Change comes through struggle, not voting ---- The abrogative
referendums scheduled for June 8 and 9, whose questions will concernreinstatement in the workplace in the event of unlawful dismissal,
compensation for dismissed workers in companies with fewer than 15
employees, fixed-term contracts, the responsibility of contracting
companies for accidents at work in the event of contracts and the
reduction of the time required for foreign citizens to request Italian
citizenship (from 10 to 5 years), are once again a blunt weapon for
social movements.
The referendum game has its own strict rules. If we take into account
that referendums are subject to a mechanism whereby they are invalidated
if the quorum of 50% + 1 is not reached in addition, obviously, to the
majority of Yes votes, it has very often happened that they have come to
nothing. Furthermore, history shows us that even when all the
requirements have been met, on several occasions the institutions have
mobilized to nullify the results. A clear example of this is the
referendum on public water, which after more than a decade has been
totally ignored and disregarded.
But the CGIL has collected the necessary signatures and everything is
ready to proceed with the vote.
Confederal and concertative trade unionism - which has been working for
social pacification for many years - relentlessly pursues its own
exclusive interest, certainly not that of the exploited and oppressed
classes. The infamous "Treu Package" of 1997, which during the first
Prodi government opened the doors to an inexorable process of job
insecurity, was supported by the same party and trade union forces that
today are shouting their heads off for the call to the polls. At the
time of the approval of the Jobs Act and the cancellation of Article 18,
the triad certainly did not do somersaults to hinder the policies of the
Renzi government, limiting themselves to a feeble symbolic protest.
Heavy neoliberal reforms that sanctioned cuts to services and
privatizations were accepted lightheartedly. The imperative was and
still is clear: maintaining one's privileges counts more than the future
of those who touch poverty and precariousness with their own hands. The
proposal of the last question, if possible, is even more paradoxical.
The security package branded Minniti-Orlando, the urban DASPO for the
poor and undocumented, the plan to build a CPR in each region, the
agreements with Libya in order to facilitate pushbacks at sea, the
closure of ports and the blocking of NGO ships, were the work of the
center-left coalition led by the Democrats. And not only that. In our
opinion, referendums are the smokescreen that risks distracting
attention from social conflict, the only terrain where the exploited and
the exploited can obtain concrete results.
The only terrain on which the state unions cannot and do not want to engage.
With respect to these dynamics, a good dose of awareness and
disenchantment is needed.
We need to open our eyes to the interclassist and losing nature of the
tools offered by bourgeois institutions and contested by union
bureaucracies.
Laws are nothing but the normative precipitate of the balance of power
in society.
If the referendum on nuclear power in 1987, held in the aftermath of the
disastrous accident at the Chernobyl power plant, proved to be a winner,
this was also and above all thanks to strikes, occupations and massive
street initiatives. Because conquests not supported by a significant
conflictual campaign are ephemeral and precarious.
Only through a general and widespread mobilization is it possible to
obtain effective improvements in the living and working conditions of
the subjects involved. Only by eschewing the logic of delegation and
practicing direct action can the government take a step back, restoring
rights and protections that have long been dismantled.
We renew our commitment to participation in the struggle. Let's build
the alternative from below!
The FAI Correspondence Commission
The Argentine wolf and the American lion
With the death of Jorge Bergoglio, we witnessed the spectacle of much of
the left, moderate or radical, mourning the passing of the pontiff.
Everyone praised the late pope as a progressive, pacifist, open to
women's and homosexual rights.
Let's dispel a myth: Francis was not a progressive but a populist.
Bergoglio declared himself the son of the Teologia del Pueblo, which
opposed itself on the theological, social and political level to the
Theology of Liberation that had been inspired by and had in turn
contaminated a good part of the Latin American opposition movements at
the end of the twentieth century.
The Teologia del Pueblo is on the theological level the transposition of
Peronism and the most intransigent political populism: the triumph of
Argentine national Catholicism.
The Guardia de Hierro, the Peronist political group of which the young
Bergoglio was one of the greatest ideologists, declared itself beyond
the right and the left and opposed the left and the progressive wing of
the Catholics. For them, the Pueblo is not a socio-economic category but
a set of values and attitudes that guard the collective identity of the
Argentine people, its morality, its intrinsic spirituality. In short,
the ideological instrument that opposed materialist and social analyses.
In 1973, Bergoglio became the Provincial Father of the Jesuits. At the
time, the Jesuits were deeply divided and a significant part of them
leaned towards Liberation Theology.
It is in this context that Father General Arrupe chose Bergoglio, then
only thirty-six years old, as provincial.
A choice with a clear political meaning. According to Bergoglio,
Argentina was in crisis because it was in the grip of ideologies far
from its history: liberalism and Marxism. The theology of the people was
therefore fully identified with Peronism, as a spontaneous expression of
the people, in its justiciar and traditionalist dimension.
Bergoglio had good relations with Admiral Massera and other members of
the armed forces.
Several concrete actions demonstrate the substantial acceptance of the
military junta by Bergoglio and the Jesuits.
The Argentine church actively collaborated with the dictatorship. The
apostolic nuncio Pio Laghi advised the generals on methods to massacre
and kill with the blessing of God.
The young head of the Society of Jesus in Baires also did his part. By
withdrawing his support for Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics, two
Jesuits, followers of liberation theology, who worked in the shanty
towns of the capital, he would have in fact favored their arrest by the
military. Yorio and Jalics refused to dissolve the community they
founded in Bajo Flores and for this reason Bergoglio forbade them from
saying mass. Both detained in the infamous Esma, they were tortured for
five months before being released. Yorio died in 2000, physically
weakened by torture from which he never fully recovered.
Jalics, immediately after Bergoglio's election, was confined by the
church to a convent located in a remote location in his native Hungary,
with the absolute ban on speaking to journalists.
Bergoglio's full adhesion to the Malvinas war is significant. In October
2009, blessing the relatives of fallen soldiers who were leaving for the
islands where they would erect a cenotaph in the cemetery, he told them
"go and kiss that land that is ours and that seems so far away" and
declared that "their sons, husbands and fathers had fallen making an
almost religious gesture of kissing the soil of the motherland with
their own blood". In 2012, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary
of the conflict, he defined those who had died as "sons of the
motherland who went to defend it to reclaim what belonged to it and had
been unjustly taken from it". Statements that dismiss any interpretation
of Francis as a pacifist.
In 2007, the conference held in the Marian sanctuary of Aparecida in
Brazil marked the definitive decline of Liberation Theology. Bergoglio's
vision prevailed and in 2013 when Bergoglio returned as Pope to Brazil
he spoke of Aparecida as a "moment that defeated the temptation that had
existed in the previous years in the church to create an interpretation
of life outside the gospel and the church.
Here lies all the profound thought of Bergoglio: the poor understood not
as a socio-economic category but as Ser fundante, "founding spirit" of
the authentic Argentine community that must resist the negative
influence of globalization.
Globalization should not be understood as a mere economic and social
dynamic but above all cultural. Globalization is identified with that
imperialist capitalism of the "North" that is embodied in the ideas and
lifestyles oriented towards liberalism, relativism, hedonism that are
completely foreign to the Argentine Ser Fundante and spontaneous popular
devotion. The triumph of national Catholicism expressed by the Teologia
del Pueblo.
One of the salient features of Bergoglio's pontificate was his
extraordinary ability in using the media. He understood perfectly that a
catchy phrase counted more than concrete gestures, so he allowed himself
to launch messages of openness towards homosexuals and women, while
maintaining the official morality of the church.
Although he claimed not to judge homosexual people, in the texts of the
Bergoglian church homosexuality is defined as a disorder, an illness.
The only legitimate family, the only possible one for Francis is that
formed by a man and a woman and has procreation as its primary purpose.
Abortion is murder and the doctors who perform it are hitmen. The clergy
must remain rigidly male.
Bergoglio has in fact reiterated, like all his predecessors, the
misogynistic, homophobic and patriarchal role of the church.
Bergoglio championed religious freedom, but justified the perpetrators
of the Charlie Hebdo massacre because religions cannot be mocked.
On the one hand, Francis showed himself to be humble where it did not
count (the worn shoes, the queue at the Vatican canteen, the 500 as a
papal car) to create the image of a pope who shunned the pomp of power,
on the other hand, he centralized Vatican power on himself as few popes
had done before him.
His papacy was characterized by continually creating appearances of
change to ensure that everything remained as before.
The Jesuit who called himself Francis was a wolf in sheep's clothing.
A full analysis of his successor is premature, but we can still hazard a
few reasonable guesses. At the moment we can be certain that he will
continue the crusade in defense of the patriarchal family. In a 2012
radio interview in Peru, Prevost declared: "They want to convince us
that homosexuality is a neutral option. But God created man and woman,
not a fluid identity."
His pleas for a "just" peace in Ukraine seem to reposition the Vatican
in the Western camp within the inter-imperialist conflict, beyond the
chatter about disarmed and disarming peace.
Prevost is an Augustinian, and Augustine justified war as a tool to
build a "just" peace, as all governments do when they want to justify
wars and massacres.
The choice of name is never random: each pope chooses his own based on
an explicit reference to a predecessor whose footsteps he aspires to
follow. On June 23, 2003, the future pope, during a spiritual retreat in
Cuzco, declared: "Christians must resist the ideological temptations of
extreme collectivism that enslaves the soul in the name of social
justice." In these words, it is easy to grasp Prevost's affinity with
Leo XIII, the pope of Rerum Novarum cupiditas, the encyclical in which
the social doctrine of the Catholic Church was formulated, based on
class collaboration as opposed to class warfare. This encyclical
defended private property with all its might and hid, behind generic
appeals to "just wages" and "human dignity", its hatred of the
revolutionary thrust of the workers' movement: it judged the strike "a
grave outrage" and saw behind the autonomous organization of the
exploited classes the action of "hidden leaders", who would govern them
with criteria contrary to the public good.
Rerum Novarum was the Catholic response to the workers' movement and the
class struggle: it was right that the exploited should join together to
improve their condition, but they should do so in collaboration and not
in conflict with the bosses. The division into social classes, with its
inequality, should not be called into question. The social question
should be resolved in collaboration between the exploited and the
exploiters, the latter guided by a greater spirit of charity. In these
times, marked by the attempt of the dominant ideology to pass off the
class struggle as a vision now outdated by history, the class
collaboration theorized at the end of the nineteenth century by the
Catholic Church can be useful to the bosses. Poverty is addressed by
distributing one-off brioches to the homeless, as the Roman Church
recently did on the orders of the new Pope. And let the poor remain
poor, otherwise who will be given charity to?
An Augustinian on the throne of Peter, with the insistent role of divine
grace as a necessary inspiration for good for men and women otherwise
the source of all evil, can try to recover the ground on the evangelical
churches, which are undermining Catholicism both in South America and
Africa.
Regardless of the future gestures of the new Pope, we are certain of one
fact: the Catholic Church will continue to suck money from all of us.
6.7 billion: this is the amount that the Italian state paid to the
Church in 2024. This year, with the contributions for the jubilee, the
figure will probably be higher. Money that, like that of military
spending, is taken from our pockets. Money taken away from health,
housing, education and what we really need.
Today they are all kneeling at the throne of Peter.
The left in search of an author is continually hunting for some social,
pacifist or environmentalist nuance to legitimize itself and the church.
But the church is intrinsically authoritarian and patriarchal.
The church fights the class struggle in the name of brotherhood between
exploited and exploiters, between oppressed and oppressors.
The existence of the church is incompatible with the idea of freedom,
because the church, any church, is based on the idea of God, on the
belief that man and woman cannot give themselves their own morality and
rules, because these must descend from above, from the divinities and,
obviously, from the earthly representatives of the divinities, that is,
the church itself.
If we really want to build a world of free and equal people, the
anticlerical and antireligious struggle must return to being among the
central points of social conflict.
The Correspondence Commission of the Italian Anarchist Federation
Other Press Releases from the Correspondence Commission
https://federazioneanarchica.org/archivio/archivio_2025/20250526cdc.html
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