Lotta Comunista?

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.

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 historical origins of Lotta Comunista:
https://en.internationalism.org/content/17485/what-lotta-comunista-reality

someone from Italy told me >20 years ago, that she always felt something cultish, when she bumped into them

Alf wrote: Some elements concerning the historical origins of Lotta Comunista: 
https://en.internationalism.org/content/17485/what-lotta-comunista-reality

It's interesting that these Luxemburgite counciloids formally excommunicated their fellow internationalists from inclusion into the fold of the famously coherent "Communist Left" over barely relevant stances from several decades ago when that group was naturally still at an earlier stage of development (whereas the barely existing proto-ICC was busy tailing the openly electoralist PCInt and the pathetic events of May 68.) Even whilst referencing no material at all from the last half-century of the organisation's existence, they criticised it for Leninist stances on some national questions historically and other such issues that in reality have simply been the existing viewpoint of a large portion of the aforementioned "Communist Left" in places like Italy and France for a very long time. Of course, on many theoretical matters, the group is rather confused and doesn't have much to teach anyone, although the barely more sophisticated ICC chose to criticise very little of that which there actually is to take issue with as a result of their blatantly limited knowledge, or perhaps also because these flaws are in truth much like the ICC's own. In fact, they chose to release that article shortly after the LC made clear their genuinely internationalist stance on the reemergence of the Palestinian war in 2023, despite the fact that it was signed as having been written back in 2010  - when the ICC, whose internationalism belongs to a rather crude school based on its posturing to achieve the most "Left" position possible, was precisely still attempting to form alliances with those unrepentant anarchists that it then deemed 'internationalist.'

Honestly, I'm loathe to even comment on this tiresome stuff that's limited to these small associations (that have recently been undergoing a major collapse) and doesn't really affect people in any way, but it's rather telling how one-sided their extensive polemic is in this respect. It almost recalls, within an ostensibly more revolutionary milieu, the insecurity in the declarations of enmity that seem never-ending within the most petty-bourgeois of the leftoid parties between the Stalinists, the Trotskyists, and the anarchists.