rilla strikes, general strikes, barricades and riots; a minority government internally divided and apparently unable to find parliamentary allies; bombings, plots and financial scandals: even from the press's meagre, ill-informed and trivialised reporting of Italy, its image stands in dramatic contrast to the rest of capitalist Europe. But how are we to distinguish fundamental contradictions from ephemeral phenomena?
THE RULING CLASS: CAN IT GO ON IN THE OLD WAY MUCH LONGER?
The fundamental problems which confront the Italian ruling class are not hard to identify -indeed they could not be missed. Some, such as those represented by the South and the Vatican, are specifically Italian. The exploited and decaying South and Islands may have provided the limitless supply of cheap labour which made the "economic miracle of the fifties and early sixties possible; but advanced capitalism requires an expanding domestic market, and certainly cannot in the long run flourish with 40% of the national population and 50% of the national territory constituting a huge "underdeveloped" area. Again, the immense economic and political/ ideological power of the Vatican is by no means an unmixed blessing; though it may have played a vital role in maintaining the Christian Democrats in power. For it in fact constitutes a major obstacle to the solution of a number of fundamental problems: most notably, the archaic socio-economic structures of the South which modern capitalism must tear down are also a principal bastion of the Vatican's power.
Other major contradictions confronting the Italian ruling class are not unique to Italy-though their combination of course is. Like Japan, Italy has a state apparatus, police, bureaucracy and legal system whose structure and whose personnel were largely formed under fascism. The disadvantages of this are obvious-a grossly inflated and absurdly inefficient bureaucracy, massive corruption (Just in the last couple of years public figures involved in major financial scandals have included the mayor of Rome, the mayor of Palermo, one cardinal, two ministers, the chairman of the atomic energy programme, and the Governor of the Bank ic to auntontoand r higher incomes, etc. Like France during the Fourth Republic, Italy now has a permanent governmental crisis, and the fear of a "Gaullist" solution is naturally a constant preoccupation of the left. Like France again, Italy has a huge communist party-in membership indeed some five times the size of the French one; moreover, unlike the PCF, the PCI has shown itself ready and able, within certain limits, to move with, encourage and coordinate working class militancy. Finally, like all capitalist countries, Italy needs to expand its national economy and its industrial base; yet since the mid-sixties capital investment has been grossly inadequate, and the result has been failure to run the economy at full capacity. Government policy has consisted of a series of timid deflationary measures. In such a situation, Italian capitalism needs desperately to control wages nignuy, and une industrial conflicts of the autumn of 1969 must be seen in this context.
CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATS How capable is the Italian ruling class of finding solutions to these problems-problems which are not simply external but which invest and structure that ruling class itself? Before any answer can be even attempted to this question, we must look at the main political instrument of bourgeois power in post-war Italy-the Christian Democrat Party (DC). Since the break-up in 1946, at the start of the cold war, of the coalition which had been forged in the wartime resistance to fascism, the Christian Democrats have been continuously in power. They have governed with a series of allies, at first mainly on its right, and more recently on its left-the so-called "centre-left" formula. In this latter phase (since 1963) it has had the support of Italian social-democracyPCI stretches right across the social and political spectrum via urban petty bourgeoisie and peasants, via the central bloc of the big bourgeoisie itself, to the landowners and political bosses of the South, though sections of big bourgeoisie support the Liberal party on the right and the Social Democratic party on the "left". The weight of the Vatican in cementing and swaying this bloc of forces needs no emphasising. Is this organisation capable of effecting the transformations which are needed by Italian capitalism? It is difficult to believe so.
NEW BLOC Yet what should we conclude from this? The most popular conclusion is that a new bloc will have to be formed. In concrete terms, this means the eventual inclusion of the PCI, which takes 26% of the national vote, in a "new majority" coalition. Such a prospect is certainly invoked explicitly enough by the "modern" wing of Italian capitalism and of the DC, is hinted at by certain Vatican sources, and is fervently believed in by important, and probably dominant, sections of the FCI leadership. Moreover there is a superficial plausibility in it. FIAT, the Vatican, and the Moro wing of the DC with its trade-union left, might seem strong enough forces to form a new bloc with an "integrated" PCI and the social democrats, and to shed the Christian Democrat right=the reactionary Southern bosses and landowners, and those sections of small capital, of the petty bourgeoisie and of the traditional intellectuals (Southern priests and lawyers, bureaucrats, etc.) who were not prepared to ollow. Then the way would be open for a 0uG to a Bie neared Dosic enumerated above.
However, this "rational solution" is in fact a pipe-dream, or rather it is a myth-which has a very precise function. The fact is that on closer inspection, the "modern" forces have very little substance. FIAT has been the foremost proponent for a decade and a half of company unionism and iron fist polic gainst strikes. The Vatican, by all evidence is a thoroughiv conservative concern. and it is hard to take "modern" hints as anything other than its customary bet-hedging. Is it eriously possible to believe that an organisa ion unable to come to terms with the Pill can do so with Communism? The Moro group has been ousted from any serious positions of power within the Christian Democratic party. But these are only minor considerations. More importantly, it is necessary to be quite clear that it is sheer idealism to reduce bourgeois politics to the rational interests of "capitalism"" in the abstract. The process whereby economic factors are ultimately determinant is a very complex one, in which in specific conjunctures the dominant factors may well be themselves political, social, or ideological. The fact is that the Christian Democrat party, despite its internal contradictions, has been the most successful bourgeois party in the world since the war. Quite unchallenged in power, it is comfortably the largest party (half as large again as the PCI even after its reduced vote at the last general elections). It stands in the centre of a wide spectrum of potential allies, and whereas during the fifties it was confronted with a communist/socialist front commanding 40% of the electorate, it now has against it fewer than 30% (the combined forces of the PCI and the little PSIUP which can to all intents and purposes be considered an appendage of the PCI). Moreover, in Italy more than in any other advanced capitalist port consistently over the last twenty-five years while its membership has declined and its allies have been detached from it.
The real function of the "modern solution" is as a myth to ensure that the PCI remains within the system. So long as the PCI leaders have their eyes firmly fixed on the possibilities of participation in a coalition government, there is little danger that they will endanger such possibilities by extra-parliamentary adventures. Of course, this is an over-simplification, since the myth is genuinely believed by many of its proponents, and is not simply manipulated as the way I have presented it might suggest. But it functions as a myth whatever the intentions behind it.
THE EXPLOITED CLASSES: WILL THEY BE PREPARED TO GO ON IN THE OLD WAY MUCH LONGER? The expanding industrial working class, followed by numerous other categories of employees, has shown itself decreasingly willing in the last couple of years to accept the logic of the bosses. The three trade-unions federations have achieved a remarkable degree of unity, after years of mutual hostility fostered by every device of the ruling class; but the national wage campaigns and massive general strikes of the autumn of 1969 should be seen against the backdrop of two years of escalating working-class militancy in almost every sector. Significantly this militancy has expressed itself not simply in terms of wage demands-though these are of course crucial -but also in the growth, at first largely spontaneous and subsequently fostered by the PCI, of new forms of factory organisation, notably general assemblies of all workers in each factory. The picture has been one of vorking-class militancy preceding trade 104 002000Д IC IC 1aE0BRLSc311 but also of a relatively Lexible response on the part of the union leaders-in particular the communists and the left catholics. For instance, high wage demands first put forward by small anarcho-syndicalist groups such as Potere Operaio were subsequently adopted by the unions and fought for successfully in recent strikes. Naturally, one can be certain that this policy of militancy and sensitivity to the masses followed at present by the unions has its very definite limits. It is an industrial policy, avoiding any direct political dimension. It would be quite wrong to see the present situation as one of irresistible and irreversible pre-revolutionary upsurge on the part of a united working class. It is perfectly possible that the movement may be braked, at least temporarily, by wage increases in key sectors, and the French experience after May shows how easy is is for the capitalists to recoup these by price increases etc. Perhaps the most important of all, it seems only too likely that if the danger of a rightist solution of some kind becomes a real possibility in the minds of the communist and left catholic leaders they will reverse their present policy and bend every effort to brake the movement. Perhaps there are already signs of this in the wake of the recent bombings in Milan and Rome. though it is still too early to prophesy the effects of ROMEO ALFR ILIALE D FORZY FIDM UILM NO AL recent months both by peasants in the South and by the working class in the North is an important and encouraging sign that the long period of discouragement and disunity is at least for the moment at an end; but it should not be made out to be more than that. What one may legitimately believe is that both the new-found militancy, and the experience of new forms of organisation and of united action by communist and catholic workers, will have their own dynamic, and that any attempt to reverse the trend will be hazardous.
REVOLUTIONARY FORCES The Italian left is of course dominated by the the huge communist party. What kind of a party is it? This is not the place to attempt a characterisation of the parties formed by the Third International, but at least it can be suggested that the PCI is a complex organisation, neither characterisable simply as "reformist nor certainly as "revolutionary". Widely quoted as now threatening the entire stability of Italian political life by its recent gains in electoral strength, its membership has in fact declined steadily from over 2 million in 1949-56 to a million and a half in 1968, its youth organisation has dropped from a 1951 peak of 460,000 to 125,000 in 1968, 80% of its members are over 30, its membership in the industrial triangle* has• dropped proportionally to total membership from 31% in 1946 to 21% in 1968 (despite the huge increase in the working-class population of that area. The drop in its member-. ship in the big cities has been greater than the average drop throughout the country, its working-class membership has dropped by over a quarter from 856,000 in 1954 to 617,000 in 1968 despite a big increase in the size of the working class during that period Perhaps most striking of all, PCI membership in both Milan and Turin-the key working-class cities of Italy-has been halved since 1956. What do these figures signify? They should not be over-dramatised. Membership has never meant a very high level of active commitment-at least since the end of the war. The party still undoubtedly has the vast majority of the most militant and politically conscious workers; its political and cultural presence in the country as a whole was almost certainly greater in the sixties than it had been in the fifties, and its strength is of course far more real in the present context of government crisis and working-class militancy than it was-despite its "socialist" allies- in the doldrums of the fifties, when Christian Democrat hegemony appeared unassailable and unemployment and the flood of cheap labour from the South drained the industrial power of the organised workers. What one can say with certainty is that the overwhelming emphasis of the PCI on parliamentary activity has been accompanied by a massive neglect of organisation in the factories, which has only begun to be fully appreciated in the last couple of years. At the last party congress, blessing was conferred on the factory assemblies which have begun to spring up, but the partv's industrial strategy is guided by a constant preoccupation on the one hand with maintaining a "responsible" national image, and on the other with preserving us contmang amance witn un Nenni social-democrats inside the CGIL Moreover, it is important to stress the deficiencies of the party s implantation of even a general idea of what the socialist revolution might mean in an advanced capitalist country; for years its central themes have been on the one hand the defence of democracy and the full implementation of the republican, post-fascist constitution, and on the other identification with the Soviet Union. The birds came home to roost with a vengeance in this latter respect when an estimated third of the party's membership dissented from the leadership's condemnation of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia-a third which largely coincided with the party's working-class base. (A curious coda to this LILM-UIL FIO