Party of the Communist Refounding, Italy
by Graziella Mascia

These last few weeks in Italy there were a number of
demonstrations which could be characterized as a protest
against the globalization process. In Ancona, people took
to the streets on the occasion of the Mediterranean
Conference and against the Politics which are the fundament
of the NATO's war in Yugoslavia. In Florence, we contested
NATO's summit there, in Genoa, thousands marched in protest
against the use of biotechnologies and patents which give
the multinational companies the control over the food
production. In Bologna, demonstrators protested against the
OECD Summit on small enterprises. These are for Italy the
main events among all the demonstrations where one could
feel a breeze from Europe and from the whole word. We have
called it the wind blowing from Seattle. On June 25 we will
be in the streets of Geneva for a European rendezvous where
demonstrators for employment from all over Europe will join
all those who were in Amsterdam and Cologne against the
Seattle Cartel. Also the demonstration last year against
NATO's war in Yugoslavia was important and massive.
It is still too soon to speak of an adequate movement of
struggles against globalization, but it is a fact that
something important is on move and we want to be part of it
with all our strength.
Workers, unions, youth, pacifists and environmentalists who
radically protest against capitalist globalization are part
of this movement. They are protesting against a process
which brought about a huge restruction of capitalist power
operating on many levels, during the past years.
New methods in the production process have appeared going
far beyond the Fordist model and accounting at the same
time for work force which is being sought anywhere it costs
less and has no possibility of defending itself.
The model of production, called �Toyotist� feeds on
international competition which imposes itself by
constantly seeking new exploitation of work and natural
resources. The protagonists of this process are the
multinationals who are decentralizing their activities,
reducing their work force in the most advanced regions
where they retain however all their command centers, while
at the same time huge financial procedures are progressing.
More precisely, this process reconsiders the role of the
state-nations and, more generally, the forms of democracy
existing until now.
The fact that more and more power is being transferred
towards structures which are not democratic, such as the
IMF, the World Bank, the WTO is not new. It is a process
building a world government along the lines of
international capital's interests. The actual growing
commercial contradictions and technological and productive
competitiveness no doubt exist in a capitalist system that
are more unified, and to say that they are determined by
capitalist systems which differ from one another is not all
that simple.
On the other hand this process has to face enormous social
and environmental contradictions. There is a growing gap
between North and South, and some entire countries run the
risk of collapsing into poverty and social exclusion are
increasing. Work is becoming more and more precarious and
flexible, everyday though it does not prevent structural
and massive unemployment. The migration process is dramatic
and on a large scale.
One could say this is a new phase of the regressive
evolution of the capitalist system, in which we witness the
conceptual negation of the dual process
development/progress and in which the same consequences
result in the wealthy as well as in the poor countries.
It is a phenomenon with features that are very new in
comparison with other past periods. In this context, the
introduction of new technologies really produce major
contradictions and new dependences. Moreover, in this
context of contradictions, more and more often practices of
power are used, subtracting them from their democratic
organs, ratifying total market hegemony, patenting nature
and imposing what is called �unified thought�.
The most radical form of this logic is war. And in fact, on
the occasion of NATO's war against Yugoslavia, it was said
that it was a real constituents war. The right of a part of
the people, the strongest (under the USA's absolute
hegemony) to be the representative of what is called the
World Order.
NATO has in fact refounding itself, redefined itself after
the dissolution of the Soviet Union, as a guarantee of the
order. The dismissal of UN authority is total, and adding
to that, the power of the parliaments and constitutions is
being taken away.
This process of globalization has had an heavy impact on
the construction of Europe. We, as a force believing in
the necessity of the construction of a social Europe, have
protested deeply the logic on which the Maastriht and
Amsterdam treaties are based. It is a monetarist logic of
which the Central Banks and especially the German Central
Bank is the leading force, it is a logic submitted to
exigencies of neoliberalism which contributed to the
increase of a serious social disturbance that touches 20
million unemployed living on the continent.
This basic flaw in the European construction influences the
European Unified Currency in such a way that there is a
risk of Americanization, i.e. the explicit demand of
renouncing whatever social and economic character that
still makes Europe unique, for instance its social state
and its democracy, marked by the presence of strong
movement of workers and left forces.
We have experienced this process in our country under even
more intense forms. The present crisis in the center-left
which we believe is structural proves it. This crisis is
only the expression of the more general crisis of this idea
of a moderate liberalism called the �third way� and of
which Tony Blair is the principal instigator. The extent of
the crisis makes even possible the repeated victory of the
conservatives representing in some way an innovative
mixture of hyperliberalism, populism, a combination of
reactionary cultures, threating particularly those who are
�different�.
The Party of the Communist Refounding is participating in
research for a social and political alternative t the
center-left crisis. We believe that it is necessary to
gather a larger antagonist left and in the same time
propose to the moderate left forces to free themselves from
the center-left and create a pluralistic left.
To be able to commit ourselves to the counteraction of a
really alternative politicy is determining. This is why
Europe is for us the indispensable ground on which to
struggle against globalization, Americanization and �Single
thought�.
Another imperative is the construction of relations between
political and social forces without any preconditions of
the ideological type, but based on the protest against the
globalization process, of liberalism and war.
We shall always participate in multilateral meetings where
we invited, but however without encouraging reconstruction
operations of whichever gathering based on an ideological
basis or something like this. On the contrary, we are
working for relations, movements and gathering as I said,
on a protest basis of the process in progress, searching
the of principal subjects in order to define an economic
and social alternative.
What we have in mind are important questions such as the
implementation of social and environmental standards for
production and circulation of goods based on child
exploitation, low revenues and destruction of the
environment.
We support the reduction of working hours without loss of
salary, the fixation of a European minimum wage, of a
social salary for the jobless. We support the introduction
of the Tobin tax on the speculative transactions of
capital, the protest against WTO, we are in favor of the
cultural exception in order to except the products of
cultural value from the rules of liberalism. We are for a
Europe of peace and international cooperation.
Our political idea of Europe is not founded on the false
and illusory perspective of a development of contradictions
between a presumed European capitalism and an American
capitalism, also because there are no multinationals,
administrative councils in Europe or in the USA, that do
not propose exactly the same thing, as was proved for
instance in the well-known case of the Multinational
Agreement on Investment (MAI).
We are continuing on resistance to the neo-liberal economic
and social model which is produced today either in each
state separately, either on the regional level also on the
supranational level. We think also that only a
supranational dimension is useful for the production of an
alternative to the present capitalist model. In other
words, we think that in fact, only our idea of Europe would
be able to produce a real process of political integration
and a real common foreign policy. Only an autonomous social
model as an alternative to the neo-liberalism can produce
in fact a real political autonomy and a new relationship
between the old continent and the Third World countries.