Anyone here familiar with the Italian group, Lotta Comunista? I've occasionally seen them mentioned in the 'Leftist Trainspotters' Facebook group and saw that DSA's Democratic Left publication featured an article and a response from them. Apparently, they are one of the largest radical left groups in Italy.
They seem like a peculiar group with an unusual background and idiosyncratic politics. Although they are a 1960s Marxist group that still exists, they apparently have no real links to operaismo/autonomia or the numerous Bordigist splits. From what I can tell, their origin story is anarchists who became Leninists who then were expelled from the Italian Communist Party.
From comments, I've read they resemble Jehovah's Witnesses in that they enforce a dress code and rely on aggressive door to door canvassing. They also seem to get in physical confrontations with other leftists somewhat frequently, so comparisons to the Larouchites or NATLFED seem apt.
Just wondering if anyone here can shed more light on this group...
This is what I have been…
This is what I have been able to cobble together: the post-war Italian FAI had a current called GAAP which sympathised with the Fontenis-led Federation Communiste Libertaire in France, sharing some of the same goals (stricter organisation, a more "activist" orientation, and some kind of a rapprochement with Marxism). This was rejected by the FAI majority and the result was that GAAP left to form their own organisation together with a group that had split from the PCI.
Unlike the Fontenis tendency, which continued to identify with anarchism and libertarian communism, this independent GAAP eventually began to evolve towards more directly Leninist positions. This process sped up after they joined an alliance of left groups called "Azione Comunista". The former GAAP-ites went in a few different directions, some returned to anarchism, but others coalesced around Arrigo Cervetto who founded Lotta Comunista out of Azione Comunista.
In a way their politics are somewhere between the UK SWP and the Bordigist ICPs. They believe in a disciplined, centralised cadre party implementing the tactics laid down by Lenin. They took a "neither Washington or Moscow" position during the Cold War and consider the contemporary conflicts between Russia and Europe, China and the US, etc to be inter-imperialist in nature and they thus advocate for opposing both sides. This carries through to their position on smaller-scale conflicts like the Israel-Palestine one, where they advocate for workers on both sides to overthrow their respective governments. Internationalism is very important for them, particularly as mediated through Cervetto's concept of "unitary imperialism" that they harp on about non-stop in all their publications.
They usually don't have any interactions with other groups on the left but in recent years they've attempted to organise conferences supporting proletarian internationalism, and have reached out to a number of groups outside their tradition as part of that. For instance, the workerist Trots of Lutte Ouvriere in France, as well as some anarchist groups that oppose supporting the Ukrainian government against Russia.
I think the door-to-door missionary work is just something they do to keep recruits busy. As far as I know their main strategic focus is in burrowing inside the unions, they've managed to reach some fairly high positions in some of them. They are also very into theory and their publishing house is, I believe, responsible for publishing Marx's collected works in Italian. Their newspaper looks terrible and is also unreadably boring. They also have the shittest web presence of any group, it's so bad it's impressive, everything is scattered across sites with different URLs that all look like they were made in the 90s.
Thanks for that. A bit of an…
Thanks for that. A bit of an unusual group that doesn't follow most other existing groups' lineages. That's probably why not a lot of people have much to say about them.
Iirc, think the Heath Idea…
Iirc, think the Heath Idea book had a bit about the GAAP, but can't remember how far that followed them along the Azione Communista trajectory. (Slightly) interesting if they combine a leftcom position on nationalism with what sounds like a very un-leftcom position on working in trade unions.
Some elements concerning the…
Some elements concerning the historical origins of Lotta Comunista:
https://en.internationalism.org/content/17485/what-lotta-comunista-reality