Crisis faces Italian labour movement as 'socialist leader' Nenni joins coalition

control.

However much they may care to criticise the Tories, the fact cannot be escaped that, throughout all the lengthy discussions and conference resolutions and debates on this issue, the NEC and Labour MPs have been quite certain in their minds that control should be exercised.

In any case, their attacks on the Tories are concerned solely with the administration of the Act, not the Act itself.

Sparks

Anger from rank and file members of the party came last November when the Commonwealth Immigrants Act came up for renewal in the House of Commons. Party members felt that lurking somewhere in the breasts of Wilson and company there must be a few tiny sparks of socialist principle which would force them to oppose the Act.

Alas, the sparks had gone, long since. Let the NEC document speak: 'Speaking on behalf of the parliamentary party, Mr. Wilson offered the government, as an interim measure, an unopposed passage to the Act, if, but only if (NEC emphasis), they agreed to replace it with new and improved legislation (my emphasis), drawn up in consultation with the CommonTALBOT - from page public money to subsidise the steel barons.

The main part of the SCOW was built when the industry was still nationalized in 1952. This ultra-modern plant was then sold at cut rates to the present owners by the Tory government.

The present strike and the management's modernisation plans now reveal what this denationalization meant. In the boom years, super profits for the bosses were compatible with high wages and a strong union organisation inside the plant. T'Socient Par the Nemi Socialist Party into a coalition government with the Christian Democrats and the split in the party which this has provoked displays the depth and nature of the crisis in the Italian working-class movement.

Once close allies of the Communist Party, the Nenni Socialists claim half a million members compared with some two million in Togliatti's party, which also controls the main trade union federation.

The two parties constitute a mighty force, representing the growing strength of the Italian working class as industrial development takes place. But, under its present bureaucratic leaders, it is also a mighty force for holding back the workers and chaining them to the needs of capitalism.

Nenni's decision to co-operate in governing capitalist Italy is but a logical conclusion to a whole chain of reformist thinking which began with, and still finds its most finished expression in, the Italian Communist Party.

The so-called Italian Road These times are now past. Increased competition means that the private owners must automate and cut down the labour force or go out of business.

Under this system, increased wealth goes hand in hand with increased unemployment and misery for the workers.

The Labour Party is pledged to re-nationalize the steel industry. Port Talbot shows how necessary this is if the jobs of the steel workers are to be saved and wholesale misery averted. Togliatti: his ideas paved the for Nenni.

Socialism' is based on the idea that it is possible to permeate the institutions of the capitalist state and to develop working class power within capitalism. The logical outcome is to join a coalition with the capitalist parties, of which the Christian Democrats are the most important and have dominated Italian governments since the end of the last war.

SPLIT

The left' of the Socialist Party, representing about 50.000 members, has now held its own congress and has split from the party. Whether it will carry many more members with it remains to be seen.

It appears to be a typical centrist grouping, with a political line resembling the French Unified Socialist Party's. The leadership, however, is in the hands of men who were once close to the CP.

Lelio Basso (editor of the new journal 'International Review of Socialism'), main spokesman of the 'new left' tendency, is now a sick man, unable to take an active part in politics. While in Brussels recently he gave an interview to a journalist from 'La Gauche' which gives an indication of the centrist nature of his politics.

Asked whether principle against participation in a coalition government he replied that he was not, as long as such a government carried out 'structural reforms'. The majority of the Socialist Party apparently thinks that the Christian Democrats will be obliged to introduce changes favourable to the working class.

OPPOSITION

While accusing the Nenni tendency of l becoming just another party of bourgeois democracy, he showed he was thinking, in parliamentary terms, of becoming just a 'loyal opposition'. He stated plainly that 'while opposed to the government and its programme, we should limit ourselves to not taking part in the voting [in parliament], and not vote against the comrades involved in the government and against the official decisions of the party to endeavour to prevent a definitive split'.

Fundamentally, then, there is little to choose between Basso and Nenni, and Nenni and Togliatti. The so-called 'opening to the left, now embarked on by Nenni, has been made possible by Togliatti and the revisionist line of the Communist Party.

RESTS

Behind it stands a fully worked out theory of reformism which suits the needs of a labour bureaucracy which rests on the massive base of the Italian working class. Basso does not support Nenni only because, at present, he does not trust the dominant trend in the Christian Democratic Party.

Togliatti, who prepared the way for Nenni, cannot enter the coalition- for the time being-because he has not given sufficient guarantees for the Christian Democrats Communist Party.

Nenni is leading the workers straight into the arms of Italian big capital. Togliatti blunts the militant edge of working-class feeling, thus assisting capitalism to enter the next phase of development in the Common Market on the basis of capitallabour collaboration.

As a reward he hopes, in time, to enter the coalition as well and, from within, do his bit to push Italian foreign policy along lines satisfactory to the Soviet bureaucracy.

DANGERS

Basso and his friends keep out of direct complicity because they see some of the dangers. The entry of the CP into the government would, no doubt, convince them i that 'structural reforms' would be carried out and SO pave the way for a reconciliation with Nenni.

Italian parliamentary life has a lengthy tradition of unprincipled coalitions. It has now corrupted the working-class parties, whose leaders are deeply involved in 'parliamentary cretinism' and bureaucratic administration in the municipalities and trade unions.

SUSPICION

On a number of occasions workers have moved into struggle regardless of "left' leaders.

Suspicion of the leaders is now growing. The Nenni experiment may help to crystallise a real opposition within the working class, in the trade unions and in the Communist and Socialist parties to the reformist policies of the leaders and the theories on which they are based.

WSL Th