Saturday, November 24, 2018

Italian communist leader Marco Rizzo blasts Berlinguer's eurocommunist legacy

Marco Rizzo (left), General Secretary of the CC of the
Communist Party, Italy. Right: Enrico Berlinguer.
In a very interesting speech delivered at the 20th International Meeting of Communist and Workers Parties, which is taking place in Athens, the General Secretary of the CC of the Communist Party of Italy (Partito Comunista) Marco Rizzo strongly criticized the ideological and political legacy of the so-called "Euro-communism".

The intervention of Rizzo marks a break-up with the traditional reformist line of the - once powerful- Italian Communist Party. "We reject with extreme firmness any hypothesis of political alliances between parties, both for electoral purposes, which, even worse, in support of self-styled "left "governments. The Italian labor movement has paid heavily for the lines of collaboration and compromise with the reformist parties" said Rizzo and added:

"Eurocommunism, which in Italy could be defined as "Berlinguerism", was a revisionist and opportunistic degeneration, based on upheavals and falsifications of Gramsci's thinking. By denying Marxism-Leninism, it sanctioned the distortion of the PCI, bringing it first to the support of the bourgeois government with the national unity of the '70s, then the acceptance of NATO and the EEC, to the break with the International Communist Movement and finally to his self-destruction".

Its true that never before had the leader of an Italian Communist Party expressed such a straightfoward critique on the strategy of the old PCI in an international forum. Marco Rizzo continued by exposing the actual role of euro-communism as the "trojan horse" of bourgeois politics within the working class movement.

"The inglorious end of what had been the strongest communist party in the capitalist world should make everyone reflect, even those parties that, in our country, have tried to formally collect the legacy of the PCI, without due critical and self-critical analysis of the damage of the Eurocommunist compromise with the bourgeois state" Rizzo pointed out, underlining that "the internal and external participation of the bourgeois governments and the center-left coalitions has made them complicit in the approval of the worst anti-people measures, invisible to the masses and, finally, deprived of their consent for years and, therefore, of parliamentary representation ".