The ISTAT annual report of May 2024 mercilessly photographs the social
reality of Italy: ---- "As a result of the strong rise in inflation inthe last three years, family consumption expenditure has decreased in
real terms and the distance among more or less wealthy families... This
increase in economic suffering was reflected in the contemporary
worsening of absolute poverty indicators... Overall, therefore, despite
the increase in the employment rate, work has not been able to protect
against situations of serious economic difficulty, especially in the
case of employees".
Capital has maximized its profits and the banking system continues to
grind out growing numbers, recording profits of 6.3 billion (+25.6% in
the first three months of 2023). This is a serious budget, with respect
to which even the policies of previous governments certainly cannot be
said to be extraneous. Just as the historic choices of confederal trade
unionism have not been, oscillating over the years between the
containment of trade union requests "for production recovery",
concertation, income policies and contractual policies oriented towards
compatibility. Choices that have progressively facilitated capitalist
restructuring to the total detriment of work.
That is, we are witnessing a gigantic concentration of social wealth
produced to the full advantage of industrial and financial monopolies,
in the context of an unprecedented attack on the environment, in which a
bucket of washable paint causes more scandal than the recurring floods
and environmental devastation . To the constant decline in the
purchasing power of wages and the uncontrolled spread of precarious
employment; to the increase in exploitation and the intensification of
the pace of production activities, the main cause of the dramatic
increase in accidents, including fatal ones, at work; to the worsening
of essential public services such as healthcare, education, public
transport and social security; to the progressive questioning of
historical conquests, we add the recent request that the International
Monetary Fund addressed to Italy: proceed towards a further increase in
the effective retirement age, at the same time "avoiding expensive early
retirement schemes" in order to contain the public spending.
The recent intervention of the Governor of the Bank of Italy Fabio
Panetta, entirely within a neoliberal vision, then raises the
demographic question and the need for the national industrial system of
"a flow of immigrants greater than that hypothesized by Istat". A
contradiction between the current needs of Italian capitalism, but also
of European capitalism, and the barbaric and racist policies of
successive governments that have represented it and which puts class
solidarity with workers at the center of our political action coming
from other countries.
Furthermore, the difficulties of economic recovery, with Italy bringing
up the rear in Europe, are replaced by European funding from the Pnrr.
Specifically in the reality of our country, the use of these resources
translates into a massive attack on the environment with projects
impacting social and ecological balances and which, given the
foreseeable construction delays that will interrupt European financial
flows, plans to replace them with national resources that will have
significantly higher costs.
The union unity, which the confederal leadership groups have pursued by
stubbornly opposing a process of class unity from below on concrete and
unifying objectives, has not counteracted further social divisions and
the weakening of the union organization itself. The CISL is currently
attempting a privileged relationship with the current government
majority with a popular initiative law proposal, "Participation in Work"
for co-management in the Boards of Directors of companies for which it
has activated a collection of signatures. The CGIL maintains that "work
must be protected because it is a constitutional right. It must be safe
because you have to live and not die from work. It must be dignified and
therefore well paid. It must be stable because precariousness is a loss
of freedom": but, instead of relaunching a great unitary dispute on
these important objectives, he limits himself to the statement, calling
four popular referendums which, in practice, are not accompanied by a
real, united mobilization and from below but they replace it with the
collection of signatures, delegating the defense of the interests of our
class to the institutions and parliament, moreover with the prospect of
results that are anything but obvious. The UIL, more cautious because it
is weaker, chooses, however, the less compromising argument of
Artificial Intelligence by stating that, as always, "we intend to govern
and manage change and not suffer it", a statement which, in the
phraseology but above all in the intent refers to the end of the 1980s,
when the management of a hypothetical "new development model" to be
co-managed jointly with the capital and for whose take-off it was
decided to contain the union demands, led to the very serious defeat of
the FIAT dispute of September/October 1980, where the capital that was
being restructured and strengthened, expressed its intent to attack the
material interests of the subordinate classes in a process that trade
union and political/parliamentary reformism had absolutely not
understood and which, it seems, continues to do not take into account.
The dramatic situation of our class then emerges which, increasingly
oppressed by material need, has entirely paid, and is still paying, the
costs of capitalist restructuring. The world order is exploding,
producing generalized conflicts that further exacerbate the clash
between the major imperialist powers for control of the world market.
The crises multiply without any mediation and with them the widespread,
increasingly atrocious wars: from Ukraine to Palestine and the Middle
East, as well as in Africa and Asia: today in the world there is
fighting in around 60 countries, in a scenario that he sees proletarians
massacring each other for interests that are not their own.
"Peaceful" Europe is rearming itself like other states to better pursue
its own power interests: military spending and contracts increase to the
exclusive advantage of large multinational groups and we return to
discussing European defense, nuclear rearmament and compulsory
conscription . The war economy distributes profits only to a few and has
a negative impact on the general economy of a society, as well analyzed
in the work of Chiara Bonaiuti Ires, Sbilanciamoci Green Peace, La Pace
a mano armata.
The recent agreement between the Italian Railway Network and Leonardo,
stipulated to improve the capabilities of the Italian rail
infrastructure, managed by RFI, according to military needs, is instead
the clear demonstration of how the large economic "players", active in
everything field also in the digital security sector, envelop ever
larger sectors of civil life in their coils.
The opposition to capital's plans is overall weak and divided and the
trade union struggles and those of social movements, which although
manifest themselves at a national and international level, are unable to
unify and generalize to broader contexts. From the Americas to Europe,
the right in its most reactionary configurations is consolidated
precisely following the crisis of bourgeois democracy, and if today we
cannot speak of a fascist dictatorship, we can nevertheless recognize
its numerous emerging authoritarian characteristics: from the repression
of all social dissent to intolerance towards the processes of
emancipation of women, of sexual minorities and towards the weakest and
least protected strata of the population and, in general, towards the
social conquests which, at the price of hard struggles, have defended
and elevated the living conditions of our class.
The restructuring processes have become generalized: from industry and
finance they have now spread across the territory and in particular into
the tertiary sector and essential public services, with gigantic and
progressive processes of privatization and precariousness of work;
Corruption is growing, not only in Italy, and has now become an integral
part of the GDPs of various countries. In addition to the social damage
to our class, we also suffer a psychological drift that does not yet
find suitable weapons to fight a cultural battle and political and
social opposition to the logic of capital's domination.
The recent political elections in Europe took place in a context that
saw European imperialism committed to saving the neoliberal choices
strenuously pursued and expressed in its bourgeois democratic form
which, demagogically enunciated as progressive, unitary, peaceful and
"green" is rapidly entered into crisis with the need to safeguard
profits together with the interests of financial capital which, with the
war in Ukraine, Palestine and 60 other countries, is showing its
authoritarian and militaristic essence.
It is easy to understand, then, how the renewed composition of the
European Parliament is completely irrelevant, because its role will in
any case be subordinate to the balance of power within the imperialist
conflict in which Europe plays a subordinate role to the USA and NATO.
But if these general trends must be taken into consideration, the
political data emerging from the recent elections must not be
underestimated: namely the alarming strengthening of the influence of
formations of clear fascist derivation in numerous European countries, a
phenomenon which also concerns the 'Italy with the Meloni government.
Another fact to be misrepresented and omitted is the phenomenon of
abstentionism which must not be evaluated on the basis of mere formal
criteria but in its real social dimension. In Europe the average voter
turnout was 50.01%. This means that the ability of political parties to
be representative of their respective social strata of reference has
been reduced. The phenomenon is particularly relevant in Italy where
49.69% of eligible voters went to the polls. This means that "Brothers
of Italy" was able to win the elections with 28.8% of the votes: a
percentage which gives Meloni a certainly winning electoral result but
which, if referred to the low turnout, also highlights a weakening of
the party that lost over 600,000 votes compared to the previous
political elections.
A lucid description of this phenomenon is provided by Gianni Trovati in
his article in "il Sole 24 ORE" of 11 June: "...a measure of the
increasingly complicated relationship between parties and Italian
society can be offered by the percentages of votes obtained in relation
to the total number of Italians with the right to vote. In this
calculation FdI stands at 13.1%, followed by PD at 11%. The M5S, with
4.6%, is followed by Forza Italia at 4.4%, while the League follows at
4.1%. The Green Left Alliance, the only real winner of this electoral
round does not go beyond 3.1%, almost doubling the United States of
Europe at 1.7% while Action reaches 1.4%. Percentages that are
indigestible, all of them, for any political narrative."
This progressive reduction of the electoral base due to abstentionism
also affects the other European political formations, which are becoming
less and less representative albeit with some limited exceptions. On the
other hand, abstentionism is a historical, socially and politically
composite and contradictory phenomenon which, due to these
characteristics, cannot be assumed as a political interlocutor and
therefore apologised. This is not the place to address the phenomenon of
abstentionism, a reflection that we intend to carry out in any case, but
only an abstract institutional conception, moreover overwhelmed by the
crisis of bourgeois democracy, can assimilate it, in its entirety, to
indifference, pointing it out as the true enemy, blackening him to
better be able to mock him. In other and clearer words: the European
left, by embracing neoliberalism, has produced failures that have
progressively strengthened capital, weakening the subaltern classes,
their mobilisations and the conquests that are historically derived from
them, and is paying the price, not so much electoral but above all
social, of own subordination to the capitalist model of development.
But the wars continue well beyond the electoral deadlines and, as we
have already stated: "We are aware that if the priority is the end of
hostilities in all war areas for the protection of civilian populations,
the only real long-term political solution consists in strengthening the
unitary and internationalist social struggle against capitalism and its
wars, which leads to the overcoming of nationalist, fundamentalist and
statist logic. The way to achieve this objective can only be through
class struggle alongside workers who unite on both sides of the
conflicts to improve their living conditions and thus overcome
long-standing divisions: for a society of free and equal, for a just
peace that takes shape in coexistence beyond all borders, beyond
religions and nationalities".
It is necessary to relaunch the conflict to win again. The only
hypothesis for moving quotas from capital to wages is trade union action
aimed at building a large dispute platform, organizing the fight
capillary and transversally to the production sectors on clear
objectives of unification of widespread disputes with the National
Collective Labor Agreements, supporting the reduction of working hours
with equal pay and substantial wage increases that allow the defense of
the purchasing power of the wages themselves and a real recovery of
inflation.
In Italy as in Europe, electoral deadlines do not guarantee the defense
of the interests of the subordinate classes which are pursued by
relaunching general disputes on concrete and unitary objectives, taking
concrete steps for the constitution of a strong European trade union
capable of linking the trade union struggle to that of the mass
movements and for the defense of the environment.
https://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/wpAL/blog/2024/06/19/leuropa-e-trascinata-a-destra-dallasmobilitazione-del-conflitto-socialeche-deve-essere-sostenuto-e-rilanciato/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten