Che fare n.71 , November - December 2009: translation of the first article
28 December 2009
Against the redundancies, the job insecurity, the ruthless squeezing of the workers, the racism.
Let us unite all workers’ forces in a general struggle against the Berlusconi government!
How will the economic crisis evolve? Will the tide of redundancies, which is “silently” going on for months, be stemmed? Will the production machine set off again?
These are the questions with which workers, young proletarians, common people are settling their account.
The major world capitalistic powers are giving reassuring answers. The United States and China, the principal mainstays of the present world capitalist system, are ensuring that the worst has passed. That, if capitalism is able to take another historical metamorphosis, the sky will return to shine for everyone. The leaders of the two countries appeal to workers to do their part in this work, including putting aside recalcitrant capitalists, still grasping annuities that have become obsolete.
This hypothesis of revival arouses hope among workers in the USA, China and beyond. On the contrary, we think that, beyond temporary arrangements, Washington’s and Beijing’s plans envisage a historic phase of major international tensions and spasmodic competitiveness, in which the world capital, to relaunch itself again, must pass over the world workers’ and nature’s body.
Otherwise, in Europe the atmosphere is cloudy. Especially in Italy. With good reasons.
Because of the structural weakness of Italian capitalism and the shifting of the world economy’s centre of gravity towards the Pacific, in the clash between Titans that is being outlined, it may well be that the Italian capitalists and bourgeoisie retire to the role of low-cost workforce and troops suppliers to the highest bidder or to the strongest in charge, as happened sometimes in the past. With the parallel injection among the workers of heavy doses of racism and moral corruption as instruments to maintain the domain on the salaried masses. It may well be, however, that the Italian bourgeoisie will manage to bounce back from this drift, which would mark a historic downgrade.
However goes, the fate of Italian workers will be stormy. Both if the social and political decomposition, that is going on under the Berlusconi government, will prosecute; or there will be a militant social basis sustaining the bourgeois attempt to include Italy, although with a lower rank, in the rationalization of the capitalistic system launched by Obama, as the Chrysler-Fiat agreement and the cloth woven between Casini-Fini-Montezemolo-Bersani would suggest. In any case, for workers there will be the extension of the scourge that has "silently" crept in proletarian households: unemployment and mass intermittent work. In any case, there will be the attempt of the bosses and of their institutional representatives to leverage on the formation of an army of unemployed proletarians, in order to crush, like a steamroller, the collective safeguards won with proletarian struggles of the 20th century, and not yet completely crumbled. There will be obsessive attention to isolate and repress the attempts of sectors of workers to oppose to this historic setback: penalties to the workers who has participated in the fight at the factory Innse in Milan and to the workers of the Atitech in Campania, disciplinary measures in Trenitalia, injunctions to narrow the so-called freedom of the press are a very slight anticipation of that.
With our newspaper, we address to those workers who perceive this drift and the dangers to their class involved from it. We urge them not to renounce - notwithstanding all these difficulties - to the fight against redundancies, job insecurity, exploitation in factory and in office, racism, and against the plunder of nature and social health. The progress of these struggles calls them and us for a work of linking among mobilizations and between mobilizations and the crucial nodes connected to the overall fate reserved by capitalism to the working class. In this perspective, a fist-rate role belongs to immigrant workers.
We give them our unconditional sustain. We support them for each attempt of militant self-defence, of which we have seen a promising beginning in Campania and in Calabria. This self-defence is necessary both for their protection, and to help the Italian workers to understand that only in close unity with their class brothers immigrants they will be able to stem the capitalistic attack.
What we expect, then? A difficult phase but, at the same time, a phase of promising revival.
The old labour movement is dead. It has been sunk by the capital, who has managed to disorganize it using transformations occurred over the past 25 years in its economic structure, the attack of businesses and of right and "left" governments, the ideology and practices of trade union organizations, which has become “fifth columns” of exploitation institutions.
What is bubbling in the capitalist pot, however, pushes towards the opening of a regeneration phase. From the abyss of the social-darwinist atomization, the world’s working class, with its bastions on the two shores of the Pacific, is urged to be aware of the fact that it is the only class capable of leading humanity out of the present miasma. The working class will not succeed in doing it all in one go. It will do it in the wake of the accelerated development of a multi-faceted struggle movement and the development of new immediate and political class organisms within these struggles. In this path, workers will be forced to deal with the themes of the programme for the revolutionary transformation of capitalist society and the international unification of the proletarian ranks.
For this perspective, that is the perspective of communism and inherits the immense heritage of the experience of the more than bicentenary communist movement, we call to fight from the trenches that capitalism puts in front of us in this provincial corner of world that is Italy. Also from here, it is possible and necessary to work for the restarting of an international militant class organization based on revolutionary marxism.
28 December 2009
Che fare n.71 , November - December 2009: translation of the first article
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