The entire Italian situation can be summarized in this overall picture: the more the Berlusconi government enters in decline, the more the liberal changeover of the Union advances, advanced by the strong powers of the bourgeoisie. The more the liberal changeover advances, the more it reveals its anti-working class and anti-popular program. The more its face is revealed, the more this changeover needs cover from the left.
The crisis of pro-Berlusconi forces has a structural and a deep character. The barefaced institutional and publicity maneuvers to which it has recourse —from the new electoral law to a future broadening of its own space in the media-- are directly proportional to its crisis of consensus in the real majority within Italian society. It is a crisis above and below: on the one hand, in the petite-bourgeois popular sectors impoverished by the crisis and in the vast sectors of the poor population in the south; on the other, in the salons of the Italian bourgeoisie, who have always been distant from the familiar features and the clan of the Berlusconi forces, and much warmer these days to a political solution in the form of a changeover. The combination of these factors, with the undercurrent of a sustained capitalist crisis, seems to make Berlusconi's descending curve irreversible.
But the advance of the Unión and its perspective of winning the government —as unquestionable as it may seem-- takes place on a terrain convulsed by the class contradictions of its own social block: contradictions which precisely the socio-economic crisis deepens every day.
The advance of the Union, of course, rides the wave of the demand in chorus for the expulsion of Berlusconi, present in the deep sentiment of broad sectors among the people. It is the legacy of the long stage of movements of struggle against Berlusconi developing between 2001 and 2003. And it is the sentiment which has driven the great triumph of Romano Prodi in the primary elections of the Union, marked by an exceptional popular participation. In other terms, the advance of the liberal changeover around Prodi, big industry, the big banks supporting him, finds support among the subjugated social classes, and is benefitted from its drive. And, however, precisely here lies the contradiction. The proximity of the governmental changeover in the face of the elections of 2006 obliges Prodi and the liberal Center to progressively reveal their real program. And this program stands at the antipode of the demand for change among the vast masses and the movements of struggle of these years: loyal collaboration with the United States, and “withdrawal from Iraq in agreement with the United States” in foreign policy; “shock therapy” in terms of financial healing in domestic policy. The economic crisis of stagnation and the calendar of reduction in the public debt agreed upon in Brussels do not leave much margin for maneuver for the future government. And the experiences of center-left government themselves —which today governs in 75% of the regions and Italian cities-- underline more and more a profile of “law and order” which openly defies the youth movements (Bologne) and popular demands (Piamont). Therefore, the overriding dominant sentiment for the expulsion of Berlusconi begins to cohabit, on a second plane, with the bad mood towards and growing lack of confidence in the Union Center. A real lack of confidence, but still secondary on the level of the great masses. And, on the contrary, very marked in a significant portion of a broad social and political vanguard, which already today is translated into opposition and open hostility: this is how things are in a vast sector of the militant rank and file of the PRC; as well as in significant sectors of left-wing trade unionism, in the working class vanguard, in the pacifist and anti-globalization movements.
This emerging contradiction, in turn, is reflected on the Italian left: in its relations with the Union, in its internal life. The more the fracture between the capitalist program of the command Center of the Union emerges, together with the demands of the popular grassroots, the more Romano Prodi seeks cover and co-responsibility from the left. On the one hand, after a vote of confidence in the primaries, he assures the capitalists that he will govern with a firm hand and “without mediations” with the policies of austerity. On the other, he hastens to consolidate support from the leadership groups of the left, from the leadership of the CGIL and from Fausto Bertinotti, who are very conscious of their own roles, more and more irreplaceable, as candidate guarantors of the future social peace. The importance of their position for the Union is not based simply on the “numbers” which are necessary today to defeat Berlusconi at the polls. It is based more and more on its future function as social cover for Prodi and his programs. But the more this subordination of the left to the liberal Union Center accentuates, the more the contradictions and differentiations in his organization and in his social and militant grassroots multiply. “Whither the Italian left?” is today a question widely present in the concern of significant numbers among the popular sectors.
Progetto Comunista has assumed as a central slogan in its mass political battle the rupture with the Union Center. That is, so that the proposal may be a challenge to all the Italian left, for them to break with the Union and present itself as a cnadidate to struggle for an anti-capitalist alternative. Millions of workers and youth have not struggled against Berlusconi only to continue subordinate to Prodi's industrialists and bankers. Even more so: already today the very perspective of a government of compromise with the industrialists and the bankers has put a damper on the opposition of the masses to Berlusconi, it works to divide them, to deprive them of an independent platform, to disactivate its potential for explosion. For this reason the rupture with the Union Center is not a “politico-ideological” proposal, or one of parliamentary-instututional character. It is the decisive condition with which to relaunch and unify the class struggle opposition to Berlusconi; to overthrow Berlusconi on the basis of the workers reasons and not the interests of Confindustria; in order to open the raod to an alternative of power for the brother and sister workers, which is the only true alternative.
In this framework, Progetto Comunista is today the only tendency on the Italian left to defend a prolonged general strike to expel Berlusconi on the basis of a unifying platform for the movements in struggle. A slogan based on the concrete triumphal experience of indefinite struggle put into practice by working class and popular sectors over the past few years (starting with the 21-day strike at the Melfi Fiat) and aims at regaining and generalizing it in the direction of an authentic overall proof of strength against the dominant classes.
But if —as everything makes it seem—, the leaderships of the Italian left end up subordinating the workers movement to the political perspective of the Prodi changeover, the defense and relaunching of a Communist and class struggle opposition against the new government will be the order of the day as an inalienable demand. Not only for the revolutionary Marxists, but also for a sector of the class struggle vanguard which has matured in the struggles of the last few years. The central task of the Marxist revolutionaries is not to defend its own ranch, but instead to direct itself towards this vanguard with its program, on the basis of its struggles, in order to relaunch Communist Refoundation upon revolutionary bases. Italian Trotskyism finds itself on the eve of a great test.
