Party of Committees to Support Resistance―for Communism (Italy)
CARC PARTY- Contribution for conference in The Hague, June 2025
Let’s put an end to Italy’s subordination to the U.S.-NATO imperialists and to the complicity with the Zionists in Israel, to the participation in the war operations they multiply in the world and to the use of our country as a rear-guard!
Let’s extend the struggle against the US-NATO and Zionist imperialists! Let’s strengthen and coordinate the organizations already active against the US-NATO bases, war and rearmament and let’s create new ones!
Let’s develop in every sector of the population specific operations against war, the war economy and the government of war!
1. THE FOUNDING OF THE NATIONAL NO NATO COORDINATION
On December 8, 2024, the No NATO National Coordination – NNNC was founded in Bologna, with an assembly attended by dozens of committees, associations and individuals (one hundred participants in attendance and 25 in online connection). In its Programmatic Declaration, the NNNC takes as its goal to “implement to the full Article 11 of the Italian Constitution the application of which implies and coincides with Italy’s exit from NATO.”
NNNC is currently joined by 21 national organizations, committees and local associations and about 80 individuals: each of being can be (potentially) the embryo of a new local committee. The NNNC aims 1. to coordinate already existing national organizations and local committees, but also 2. to build new local committees and 3. to promote the construction of regional and provincial coordinations, which in turn serve to connect already existing bodies considering that in some areas of Italy several bodies are already fighting against the presence of US-NATO bases, against the militarization of schools and universities, against the militarization of territories, arms trafficking, etc.
The NNNC also has a secretariat, which is in charge of organizational work, communication, calling meetings and assemblies (one secretariat meeting per month and one plenary assembly) and whose members are removable on the instructions of the plenary assembly. The activities it currently carries out include.
1) the mapping of U.S.-NATO military installations on Italian soil and the agreements that Italian universities have in place with agencies of NATO and the Zionist State of Israel;
2) the organization of local initiatives and assemblies that, combined with mobilizations, serve to gather adhesions and structure the NNNC locally (city and/or regional nodes);
3) the promotion of joint national dates of struggle and mobilization on some deadlines (April 4, June 2 and others).
From Dec. 8, 2024 to date, the NNNC has promoted assemblies and initiatives in Naples, Rome, Trieste, Carpi-Modena, Milan, Brescia, to publicize its existence and aims, and the mobilization days of April 4-5-6. They were 30 initiatives throughout Italy, attended by more than 2,000 people, part of the more general context of mobilization against the war, the EU arms race, etc, in which NNNC more openly carried the watchword of the new liberation of the country from the U.S.-NATO imperialist groups and the ruling warmongers.
2. A PREMISE: THE GENERAL ORIENTATION THAT GUIDED AND GUIDES THE CARC PARTY
• The link between mobilization against our country’s participation in the U.S.-NATO war in Ukraine and complicity with the Zionists in Israel, struggle for national sovereignty and establishment of socialism
Italy’s involvement in the war that the U.S. imperialists initiated in 2014 to expand NATO to Ukraine, and against which the Russian Federation reacted with its “special military operation” on Feb. 24, 2022, and the support for the genocide of the Palestinian people by Zionist criminals have created another front on which Italian communists can and must carry out the counterattack of the popular masses by channeling each and every operation into the river of socialist revolution.
To this end, our action is developed in three directions: 1) supporting and promoting the mobilization of the popular masses and the coordination of all forces in some way opposed to the war and the war economy and directing them toward the establishment of a popular emergency government; 2) developing the struggle for national sovereignty, which our country’s involvement in the U.S.-NATO war has placed in the foreground among the interests of the popular masses, as a component of the struggle to establish socialism; 3) to conduct in the conscious and organized communist movement the theoretical struggle on the nature of the war in Ukraine and, closely related to it, on the balance sheet of the first wave of the proletarian revolution and on the analysis of the phase about the nature of the imperialist epoch, the current crisis and political regime of the imperialist countries, the characteristics of the state of the Italian imperialist bourgeoisie).
We also leverage the effects of Italy’s involvement, on the NATO bandwagon, in World War III that aggravates the conditions of the popular masses to develop the struggle against our country’s subordination to the US-NATO imperialists and for national sovereignty.
In fact, with the creation of NATO in 1949, Italy became a kind of U.S. protectorate, in open violation of the 1948 Constitution of the Republic: today in Italy the U.S. has about 116 military installations.
This is an aspect of our country’s condition that the old Italian Communist Party, headed by the modern revisionists led by Togliatti, always tried to avoid talking about (as they did with the issue of the Vatican’s role in ruling Italy), going so far with Berlinguer as to extol “the protection of the NATO umbrella.”
The U.S. protectorate was combined with complicity with the Zionists of Israel and the “EU cage” built, step by step, since the creation in 1951, by the will of the same US imperialist groups, of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and reached a qualitatively higher level with the Maastricht Treaty (1992) and the establishment of the European Central Bank (1998) and the Euro (2000).
Many “sovereigntist” organizations have been formed in our country, that is, those that take as their goal the regaining of national sovereignty. With respect to them, our action consists in expanding their activity on all four fronts in which the struggle for national sovereignty is articulated in Italy:
• struggle against NATO (military bases and installations, participation in war missions, participation in economic sanctions against other countries, impunity of US soldiers in the face of common crimes which they are not prosecuted for, etc.);
• struggle against the EU and its institutions (public debt, stability pacts, balanced budget in the Constitution, allocation of production quotas in agriculture and industry, etc.);
• struggle to prevent closures and relocations of Italian companies and their sale to multinational groups, to keep them open and in operation in Italy (as implemented by Articles 41, 42 and 43 of the Constitution), to nationalize companies such as Alitalia, Stellantis-FCA, TIM, etc. There is no national sovereignty nor popular welfare nor personal security without direction byItalian authorities and workers on economic activities taking place in Italy;
• Fight against the Vatican (abolition of the Lateran Pacts and the privileges of the Catholic Church over other religious organizations and associations).
– Mobilization of the Italian popular masses and all forces opposed to the war and the war economy
Opposition to the war and the war economy is shared by a large part of the Italian population, albeit with different motivations. It is shared not only by the popular masses, but also by groups and exponents of the ruling class (in the context of the contradictions between European imperialist groups and U.S. imperialist groups), by a part of the clergy and Catholic institutions, and even by a part of the Armed Forces and the Law Enforcement. Communists must develop specific operations in each sector of the population.
1. Capably denounce every NATO and U.S. military base, agency and installation, every servitude and military operation. In order to circumvent the opposition to the war of the bulk of the Italian population (as well as that of other imperialist countries), the Meloni government cloaks servitudes and military operations in secrecy as much as possible: breaking this veil of secrecy is one of the tools for blowing them up. Expose and make public the dirty operations of the war profiteers, whether legalized or illegal.
2. Promote demonstrations and initiatives against participation in the war and against each and every operation in which participation takes place (sending weapons, buying new armaments, training of militaries, etc.).
3. To block and sabotage the sending and transport of weapons to Ukraine and Israel, every rail and road convoy and every loading of ships and planes.
4. To extend organizing and struggle against the militarization of public schools: spread denunciations against the militarization of schools, develop boycotts of war propaganda initiatives in schools and universities, denounce the role of school and university institutions in war-ordered scientific research by the U.S. and Israel, and promote the mobilization of teachers, researchers, students.
5. To make agitation against Italy’s participation in the U.S.-NATO war in every instance of the Italian Armed Forces and Law Enforcement Forces. Military unions that are democratic and not subservient to the directives of the caste of generals enslaved to the U.S. can play an important role in mobilizing and organizing the ranks so that they will rebel against the anguish of their superiors, so that they will denounce, oppose, and sabotage the anti-people activities that their superiors want them to do, so that they will cope with the effects of the crisis and the anti-people measures of the Meloni government that affect them as well. To support the senior officers of the Armed Forces who oppose the infamous tasks and crimes that the regime of the Papal Republic, enfeoffed to NATO and the EU, assigns to military bodies in violation of the 1948 Constitution itself (Art.11). Incite them to go to the depths of public denunciation of the dirty maneuvers that the ruling class carries out behind the theater of politics, point them as an example to lead others to set themselves on the same path, make known and incite them to follow the example of officers who have done so.
6. To promote mass solidarity with every person persecuted by the Meloni government and its accomplices and agents because they oppose the U.S.-NATO war, complicity with Israel’s Zionists and rearmament.
7. To connect the fronts of struggle against the war, the high cost of living, environmental devastation and climate change, the privatization of health care, education and other public services, and the dismantling of corporations: develop coordination at the local and national levels of workers’ and popular organizations that organize and animate mobilization in each front of struggle, extend the united front of all organizations and individuals that promote mass resistance.
8. To organize non-payment of bills, proletarian spending and other initiatives to remedy the effects of sanctions against Russian Federation and the arms race that backfire on the Italian working class masses: every form of struggle is just and legitimate, the only criterion is having the strength to do it!
In summary, we must lead the popular masses to make Italy ungovernable by the current ruling class, oust the Meloni government and form their own emergency government.
Developing specific anti-war operations in every sector of the population requires that we pay special attention to four aspects.
• To develop the initiative of each body starting from the level at which it is, leveraging its positive side, mobilizing and strengthening the left in each, and taking into account the classes of which that left is an expression and spokesman. The antiwar movement is diverse, the organisms and individuals promoting or contributing to it are numerous and very different in characteristics, objectives, watchwords, methods of struggle, and social classes of which they are an expression. We must not start from the “revolutionary purity” of promoters and participants, but derive from what they do as much as we can to advance the mobilization of the popular masses in the revolution we promote, make their actions benefit our cause whatever their intentions, aspirations and ambitions may be, push them to do what most benefits the socialist revolution. Depending on the nature of the organism and the individual we are dealing with, we must take it as far as we can to strengthen the camp of the popular masses or to weaken the enemy camp, create havoc there, widen the divisions within it.
• To strengthen the centers promoting anti-war mobilizations that are a direct expression of the popular masses such as Dockworkers Autonomous Committee (CALP) in Genoa, Autonomous Dockworkers Group (GAP) in Livorno, No Mobile user objective system (MUOS) in Niscemi, A Foras (Out [NATO]) in Sardinia, “No to the Base Either in Coltano or Elsewhere” Committee in Pisa, “No NATO Command in Florence” Committee, etc., and to promote the coordination among them. The popular masses gradually become more combative as they realize from direct experience that they have a center that mobilizes them with a line that leads them to snatch victories, to make breakthroughs.
• To develop the role of workers and other workers. The working class (workers in capitalist enterprises) is the main actor in the socialist revolution. The workers of public enterprises and institutions should be added to it, for playing a similar role.
• To orient every body and individual against the Meloni government, to oust the government of war, war economy, subservience to the U.S. imperialists and the arms race, and to establish a popular emergency government.
It is in this light and with this orientation that the CARC Party promoted the establishment of the No NATO National Coordination.
For the P. CARC, the establishment of the NNNC has meant moving from intervening and participating mainly in initiatives and groups promoted by others to promoting directly ourselves the formation of a front of forces on a national scale, and has required learning both to translate into the particular and implement in concrete terms orientations, criteria, and methods already set and to do new things, to perform new tasks, to face and direct new problems and contradictions.
3. THE STAGES THAT LED TO THE FOUNDING OF THE NNNC AND THE PROBLEMS WE FACED
The founding of NNNC is the result of the work we have promoted since April 4, 2024 (75th anniversary of founding NATO) enhancing the call “Let’s close NATO-US bases—75 years of NATO is enough! Let’s Declare April 4 as International Day Against NATO,” launched on February 23, 2024 by an international aggregate, the Anti-Imperialist Front. We used that call to contact on a national scale committees, associations, grassroots unions, parties and bodies of the Italian communist movement, sincere democrats and members of civil society and organize a day of national mobilization with local initiatives against NATO: it was the first brick that led to the establishment of the NNNC.
The following are the main steps that led to the founding assembly of the NNNC.
1. The “April 4 – June 2, 2024” operation.
Prior to the official establishment of the NNNC, the CARC Party worked with its members and popular bodies linked to it to unite as many other popular bodies, networks and organizations of the communist movement as possible around a call to denounce our country’s submission to the U.S.-NATO imperialists on these two dates (anniversary of the founding of NATO and Italian Republic Day, respectively), with the aim of ascertaining which ones were willing to join forces on the issue, to start a work of meetings, gatherings, assemblies, small (local) but nationally coordinated mobilizations, and to understand the basis on which a future coordination could rest. During these operations, the CARC Party made the most of the experience of each local organism so that it could be a protagonist in the process, through the sharing and valorization of proposals, materials, etc., and the construction of a logical and political thread between the various meetings, initiatives, assemblies, and mobilizations that took into account the specificities of each organism: for example, we valorized the organisms fighting against NATO because they were born as a result of NATO criminal operations (ex. State massacres in Italy sponsored by NATO) as well as environmentalist ones (war pollutes and devastates the planet) and those that come from mobilizations against the criminal management of the pandemic (struggle for sovereignty and civil liberties against repression and militarization).
At this stage, the main difficulties we faced were internally:
1) the tendency to conceive of these operations primarily as a field of mass intervention and not as a field of intervention of the CARC Party (thus, the tendency not to show the role of the CARC Party),
2) the difficulty of combining the work to be done by enhancing and moving popular bodies where the Party had the strength with promoting Party initiatives and activities where our mass-level ties are weaker, but with the goal of developing ties around the struggle against NATO. In essence, this means learning to act through the front but also independently of the front.
2. The “thematic table” on August 4, 2024 at the National People’s Redemption Festival.
The thematic table served to elevate the political debate on the perspectives of the anti-war and NATO struggle movement in Italy and on the structuring of coordination with those exponents of popular bodies, networks and communist organizations most willing to give continuity to the path started with April 4 and June 2, in light of the good results obtained with the initiatives made on those two dates and the debate that this path has provoked. This step opened the door to the preparatory work for the establishment of the NNNC.
3. The September 2, 2024 assembly and the September 21, 2024 mobilization in Florence
After the thematic table of August 4, a series of contrasts emerged openly within a local committee in Florence (which constitutes one of the most important experiences in the anti-NATO struggle and of which the CARC Party was one of the promoters) against the installation of a NATO headquarters in a neighborhood of the city. The most backward part of this body (the right wing) used our leadership limitations (failure to distinguish the CARC Party from mass bodies, lack of clarity with respect to the CARC Party’s role in the construction of the NNNC) to try to sabotage the path of building coordination by accusing the CARC Party of “hetero-directing” the network of bodies that had been created and bypassing democratic processes and trying to isolate it both nationally and locally.
This phase strengthened the Party, as the summation of the work done led us to build greater unity between the center of the Party (directing the national work of building the NNNC) and the periphery (the local structures of the CARC Party engaged in intervention on local bodies). We understood that the main problem was not the right wing attacking us, but the fact that within the Party there was not yet sufficient unity of direction on the line to follow, a unity built through the summation and the clearer definition of goals, lines, tasks.
4. The mobilization week of November 4-10 and the preparation of the founding assembly
At this stage, the CARC Party promoted the discussion on the content of the Programmatic Declaration and Regulations of the future NNNC among those who had participated in the path. This brought out those who were really wanted to give practical follow-up to the establishment of the NNNC and those who were for “waiting for better times, for the conditions to mature further.” In fact, the basic disagreements at this stage were related to the fact that a minority component of this path either did not have confidence that it was possible to establish a national coordination or had qualms fruit of the struggle launched by the right against the CARC Party (accused of hetero-direction) and therefore feared being instrumentalized. The debate on the founding document of the NNNC meant that the advanced party (the left) emerged more clearly, united around commonly defined theses and objectives that were not imposed or lowered from above, but the result of a document that was the synthesis of the political path taken up to that point. All this led to December 8 and to the birth of the NNNC.
4. INTERNAL DEBATE AND DEVELOPMENT OF EXTERNAL WORK
Since its founding, the NNNC has been continuing the work of aggregating forces (committees, networks, political and trade union bodies, etc.) and building local NNNC nodes. In this journey, the CARC Party still plays an important role. Indeed, there are still few forces that come to the NNNC on their own initiative, because there prevails
1) a certain mistrust among the masses and the red base (the thousands of people in our country who feel like communists and somehow aspire to socialism) that an effective opposition against NATO can actually be formed on a national scale,
2) because there is still a strong tendency for sectarianism and competition among the promoters of the various bodies mobilized against the war. Put another way, the struggle for unity of action against the common enemy needs to be taken deeper, a unity of action that is also an opportunity for confrontation over differences of positions and an area for practical verification of different lines, watchwords and proposals. This tendency that has also manifested itself within the NNNC, in the approach of its component forces to the outside world. We have fought it by putting at the center the political objectives for which the NNNC must fight, reaffirming the autonomy of the NNNC in its own politics and the need on the part of the NNNC to enhance the positive aspects of any initiative promoted by others that serves to extend the struggle against NATO and the U.S. protectorate.
At the same time, we have promoted the fight against the tendency to self-referentiality that opposes the line of carrying out an action to connect and combine with what already exists in the struggle against NATO. The CARC Party has promoted the line of linking up with as many realities as possible starting from the watchwords that the NNNC pursues and on this basis combining the collection of memberships in the NNNC and the enhancement of all bodies that reflect―in whole or in part—the objectives of the NNNC, regardless of membership in this or that political or trade union area or other sectarian and competitive discriminations.
We also addressed the divergence between those who favor large national mobilizations and argue that small initiatives serve little purpose and do not make an impact and those who, as a matter of mistrust, are oriented only toward doing small mobilizations and initiatives. Large mobilizations are useful and necessary to “count” each other, to give a strong political signal of organization and struggle to the popular masses of the country, to strengthen unity within the NNNC more generally. At the same time, small initiatives and mobilizations are necessary to weave the network of the NNNC, tie new forces to the it, and organize individual contacts who approach to build local nodes (branches) of the Coordination. Both tendencies, if taken in the abstract and as alternatives, lead astray: national mobilizations and local initiatives must be combined to strengthen the overall activity of the NNNC.
The struggle against these backward tendencies has strengthened the NNNC, which took it upon itself at the end of May 2025 to launch an appeal against the attempt by two different political areas in Italy to promote two separate mobilizations on June 21 against the EU rearmament plan and the NATO summit in The Hague, stating that a united mobilization involving as many elements of the working class masses and working-class and popular organizations as possible is needed. As we write this contribution, we do not know whether the goal of united mobilization for June 21 will be achieved, but the NNNC has taken a leading role in this struggle and has animated a debate at the national and local levels that has given prestige to the NNNC and enabled it to elevate the orientation among organizations and individuals mobilized against the war.
5. CONCLUSIONS
The NNNC has been born, but there is still a long way to go to make it a coordination that launches and conducts joint campaigns, that supports and strengthens what its member organisms are already doing, and enhances the struggle initiatives and teachings of other organisms and movements, connecting them and strengthening in each of them the consciousness of their own action, possibilities and strength, giving each organism the opportunity to learn and teach others, to support each other, and to pool knowledge, experience and tools of struggle. That is, to make it actually become a coordination of forces (a part of the anti-Larghe Intese [that is the term we use in Italy taken by the German term Große Koalition, Translator’s Note] front that the CARC Party wants to build) that advances the movement of workers’ and popular organizations in the more general struggle to give the country an emergency government acting on their mandate.
The CARC Party is acting with the awareness that it is leading dozens and dozens of bodies to take a different course of action from what they are used to: individuals and bodies, which sometimes have long experience in conducting specific and local struggles, are in fact used to claiming from those who now govern and run the territories (the forces of the Larghe Intese). The CARC Party is leading them to understand that the need they feel (that is to say to elevate the coordination between the territorial realities in struggle because “union is strength”) opens to a broader perspective: to oust the governments of the Larghe Intese (succub of the U.S., EU and Zionists) in order to impose from below a new governability (what we call People’s Bloc Government).
The modern revisionists first and then the bourgeois left[1] have educated the Italian working class and popular masses to act as a remittance to the ruling class: great mobilizations in election period and then reflux and grievances following defeats; great union struggles and then, whether the goal is achieved or not, all at home waiting for the next attack of the master; protests, mobilizations, initiatives even participated but unconnected to a political planning, without summation of the experience and relaunching of activities. Through the development of NNNC’s activities, the CARC Party also aims to transmit a method of struggle through which parts of its own line can gradually be brought to life, to make a school of communism for the bodies adhering to or collaborating with the NNNC.
It is clear that the CARC Party’s proposal shakes up every organism involved in the process of building the NNNC. What we propose is something new for them, breaking with their usual practices and conceptions. It is an experimental path for us as well, so we must dare to try, dare to fail, learn from mistakes to do better. We need to get into the mindset that transforming workers’ and popular organizations into new authorities means educating their constituents to do something they are not used to: to reason and pose as a new ruling class that will supplant the system of the Larghe Intese and more generally the power of the imperialist bourgeoisie and the clergy.
Note
[1] The bourgeois left gathers the forces that remained after the end of the first Italian Communist Party, which had become the party of modern revisionists. The difference between revisionists and the bourgeois left is that the former had socialism as their goal, even if they believed that it could be achieved peacefully and that the bourgeoisie would surrender ownership of the means of production without the need for a socialist revolution, while the latter believed and still believe that the goals guaranteed by socialism (equality, well-being, progress, peace, etc.) can be achieved by maintaining capitalist relations of production, i.e., without socialism. [Translator’s note]
