Crisis of Italy's Mafia state
Socialist Outlook newspaper1990sPaul ClarkeTranscribed or corrected by hand from the printed page.
AT A RECENT election rally of the far right Northern League, its leader announced that the party had discovered the headquarters of the Mafia in Italy.
At the end of the meeting the address was revealed – the Rome headquarters of the Christian Democrat Party. The laughter was perfunctory; far from being a joke, everyone in Italy knows it's true.
The corruption scandal has enveloped the whole of Italy's political elite. Former Socialist Party prime minister Bettino Craxi has been exposed as totally corrupt, although parliament has voted not to prosecute him.
Now the scandal has dragged down Giulio Andreotti, seven-times Christian Democrat prime minister and one of the major figures of post-war Italian politics. The Senate has now cleared the way for what will be a spectacular trial of Andreotti.
Exposed
The whole system of rule in Italy since the second world war, in which the Mafia has played a central role, is now being exposed. Defeating the Mafia has been impossible not because of the lack of conscientious police investigators, but because the Mafia is part of the system and protected at the highest levels.
When the US troops landed in Sicily in 1944 they immediately made a deal with the Mafia, which had been severely hit by Mussolini. The US installed Mafia stooges in local government throughout the peninsula.
The Mafia link has been maintained in Italy by the system of clientalism. The Mafia state was a cold war state, constructed to keep the Christian Democrats in power, and Italy's immensely powerful Communist Party (PCI) out. Now the Italian state cannot go on in the old way. That is why the system of proportional representation which has aided the Mafia state is being abolished.
The Christian Democrats kept themselves in power through a super-bloated state apparatus. Control of the state gave access to huge funds, to be distributed to local businesses, local authorities and party cronies. Tens of thousands of jobs went to party loyalists and Mafia henchmen.
At the same time state funding kept the welfare state afloat – underpinning not only health and welfare provision, but also social gains like the scala mobile, the sliding scale of wages for industrial workers.
In post-war Italy huge sectors of industry were nationalised, controlled by IMRO, the state holding company. This again was a huge source of state patronage and corruption, under the control of the Christian Democrats. The recent revelation that Olivetti paid out £7m in bribes for state contracts is just one tiny recent example.
The web of right-wing corruption involved Masonic lodges, the Mafia, the Catholic hierarchy, and of course the Christian Democrats.
Murder
It is now thought that the 1978 assassination of Christian Democrat elder statesmen, Aldo Moro, apparently by the Red Brigades, was in fact carried out by far-right forces, possibly in alliance with the CIA to create a climate of fear and anti-left hysteria – when the PCI seemed likely to enter government for the first time.
The old system of rule has been rendered redundant by the economic crisis of the state, compounded with the financial targets of the Maastricht treaty. Huge cuts in state spending are inevitable. The largesse which sustained state corruption, and also the welfare state, is no longer affordable.
Despite the gains made by Italian workers, the social and economic crisis in Italy is now spectacular. Disillusionment with official politics has led to the rise of the Northern League, a right-wing populist organisation which blames Italy's problems on the corruption of the political elite, and subsidising the economically backward South.
The rise of this rightist force has also been spurred by the crisis of Italian Communism, with the mainstream forming the PDS (Democratic Left Party), which is now an openly reformist, social democratic, force and a large minority forming the 150,00-strong Party of Communist Refoundation (PRC).
Splits
The PDS is in permanent crisis, with split after split going to the left; the latest defectors are a grouping around Pietro Ingrao, long-time leader of the PCI left.
The crisis is urgent. Popular discontent with the old system, crystallised in the rise of the Northern League, threatens the break-up of the country.
The question is whether the system is capable of changing, or whether the corrupt elites are too powerfully implanted. Either way, Italy is now set for a prolonged political crisis.
Only two forces can gain in this crisis in the long term; either the far right or the militant left. The challenge for the PRC is to rebuild that power while breaking with the reformist heritage of mainstream Italian communism.