>--- Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
>> The liveliest and the largest contingent in the
>> march was from the
>> Refounded Communist Party of Italy. They had a DJ on
>> a sound truck
>> playing great music and hundreds of young people
>> dancing behind a
>> banner that shouted "Disobienti."
>
>I have a hard time believing that Rifondazione Communista would have
>a banner that read "Dissobedienti". "Dissobedienti" (The
>Disobedients) are autonomists, coming mostly from the Italian social
>centers (centri sociali). There must have been an italian
>contingent of which both Rifondazione and Dissobedienti were part.
I take it that collaboration has continued and expanded:
***** The ESF's organisation has been formulated largely by a co-operation between the Disobedienti (or 'Civil Disobedience', formerly known as the Tute Bianche / White Overalls), spearheaded by Antonio Negri, led by Luca Casarini and based in North East Italy, and the Rifondazione Communista (RC), a national far-left group which splintered from the previously encumbent center-left party Democratici della Sinistra (DS), and which sits in Italian Parliament with roughly 6% of the national vote. Some regard this alliance between the statist-leftist RC, who have made it their open aim to 'contaminate, and be contaminated by' the anti-capital movement, and the 'Zapatist' Disobedienti to be rather an unholy one, especially since it has effectively bought the Blairite DS a direct role in the ESF's organisation.
The Forum's location in Florence, locally ruled by the DS party, is not insignificant in this respect. The resources the DS are able to offer in Florence - a conference center, accomodation, satellite uplinks, and so on and so forth - are obviously attractive to the Disobedienti / RC. Obversely, by cooperating with the Disobedienti and providing access to its own tax-funded, party-political infrastructure and that of the DS, the Leninist RC is able to promote itself as being 'side by side' with active 'non-statist' anti-capital groups. And as at Porto Alegre, the organising Disobedienti/ Democratici della Sinistra / Rifondazione Communista nexus has undoubtedly been able to allocate time, at the ESF, to groups that fit within the more traditional statist framework, with NGOs such as ATTAC once again looming large. Indeed, the ESF is beginning to look like a straightforward progression from Porto Alegre, a replay of the flocking of extra-parliamentary groups to a local arm of a statist power, this time in the shape of the Democratici della Sinistra rather than the Workers' Party of Brazil.
<http://slash.autonomedia.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/16/2028231> *****
***** 'Traditional' politics have also resurfaced over the question of standing in elections. Although Italy is still undergoing a fascinating and inspiring period of mass mobilisations, it is not a fundamentally different society to a year ago. So electoral politics and trade union mobilisations still dominate the thinking of the majority of left wing voters and activists. So elements of the movement have been unable to resist the temptation of standing in council elections at the end of May. In Genoa Giuliano Giuliani, Carlo's father, stood for the centre-left DS party. One of the main organisers of the Genoa Social Forum, Massimiliano Morettini, also stood for the DS in his home town. Yet a Genoese spokesperson for the Catholic Lilliput network, which has formally left the social forum movement, criticised the decision: 'entering institutional channels only weakens the movement'.
The same is true outside of Genoa. Communist Refoundation has offered many social forum activists a place in its list of candidates. There is a social forum candidate in Cosenza in the south. And in the far north, Vicenza, the leader of the 'disobedient' wing of the movement, Luca Casarini, also ran as a councillor.
<http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=8046> ***** -- Yoshie
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