From Rome to London!

Andy Brooks with the Italian comrades

By New Worker correspondent

THE NEW Communist Party of Britain has forged links with Italian communists working in Britain following a meeting on 1^st March at the Party Centre in London. NCP leader Andy Brooks held a meeting with comrades from the Pietro Secchia branch of the Communist Party of Italy that was formerly known as the Communist People’s Left.  

This Italian party broke away from one of the two successors to the old revisionist Italian communist party in 2009 over disagreements on social policy and the European Union.

The People’s Left is opposed to the EU and it was one of the founding members, like the NCP, of the Initiative of the Communist and Workers Parties of Europe that was set up at a conference in Brussels last October. The People’s Left changed its name at its second congress in January of this year and it is organising all its supporters throughout the EU.

The British wing is named after Pietro Secchia, after a leading Italian communist who was imprisoned by the fascist regime in 1931. Freed by the partisans in 1943 following the collapse of the Mussolini regime, he became a guerrilla leader in the struggle against the Nazi occupation and the fascist forces still loyal to Mussolini. After the war Secchia entered the Italian parliament while secretly maintaining a group of former partisans who kept their weapons in case of a right-wing coup.

Secchia was increasingly side-lined by the revisionist Italian communist leadership from the 1950s onwards but he continued to support national liberation struggles and upheld the Marxist-Leninist line until his death in 1973.