[GM94] The Spring 2006 Meeting at Parma

On January 28^th and 29^th of this year, we were back in Parma for the first party meeting there in almost half a century. The last one was in 1958, and none of the comrades who attended that meeting are still with us today, an absence which has taken its toll. However, anyone who needs the person of a leader in order to trace the party’s programmatic or organisational continuity obviously hasn’t grasped the essential spirit of communism, or what it really means to militate as a communist; isn’t free of the bourgeoisie’s vile individualist, democratic and electoral ideologies which surround us on all sides, and from which only the party is immune.

The way we conduct our research isn’t based on the pitting the opinions of individuals and groups within the party against each other, rather it is a convergent historical research based on the firm foundation of our Marxist doctrine. We don’t, therefore, have a congress rule book in which debate is prohibited; given our methods and our aims, we simply have no use for it.

In a quiet, well-lit venue chosen by local comrades, with a marvellous view over a lovely snow-covered park, we were able to carry out our work in our usual calm and focused way. Almost all our groups were represented; unfortunately our French and some of our Italian comrades couldn’t attend because of train stoppages due to the snow. Even those expected on the Friday evening didn’t arrive until the following morning. The logistics for the visiting comrades accommodation went very well, and it was good to spend time in Parma, a beautiful, ancient city with a rich proletarian tradition.

The morning of the Saturday was spent planning the meeting, reading mail from comrades unable to attend, discussing completed work, exchanging materials, planning publications and making arrangements to intervene with our propaganda in current workers’ struggles.

The sittings on the Saturday afternoon and the Sunday morning were dedicated to listening to the six reports which had been prepared by various comrades. What follows is a brief resume of these reports, which will appear in full in our review Comunismo.
 

American Workers’ Movement

To begin with we listened to the report on the workers’ movement in the most capitalistically advanced and powerful country in the world, the United States of America. It was the first instalment in a new ongoing study embarked upon by the party.

The speaker started with a description of the peculiarities of the colonisation process in North America: unlike what happened in the Central and Southern parts of the continent, there were no riches to be plundered, except those produced by the hand of man. Thus from the outset the first colonies needed low cost labourers, and lots of them. The problem was resolved to begin with by using bonded labour and the deportation of masses of convicts. Then there was a preference was for using low cost slaves imported from Africa who after a few years would repay their costs with their labour; although unlike bonded labour they weren’t then freed, but remained slaves for life.

In a predominantly agricultural country, manufactured goods were produced almost exclusively by artisans, and the only places where a high concentration of workers could be found was in the naval shipyards, and on the ships themselves. In the 17^th Century an urban proletariat composed of ex-slaves, workers arrived from Europe, and freed slaves slowly started to form. Throughout the rest of the century though the predominant form of manual labour was slave and bonded labour, and inevitably the form in which economic struggles expressed themselves was as violent revolts; in which whites and blacks often fraternised against their common class enemy.

The War of Independence, which broke out in defence of the interests of the possessing classes, saw the poorest classes (as usual) providing the troops which would fight against, and defeat, the English armies. If their expectation was better working and living conditions in the future, in the end, it would be the bosses (as usual) who would reap the benefits of the blood which the proletariat had spilled on the battlefields. The war, and the 1787 Constitution, would prompt the birth of the Federal State which in a few decades it would become a great industrial and military power.

For the working class, the real confrontation with the Bourgeois was yet to begin.
 

Origin of the Trade Unions in Italy

The Allied landings in Sicily and the South in 1943 and 1944, and the dissolution of the fascist trade unions and corporations, prompted the formation of the Uffici del Lavoro, the Offices of Labour, by the occupying forces; their aim, to use them as a bulwark against the resumption of class struggle. Needless to say they weren’t able to prevent the birth of new trade union organisations, and the Allies and the Badoglio government would resort to trying to keep them under control.

In November 1943, the Chamber of Labour was reformed in Naples, then in other major towns in the area and beyond, as at Salerno, Foggia and Potenza. The workers of the Province of Naples and a few other districts created the Southern Secretariat of the General Confederation of Labour (CGL) and nominated Enrico Russo as its Secretary General. The CGL, putting itself at the head of the class struggle during those months, saw a sharp rise in its membership not only in Naples but throughout the South.

The classist orientation of the new union would bring it into conflict with the Italian Communist Party (PCI) which was advocating instead unity with the other classes to achieve “national liberation”. Thus in Bari, at the start of 1944, the PCI created the CGIL, the adjective ’Italian’ being included in opposition to the CGL in Naples.

On February 20th, 1944, the CGL managed to obtain the Allies permission to publish its newspaper Battaglie Sindacali. On the same day it held its 1^st National Congress at Salerno with 30 Chambers of Labour participating. The CGIL of Bari, which was trying to prevent delegates from other districts attending, was absent.

In his speech to the Congress, Russo spoke out against any trade union truce and said: “the collapse of fascism doesn’t mean to say conditions have been created which will take us, via ’progressive democracy’ and without class struggle, directly from capitalist to socialist society”.

At the Congress, the motion for unification with the CGIL in Bari was carried, although in practice the two organisations would afterwards retain their separate identities. Nicola Di Bartolomeo, who was another important leader of the CGL and a trotskist practising entryism in the Italian Socialist party of Proletarian Unity, would also declare against recognising any programme of national reconstruction.

Obviously in the Neapolitan CGL there were other positions as well, such as Gentili’s and the Action Party’s, with the latter advocating participation in the war effort alongside the Committee of National Liberation (CLN).

In order to offset the Salerno Congress, the Campania branch of the PCI spoke on “national unity against Hitlerism”. When Togliatti arrived, he would launch the alliance with the monarchy and say to the workers, as reported in Unità on 2 April 1944, that they didn’t need any “so-called class interest” to inspire them, national interest would do. Togliatti would even try to personally win Russo over to the ’national unity’ policy, and, having failed, the PCI would embark on a policy of attacking and denigrating the CGL; and attacking Russo, who by now had adopted the positions of the Communist Left, from which he had distanced himself in 1936 at the time of the Spanish Civil War. Finally in June 1944, with the signing of the Pact of Rome, the PCI, the PSIUP and the Christian Democrats would create the CGIL from on high; a patriotic union from its inception and mirroring the new inter-imperialist relations.

In Comunismo, no 1, we wrote “the formally free trade unions which were formed during the 2^nd World War are the continuators of the State trade-unionism of fascism, and have adopted Mussolini’s model. Their function is to keep the working class tied to national solidarity”. In Article 1 of the CGIL’s statutes we read: “the CGIL is a national organisation of workers who (…) consider an allegiance to liberty and democracy as the permanent foundation for trade-union activity. The CGIL bases its programme and activity on the constitution of the Italian Republic”.
 

Italic history and ideology

Without permanent modernisation there would be no capitalism. Countries like ’little Italy’, which entered into the infernal circles of the world market later than the others, would bring all their backwardness and contradictions with them.

If Italy certainly taught the plutocrats a lot (they who had followed developments there with ill-disguised interest, before declaring war on it), and if fascism – as everyone would now admit – served as vanguard and model defender against sovietism, nowadays every country which wishes to emerge from a state of ’under-development’ in order to modernise risks finding itself in the same quandary as Italy when it was in a similar position.

A ’model’ country then? No, rather a country which mirrors the contradictions produced by world imperialism, which nowadays likes to celebrate its beanos under the much abused tag of ’globalisation’.

The ’modernisers’ in the field of State policy talk of “neo-feudalism” and “supra-nationality” but they are just two sides of the same coin and are certainly nothing new.

The various bourgeoisies need, both practically and ideologically, to tackle the devastating consequences of capitalist ’modernity’, but their problem is to do it in such a way that they can stay head of their competitors, protect themselves and their capital, and at the same time not inadvertently allow the wolf of proletarian revolution to cross from the other side of the river of history.
 

Iran: Balance-sheet of the “Islamic revolution”

The continuation of the work on Iran took up from the liquidation of Mossadeq’s experiment in democracy, and covered the period from the return of the Shah, from his brief exile, to his fall during the 1979 ’revolution’.

This period, of over twenty years duration, continued to be marked by deep social rifts and upheavals on the political and economic levels, and by crucial changes in the balance of power in the area.

In 1956 there had been the Suez crisis, in 1967 the Arab-Israeli War had shaken the Near East and in March 1971 Great Britain had announced the expiring of treaties with the Gulf Sheikhs and the withdrawal of their troops. This marks the end of the 150 year old Pax Britannica, motivated by London’s need to protect the route to the East Indies, and the definitive establishment in the area of American hegemony, with the opportunity for Iran to control the Persian Gulf and form a powerful army, equipped by the most technically advanced weapons of the time and lavishly financed from the proceeds of the oil revenue.

And yet in the 1970s this huge arsenal would prove useless against the domestic threat to the regime, popular insurrection and the conflicts breaking out in the cities.

Against this backdrop, the Shah, who kept total power in his hands and who had installed a rigid system of social control guaranteed by the all-powerful political police, the Savak, was able in the 1960s to introduce a far-reaching programme of social reforms ’from above’ with the intention of placing Iran amongst the top industrialised countries within just twenty years.

Meanwhile the Shah would assign the production of Iranian crude oil to a consortium of eight foreign companies, thereby reinforcing relations with the West and ensuring the influx of considerable sums of capital into the State coffers.

In 1961, in order to rationalise agricultural policy and to uproot the phenomenon of the latifundium, the agrarian reform – dubbed the ’White revolution’ – was enacted. With this reform, and in line with his father Reza’s policy, the Shah wanted to hit the powerful Shiite clergy as well. By depopulating the countryside, and favouring the abnormal process of urbanisation which in less than twenty years would multiply the population of some Iranian cities tenfold, it was however soon obvious the reform had failed.

The progressive failure of the agrarian reform had the effect of further accelerating the programme of industrial reform, with forced investments and with the development of commercial relations. However the nation’s political and administrative structure was totally incapable of dealing with such profound changes in the economy, and so was the national infrastructure. On top of this the corruption of the small dominant class further accentuated the social divide.

In 1973 there was the ’first global oil crisis’ as it came to be known, with a 600% hike in oil prices. Iran’s oil income would rise from 200 million to 20 billion dollars per year. This was an enormous figure which would be completely used up in an enormous spending spree.

When in the mid-70s the revenue derived from oil sales started to drop off, the failure of the pharaonic industrial projects would lead to a dramatic increase in unemployment and widespread discontent amongst the commercial middle-classes of the bazaar, who would later play a crucial role in the Islamic ’involution’ in 1979.

In this feverish period the economic and financial crisis would sharpen the already accentuated political crisis and increasingly fuel the social struggle within the country. Against a backdrop of major demonstrations, massacres, dissolution of the monarchical state structures and paralysis of economic activity, society as a whole proved unable to emerge from the chaos. In a situation where the prerequisites for a revolutionary solution were lacking, it would be proletarian struggles in the oil refineries and the industrial zones of the big cities – struggles which were fought in defence of decent working conditions and living standards – which would deal the coup de grâce to the monarchy.

What was missing was the classist conduct of the struggle for the political ends of the proletariat, rather than for a change of regime to liquidate a corrupt administration or breath new life into a hitherto impotent bourgeoisie by substituting the Shah for the bourgeois Baktiar, or with a wavering Bani Sadr. A Communist orientation, which neither the ex-Stalinist Tudeh, which had become reformist and democratic from the time of its support for the Mossadeq government, nor the insurrectionary groups which had reformed from its collapse, could ever have guaranteed.

The workers’ councils, the Shora, were born from the formidable Isfahan and Tabriz strikes and the struggles in the oil-fields, but when counter-reaction appeared in the guise of Islamic priests – the inevitable outcome, the thermidor of the courageous proletarian movement in Iran – they were transformed into “Islamic councils”, becoming transmission belts for the ideology of the mullahs.
 

The History of Modern Iraq

Today, after all of Washington’s official justifications for unleashing the war against Iraq have proved to be false, the real reasons are emerging, even appearing in the bourgeois press: “Bush’s war had three aims – wrote ’Limes’ in its December 2005 issue – One, to set up military bases in Iraq to dominate the Gulf area and beyond. Two, to establish a relatively democratic government in Iraq to act as a paradigm for the Islamic world as whole. Three, to ensure control of Iraqi oil reserves”.

In three years the Gulf War has produced a situation of seemingly perpetual civil war in Iraq; a war with no way out similar to the one in Algeria, where a ten year war between terrorist gangs and the bourgeois State has left a hundred thousand dead, mainly consisting of proletarians and the disinherited poor, and where a generalised climate of terror has been created which has killed off all attempts by the proletariat to launch a counter-attack against oppression and exploitation.

The American occupation force in Iraq, which has already caused tens of thousands of civilian deaths, is being fought by a well-organised and battle-hardened resistance which is responding to the generalised repression by intensifying its attacks on civilian and military targets.

In an increasingly complicated and difficult situation the occupiers, in imitation of Saddam Hussein’s policy, are working to intensify ethnic and religious differences; thus they hope to divide the proletariat and goad the various communities into fighting amongst themselves and thereby reinforcing their role as “mediators”. But the cracks which have been opened up at the heart of the Iraqi nation have widened into an abyss, threatening the occupiers themselves.

Even the highly propagandised “democratic elections”, and then the almost clandestine approval of the constitution by the first freely elected parliament (which has been forced to meet in the so-called “green zone”, guarded by occupying troops), haven’t brought about a normalisation of the situation. As each day goes by, more and more corpses fill the mortuaries and mass graves; the American army, meanwhile, on the very day Parliament opened, would launch its most powerful offensive since the start of the war against the city of Samarra, situated a few miles to the north of Baghdad.

In this tragic situation the Iraqi proletariat is fighting tirelessly to rebuild independent organisations able to defend the class against the government, the armies of occupation, the guerrillas, the white militias and the criminal gangs. The same can not be said for the anti-American guerrillas, who certainly have allies in many of the States in competition with Washington.

It is significant that right in the middle of the Iranian nuclear crisis the news emerged that U.S. diplomats would soon be heading to Teheran to seek the collaboration of the “rogue State” in managing the Iraqi problem. The bourgeois States may be enemies but they are allied in their struggle against the proletariat.

The Iraqi working-class is alone, and asks the international proletarian movement for help. But the working class in the most fully industrialised countries, the only ones able to support their Iraqi brothers and sisters in a practical way, can’t do so because it lacks those instruments which would allow it to organise and channel the devastating power its possesses: the class trade unions and the revolutionary political party.
 

The Jewish Question

Anti-Jewish hatred was able to attribute a identity to a German bourgeoisie which hitherto had been unable to come up with one credible enough to fight and die for. In the whirlpool of capitalist production not only the identity of individuals is menaced but that of nations as well. And what of their identity nowadays?

Every “culture”, i.e., every class, tries to maintain its identity intact, but the “permanent revolution” of the productive forces constantly corrodes and damages it.

It isn’t just hatred which underlies anti-semitism, but also the more or less clear knowledge of its own inconsistency masked by the desire for power.

“Ideologies” are limited by their excessive simplification of the complex social reality which they reflect, and democratic culture in turn seems unable to move beyond simple platitudes.

What is stopping current bourgeois circles from going beyond the stereotypical anti-semitic formulas?

To get to the bottom of the identity crisis would mean no longer trusting in mystifying formulations such as the “banality of Evil”. We cannot reduce ourselves to saying that Nazism was imprisoned by the “banality of Evil”. We cannot say that it committed massacres and exterminations “inevitably”, and without any plausible reason, because it was blinded by the demon of destruction and just leave it at that.