Livio Maitan on the Communist Psrty of Italy (PCI)'s medium-term project, Bandiera Rossa no. 15, 1 October 1977
Translated into Englsh for the first time from the Italian, with Red Mole's introduction.
Introduction
The Proposta di progetto a medio termine was completed by a commission of the PCI Central Committee in June 1977 and published by Editori Riuniti in time for the summer. Maitan read it and gave the substance of this article to a seminar in Turin over 3, 4 and 5 September, held on the nature and contradictions of the PCI and on the party question as it was then being argued out in the far left. The charge he brings is that the document contains almost nothing an intelligent capitalist planner would need to refuse.
Expansion and reconversion of the productive base require “profound changes in social relations”, the project says, and the changes turn out to mean reducing the pockets of parasitism and unproductive labour, removing rigidities and degenerate equilibria, concentrating material and human resources in productive activity. Read those words from the other side of the class line. Productivity up, unproductive employment squeezed, investment redirected towards whatever the modern sectors are held to be. Confindustria could have signed most of it, and the Andreotti government was already doing a coarser version of it, sustained by PCI abstention. Then comes the clause that gives the game away: such an undertaking “can be achieved only through consent”. Consent from whom? A programme that must command the assent of both classes is a programme confined in advance to what capital can live with, and its yardstick is compatibility.
Austerity gets a chapter of its own at the very front, and a definition long enough to cover the retreat: a permanent reordering of consumption, investment and public spending, reaching into the models of culture and behaviour of entire sectors of Italian society. Whatever that describes, the austerity actually available in Italy in the autumn of 1977 was the one Andreotti had begun to impose, with some success from his own point of view, and which the PCI had spent a year declining to oppose. The arrangement had a name and a procedure. A Christian Democratic monocolore kept alive by abstention, 258 in favour, 44 against and 303 abstentions when the Chamber gave it confidence in August 1976, and the formula the party used for what it was doing was non sfiducia, no-confidence withheld. Maitan’s phrase for it, “support, directly or indirectly, or at the very least not opposing”, is a description of procedure, and the procedure let a party sustain a government’s economic measures for a year without ever having to defend a vote in favour of them to its own members.
Three months after Maitan wrote, on 27 December 1977, the CIA circulated a memorandum on the economic consequences of a larger Communist role in the Italian government. Bankers would not react adversely, it judged, with Italy’s short-term debt to foreign banks running at about seven billion dollars and exposure set by the surety of the investment and the rate of return. “The commitment of the PCI to austerity is strong,” the memorandum says, “and admission of the Party to the parliamentary majority would enhance the ability of PCI leaders to sell austerity to the Party base.” Many businessmen, it adds, would rather see the party gradually admitted to the governing process than risk it ceasing to cooperate with Andreotti and exerting its influence with labour in a negative manner.
The intelligence article attached to that memorandum goes through the medium-term project itself. It notes that the plan steers clear of wage reform, and of any modification of the wage indexation system in particular, exhorting workers to be more productive and promising voluntary restraint once the grand transformation has been achieved. On social insurance the project is franker. Take-home pay would rise at the expense of fringe benefits and contributions, and the deficit in the insurance system would be closed by scaling down health benefits and charging for medical services. Unlike their French counterparts, the analyst observes, the Italian Communists do not call for outright nationalisation of industry.
Set against that, those same analysts thought the planning section went further than earlier PCI documents, “broader and more strident”, and recorded that the Christian Democrats’ deputy secretary Galloni had called the plan duplicitous and predicted that carrying it out would end the free market in Italy. Somebody on the other side, then, read the document as a threat. The reading is worth keeping, with the qualification that it comes from a market-liberal analysis which treats the elimination of small farms as one of the benefits of EC membership and any diversion of resources from what the market shows to be efficient as a cost. What alarmed Galloni was the planning machinery, and machinery of that kind is neutral about who ends up operating it, which is where Maitan’s objection bites: the project asks for control over investment and concedes in the same breath that it will be exercised by consent.
The photograph at the foot of page 22 takes a moment to place. Lucio De Carlini, secretary-general of the Milan Camera del Lavoro, walking the line of the union’s own stewards, photographed by Lucas. The caption gives his office and nothing else, and somebody at Bandiera Rossa put the picture under an article about a programme built on consent.
Against this the article sets the bridge. Maitan is careful to concede that a medium-term project is legitimate, and that the Leninist tradition always rejected the sterilising separation between a minimum programme of immediate demands and a maximum programme attached to the conquest of power. The two methods part over what the connecting link is for. A transitional demand is chosen because the masses feel it and because winning it strikes at the framework of the system, so that its function is measured in the balance of forces it leaves behind. Where the PCI’s planners hunt for compatibilities, the transitional method sets out to heighten the incompatibilities.
The redistribution of existing work with no reduction of pay is the clearest case. It answers unemployment as workers actually experience it, which is why it can be fought for by people with no interest in Leninism whatever. It also takes hours out of capital’s hands and gives nothing back. No employer concedes that in a crisis of profitability, and the fight over it puts the question of who decides in front of people who had not been asking it. Nationalisation without compensation and under workers’ control does the same work from another direction. The compensation clause carries the argument, because paid nationalisation transfers the asset and leaves the wealth, and the electricity industry in 1962 had already taught Italian workers what that produces. Control is the other half, and it is the half a plan built on consent cannot accommodate, since planning by agreement means planning that the planners’ partners can accept.
The obvious reading is that all this is a quarrel about pace, the reformists going slowly and the revolutionaries going fast. But that is not quite right either. Maitan’s own preference in this article is for a trial of strength at medium term over an immediate confrontation, and his reason is the crushing preponderance of the reformist organisations inside the class. He too is arguing for a period of preparation. The difference lies in what the preparation prepares: a working class stronger at the end of it than at the beginning, as against an accumulation cycle restored.
Which leaves the difficulty the article states and does not solve. A medium-term programme conceived in the logic of transition needs organisations willing to fight for it, and the organisations with the members were the ones whose entire strategy the preceding pages have just demolished. The GCR could write the programme. It could not deliver the metalworkers. Though the metalworkers, as it turned out, did not need delivering. By late 1977 the FLM was impatient enough with the government’s slowness to call a mass strike and demonstration in Rome, against the PCI’s public warnings and its private pressure, and the mobilisation was strong enough to push the Communists into demanding more from Andreotti, which produced a cabinet crisis that ran to March 1978 and ended in the party’s complete humiliation, a reshuffle bringing back the same people with a few acceptable independents added. So the base moved, and the leadership spent the movement on a bid for ministries that failed. Maitan’s answer is that more than three quarters of the active population had an interest in an anti-capitalist dynamic, and that decisive matches would be played in France and Spain in the years immediately ahead. An interest is not an organisation, and the article does not say how the first becomes the second, or perhaps it says as much as anyone could say in August 1977, which is not very much.
The scala mobile appears in the article as the sole partial guarantee of workers’ incomes, to be defended intransigently, with workers’ control running from production costs through to shop prices. It was defended, and for a while the defence held. Near-full indexation under the 1975 agreement protected the lowest paid and compressed differentials through the rest of the decade, which is what made it the thing employers and governments most wanted rid of. Craxi’s decree of 14 February 1984 cut three points off the escalator and was law by that June. The PCI carried the fight to a referendum on 9 and 10 June 1985 and lost, 54.3 per cent against abrogating the cut and 45.7 per cent for, on a turnout of 77.9 per cent, which in a country that had been voting at eighty-five and ninety was the lowest a national ballot had drawn since the war. Turin and Genoa could barely muster half for putting the money back. Confindustria announced immediately afterwards that it would no longer honour the egalitarian 1975 agreement on the escalator, and the union confederations had already renounced their unity pact in the run-up to the vote, the Communist component of the CGIL alone balking at the concessions its Socialist wing, the UIL and the CISL were prepared to make. The mechanism itself lasted until the tripartite protocol of 31 July 1992. The workers’ control over costs and prices that Maitan attached to the demand was never fought for at all, and by the time of the referendum the argument had narrowed to points on a scale, with nobody on the union side in any position to say what a price was.
Employment was defended by other means. The cassa integrazione carried the redundancies and the state paid the wages of workers who were no longer working. Reductions in hours came later as a bargaining chip inside restructuring agreements, traded against flexibility, instead of a claim on capital’s control of the working day. Nationalisation without compensation and under workers’ control never became the axis of anything. Fiat settled that in the autumn of 1980. A militant strike against mass lay-offs and restructuring divided the shop floor, brought the white-collar grades out against the pickets, and ran to a full walkout of thirty-five days that ended in Agnelli’s victory, after which the private sector moved quickly to reassert control across Italian industry. Berlinguer went to the gates and told the strikers they would have Communist support even if they occupied the plants, and his own people spent those weeks working behind the scenes to head off the defeat that was coming anyway. After that the question of who decides in the factory was handled, where it was handled at all, at national level between three parties, one of them the government.
So the demands were never really tested, which is the difficulty with asking whether Maitan was right. A programme that is not carried into a fight leaves no record of its own, and what the years after 1977 do record is the other side of the ledger, the project’s own promises about employment and the Mezzogiorno set against what the PCI had to show when the compromise collapsed, an ultimatum in 1979 answered by early elections in which its vote fell four points, and a membership that never recovered the 1976 peak. The compatibility strategy can be scored. The other one cannot, and a reader coming to the article at nearly fifty years’ distance has to decide what weight a scored test carries against an unplayed one, which is not a question the archive answers.
A programme of capitalist re-stabilisation or a programme of transition?
On the PCI’s medium-term programme
On 3, 4 and 5 September a seminar was held in Turin on the following themes: 1. the nature and contradictions of the PCI; 2. the problem of the party through the current debate in the far left (crisis of militancy, theory of needs, etc.). We publish below extracts from a contribution made in the course of the debate on the first point by comrade Livio Maitan.
The drawing up of a medium-term economic programme undoubtedly answers to a requirement of this phase. It is clear to everyone that the Italian economy will not emerge from the deep crisis in which it finds itself simply by means of cyclical measures, emergency provisions, or international loans and facilities. At the same time, the real significance of the short-term decisions themselves can only appear within the framework of a wider perspective.
The PCI leadership feels this problem all the more acutely in that over the past year it has found itself supporting, directly or indirectly, or at the very least not opposing, a series of measures by the Andreotti government which have obtained certain results, though not exactly in the direction of the perspectives and indications the PCI had expressed during the 1976 election campaign and which still today constitute the leitmotiv of its propaganda and its agitation. The rate of inflation has been brought down, the balance of payments deficit contained, commitments to foreign creditors have been honoured, productivity has risen, hours worked have risen with it, some important industrial sectors have begun to climb back, wage dynamics have been slowed and, taken as a whole, working-class incomes have suffered a contraction in terms of real purchasing power. But quite apart from the fact that this schematic list already shows how the bourgeoisie has managed, thanks to the skill of the employers’ side and the shrewd manoeuvres of the Andreotti government, to shift the burden of the crisis onto the shoulders of the workers far more than it had managed to do in previous years, what has not taken shape at all is the hoped-for revival of production on a sufficiently broad scale, even if not a wholly generalised one. Investment, for its part, continues not to move. The Gioia Tauro affair, that steel giant in gestation condemned to death before ever seeing the light of day, is the symbol of the persistent absence of any real perspective for an organic industrialisation of the Mezzogiorno, while the crisis of the public sector, from the steel “colossus” of Italsider to the food “colossus” of Unidal, hardly adds to the credibility of the leading role this sector is supposed to play in the hoped-for transformation and recovery. The continuing fall in employment, finally, and the threats hanging over important industries in the coming months, if not indeed in the coming weeks, are the most dramatic translation of a situation of impasse and paralysis.
It is clear, lastly, that the PCI cannot content itself with continuing to hold out to its militants and its voters the less than inspiring perspective of support for the Andreotti government and its emergency measures, nor that of the agreement concluded in July between the six parties of the so-called constitutional arc. It has to show, or at least give the impression, that its present attitudes and objectives form part of a design of wider scope, whose realisation would carry a far greater weight than the measures put into practice over the past year or held out for the short term, and could actually secure some economic and political advantage for the working masses and the exploited layers. The draft medium-term project, drawn up by a special commission of the Central Committee and completed in June, is intended among other things to serve this purpose.
The objectives of transforming Italian society
Starting from the premises we have referred to, the PCI’s project can only end up setting itself objectives internal to the system, and restating for the umpteenth time aims so obviously desirable as to appear an almost cloying repetition of pious wishes (development of the Mezzogiorno, full employment above all). We shall see later what the real achievability of these objectives is, in the given context and even in the context the PCI leaders themselves postulate for the short and medium term.
Consistent with its analysis, the project sets itself, in more concrete terms, the elimination of the more specific causes of the crisis rather than the rupture and supersession of the mechanisms of the capitalist economy: the overcoming of the distortions, malfunctions and deformations of those positions of rent, or more generally of parasitism, which have long been the central element in the PCI leadership’s criticism and denunciation. In the part which concerns, note well, not the medium term of three to five years but social transformation in the broader sense, the project says:
“The fundamental objective of an expansion and reconversion of the productive base implies profound changes in social relations. What is involved is effectively reducing the vast pockets of parasitism and unproductive labour, removing positions of privilege, rigidities and degenerate equilibria which obstruct the setting in motion of a healthier and more organic process of economic and social development, of a broad concentration of material and human resources in productive activities, in the sectors essential to the country’s evolution in a modern and progressive direction. But such an undertaking can be achieved only through consent, and can therefore be built only around new ideals and new aims, developing at one and the same time as an economic reform and as an intellectual and moral reform of society.” (Proposta di progetto a medio termine, p. 25, Editori Riuniti, Rome)
The flimsiness and the almost banal generality of the objectives are not made good by the proclamation which immediately follows, on the need to fight for “humanly and socially advanced values and firm orientations of struggle for the liquidation, etc.” (ibid.). On the contrary, the attempt to lend a certain ideological dignity to an ultra-moderate gradualism produces nebulous formulations (”productive and creative labour”) about “a new scale of values” founded on “a revaluation of socially useful productive labour” (p. 26). It is telling that this notion has already been taken as a target in some of the contributions on the project published by the party weekly Rinascita. One need only recall an article by Claudio Napoleoni, an economist elected as a deputy on the PCI lists, who even recently has not hesitated to use explicitly revisionist concepts and formulas in support of the Berlinguer leadership’s underlying strategy. “The pairing of these two qualifications (productive and creative)”, writes Napoleoni, “seems to me a constant of the text, which almost tends to treat them as reciprocally implying one another. The difficulty that arises here is the following: if the term ‘productive’ is given the meaning it has in capitalist society, the two terms not only do not imply one another, they positively exclude one another. For ‘productive’ means ‘productive of surplus value’ and therefore refers to abstract or alienated labour, which is the contrary of creative labour realised by man.” (Rinascita, no. 31, 5 August 1977)
Elsewhere, and on particular questions, the rest descends into the emptiest rhetoric: when it declares that Italian schooling must have “its dignity and seriousness restored”, when it writes that we must “expand the personal capacities of every individual and the bonds of solidarity between all men” (p. 30), or when it speaks of sport as “a means of physical and moral enrichment of individuals and the conquest of an important collective dimension” (p. 31). The question of equality itself is posed in generically idealist and democratistic terms, while the paragraph devoted to “social relations” can be summed up in a proposition that any well-intentioned liberal or philanthropist could make his own:
“It is necessary to promote, on the one hand, a substantial raising up of the great mass of the people, and first of all of the neediest and most backward layers, including through policies of income redistribution, to be pursued systematically by cutting into positions of privilege which sustain intolerable wastes of wealth.” (ibid., p. 32)
If, for that matter, the themes of the women’s movement are touched on, the fact remains that the solution of the problems is presented as achievable within the framework of the family, without even the most cautious hint at a supersession of that institution (pp. 30 and 34), which is one more sign of the inspiration of the project under discussion, gradualist and beyond that moderate.
It is telling, besides, that right at the beginning of the first part the theme of austerity should be introduced in a separate chapter. “Austerity”, one reads, “is an undeniable necessity if the present economic difficulties are to be faced. It therefore has no alternative. But in our conception austerity is not a temporary expedient, a brief period of painful sacrifices in order then to return to the old orientations, it is not a momentary reduction of consumption conceived as unchangeable, but rather a proposal aimed at changing, according to a precise programme, the way the economic mechanism functions and its social ends, the orientation of investment, of production and of public spending, the very quality of consumption, and thus at affecting the ways of life bound up with it, the models of culture and behaviour of entire sectors of Italian society” (ibid., p. 21).
To put it a little crudely, here the worthy drafters of the text are prevaricating. Not insensible to the reactions which the sermons on austerity have provoked among substantial sections of the party’s working-class voters and among its own members, they have taken pains to sugar the pill by mixing different concepts together and unduly broadening the notion of austerity. But the mystification, and the word is more than ever apt, consists precisely in this: behind future perspectives of at best uncertain realisation, or behind rhetorical smokescreens, the real content lies concealed, that is to say the positions already taken and in all probability destined to be repeated in the period immediately ahead, not with regard to some metahistorical concept of austerity but in the face of the concrete, prosaic austerity which the Andreotti government has already begun to impose, from its own point of view not without a certain success, on the working masses of the country.
For the rest, the project advances no new themes or objectives. Thus in substance the notion of a new phase of the “democratic and anti-fascist revolution” returns, with the wish expressed for the “valorisation of the anti-fascist matrix and of the progressive character of the constitutional pact”; thus the familiar motifs recur, on the “democratic government of the economy”, on “decentralisation and the reordering of the structures of the state”, on the “development of democratic, social and political pluralism”, on “the renewal and democratisation of the European Economic Community” (pp. 36–41).
Naturally the motif of the “elements of socialism” which could be introduced gradually “into the functioning of the economy and of society” is taken up again as well. But these elements appear, if it is possible, still more diluted and insubstantial than in earlier formulations. They are, to take the exact words of the text:
“... first of all the necessity and the choice of a conscious direction of the development of society, of an effective planning of the economy, placing at the basis of such a process requirements of justice, of solidarity, of freedom, of the raising up of the human condition.” (ibid., p. 19)
It is obvious that on “requirements” of this kind there can be, in theory at least, the widest convergences. Such convergences are held out for this phase of “transformation and renewal of Italian society” as well, and not only for the medium term, on a multi-class basis: the hypothesis being that “forces of differing political inspiration, in respect of the general conceptions proper to each component of the democratic and popular movement” can contribute to satisfying them.
The reality is that there no longer exists, in general, any clear distinction between the programme of more general transformation and the medium-term project. This is the logical consequence of a gradualist conception which tends to eliminate every qualitative leap in terms of power and of class content, and to reduce, so to speak, the clashes between opposed classes to “confrontations” within the given institutional framework, between honoured protagonists of an almost idyllic political and social pluralism.
The battle for a transitional programme
The drawing up of a medium-term project by the workers’ movement, political and trade union alike, in this phase, is by no means to be rejected. The Leninist conception – with all due respect to revisionists old and new and to all the more or less fanciful “inventors” of truths about the transition – has always rejected the sterilising separation between a minimum programme of immediate demands and a maximum programme with the objectives bound up with the conquest of power. It has always insisted on the essential character of the bridge, of the connecting link constituted by a transitional programme. But the purpose of such a programme – put forward in terms of immediate relevance in periods of great social and political crisis, in revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situations – was never conceived as that of correcting or eliminating the “distortions” of the system, of promoting its “democratisation”, but rather as that of indicating to the mass movements objectives to which the masses were responsive and whose attainment entailed an attack on the framework of the system itself. To use a current terminology, a transitional programme inspired by Leninist criteria, far from concerning itself with respecting certain “compatibilities”, tends to heighten the “incompatibilities”, in the perspective of a struggle for power.
In the contribution on the project which we have already cited, Claudio Napoleoni wrote:
“We are in a situation in which the working class has obtained results which are not compatible with the maintenance of a privatistic mechanism of economic development, but in which, on the other hand, the production of material wealth depends more and more on that mechanism.”
Leaving aside the overstatement in the first assertion, the observation is broadly correct. It should be added at once that a situation of this kind cannot be prolonged indefinitely, and that it would be wrong to regard it as irreversible (as Napoleoni appears inclined to do).
Antagonistic social forces, unlike the players in a game of chess, cannot accept that a stalemate should bring their contest to an end. The problem is in which direction the present relative equilibrium of the opposing sides will be broken, and which class will succeed in gaining the upper hand by imposing its own solutions. The bourgeoisie has to aim at a more or less far-reaching restoration, not out of reactionary obtuseness or political insensitivity, but because of the vital requirements of accumulation and of the functioning of the system. If it does not succeed, it will have to face an explosive situation at home and on the international market, and it will fall prey to the sharks who, contrary to what the authors of the project appear to dream, are not prepared to apply any “correct” rules.
The working class must not delude itself that it can remain entrenched on the defensive indefinitely without suffering a serious defeat. In the abstract, it can choose between moving towards an early confrontation and preparing for a trial of strength at medium term. For a whole series of reasons – in the first place because of the political relationship of forces within it, that is, given the crushing preponderance of the reformist organisations – the second alternative is without doubt preferable. A medium-term economic project, conceived in the logic of a transitional programme, that is, from the standpoint of revolutionary rupture and not of reformist gradualism, can and must be a valid instrument for building it.
To confine ourselves to a few indications by way of example, the defence of employment will have to be posed from the standpoint of the priority of workers’ interests, in the full awareness that lacerating contradictions will follow from it which cannot be set on the road to solution except through the establishment of a new political power, a new social system. The central axis of the struggles will have to be a redistribution of the existing work which implies a reduction in hours with no reduction in pay. In parallel, the objective must be posed of striking, through nationalisation without compensation and under workers’ control (so that what happened with the nationalisation of electric power is not repeated), at the big groups responsible for the crisis and profiteering from it, and at big commercial intermediation, beginning with that which operates in the import of essential foodstuffs. Against inflation, an intransigent defence of the scala mobile, the sole partial guarantee of workers’ incomes, imposes itself and will impose itself, together with forms of workers’ control extending from the level of production costs to that of consumer prices.
The reformists of the PCI will object that this is a perspective of war between the classes, and on an international scale. But is it in fact possible to evade this war? Is it possible, without being reckless, to ignore or underestimate how dramatic the situation is? The problem is to put ourselves in a condition to win. The basis for a reasonable optimism – beyond the enormous difficulties and the tremendous risks – is that more than three quarters of the country’s active population have an interest in a dynamic of anti-capitalist struggle; and that important matches are to be played in the coming years in decisive countries such as France and Spain, where the workers’ movement is still on the rise.
28 August 1977 – Livio Maitan