On the world vision capture of the mafia super-boss M. Messina Denaro
A national event. More, international. Celebrated in the press around the world (the Western world, which – many forget it – is not the world at all, it is less and less). Congratulations to Meloni flock from everywhere, starting with Metsola, president of the European Parliament, a well-known center of malfeasances.
What a historic coup. What professionalism. What an investigative miracle. When you say a state apparatus with integrity and irreducible in the hunt for its mafia “enemies”! (You say: enemies?) They had looked for him everywhere for decades, night and day, weekdays and holidays, without respite, the elusive, the black primrose, the boss of bosses, the guardian of “all the secrets” of the mafia (and of the state).
They had looked for him everywhere except at his home, or near his home. An identical mockery as the Riina case [another super-boss]: he too was furiously hunted on five continents and on the satellite circuit for 23 years except at his home, or near his home, little stuff compared to the 38 of quiet abscondence of his buddy Provenzano…
The screenwriter, however, was not at the level of the astonishing historical-world event. Broadcast on TV the arrest (strictly without handcuffs) of a “criminal mass murderer” at the head of an army of picciotti capable of blowing up overprotected high-ranking state officials, without having to gut secret atomic-proof bunkers, without shootings, without any resistance on the part of the candidate for a lot of life sentences, as if it were an appointment between acquaintances rather than friends, all these circumstances let also unprepared spectators understand that the “capture” of Messina Denaro was nothing more than a delivery by the new godparents. Or a self-delivery to enjoy a well-deserved retirement safe from any internal settling of accounts in his most honorable environment. Be that as it may, the result of a negotiation with the state, between feigned enemies which are only competitors, in view of the superior common interests of conducting with a firm hand war and the war economy which loom over all sectors of the bourgeois class. After all, M. Messina Denaro [Money] … nomen omen, his super-boss destiny is already written in his name, the mafia being nothing more than a gang of ravenous money hoarders – how could it be antagonistic to the State of Money?
Trade? Negotiation between State (the Meloni government) and Mafia? There are several clues. The assurance that the Strait Bridge will be done. The billions of euros in the PNRR. The co-interest in war supplies. The tax gifts for all business (Mafia bosses own multiple businesses). Nordio’s “justice reform” program. Why not? Let us dwell only on the latter using a valuable intervention by 5-star Senator Scarpinato who, as a man of bourgeois institutions, inevitably ends up tumbling into a eulogy of the judiciary and the police (a position that is at the antipodes of ours), but nicely highlights the organically classist, and pro-Mafia nature of Nordio’s justice reform program, “strong with the weak, weak with the strong” (where do you place the Mafia bosses?). A program to be implemented in two stages. In the first stage, pass a series of ordinary laws aimed at the single common denominator of “guaranteeing the impunity of members of the “upper classes,” “downsizing or decriminalizing white-collar crimes” to protect the “world of economics, politics, and high finance.” In a second step, bringing down the mandatory nature of prosecution so as to armor these privileged sectors of society from any risk a priori. On the other hand, as for “justice” toward the subordinate classes, it says it all – Scarpinato argues – the introduction by authority, by Decree-Law No. 162/2022, of the new crime of Art. 434 bis of the Criminal Code (against so-called raves, crime + rave), an example of “anti-garantist, illiberal, classist” legislation, which provided very severe punishments for organizers and participants in unauthorized demonstrations with an “impressive legal artillery,” similar to that existing against organized crime – an example of “neo-fascist legislation,” a “formidable tool of repression even against hundreds of ordinary citizens participating in unauthorized demonstrations of dissent against government policies.” On the other hand, the Nordio’s attack to mafia investigations as a source of “plethoric” wiretapping and provide for cutting the related funds, urgently abolish or lobotomize the crimes of abuse of office and other crimes against public administration, trafficking in illicit influence, and so on.
In his inauguration speech, Draghi providentially “forgot” the usual ritual formula of “fighting the mafia”. Meloni did better, choosing Nordio’s program of “justice reform” that generously meets all the fundamental demands of the mafia. It is time for indefinite appeasement between the state and organized crime. Well other wars have begun or are on the way. And this anti-proletarian pax is sorely needed in that Italy that NATO and EU members consider a possible weak link in their chain.
On the relationship between organized crime, capital and the state
From the n. 3 of “Il cuneo rosso” (April 2019): “Twelve theses on capitalism and crime today”.
- At the dawn of the twenty-first century, in the midst of globalized capitalism, crime is essentially organized crime through large transnational corporations.
- Organized crime constitutes, with all its activities (trafficking in drugs, people, arms, organs, the prostitution industry, pornography, “pedophilia”, trafficking in toxic waste, sports doping, production in of counterfeit goods, laundering, receiving stolen goods, extortion, illegal usury, etc.) the first capitalist “industry” on the planet, a real pillar of global capitalism.
- This industry has its greatest density, its greatest weight and its management centers in the West, in the rich and dominant countries of the North, not in the poor dominated and controlled countries of the South. Italy has a leading role in this industry plan on a worldwide scale, which it does not have in any other branch of activity.
- The activities of the organized crime industry are not an “anti-economy”. On the contrary, especially in Italy, they are an integral part of the national economy, the global economy and world finance, of which criminal organizations, with the large availability of liquid capital they enjoy, are a valuable business partner.
- Criminal organizations are essentially capitalist enterprises, as their first and last aim is the accumulation of capital.
- Organized crime, the industry and finance that belong to it are universal phenomena. They have nothing “ethnic”. Born in the West, they are expanding wherever favorable conditions are created, both through the process of delocalization and through a “local” accumulative impulse.
- Criminal organizations are not an “anti-state” that threatens existing states; instead they are intertwined with the capitalist states, top-down, bottom-up, in such a way that they are inseparable from them. Which does not mean, as for any other fraction of capital, that there can be, and there are, partial conflicts with other branches of capital or institutions, and with this or that policy of this or that government.
- Criminal enterprises carry out activities with a very high profit rate. And they constitute, taken together, a countertendency to the tendential fall in the rate of profit, as they specialize in highly profitable businesses. This also explains why the competition between them resorts to brutal methods (although in Italy, for some time now, they have preferred corruption and non-aggression agreements to murders).
- Criminal enterprises are deeply rooted in the social fabric of the richest capitalist societies as they are specialized in providing deviant responses (drugs, prostitution, violence against minors, forced labour, etc.) to unsatisfied needs by the official society and economy.
- Petty crime (in which immigrants who commit crimes are usually involved) constitutes, in most cases (see drug dealing), a visible offshoot of macro crime which, instead, prefers to stay indoors. Entry into petty crime has its primary cause in the growth of poverty and marginalization within which criminal organizations seek their own labour. In the case of immigrants, being without a residence permit plays a fundamental role.
- From all this it follows that no serious struggle to eradicate organized crime can be waged either by the legal forces of the market economy, or by capitalist states and governments – and least of all by the Lega-Cinquestelle government. The iron fist against street “criminality”, as well as stoking the war against immigrants, serves to cover up this inconvenient truth. But even the eradication of petty crime is, for these states, impossible because they are unable to eradicate either poverty or the processes of marginalization which, on the contrary, are rampant in many countries of the South of the world, and are also spreading in Italy and in Europe.
- The only social force that will be able to bring about this double uprooting is that of the proletarians and the exploited of the South and North of the world, natives and immigrants, organized and determined to give together a formidable revolutionary cleaning up of their own societies (you know the broom of Vladimir Ilič?), “cleaning up” also themselves in the fight against capitalism.
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