If one had only cast a glance at Italian politics a few years ago, the results of the Prodi government would have seemed miraculous: a reduction of the public deficit to 3 per cent of the GDP, containment of inflation at 1.5 per cent, political stability and absence of significant struggles by workers. In an Italy accustomed to governments of a duration of two months, to a high level of class conflict and a rate of unionisation which was one of the highest of the industrialized countries, the relative stability of the Prodi government seems like a dream. And it is not by chance that Confindustria, and in first place Fiat, have supported the incumbent government against each attempt on the part of the centre-right (the political "pole" of the magnate television Berlusconi and of the neofascist Fini) .

The president of the council, Romano Prodi, is not a professional politician, but, as in said in (Italian) slang, a "tecnico". A catholic economist and ex-Christian Democrat, already president of the IRI, the Institute of Industrial Reconstruction founded in the fascist epoch by Mussolini to manage government investments, he has distinguished himself by having sold-off Alpha Romeo, the state owned car firm, to Agnelli's Fiat, allowing the formation of a Fiat monopoly over Italian car production. It is for these qualities that he has been selected by the secretary of the PDS ( Party of the Democratic Left, heir of the PCI) D'Alema, to steer the Olive Tree electoral coalition of the centre-left, with the purpose of attracting the votes of catholics and getting the support of the big bourgeoisie. The electoral victory of the Olive Tree Alliance, in April of the 1996, albeit by a narrow measure, over the "Pole of Liberty" (the coalition between Forza Italia, of Berlusconi, and the neofascist National Alliance, of Fini) was made possible thanks to the electoral support of Rifondazione Comunista (PRC, a split form the PCI when it decided to change its name to PDS). The Popular Front that has been formed, from ex-Christian Democrats to Communist Refoundaton (although formally the latter is not a part of the government), constitutes a bloc between the workers' bureaucracy (trades union and reformist) and the big capitalist families with a significant participation of technocrats, direct representatives of big capital, like Ciampi and Dini. Rather than "supported" by the popular masses and by the workers, the Prodi government has been suffered as the immediately lesser evil. Only the leaders of Rifondazione Comunista have fomented the illusion that the Prodi government could inaugurate a "new reforming course" with the purpose of justifying to their own base their support for a government of the big bourgeoisie. And instead the programme of blood and tears of Prodi and D'Alema has been explicit from the beginning: "to take Italy into Europe" have become the codewords for a fierce, anti-working class austerity, of an attack against what has become known as the "social state" (pensions, healthcare, public education etc.) and of racist repression against immigrants, in the first place the Albanians, but also against North Africans and, in these last months, against Kurdish refugees who seek asylum from the terror of the government of Ankara. At first sight it might seem strange that, a few years from the collapse of Soviet Stalinism, the heirs of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) are today a decisive factor in the government. Yet the participation of the PDS and the RC in the government does not contradict their Stalinist past. As Trotsky observed, the Stalinists were dutybound to serve two masters: the Moscow bureaucracy and their own bourgeoisie, which was irreconcilably hostile to the Soviet degenerated workers state. With the triumph of the capitalist counterrevolution in USSR, and the disappearance of the Soviet bureaucracy as a pole of attraction for the Stalinist parties of the capitalist world, the contradiction in which the Stalinist parties found themselves has shifted in favour of the alignment with their own bourgeoise. It is true to say that the PDS and Rifondazione Comunista today essentially constitute two variations of social democratic parties that do not question the capitalist system. After all, in all Europe the bourgeoisies are trying to put their anti-working class austerity programmes into practice, looking for the active support of trades unions and reformist workers' parties.

For around half a century, Italy has been governed by coalition governments based on the Christian Democracy (DC), the party tied to the Vatican and financed by the CIA, that has maintained power combining a diffuse corruption, an expensive system of clientellism and social welfare, above all in the backward south, and, in critical periods, anti-communist state terror with the use of the fascists in a supporting capacity. With the purpose of keeping the PCI out of the go vernment (but continually looking for underhand agreements) under the Christian Democratic governments and, in the decade of the eighties, with the active participation of the Socialist Party of Craxi, there was put in place the system of corruption, political clientellism and the squandering of public funds exposed by the "clean hands" judicial processes. With the triumph of the capitalist counterrevolution in the USSR, the Italian bourgeoisie and, which have more weight, its sponsors in the Vatican and Washington, have decided to clear away the expensive Christian Democratic regime, now that the participation of the PCI and its heirs in the government no longer retains a danger for the capitalist system and Nato

The disappearance of the Christian Democrats, swept away by the corruption hearings of 1992 and since, has left the bourgeoisie without a mass party, in a critical period of movement towards a united Europe. On the other hand, the rightist "Pole of Liberty", in its brief period of government, proved incapable of making the workers accept the fierce programme of austerity necessary to implement the Maastricht criteria.

To Die for Maastricht?

In contrast to the Popular Fronts of the thirties, which climbed to power with a programme of reforms, although compatible with the capitalist system, the Prodi government won the 1996 elections with an explicit counterreformist programme: austerity, cuts to the social state, privatisation of important sectors of the public economy (from telecommunications to energy) and of the basic social services, from healthcare, to the pensions, to education.

The two financial laws of 1996 and of 1997 (respectively of L100,000 and L40,000 billion) had as their central purpose the objective fixed by the Maastricht agreement, and they have substantially succeeded without workers' protests, as a result of the fact that the two most important workers' parties participate in the government of capitalist austerity. On the parliamentary left, only one deputy elected on the list of the PRC, Mara Malavenda, a worker from Alpha Romeo at Pomigliano (near Naples), has voted against the Prodi government and she has been expelled from the party.

As the vice-president of Veltroni council has declared, 100,000 billion's worth of finance has been snatched without even an hour of strike. Public spending has been cut, from healthcare, to pensions, to schools, a new tax has been introduced, the tax "for Europe," and a privatisation programme has been undertaken. The financial legislation of 1996 has created over 30,000 new poor families, that is to say, people who are forced to live on less than the minimum income. At the same time increases in taxation to finance public services, and of all those goods that do not count in the "basket of basic necessities" (a statistical trick to increase prices without subtracting the increase in the inflation), have been allowed.

The reduction of social spending has affected the most useful services for the workers, above all, and the weakest strata of the population: in public education, a cut of 3 per cent of the personnel, and the non-renewal of people on temporary contracts, has been imposed (in practice around 30,000 people will have been dismisssed); in the field of public health, the ticket (that is, the amount that each patient must pay) has been increased; in the field of pensions, the pensionable age has been raised and the formation of "pensions funds" have been encouraged, that is to say, private companies raking-up the money of the workers.

This program of reduction of public spending has had, as its corrollary, the direction of investment to help the big capitalists (in the first place Fiat, the true sponsor of this government): through the reduction of the taxes on profits (from the 60 to 37 per cent), the "contribution to the rottamazione", (that is to say, a part of the cost of car-sales is shouldered by the state), the revision of the share of direct taxes, of which the people on lower incomes will pay more and those on higher incomes will pay less. In total these manoeuvres will cost around a million lira a year to each working class family. These measures have been accompanied, with the hypocritical justification "to reduce unemployment," by laws that allow a greater flexibility of labour. That is to say, in practice, a greater facility for dismissal by the employers, low salaries for the newly-hired and no brake on overtime working. The result is a deeper division in the working class and an increase in unemployment, which by now has reached over 12 per cent of the active population. The employers find it more convenient to impose overtime than to engage new workers. In addition, it is necessary to note that in Italy, forms of assistance to the unemployed person are practically absent. In the two years of the Prodi government, employment in big industry has decreased by over 4 per cent. It is not strange therefore that in over the whole of the two years, the percentage of the GDP that goes to salaries has decreased by around 4 per cent, while the percentage of the profits has increased. And that in the south, where the industrial structure is weaker, the rate of unemployment has reached over 25 per cent (around 50 per cent among young people). The strong growth of the stock exchange serves to show the trust that capital puts in the Prodi government, despite the presence of Rifondazione Comunista in the majority. The stock exchange is worth today around a third of the whole GDP.

In a word, the salary of the workers and employees has been drastically reduced, through the increase in prices and the reduction of public spending, while insecurity of their jobs has been increased and elementary trades union rights are up for discussion. The Prodi government is trying to dismantle what remains of the conquests of the workers achieved through decades of hard trades union and political struggles.

How is it possible that all of this social massacre could proceed without significant workers' struggles?

In the absence of a revolutionary leadership with mass influence, the reformist leadership group has a good chance to divert workers' struggles towards electoralism "against the right," against that right by way of which one can put politics into practice. As each manifestation of the crisis of government appears, the scarecrow of the "right" is shaken in front of the workers to convince them to support a government of austerity "of the left."

The trades union bureaucracies are on their knees in explicit support to the Prodi government, and CGIL-CISL and UIL (the three historical trades unions) are tied up with double thread to the government. While over a million workers took to the streets against the counterreform on pensions of the Berlusconi government, there has been no protest faced by an analogous measure of the Prodi government. The fact is that the Berlusconi government has looked for a frontal clash with the trades unions, while Prodi has used the trades union bureaucracies to make his austerity plan acceptable. In this way the trades union bureaucracies have proven subordinate agents of the imperialist bourgeoisie inside the working class. The attitude of the British, or French, trades union bureaucracies are not all that different in the face of their own governments "of the left." The battle for the independence of the trades unions from the capitalist state can only be achieved by an authentic revolutionary leadership

Such an ambitious bourgeois programme needs a strong state. Prodi and D'Alema are doing a good job smoothing the road to a bonapartist solution to the Italian crisis. The "constitutional reforms" (the revision of the Constitution) the objective of the bicameral (a multiparty parliamentary commission of the majority and of the opposition presided over by D'Alema) have the purpose of reducing parliamentary democracy through the introduction of the presidential system and an electoral reform that excludes the parties of the extreme right and of extreme left from Parliament. But the parliamentary combinations are not a reflex , although distorted, of what happens in society. The apparent social calm hides a deep discomfort among important sectors of the population. Incapable of answering on the plane of social reforms, the Prodi government applies, in an increasing manner, state repression. At the beginning of December, a series of student demonstrations, protesting against the reform of the school by the Berlinguer ministry, led to occupations of the schools which were evicted with the intervention of the police. The protests of the farmers and producers of milk systematically confronted the police. While the same treatment was reserved for the workers adhering to the "trades unions of the base" (Cobas and so) that protested against the cuts in the social state.

The government repression has impacted in a particular way on immigrants. When, following the Albanian crisis, thousands of fugitives have poured onto the coasts of Puglia, a region of the south, the response of the Prodi government has remained extremely hard. Pressurised by its "allies" in the EU, who threatened to exclude Italy from the Schengen agreement, the incumbent popular front has looked for all ways of rejecting the Albanian immigrants. To state repression has been added an odious campaign of racial hate fomented by the press and the television against the Albanians, who are presumed "criminals," "mafioso," "exploiters" of prostitutes and so on and so forth. It is in this climate that the racist assassination of March 28 has matured, when a ship loaded with fugitive Albanians has been sunk by a unit of the Italian military marine, the "Sibilla". 89 people, mostly women and children, lost their lives, while the survivors have been detained and held in concentration camps. But it was still not sufficient for the Prodi government. The sinking of the "Kater i Rades" has only been the most well known case for the number of the victims. The Albanian rafts, loaded with any number of fugitives, are faced by the full extent of the military marine and nobody, probably, will know the exact number of victims of this undeclared war on the immigrants. Not even this is sufficient for the Prodi government. Despite all of this anti-Albanian racist wave, which it has instigated, the Prodi government has decided to put legislation into operation which is still more restrictive against immigrants, the closing of the reception centres and the forced repatriation of around 5,000 Albanians that have not yet gained permission to stay or could not get it. The outcome has been the police raid in December, when over five hundred Albanians were withdrawn from the reception centres by military and police officers in combat gear, forcibly loaded onto an Italian freighter and repatriated, amidst the silence of the official left, and amidst the crocodile tears of the leadership of Rifondazione Comunista, which three months before had voted for the resolution of the government which foresaw the repatriation of the immigrants.

Albania has, in fact, become an Italian protectorate. Both the ex-president, Berisha, and the current prime minister, Fatos Nano, have benefitted, or are benefiting, from Italian support. In exchange, hourly Italian gunboats patrol the Albanian coasts to prevent new departures of immigrants.

But it is not only a matter of Albanian refugees: given its particular geographical location, Italy is a natural destination of immigrants that evade the poverty of neocolonialism, or political and religious persecution: Kurdish, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Ruandan, all are treated with the same hardness. The EU asks Italy to become the police officer of the Mediteranean and the Prodi government obliges showing that, in addition to the Maastricht criteria, it is is able also to respect the Schengen criteria.

And the Northern League of Umberto Bossi fans the flames of racism. After having provoked the fall of the Berlusconi government, the movement of Bossi has been engaging with a more and more openly racist and secessionist character, picking up on the anger of the petit-bourgeoisie of the north that feels oppressed by too much taxation and by an inefficient and parasitic bureaucracy. Being a bloc between big capital and the workers' bureaucracy, the popular front has a disgruntling effect on the small and average petit-bourgeoisie which feels it is being squeezed by that bloc. At the same time, the aggressiveness and demagogy "against the state" attracts sectors of the working class that feel abandoned and betrayed by their traditional parties and who do not find a credible revolutionary alternative. It is the politics of class collaboration of the PCI, and of its heirs (PDS and RC), that pushes thousands of workers of the factories of the North, the most developed part of Italy, into the arms of the League, which furnishes reactionary and radical answers to the impoverishment of the petit-bourgeoisie and to the loss of competitiveness of the small and middle firms of the North in the international market.

The Northern League today proposes the separation from Italy of the north, rechristened as the proposed "Padania," from the rest of the nation. The League has the elements within itself to become a mass fascist party cemented by nationalistic ideology, in the first place the mobilisation of masses of the petit-bourgeoisie in an anti-working class role and, in the current situation, against immigrants. In addition, to justify its own existence, the League has not disdained to renew other icons of the ideological armoury of fascism, such as the identification of the nation with the race (Celtic!), the struggle against the "plutocracy" (Berlusconi, Agnelli), the contempt for parliamentarism, etc. It has organised its paramilitary militias, which counts among its exponents elements which have fought in the ranks of the Croatian militia in the conflict in Yugoslavia. The green shirts of the League have distinguished themselves in the shooting of immigrants, while the movement of Bossi has organised "the bonfire of union cards", a demonstration which fortunately, for now, failed. To anti-immigrant racism, the League adds racism against the southerners, trying to break the unity between workers of the north and of the south cemented in the big factories by the struggles of the sixties and seventies.

The economic programme of the League is very clear: build free zones of superexploitation of the working class, without trades unions or legal restrictions, as a way of increasing the competitiveness of "Padanian" capitalism through a corporate industrial model.

The Northern League is a danger to the working class, both for its current politics of division of the workers along regional lines and for its being virtually an assault force which big capital uses against the organised worker's movement.

The Northern League could be defeated only by breathing life back into proletarian struggles and reforging the class unity between the working class of the north and of the south under a revolutionaey programme and leadership. But these struggles will be, above all, political struggles against the bourgeoisie and its governments, of right or of "left."

Confronted by the challenge of the Northern League, the Prodi government oscillates between a generic call for "national unity" on the one hand and state repression on the other and the use of fascist legislation against those who threaten national unity. A trial has opened recently in which Umberto Bossi, leafer of the Northern League, has been charged with "an attempt against national unity".

The reformist leadership uses the League today to strengthen class collaboration and proceed in the direction of the reinforcement of bonapartist state measures. For the first time in 50 years on a trades union demonstration, September 20, patriotic hymns for the unity of Italy were heard.

Despite the politics of class collaboration of its leadership, Rifondazione Comunista remains the point of reference of the masses in Italy who still want to fight for communism. But today the PRC is in deep crisis. It is a matter, above all, of a crisis of political perspectives.

For over two years, the PRC has participated in the government, criticising it from the left, and arriving on at least two crucial occasions at the brink of breakup, first voting against the military intervention in Albania, then, in October of this year, threatening a crisis on the issue of finance. These politics have caused a deep dismay at the base of Rifondazione, resulting in the disastrous results in the local council elections of November.

The assumption of support of the PRC for Prodi, exhibited by the leadership, appeared false and deceptive. For the leadership of RC needed to support Prodi and, at the same time, build the mass movement to pursue "reforming action". While the Prodi government proceeded on the road of sacrifice for Maastricht, the PRC revealed itself incapable of arousing any serious struggle for even minimally "reformist" objectives. On the contrary, it has to be said that all the political action of RC was confined to the parliamentary sphere. It was in the logic of things that the support to the Prodi government changed the very objectives of the leadership of RC. Yet at the congress in December 1996, the leadership affirmed its hostility to the Europe of Maastricht. In its intervention in "Liberation" (newspaper of the PRC) of December 31 1997 Nerio Nesi, ex-banker and economic spokesperson of the PRC, approved with satisfaction the fact that the Maastricht criteria had been reached by the Prodi government. And the same Nesi sometime has declared "we have voted L100,000 billion of cuts, job flexibilty, the facilitating of the state subsidisation of cars and motorcycles, the financing of the private schools, the fiscal remission, always without conviction, often with reluctance, always only for the purpose of allowing the Prodi government to go ahead" ("Liberation" 25 September 1997). The results of the botched crisis of October, together with the electoral defeat, have instigated a split in the leadership of Rifondazione Comunista between the two great leaders. While in fact the secretary, Bertinotti, an ex-trades unionist, closes his eyes when confronted by the difficulties of rooting the Party in the working class, and the problems set by the support to the Prodi government, the president, Cossutta, an important old representative of the Stalinist apparatus of the PCI, has posed a problem in the pages of "Rifondazione" (theoretical magazine of the PRC), that he would like to see the Party modeled on the old communist party. It is in this sense that he speaks about "rooting the party in the masses". For Cossutta, the PRC is too weak because it is insufficiently rooted in bourgeois society, it has few represenataives in the cooperatives, few officials in the trades unions, etc. In a word, the "rooting" in the masses that Cossutta would want remains always as a better diffusion and grounding of the bureaucratic apparatus of the party. It is in this framework that, for Cossutta, it is necessary to arrive at a programmatic accord with the PDS, that is to say, to entry into the full entititlement of the PRC in the governmental majority.

Neither Cossutta nor Bertinotti, however, exceed the framework of the acceptance of capitalism. The left of the party, of which the most coherent component is the supporters of the ITO in Italy and the magazine "Proposta" ("Proposal"), has given battle in the 1996 congress, obtaining a significant 15 per cent of the votes and of the delegates. Despite the weakness and the uncertainties of this battle, the axis of the struggle of the left has been very clear and understood by the activists of the PRC: the opposition to the popular frontist politics of the leadership. And it is not by chance that the recent conference of young communists, which took place in November, has seen the redoubling of support for the left, which among the youth is now at 33 per cent of the votes. More significant still is the affirmation of the left among the youth, as has happened after a whole sector of leftist militants, gathered round some leaders of the old PCI, left the PRC disgusted by the continuous yeldings of Rifondazione.

Nevertheless a qualitative leap is now posed. Untill now, the left of the PRC has conducted its battle essentially by reflex, in opposition to the leadership of Bertinotti and Cossutta. What is needed instead is that the rationale of Leninism, of Trotskyism and the opposition to class collaboration reaches broad sectors of the working class, also outside the PRC. In fact, it is essential that the programme of the socialist revolution reaches the workers also disappointed or disgusted by the politics of the PRC, on the one hand, and, on the other, that the programmatic bases and practices of the construction of a communist revolutionary party are established. Until now an easy solidarity between the different components of the left, united by a repudiation of the reformist politics of the leadership, has been built. It needs to move from "opposition" to the construction of a party, but to do this it is necessary to proceed to a programmatic deepening among the varied components of the left because this must not be simply a bloc of different political tendencies, but its transformation into the nucleus of a revolutionary party.