ the struggle – old illusions! – we are but its instruments”).

And the activity of this virtually unknown party didn’t cease even when Italy entered the war and the PSI adopted that dishonourable position which consigned proletarians into the hands of the State executioner. Over the course of several meetings between Istrian socialists, of both Slovakian and Italian nationality, their clear aversion to war was reaffirmed in passing the following resolution: “The united social-democratic parties of the Litorale (Coastland) condemn the war and the nationalist aspirations which caused it”.

After the occupation of formerly ’unredeemed’ (’irredente’) land by the Italian army, the ex-Adriatic – Italian and Slav – sections of the Partito Operaio Socialista in Austria joined the PSI. On January 26, 1919 the first socialist congress of Venezia Giulia was held. On April 7, a motion for the party to leave the Second International, and join the Third, was approved.

At the Livorno (Leghorn) conference in 1921, the overwhelming majority of the proletariat’s Triestine and regional organisations went over to the Communist Party, retaining the leadership of the Trieste Camera del Lavoro (Chamber of labour), along with various other proletarian organisations, and they also brought to the party the illustrious Il Lavoratore.
 

Italian Ideology, the Post-resistance Bloc

The Gramscian theory of antagonistic “historic blocs” has been characterised by us as terminology which can allow a new type of “alliance” to be put in the place of the struggle between one class and another. The latter, of course, being the fundamental theory we subscribe to.

After the Resistance, once the “anti-fascist bloc” had defeated the fascists, the idea that the political ’glue’, tried and tested during the war, could represent a winning and definitive social alternative was seen as very original.

And now? Supposedly the proletariat functions, from its “central” position, as a kind of coagulant in relation to the middle classes, peasant farmers, small businessmen, shop-keepers, managers, who are linked by their common wish to take part in the anti-monopoly struggle. Against who? Supposedly against those strata who are somehow linked to those who “derive wealth from their privileged position”.

This theory of the “social bloc”, which is very adaptable indeed, provides succour to opportunist politics, and is pandered to by the general State interest, one minute with ’consultations’, the next with open competition between emerging social strata.

After the economic crisis of the sixties and seventies, the blocs broke up, to the point where the justicialist grand reckoning of the nineties has even been in this light [’justicialism’ – a term used to describe the political ideology, devised by Juan Peron, involving a particular combination of fascism and socialism. ed.]

And where is Italian ’transformism’ today? Where it ever was! That is, trying to pass itself off as politics when in fact it is just a camouflage for the anti-proletarian tension got to the level we know today.

It appears that class struggle, and the class’s history, has been definitively ’abolished’ by the emerging ’new blocs’. Well, we aren’t sure about that! Precisely when the national social blocs were no longer able to justify their composition, the old historic blocs of nations started to be juggled around again, putting considerable strain on both the domestic and foreign policy of the various States. And that includes the Italian State, displaying the characteristic muddle-headedness and foolish ambition typical of a nation-state which was formed relatively late.
 

Origin of the trade unions in Italy: Fascism and War

In this report there was a detailed treatment of the wave of strikes which affected the industrial cities in the North of Italy from the second half of 1942 to the end of 1944. The official Stalinist/’resistancist’ (resistenziale) vulgate has described them as patriotic and anti-fascist, in other words motivated by political ideals of an inter-classist and pro-democratic stamp. In actual fact we are talking about a genuine class struggle which was conducted for purely class reasons. Even in the absence of communist leadership, the industrial proletariat, crushed by overwork in the factories, by hunger and by the repressive measures of the occupying forces and the bombardments of the ’liberating’ forces, would be spontaneously carried on to its natural terrain of self-organisation and the fight to defend its existence.

A leaflet of the time called for “Struggle against hunger and terror”. To those disabled by the war it proclaimed: “You are poor wretches like us. Whilst the bosses accumulate money from our sweat and blood”.

Other demands of the strikers were equally advanced and related to wages, hours, rationing of essential goods and protection from bombardments.

And it is to be noted that the Stalinists only tailed behind this movement. They neither expected it, nor did they do anything to actively promote it; and the only reason they didn’t actively try to prevent it was that certain elements, taking into account the balance of forces between the classes at the time, were able to sidetrack it in pursuit of their own national ends.

Furthermore, the fact that amongst the active participants in the movement there were not only those who thought of themselves as fascists, and who passed for such, but also members of the control formations (formazioni di controllo) specially created in the factories by the regime, is further proof of how the class struggle cuts across all the bourgeoisie’s false oppositions, war fronts and styles of government.

Once again consciousness is lacking within the class and the trade-union movement. The lesson which the bourgeoisie and the Stalinists wanted us to learn, and unfortunately managed to import into the movement, was that the exploitation of workers was the product of fascism and the fascist war, and therefore in order to oppose exploitation it was necessary to fight for democracy and the allied victory. The communist lesson, which our few comrades tried to put over as clearly as possible in their newspapers and manifestos, was that it is the bourgeois and landed classes, whatever banner they fly under, who are the oppressors of the proletariat; it is they who are the enemy, and they who need to be fought and overthrown.
 

Course of the Crisis

A number of detailed graphs pinned to the wall, following time-honoured tradition, illustrated the speakers’ essential points. The course of the economy in the post Second World War period was represented by a series of small graphs, with a larger one to cover last year.

Drawing a balance sheet of the last economic cycle, it was possible to see who were the (current) winners and losers amongst the biggest capitalisms. The United States and Germany have maintained a rate of growth which is high relative to the others and haven’t experienced recession. It thus confirms that accumulation of capital isn’t at all in contradiction with an evident increase in poverty and an enduring high rate of unemployment.

At the other extreme Great Britain and Italy are clearly in recession. A sharp fall in Italy where the index of industrial production has dropped below the previous peak of 1,943 (based on the reference figure of 100 in 1913) in the year 2000, to the present figure of 1,577, a contraction of 19%. Great Britain has been in recession since the year 2000.

But France and Japan are also in recession, even if less severe. In this last capitalism the scale of production has never surpassed the peak of 13,431 in far off 1991, a figure it is still 1% below.

By considering the average rate of growth over the whole of the last cycle, taken to mean relative growth between the penultimate and last peaks, we get a series, running from the lowest to the highest rate of growth, which also reflects the age order of the capitalisms concerned: Great Britain +1.3%; France +1.8%;Germany +2.5%; Italy +3.4%; United States +3.6%; Japan +5.8%.

Passing to the volume of exports it is to be noted that China now comfortably occupies second place in the world ranking. The current order is this: United States – China – Japan – Germany – France.

Iran: Balance sheet of the “Islamic Revolution”

As part of a new ongoing study of this important country, an initial chapter on the geography and history of the region was presented.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and its fragmentation into autonomous republics, and the invasion of Iraq by the United States, Iran found itself both in a geographical and political sense caught up in an extremely tense web of conflicting interests centred on control of the Middle East and the planet’s main oil reserves. This imperialist dynamic is opening up scenarios with major consequences for the whole world order, anticipating rifts and clashes between the capitalist States on a global scale.

Without claiming to be an ’international institute of strategic studies’, we can say that the very nature of recent events means that we need to apply our Marxist vision to the series of crises which broke out in the late 70s starting with the collapse of the Pahlavi regime; with today’s crises tending to be linked to the formidable appearance of the Chinese and Indian colossuses in the East.

The geographical location of Iran, situated between the ex-soviet republics of the Caspian Sea – with their enormous, but barely or poorly exploited, oil deposits – and Turkey, Iraq, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and Pakistan, means that it plays a key ’linking’ role in the region. Its economic indicators, its rate of annual growth, its industrial sectors – along with the main one, oil – and the volume of imports and exports show we are certainly not dealing with a ’backward’ country here.

With a population of over 68 million Iran is by far the most populous country in the Persian Gulf and also the most urbanised.

Although throughout its history Persia has never suffered direct colonial domination, it has been the object of pressure from Tsarist Russia, and amongst the European powers Great Britain in particular.

In 1906, a nationalist party would install a constitutional government in order to combat foreign influence and to oppose the corrupt and weak Cagiara monarchy. European interference would become increasingly persistent after the discovery of oil.

The story of Modern Iran commences in 1925-26 when an officer of the Cossack army, Reza Khan would, with the support of the British, usurp the Persian throne and reign as Reza Shah Pahlavi. The new Shah would speed up the process of westernisation and rename the country ’Iran’, thus embarking on a long trial of strength with the religious hierarchies. In the countryside he would introduce a reform of agriculture which was still based on latifundia, of a semi-feudal type.

During the 2^nd World War the north was occupied by the Soviets, whilst the south was occupied by the English and Americans who would force Iran to declare war on Germany. In order to break free from an awkward ally who didn’t share their politics, the Americans and English forced Reza Khan to abdicate, putting in his place his son, Mohammed Shah Pahlavi, who would speed up the process of modernisation, which extended to the social domain.

This moment marked the entry of the country into the assembly of western States, and, due in part to its efficient military organisation, it would establish itself as the principal power in the Persian Gulf.

The exploitation of the oil resources would spark off a new contest between the western States. Led by a coalition of nationalist and religious groups, a powerful popular movement would arise which was opposed to foreign interference and in favour of a new division of the oil revenue. The Shah was forced to nominate Muhammed Mossadeq as his prime minister; he who in 1951 had nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, in a move effectively excluding Great Britain and involving the expropriation of most of the oil revenue.

Great Britain, supported by the United States, would retaliate by organising an international boycott of Iran, and the economic crisis which resulted would shatter the fragile political coalition which supported the prime minister.

The Americans then imposed an embargo on the country which prevented the export of Oil to the USA. In 1953 Mossadeq would be overthrown by a CIA orchestrated coup.

Mohammed Pahlavi, previously forced to leave the country and demanding that the new American boss resolve the crisis, re-ascended the throne. And there he would remain until 1979, when he took the road to exile after the revolution.

The presence of the United States is substantiated with a new ally in the Middle East, and consolidated in 1951 with the signing of the anti-soviet and anti-Egyptian Baghdad Pact, the other signatories being England, Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan.
 

The War in Iraq

The reports presented at previous general meetings (currently being published in instalments in our review Comunismo) have traced the history of the proletarian movement from the first years of the 20th century up to the outbreak of the war with Iran. On this occasion, the comrade who has been entrusted with the study took a detour in order to examine certain aspects of the war between the resistance and the coalition and look at recent developments.

And it really is a war: the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq has now passed the two thousand mark whilst the US army in the North-west of the country, with the support of mercenary troops, is conducting massive attacks against towns and villages to annihilate the “terrorists”. Two years on from the “end” of the war, the war continues, and the American army instead of reconstructing bridges over the Euphrates is still blowing them up.

Of course the parties and political movements in the West which subscribe to “third-worldist” ideology, and some even that describe themselves as “communist revolutionary”, have openly sided with the Iraqi resistance, which is fighting, “arms in hand”, with enemy number one, United States imperialism.

The Iraqi resistance, as ably demonstrated in the report with a number of quotations, is a political movement composed of a number of elements, mainly ex-Baathists, nationalists and religious fundamentalists, and it proposes to drive out the occupiers in order to reconstitute a united and independent Iraq.

One thing is clear, the Iraqi proletariat has nothing to gain from siding with this openly reactionary movement. Attacks by armed resistance groups against the workers trade union organisations and against women’s organisations have been denounced.

The primary duty of the proletarian movement in Iraq, as elsewhere, is taking part in the struggle to defend the living and working conditions, which in Iraq have sadly deteriorated over the course of the long war. The proletariat’s enemy is the bourgeois State, whether “independent” or in the service of the foreigner. The proletariat doesn’t have to choose between the stars and stripes, or the Islamic or Baathist banners. The Iraqi proletariat, like the Iranian proletariat, has had been deeply scarred by the experience of losing millions of lives whilst defending “revolutionary” and “anti-imperialist” regimes such as these.

Communism is anti-imperialist insofar as it is against capitalism, considering imperialism as merely the latest, “supreme” and necessary form which capitalism takes.

In Iraq there are no further historical duties of national emancipation and bourgeois revolution to accomplish. The driving away of the Americans is a commercial/financial matter. It may divide the Iraqi national bourgeoisie, but it is still the bourgeoisie in power, in its entirety, in its constituted national State. A dismantling of the Iraqi State, produced by whatever combination of centrifugal forces, domestic and foreign, would do nothing to modify this condition.
 

The Jewish Question: Universalisms in Conflict

In this work our intention is to show that when you ignore the economic and social structure of the diverse forms of society, and try and make ’ideological’ judgements (’ideological’ as we understand the term), misunderstandings abound, and you run the risk of committing not just errors, but horrors!

Hebrew universalism, like other universalisms and in particular Catholicism, is the super-structural product of the historical given conditions in which it arose and which it variously adapted itself to. That is something we take as said. The fact is that the various manifestations of ’universalism’ are destined to clash precisely because they arise out of the contradictions which exist within the material world.

Our ’universalism’, which with good cause we continue to call ’internationalism’, is of a different type, insofar as we don’t deny that the proletariat – called on by the Manifesto to unite against the capitalist-imperialist hydra – needs to settle accounts with its own national conditions; not in order to accept them, but to fight against them according to the various historical necessities.

And this is all the more necessary when the bourgeoisie produces its fascisms and nazisms – not to speak of the monstrous Stalinian State, which marries them to the degenerated communist movement, defeated in its internationalist role.

It is then easier to understand how one can appeal to forms of reaction against certain universalisms in the name of ’corporative’ interests, which don’t tolerate the disruptive effect of individualism in all its manifestations.

As far as one can claim to change things with words alone, is it not perhaps true that arguments for and against globalisation develop on the basis of the actions and reactions located within the matrix of class struggle at an international level?

Therefore our duty is one of revealing the social matrix of the universalisms, both understood in a positive historical sense, and as an expression of danger or conspiracy.