comprising the growing Social Democratic party of Saragat and the declining rump Socialist party of Nenni. These two parties divided in 1947 on the issue of communism, reunited in 1967 and re-divided in 1969.
The DC is an inter-class formation; not merely in the sense that like the British conservative party it has a large slice of the working-class vote, but in a more structured way. Most notably, the second in strength of Ine three Trade-umon ederalons country, anti-communism has been the cement of the social order. Crucially impor tant as anti-communism has been, and is, in' both the United States and West Germany, the absence of large communist parties has meant that it does not have the same absolutely fundamental function in the domestic politics of those two countries that it has in Italy. If the PCI was brought into a coalition, the DC would lose both the inter-class unity and the ideological cement which have , CONTRATTU A RATE
opportunistically adopted a more "pro-Soviet" position on Czechoslovakia in the hope of wooing discontented communist militants)
Two further episodes must be mentioned in any attempt to characterise the present PCI. Firstly, its relations with the student movement. After May 1968, Longo, the party secretary, (who himself had an ultra-left past when he led the vouth organisation between 1927 and 1969; he was already campaigning for what was later to become the line of the Third Period, in opposition to the Bukharinist leadership of Togliatti and Tasca in those years) arranged a meeting with a number of prominent student militants from revolutionary groups to the left of the PCI, and after a long discussion inaugurated a new "open" policy towards the far left in the student sector. However the practical effects of this directive are hard to assess, since the student movement declined sharply in 1969 and the far-left groups fragmented prodigiously.
IL MANIFESTO The second, and more important episode is the "Manifesto" affair. After Togliatti's death, there was a swing to the right of the PCI's centre of gravity, and a number of leftists in important positions in the party apparatus and press were pushed out and were subsequently unable to develop any consistent alternative to the official strategy in the party press. This, however, they regarded quite correctly as absolutely indispensable in the present conjuncture. In the past, two more ones concent suatenes axe been respectively articulated by the party's "right" and "left. On the one hand Amendola was arguing for a labour alliance of communists and social democrats as an electoral alternative to the DC. On the other Ingrao was calling for a strategy aimed at detaching the catholic working class from the DC. With the recent fragmentation of social-democracynot merely have the followers of Nenni and of Saragat re-divided, but each sub-party is itself riven with dissension-Amendola has made himself the standard-bearer of what in reality would amount to an eventual "grand coalition" of PCI and DC-with presumably social-democracy thrown in for ure. The traditional grao or has mean'has been absorbed into a "centre" which on the one hand seems to have accepted the Amendola perspectives for a new coalition, but which at the same time is following an industrial trategy which fairly closely corresponds to the old Ingrao conception of uniting with the catholic workers. This situation comprises the background to the decision of a group of intellectuals from the left of the party who had been effectively silenced after Togliatti's death to found their own journal Il Manifesto-despite party disapproval. The group includes Central Committee members Aldo Natoli, Rossana Rossanda and Luigi Pintor, and the most original Marxist theorist in the party, Lucio Magri. The signifi ance of this enterprise became clear when the first issues of the journal revealed that the group was producing a coherent and powerful alternative to official party positions on a number of key issues. Not only did they attack the policy of waiting hopefully to be allowed to participate in a subordinate capacity in some new coalition, and call for a strategy for socialism, based on mass struggle; they also published serious analyses on the structure of the PCT itself, favourable material on the Cultural Revolution, and wrote an editorial on Czechoslovakia which stated that the existing order in the European socialist countries could not be renovated but must be replaced. Such unorthodox views earned them expulsion from the party. Many commentators have expressed surprise at this decision -the more naive that the "liberal" PCI should do such a thing, the more cynical that they should do it now, of all times, when they need a democratic image to reassure the bourgeoisie that they would be acceptable partners. But in reality, of course, the PCI has not permitted freedom of expression for marxists since iszo, and un bourgeoisie-despite the rhetoric-could not care less about the internal regime of the PCI, any more than United States imperialism could care less about the internal regime of its Soviet partner in peaceful coexistence (or for that matter than the Kremlin could care less about the internal regime of the United States).
Aside from the PCI, the Italian left presents a dismal picture of incoherence and disarray-to which can be added severe repression since the recent bomb attacks. The state of the revolutionary groups alone should temper the illusions of those who see the revolution around the corner in Italy Before the student movement of 1967-8, the Italian far left was broadly speaking spontaneist and ouvrierist, and the main international marxist currents outside Moscow-orientated communism, Maoism and Trotskyism, had little presence. During the student upsurge, which in Italy was an extended one, the Cultural Revolution made a bigger impact than in any other of the European advanced capitalist countries, and a vigorous The Black Dwarf 16th January 1970 Page 5 list countries, and on the other a vigorous Trotskyist youth movement, Falce e Martello, emerged. In the past year the picture has completely changed. The spontaneist groups have returned to the forefront in the recent industrial militancy, and devoted as they are, their mish-mash of vulgar antiLeninism and crude ouvrierism hardly fits them for the role of political vanguard. The countless "Maoist" groups, far from applying any positive lessons either from Mao's own example or from the Cultural Revolution, have degenerated into a delirious cult of Stalin. To complete the picture, Falce e Martello has disappeared and its former leaders are now leading one of these "Maoist" groups, the Unione, abject Stalin-worshippers, who are renowned for making their members marry if they live together, so as not to offend the workers' sense of morality!
In conclusion, one can say the following. The ruling class does have a series of fundamental problems which it is hard to see it being able to solve in the immediate future, but there will always be a way out for it in the absence of any real revolutionary challenge.
The working class has recently achieved a very high degree of militancy and unity, Which is bound to alter the coordinates of the political situation to some extent; but it would be wrong to present its temper as revolutionary.
As for the forces of the left, it is clear that there is no existing organisation on the Italian left which could even potentially become a revolutionary vanguard, so that the PCI retains its absolutely dominant position. The future of the Manifesto group, now outside the party, is unclear. Without a revolutionary party, talk of imminent collapse of the bourgeois order in Italy is quite illusory. Ouintin Hoare