The Italian Communist Party is the largest CP in the West. At the last election it polled more than eight million votes, it has deep roots both in the working class, particularly through its trade-union arm, and among intellectuals of all kinds, school and university teachers, writers, cineastes, playwrights, and directors. Its theoretical level has been accounted among the highest in the West - Gramsci, perhaps the example militant worker/intellectual, was one of its founders and in any Italian until recently, all 'modern' and "progressive' theatre clubs had some connection with the party. Yet it is in precisely these areas, of party and electoral politics, of the trade union world, and of the world of cultural and intellectual affairs, that the Maoists have attacked and continue to attack the Party.
It is possible that the next government will be a left-centre coalition (not, as at present, a centre-left one), with the majority held by the Communist Party (PCI). Successive centre-left governments - the present one is the third in two years - have been quite incapable of resolving the difficulties presented by continuing strikes in universities and factories, by ever larger and more militant demonstrations (the most recent and bloody being the welcome for Nixon), and by the general cynicism towards the 'fair' functioning of institutions like banks, law-courts, and hospitals. The government's only answer has been to increase the numbers of police, to equip them with a more repressive technology, and to grant them greater freedom in deciding when to open fire. On the Nixon demonstration, the public had its first view of the police's new space-age equipment: steel helmets with visors of plexiglass and leather chinstraps, long jackets weighted down with metal strips along the hems, and, a final touch Cecil DeMille, long, narrow, centurion-shaped shields of transparent plexiglass, with the word POLIZIA inscribed slantwise across them in letters of gold. The most recent in a long series of shootings by the police on unarmed crowds was the killing of two and injuring of three hundred at Battipaglia, a small town south of Naples, sace. it iis dia to close act summera king place. It was due to close this summer, would have been the sixth factory to close down in the town over the last year or so. The best reply the PCI could make was to call for a mere three hour national work-stoppage next day, plus their familiar demand for disarming he police.
With regard to the Party's relations witt trade-unions, it would seem, at least to us in England, that the Maoists had less justification for attack. French and Italian trade-unions, though smaller than English ones, have always been considered more highly politicised, and can be mobilised as much for a strike against the Vietnam War, as for shorter hours or better working conditions. This is true. There is also a difference, however, between political perspective, and revolutionary political perspective. The PCI has naturally never taken anarcho-syndicalistic line that the trade-unions could be the spearhead of the revolution, but it has also recently failed to press more than economistic demands through its union organizations. It has failed to advance the economic argument beyond the well-known levels of more pay, less hours and better conditions. Progressive industrialists, such as Agnelli (Fiat) and Olivetti, more than capable of absorbing such demands, of even granting such revolutionary ones as regular workers' assemblies factories, and "participation' in the running of them.
At a recent meeting of a group typical of many which have sprung up throughout Italy, the Student-Workers Committee of Casoria (a small town near Naples with many Large factories), there was a continual insistence by the PCI member of the group on limiting the group's programme purely economistic demands, on basing all energies on trying to get the work-shifts reduced without loss of material benefit. Together with this, for the benefit of the workers present, went continual self-denigration by the PCI speaker, a maths lecturer, of 'us intellectuals, an apparently progressive move away from the kind of intellectual sterility mentioned above. This line, however, was attacked, and rightly, by several other members of the group. could see was nothing more than State Capitalist, and that this self-denigration was both a disguised form of arrogance and a deliberate attempt to simplity a complet situation ordent reeariy workers. present clearly expected more than this from students who talk so much about a total revolution, but also felt just the kind uncertainty when confronted with articulate party intellectuals which the PCI man, apparently, was trying to abolish. The opposing group, while not all Maoist, was reacting against the line of the PCI, impelled by the critical atmosphere which has arisen on the left because of the events in China.
The Chinese Cultural Revolution, indeed, is the had the greatest impact in What the bourgeoisie calls "culture", in Italy as in any other Western country, is basically its own class-distorted interpretation and selection of History and Art, imposed on the mass of the population through the educational system, and leaving it, at the end of school, ignorant, angry, and afraid. This 'culture" here to be imposed with particular stupidity and rigidity. The exams are eternal and mnemonic, from primary to postgraduate level; all elements of 'pop' culture have had to serve a stiff trial period at the hands of the marketeers and official, hypocritical Morality; and the Church, the political parties, and the advertisers have combined to show a united front towards even the partial criticism of Italy's most sacred, most suffocating, and most backward institution, The Family. Signs of sporadic tevolt were already evident in early 1966, with the setting up in Milan of a mixed Hippy-type Commune on the outskirts of the city, and the appearance here and there of the first, courageous boys to wear long hair. These feelings, however, could not long remain in Italy on this individualistic. apolitical level, and it is not hard to see how easy it is for a young Italian to find his own parallels to the targets Mao was trying to destroy in the tremendous upheavals of 1966/68. The Italian Maoists, then, have particularly concentrated on attacking the kind of "intellectualism' which puts theory in one compartment, and practise in another. Their inst the PCI, aber of Party wide patrimony cinema clubs, which created only a self-satisfied cultural elite, convinced, because it saw a film on Revolution, that it was thus helping to Make Revolution.
though ver-simplified ling all culture bourgeois, and so not making the crucial distinction between a culture's content, which is as variegated and many-levelled as any society's class-structure, and its control and presentation which, in any bourgeois society, will certainly be in the hands of and for the benefit ultimately of the bourgeoisie.
Who are the Maoists? A year ago, apart from the official Communist Party of Chinese inspiration, the PCDI (founded 1966), one could have found the majority with Maoist sympathies in the vast, heterogeneous; nation-wide Movimento Studentesco (Students Movement). The Movement was then as now engaged in constant contestation with the authorities and the police over questions of University and secondary-school reform. In February 1968, came the radicalizing experience of the Movement in the Battle of Valle' three-hour battle with the police. For the first time, students fired back with their own guns.
The chief organization so far of such militants is the Unione Dei Marxisti Leninisti D'Italia. It has sections in Milan, Florence and Rome, and the Naples section is shortly to declare itself. There is constant criticism and self-criticism within all the sections, and a seriousness and secrecy which reflects the growing atmosphere in Italy of repression and fear.
Potentially, every young Italian today, male or female, worker or student, is a Maoist. All which suffocates him or her, be it Party bureaucracy, snotty-nosed academicism,, the myths of masculine sexual virility and feminine passivity, priests, mothers, bosses, teachers, prostitutes he can find included but revalued in the vision of society revealed by the social theory and practise of Mao Tse-Tung. Of course, the little red book alone is not going to cause the country's mandarins any less of sleep. What they fear is its application in practise, really building organizations from within the worker and peasant masses so that finally the organizations are simply Of The But the time to build in seems frighteningly short, everyone talks of the need for speed, for in the wings stands the shadow of the second Fascist Italy