Workers World, Vol. 20, No. 18
May 2 – Italy is moving slowly but surely to a Chile-type resolution of the political crisis confronting the Italian people. Of course, this process could be interrupted by the intervention of the masses on a truly spontaneous and elemental level. But should this not happen, and should such a frightful development actually take place, it would have the most far-reaching consequences all over Europe. It would most certainly transform the entire political situation on the continent and send shock waves throughout the entire world.
The stakes of the international working class and oppressed people in the outcome of the Italian crisis are very high indeed, for it will have lasting effects.
For the last several weeks the headlines in the United States and other capitalist countries regarding Italy have been dominated by the Moro kidnapping case. Yet, whichever way one regards the Moro case – whether as simply a kidnapping carried out by an anarchist organization or as an essentially rightist plot which hides behind the screen of a Red Brigade kidnapping – it is a symptom of an acute social crisis.
The crisis is not of yesterday’s making. It has been going on for a number of years – ever since the end of the so-called industrial miracle in the years of postwar capitalist boom in Italy. After the growth of the 1950s and 1960s, galloping inflation – which took its highest toll in Italy – heralded the oncoming capitalist crisis with its consequent unemployment, soaring cost of living, and inability of huge sections of the youth to find any outlet or any hope for job opportunities.
The capitalist crisis has been “quietly” taking a far greater toll in Italy than in probably any other country in Europe, with the possible exception of Portugal or Greece. Italy did not get rich from colonial empires like West Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands or Britain.
However, Italy as a country is rich in industrial development (certainly in the North), rich in talent and in skills, and could, under a socialist system, become a powerhouse for the satisfaction of human needs far beyond the confines of Italy.
But as an imperialist country, as the anchor of NATO, it is a poor country – really and truly poor – and it cannot lift itself out of its poverty without breaking the chains of capitalist exploitation and imperialist oppression.
At the moment, at least as seen from this side of the Atlantic, all Italy seems completely absorbed in the Moro case and all Italy looks united as one against the Red Brigades who are believed to be Moro’s captors. Moro himself seems to have been elevated not only to martyrdom, even while he is still alive, but virtually to sainthood. Yet a little reflection will show that all this is superficial.
Although the capitalist press here has deliberately failed to mention it during all these weeks of the Moro crisis, it is well known that Moro is a corrupt capitalist politician. His cabinet while he was premier crumbled as a result of the Lockheed scandals, which none of the newspaper accounts seems to have remembered, but which many Italian workers have not forgotten.
It is assumed in the U.S. reporting of the Moro case that the great danger to Italy and to the “Italian state” (to “civil society”) comes from the Red Brigades, whose terror is alleged to hold the possibility of destabilizing the entire social order. And as the Red Brigades are reported to have said on many occasions, they are out to “destroy the state.” The individual terrorist acts which they have carried out are mean to accomplish precisely such a purpose.
Under these circumstances one is led to believe that all of Italian society is convulsed by the terror of the Brigades. Hence it is argued that “national unity” must be achieved between the oppressor and oppressed classes in Italy as the first and fundamental task in order to exorcise the demon.
The first and most important thing to understand about the nature of the current political crisis in Italy is that the ruling class is neither scared nor convulsed nor really greatly agitated by the Red Brigades, even assuming that they exist in the numbers the capitalist press attributes to them and that they are all anarchists or anarcho-communists.
It is often said that Italy is a new nation. Its ruling class, however, is old and experienced. They know that the state cannot be destroyed by individual terrorism. Their ideologues and politicians, unlike the anarchists, know that the state as it presently exists in Italy is in skeletal form a body of armed men. As Engels said, it is the repressive apparatus of the military, the police, and the secret services. And this state is an instrument of the ruling class which can only be destroyed by the collective acts of huge masses of workers, peasants, and soldiers, in the course of a revolutionary class struggle of a mass character.
What the Red Brigades are doing does not remotely harm the functioning of the capitalist state. Even more importantly, it in no way stops or slows down the exploitation of the workers by the capitalist class. The extraction of surplus value continues inexorably. Capitalist accumulation goes on as before. The process of capitalist production is in no way affected by the individual terrorism, which is an expression of the frustration of the petty-bourgeoisie and not an inspiration or an exhortation to the working class to struggle.
Certainly the existence of the Red Brigades indicates the presence of a strong anarchist tendency. But anarchism is the price which the working class pays for the opportunism of the working class leaders. This is how the Brigades have to be understood and not the way the bourgeoisie puts it. The danger that the working class faces inside the proletarian movement is the complete surrender of the principal working class party – the Communist Party (PCI) – to the politics of the bourgeoisie. This is the internal danger within the working class movement.
The real external danger lies in a neo-fascist military dictatorship. This is inherent in the Moro case and this is what is completely underplayed.
It was not so long ago that the present Premier Giulio Andreotti, who was then defense minister, led an investigation into plots to overthrow the Italian government. According to him, from January 1970 to August 1974, at least three right-wing plots were hatched to overthrow the Italian government.
In December 1970, the Julio Valerio Borghese movement planned to overthrow the government with the help of the military.
In January 1974, a detailed plan was set up by the neo-fascist movements to seize the presidential palace (Quirinale), the Parliament, the ministers, the radio and television centers, and the other centers of news media and information.
In August 1974, the Rosa Del Venti (Compass-Card) conspiracy was ready to strike. This was a political and military conspiracy to overthrow the democratic system and set up a military junta. The conspiracy involved more than 75 generals, politicians, and “law enforcement” agents, all belonging to neo-fascist movements. (See “Italy in Trouble” by Pellegrino Nazzaro, Current History, March 1975.)
What happened to all these neo-fascist elements and their ties to the ruling class? Have they all be shot, killed, or kidnapped? Why is so little heard of the danger from the right? Is it that the right has completely disintegrated?
Would not this prior investigation by Andreotti in and of itself indicate that there is much more to the danger from the right than the ruling class is willing to talk about and than the U.S. press in particular is willing to write about?
Which again brings us to the Moro case. It is said that Moro was the principal leader in the Christian Democratic Party willing to “permit” the PCI to join with the Christian Democrats in an coalition based on the so-called historic compromise. He thereby presumably obtained the full support of the PCI in the ruling class effort to solve the capitalist crisis on the basis of the sacrifice of the working class.
The Red Brigades, it is said, so detested the historic compromise that they regarded it as a sellout by the PCI. (It is, of course, that.) So they ventured to stop the consummation of this compromise by kidnapping the one political figure in the Christian Democratic Party whose immense authority was capable of bringing the left and right factions of the Christian Democratic Party together to agree on formal PCI entry into the government.
We will not contest that anarchists are capable of such twisted logic, which of course is a possibility. But anarchism, which bases itself on hopelessness, frequently goes to all sorts of extremes to defeat its own purposes.
Nevertheless, it is much more relevant to the present political crisis in Italy, insofar as the Moro case is concerned, to look at it from the point of view of American finance capital.
Since the beginning of NATO, the U.S. has looked upon Italy as its strongest anchor. Italian capitalism is a satellite of U.S. imperialism. This has not changed with succeeding presidents.
It is very well known that the U.S. has consistently opposed allowing the Christian Democrats to bring the PCI formally into the government. The fact that the PCI has completely renounced Leninism and is acting more slavishly, more brazenly on behalf of the Italian bourgeoisie, has made little difference in Washington’s strategy. No matter how much the PCI leaders try to assure both Washington and Wall Street that they are heart and soul for the “democratic system” – that is, for capitalism – the ruling summits of U.S. finance capital nevertheless prefer to deal without PCI help and would rather see the PCI dead as a doornail than as a junior or full-fledged partner of the Christian Democrats.
The grim reality is that notwithstanding the recent visit to the U.S. by Giorgio Napolitano, a member of the Central Committee and the Secretariat of the PCI, and his public renunciation of Marxism and even of socialism (New York Times, April 19), the Carter administration seems unconvinced. And this is not accidental.
It will be remembered that just prior to the French elections President Carter publicly issued a virtual ultimatum to both the French and Italian governments not to permit a coalition government with the CP. In doing so he followed in the footsteps of an earlier warning by Henry Kissinger in an NBC “documentary” on Eurocommunism which contained strong language calculated to inhibit the Christian Democrats from venturing into the field of coalition politics with the PCI on the formal basis of the PCI entering into the government.
In this connection it is important to recall that Giovanni Leone, the President of Italy, conferred with President Gerald Ford in September 1974 on the situation in Italy. Ford pledged the full support of his administration to “help Italy in restoring her economic equilibrium.” Leone’s visit came immediately after “a super-secret committee had been set up by United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger,” according to the Current History article mentioned earlier.
Not much is known about this. But according to the Nazzaro article, “The scope of the committee was to study Italy’s serious political and economic developments. The committee agreed that the Italian crisis was basically economic and that with massive economic help political adventures could be prevented. The report emphasized that the U.S. should give Italy economic and monetary assistance. As for the political consequences of the crisis, the committee reported that the economic crisis could fuel a government of the extreme right. This could result from a coalition of conservative Catholics, neo-fascists, monarchists and liberals with the support of the Church.”
The report also posed the possibility “that an extremist coup d’état could bring the military to power supported by the neo-fascists and monarchists. It was possible that the [bourgeois] center-left coalition could be restored with decisive outside support from the Communist Party. This third alternative, though most effective, was rejected by the committee as unfeasible because of the international consequences. The committee concluded that the best solution to Italy’s political and economic problems lay in restoring the [bourgeois] center-left formula and working to overcome the economic crisis.”
As can be seen, a Chile-type coup d’etat was squarely posed as one alternative solution to the Italian crisis by Kissinger in this so-called super-secret committee report. And the alternative that was rejected was not even a formal coalition with the PCI but just the outside support of the PCI.
One is led to the inevitable conclusion that what resulted from the Leone visit to Washington was a commitment by Leone on behalf of the Christian Democrats not to form a coalition with the PCI. The economic situation in Italy deteriorated, however, and the political crisis sharpened notwithstanding efforts by the PCI leadership to be as accommodating as possible from the outside.
When Moro then opened the door to PCI collaboration, although not on a formal basis, it would seem that he violated the spirit if not the letter of the agreement made between Leone and Ford.
The intransigence on the PCI by Ford and Kissinger as well as by Carter and Brzezinski must of necessity be viewed in the light of the agreement made in September 1974 between Ford and Leone regarding a coalition government with the PCI. If, as has been said very frequently since the kidnapping of Moro, he was in favor of opening the door to the PCI, and did in fact do so, then he ran afoul of the understanding he and his party were presumably committed to keep with the U.S.
While it may be true that the Red Brigades are holding Moro as a captive, it is certainly in the realm of possibility that Washington is not at all displeased with the development and may in fact be behind it. The Brigades could be unwittingly guided or controlled by the CIA without even knowing it.
The PCI leadership is fearful of accusing the rightists of the plot for fear of polarizing the struggle between right and left. Even more so it is anxious to avoid calling the particular Brigade that captured Moro the tool of neo-fascist or monarchist and ultra-rightist forces working in coalition with the CIA. That would have made Giorgio Napolitano persona non grata in the U.S.
Thus there is a sort of agreement among PCI leaders to generally characterize the kidnapping as the work of criminals and assassins without giving a clue as to what the real origins of the kidnapping may really be. Of course, the rightists in Italy are not at all as accommodating. They speak of a conspiracy and some darkly hint that its roots may lie in Czechoslovakia, which is another way of saying the USSR or the “international communist conspiracy.”
In the course of the eventual polarization in Italy after the façade of unity around the Moro case has faded, the PCI leaders, coming face to face with a Chile situation, may in self-defense have to retreat from their headlong surrender to the bourgeoisie.
The question arises as to whether, in the light of all the recent CIA revelations, the Carter administration could possibly encourage let alone be the architect of such a covert operation as the Moro case.
However, on Jan. 30 at a Presidential press conference, Carter was asked very specifically whether all covert operations were forbidden.
Reporter: “The executive order you signed last week, January 24, provides the procedure for the National Security Council to approve covert manipulation, and I’m wondering, if the American people have had their fill of covert manipulation, why you are continuing to provide these procedures to allow it?”
Carter: “I don’t believe the executive order would permit as you call it covert manipulation.”
Reporter: “Section 4212 of the executive order defines special activities as activities conducted abroad which are planned and executed so that the role of the U.S. government is not apparent or acknowledged publicly, which seems to be a covert operation.”
Italy’s crisis is far deeper than the Moro case, which is merely one manifestation of it. But it is important not to confuse the working-class movement and divert its attention in such a way as to completely take it off guard. Anarchism as an ideological and political danger in the working-class movement is one thing. Covert operations by the CIA conspirators and the criminal military machine are something else.
Last updated: 11 May 2026