Italian proletarians and immigrants: let us unite to fight back the attack of bosses and Draghi government!
Proletarians around the world: let us unite to end it all, fighting an increasingly chaotic, ferocious and unsustainable capitalism!
On this first of May, a theme dominates everything: capitalism is getting more and more chaotic, ferocious, unsustainable. It is not us, its irreducible enemies, who claim this: hard facts clearly lay it out. Capitalism has staged a horrific show all across the world plunging us into a pandemic crisis that has already taken three million lives and will likely mark the start of an era of pandemics. Behind Covid-19 is an ecological catastrophe that is rapidly worsening under the pressure of the capitalist exploitation of natural habitats. The pandemic and ecological disaster has triggered the outbreak of a global economic crisis that, both in the Global South and in Europe and the USA, has already pushed hundreds of millions of people into unemployment and poverty.
In this context of health and economic chaos, the competition among powers has intensified both at world level, between the United States, China and the EU, and at regional level. War expenses, indeed the most harmful expenses, are skyrocketing. The stinging stench of upcoming wars can clearly be smelled and the war on emigrants, refugees and asylum seekers has not even temporarily stopped.
Meanwhile, we can see nothing but police forces patrolling the streets, ready to draw their batons: repression against the struggles of workers, exploited people and social movements are getting more and more brutal. Italy and its democratic “beautiful Constitution” have recently seen police officers backed up by vigilantes and dealers assaulting Si-Cobas pickets at Fedex in order to intimate them, which they failed to do. At Arcelor-Mittal and many other companies, even the slightest criticism leads to disciplinary dismissals, while the “right to strike” has been increasingly narrowed by administrative means in the public sector, as with 8 of March strikes of school workers. All in all the bosses are aiming at getting rid of proletarian independent organizations together with Cgil, Cisl and Uil tame unions, hindering workers from joining in classist unions threating to dismiss them.
This is the self-portrait of today’s global capitalism. This social system can still improve life conditions in Asia or Africa, but is irreversibly declining in its born place, where its headquarters are still located. This will drag into chaos and confrontation even the countries that are still on the rise. Capitalist elites, and especially Western ones, are not going to resign voluntarily: they are not going to realize that they are totally unable to make humanity advance.
On the contrary, both from the United States and from Europe comes the ringing promise (the same as in 2009): it was just a bad, unpredictable accident. Don’t worry, we’ll go back to growing! Indeed, we have already returned to growing at a record pace, they rejoice in the United States. The “miraculous” vaccines and the equally “miraculous” deficit spending drag the Wall Street indexes into the sky. Still enjoying (not for long) the advantage of printing money at will, Biden’s United States even announced a plan of interventions “in favor of workers”: higher taxes on companies and on the 1% of the richest, monetary support of mass to the families of the poor and middle classes. Biden himself, however, admitted that it is a poison bait. The meaning of his message is: we are forced to enter into a competition for life and death with China, and we cannot hope to win without restoring some calm to a country so polarized, so dramatically divided along lines of class, racial and gender, what post-Trump America is. Deficit spending is only a means, the goal is victory in the power struggle with China (and putting it back under the protection of the EU). Anyone who thinks that this prospect will not lead to new war conflicts and a chain of disasters are very mistaken. The spiral of infinite growth that Yankee capitalism claims to embody at the highest level is none other than the spiral of increasing destructiveness, of the growing chaos of the capitalist mode of production, which twists in its contradictions becoming more and more necro-capitalism.
In turn, the EU, by overturning its previous rules, has launched a major investment plan, the Recovery Fund, which exponentially increases the debt of all states and creates a common European debt for the first time. Unlike Washington, however, Brussels cannot promise its workers much even immediately. Indeed, it must continue to squeeze wages and rights because otherwise it cannot compete with the two giants, the US and China. And here is that the Draghi plan, finally made known (in part), gives us a precise idea of the interests on which the “recovery” is structured: 90 billion euros out of 100 will go, straight or sideways, to businesses, to capital, 10 to the working class. The rise in unemployment, which is already a fact, will explode after 30 June. The fundamental objective of the plan is to increase the productivity of individual companies and the Italian system as much as possible, so that Italy can successfully defend its place in the sun, plundering work and nature almost everywhere, from Libya to Lebanon, from Argentina to Mali to Bangladesh. Nothing clear is said, for now, about who will have to pay the huge debt launched in the last year, a debt that accumulates with the previous one, very huge – but around the corner other pension counter-reforms are already lurking, increases direct and indirect taxes on workers, years and years of hard sacrifices to enrich the creditors of the state (bankers, bosses of all sizes, high ranks of the state bureaucracy, the army, the professions).
he post-pandemic capitalist world therefore promises to be more polarized, dangerous for the health of the working class and for the life of the population, full of factors of new crises and wars, than that which existed before the pandemic. In all countries, the mass of the proletariat is not yet aware of it, but it experiences day after day on its own skin that its future and that of the new generations is fraught with unknowns, and today’s fatigue and pain do not prepare better times. For many and many, the dream of being able to preserve their jobs and their conditions of existence by fully adhering to the interests of companies, making themselves available without reserve to the bosses and state directives, is destined to turn into a nightmare. It will be women, especially wage women, and immigrants in particular, who will experience the worst in terms of labor exploitation and discrimination. But a much larger sector of the working class, even in the richest countries, will experience an unexpected deterioration. And in Latin America, Africa and many Asian countries, the worsening will have catastrophic features, heralded by the uncontrolled spread of the pandemic in India and Brazil.
The most combative and organized part of the proletariat is called to become aware of the increasingly destructive character of capitalism, and to draw today a firm line of class resistance to prepare for the counter-offensive of tomorrow. If in the West the old workers’ movement has collapsed on itself, and if the historic trade unions have institutionalized themselves and placed themselves at the service of corporate and national interests (as happened in Italy with the CGIL, CISL, UIL); however, the first signs of the awakening of the newly formed working class can be seen in the strikes that took place in the “avant-garde” companies, Google, Amazon, RyanAir and, here in Italy, in the strategic logistics sector. The uberization of work, this new form of wage slavery under the deceptive appearance of self-employment and the neutral command of algorithms, is increasingly being accused by those who have ended up in their network for lack of alternatives.
After all, for at least a decade the immense mass of proletarians around the world has been trying to deal with the tasks of the new historical phase opened by the great crisis of 2008. The first to do so were the exploited and oppressed of the Arab world in the Intifada. regional of the years 2011-2012, diverted from within by Islamist forces and crushed in blood by Arab satraps protected by the US, EU and Russia, but able to re-emerge in the massive protests of 2018-2019 in Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon – exploded at the same time as those in South America (in Chile, Colombia, etc.). The third act of this awakening took place last year in the most central of the countries of the center, in the most imperialist of the imperialist countries, the USA, with the birth of an impetuous movement composed of young blacks (in the front row), whites, Latin- Americans, Asians – the whole world of the international proletariat concentrated in one country. That same multiracial and multinational proletariat that also here in Italy, for ten years, has been ringing the alarm for indigenous workers, and those with blood in their veins, with strikes by drivers and logistics porters. No less significant, although at the moment in ebb, was the return to the field, with more radical and classist pushes than in the past, of the world women’s movement that started from the two Americas, and the teeming here and there in the world of the ecological youth protest, even if still burdened by illusions towards the established powers.
We comrades of the Revolutionary Internationalist Tendency feel part of this international process that sees the proletariat and the oppressed classes appear in an irregular and jerky way, as in the case of the great movement of poor peasants in India. And, although our main area of intervention is currently in Italy, we feel obliged to multiply our commitment to weave networks of knowledge and cooperation with all the forces that are really in the field, consequently, against capital, and they have in their program the revolutionary exit from the historical crisis of capitalism and the establishment of Soviet power in the world.
Here we fully reclaim the action taken in the last two years to bring together and connect together, together with SI Cobas, female workers and combative workers by uniting them on a platform of struggle that reflects the needs of the proletariat in all its components and aspirations. We know that it is still a very embryonic and limited process, at risk of recoil. But – while we are fixing, step by step, our strategic and tactical structure taking advantage of the enormous experience accumulated by the communist movement – we reaffirm on this May 1st our being internal, whatever the cost, to the pioneering efforts that of thousands of immigrant proletarians are doing for the whole class. Their courage, their determination, their collective feeling of belonging to the working class, and the strength with which they are rejecting the attempt of the logistics multinationals, FedEx in the lead, to throw them back into a semi-slave system like the one from which they were set free with their battles, they are an example that the Draghi government is trying in every way to suffocate. And that instead must be collected and generalized in a perspective of struggle that cannot be simply economic, but has already become a political struggle, and will become even more so by taking on the task of blocking the way to the “Draghi era”. The most combative part of the working class must succeed, and will succeed, in speaking to the whole class, to all / and the oppressed / and, to think big, without being diverted or held back by localisms, economisms, short-sighted refusals. of the theoretical dimension of the anti-capitalist battle.
The future does not belong to capitalism, racism, sexism, militarism. It does not belong to the Dragons, the Bidens, the Macrons, the Putins, the Xi Jin Ping. The future belongs to the international social revolution of the proletariat and the oppressed!
May 1, 2021
Revolutionary internationalist tendency
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