The astonishing success of the European Social Forum in Florence last month has focused the attention of the British left on the forum's main organisers, the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista (PRC), more usually known as Rifondazione Comunista. The PRC has been the most successful example of left regroupment in continental Europe over the last decade.
As Florence showed, Rifondazione has organic links with both organised labour (having substantial support within the biggest union confederation, the CIGL, as well as the radical breakaway unions like COBAS) and with a broad layer of anti-capitalist youth that the Socialist Alliance (or Globalise Resistance) can only dream of.
It might therefore be suggested that some of the British far left should be far readier to learn from Rifondazione, and more diffident about imparting lessons to it, than seemed to be the case during the Florence sojourn.
Whilst Rifondazione are obviously not beyond criticism - the current line of dissolving the party into the movement could create problems if the movement ebbs -their subtle methods of achieving hegemony over young people and rank and file trade unionists seem more successful, as well as attractive, than the crass vanguardism often found in England, which sadly limits the Socialist Alliance's appeal to groups of workers breaking from New Labour (such as the RMT).
The Italian example also seems relevant to the debate going on within the Socialist Alliance about the relative merits of the
..... ..... ••• relevant to the broad mass party as against the united front. A few years ago, many would have argued that a better and more appropriate vehicle for the recomposition of the left after the collapse of Stalinism and rightward shift of social democracy was the broader, looser and more flexible Spanish formation, the Izquierda Unida (United Left).
Interestingly, despite all Rifondazione's trials and tribulations, including the splits of 1995 and 1998, this broad multi-tendency party has in the long run proved stronger both at the ballot box and in society than the initially more successful Izquierda Unida. The Spanish formation never transcended its origins as a united front of special type albeit one centred round the Spanish Communist Party rather than any far left
Any serious discussion of Rifondazione must go back to its origins. Whilst it is true that the Genoa events of July 200l, and PRC leader Fausto Bertinotti's reactions to them, revived the party and shifted it to the left, it is ridiculously simplistic to portray Rifondazione as a semi-Stalinist formation suddenly radicalised by an encounter with the anti-globalisation movement, as some SWP speakers often seem to infer. ignorance of the complexities and ambiguities of Italian Communism, a mass phenomenon that reflected some of the best, as well as some of the very worst aspects, of the Italian workers' movement as a whole.
Moreover, the widespread British belief in the legend of PRC's Stalinist origins was consciously fanned by the Marxism Today/Democratic Left clique who dominated the British media coverage of the Italian left in the early 1990s.
Bandiera Rossa Italian section of the Fourth
International) had joined DP in July 1989, this meant that a decision had been taken at
the very beginning to accept not just the exMaoists of the DP majority, who had always
been profoundly hostile to the Soviet Union, but even open Trotskyists into a
party whose roots were very self-consciously within the mainstream of Italian
Communism as the prolonged battles with Rifondazione has to be seen from the moment of its a new departure in European politics ..... the PDS over the old PC symbol made clear. within the social-democratic formation until April 1993. - his variant of left Eurocommunism had always been the most open to the movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s amongst students women and other groups such as ecologi. cal activists.
While vociferously rejecting the social democratic tendencies of Armendola and Napilitano on the PCI's right, he had never seen the Soviet Union as a model for communism in Western Europe.
The role of the Ingraiani - although not of Ingrao himself - in the PRC's foundation meant that it was always going to be more open to movements than the PCI of Togliatti and Berlinguer ever. was - supporting rank and file trade unionists protesting against austerity in 1992-93, when the PDS leadership rallied to the monetarist premier Amato, and vigorously defending women's rights to abortion in the late 1990s, when PDS/DS leader Massimo D'Alema was anxious to do a deal with the Catholic Church.
Anybody familiar with the PCI's A
nauseating support for austerity and clericalism in the years of the Historic Compromise (1976-79) should be able to see that the PRC's rupture with the worst elements of the old party's past was always a radical one and that ista 1992, this had been reversed by 1994 and the party has not been subject to demo. graphic erosion in the way its enemies in the PDS predicted; a large proportion of its members were never in the old PCI.
By emphasising the positive feature of the PRC throughout it existence, it is possible to see the leftward shift in the party since 1998 in some sort of historical context.
The party broke with the Ulivo government in the autumn of 1998, provoking the breakaway by Cossutta and his more Stalinist Partito dei Comunisti Italiani (PCI).
The process has accelerated since the Genoa events of july 200l. Bertinotti's stress on the anti-globalisation movement has made the PRC more open to joint work with the far left at the European level, as well as more sceptical about long-term collaboration with the more traditional parties of the European Communist tradition like the PCF in France
As a party with about 100,000 members and deep roots in Italian society, especially in traditionally red' regions like Tuscany, the PRC has always contained a diversity of currents, some more organised than others; at present the main groupings are the Italian section of the Fourth International Bandiera Rossa, the Bertinotti supporters and Ferrando's more dogmatic Trotskyist group Proposta Comunista and, on the