An English translation of several chapters of Philippe Bourrinet’s book “Un siècle de gauche communiste ‘italienne’ (1915-2015) – Dictionnaire biographique d’un courant internationaliste“, which aim at tracing back the history of the International Communist Party. Bourrinet intersperses his own commentary into the presentation, not all of which we agree with.

PDF-Version: Philippe Bourrinet – A Century of Italian Communist Left

An Organisational Domino: Splits, Expulsions and Schism in Italian “Programmism” (1960-1974)

To write the history of “programmism” often leaves the impression that it could be summed up in its splits. We shall confine ourselves to mentioning the most important ones, those which reflect a real activist orientation, sometimes combined with ultra-dogmatic academicism, to which the “programmist” mother organisation would eventually succumb (see below).

“Rivoluzione comunista” (1964)

This group, originally purely Milanese, was the creation of a single man, the fiery Calogero Lanzafame, barely 27 years old at the time of the split. This Sicilian volcano had joined “Programma comunista” in the early 1960s; he quickly became the rising star in Milan.

Disagreeing with dogmatic immobilism, he is the driving force behind the Milanese split which is dragging its majority into positions of activist intervention. From this split in November 1964, the group “Rivoluzione comunista” was born. Its leader had been expelled manu militari, in the presence of Bordiga, during a tumultuous meeting in Florence. Rivoluzione comunista became the organ of the Internationalist Communist Party, totally focused on “a practical activity of intervention”. The “programmists” were fast to change their label and henceforth called themselves “International Communist Party”.

The group programs its return to Bolshevism, that of What Is To Be Done? and Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism by Lenin and The ABC of Communism by Bukharin. Few in number (about thirty activists), the group created by Calogero Lanzafame embarked on an all-out activism until the early 1980s, spreading agitating leaflets: Lotte operaie (1968 – 1977), within the trade unions; Donna proletaria (1973 – 1984), towards proletarian women; and Agitatore comunista (1968 – 1979), organ of the students belonging to the “Party”. From 1977 to 1985, the group even launched a specific edition of Rivoluzione comunista for Mezzogiorno. Despite this activism which exhausted entire generations of activists[1], especially at the level of para-union agitation, the group did not leave with a purely Italian cadre. Ideologically Leninist, its practice, on a more modest scale, can be compared to that of the British activist organisation SWP (Socialist Workers’ Party) which publishes International socialism.

The Florentine schism of October 1973: “Il Partito Comunista”, “programmist” duplication

The Tuscan “programmist” group, led by Giuliano Bianchini, had been since the 1960s at the head of the PCInt Central Trade Union Office (“Programma comunista”) whose slogan was the “reconquest of the class union” (CGIL) in order to transform it into an authentic “red union”: an uchronia of the history of Profintern[2]. It was in Florence that the party’s “union agitation” paper was printed: Il sindacato rosso, from July 1968 to October 1973.

After Bordiga’s death in 1970, Giuliano Bianchini clashed head-on with Bruno Maffi, considered himself one of Alfa‘s possible “dauphins”, although Bordiga in 1964 explicitly chose Maffi as his successor. Bianchini is nevertheless part of the “organic duo” that watched over the so-called “purity” of the heritage of the “Sinistra comunista”. He fought violently against the influence of the anti-unionist positions of the KAPD[3], of which the Scandinavian section (Carsten Juhl and Gustav Bunzel) had just completed its study. At the general meeting in Marseilles on 4 and 5 September 1971 he represented with Maffi the “Centre” which fought the “KAPDist” theses defended at this meeting by Carsten Juhl, Danish member of the Party.

He is the main architect of the Tuscan split which gave birth in September 1974 to a small organisation grouped around the newspaper Il Partito comunista and the theoretical journal Comunismo. The rift between the two enemy brothers of Milan and Florence had only widened on the occasion of the referendum of 12 May 1974 on the repeal of the law on divorce. Maffi’s organisation called for a vote against it. Bianchini’s tendency saw tangible proof of the “degeneration of the old party” there.

No opposition of principle existed in fact between the two microparties, except the choice of the “pope” (the “single commissioner”) of the “Party”. For the first time, the ICP was affected not by a split or a heresy caused by an interpretation of Dogma, but by a schism, on the sole question of the choice of the primus inter pares.

An article in an encyclopedia (critical!) of theology makes a clear distinction between schism and heresy: “Conceptually, schism can be distinguished from heresy or apostasy in that it does not imply in principle a dogmatic error or any deliberate break with faith. But, in practice, one can hardly trace a separation between schism and heresy, the primacy of the pope being considered in the Catholic Church as a dogmatic principle.”

All things considered, the 1973 schism, which put an end to the two-headed “single commission”, could be compared to the division of 1054 between the Church of Rome and the Church of Byzantium, in which each of the two parties proclaimed its infallible authority in the interpretation of the primitive dogma.

The Bianchini group decided, without any real justification, to label itself the “International Communist Party”, from the first issue of its organ Il Partito Comunista. The second ICP could moreover refer to the letter of Bordiga who had elevated schism to the rank of cardinal virtue: “Schisms were born from respect for the Doctrine on the one hand, and from a revolutionary rupture with the latter on the other… The way of new humanity lies in revolution. Schism gives birth to revolution”[4].

The Renaissance of the Bordigist Current in France (1951-1968). The 1966 Split: Fil du Temps and Invariance

Before the majority of the French Fraction of the Communist Left formally joined Socialisme ou Barbarie, there was a year of group to group colloquia. Suzanne Voute, who represented the French Bordigist organisation in these discussions, met with Chaulieu himself up until the summer of 1950 to initiate a merger process[5]. But the bets had already been made. Gutted by the passage of the majority of its militants to the group “Socialisme ou Barbarie”, the organisation re-emerged only in 1951.

Modestly, the former “French Fraction” reduced its name to “the French group of the International Communist Left”. Yielding to the bluff, it sometimes signed “Bureau politique de la GCF” (Communist Left of France). In September 1951 the group published an internal Bulletin of the French group of the International Communist Left, which later took the name of Travail de groupe. In an article written with the help of Lucien Laugier[6], Suzanne Voute considered that the group “Socialisme ou Barbarie” was a “circle of ‘Marxist’ intellectuals and not a political group“. In another text, she stressed that ‘barbarisme’ “had some merit in rethinking certain problems of the theorising of socialism“, as in Castoriadis-Chaulieu’s article “Les rapports de production en Russie”. Nevertheless, the criticism of Chaulieu’s positions based on the “leader-led” dyad was the starting point for the group in its attempt to acquire a theoretical framework by reappropriating Marx’s writings.

From 1954 onwards, the French Fraction invested itself in the publication of brochures which reflected the internal discussions on the revolutions in Russia, China and Hungary in 1956 under the name of Travail de Groupe.

It was in fact after the events of October 1956 in Hungary that the group began to develop, as did “Socialisme ou Barbarie”. But unlike the latter, the Bordigist group spoke not of revolution but of proletarian revolt by the weapon of the general strike, without mentioning once the formation of workers councils . It also insisted (rightly) on the weaknesses: “the Hungarian workers’ struggle has become obscured by non-proletarian demands and a national-democratic ideology“, that of the “oppressed nations“. Nevertheless, the Bordigists, with a very Sorelian tone, exalted the insurrectional general strike: “The facts are screaming. For if the Hungarian movement was well started and developed as a REBELLION AGAINST THE USSR, if it was thus a political movement not PROLETARIAN, but INTERCLASSIST, ‘national’, it is however the general strike, a specifically proletarian weapon, that it drew and draws its principal force of shock from“. And engaged in a literary prosopopoeia of insurgent workers, whose “great voice” is a glorious call to violence: “In the West, you fight imperialism with words! We fight by general strike, insurrection, VIOLENCE“.

After 1956, the group was made up of two sections, one in Paris and the other in Marseille. The latter, where two postal workers (Lucien Laugier and François Gambini) and young students (Christian Audoubert and Jacques Camatte) were active, was for a long time the most numerous when Suzanne Voute, transferred to the Marseilles region, joined it. The group had almost as many Italians as French, such as Otello Ricceri (Piccino), Bruno and Ida Zecchini, Giulio Bertazzo (Pataro), Ferruccio Pessotti (Ferruccio), etc.

In Paris, in addition to Suzanne Voute, once a Parisian, the section included the Swiss couple Daniel and Marianne Dumartheray, but also Martin Axelrad (Jean-Pierre) and Serge Demianiw (since 1958). After 1956, then in the early 1960s, Roger Dangeville, Jacques Angot, André Claisse (Goupil) and Claude Bitot strengthened the small Parisian section.

The life of the group took place with a good dose of autonomy in relation to the Italian centre. In 1957, an editorial of Programme communiste, the primary public face of the Bordigist current, made the Italian organisation a simple “sister organisation”: “We shall simply point out to the reader that this (sic) Internationalist Communist Party of Italy, which we consider to be a sister organisation, was formed towards the end of the war by the same current which founded the Italian section of the Communist International in January 1921“.

When the magazine Programme communiste began to appear in 1957, printed in Marseille, it was “recognised and encouraged by Bordiga“, according to Suzanne Voute, who was the soul of this quarterly magazine. She did not hide all that the new magazine owed to Ottorino Perrone, who had just passed away. In two letters to Christian Audoubert (Oct. 1957), she highlighted the immense contribution of the review Bilan, written largely by Ottorino Perrone and Virgilio Verdaro: “… we cannot forget that without Bilan we would probably not exist, we, in France… The outcome was the refusal to defend the USSR; the refusal to send the French, Belgian, Dutch proletarians, etc., to sacrifice themselves to defend the Spanish bourgeois republic – and thus prepare the mass sacrifices of the imperialist war. This was the affirmation of the idea of fraction, in the historical if not organisational sense of the word“.

If the theoretical work was organised around the journal Programme communiste, the work of political agitation was largely marked by the question of the Algerian war. On this question, the group’s position moved towards a total reconsideration of Rosa Luxemburg’s position on the “struggles for national liberation”.

An article, written by Suzanne Voute, fully supported, with regard to Algeria, Bordiga’s position on the “struggle of peoples of colour”: “It is a question of instilling in the masses of workers that the nation, the straitjacket of social conservation in developed countries, can be a revolutionary catalyst in backward and oppressed countries and must therefore be supported, while the working class, driven by opportunism, has twice overthrown the order of these values: sacrificing itself to the bourgeois nation where it is an accomplished historical fact, guarantor of capitalist exploitation, refusing its support where its constitution, through the revolutionary movements it arouses, contributes powerfully to the maturation of the future international conditions of socialism: extension of modern economic and social forms, qualitative and quantitative growth of the world proletariat.”[7]

From 1962 onwards, after the end of the Algerian war, which had attracted a certain number of sympathisers and readers around the magazine, the question arose of quickly publishing a monthly newspaper which should allow the construction of the organisation, and thus pass from the “historical party” to the “formal party”.

The newspaper’s conception was entirely along Leninist lines: “The role of a newspaper, however, is not limited solely to the dissemination of ideas, to political education, and to the enlistment of political allies. A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser. In this last respect it may be likened to the scaffolding round a building under construction, which marks the contours of the structure and facilitates communication between the builders, enabling them to distribute the work and to view the common results achieved by their organised labour. With the aid of the newspaper, and through it, a permanent organisation…“[8]

Suzanne Voute was truly the soul of this turning point. Le Prolétaire, whose first issue was released in 1963, was really “her child”. She threw all her energy into imposing what many militants, in particular Jacques Camatte, considered premature or unviable. In this, she was helped considerably by Lucien Laugier and Christian Audoubert, but also by Martin Axelrad, in Paris, and the Italian “centre” of Bruno Maffi.

This Leninist conception of the newspaper as a “collective organiser” was bound to encourage latent activist tendencies. As Jacques Camatte remarked, this focus on the sale of the Prolétaire collided with the harsh concrete reality:

“Most activists frantically embarked on the little agitation that the situation gave them, thinking it was absolutely necessary to prepare the party. It did not have much echo: no worker bought Le Prolétaire which, to be distributed, had to be handed out.”[9]

But from 1965 onwards there was a turning point in the party’s vision, and in Bordiga himself[10]. It distinguished the “historical party” from the “formal party”. The latter, reduced to a small handful of militants, must continue to defend the invariance of the communist programme. The “historical party”, a sort of Hegelian spirit of the Revolution, is expressed by the programmatic continuity with the past of October ’17. As pure spirit, it passes through long periods during which its influence on the workers is dematerialised. Consequently, in the counter-revolutionary period (as in 1965), the activity of the communists had to be exclusively concentrated on theoretical work. But it was a work that Bordiga himself did not confuse with academism.

From 1966 onwards, the major event in the French organisation was the split of Roger Dangeville and Jacques Camatte, both of whom had been Bordiga’s much-loved “ghostwriters”. Both had a rather academic vision of the organisation, championing a “struggle against activism”, represented by the publication of a workers’ newspaper, which was not even that[11].

The split of Camatte and Dangeville in 1966 was of great importance, both politically and theoretically, because it raised, before May 1968, the question of intervention in a course which “remained unfavourable”.

This division was considered by the “centre” of Maffi as a simple “desertion”, even a “counter-revolutionary pathology”: “In a party like ours, crises and divisions are always the product of real struggles and we refuse to consider desertions as such… It is more about escapes which respect the counter-revolutionary pathology than splits having some political meaning“[12].

This “desertion” in the form of an “escape” played a major role in the 1970s, the first “escape” taking shape around Roger Dangeville’s Le Fil du temps magazine and the other around Jacques Camatte’s Invariance magazine.

Roger Dangeville, more a Marxologist than an activist, was a commentator born of Marxism in 1848. Convinced by the theories of invariance codified by the prophet of Naples, he never went off the beaten track and, very often, was content to plagiarise the “maestro”[13]. He was also the active promoter of a pure academism which he communicated to the Belgians, who, like Henri Heerbrant, had left the “party”. The result was long scholastic studies on the “Belgian question”, as soon as the first issue of Fil du temps was published[14].

Nevertheless, after 1968, for almost 15 years, he had to undertake a remarkable editorial work, very useful for the young Marxist militants of the 1970s generation, who were looking for collections of selected texts by Marx and Engels that had not passed through the “national-communist” screening of Moscow or Beijing.

Dangeville was a magician of Bordigian hermeneutics, in the form of additional interpretations to sacred texts. In the public meetings of his “Party”, he officiated like a Marxist theologian, as an “exegete, whitewashed to decipher the Bible, [who] went straight to the volume and page concerned“. Very attached to the dogmas of a purist “Leninism”, adept of a terrorist “dictatorship of the proletariat” (“red terror“), he always affirmed, without ever dismantling himself, that Marxism did not support innovation, and that Lenin himself only “thought of restoring Marxism itself“[15].

It was quite different with Jacques Camatte. His work as a “party” was first, like that of Dangeville, academic. He showed, however, a great critical audacity which allowed to give a real echo to the German communist left (KAPD), cursed by the ideologues Maffi and Bianchini of the ICP. Convinced that the prospect of a new period was opening up, he published the journal Invariance as early as 1967, whose particularity was to reject, through its various series (1967 – 2003), any shade of invariance, while providing, overall, a certain theoretical oxygen, that of “discontinuity”. Critical of Bordiga, whose “passion for communism” he always underlined, he nevertheless distanced himself from Marxism, considering that the advent of Gemeinwesen, represented by the proletariat, could only arise from the collapse of the system, and not from sectarian political groups which he quickly qualified as “activist rackets“.

When Camatte took his turn negating the Bordigist doxa, he was not followed by others like Philippe Leclercq (Fabien) who formed the Groupe Communiste Mondiale (GCM), a follower of an ultra-Bordigist scholastic, close to that of Roger Dangeville.

The split of Camatte was thus much more significant than that of Dangeville (and Jacques Angot), totally “academic”. It had, however, little impact on the organisation, at least until 1971-72.

In 1968, the French “programmist” organisation still remained centred on Marseilles, which remained the most vibrant centre of the Bordigist current. If Paris experienced a tremendous expansion after 1969, the Marseille section remained the theoretical centre of the French core. It was also the section most free through the healthy spirit of companionship cultivated by Lucien Laugier:

“… Unlike [the section] in Paris, no bigotry, no ‘official’ leaders, no protocols or posters above our heads. Lucien Laugier was the soul of this group without a leader… he symbolised the ideal revolutionary, the one who constantly tried to live theory and everyday life (work/family) without contradiction.”[16]

The end of this freedom of tone and the advent of “corporalism”, coated with the worst sectarianism, would quickly make their effects felt in an organisation that began to grow like a mushroom after 1969.

Exhilaration of Intervention and “Marxism-Leninism” (1968-1982). To the Crash of 1981-1982

Until 1968, the risk of activism in the International CP was minimal. The visibility of the “party” was insignificant. The activist fever which had manifested itself in 1964 in Italy by the important split of the Milanese group “Rivoluzione comunista” had spared the “Party” in France. After 1969-71, it gradually gained the whole of the international movement, all the more so as the activity took place in a favourable context of expansion of workers’ struggles.

In the 1970s, the ICP benefited from the formation of small nuclei in various European or neighbouring countries (Germany, Spain, Portugal and Algeria), both on national territory and in emigration. In a notable way, it was able to “establish itself” in the Middle East (Lebanon) and in Latin America (Venezuela and Brazil). The nuclei could be as small as an individual: those of Greek and Turkish origin devoted most of their activity to translation alone.

This growth resulted in the establishment of various national central offices, all headed by the International Central Bureau (ICB), headed by Bruno Maffi, who had to abandon his function as single Commissioner. The monarchical Italian central bureau transforms itself into a composite triarch of Alberto Clima (Armando), Renato De Prà (Ettore) and Graziella Bronzini (Veronica).

In practice, this growing body had two heads, one in Italy, and the other in France which was becoming more and more important.

In France

It is indisputable that the French “Bordigism” received a certain echo in the student milieu, but also by workers radicalised by the May 1968 movement. At the sides of the very activist ‘leftist’ groups, whose militants were most often devoid of any Marxist background, of any historical culture, the theoretical coherence of ‘Bordigism’ intrigued, then seduced the neophytes. The haunting populism of the Maoist groups, firmly attached to a counterrevolutionary tradition, was a powerful emetic that made them quickly evacuate the poison of Stalinism. Then each of the neophytes could relate to a true organic continuity with the revolutionary movement of the years 1917-23. Gérard Mangiavillano, a militant from Marseille trained by Lucien Laugier sums up very well this indestructible revolutionary faith given by the truth tables of ‘Bordigism’:

“The Bordigist militants were a bit the depositaries of humiliated, crushed, persecuted generations, of the Commune to the spartakists of (Rosa) Luxemburg, of the mutinies from 1917 to Red October, of the savagery of the Stalinist counterrevolution, of the gangsterism of the PCF, of its false epics, of its rigged history… We were screaming the truth. It made us indestructible. The Italian Left, the P.C.I. the history of the Revolution was within us.”

The French organisation, in the wake of a May ’68 that Bordiga was going to reject with a holy horror, experienced a sudden growth, which culminated between 1971 and 1976. According to Lucien Laugier, “after May ’68, the numbers quintupled” or even increased sixfold. The organisation grew from 70 members in 1966 to 200 or 300 members in 1975, active in about 22 cities. In 1970, Le Prolétaire was given more circulation: from monthly to bimonthly. A year later, the organisation held a meeting in Paris twice a week. In 1979, despite the brutal drop in membership, offices were still held in Aix-en-Provence, Angers, Arles, Avignon, Besançon, Caen, Grenoble, Le Havre, Le Mans, Laval, Lille, Lyon, Nantes, Nîmes, Paris, Rouen, Roubaix, Strasbourg, Toulon, Toulouse and Valence, but also in Brussels and Lausanne, attached to the French “centre”[17]. The Reims section, ephemeral, quickly disappeared. But, as Benjamin Lalbat notes, “this profusion of sections is only illusory since, as the study of subscription figures shows us, it hides a gradual defection, more and more militants leaving the party in a disorderly manner”.

If the centre of the “party” in France had long been Marseille, where the editorial board sat until 1972, it then moved definitively to the Paris region. The Paris section, the largest, was divided into four sections which had their own rooms, such as the “Vercesi”, the “Laura Lafargue”, the “Barbato”[18] and the “Mario Acquaviva”. In addition to these four sections, a tiny section was added: the “Rosa Luxemburg”, mainly oriented towards the Middle East, while the “Barbato” was oriented towards the Maghreb[19], directed by a member of El-Oumami[20].

Unlike Italy, the militant base of the “Party”, especially in Paris, was much less proletarian in tradition, the “militant workers” being mainly postal workers, hospital workers, technicians, researchers or teachers. Among the latter, Martin Axelrad (Jean-Pierre), physicist, lecturer, and a normalienne[21] who graduated first in the Agrégation de Lettres Classiques[22]: Annie Prassoloff (Laurence).

At times, the organisation was much more than a mere Leninist grouping of “revolutionary intellectuals” applying the recipes of the What Is To Be Done? in the life of the “Party”[23]. It attracted a number of workers, such as those who broke with “Lutte Ouvrière” that constituted the Lille section. Similarly, for a brief period, a whole group of young Renault workers joined the “party”, believing that intense activity inside the factory would “create” the Revolution… As one former Bordigist notes in an interview: all “were voluntarists”. To “occupy” them, the single Commissioner Bruno Maffi would then have adopted “that strategy of the red union for a time“[24].

For some old militants, such as Luc Thibault (Dominique), it was the “mass entry in the 70s of ex-68s” that had a “negative role“[25]. It also saw a strong influx of militants of Maghreb origin (especially Algerian), whose internationalism was reduced to “anti-imperialist” slogans, or even Arab nationalist ones.

As is rarely mentioned by witnesses at the time, the organisation experienced an influx of former Maoist activists (Gauche prolétarienne and others), desiring “to move towards the people”, quite comfortable in an “anti-imperialist” policy oriented towards immigrants. Some, in their interventions, did not hesitate to practice “blue-collar politics”[26].

These elements, at least in Paris, could not really be assimilated: “In France and, especially in Paris, the situation took a bad turn, with the arrival of some young people from the Maghreb and the Middle East, among whom, in spite of a strong anti-imperialist radicalism, remained prevalent the nationalist temptation, with all that follows. Our organisation, as I see it, had a good dose of responsibility in this debacle, by failing to give these anti-imperialist (sic) youngsters a class approach, on the theoretical level and therefore on the practical level…“[27]

At the beginning of the 1970s, the French Bordigist group gradually moved from a trade union-type activity, deliberately modelled on that of the Italian sister organisation (formation of “red trade unions”), to a “movementist”[28] activity, focused more and more on the category of immigrant and precarious workers, particularly in the work-places. Simultaneously, the “party” embarked on a less economic activity, focusing on anti-militarism.

In 1968, the group pursued a union policy, little different from that of the PCF-CGT. In a leaflet distributed at the gigantic demonstration of 13 May 1968 in Paris, it, like the PCF and the CGT, pitted students against workers: “You workers know well that this movement is not yours; it actually reflects the reaction of the petty bourgeoisie to the increasing loss of its privileges.”[29] In another pamphlet, it uses a language little different from that of Stalinist organisations, denouncing “all false revolutionaries, from pro-Chinese to anarchists through Trotskyists and students.“[30]

In a leaflet dated 22 May 1968, the “party” sticks to the PCF and the CGT, advancing “unifying demands: …general increase in wages…general reduction in working hours, immediately 40 hours of work paid as 48… integration of bonuses into the basic wage… full payment of strike days…“.[31]

In another pamphlet (24 May 1968), the French proletariat was considered as beaten in advance: “Alone against all, we foresaw and proclaimed from the beginning that [the awakening of the proletariat] would lead in the immediate future only to very limited results. For not only is the disorganised proletariat incapable of taking power, but it cannot even economically support a frontal and unitary struggle against the bourgeoisie.” The conclusion was logical: only the conquest of the CGT to transform it into a “school of communism” was within reach: “… the proletariat must struggle on the economic field to unify and organise itself, to make its union the school of communism. Thus the CGT, once again a Red Union, will oppose the reformist demands with its unitary demands“.[32]

This slogan was hardly different from that adopted by the various Maoist groups of the time, which called for the founding of a “CGT of class struggle“, betrayed by the “bureaucrat and revisionist” union leaders, a qualification that the “programmists” replaced with the softer one of “opportunists”.

At the end of the May 68 movement, with a staggering unconsciousness and/or an uninhibited sectarian disdain, the “party” called for the transformation of trade unions into instruments subject to the “World Communist Party” (id est the ICP…). It was necessary “to impregnate the trade union organisations with communist ideology in order to make them the transmission belt of the political governing body, the Party”, and thus “to (regroup) behind the Party flag“[33].

In the 1970s, the French group hesitated between an activity which, by force of circumstance, became anti-union – under pressure from a workers’ base outraged and exasperated by union-management collusion – and an activity increasingly centred on the struggle of immigrant workers.

Since the late 1960s, and even long before, wildcat strikes had been on the rise in northern Europe[34]. In what became “Wild Europe”, the one that had the most impact was that of the workers of the largest iron mine in the world, in the small Swedish town of Kiruna, on the polar circle. 5,000 miners clashed for 54 days (Dec. 1969 – January 1970) not only with the social-democratic state, but with the trade unions, their transmission belts.

For several years, the “party” press had been reporting on these anti-union “wildcat strikes” with some reluctance[35]. It did not mention Kiruna, nor the wildcat strikes in Scandinavia (Denmark), Great Britain (Ford, February 1969) and West Germany (Saarland, Ruhr, steelworks and shipyards in Kiel, summer 1969)[36]. Despite the strength of the anti-union phenomenon, the French organisation continued to publish (since July 1969) a monthly sheet entitled Syndicat de classe, which proclaimed: “Let us form groups of the International Communist Party in the C.G.T.!“.

It was up to the Scandinavian section of the ICP, led by Carsten Juhl and Gustav Bunzel, to bring up the issue of class anti-unionism, put into practice by the German revolutionary movement (KAPD and Workers Unions) in the early 1920s. A paper by the Scandinavian sections [Aarhus, Copenhagen (Denmark), and Malmö (Sweden)], presented at regional meetings between May 1970 and August 1971, was presented at the general meeting in Marseilles, in the presence of Suzanne Voute and the Dioscuri of the “party” Giuliano Bianchini and Bruno Maffi, in September 1971[37]. This work was considered a major heresy aimed at undermining the programmatic bases of the “Italian Left” and destroying all trade union work carried out in the CGT and CGIL.

Shortly afterwards, an attack against the policy of “union recovery” appeared on the front page of Prolétaire, printed in Marseilles: the article “Régler les comptes avec le syndicat“[38] repeated the words of an angry RATP driver, uttered in front of the television cameras. To the phrase by François Mitterrand demanding “very powerful unions” in order to maintain “social obedience”, the Marseilles editorial staff opposed a class struggle involving “the destruction of the degenerated union” and the formation of “strike committees responsible only to strikers“. The conclusion could not be clearer: “It is up to us revolutionaries to anticipate this process and make it an object of propaganda… Our role, we believe, is to denounce trade unions for who they are and to call on workers to fight their directives, to emancipate themselves from their defeatist slogans, to organise independently of them and against them“[39].

Faced with the offensive of the “centre”, reaffirming the invariance of Marxism and the necessity of the “red union”, the sections seceded one after the other from December 1971 to January 1972: Saint-Etienne, with Georges Calmette and Jean-Pierre Laffitte, individuals like Lucien Laugier, Gérard Mangiavillano, Jean Berg in Marseille, Daniel Dumartheray (Georges), in Lausanne. At the beginning of 1972, it was the turn of the sections of Lyon, Bourg-en-Bresse and Le Mans, Caen and Besançon, about thirty members[40]. Contacts were then established between Lucien Laugier, Jean-Pierre Laffitte and Carsten Juhl[41], then with Jacques Camatte, around the journal Invariance.

But in the face of the Italian situation, where a strong anti-unionism is asserting itself, where wildcat strikes are accumulating, where all sorts of anti-union organisations proliferate, the centre of Maffi, relying on Suzanne Voute, is backtracking in Italy, and reassessing its intervention in a more “movementist” sense.

While in Portugal the “Carnation Revolution” of 25 April had broken out, led by young officers such as Otelo de Carvalho and Ernesto Melo Antunes, the French army had been shaken since the autumn of 1974 by the contestation of young conscripts. The LCR had launched an active anti-militarist campaign, calling for the formation of soldiers’ committees (then “soldiers’ unions”[42]) in barracks[43].

A leaflet, signed by the “trade union groups of the ICP” – and not by the “party” itself! – was released in November 1975[44]. It supported an initiative of soldiers of the 19th Besançon regiment, claiming the “right of soldiers to organisation”. Above all, it called for the “support of (their) demands”, with the aim of fighting “bourgeois militarism and its reformist leading henchmen” and achieving the “class unity of the proletarians of the factory and the barracks“.

The government – of which Jacques Chirac was Prime Minister – took the decision to violently repress organisations that were conducting anti-militarist work among soldiers. The leaflet of “Prolétaire” led to the indictment of two Parisian militants (Roger Le Scour, teacher, and Anne Duperray, doctor), arrested at the offices of the Parisian organisation, Rue Jean-Bouton. This charge was reported by the investigating judge to the State Security Court for “demoralisation of the army“. François Gambini, in charge of publications, was raided and arrested at his home, then released without charge, on 5 and 6 December 1975[45]. In total, 47 people from the far left (mainly PSU and LCR) were charged and several dozen soldiers arrested.

The result of this repression was that the ICP declared anti-militarist agitation a low priority, in which it had only followed that of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR). It also resulted in a total fragmentation of the organisation, where no section, no militant could communicate without passing through the filter of leaders designated by the Parisian “center”, embodied by Martin Axelrad. The anti-militarist activity was only resumed 10 years later, in Italy, by the dissident group “Combat”, against the action of the Italian Army in Lebanon[46].

Priority was given to immigrants, perhaps because the “party” had a strong Arabic-speaking core in Paris. Immigrants, both North African and black African, were considered potentially more revolutionary than workers in developed countries:

“…immigrant workers, especially non-European workers, have an asset: that of belonging to a young proletariat, not corrupted by the crumbs that imperialist domination and the post-war boom granted to the upper layers of the’indigenous’ working class, not subject at the outset to the paralysing influence of social-chauvinist and reformist parties and trade unions which for several decades has hindered the proletariat of the’host’ countries and, on the other hand, permeated some of its layers with the tradition of combativeness inherited from anti-colonial struggles.”[47]

But, with a jolt of lucidity, the French organisation noted that “conversely, the influence of democracy and nationalism can penetrate them by other ways: precisely those of the anti-imperialist struggle which saw them fight alongside the young national bourgeoisies…“. This call to fight nationalism remained in vain, all the more so as it was encouraged by the elements of the Algerian section. Thus one can read in the brochure devoted in 1981 to the struggle of immigrant workers against the rise in rents the following balance sheet, where the anti-Zionism displayed is praised as a “formidable lever” to mobilise workers: “…following the Kippur War of October 1973, a nucleus of combative residents began at the Romain-Rolland hostel in Saint-Denis to organise workers in order to prevent and respond to any retaliatory action coming from Zionist commandos often acting with the approval of the French police. It goes without saying that such organisational work contributed powerfully to the preparation of the rent strike and constituted a formidable lever for the mobilisation of workers.“[48]

From January 1975 to December 1979, the French group was totally invested in the struggle of immigrant workers, both in the Sonacotra hostels and in the Paris metro cleaners[49], while immigration was stopped and the Stoléru law was adopted to expel one million workers, illegal or not[50], often prey to racist pogroms[51], from French territory.

For five years, in France, the “party” intervened in the struggle, shoulder to shoulder with Maoist organisations [PCML, OCF (ml) and UCF (ml)] and the Arab Workers’ Movement (MTA), close to the Algerian government[52] and a follower of Arab-Palestinian nationalism. It did not hesitate to sign joint appeals with the Maoists, Trotskyists and the PSU. The result of this “elastic” policy was that some sections of the ICP campaigned for the right to vote for immigrants[53], leaving its anti-electoralist principles in the cloakroom.

Alongside this activist intervention towards immigrants, the “party” had been involved, since 1974, in the struggle of postal workers[54]. Active in sorting centres, the “party” intervened there during the strike of January – February 1978, in the Paris region (Créteil, Trappes, Bobigny, Nanterre, etc.), a conflict in reaction to the precarisation of “temporary workers”. Its intervention was limited to the Créteil centre, where it distributed a “Bulletin PTT”[55].

But, overall, the intervention of the “party” was much less working class in tone than in Italy from 1969 to 1978.

In Italy

The movement of international recovery of the struggles in the wake of May 1968 was particularly intense in this country. Its premises date back to 1 March 1968, when Roman students violently confronted the police[56].

Bordiga, for his part, expressed a total rejection, refusing to make any in-depth analysis of this new phenomenon, which saw the birth of a myriad of “leftist” groups, mainly Third Worldist and “autonomist”. Many of these students, after a few years of vain agitation, had to proletarianise themselves, capital not offering them the “lucrative” positions from which the “middle classes” had benefited during the Reconstruction.

Bordiga had never stopped going to war against the “middle classes”. They were the “bête noire[57]” of the “Party”. These could only have as watchwords the fetishes of “People”, “Nation”, “Fatherland”, “Democracy”, “Freedom”, “Pacifism”, to which Bordiga could have added “Race” and “Land of the Dead”, in the synthesis of Maurice Barrès, who was however neither “democrat” nor “pacifist”[58]. The anonymous of Naples, raging, concluded immutably by: “War on the middle class, death to the middle class, shit on its cursed ideals.[59]“

In an article, probably the last published two years before his death, he left a “Elementary Note on Students and the Authentic Marxism of the Left“[60]. The old Neapolitan chief noted as a premise that “student movements cannot present a history or a historical tradition“.

Bordiga was in fact attacking the policy of the Italian CP which, unlike the French CP, was trying to reclaim the movement in the name of a student-worker unity, which was in conjunction with its policy of national unity between the North and the Mezzogiorno[61].

The “programmist” organisation disposed of about a hundred militants in Italy, which was less than the sister organisation in France, which was less socially “proletarian”.

It is true that in the region, competition was fierce with the “Lotta comunista” group which, in the 70s and 80s, was experiencing rapid growth not only in the student sector but also among workers. This group, formed by Arrigo Cervetto and Lorenzo Parodi, workers who had been anarchist and became ultraleninists, presented themselves as the “continuity of the Italian Communist Left” by highlighting the emblematic figure of Bruno Fortichiari. It gradually succeeded in forming a number of student cadres and in winning entire sections of the CGIL in Liguria.

The “programmist” organisation had always been active in the class struggle, including in the 1960s. It had established links with the tramwaymen in struggle, publishing a bulletin of union opposition: Il Tranviere Rosso[62]. It also published since 1962, in Florence, the monthly bulletin Spartaco, for its militants registered in the CGIL.

The organisation was very modest and made a name for itself in 1962-66 during the Marchi Baraldi (Zeffirino) “affair”. In September 1962, this PCInt member had distributed a leaflet against the closure of the LIBEA knitting factory in Rovereto sul Secchia (Modena), denouncing the passivity of the Labour Exchange and the PCI in the face of the sacking of all the workers. The leaflet concluded with a bang: “Class against class! Red against Tricolore!“. This led to this rank and file militant being charged on the basis of Article 272 of the Italian Criminal Code, which punished any incitement to class struggle, “propaganda aimed at destroying or weakening the Nation“. Sentence No. 87 of the Constitutional Court (6 July 1966) considered the application of article 272 fully lawful, seeming to return to the time of fascist jurisdiction.

“Programma comunista” was present in some factories in Ivrea, north of Turin, in particular in the Olivetti factories – founded by Adriano Olivetti, who went from “left-wing” fascism to Catholic anti-fascism[63]. The “programmist” base was already old, formed well before 1968. That year, the factory group had launched a vibrant call for a transformation of the CGL into a “red union”, inviting the proletarians to read and distribute the journal, alongside “transitional demands” such as: “reduction of the working day without loss of wages, general increase in basic wages, full wages for the unemployed“[64].

The presence of the “programmist” workers was always persistent: its militants were known and appreciated in the demanding daily work. In 1977, eight of them were expelled from the Olivetti works council (Consiglio di fabbrica) because they had refused to sign a declaration of allegiance against “terrorism”[65]. But in 1978, militants of the programme were again elected to the works council[66].

The “programmists” had other “workers’ bases”, in particular in the petrochemical industry in Mestre Porto-Marghera[67], near Venice, the steel industry, as in Italsider in Bagnoli (Naples). In service sectors, such as hospitals, rail transport, but also the precarious “school workers”, they played a certain role in the strikes that multiplied during the 1970s.

Generally, the militants of “programma comunista” were doing propaganda, more than agitation, speciality of the very activist group “Rivoluzione comunista”[68]. This is what prevented them – but sometimes it was a matter of not being in the wrong place at the wrong time – in those years of fire and lead, from becoming martyrs of “communist honor”. On December 12, 1970, Saverio Saltarelli, student – worker, member of “Rivoluzione comunista” was killed by the police, an hour and a half after leaving the Milanese university library where he was studying. He and his organisation participated in a banned demonstration organised by the anarchists to demand the release of Pietro Valpreda, Emilio Borghese and Roberto Gargamelli, accused of lying about the massacre in Piazza Fontana in Milan (12 December 1969). He succumbed to a tear gas canister shot that hit him in the heart.

It is undoubtedly what avoided that the repression against the Italian organisation was as relentless as that against the militants of workers’ autonomy. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the Autunno Caldo, Bruno Maffi, the director of publications, was accused by the Italian state of “spreading hatred between classes“. In December 1969, he was sentenced by the Florence court to six months’ suspended imprisonment for an article published in the monthly leaflet Il Sindacato Rosso (No. 10, April 1969), distributed in and in front of the factories[69]. The court refused to hear the plea prepared by Bruno Maffi[70].

From 1968 onwards, when the struggle in the factories became clearly anti-union, the groups of workers’ autonomy, “student-workers collectives”, played an increasing role in the formation of an opposition, no longer internal, but external to the official apparatus, which, moreover, was very weak in the factories. In June 1968, a group of Pirelli workers in Milan, attached to Avanguardia Operaia, formed an autonomous Unitary Basic Committee (CUB) to continue the struggle in the factory. The CUB’s victory at the Pirelli had a huge spillover effect, which led to the creation of new CUBs everywhere. But they soon played a parasyndical role, that of “rank and file unionism”. As Guigou and Wajnsztejn point out, they “often fill the void left by the lack of union initiative, but they do not replace the union“. The action of the CUBs “ultimately benefited the unions“, “(posing) in parallel to the union, with the more or less admitted aim of pulling it towards the left“.

The Bordigist “party”, during the Hot Autumn, tried to convince itself that the workers’ vanguard of Northern Italy (FIAT, Montedison, Pirelli, Olivetti, Siemens, etc.) was following it, that it had even succeeded in “linking itself to the workers’ vanguards“. With a confounding assurance, the “party” proclaims “it alone… has intervened in the struggles in a determined and real way“, “for the generalisation of the struggles“, indicating as the only “way to overcome: the fight against opportunism within the CGIL“[71]. The “programmists” were soon forced to use a different wording than the one of yet another invitation to “win back the class union” by joining the “party”. Faced with young radicalised workers, enraged by union/employer/state collaboration and whose motto was “vogliamo tutto[72]” (“We want everything”), the pure “programmist” rhetoric sounded perfectly hollow. It sounded all the more hollow because a large minority of young workers did not want to be represented by delegates of any kind – in official unions, in “zone councils”[73] or in CUBs. The slogan was: “Siamo tutti delegati” (We are all delegates), in response to the system of factory councils set up by the unions at FIAT Mirafiori, with a “consiglione” (mega-council) made up of 800 delegates…

In 1972, an article – by the way, because it repeated the old positions – gave new directives on the trade union question. It was no longer a question of ignoring the phenomenon of anti-union wildcat strikes and that of workers’ spontaneity expressed in the (quickly distorted) form of basic unitary committees (CUBs) or independent strike committees: “(The Party) cannot simply condemn the episodes of wildcat strikes, of the formation of strike or “base” committees, etc. – phenomena that are recurrent (apart from the name) in the history of the workers’ movement – or be disinterested in them because they do not fit into the harmonious pattern of a centrally organised and extended battle on all fronts, but see in them the symptom of an instinctive reaction of the proletariat to the state of impotence to which the trade unions reduce their resistance struggles… The militant workers of the Party do not shirk the responsibility of co-leading temporary committees or bodies…“[74] And to add, the anti-union pressure of the workers’ base must have been so strong that joining “this or that” union did not mean “(making) concessions” or “(giving) a classist license” to it…

A severe condemnation of the Central Trade Union Office (UCS) led by Bianchini and the Tuscan section, faithful to the old slogan of transforming the CGIL into a “red union”, was published in the press of the “party”[75]. It soon led to the Florentine schism of the summer of 1973.

Like its French comrades, the Italian “programmist” group gave in to the movementist temptation. In 1974, it returned to “revolutionary parliamentarism” through the back door: it called for a vote against the abolition of the law allowing divorce, an abolition demanded by the Catholic Church. It timely issued a quote from Lenin which made divorce “a direct demand of socialism” and, in volley, condemned “the placid indifference of ‘revolutionaries’ behaving like Christian millenarians” (sic)[76]. This was followed by a call by the ICP in Switzerland to vote no in the face of a xenophobic initiative launched in 1974[77].

This electoral flip-flop corresponded to a “Bolshevik-Leninist” turning point. By the mid-1970s, Trotskyist tendencies were emerging that eventually led to splits. The head of the Belluno section Marcello Braccini breaks with his organisation and engages in Trotskyist activity. The same is true of Corrado Basile in Genoa-Savona and especially of Fernando Visentin, in October 1974, who was approached as the organisation’s runner-up. Visentin, with the support of Bruno Maffi, wrote numerous articles devoted to “the crisis of leadership of the proletariat“[78]. This orientation led to the decision to discontinue the sale of the brochure published in French against Trotsky and Trotskyism[79]. Despite the defection of the Trotskyist elements, whose orientation was rejected by the whole organisation, its press published many articles on the “transitional slogans”, in line with Trotsky’s Transitional Program[80].

Nevertheless, the organisation backtracked from 1978, reissued the old texts on the emptyness of elections and “transitional” activism and responded with increased activity in factories, as the ebb was beginning to win. It is on this ebb and the demoralisation brought about by the rise in unemployment that the CGIL led by Luciano Lama – leader of the Italian CP – was counting to impose a policy of sacrifices on Italian workers[81].

At the end of the 1970s, taking advantage of the anti-terrorist hysteria maintained as much by the media as by the trade unions and the communist party led by Enrico Berlinguer (1922 – 1984), repression had considerably hardened in the factories and resulted in thousands of “economic redundancies”, in fact largely political, whose victims had to point to the Cassa integrazione[82]. Many laid-off workers then tried to work for themselves, as craftsmen or in “small jobs”.

The repression continued against the militants most involved in a daily action of “defending class interests”, such as Guerrino Golfetto who worked at Carman in San Donà del Piave (Veneto) and was fired. The militant workers were harassed particularly in the late 1970s, when the “struggles” were at a low point.

Others close to the autonomous Operaist[83] movement and the sinistra comunista, with Azione rivoluzionaria, like Mauro Guatelli, were imprisoned and tried for supposed links with the Red Brigades, whereas they were machinations set up by this or that general of the Carabinieri or the secret services working in symbiosis with the neo-fascists.

It was only at the end of the 1970s that – as struggles tended to diminish in the face of the joint offensive of employers and trade union confederations – the “programmist” organisation took a more “operaist” and “autonomous” orientation towards the trade union structure. This orientation became indispensable, in order not to become complicit in its policy. In September 1978, the confederations signed a “code of good conduct” to “self-regulate” strikes. In an article in December 1978, entitled “le syndicat contre la grève”, the organisation used unprecedented language: “The real strike must be without warning!… The strike must respect nothing other than the interests of the working class in struggle… To be effective, strikes must be tough, expand and become as widespread as possible without pre-established time limits… (The working class) must deliver blow for blow, by surprise strikes, violent and to excess… The working class can only count on itself… Let the most combative workers… begin to organise…“[84].

This language advocating self-organisation through wildcat strikes could have passed as “council communism” or “KAPDism”…

But from the beginning of the 1980s, the most conscious “programmist” workers militants ceased to hide their faces. The capacity to intervene, however radical, had been reduced, facing a real crisis of “radical” militancy in Italy: “…the state of profound disintegration of our organisation is the consequence of a general crisis which, for a long time, has occupied the entire milieu of the left, including the bourgeois workers parties, and which more or less radically destroys various political organisations, such as Lotta Continua, Lotta Comunista, Avanguardia Operaia, the so-called pro-Chinese, autonomy, armed struggle groups and similar formations in foreign countries…“[85].

The movement of Italian workers radicality had in fact ended with a profound ideological defeat. Italian capitalism, embodied by FIAT’s patron Agnelli family, had taken full control of things. Fiat was no longer the spearhead of this radicalism that sprang up in 1968 in Turin, but the symbol of the end of a whole fiery era: on 14 October 1980, 20,000 FIAT executives and employees came to support Agnelli in the face of the ongoing strike against dismissals. A long litany of redundancies, concerted between employers and trade unions, then struck the entire Italian working class. The total bankruptcy of the trade unions, which the programmist ICP had claimed to “reconquer”, gave way to the phenomenon of “rank and file unionism”, that of the CoBas[86], in the 80s and 90s, to which most of the Bordigist or Leninist groups rallied[87].

Faced with this sharp decline in Italy, the “programmists”, especially in France, ignored the signals by testifying, preferring to listen to the sirens of “anti-imperialism” which seemed more fascinating to them.

[1] In an e-mail dated 18 February to the author, Dino Erba gives a precise idea of the numbers of the Lanzafame group, around 1975: “15 to 20 workers, 7 or 8 students, 3 or 4 others. At public events (street demonstrations), maximum 100. Today, there are 10 of them, no workers, no young people”. He specifies that its “activism is inversely proportional to the number of militants”, unlike the activism of the French “programmist” group which had seen its membership quadruple between 1969 and 1976.

[2] Red Trade Union International (ISR) or Rote Gewerkschafts-Internationale (RGI) founded in Moscow in July 1921. The three secretaries were: the Russians Solomon Losovsky and Michail Tomski, the Catalan Andreu Nin, future leader of the POUM in 1936, kidnapped and murdered in June 1937 by order of Stalin.

[3] In the midst of a class struggle in Italy (of the “Hot Autumn”, 1969, to 1977), where the workers clashed with the employer/union front, the ICP ingeniously confessed: “…in ‘forms’ of organisation, it is the… trade union that we would give preference to“. Breaking with the unions, for the Bordigists, was “a weakness” [“Gorter, Lenin and the Left”, Programme Communiste No. 53 – 54, Oct. 1971 – March 1972, p. 78].

[4] “Tempo di abiuraturi di schismi”, Il programma comunista n° 22, 20 Dec. 1965, p. 1. Bordiga’s position was taken on the occasion of the completion of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council.

[5] Lucien Laugier, “Socialisme ou Barbarie” et l’écroulement du groupe parisien [in La critique de “Socialisme ou Barbarie”, Les éditions du pavé, s. l., February 2003 (Preface: G. Mangiavillano ; Introduction: J.-L. Roche)]. Suzanne Voute in a letter to Albert Masó, July 1950, recalls a working meeting with Chaulieu, where she envisages the possibility of a single organisation: “We envisage only one kind of group to group discussion: that which is undertaken with a sufficient degree of political affinity for the constitution of a single organisation. Let us reject academic discussions or mere information, preferring to them internal work”. She concludes: “What is important is that they have returned from what we reproached them above all: the claim to constitute a tradition from their split in 1949 with Trotskyism”[Lucien Laugier Archives].

[6] “Two Years of Chat”, Bulletin #1, p.3 – 15. The warning to our readers (p. 1 and 2) was signed by a pompous “Bureau politique de la G.C.F.”.

[7] (Suzanne Voute), “The ‘Vanguard’ and Algeria”, Programme communiste n° 5, Oct. – Dec. 1957, p. 66 – 67. This article is a polemic against “Socialisme ou Barbarie”, which supported the “Algerian revolution”, to the point of being transformed, like Jean-François Lyotard, into “suitcase carriers” on behalf of the FLN.

[8] Lenin, Where to Begin?, Lenin Collected Works, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961, Moscow, Volume 5, pages 13-24. Written in May 1901, Published in Iskra, No. 4, May 1901.

[9] Jacques Camatte, “Scatologie et résurrection”, Invariance n° 1 (series II), supplement, Savona, Oct. 1975.

[10] Considerations on the party’s organic activity when the general situation is historically unfavourable, 1965.

[11] Lucien Laugier considered Jacques Camatte’s Gemeinwesen “nebulous and impalpable”. However, he himself “also well perceived what was absurd and humiliating about offering a newspaper entitled ‘Le Prolétaire’ to employees who no longer even wanted to be considered workers” [“Dix ans de solitude. Réflexions sur la petite crise interne de 1964 – 66”, (Dis)continuité n° 13, August 2001, p. 111 – 137].

[12] Circular letter from Bruno Maffi dated 24 March 1967, quoted by Lucien Laugier, in (Dis)continuité n° 13.

[13] One can judge by these issues of Fil du temps published from 1968 to 1970: Le marxisme et la question agraire, no 2, 6 and 7; or Facteurs de race et nation dans la théorie marxiste, no 5. The only original issue (from the pen of Dangeville) was the one devoted to La crise économique et sociale de mai-juin, n° 3, Oct. 1968. Dangeville announces the end of prosperity: “this prosperity of the working class is only temporary and already announces the crisis“.

[14] Le Fil du temps n° 1, Dec. 1967, La nation et l’État belge produits de la contre-révolution; n° 4, January 1969, L’État et la nation dans la théorie marxiste (Belgium). At the end of the 1970s, Dangeville, Henri Heerbrant and Anne Manne published a book on the same subject: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels. La Belgique: État constitutionnel modèle, Fil du temps, Ixelles.

[15] Roger Dangeville (editing, notes and introduction), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The dictatorship of the proletariat http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/Engels_Marx/dictature_du_proletariat/dictature_du_proletariat.html.

[16] Gérard Mangiavillano, “Lucien Laugier ‘hors du troupeau'”, in François Langlet (ed.).

[17] Le Prolétaire had a monthly addition for Switzerland, since October 1974, and another for Belgium (then the Netherlands), since 1977. Its mailbox was in Angleur (Liege).

[18] Nicola Barbato (1856 – 1923), Sicilian socialist psychiatrist, directed the workers’ fasci (1892 – 94). He was sentenced to 12 years in prison for “conspiring against the State authorities and inciting civil war“. Amnesty was granted in 1896 and in 1900 he was elected to the leadership of the Socialist Party. Losing his bourgeois clientele in Palermo, he had to emigrate to the USA in 1904. Leading a fierce fight against religion, he published a book on Science and Faith (Scienza e Fede). During his trial in 1894, he praised the insurrection: “I, an obscure militant of socialism, am honoured to belong to the phalanx of revolutionaries; that is, I do not believe that the phenomenon of armed insurrections can be avoided during the greatest and most humane revolution of my kind“.

[19] “Sur l’état des sections parisiennes” (July 1982). The report, signed by Éliane, notes (before the October explosion): “Overall, we have a situation of disintegration… The sections themselves find it difficult to direct themselves, the activity itself is no longer controlled and falls either to quasi-autonomous mini organs or even to individuals“[Private archives of former activists].

[20] An Algerian, named Sami, directed the work towards the Maghreb and was in charge of publishing in Arabic. In the 1990s, under his real name, he published a book in Algiers printed by government presses. This simple fact suggests a penetration by the Algerian secret services, particularly after 1974, in the wake of the Sonacotra home strike.

[21] Term used for French civil servants on an École normale supérieure, a type of publicly funded higher education in France. They constitute the top level of research-training education in the French university system. Only 3% of normaliens are admitted following a difficult examination.

[22] The Agrégation de Lettres Classiques are higher-level French competitive examinations held to recruit senior secondary school teachers – though many of its laureates are in fact university teachers, whether lecturers or professors. The Agrégation examination is national in scope and is thus not tied to any particular university or institution. Laureates, called agrégés become civil servants. Being an agrégé is a de facto condition for doctors who want to get tenure as university lecturers. Each year, there is a definite number of positions offered for each discipline separately, on a nationwide level, with slight variation from year to year. In 2013, for example, Lettres Classiques had 75 posts. These examinations require great mastery of Latin, Ancient Greek, and French (including Medieval French). Every year, a set of about 14 book-length classical texts is assigned as the program to be studied in particular.

[23] Cf. this novelistic interpretation by Catherine Axelrad, op. cit, p. 47: “… comrades who themselves, in the hospitals where they were doctors, the laboratories where they were engineers and the universities where they taught tried in vain to sell Lutte de classes to their colleagues” [To blur the tracks, the author transformed the newspaper Le Prolétaire into Lutte de classe, which was a very unfortunate “novelesque” solution: the Trotskyist organisation “Lutte Ouvrière” [formerly: “Voix Ouvrière”] had published a monthly of this name since 1960].

[24] Lalbat, op. cit., annex 25, pp. 25 – 28, interviews with B.C., former member of the Marseille group, circa 2013-14. As indicated, this “red union” strategy dates back well before May 1968

[25] Luc Thibault, «Da Parigi a Schio», in Riccardo Salvador, Ricordi di un militante, Bergame, 2012, p. 159 – 162.

[26] An ex-G.P. (Gauche prolétarienne), of Jewish origin (Marc T.), known as Coluche, proofreader, came to the Sonacotra meetings in a boilersuit. After the split in 1982, he followed for a time the group “El-Oumami”, creating in his capacity a printing house which published Que Faire? and Octobre of the Algerian “Marxist-Leninist” group, which called for the destruction of Israel.

[27] Luc Thibault, ibid.

[28] After the explosion of the autumn of 1982, the new leadership of the “party” in France believed that it detected the cause of all the evils in “movementism”, defined as the tendency “to see only the movement in progress, to which in practice one abandons oneself” [“Mieux vaut moins, mais mieux!”, Le Prolétaire n° 367, 12 Nov. – 10 Dec. 1982, p. 3].

[29] Brochure Le Prolétaire n° 24, May – June 1968. La nécessité du parti politique de classe, Lyon, June 2002.

[30] Undated leaflet from the ICP, quoted in the special issue of Cahiers de discussion pour le socialisme des conseils: Conseils ouvriers et utopie socialiste, Nov. 1968, p. 36.

[31] Manifeste du Parti communiste international sur la grève générale, June 1968 (supplement to No. 55 of the “Prolétaire“).

[32] May-June 1968: La nécessité du parti politique de classe, brochure “Le Prolétaire” n° 24, Lyon, June 2002. Mentioned by Benjamin Lalbat, op. cit. pp. 75 – 78.

[33] Manifeste…, ibid. In bold: Emphasised by us. The use of the terms “communist ideology” suggests that communism is pure ideology.

[34] Cf. Claude David and Jacques Olivier (eds.), Livre Journal: L’Europe sauvage, s.l.n.d. The collective editing this “journal” reported on the wildcat strikes of the 1950s, those of Nantes-Saint-Nazaire in 1955, the strikes of the British dockers in 1954-55, those at the Hamburg and Bremen shipyards in 1955. In Britain, where there is a strong shop stewards movement, “illegality is commonplace: in the 1950s, between 80% and 90% of work stoppages begin with unofficial shop strikes“.

[35] “Letter from Belgium: The ‘Wildcat Strike’ of the Ghent Dockers”, Le Prolétaire n°5, Dec. 1963; “The ‘Unofficial’ Strikes’ in England”, Le Prolétaire n° 29, Feb. 1966; “Wildcat Strike in Holland”, Le Prolétaire n° 90, Oct. 10 – Nov. 1, 1970.

[36] It was not until the autumn of 1973 that Le Prolétaire (No. 159 and 160, “Civilised’ Trade Unions and ‘Wildcat’ Strikes”, Oct. – Nov.) reported the wave of wildcat strikes in western Germany.

[37] Kommunistisk Program, La Gauche allemande et la question syndicale dans la IIIe Internationale, 11 January 1972. Internal text, this brochure was sold externally after the split.

[38] “Régler les comptes avec le syndicat”, Le Prolétaire n°114, Marseille, 1-14 Nov. 1971, p.1 and 4. The article is probably by Lucien Laugier, himself a postman in Marseille, or it was written by Christian Audoubert.

[39] Ibid, emphasised in italics by the author of the article.

[40] Letter from Lucien Laugier, Camps La Source, to Professor Werner Cohn (Vancouver), 8 June 1988. The latter, an expert on the Roma, had attacked Noam Chomsky, who had supported Robert Faurisson in 1980. Laugier demonstrated in his very long letter that the Italian left had nothing to do either with the “negationists” or with Chomsky.

[41] The fruits of these contacts can be found in the publication in French of “texts de travail à l’occasion de la split dans le Parti communiste international”, from Sept. 1971 to January 1972, distributed by Kommunismen in Denmark. The theses on the trade union question are without appeal: “The destruction of counter-revolutionary trade unions appears as historically necessary“.

[42] The FSMAR (Front des soldats, marins et aviateurs révolutionnaires), a satellite organisation of the LCR in the army, created on Oct. 1, 1972, had launched an appeal for a “union of soldiers”, “a class union, a workers’ union” (Rouge, March 7, 1975).

[43] Robert Pelletier and Serge Ravet, Le mouvement des soldats: les comités de soldats et l’antimilitarisme révolutionnaire, François Maspero, Paris, 1976. The two young authors belonging to the 19th Draguignan artillery regiment were sentenced in January 1975 to one year in prison, eight months of which were suspended. In all, about 100 soldiers’ committees were created in the barracks.

[44] “Solidarité de classe avec les soldats en lutte”, Le Prolétaire n° 207, 15 – 28 Nov. 1975, p. 1 and 4. A leaflet dated 10 November 1975 called for solidarity with the soldiers of Besançon.

[45] “Les perquisitions et interpellations contre notre journal”, special issue of Prolétaire, Tuesday, Dec. 9, 1975.

[46] A large banner of this group (24 April 1984) called for a demonstration in Genoa on 14 May to block the “exhibition of death” of the navy as well as “the appetites of Italian imperialism” in Lebanon [Combat No. 2, Milan, April 1984]. “Combat” was associated with the action of a “Comitato promotore” against the “exhibition of death”, aimed at selling warships to both Iran and Iraq. The multinational force in Beirut was created in September 1982 by the UN and disbanded in March 1984, after the bloody double attack against the French and American contingents.

[47] Le Prolétaire, Solidarité prolétarienne contre le contrôle de l’immigration, brochure n°12, January 1980, p. 39 (recast of the brochure of Sept. 1975)

[48] Le Prolétaire/El-Oumami, Foyers de travailleurs immigrés. Enseignements de six années de lutte, brochure no. 14, February 1981, p. 11, emphasis added.

[49] Le Prolétaire, La grève des nettoyeurs du métro. Leçons et bilan, brochure n° 7, July 1977.

[50] The ICP brochure of 1975 and 1980, already quoted, launches a poster campaign: “No to immigration control! No to deportations and expulsions! Equal rights for workers“.

[51] Pogroms targeting Algerians living in Marseille killed more than 50 people and injured 300 in the summer and autumn of 1973. Cf. the article ” Face à la répression contre les travailleurs immigrés, une seule arme, la lutte des classes ! “, Le Prolétaire n° 156, 10 – 23 Sept. 1973, p. 1 et 2.

[52] On 3 and 14 September 1973, the MTA issued the slogan “general strike by Arab workers” in factories, particularly in Marseilles.

[53] “Sur la question du droit de vote pour les travailleurs immigrés”, Le Prolétaire n° 262, 11 – 24 March 1978, p. 2… In an embarrassing way, the article maintains that “…refusing discrimination between workers with regard to the right to vote does not mean, for us, that they must, that they have an interest in voting“. Emphasis added by the editor of the article.

[54] In 1974, 3,101,826 strike days were officially counted in the post offices. In 1974, Lucien Laugier, a militant in the post offices in Marseilles, strongly criticised the ICP’s attitude during the strikes, “paying itself with words” by contenting itself with denouncing the “opportunism” of the trade union leaders [Le Gauchisme et la grève des P.T.T., March 1975, supplement to Invariance n° 6, series II, p. 28 – 35].

[55] Le Prolétaire, Postiers en lutte (La grève de janvier – février 1978 à Créteil et dans les centres de sort), brochure n° 10, 1979.

[56] See Jacques Guigou and Jacques Wajnsztejn, Mai 1968 and Le Mai creepant italien, L’Harmattan, Paris, April 2008, pp. 208 – 220.

[57] Literally: black beast. Someone or something which is particularly disliked or avoided; an object of aversion, the bane of one’s existence.

[58] For Maurice Barrès, the writer who embodied the nationalism of these “middle classes” in the “Belle Époque”, it was a question of “rooting (sic) individuals in the earth and in the dead“, while ensuring “respect for the national army” whose soldiers populated the cemeteries of the “terroir”, “a terroir that speaks to us and collaborates with our national consciousness, as well as the dead” (La Terre et les Morts (sur quelles réalités fonder la conscience française), La Patrie française, Paris, 1899).

[59] “La mezza classe, nostra bestia nera”, Il programma comunista n°15, August 4, 1963. In French, Invariance No. 9, June 1994, pp. 164 – 167. English here.

[60] (Bordiga) “Nota elementare sugli studenti ed il marxismo autentico di sinistra”, Il programma communista n°8, May 1 – 15 1968, p. 2. In French, in Invariance n° 9, series IV, June 1994, supplément, p. 223 – 228.

[61] The slogan “Nord e Sud uniti nella lotta” (North and South united in the struggle) would be chanted at all CGIL events during the 1970s.

[62] The Red Tramwayman, “Bullettino dei Tranvieri Comunisti Internazionalisti aderenti alla CGIL”, 67 issues, from November 23, 1961 to October 10, 1963.

[63] “Due giorni caldi alla Olivetti d’Ivrea”, Il programma comunista n° 5, March 9, 1974, p. 1 and 2.

[64] “Nostre battaglie alla Olivetti di Ivrea”, Spartaco No. 3, 15 – 29 February 1968. This supplement to Il programma comunista was subtitled: “Page of programmatic position and battle of the militants of the International Communist Party registered with the General Confederation of Labor”.

[65] The “programmist” factory group in Olivetti published a bulletin: Spartaco. Issue 5 of December 1977 reports on threats to militants.

[66] “Si scatenano contro di noi gli a postoli della democrazia”, Il programma comunista n° 22, Nov. 26, 1977, p. 1 and 6; “Ancora sull’espulsioni dal sindacato alla Olivetti”, Il programma comunista n° 3, Feb. 4, 1978, p. 5 and 7.

[67] “L’azione del Partito nelle lotte operaie: A Mestre Porto Marghera, per gli operai del ACNIL”, Spartaco n° 9, May 16 – 31, 1968; “Voci dei nostri gruppi: L’agitazione dei lavoratori degli appalti telefonici ed elettrici – Al Petrolchimico di Porto Marghera – In margine al contratto dei tessili” , Il programma comunista n° 14, 1973; “Nostri interventi: Petrolchimico di Porto Marghera”, Il programma comunista n° 19, 1973.

[68] Cf. PCInt – La Rivoluzione comunista, La linea internazionalista nelle lotte operaie. Atti e documenti della I conferenza operaia, Milan, 1972.

[69] The article which led to the indictment was a “call for the potentiation and extension of the struggles for the rebirth of the class union”. He affirmed that “the place of revolutionaries, conscious workers, communists was in the workers’ unions to drive out the traitors, the reformists, the fifth column of capitalism”; that “without the party, it would be impossible to save the workers’ unions from opportunist degeneration”.

[70] The summary of this plea was published under the title: “I comunisti non hanno nulla da nascondere” [The Communists have nothing to hide], Il programma comunista n° 1, 10 January 1970, p. 1

[71] “Bilan de l’automne chaud en Italie”, Programme communiste n° 47, January – March 1970, p. 74 – 78.

[72] This slogan of young workers influenced by Maoism was taken up in France by the anarcho-Maoist organisation “Tout”, whose organ, published from September 1970 to the summer of 1971, was: Tout! What we want: everything!

[73] In 1970-71, the CGIL launched a call to form ‘zone councils’, broad structures open to the unemployed, young people and students, especially in the Mezzogiorno, forming coordinations ready to supervise everything that moved, in particular in Naples (Guigou & Wajsnstejn, ibid., p. 274).

[74] “Il partito di fronte alla questione sindacale’, Il programma comunista n° 3, 1972. The article was probably written by Bruno Maffi and Suzanne Voute, very rebellious against the position of the “Florentines”.

[75] “Marxisme et question syndicale”, Le Prolétaire n° 128, 29 May – 11 June 1972, p. 4. The text (probably written by Maffi), defined as “incorrect” the Florentine positions: “1° Call for the constitution of Defence Committees of the Class Union in response to the trend towards the merger between the three existing centres which was taking shape in Italy; 2° Announcement of a boycott slogan of the new union accompanied by a call for the reconstitution of the class union in the event that this merger should take place“. Emphasised by us.

[76] “Diciamo la nostra sul divorzio”, Il programma comunista n° 7, April 6, 1974. This change in “tactics” created an unease that is reflected in the article: “Le oche capitoline”, Il programma comunista n° 9, 4 May 1974, p. 1. The dissident group in Florence, which still only published leaflets, denounced the parliamentary turn of “Il programma”. The opponents, internal or external, of this turn were called “capitoline geese” or “infantile anarchists“.

[77] “Après le référendum en Suisse: égalité totale des droits pour les travailleurs immigrés”, Le Prolétaire n° 184, 18 Nov. – 1 Dec. 1974, p. 3. The “party” campaigns for “freedom of movement” and “full equality of rights” for immigrants, “a sine qua non condition for joining the ranks of the international proletariat“.

[78] “Crisi e rivoluzione”, Il Programma comunista n° 14, July 13, 1974.

[79] After Visentin’s departure, Bruno Maffi, on behalf of the Center, sent a circular letter (“À propos du trotskysme. Lettre aux rédacteurs”, Dec. 3, 1974) criticising Programme communiste No. 57 (Oct. – Dec. 1972) devoted entirely to a critique of Trotskyism. The circular letter stated that this brochure “follows a method that is not ours“. Not long before, the newspaper had made an apology for the transitional slogans.

[80] “Le rivendicazioni transitorie nel quadro della tattica comunista”. Il programma comunista, n° 23, Dec. 1976 and n° 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, 1977.

[81] This was the turning point of the EUR Congress Centre in Rome (svolta dell’EUR), where Luciano Lama (1921 – 1996), in February 1978, demanded sacrifices from workers to enable employers to accumulate all the capital they needed to make “good investments”.

[82] The Cassa integrazione guadagni (CIG), set up between 1947 and 1951, is a financial aid structure for workers reduced to partial unemployment. This body allows employers to temporarily suspend the payment of wages to workers laid off for a period of 13 weeks to 12 months, or even 24 months. The compensatory allowance is 80 per cent of the hours not worked, in fact much less, through a set of caps set by the National Social Welfare Institute (INPS).

[83] Operaism had developed in the early 1960s around the magazine Quaderni Rossi, then around Classe Operaia, directed by Mario Tronti and Toni Negri. The Italian operaists advocated the refusal of work as a precondition for communism. In 1969, the operaist movement split into two left-leaning groups: Potere Operaio and Lotta Continua, from which Autonomia operaia emerged. For this current, some of whose branches were “councilists”, anarcho-communists, situationists, anarcho-punk, etc., and in order to capture the atmosphere of the years 68-80 in Italy, read: Nanni Balestrini & Primo Moroni, L’orda d’oro 1968-1977. La grande ondata rivoluzionaria e creativa, politica ed esistenziale, Saggi Universale Economica, Feltrinelli, 2003. Primo Moroni, who died prematurely, was the initiator of the Calusca bookshop in Milan, an obligatory point of reference for the entire counter-milieu (capital and its system).

[84] “Il sindacato contro lo sciopero”. Il programma comunista No. 24, 16 Dec. 1978, p. 5.

[85] Document of rupture of the section of Torre Annunziata, 20 Dec. 1982, sent “to the comrades of Naples” and to others, like those of Marseilles.

[86] The first basic committee (COBAS) was that of “auxiliary teachers” in the fight against precariousness, born at the end of the 1970s. It would later join the Comitati di lotta (Committees of struggle) of the hospital and energy sector (ENEL). The current COBAS-SLAI (Self-organised workers’ union) groups together “rank and file” committees mainly based in factories. The products of the 1992 wave of strikes, they had experienced Alfa Romeo in Milan, where a dissent from the CGIL eventually formed COBAS. It is in fact a new union, with a majority of 45% of the delegates from a factory with 6,000 workers.

[87] PCInt – La Rivoluzione comunista, Avanguardie e Cobas. Come e per che cosa organizzarsi, Milan, 1987.