Italy: Grillo, the Five Stars Movement, Fascism, and their SWP and Counterfire Fans.

Left Wing ‘Coalition of Resistance’?

For the left the Italian elections results were deeply disappointing.

The left bloc, Rivoluzione Civile, got the results below, and  failed to enter Italy’s elected Chambers.

Chamber of Deputies
Election year	# of overall votes	% of overall vote	# of overall seats won	±
2013	765,172	2.25	0 / 630

Senate
Election year	# of overall votes	% of overall vote	12 of overall seats won	±
2013	549,987	1.79	0 / 315

 

 

More worrying is the rise of the Five Star (Cinque Stelle) Movement (M5S)  led by Beppe Grillo.

They got  the most number of votes in the Chamber,  25.5% of the overall and 109 of the 630 seats. In the Senate, it was second overall and  got  54 of the 135 Senate seats.

This from the Guardian’s Comment is Free is good place to start to look at this result,

There is an important distinction to be made here between the M5S and truly radical movements: the M5S divides the world into “us” and “them” in a completely different way from the radical movements mentioned above. When the Occupy movement suggested a distinction between the 1% and the 99% in society, this was based on the distribution of wealth, going right to the root of social inequalities: the 1% are the multimillionaires. Had it known Grillo, Occupy would have included him as well. In Italy, Grillo is part of the 1%.

Comrade Toby Abse writes (it is essential to read the article in full),

…more attention needs to be paid to Beppe Grillo and M5S, particularly in view of the SWP’s appalling stance on this question. The 64-year-old stand-up comedian – whose own tax records would probably bear no scrutiny like so many of his ilk – is no ‘leftwinger’ and his shadowy media advisers in Casaleggio Associates, who make Peter Mandelson look like a model of transparency, used to have rightwing associations.

He has courted the violent neo-Nazis of CasaPound, having at least one friendly meeting with their representatives.³ Grillo has repeatedly expressed hostility to trade unions, arguing that all workers need are representatives on company boards.

This is how Socialist Worker described the Five Stars Movement,

The only party with anything to celebrate was the left wing, anti-corruption, Five Star Movement.

Led by former comedian Beppe Grillo, this new party picked up a quarter of the votes.

If anything Counterfire makes a worse misjudgement.

They compare Five Stars to the British  left-wing and union Coalition of Resistance.

Populism” is the word being used to describe Grillo and the Cinque Stelle, the sort of condescending label that tells you very little – though it’s an improvement on the Guardian‘s description of them as “irrelevant”, which must surely rank as one of the more grotesque political miscalculations of recent times, even by that newspaper’s standards. In fact the movement is more like an amalgam of campaigns, many of them civic or environmental. And it’s rooted in opposition to the corruption and cronyism endemic in much of Italian political life.

The origins are local and its roots are in local activity. Back in 2009 in Florence there was the first national meeting of Comuni a Cinque Stelle (roughly translatable as Five-Star Councils) aimed at linking up local campaigns for proper public water supply, sanitation, control of building, clean energy and so on. Basic issues which united people across the usual party boundaries. You could describe it as a movement of active citizenship, but also as a sort of coalition of resistance.

Dave Broder’s letter to the Guardian yesterday nailed this lie.

I challenge the assertion that Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement poses an alternative to the dogma of austerity. Following the ex-comedian’s friendly televised meeting with the fascist CasaPound group, his calls for trade unions to be “wiped out”, and his complaints about migrant communities settling in Italy, it should be obvious that the large M5S vote is small-minded and defeatist, rather than some new voice of hope for the working class and poor. Italy may be driving in the wrong direction, but this “fuck everything” demagogue trying to grasp at the steering wheel does no favours to those on the receiving end of austerity.
David Broder
Rome, Italy

Jim Denham points out the “extraordinary degeneracy” of those on the British left who think that Cinque Stelle is ‘progressive’.

M5S is linked with CasaPound (named after Ezra Pound, who backed Mussolini to the hilt, and was mired in profound antisemitism).

CasaPound had received a lot of publicity in Europe (see Dans la maison des néofascistes italiens from Le Monde’s Rome correspondent earlier this year).

Clearly nobody would want to reduce Cinque Stelle to this connection.

But what do the British SWP and Counterfire think they are doing giving such indulgence to a group with these ties?

With this (Wikipedia),

The name, inspired by the poet Ezra Pound, in particular, refers to his Cantos against usury, the economic positions of critical both to capitalism and Marxism and its membership of the Italian Social Republic. References political association are more specifically related fascist ideology, with particular attention to the Manifesto of Verona, the Labour Charter of 1927 and social legislation of Fascism itself. The chosen symbol is a stylized turtle, the shell octagonal.

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