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Against state repression and racism
in support of the revolts of the immigrants

The summer of 1998 was characterised by a ferocious exacerbation of State repression against immigrants trying to land on Italian shores.
The "policy of dissuasion" adopted by the "Left" once again led to the murder of immigrants, as happened in the case of the five who were burnt alive in a ship's cabin at Genoa. In the case of those who actually managed to land, the government turned to mass imprisonment in what can only be described as concentration camps (delicately known as "Reception Centres") inside of which survival was impossible: the umpteenth proof of the substanti al conti nuity between nazi-fascism and democracy.
The protests of the immigrants justly exploded against such examples of white barbarity. This time they refused to submit passively to the repression, their inhuman conditions of detention and their forced expulsion. The "Reception Centres" were the scene of countless revolts and attempts at mass escapes, against which the government reacted by means of brutal aggression, beatings, denunciations and even more restrictive immigration measures ttan those established by the last odious decree.
Once again, the "benevolence" of the govemment headed by Prodi and supported by Rifondazione Communista has revealed the truly antiproletarian nature of its strenuous defence of capitalist interests by adopting an increasingly extremist and ggressive position against immigrants who are painted as delinquents, drug addicts and possible terrorists.
The Italian government is not alone in this radicalisation of the anti-immigrant offensive. As Western imperialist robbery continues to aggravate the living conditions and exploitation of Third World countries, there is an inevitable increase in the flow of the oppressed seeking to flee their misery and starvation.
All of the governments in the West are responding to these uncontainable waves of immigration by establishing crusades that have the aim of sealing the borders of Europe and allowing the controlled access of a new, cheap and super-blackmailed labour force to set against Western workers and the unemployed. In this way they are looking to provoke divisions and wars between the two sides in order to weaken the capacity to resist of both one and the other.
The globalisation of the economy, the increase in the contraditions characterising the capitalist system and the growing competition between the imperialist plunderers are driving capital to try to defend the profits and privileges of the bourgéois class by unleashing a general offensive designed to hit (albeit to different extents) both the Western proletariat and the disinherited masses of the dominated countries. There is no escape for either, nor any possibility of seeking reformist improvements in their conditions of existence. If it wants to avoid falling into the abyss, the only path open to the proletariat of the world is to unite its forces against the declared or concealed attempts of the bourgeoisie to divide them and set them against one another in order to be able to increase its exploitation of all of them.
One important step in this direction is to construct a common pathway of struggle and trade union organisation that can weld the fight against racism and discrimination of the immigrant proletariat to the fight against illegal work and in favour of the defence of equal workers' conditions.
If we look at the independent and general interests of the proletariat in an international and internationalist light, of equal importance is the struggle against growing imperialist aggression - such as the latest examples in the Sudan and Afghanistan - designed to reinforce imperialist plundering and attack the movements of the exploited in the south of the world who rebel against it.
It is only in this way that the phenomenon of immigration towards Western countries - a phenomenon that cannot be arrested under the dominion of capital - can be transformed by the exploited from a weapon of blackmail in the hands of the bourgeoisie into a resource for strengthening mutual resistance against the increasing capitalist attack.
This summer's immigrant revolts represent an exceptional sign of a readiness for struggle that we welcome and warmly support. It is up to the Western proletariat to demonstrate its ability to recognise and relaunch it in more advanced terms of organisation and mobilisation in order to strike at the roots and destroy capitalism which, by means of its savage depredation of natural wealth and its inhuman exploitation of the labour force, is not only the cause of forced migrations but also the cause of all of the ills affecting the proletariat as a whole.

ORGANIZZAZIONE COMUNISTA INTERNAZIONALISTA
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