News from Rifondazione

(8.5.2008)

Rome – Our electoral defeat during the last elections of 13 and 14 of April has an historical dimension. For the first time in Italian Republic’s history the left has no representatives in the Parliament. Meanwhile Berlusconi’s po­pulist right wing has won with a great popular consensus including in its coalition a xenophobic force like la Lega that has doubled its votes changing forward the political scenario in the North of Italy.

The reasons of our defeat need to be deeply investigated because they have to do with the essential, with our relation with society, with our ability to assume the social change. We will not get out from this situation if we don’t investigate deeply, if we don’t have a participate lecture of social dynamics. This work will have to shape our political commitment in the next phase. We believe that the main reason that led us to a negative electoral result need to be founded in the fact that inside a concrete political, institutional and social context voting the left has been perceived as not useful in social terms.

We need to reflect and re-propose our social utility, the role that the left has in the society. In the short term we need to assume that we were unable to exercise our role inside the majority and in our government’s par­ticipation in order to give an answer to the main social problems of our country. The tight victory of 2006 didn’t claim, in order to have a sense, only to defeat Berlusconi, but as well to defeat Berlusconian policies. The government and the majority in their concrete activities did not answer to this need, to the contrary they bend to stronger powers on all social matters: re-distribution of incomes, precariousness fight, revenues taxation, state secularization among other things. Our political action wasn’t efficient and is inside this framework that the perception of non- social utility of the left has been feed. For this reason a crisis has started, whose deepness we were not able to see, in our relation with the real country and in particular with movements and struggles. The value of the government experience as a possibility to invert the policies of the last 15 years has been impossible to realize and our permanence in the government has turned into a problem for us and for the movements.

To these factors we need to add the bipolar electoral system and the media campaign on the useful vote carried out not only by the Democratic Party and the Party of Freedoms, but as well by mass communication media as a whole. The elections have been a passage point for the building of that bipolarism that is ran by similar subjects, which is the aim of the dominants classes of this country from at least fifteen years. The goal of this bipolarism that heavily influenced this electoral campaign is to make institutions impermeable to social conflicts and to transform politics into a not useful tool for the emancipation of subaltern classes.

It is also evident that the way we presented our selves in the elections have not worked. On the reasons of this functioning failure there are different points of views, sometime very different ones, but the core political point is that the operation has failed, and that in front of everybody’s eyes it looked as a political operation that was not able to intercept the social crisis.

All these elements as a whole, the incapability of transmitting the social value of our affirmation, has led to loose our votes in all directions: toward a non-vote from those who think “you are all the same”.

Toward the Democratic Party from those who, even if sharing our contents, thought that was a useful vote in order to defeat Berlusconi.

Even to la Lega, from the working classes that felt non protected by the left. They thought that if there was no way to change things with a general action, at least it is possible to improve things “in our house”.

Starting again from the social side

This historical defeat did not took place during a phase of economical and social stabilization. We are not facing an economical grow cycle that reduces social contradictions. To the contrary we are in a phase of crisis, with social and personal insecurities, that are very close to anguish. Is in that feeling of loneliness in front of dangers that our project has been defeated bringing the right wing to win elections.

We are aware that these contradictions will increase in the next phase. Salary problems, precariousness, housing, welfare, aggression to the territory and its militarization are about to increase. The crucial point is if in front of this embittered social crisis the populist right wing will be the one in power proposing war among poor and constructions of scapegoats, or if we will be able to re-build forms of solidarity, of conflict, of movement, able to re-establish an identity and a social utility of the left.

From this starting point it’s necessary to define through which tools we will proceed to re-organize the left policy field. Is evident the risk we are facing after our defeat in society, we risk a braking up of the militant weave and the evaporation of the political left in a Babel of languages and proposals.

The point is not the acceleration toward an unclear aim, but the definition of concrete paths, able to give back a membership sense to a community and able to be efficient in social terms.

1. In first place we need to re-launch PRC as a collective body. The issue of a communist refoundation is not behind us but in front of us in its dimension of political, cultural, social project and in its community dimension. To reopen the Communist Refoundation Party as a political project necessary to the Italian left for today and tomorrow is an essential point we cannot miss, in all its aspects, from the membership drive to social, political and cultural initiative. Reopening the Communist Refoundation Party is necessary to offer certainty to women and men that choose to be a part of this community clearing out the filed from hypothesis of fade and overcoming, that have defined the phase we already passed through, that was underlined during the electoral campaign, contributing to disorient and depriving motivation.

Reactivate the Communist Refoundation Party means to reaffirm a political ethic, in coherence between what is declared and what is practiced as a daily exercise, means a strengthening of the internal democracy, re-launching Carrara’s path. Reactivating the gender conflict inside the party, in order to convert it in a real sexuate subject where women are not only persons to show off or quotas. A party able to assume feminism as a point of view from which we need to read the world, a party able to be crossed by the daily criticism of politics that women do. We need to know clearly that the PRC is the indispensable, but not sufficient tool, for the reconstruction of a wide anti-capitalist left in this country. Indispensable and non sufficient: these two terms are not defining a geometrical space but a culture of politic were sectarianism and the will to liquidate are cancelled in the scenario.

2. At the same time we need to unite the left field. The unity request raised in the last electoral campaign and that still emerges today need to be caught because is a big resource in order to get out from this defeat. PRC is indispensable but not sufficient, because the political left is wider than simple communism, and because the concrete forms of commitment in the left are going far behind the ones codified in a party membership.

Movements, committees, collective groups, associations, trade unionists, territorial and environmental demands: today in the left there are thousands of ways of doing politics. Let’s just think about No Dal Molin in Vincenza or No TAV in Val di Susa.

That means to unify the left field starting from the value increasing, in all levels, of what already exists and of the innovative experiences that took place durino the last years: just think to the European Left based on this idea and that moved its first steps in these recent years.

Re-starting with the construction of common left spaces, of concrete forms of investigation work, of political, social and cultural work in the territory to build a path, not accelerated by electoral deadlines, but focused on unity building among all available forces on the baiss of contents, goals, real practice sharing. A unitary path addressed to all, and not only, who have supported the Lef, the Rainbow. A unification process able to avoid divisions among those who is proposing a left constituency or a communist constituency. These are two proposals that could mashed forward the left, producing divisions inside Rifondazione’s bo­dy, which political project, in our vision, needs to be re-launch and seen as a priority, creating division among our people on the basis of ideological references. Two proposals that are not facing the main problem: how to re-build the social utility of the left.

We need to start immediately with a re-aggregation path, which forms and modalities will be delivered to free discussion for all in the congress path, that will not do the political mistakes and top down administration that we have in the former phase. The left can born only as a tool of participation, only if their organisations are led by democratic and transparent principles, without the domain of apparatus, with their logics and cooptation. That is why we suggest to build a discussion, inside the party that include all the area of the Left, the Rainbow, as a political priority for the next week. We need to start again the discussion.

We are recommending as well the participation to all demonstration of 25 of April and 1st of May that will take place in the territories delivering a clear message:

The populist right wing is growing laying on low salaries, on precariousness, on lack of housing and services.

Let’s build the social opposition to Berlusconi’s go­vernment!

Imma Barbarossa, Roberta Fantozzi, Loredana Fraleone, Fabio Amato, Ugo Boghetta, Bianca Bracci Torsi, Stefania Brai, Alberto Burgio, Maria Campese, Giovanna Capelli, Guido Cappelloni, Carlo Cartocci, Bruno Casati, Aurelio Crippa, Paolo Ferrero, Eleonora Forenza, Claudio Grassi, Ramon Mantovani, Laura Marchetti, Citto Maselli, Giovanni Russo Spena, Bruno Steri, Luigi Vinci

Approved with 98 favorable votes

National Political Committee of Rifondazione Comunista, 19–20 April 2008