In Italy, where the party can boast a continuous presence within the trade union movement and has conducted a thorough examination of its history, it has modified its slogans in the postwar period. We fully uphold our long-standing general positions, with which we remain in complete continuity, but the context in which the proletariat has found itself fighting has changed.

In “Il Partito Comunista” No. 64 of 1979, our slogan regarding Italy appeared: “Out of and against the current trade unions.”

We had already defined the trade unions founded in the postwar period—CGIL, CISL, and UIL, as “tailored to the Mussolini model,” subservient to the state and representatives of the bourgeois parties, a reflection of the new inter-imperialist balances: we defined them as “regime” unions.

The article noted that up to that point the most militant section of the Italian proletariat had been found within the CGIL, which had been forced by workers’ pressure to lead major strikes. We therefore concluded that, up to that moment, the process of integrating the unions into the state machinery was still reversible, not yet complete, so the possibility could not be ruled out—in the wake of the workers’ struggle—of winning back the CGIL to a class-based policy. “That is why we spoke of a ‘reconquest by force.’ If that had not happened, we said at the time, new class-based organizations would have had to emerge (…) That is why our militants waged the battle within the CGIL.”

From 1975 onward, while widespread workers’ struggles were openly sabotaged by the CGIL, “the most combative and conscious section of the proletariat tends to abandon the existing unions and give life to new organizations.”

In 1980, when the first glimmers of future grassroots unionism were visible, we wrote: “While the slogan ‘outside and against the union’ cannot be made a prerequisite for joining any workers’ committee (…) communist militants must work to ensure it becomes the dominant orientation within them (…) by fighting resolutely against those who take the ambiguous and convoluted position of ‘inside and outside the union’ or, conversely, those who claim that these small committees are already in themselves a new union and must aim in the short term to establish themselves as a class-based union. Instead, we are witnessing the first organizational signs of very narrow layers of militant workers, whom it would be more accurate to define as nuclei of the future class-based union, and whom the Party must help to fully and consistently express the anti-opportunist and anti-capitalist energy they potentially possess.”

Our slogan was confirmed in the article “Terms of the Party’s Trade Union Activity,” in Il Partito Comunista no. 202, 1992:

“With regard to the unions, the Party expresses positions of a principled nature concerning the necessity of broad economic organizations open to all wage earners. Through its organized faction within them, the Party seeks to gain decisive influence in these organizations and, in the revolutionary phase, control of their leadership (…)

“Another issue is the assessment of current trade unions, our attitude toward them, and the tactics the Party adopts in various circumstances. In this, the Party’s action is linked to the interpretation of facts and the study of different situations, which is not immune to approximation and requires progressive clarifications and corrections (…)

“The Party’s assessments and tactics regarding the current trade unions will therefore likely not be identical in all countries and circumstances. The Party’s directive to cease organizing within the CGIL and to rebuild the class-based union ‘outside and against the regime’s union’ is not a general principle of Party action, but the result of an assessment of the situation that has developed in Italy (…)

“It is possible that the working class may, in a phase of recovery, adopt organizational forms different from the traditional ones, which we cannot foresee today. The COBAS are therefore of interest to us not because they manifest original forms of workers’ organization, but because they express the tendency toward reorganization against collaborationist politics.”

The pre-fascist CGL was an instrument of the working class directed by professional counterrevolutionaries. The current CGIL is an organization of the bourgeois regime, to which it answers and whose interests it serves, which keeps workers in line so they do not organize for the struggle.

Sporadic workplace struggles—even fierce ones—do not contradict this diagnosis: it is confirmed by the fact that, when they occur, they are isolated and confined within the boundaries of a single company, if not a single factory.

If for thirty years the workers of our party joined the CGIL and carried out communist union agitation there, it was not because we harbored any illusions about its nature and function, but because the most militant section of the working class that belonged to it still considered it their own “red” union, and because it was possible for communists to organize as a faction within it and to practice and propagate our class line.

The Party confirms all its positions and reiterates that our stance “outside and against” the CGIL is not due to a mania for purism or sectarianism, which we have always condemned as a manifestation of short-sightedness and revolutionary impotence. We fully share Lenin’s criticisms in his “Extremism” of the “left-wing infantilists.”

Since the 1970s, on the one hand, it was no longer possible for communists to make their voices heard among workers in the CGIL; on the other hand, in order to fight effectively, the proletariat set about forming new militant unions.

However, even the unions founded over the past 50 years in declared opposition to the regime’s unions are not without weaknesses. Some follow sectoral logic; at times they accept self-regulation to legitimize themselves in the eyes of the state or to enjoy the benefits afforded to regime-aligned unions. Often their leaders belong to small self-proclaimed communist parties, whose main aim is to recruit members for their own party: carrying out a workers’ struggle becomes entirely secondary for them. There is also good faith. Often, however, it is accompanied by the idea of creating hybrid bodies between party and union, whose characteristics remain obscure even to those who support them. All things we have seen before. But, despite the limitations of such unions, within them are the proletarians most willing to engage in class struggle, to whom we communists must direct our aid, admonitions, and guidance.

Our goal remains the same as always: a single class-based trade union organization to which the majority of the proletariat belongs. It is with this aim that party members are active in the unions, promoting the work of coordinating bodies that unite proletarians from various unions in the struggle—in Italy, these are also open to the militant elements within the CGIL.

The line is the same as always, but obviously without a reawakening to the class struggle of a proletariat bent to individualistic resignation by decades of counterrevolution, no correct line, no organizational formula can bring about the rebirth of great class-based unions. Conversely, without these, the proletarian revolution is unthinkable. The union, in addition to serving as a transmission belt between the party and the class, is also the reservoir from which the party itself draws strength.

There is no room for doubt regarding our principles and our program, since they are not the product of individual speculations but of historical experience; they can only be accepted in their entirety or rejected. In this, we are dogmatic. It is in the analysis of various phenomena and situations that doubts are, on the other hand, inevitable and necessary.

Today the Party must analyze what is happening in various parts of the world, even where we have no sections or comrades. If we happen to make a judgment that is not sufficiently accurate—and this sometimes happens to formal parties—we will not give up. An example of the doubts we may harbor concerns the CGT, which in recent years has seemed receptive to the class struggles that have developed in France, for example by organizing indefinite strikes at the national level in the petrochemical sector.

Just as the tendency of all bourgeois states to establish regime-controlled, if not state-run, unions impervious to class struggle, so too is the need for the proletariat to organize itself into truly combative and loyal unions.

As for those who never have doubts about their own analyses, this is because they are afflicted by petty-bourgeois intellectualistic presumption, inevitably ending up harboring doubts about the very principles of communism and Marxism. The party, in the trade union question, as in all others, has nothing to discover or innovate, but only to study, “in contact with the working class.”