proletari comunisti & the elections

from the last issue of proletari comunisti, no. 3, March 2008.

The fall of the Prodi’s government is first of all the result of the crisis of consent that expanded and deepened among the ranks of the workers and people masses. The policies of this government followed the stream of Berlusconi as regards the economic and social measures, internal affairs, foreign policy. All the great expectations, coming also from the support given to this government by the parties supposed representing the workers interests, have been disappointed.

The past October 20, one million people marched on the street organised by the Rifondazione Comunista Party to press the government so it could gain consent and confidence. But the accord on the pensions and the social welfare and the following Financial Law immediately betrayed this confidence. The government had already exhausted the reserve of consent on the issues of the democracy and peace along with the building of a new NATO base in Vicenza, the occupation of Afghanistan, the “security package” etc.

This weakening of the government led the owners and the different mafias inside itself to feel this administration inadequate. The “Mastella Affair” is only the last of a series of episodes that might bring the collapse. However, this affair brought at the light the caste arrogance that characterised also the Prodi’s government. The round of applause given in the parliament in defence of Mastella by almost all the centre-left majority joint with the centre-right opposition has widened their distance from the masses and the crisis of reliability.

The official left forces appear pathetic and risible when they argue that so far the government has “acted bad” toward the masses – a true admission – but just when it was to “act good” someone made it fall. Beside the crisis of consent, an internal contradiction came up along with the birth of the Democratic Party and the rising leadership of Veltroni. This showed to the bourgeoisie a chance for even more rightist policies. Through the Berlusconi/Veltroni convergence, they will be able to march more quickly toward a “strong” government and state.

Therefore, the anticipated elections are a necessary move to form a more adequate government for the ruling class. A cheating game with a known end: the votes will not decide the form of the government but only the composition.

To demolish every electoral illusion among the workers and the people’s masses is still the first task for the genuine communists, now more than ever. The crisis of consent among the masses expressed itself with important movements of struggle. So far they have not found a representation or the necessary political weight to really produce a crisis “from left” and a new scenario in which the workers and the people’s masses can influence in a determining way the formation of the government, the program and the strength balance with the State and the owners.

The next government, no matter who will win the Berlusconi/Veltroni competition, will march in with a more and more accelerate pace toward the building of what we call, with a simplified formula, a regime of modern fascism and police State.

We say modern fascism because the ideological, cultural and programmatic common cement of the parties competing for the government is given by the absolute primacy of the capitalist dictatorship, by their deep-down anti-communism, by a new corporative system of industrial relationships, by the projects of a reactionary change of the Constitution, to clear the elements coming from the Resistance.

It is a “modern” fascism, adequate to the Italy, the Europe, the world system in the 2008, like that existing in the imperialist US or that advancing in well sharp form in the France of Sarkozy.

The close nexus between the building of such a regime and the police State is shown by how they turn the social struggles into problems of public order and adopt “security packages” to armour the State, make the repressive forces sacred and channel the reactionary humus they widely spread among the masses toward a totalitarian form of State.

The reactionary ideology of the State stands against every issue of the social and political struggle: the life in the factories as well as the problem of the rubbish or the rights of women and migrants. The electoral competition between the major parties does not move between two alternatives solutions but on the politic personnel that will apply the sole solution.

In order to outline the role of the communists before this elections and in this political phase, we need start from the advanced factors coming up from the class struggle, the proletarian and mass movements under the Prodi’s government.

The workers refusing the accord on the pensions and welfare state and some advanced sectors of the struggle for the wage, out of the control of the official unions, the uprising of Naples and the Campania, the demo of the women on 24th of November, the demos against the repression, the different forms of resistance in the cultural life, all these form a composite and still fragile movement, but it is an important ground of strength accumulation for a genuine movement of opposition that will gain strength every time it gets separate from the two bourgeois poles, every time it shows another politics based on another understanding, another program, that opposes also the reactionary populism and the anti-politics of the petit bourgeoisie.

To unite this struggle movement, to carry out the proletarian leadership in different forms, to develop a united front based on the autonomous and independent organization of the masses, to uphold the strategy and tactics of a protracted “war” in the clash with the bourgeoisie and its two poles, this is the role of the communists and the workers militant vanguards in distinction from two currently harmful ways.

The first one is to participate with own lists at the elections. Far from to facilitate the entry of the proletarians in the “toy theatre of the politics” or to represent there the issues of the masses, it brings confusion, marginalization and ideological corruption. To use the metaphor of the “toy theatre”, it reduce the proletarian and mass movement into a “walk-on”.

The other equally harmful danger is given by the anarchist-economist or new populist forms of escape from the current political tasks. To forge in the fire of the class struggle the necessary tools to develop the class struggle – the communist party of new type, the class union, the united opposition front – even the specific electoral process demands the just slogans to give a sole reference to the entire movement of opposition, a direction to give concreteness to the autonomous role of the working class and the proletarians.

The slogan “neither centre-right or centre-left, workers government” serves this goal.

It is important that it wins the ranks of the working class and becomes a reference for the whole movement of opposition. In this electoral campaign to state “the struggle, not the vote” is not enough. We need to bring vigorously the slogan of “another government” that will express another understanding of the government, the State, the politics. Another power.

The “workers government” today serves also the propaganda of the communists solutions of the problems of the daily life of the proletarians and the people’s masses, of the perspective of the proletarian power, of the socialism and communism.

Therefore, the work of the communists aims to unite, strengthen and increase the actual opposition against the two bourgeois poles to turn it into the base of the opposition against the new government that will come from the elections.

proletari comunisti
PCm Italy