“To be revolutionary today is to apply the Constitution, because only from here can start the social and political reconstruction of the country”, proclaimed Maurizio Landini, secretary of the metalworkers’ union federation FIOM from the platform in Bologna on Sunday 2 June.
It was the latest manifestation of the Italian left’s attempt to cobble together an “alliance of resistance” to the ruling coalition of Italy’s two biggest parties, the supposedly-left PD and Berlusconi’s really-right PDL.
Landini’s line is now common currency for a motley collection of would-be saviours of the Italian working masses.
In the midst of a crisis of the capitalist order, the working masses are being invited to put their faith in a constitution drafted to maintain that order in 1947. The tragedy of Stalinism’s betrayals in 1947-48 is now being replayed as farce.
To brandish Italy’s charter of bourgeois legality as a banner around which to rally the desperate and suffering masses is eloquent proof of crisis, impotence and shamelessness.
