New left party for Italy MORE THAN 150,000 members of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), recently renamed the Party of Democratic Socialism, have left to form a new, anticapitalist organisation 'he Movement for Communist Refounda tion (MCR) was launched at a congress at the beginning ofMay, followed by a public meeting attended by 15,000 people.
The group's 12 senate representatives have now formed a common group with Thoco of the far left Democrazia Proletaria(DP), as well as winning between five and sixteen per cent of the vote in recent local elections. ' The organisation of the joint parliamentary fraction prefigures the merger 1fth atter Dra cotions, scheduled for June The MCR. led by Sergio Garavini, a prominent leader of the CGIL union federation, and Armando Cossutta, a well-known leader of the Italian communists, remains unclear on many political issue. But speeches by it's leaders indicate that the organisation intends to promote the politics of class struggle, while rejecting many of the PCI's past positions.
Cossutta described the foundation of the MCR as a 'denunciation of the abandonment of a class identity, of an anti-imperialist tradition....
The MCR leader went on to explain his view of eastern Europe: that the pre 1989 regimes in Berlin and Prague had 'no foundation in the consciousness of the workers' But '1989 has not freed the world as Ochetto and his PDS comrades said; today there exists...a strong capitalist domination.'