Italian home page Archives e-mail English home page to contact us
13 November 2007
Against State racism
Against the anti-Romanian, anti-Rom and anti-immigrant campaign
of Prodi’s government, the “leading” press, and the political right
1. The crime of Tor di Quinto (Rome) was materially committed by a recently arrived Romanian, but it has nothing to do with Romania and even less to do with immigration because it is the fruit of the social and human degradation that is mushrooming on the outskirts of every large city in Italy and Europe (not to mention the United States), including Veltroni’s glittering showcase of Rome with its 20,000 shanty-dwellers.
The husband of the murdered woman has declared with dignity: “It could have been committed by an Italian”, and he is right. Our newspapers are full of horrors of every type that are exquisitely Italian to the core (almost always involving), but you may not be aware of it because the scribblers of “public opinion” always and only write as if they have been committed by mad or depraved individuals. However, this time, together with and by means of Nicolae Mailat, they are accusing an entire people: the Romanians, followed by the Roma (also known as Gypsies in the UK), and then the immigrants. When it is one of “ours”, the blame is individual; when it is one of “them”, it is obviously collective, national or a question of race!
2. We make no excuses for one or the other but, just as social determinants always lie at the root of Italian crimes, we say the same is true of the crime of Tor di Quinto and its material perpetrator – and therefore accuse the social force underlying the social and human degradation that is spreading throughout the world: globalised capitalism. In order to undermine, or at least reduce the value of the labour force and the rights of the working proletariat, this has created an enormous proletarian reserve that is largely made up of people from the poorest countries in the world, who are forced to vegetate in a life that is anything but life in all four corners of the world, in their own countries or large or small ghettos elsewhere.
This planet of slums, semi-slums and super-slums (admirably described by Mike Davis) is not and cannot be confined to the megalopoli of the Southern world. Economic and social marginalisation, extreme poverty, existences eked out on the basis of expedients and petty crime, shanty towns and desperation are expanding day by day also in our “own” Northern metropoli: “surplus humanity”, condemned to endure desperate hardships just across the street from the most shameless display of wealth. Before becoming a wretched torturer, Nicolae Mailat was one of this host of the abandoned forced by His Majesty the market to undergo the brutalisation of sub-proletarian conditions: a victim of the hyper-capitalistic and moneyed “civilisation” that has colonised Romania, his country of origin.
3. The mere existence of this “surplus” humanity (one or one-and-a-half billion unemployed or chronically under-employed people) is enough to indict the dominant class of capitalists above all because there is no chance that they will ever be reabsorbed by a market economy, just as there is no chance that the degradation of the places in which they are herded will ever be cancelled by the capitalist powers that be. And so they make every effort to hide the responsibility of the capitalist market, and that of governments committed to cutting one branch of the “social state” after the other in its name. And what better means of doing this is there than to off-load the primary responsibility for such appalling conditions onto the poor and marginalised themselves, onto the people abandoned to the misery of the streets – and then, by means of a “natural” extension, onto “illegal immigrants” and finally all immigrants as a whole?
The ideology of “zero tolerance” (forged by research centres working hand in glove with the government in Washington, and first spread on a large scale in the USA in the 1980s), the penal system and the highly profitable private prison industry are nothing more than attempts to criminalise poverty by identifying the marginalised as public enemy No. 1 of the rest of society as a whole, and therefore necessarily to be treated with a rod of iron. The incurable optimists of Europeanism were convinced that this filthy wave of slime would not reach our shores, but they were wrong: it is breaking through on every side. With the European “left” being the first to open the floodgates precisely here in Italy.
For twenty years now, we have been hearing the promises offered by the advocates of “zero tolerance”: being merciless against small everyday disorders and petty violations of the law (window breakers), against beggary, against the writers/painters of graffitti or traffic-light windsreen washers, against shanty-dwellers and youths in high-risk areas will make society safer, more bearable and more immune not only against thieves, pickpockets, bag-snatchers and incidents of individual violence, but also against larger threats such as the drug trade and prostitution. This lie is amplified by the entire system of the mass media (on behalf of the capital and State that control it) and followed by a lying appeal: if we all fight together against such petty crimes and criminals we can save ourselves from the effects of large-scale, organised crime because it will no longer exist; if we continue to be “permissive” towards the small fish, we are lost.
However, the real effects of such policies are quite the opposite, as we can see if we look at the country in which they have been practised for twenty years. In the United States, they have simply led to more prison inmates and an increasingly capillary system of surveillance, an explosion in State spending on jails and penitentiaries, with a parallel reduction in social spending (in California, more is spent on new prisons than on new schools or hospitals), the birth of the private prison industry, and the especially intense repression of blacks. Society is no safer, there is merely more general (and selectively racial) repression, and less funding for social security. After a quarter of a century this therapy, the United States is the same extremely violent society as before (particularly in relation to women!) and more than ever pervaded by social insecurity (more than 40% of all wage earners have no health protection in a country in which medical treatment is prohibitively expensive). This social insecurity is certainly not due to the homeless who spend the night lying inder bridges or in the entrance ways of banks, but to the heartless functionaries who personify the capital of Wall Street and elsewhere. Things are no different in Europe where our political leaders, like the paranoic Blair, want to incarcerate under-14 year olds in experimental juvenile prisons.
4. But the American and European pushers of the drug called “zero tolerance” know all too well how to play on the sensitivities of a substantial proportion of the “ordinary people” (especially women and the elderly), who are more exposed to the consequences of urban (and not only urban) social degradation than the well-to-do because they are physically closer to it and certainly in no position to hire private bodyguards for their personal protection. When they promise security, they know they are playing on a theme that is not only dear to the people most exposed to physical violence, but also to the wage-earning masses in millions and millions of household who are affected a growing sense of also existential insecurity. This is certainly not brought about by chicanos without documents or the Roma coming from the Balkans (where at least they had a decent modus vivendi before the destruction of Yugoslavia – in which we Italians also played our part), but by the current phase of the globalisation of capital, with its structural destruction of stable working conditions, its temporary contracts, and its deliberate fuelling of an ideal of competition in which everyone is against everyone else and, consequent, nobody has any certainty or guarantee for the future.
Furthermore, this generalised spread of insecurity is astutely exploited by an information/disinformation system intent on diverting the anger aroused by conditions that the passing of the years is making increasingly less temporary and increasingly harder to bear towards and against other, even more unfortunate and “degraded” members of the proletariat, or against petty criminals of preferably other nationalities. The source of 0.1% of the risk is inflated to the point of encouraging the fear of an epidemic of small-time crime spreading from the people of the ghettos: everyone is being made to feel a potential Giovanna Reggiani (the woman killed in Rome) because all immigrants and the dispossessed are potential Nicolae Mailats or potential thieves. On the contrary, the source of 99% of the risk threatening our lives – real capitalism, its State and its government – is completely obscured or presented as a source of security, whereas it actually robs us systematically every day with its price inflation, the lowest wages in Europe, rocketing mortgage costs and monopolist fixed charges; keeps us in a state of permanent insecurity with fixed-term contracts and easy dismissals; and ruins our lives with its heedlessness of the plague of fatal accidents at work, or the deaths and diseases caused by pollution, the spread of drugs, prostitution, and so on. The world has been turned upside down, back to front, and inside out. It is the vile but well tried and tested practice of identifying scapegoats who come from outside, or who have voluntarily chosen to live outside the “rules of civilised life”, and then accusing them of being responsible for something of which they are really the victims.
5. The matrix of this ideological, political, cultural and psychological operation is clearly right-wing, and the insistence with which it is used to attack the Roma, the Romanians and other immigrants inevitably evokes sinister parallels with Nazi propaganda.
However, it is also being espoused by the “left” in a growing and increasingly less conditional manner. It started with the mayors of the Union claiming greater police powers and setting a series of forced evictions under way, and these “greenhorn mini-sheriffs” have now been followed by the goose-stepping leaders of the newly founded Democratic Party, intellectuals, “progressive” sensationalist journalists, and the members of Prodi’s government. As a result, we now have measures allowing people to be expelled from the country if they are only suspected of being “dangerous” even if they are citizens of the European “community”, and the power to order such expulsions has been granted to a wider range of officials. Equally indicative is the demand that the right vote together with the centre-left and, if necessary, join it in hardening the government’s stance. Fini [the leader of the right-wing party Alleanza nazionale] is calling for the expulsion of whoever “does not have the means of supporting himself” (i.e. the mass of the temporarily unemployed, who he estimates as numbering 200,000), and nobody in the Democratic Party has yet answered him with a categorical “no”. If Prodi’s government has somehow moderated its decisions, it is only because of the fear of prejudicing the interests of the thousands of Italian entrepreneurs present in Romania – an exploitative “presence” worth a mountain of euros …
The “left” has also seen a competition between Rutelli, Veltroni and others aimed at establishing who can claim to be the progenitor of “zero tolerance” in Italy, and Berlusconi has been criticised for not having closed the Italian borders to the new members of the EU before they joined – particularly the Romanians, who have become today’s plague-bearers, but hold the record for the number of workers involved in fatal accidents: 35 in 2004, 29 in 2005, and 30 in 2006, and can “boast” of more than 44,000 serious working injuries (declared…) during the same three years! And the same nationality that also holds the record for the number of cases of discrimination at work, according to Pietro Vulpiani, a member of the Prime Minister’s Anti-racial Discrimination Office (in a communiqué dated 5 November)! However, it is forbidden to speak about any of this on the left and the right because, otherwise, it would be all too easy for the public to understand who is brutalising who, and on a daily basis: the “illegal” Romanians who brutalise ordinary Italian men and women, or the Italian exploiters who brutalise Romanian working men and women here as well as in Romania! An eloquent silence that confirms how closely the “left” is approaching the right.
6. This “left” and the Democratic Party have also carefully avoided another key issue raised with splendid clarity by some anonymous members of the Romanian police: “Members of the Romanian police tell us: You Italians are the ferocious wolves. You now ravage more than 30,000 Romanian girls. It is you who maintain the Romanian criminals who enslave them. It is your Italian men who pay the Romanian delinquents. We must ask forgiveness of the murdered woman. But you should remain on your knees throughout the year” (Don Benzi, L’Unità, 3 November). The language is certainly not ours, but the substance of this denunciation is nothing but the truth. Every day, Italian men are involved in a mass ethnic rape of young and very young Romanian women (and men), who are condemned – by the market, by the putrefaction of “our” customs and by the Romanian underworld – to an early and atrocious social death in streets and cheap hotels, and in so-called night clubs or private homes.
We have heard absolutely nothing against this form of abominable sexist and colonialist violence because the spotlight is exclusively turned on today’s Romanian, Rom or immigrant branded by the suspicion of being an avid rapist of “our” women.
7. Large-scale organised crime plays a leading role in creating the micro-criminality that generates insecurity and degradation. This can be clearly seen in the increasing number of robberies being committed by drug addicts in their urgent search for the cash needed for their next “fix”, not to mention the spread of drug trafficking itself, street prostitution, the trading of clandestine immigrants, illegal usury (the legal kind is still firmly in the hands of the banks), the protection money extorted from shopkeepers, doping in sport and gymnasia, car thefts, etc. However, rather than doing something seriously and systematically against this kind of crime, the same people whose mouths are full of bringing safety and security to society do everything they can to avoid even mentioning it. The reason is once again the same: organised crime is an integral – not secondary – part of both national (according to Eurispes, the turnover over of the Calabrian ‘ndrangheta is equal to 3.4% of Italy’s GDP – not even Fiat has a bigger turnover) and international capitalism. However absurd it may seem, if the Italian government were to attack organised crime seriously, it would lead to the financial ruin of the banking system, the stock exchange, and the country itself (25% of its Treasury bonds are in the hands of criminal organisations). And so, mum’s the word! And all of the lights are concentrated on Nicolae Mailat, because “they” – and only they – represent a mortal threat.
8. The right, with Fini and the Lega Nord in the forefront, has obviously leapt onto the “zero tolerance” bandwagon and its rabble rousing campaign for order. This is where it finds itself more than at home, but it has – so far – held back from the more obvious and extreme consequences: physical attacks, and pogroms against the Roma and immigrants (although there have been reports of signs of something similar from the official right in Northern Italy for some time).
However, parallelling the institutional actions of local authorities, there have already been a number of “spontaneous” and “unofficial” pogroms in both the North and South and, given the climate that is being created, there is no doubt that they will be followed by others of a more serious kind. The terrible paradox is the possibility that such attacks will involve some people belonging to the same popular and even marginalised groups because, in the absence of class-based action, organisations like Forza Nuova (on the extra-parliamentary right) offer them an albeit suicidal outlet for their anger. Suicidal because they are being encouraged to strike other members of the proletariat (the three Romanians injured in Tor Bella Monaca were workers) or their children (like the Morroccan boy attacked at Einaudi School in Rome), and the result is to intimidate immigrant workers and drive them to accept in silence the blackmails and super-exploitation they suffer at work: in this way, employers find themselves equipped with an even more effective weapon of blackmail against Italian workers as well.
How hypocritical D’Alema, Veltroni and Amato are when they condemn these attacks! They talk of “executioners armed by the right” and the “xenophobic beast” goaded by the right, but the government and the “left” have done nothing other than prepare the ground for the entry of the racist squadrons of Fascism.
9. The mass of immigrant workers hope to defend themselves against this acceleration in the racist offensive by remaining silent, by keeping themselves out of the sight if they are not Romanians or Roma, or even by finding some protection from demonstrating their loyalty to their “host” country.
These attitudes are also encouraged by Prodi’s government which, like the centre-right government that preceded it, is seeking to create a hierarchy of immigrant workers in social, juridical and political terms, thus raising other barriers not only between Italian and immigrant workers, but also between immigrants of different nationalities. It is no accident that state racism and its xenophobic campaign was given a boost at the end of October, just after the two successful demonstrations of immigrant workers held in Brescia on 27 October and Rome on 28 October, and the “proposal” to organise a general strike of immigrant workers in Italy along the lines of that of the immigrant workers in the USA. The campaign of “zero tolerance” toward “law-breakers” is precisely what the government needs when it promises immigrant workers: if you accept the conditions offered by the country “welcoming” you and help us to isolate “clandestine” immigrants or those who are mobilising in an attempt to protect their working conditions, you can be sure that Italy, and Italian companies and institutions, will reward you … And it is also no accident that the unspeakable aggression against the Romanians took place just a few days after the latest Caritas report had made it known that there are many more Romanians in Italy than immigrants of any other nationality.
In reality, the experience of Italy over the last 20 years (as well as that of other Western countries with a longer history of immigration) demonstrates that super-exploitation and racist oppression can only and exclusively be contained and opposed by means of a collective struggle, with self-organisation, mobilisation side by side with the native proletariat and support for the anti-imperialist fight in the South and East of the world.
10. The tiny forces of our organization are mobilised to support and encourage the continuation, extension and radicalisation of the struggle of immigrant workers. We also call upon Italian workers to enter the field by showing them how vital it is for their own interests to react against the government’s racist policy and “zero tolerance”, because it is nothing other than an integral part of the attack that the same government, the right and the “left”, and capitalist enterprises and financial institutions are mounting on the front of pensions, precarious employment, the weakening of national labour contracts, and the rest of the “social state”.
There must therefore be no interruption in carrying forward autumn’s albeit fragile mobilisation. On the contrary, the urgency of the government’s expulsion decree confirms its anti-proletarian nature and underlines the fact that it should not be treated as “friendly” or “to be realigned”, but as an enemy in the service of the exploiting classes that squeeze us dry every day at work. We reject the attempt to divert the discontent and anger of Italian workers against their immigrant class brothers, and directly commit ourselves to establishing urgently needed contacts, meetings and organisational bodies capable of guiding the reponse of our common struggle.
There is a way out of the degradation being created in the urban periphery and mutually destructive competition between Italian and immigrant workers! It lies in both of them coming together in the struggle for the full equality of their rights: permits to stay free of conditions; large-scale investments in social expenditure aimed at freeing suburban peripheries of their current state of degradation; and greater organised vigilance against physical attacks on immigrants, from which it is just to defend oneself. This requires us to organise ourselves and fight together against the policies that are seeking to humiliate us both, and against the impoverishment and exploitation that the same policies reserve for the exploited peoples of countries in the East and South. We must make every effort to establish connections between the mobilisation of the workers in Italy and the trade union reorganisation taking place in Romania, in the other countries in the East, and in the other countries in the South.
These struggles – of which one splendid example is that of the textile workers in Egypt, but also the workers’ strikes in Poland and Czechia, and the demonstrations of Romanian workers – demonstrate that the countries in the East and South of the world have much more to offer than the wage-lowering competition of millions of exploited workers: a potentially outstanding force of struggle that intends to oppose this competition and is fighting for levelling working rights and wage conditions on the global market upwards. It is certainly no accident that official news sources are careful not to mention it because the workers in the East and South of the world must only be seen as marginalised, exploited, submissive and weak, and never as fighters! But it is vital that we make their struggles known and support them, and do everything we can to interrelate with them.
There is no point in joining the chorus of “Send the immigrants home, there are too many of them!” It would be totally counter-productive because the migratory movement is continuously fed by imperialism’s pillaging of the South and East, and the spasmodic need of companies in Italy and the West for a super-blackmailed reserve industrial army in order to reduce the labour-value of the entire proletariat, including or, rather, above all those that enjoy the greatest guarantees. Immigrant worker come here to “our home” en masse from Romania, Yugoslavia, Albania, Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan and Peru (and now increasingly also from Iraq, Kurdistan and Palestine) because Italy, Western states, “our” banks, “our”companies and “our” armies (let us not forget it!) are destroying their possibility of living in their own Romanian, Yugoslavian, Albanian or Iraqi “homes”. They come to “our home” because our strong powers have demolished or occupied “theirs”.
This situation can only be overcome by going forward and breaking down the barriers that labour market competition, state policies and racist campaigns in Italy and the West have erected between workers of different nationalities, races and religions. If we (Italian and immigrant proletarians) take this path, we will find also the strength to “purify” the degraded customs that are more than marginally present among Italian workers. We will also find the strength to confront the social degradation of the small proportion of immigrants who have become the pawns of the real gangsters controlling criminal activities: the big bosses of the Mafia, their political and institutional allies, their friends in the Boards of banks and in the off-shore financial market-places… Class organisation is the only means of snatching this group of immigrants out of the clutches of these vultures.
13 November 2007
Internationalist Communist Organization
Italian home page Archives e-mail English home page to contact us