[RG97] Party Meeting at Sarzana

The party’s winter meeting was held in Sarzana at the weekend of 20-21 January 2007 and was organised by our unwaveringly loyal comrade from the Alpi Apuane, whose sterling preparatory work prompted praise from one and all. We based ourselves in a small, comfortable hotel, meeting in a quiet room with a pleasing view over the river Magra just at the point it emerges from the mountains and flows into the sea. In this pleasant setting with minimal distractions we could focus on our work and achieve a lot in a short time.

As usual, Saturday morning was dedicated to organising our various activities whilst Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning were devoted to the exposition of a series of reports on a range of difficult and complex subjects.

As always we not only checked that everything we have been doing is doctrinally coherent and non-innovative, but also that it ties in with our core party theses and has strengthened, rather than giving the least hint of weakening, this earlier work. Keeping this ongoing party activity alive, such that it can be transmitted to future generations, requires and determines an appropriate atmosphere which we strive to maintain within our ‘ferociously anti-bourgeois’ body of militants, which even though very small today is, nevertheless, as in the past, still ‘in contact with the working class’.
 

Working Class Anti-militarism and the First World War

The first report, on anti-militarism, was developed on the basis of a description of the behaviour of the Italian Socialist Party from the time of the outbreak of the war until the Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915. With this aim in view the speaker made extensive use of quotations both of leaders of the PSI and the 2nd International and, most of all, of Lenin (which will be included in the complete version of the report, to be published in Comunismo).

Even though Italy was a member of one of the two opposing coalitions at the time of the outbreak of the war in August 1914, it nevertheless declared its neutrality. This was not however dictated by a wish for peaceful coexistence between nations, but was due rather to the ambiguous character which has ever distinguished the down-at-heel Italian bourgeoisie; which before throwing itself into a war it considered indispensable for its capitalist interests wanted, as well, to put up its potential intervention for sale, hoping to attract the best bidder, and hoping to ensure thereby a seat for its representative at any future peace talks: in other words, it would be happy to line up with the winning side.

The ambiguity of the Italian ruling class produced inside the Socialist Party an apparent unity of intent amongst the various currents comprising it, all of which declared their opposition to Italy entering the war. But the question that revolutionaries have asked ever since is this: if one leaves out of consideration the various tendencies within it, would the entire socialist party ever really have rallied openly, and in a classist manner, against the war? At first sight it might seem so, considering that even the right-wingers of Critica Sociale were writing statements of principle that seemed more or less in line with Marxist doctrine.

But to say more or less means there was something missing, and that missing something was constantly used as a loophole to introduce interventionism into the party. And if open interventionism wasn’t approved, although that might have been the best solution, there were plenty of other things that were.

Even though unaware of Lenin at the time, the revolutionary extreme left of the party was against the war and urged proletarian mobilisation and simultaneous anti-militarist class action in all countries; and, if that simultaneity didn’t occur it was prepared to sabotage the war by sabotaging its own national state, because even just sabotaging one of the two warring militarisms was equivalent to sabotaging them both.

The left of the party (later to be identified with maximalism) in control of the leadership, was also against the war, but despite its literature appearing to be based on correct Marxist directives the stance it defended was effectively a pacifist one. Not having understood, perhaps, that pacifism is equivalent to consigning a defenceless proletariat into the hands of militarism, it nevertheless adopted a programmatic slogan that as good as summed up that tendency.

The pacifism of the party’s historic right, which also declared against the war, was due instead to its loyalty to the stance taken by the Italian state.

As the situation slowly evolved, and Italian capitalism more and more openly stated its position, the positions of the various tendencies within the PSI began to crystallise as well. The party leadership, slowly but surely, became ever more prone to talking the kind of inconclusive waffle which would eventually be summed up in Lazzari’s formula, ‘né aderire, né sabotare‘, neither to support, nor to sabotage. A formula that was not only ineffective but misleading as well, because “to not sabotage” is the same as ‘supporting’.

It must nevertheless be recognised that the PSI, by not participating in the union sacrèe, and by its strenuous efforts to prevent the fragmentation of the International, differed from all other 2nd International parties. Italian delegates were dispatched to make contact with the leaders of the international Bureau and of the various affiliated parties with the aim of organising international meetings to reach agreement on a common approach to the war, and on how to pressurise the various governments into stopping the fighting as soon as possible.

The left position was very different in tone: the order to mobilise should be met with a national general strike. Thus the party as a whole, even if ambiguously, showed it was committed to opposing the war, which it denounced as imperialist. Thus when interventionist socialists of the Central Empires or Allies went to Italy, they would be met with stern opposition and sent packing before they’d had a chance to air their corrupt proposals. And the way the Italian socialists behaved on these occasions was much appreciated, and often held up as an example, by Lenin himself.

But when it was a case of putting statements of principles into practice, the Italian Socialist Party showed itself incapable of learning from historical events: that is, it couldn’t see the need for a firm break with the 2nd International, which had proved that it wasn’t, and could no longer be, an instrument of revolutionary action.

The convocation of the Zimmerwald Congress itself showed that the need to break the threadbare links with the past and adhere to the revolutionary programme outlined by Lenin was totally incomprehensible to the Italian socialists. It was decided in fact that Zimmerwald ‘should in no way assist the creation of a new international, but rather call on the proletariat to act together for peace, to create a centre for such action, to attempt to lead the proletariat back to its class mission’. We hardly need mention that Lenin’s intention, the goal he was proposing, was exactly the opposite, i.e., to break drastically and definitively with the 2nd International in order to breathe life into authentically revolutionary 3rd.

At Zimmerwald, the discussions about a socialist policy towards the war led to the formation of three different currents.

Lenin supported the intransigent revolutionary position, that held that it was necessary to profit from the conflict in order to launch the proletarian revolution and transform the capitalist war between states into a revolutionary class war. The motion presented by the Russian, Polish, Swedish and Norwegian delegates stated, amongst other things, that ‘only after having been freed from the influence of bourgeois politics will there be any possibility of proletarian action for peace. But such a struggle can only be a revolutionary struggle. An action for peace cannot have as its sole aim achieving peace: given the maturity of social antagonisms such a struggle will become a struggle for socialism. The task of the socialist parties is to specify the action for peace by the proper means’ (Avanti!, 14 October 1915). This motion was rejected, with 12 votes for and 19 against, and the majority of the delegates supported a much less instransigent motion, which was more or less inspired by the Italian formula ‘né aderire, né sabotare‘.

Despite having been put in the minority (not something that revolutionaries lose much sleep over) Lenin maintained that the conference had carried out a positive function and had served to consolidate the internationalist spirit in that new direction symbolised by the initial step towards the constitution of the 3rd international.

‘At this conference the battle of ideas took place between the compact group of internationalists, the Marxist revolutionaries, and the wavering semi-Kautskyists, who formed the right wing of the conference. The consolidation of the group of Marxist revolutionaries was one of the most important events and one of the greatest successes of the conference. After an entire year of war, the only current of the International that has presented a well-defined resolution – and a project clearly based on it – and which has regrouped consistent Marxists from Russia, Poland, Latvia, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland and Holland, is the current represented by our party’.
 

History of the American Workers’ Movement

The continuation of the report covered events in the period immediately after the War of Independence, culminating in the victory over the mother country, Great Britain.

Obviously the phenomenon of greatest importance for the country as whole and for the working class in particular was economic development, which was soon to transform a people based almost exclusively on self-sufficient agriculture into a major consumer of industrial goods. It is a process that would take over a century to complete, even if a few islands of self-sufficiency would survive into the 20th century.

Although the War of Independence wasn’t a revolution, as the Americans like to triumphantly define it, it did nevertheless liberate the indigenous forces that the English occupation had kept in check in order to favour British economic and commercial development. These forces can be divided into three interdependent categories, all of which characterise the industrial revolution: market, transport, manufacture.

The development of North America was also accompanied by significant demographic movements, both westwards, with the crossing of the Alleghany Mountains and the colonisation of the Midwest, and from Europe, with the immigration of relatively high numbers of mostly proletarian immigrants; and from Africa, with masses of Africans deported to work on the southern plantations.

Manufacturing production developed first of all in the textile sector, mainly in New England, and for many years it was based above all on women and children’s labour. Other sectors that developed early, but on a less massive scale, was the iron and steel industry, other activities linked with clothing, and of course shipbuilding, which in actual fact was the only non-craft based activity right up to the 19th century. For a good part of the period under consideration, i.e. the 80 years between the two great American wars, the production of manufactured goods remained the concern of small and medium sized craft workshops.

The report then paused to consider the characteristic features of this world, which saw working alongside each other the now obsolete figures of the master-owner of the workshop, the journeyman, or specialised worker, who hoped eventually to become a master-owner himself, and the apprentice, who hoped one day to become a journeyman. A relaxed, patriarchal world whose general pace and rhythms of activity required long apprenticeships in order to learn the craft and about the tools of the trade which every specialised worker owned as his personal endowment.

That isn’t to say, particularly in the big cities and where the activities of a particular sector were concentrated, that conflicts between workers and owners didn’t arise. Proletarians quickly realised that struggles were a lot more effective if there were trade or factory associations, which even when prohibited arose and disappeared in great numbers during the last quarter of the 18th century. Even if for a long time these trade unions stayed the preserve of white adult male specialised workers, they would slowly cast off the features which had been handed down from the medieval guilds and corporations. Trade union associationism would experience many highs and lows in the period from the war of independence up until the 1820s, and this was mainly linked to fluctuations in the economy.

The condition of the working class during this period is generally considered bearable when compared with that of the European proletariat, but in fact every time there was a crisis the bosses were quick either to reduce wages to below basic survival levels, or resort to mass sackings, persecuting with every means at their disposal those proletarians who stood up to them.

All things considered on the social scale it wasn’t the slaves who were materially worst off, but rather the free coloured workers, who suffered the additional burden of being on the receiving end of the bullying behaviour of other workers, above all from the non-specialised workers among the recently arrived immigrants who were in competion with them for the worst jobs.
 

The Jewish Question

We concluded Saturday’s work with the exposition of another chapter on the Jewish question.

The ‘One True Yahweh’ movement of the 8th century before Christ marks the passage from Hebraism to absolute monotheism, as it has been passed down to the present day.

This movement determines not only the formation of the Jewish religion, but also the setting up of a politico-social apparatus with a clear and organic hierarchy. The movement’s struggle against the Baal (lords) of the neighbouring peoples turns Hebraism into a definite culture that stands out in ancient history as the perfect expression of monotheism.

Underlying this powerful super-structure is the notion that the Jewish people wouldn’t have meaning and direction without Jahweh, who has chosen them, the elect, to realise his historical design. Any form of deviation from this religious notion would mean provoking the sensibilities of a God who specifically defines himself as ‘jealous’.

Since historical materialism – leaving aside all edulcorated and almanac-type versions – sets great store by the outcome of all religions, in affirming its own… communism of the species, a movement such as this, which has had and continues to have a major influence today in human society, is not to be underestimated.

The molecular movement of social life, which manifests itself in culture and religion, cannot remain indifferent to the Jewish version of language and faith, which conceives a rigid organic nexus between ‘saying’ and ‘doing’; or as we would say today, between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’.

Dabar, in the Hebraic language is both ‘deed’ and ‘word’. Between the saying and the doing there isn’t that fracture so typical of class society and modern culture, by which you can also conceive of doing something with no theory and conceive theories that are extraneous to, or which reject contact with practical life. It is a valuable lesson, considering that in our interpretation classless communism will need to convert saying into doing and doing into saying, and in an organic way such as to abolish all types of separation and alienation.

If so it is, the entire journey that the ‘One True Jahweh’ movement has taken up to now is symptomatic of a continuous erosion of the old Jewish monotheism, up to today’s liberal-type faith in the individual, although it claims, not by chance, to be going back to the notion of man as ancient Hebraic religion would have produced him. Modern liberal thinking, especially the type that has emerged in America, is full of the Old and New Testament.
 

Course of the Capitalist Economy

We reconvened the following day with an update on the economic statistical data.

A number of numerical tables were displayed and explained, which will be published in our press in due course.

As well as describing the most recent progress of the crisis in different countries, the scope of our ongoing study is to show that the various national capitalisms that have existed historically and which exist in the world today are all following the same parallel path that Marxism plotted out for them: towards the general crisis of over-production.

Although seemingly opposed to each other and cloaked in different accents of social mystification, capitalism, both in the countries where it originally arose in its classic form and in those where modern industrial development arrived later, continues to present the same features, in terms of economic and social development, as it did in the last century.

In the prevailing confusion of bourgeois interpretations, including those which don’t blatantly aim to mislead the global proletariat, Marxism manages to register with the same historical curve, expressible both graphically and numerically, the apparent discontinuities of bourgeois politics. Democracy and fascism in Europe, Stalinism and post-Stalinism in Russia, Maoism and post-Maoism in China, state-planning and free trade in India: in our tables and curves, even though based exclusively on bourgeois sources, all of them are unified by laws that Marx detected and exhaustively described for every capitalism, from the almost exclusively British one that arose in his own day through to the planetary one, ready to die, that we have today.
 

Balance sheet of the Iranian ‘Revolution‘

This last of the reports on Iran followed two main lines of enquiry. On the one hand, an exposition of Iranian history up to the election of the current president, the first from outside the priestly ranks, on the other hand, the placing of Iran in the general framework of the Middle-East up to the time of the recent crisis and the global tension around the control of sources of oil and gas.

From the very beginning of the report Iran’s pivotal role was emphasised. It is an area which has suffered the consequences of both the first and second Gulf wars (1990-1991 and 2003-…); of the dismemberment of the Soviet Union with the re-entry into the deadly imperialist game of the great oil-bearing areas which used to be part of the ex-colossus; of the attack by the USA under the NATO banner on Afghanistan and its invasion, and finally from the overwhelming appearance on the industrial and financial scene of India and China, which are also seeking to control their sources of energy.

Politically, for Iran, the decade from 1990 to 2000 marks the definitive consolidation of the theocratic state, a factor that has also conditioned the formation of a strong national bourgeoisie.

After eight years of war, devastating not only for the economy but also for civil society, the proletariat, which had dared to take heaven by storm, is exhausted by the slaughter which has cut down young and old alike. But even though betrayed by the democratic and reformist parties, it will still find it within itself, after this terrible decade of profound crisis, to launch fierce industrial battles, particularly in 2004, 2005 and 2006 when a series of strikes would shake Iran to its very foundations. A change of government would be the response.

After the revolution the capital consisting of crown property and oil revenue becomes for the most part the property of parastatal industrial and financial organisations, controlled directly or indirectly by the high shiite clergy, which finds itself playing the role of first capitalist.

After having passed through the war, and two reforms which parcelled up the cultivatable land without being able to guarantee an acceptable livelihood to the small peasant farmers, landed property has been reconstituted for the most part as church property. The social strata of day labourers and poor farmers, of share-croppers and small landlords barely able to eke out an existence, who were absent as an autonomous movement during the revolution against the Shah, who were absent after the priests’ reform, has never given expression to an autonomous movement nor ever expressed itself as a significant force within the fabric of Iranian society.

In the 90s, the economy would be weighed down by inflation and an enormous public debt. Most young people were out of work and the slump in oil prices sharpened the crisis. Outside the energy sector there was no significant industrial development. The former, moreover, would become increasingly automated and cause a reduction in the requirement for non-specialised labour power and therefore cause further unemployment.

In 1995 the USA imposes commercial sanctions, and Iran becomes officially classified as a ‘rogue state’.

The failure of the cautious process of democratisation ‘from on high’ and Rafsanjani’s abortive attempts to liberalize politics lead on the one side to conflict within the ‘priests’ party’ and to a shift towards democracy on the social plane on the other, which is realized with the election of the reformist Khatami – August 1997 – as leader of the government. His platform consists of a commitment to continue the hitherto successful attempts to contain social pressure by ‘opening up democracy’.

The politico-religious leader who replaced the deceased Khomeini, the ayatollah Khamenei, remains at the top. The strict custodian of Shiite orthodoxy, he is the representative not only of Church landed property, but also of the financial and capitalist concentration owned by the Foundations (Bonyad), which control over 40% of the gross domestic product and employ around 5 million people out of a labour force of 40 million. The Foundations control the ‘Guardians of the Revolution’ (pasdaran), a militarised corps of 150,000 men, a third of the regular armed forces, which in its turn is backed up by more than 300,000 reservists (basiji) organised in paramilitary militias.

The state governmental apparatus, of truly Byzantine complexity, is the fruit of an unresolved and abortive revolution from above. The diarchy of power devised as a consequence has proved to be just as functional at maintaining social control as the western ‘democracies’, but also reveals the contradictions within a state whose foundations are actually fully capitalist.

On the domestic front, Khatami’s “reformists” win a parliamentary majority, but violent repression of proletarian and petty-bourgeois opposition becomes increasingly intense. The mounting social pressure, spurred on by the demand for greater democracy, is kept firmly under control by the religious militias. At a formal level the right to associate and to strike is recognised, but the authorities clamp down hard on organisations that invoke these rights: and when the populist government is elected in 2005, things don’t improve.

Khatami’s political failure is a natural consequence of his failure to raise the general standard of living amongst the city-dwelling masses. Although re-elected for a second term in 2001 it is with a much reduced majority, and in 2003 the ‘conservatives’ regain the majority in the Majlis on the wave of popular discontent. In 2005, Ahamadi-Nejad becomes the first ‘lay’ president of the post-war period.

This triple control of Parliament, Presidency and Council of the Guardians of the Revolution, centralises political power. The dualism of previous years is brought to an end, and not with a victory of the priests. For the derelict Iranian bourgeoisie, the dictatorship of the conservative party is perhaps a positive thing, because finally all power is concentrated in a one party dictatorship resembling the European ones of the thirties, or of Argentine Peronism. And although subject to the religious leaders in a formal sense, it is more ‘lay’ than ‘theocratic’; certainly more so than the previous reformist regime.

Despite Iran being a primary oil producer, the domestic mechanisms for setting a ceiling on market prices mean the country spends a tremendous amount on acquiring petrol. In response to the consequent energy shortfall the nuclear programme has been resolutely pursued. Formerly got underway in 1990 with assistance from the Soviet Union, stopped and then started again in 2003 under the reformist government, it was then stopped again under pressure from the USA.

As regards Iran’s ‘conventional sources’, three projects centred on three strategic areas have been set up. The first regards the collecting of gas from the Iranian Caspian Sea and the channelling towards the gulf not only of Russian and Turkmen gas and oil but also quotas of Kazakh oil, making the selling of crude oil to South East Asia at lower prices than present a commercial proposition. The second concerns the exploitation of the oil-fields in the South of Iraq bordering the Iranian fields (providing a pretty good explanation for the Sunni-Sh’ia conflict in Iraq, incidentally, and for the stance taken by the United States to the Iranian presence in the region) and the third and final one involves the project to supply the natural gas extracted from Iran’s enormous South Pars gas field, situated in the middle of the Persian Gulf, to India and Pakistan via the so-called ‘Peace Pipeline’. Ferociously opposed by the USA the new pipeline will channel the gas (whose only means of transport is through the pipelines, unlike oil which can be transported by other means) towards its Asian trade competitors, and in the opposite direction to the Iran-Turkey pipeline, which is linked in with the ‘Nabucco’ pipeline project to channel gas across from the Caspian to Europe.

Up to now the United States has responded by cutting off Iran from the international financial system by preventing American banks from supporting Iranian operations in dollars (investments and credit) a lead which Swiss, Dutch and English banks have started to follow, and also by prohibiting American firms, the leaders in the field, from exporting the liquification and re-gassification technology and equipment needed to enable the transportation of gas. The latter will particularly affect operations in the South Pars gas field, and therefore the Asian market.

And the latter is part of the history of today.
 

The Military Question

The report presented is mainly a reworking of a major party study that appeared earlier in Il Progamma Comunista (in issue no.23, 1961 through to No. 13, 1966). The current aim, apart from revisiting conclusions reached in the previous analysis, is to extend and complete certain chapters. This is very much in line with our traditional method of working, which considers all of our work as ‘work in progress’, that is, not completed once and for all but as work which lends itself to further amplification and improvement. Like fishermen, we weave into our nets the dialectical knots needed to avoid leakages of energy during the future violent and revolutionary inundation; and by patiently repairing the damaged stitching, once so solid but today broken, we steadily strengthen the overall fabric.

However, we mustn’t confuse the question of armaments with the wider issue of violence or the military question, of which it is but one aspect.

The work’s theoretical approach is to study the evolution of the military question in relation to the successive modes of production, linked in their turn to the development of the productive forces and with a corresponding military organisation.

Our premise is that violence arises as a result of material and economic causes. Rejecting all facile pacifist sentimentalism, or bellicose aestheticism, our starting point must necessarily be the same as it was for our teachers, who summed up the dialectical core element in the following terms: ‘Force, rather than dominating the economic order, was compelled to serve it‘ (Engels) and ‘Violence is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new society. It is itself an economic power‘ (Marx). It’s a matter of identifying the successive concrete historical resolutions of this complex dynamic.

Our starting point is the function of violence in the epoch of primitive communism and the transition to civil or class society.

The small human communities were forced out of necessity to unite together and as often as not this happened by means of force. Knowledge derived from the subject communities would be absorbed by the victors, and eventually the prisoners of war, who previously had simply been killed, or even eaten, were allowed to survive, reduced into slavery and their labour power utilised. But ‘Before slavery became possible, a certain level of production had to be reached along with a certain level of inequality of distribution‘.

Classical Greece offers us the first complete picture of the rise and fall of a slave society, which had a very slow pace of life because technology was still very primitive, with a correspondingly slow pace of productivity. The permanent conflict between the agricultural aristocracy and the wealthy merchants and ship-builders was Greece’s great weakness and the main cause of its lack of unity. This cannot be said of Rome whose economic power was based on widespread agriculture: no important conflicts arose within the landed aristocracy, within the Senate. Rome’s later rise to Mediterranean power was enabled by the contemporary decline of the ones preceding it.

A description was given of the hoplite phalanx, the basis of the military power of the Greek city state. The epoch of battles between soldiers on horseback, characteristic of the archaic age, in which soldiers dismounted in order to throw their spears and fight hand to hand, runs roughly from 1200 to 800 B.C. The period of the hoplite infantry, coinciding with the rise of the city-state, runs from 650 to 338 B.C., date of the Greek defeat at the hands of the more efficient Macedonian phalanx. During the period of the hoplite phalanx, war is no longer a personal duel between rich horsemen but a broader more collective struggle, an open field battle of entire, well-organised communities, indicating an increased development of the productive forces. The speaker went on to describe the hoplite panoply and battle equipment, their usage and their limitations, then their characteristic battle formations and tactics, their eventual overtaking by the Macedonian phalanx, and the function of the different units after the introduction of the cavalry. The structure of the hoplite phalanx quickly spread throughout the Mediterranean basin and was successively modified by the Carthaginians and by the Romans as armies became ever more massive and the empire expanded.

The general historical and economic development of slave society in Rome becomes characterised by the continuous effort to organise its available energies and the military forms necessary to guarantee a constant flow of slaves, who eventually end up being used in almost every realm of productive activity. This gradually undermines the constitutive basis of ancient Rome, i.e., the small peasant proprietor, who when the need arose abandoned his fields and transformed himself into a legionary. As military duties become more and more onerous, the latter was reduced to poverty, losing his possessions.

Reference was made to the enormous number of slaves deported after each war of conquest.

The economic reforms that Rome introduced to deal with this immense effort were many and various, ranging from the earliest one, as far back as the 6th century B.C, under Servius Tullius, to that of Gaius Marius, who introduced the first professional army. From then on a permanent military force could be counted on, but gradually it would become an army that was Roman only in name, composed in fact of barbarian elements, and of ex-defeated enemies right up to the rank of general.

Many exclusively military reforms were also introduced, ranging from those needed to defeat the Carthaginians in great pitched battles, mirroring always increased productive powers, to those of Marius involving the speeding up tactical manoeuvres. In the first imperial age there were as many as 28 legions, adding up to around 150,000 men. Soldiers were paid regularly but with varying ‘labour contracts’ according to whether imperial guardsmen (praetorians), whose pay was higher and whose length of service was shorter (16 years), normal legionaries on a 20 year contract and paid less, or auxiliaries, who had to serve for even longer and were paid less still.

The economic power needed to maintain this huge war machine was ensured by Caesar Augustus with the institution of the ‘military treasury’, which imposed a percentage tax on important economic operations: 1% on auction sales, 4% on sales of slaves, and so on.

But the crisis of this society based on slavery became ever more acute, and even the 75 legions, that is, around 900,000 men, which Constantine had at his disposal weren’t enough to save the decadent empire.

* * *

After the last report, on the late Sunday afternoon, the meeting drew to an official close. For those comrades who didn’t have to rush off immediately, a visit to the excavations at the Roman city of Luni, close to our meeting venue, had been organised.