Italy: left-wing inside Rifondazione Comunista splits

A split has occurred in Progetto Comunista, the left-wing opposition tendency in Rifondazione Comunista (RC). FalceMartello (FM), a group making reference to the tradition of Ted Grant and Alan Woods, presented a motion at the recent National Political Committee of RC which was in opposition to the one presented by Progetto Comunista.

The latter claims that this means that FM has objectively placed itself outside the opposition tendency.

And to be sure, FM was never really in Progetto Comunista. While claiming to be loyal to it, it also invoked its own "independence". While this is not objectionable in itself, FM nevertheless practised this "independence" as a non participation in the tendency.

FM has never contributed to the organization, to the funds or to the initiatives of Progetto Comunista. It has also never sold the tendency newspaper.

In a document diffused via e.mail and dated 20.02.01, the Progetto Comunista leadership claims that FM does not adhere to the "decisions democratically taken by Progetto Comunista."

If this were true, then of course it would need to be publicly denounced. The problem, however, is that it only contains an element of truth. Progetto Comunista is not a united front of various groups which joined forces to fight for limited issues in RC while allowing each group to fight for its own programme.

Rather, it is controlled by Proposta Comunista, the centrist group led by Marco Ferrando and Franco Grisolia. Even the most cursory of glances at the Progetto Comunista newspaper reveals that it is just a rehash of the Proposta position, to include the same names and the same old line of passive wait-and-see argumentation.

If FM felt that this was unfair, then at one level its go-it-alone policy is understandable, though we know of no documents published to this effect and no internal fight in Progetto Comunista to expose both undemocratic treatment and its political origin. FM's splendid isolation smacks of sour grapes over the fact that Proposta, and not FM, controls Progetto Comunista.

Adopting the pseudo-Gramscian terminology which has plagued its own journal for the past ten years, Proposta claims that it exercises "hegemony" in Progetto Comunista and that it is seeking "hegemony" in Rifondazione comunista. But when using this term, Ferrando and Grisolia do so with a strongly opportunist bent.

They do not mean that a revolutionary nucleus armed with a coherent revolutionary programme has managed to gain influence in the opposition tendency, and that it is seeking via the united front tactic to expand that influence among radical members of Rifondazione and in the broader workers movement. What they mean is that they have by far the most members in Progetto Comunista. They then use this "hegemony" (ie. numerical superiority) to impose their own programme on other groups and individuals.

Anyone who does not agree with Proposta's way of seeing things and who does not conform to their pre-established "majority decisions" is labelled "undemocratic". But it is this understanding of "hegemony" which reveals itself to be little short of a profoundly undemocratic practice wrapped in what for Trotskyists are in any case Gramscian ambiguities.

Indeed, in the 20.02.01 document, the Proposta leadership has effectively expelled FM from Progetto Comunista without any democratic consultation of the Progetto membership.

The "split" results from the fact that FalceMartello does not support Progetto Comunista's (Proposta's) approach to the reformist parties in the upcoming general election. FM wants a more proactive approach to the Democratic Left (DS), the majority split from the former communist party.

It calls for RC to abstain from those electoral constituencies where a DS candidate can win. Taken in the abstract, and placed in the context of FM's calls for a government based on the main parties supported by the workers, this is a principled tactic, since it seeks to engage with the reformist workers as a whole, and not just those who support RC.

But FM's "tactic" towards RC and the DS is not in fact a tactic at all. Proposta is right to point out that FM's approach to the DS is devoid of any link to a revolutionary perspective. Following in the footsteps of their traditional mentors, FM see a government based on the reformist parties as an end in itself, a strategic panacea.

FM does not see the call for a government of the bourgeois workers parties as a means for exposing reformist leaders by imposing demands on them and by declaring in advance that the reformist traitors will not carry out those demands and that only a government based on revolutionary workers councils can and will.

However, Proposta's critique of FM is made from centrist standpoint. Proposta is fundamentally sectarian towards the DS, and is also profoundly opportunist. While rightly noting that FM does not see the bourgeois nature of the DS, Proposta does not explain to the working class vanguard about the bourgeois nature of Rifondazione comunista.

It has called for Rifondazione to go it alone in the elections and to present candidates against the DS. It rightly notes that revolutionaries can abstain from those constituencies where there is a danger of a right wing victory, and can support instead the reformist candidate while fighting unremittingly for the revolutionary programme.

But in peddling revolutionary abstentionism in those terms, Proposta contemporaneously peddles the notion that Rifondazione election candidates are in some way "revolutionary". Indeed, Proposta uses the DS as target practice for "orthodox" terminology ("bourgeois-workers' party", "agents of the bourgeoisie in the workers movement" etc.) while never characterizing RC in the same way.

And when referring to the need to win "hegemony" among the workers, it therefore proposes the "hegemony" of Rifondazione comunista, as if this would not lead the workers into the hands of the bourgeoisie (as RC has done since its existence). Proposta gives left cover to the RC bureaucracy by sewing the illusion that RC is in some way substantially different in its class character from the DS.

Indeed, the perspectives which were issued (after 18 months delay) from the 1998 international conference of the International Trotskyist Opposition (ITO), of which Proposta is the motor force, actually deny any pretence to leading the working class and the oppressed to revolution.

he ITO internet site limits itself to reproducing music files and film footage of Lenin and Trotsky, which while certainly useful as historical documents offer nothing by way of programmatic leadership in the here and now. As regards guidelines for struggle, the ITO is still at East Timor (November 1999), while sites of national sections (including Proposta's) have remained untouched for almost two years.

All this is symptomatic. The long and the short of it is that the split in Progetto Comunista is unprincipled on both sides. FM and Proposta do not agree over which of the bourgeois-workers' parties is the best one to adapt to.

This is an age old dispute which can be found in the long-standing methodological annals of the centrism which emerged out of the programmatic collapse of the Fourth International between 1948 and 1951. The problem is that neither FM nor Proposta has a revolutionary programme. For this reason they are both left adapting to reformist parties in the name of "building the revolutionary party". Their "dispute" is old centrist wine in a new centrist bottle.

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