WHAT DISTINGUISHES OUR PARTY – The
line running from Marx to Lenin
to the foundation of the Third International
and the birth of the Communist Party
of Italy in Leghorn (Livorno) 1921, and
from there to the struggle
of the Italian Communist Left
against the degeneration in Moscow
and to the rejection of popular fronts
and coalition of resistance groups –
The tough work of restoring
the revolutionary doctrine and the party organ,
in contact with the working class,
outside the realm of personal politics
and electoralist manoevrings
1.“We’re
Not Backing Down” - Working Class Confidence Grows: Volvo Trucks - Warrior Met Coal - Health Care Strikes: “Summer of Chaos” - Marathon Petroleum - Restaurants, Groceries and Food Manufacture - Donuts! - Fritos! - Pickles! - Hooters! - Burgers! - Kroger! - Public Workers: New Orleans - Elizabeth City, North Carolina - Concluding Remarks
7.For The Class Union: Italy
- A United National Strike of Logistics
Workers
- The Murder of a SI Cobas Militant: The Perpetrator is the Bourgeois Regime!
“We’re Not Backing Down” - Working Class Confidence Grows
Conditions of life and the
interests of the working class rarely coincide with one another to such
a point that the working class of different firms act at the same time.
In the United States the situation for working class action has not seen
such a combination of conditions since the strikes of the 1970s, one
which the bourgeoisie reacted to viciously with all the power the
American state could muster. But now, nearly 40 years later, despite the
legal and juridical authority the bourgeois state has wielded to
maintain and even increase the productivity of the American economy, and
a midst a rapid decline in the living standards of the world working
class following the 2008 financial crisis, the working class of this
country begins to move for its own needs on a similar scale.
Volvo Trucks
The 2900 workers at Volvo Trucks
have rejected concessionary contracts twice since May and have been on
strike twice – once for 2 weeks and currently since June 7th. They are
members of the United Auto Workers, a union riddled with bureaucratic
corruption. Half a dozen national and local leaders were convicted in
2020 of accepting bribes from FCA/Stellantis to ensure labor peace.
But the Volvo strike is a flower
growing in the UAW’s bullshit.
A two‑week strike began April 17
with a UAW contract proposal presented two weeks later. One worker told
Labor Notes magazine “The UAW has been down here twice for town halls,
each time we say ‘take it back, it’s garbage,’ and they just say they
think it’s a good contract, but they don’t say why.”
The first contract vote on May
16th was turned down by 90%. They were sent back to work by the union. A
second proposal that was virtually identical was also turned down and a
second strike has been on since June 7th.
A third proposal was voted down on
July 9th.
Issues include abolishing two‑tier
wages – where new hires are paid at a lower wage scale – where wages top
out at $30/hr for long time workers and $21/hr for new hires. Another
issue was a significant increase in out of pocket health care costs.
Warrior Met Coal:
It has been four months since
the United Mine workers of America local at the Warrior Met coal mine in
McCalla Alabama have been on strike. Despite the regime union working
with the corporation during the last contract negotiations to help
Warrior Met recover from bankruptcy while severely reducing the wages
and benefits of the workers at the mines and wash facilities, the
company still seeks to gain additional concessions to increase the value
that the firm is making. Regardless of the crocodile tears that Warrior
Met coal has shed for their overhead costs, the companies CEO has
gleefully welcomed the jumps in stock prices that comes with the
international clamoring to purchase the high quality coal which is used
in the production of steel.
Contract negotiations stalled in
April, and with no sign of the firm’s negotiators to budge in the
slightest the company would have suspected a decrease in their coal
reserves. No workers means no coal, and the workers can not continue to
place their lives at risk for decreases in their wages and benefits. The
solution of the company was not to concede to these rather
understandable demands, it was to hire scabs, at the lower wage of
course.
Despite this obstinate attitude
from the company, the workers at the mines and wash facilities have been
steadfast in their strike. They’ve blocked the entrances to the mine
consistently enough to prevent the processing and for the decreased
productivity to get noticed. This has made the militancy of the workers
there more apparent. The significant push back, both from the scabs who
brandish weapons and drive their vehicles through picket lines, but also
from the allegations of sabotage and premeditated murder that the mine
management has used to justify the actions of the scabs, the militancy
of these workers to gain their basic compensation and time off makes it
a necessity.
As this strike continues, the
workers of Warrior Met learn quickly that their only alliance in the
fight is with workers, and they’ve learned that their power comes from
their coordinated action to impede their employers profitability.
Health Care Strikes
Nurses and other Health Care
workers have been in the forefront of workers’ movement since the
outbreak of COVID. Many of the nursing unions in the US are highly
militant and run by their membership. The reality is worker actions in
health are usually a shift, or a day. It is significant that one nursing
strike in 2021 has gone for months.
At Tenet/St. Vincent Hospitals in
Worcester, Massachusetts, nurses have been on strike since March with
demands of 4‑1 and 5‑1 patient to nurse staffing ratios. Tenet is one of
the largest for‑profit health care systems.
900 nurses at Cook County Health
in Chicago went on a one day strike for more staffing. 1500 support
workers went on strike the following week.
“Summer of Chaos”
The Painters union in Portland has
successfully won $4/hour wage increases from contractors through a
strategy they called “Summer of Chaos”. After being offered a 25¢
increase by the bosses, the union built a strategy to do random pickets
shutting down work at building sites, causing logistical chaos. The
first strike of 40 painters was supported by 120 other building trades
workers refusing to cross the line. It was announced today – June 30th –
that a tentative contract will be voted on which include $4/hour wage
increases.
Marathon Petroleum
On January 21st, 200 members of
Teamsters Local 120 employed at the Marathon Petroleum refinery in Saint
Paul Park, MN went out on strike after Marathon locked them out in an
attempt to break the power of the union in the refinery. At stake was
not only pay and working conditions for the Teamsters, but the health
and safety of the surrounding community and of any potential
replacements: as history has shown, when facilities such as these employ
poorly-trained, underpaid workers, disasters happen. One need only look
to the 2018 explosion at the Husky Energy refinery in Superior, WI for
confirmation of this fact. Marathon wished to replace these skilled,
well‑paid workers with low‑bid contractors, even notifying a local union
contractor that there was no upcoming work for that firm, in spite of
the fact that it was widely known that a shutdown was scheduled for
April. The health and safety of all workers is threatened when companies
are allowed to employ workers with inadequate training, low pay, and
supervision whose sole concern is the bottom line.
In spite of the fact that local
authorities severely restricted the ability of the Teamsters to maintain
an effective picket outside the refinery gate by limiting them to 3
picketers, they did not give up. They also expanded their efforts to
informational pickets near Speedway gas stations, which were the primary
customer for the fuel produced at that refinery. The union was also
pressing for a bill that would have required refineries to employ
workers with training equivalent to a union apprenticeship. Finally,
after nearly six months, the Teamsters announced victory, just four days
after rejecting what the company called its "last, best, and final
offer". On June 26th, the union and the company reached an agreement,
which, while allowing eleven fired Teamsters to go back to work,
eliminates the minimum staffing requirement, and appears to eliminate
several job classifications, opening them up to rat contractors. The
union’s desired bill was rejected by the Minnesota State Senate, but
it’s reported that the decision to accept the company’s offer was
influenced by legislation which, if passed, would require refineries to
have their own, full‑time, paid fire departments. The Teamsters are
scheduled to return to work on the 6th.
Restaurants, Groceries and Food Manufacture
In the “service” sector workers
have been not returning to post‑COVID work, which has pushed wages up
significantly. As of the last Federal reports, there are 1,600,000 job
openings in food. According to the Washington Post “A Pew Research
Center survey this year found that 66 percent of the unemployed had
“seriously considered” changing their field of work, a far greater
percentage than during the Great Recession. People who used to work in
restaurants or travel are finding higher-paying jobs in warehouses or
real estate, for example. Or they want a job that is more stable and
less likely to be exposed to the coronavirus – or any other deadly virus
down the road.”
This refusal to take work is
driving wages up dramatically. Shops that had proudly paid minimum wage
and resisted the “Fight for $15” campaigns with talk of replacing
workers with various machines have suddenly shown their true colors by
paying $18‑20 and hour.
During COVID, walk outs had become
common in these jobs. They continue to be so. Just in the last 2 weeks
of July we have seen:
Donuts!
Workers walked out on strike at
the famous Voodoo Doughnut shop in Portland, Oregon. Poor Air
Conditioning and company water were not enough to protect the workers
from the 117°F/46°C temperatures.
Fritos!
500 Frito‑lay workers in Topeka
Kansas have been on strike for the first time in the plant’s history
since July 2nd. Horrendous over work, deplorable working conditions and
little to no compensation, both for base pay and hazard pay have brought
the long coming strike to reality. Workers at the facility have brought
up issues of hazardous working conditions, complaints of frozen and
smoke filled factory floors, callus treatment of workers who die on the
job, and lump sum payments in lieu of raises spurred on a drive to
negotiate a better contract by the union local at the facility. However
contract negotiations quickly broke down as Frito‑lay refused to accept
the demands the working class put forward, so much so the employer gave
workers an ultimatum which sparked the strike. The workers in the
facility refuse to return to work until Frito‑lay concedes to their
demands, but only time will tell how many of them will be met and what
the regime union negotiators are willing to give up.
Pickles!
35 Grocery workers at Dill Pickle
Grocery in Chicago went on a 2 day strike the first week of July to make
the management follow the recent contract. This is usual because the
workers refused to sign away their freedom to strike, an all too common
section in American labor agreements.
Hooters!
A dozen workers at a Houston
Hooters Restaurant walked out demanding the store’s Air Conditioning be
repaired after a month doing without. The AC was repaired in 2 days and
the store reopened.
Burgers!
Workers at a Jack in the Box in
Sacramento, California walked out in protest of the restaurant’s broken
Air Conditioning, which they say the owners have a habit of not
repairing properly.
Kroger!
2000 Kroger workers in Arkansas
have also walked off the job, after the grocery chain made the decision
to move all of them off their union negotiated health care plan onto the
company’s private plan.
Public
Workers:
New
Orleans City Council raised wages for workers – example garbage
collection – done by contractors to $15 an hour. Legally speaking, the
city council cannot raise wages for city employees whose wages can be as
low as $11/hr. To protest the discrepancy in pay, as well as work
safety, city maintenance workers went on a sickout.
City Workers in In Elizabeth
City, North Carolina went on strike after the city council refused
wage increases. The workers’ union, as members of UE Local 150, find
themselves in a legal gray area. According to North Carolina law they
can join a union but can’t agree to contracts. This provision calls for
them to be in constant organization and ready for attacks on working
conditions.
Concluding Remarks
This recent strike wave is an
indication of a renewed working-class movement in embryo, a result of
the catastrophic decline in wages which has decimated the American
petite-bourgeoisie and labor-aristocracy, throwing millions of workers
and small capitalists into the ranks of the proletariat. As this ‘middle
class’ fades away, the social “peace” that the bourgeoisie concluded
with opportunism and yellow trade-unionism following World War II dies
with it, a process that began in the 1970s and accelerated following the
2008 financial crisis and COVID‑19 pandemic. With union membership at a
historical low and Stalinism long out of fashion, mainstream opportunism
is reduced to impotent pleas for the Democratic Party to reverse its
“abandonment” of the working-class. “Society as a whole is more and more
splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes
directly facing each other – Bourgeoisie and Proletariat”.
The coinciding strikes that took
place in the 1970s brought concessions for individual factories and
labor unions, but also brought with it a degradation in the internal
class unity of workers in the United States. This degradation, along
with the persistent lack of internationalism, gave room for the
bourgeoisie to swiftly break the trade unions that facilitated the
strikes, move jobs overseas, and ultimately take back what concessions
they were forced to give out.
While these recent strikes are not
a unified class force, the spontaneous eruption of widespread
class-activity regardless of locality, sector, or trade; minimally
influenced by opportunist currents or parties; and under an unfolding
economic and political crisis; offers the most favorable objective
preconditions, since the Stalinist counter-revolution, for the emergence
of a generalized class-consciousness and powerful labor movement. The
labor movement is starting nearly from scratch, except with the
tremendous advantage of the superior productive forces and of over 170
years of experience. The power of the working class comes from the size
of its organization, thus wherever possible workers should seek to unify
their economic organizations such as unions into larger organizations.
This potential, however, can only be ensured by conducting coordinated
class action for immediate, class-specific demands which benefit the
class as a whole for instance:
higher wages
equal pay for equal work
shorter working hours
pensions for unemployed, elderly, and disabled workers
COVID‑19 workplace protections
Furthermore, while international
solidarity has always been necessary for the workers’ movement, in the
era of globalization this has never been more relevant. Any struggle
that limits itself to a national scope, let alone a local or sectoral
scope is a non‑starter. Capital knows no border, neither should Labor.
Internationalism encouraged
autoworkers to call strikes at FCA (Fiat Chrysler) plants in Italy in
against working conditions at the FCA plant in Sterling Heights,
Michigan. They and other ICP supporters circulated leaflets in FCA
plants around the world encouraging similar strikes.
At the Port of Genoa, dockers also
refused to work cargo bound for the Saudi war in Yemen. And again with
arms shipments to Israel. This is practical proletarian
internationalism.
Part-and-parcel with an eye
towards organizing an international association of workers means
rejecting the notion that the working-class has anything to gain from
electoral democracy and loyalty to the “nation” or state. The US state,
like all existing states, is the apparatus through which the bourgeoisie
exercises its rule. This cannot be changed or modified, despite the
existence of electoral democracy; no ruling class has ever allowed
itself to be voted out of power. Similarly, the “nation” merely denotes
the territorial market and its participants, unified by a common
language and culture, which is policed by this state. Thus the US state,
the “nation”, and the American working class are all the property of the
American bourgeoisie. Consequently, the American working-class must
break with the ideologies of nationalism/patriotism and electoralism
which keep its destiny bound to those of the American bourgeoisie and
its state. This also means breaking with the ideology of “anti-fascism”,
which subordinates the working-class struggle to that of defending the
democratic form of the bourgeois-state against the fascist form, as if
the form of the state was determined by anything except the will of the
bourgeoisie. The only true “anti-fascism” is a class struggle against
capital.
Welcome to the HeatDome
Recently the coast of Canada and
the US found itself in an historic heatwave – a region wide “heat dome”
pushed temperatures as high as 120°F/48°C. These temperatures are 40%
over the usual.
This shocking example of
Capitalism’s changing of the climate has led to a lot of hand ringing by
the bourgeois classes – both small and large.
The small capitalists have to keep
operations going to maintain their position in society. But at best,
they will apologize to your face over the conditions you have to face.
So get to work.
Like characters in a story by
Edgar Allan Poe, the large bourgeoise – the financiers and Oil Barons
and Hotel tycoons – of course just push fast forward into the climatic
apocalypse. They need the machine to continue full steam ahead and damn
the climatic hurricanes.
Of course, those who have been
suffering are workers, whose labor is needed to keep the satantic Rube
Goldberg machine system going. The system which is creating the
conditions which threaten to kill them.
Unofficial scoring for regional
deaths caused by the 4 days of heat were over 40 in Oregon, 30 in
British Columbia and 20 in Washington State.
An example from the “heat dome
event”, comes from our friends who work in the farms, orchards and
warehouses in Washington State’s Yakima Valley. A friend of the ICP – a
warehouse worker – was hospitalized for several days with heat stroke.
A comrade working in manufacturing
next to machines radiating 400°F/ 204°C. The building’s ambient
temperatures were well above 110°F/43°C degrees. Our comrade was
generously offered “popsicles, AC units near the lines, plus they give
out these cooling neck towels...”
There are reports of the various
regional Farm Workers unions – which, due to federal laws, tend to be
semi‑legal and divided by locality, led walk outs from fields
undoubtedly saving lives.
Worker action took place last
year, culminating into a valley‑wide strike that spread to six major
packing-facilities. Though, warehouse laborers have been suffering just
as much from the heat and other abuses from employers, they have not
engaged in real action.
Bourgeois Construction: The Florida Building Collapse
On June 24, a section
of the Champlain Towers South condominium building in Surfsong, Florida
collapsed abruptly.
16 people are
confirmed dead and over 140 are still missing. Among the unaccounted for
are workers, vacationing families, international tourists, and retirees.
In typical bourgeois
fashion, the safety of many comes second to the profits of the few. With
over 130 units stretching over 12 stories, the structural integrity of
the building was already questionable, since the original blueprints did
not account for a penthouse. And yet, profits drive the capitalist
towards depravity, and thus town ordinances were circumvented to
accommodate such a frivolous addition.
The selfishness of
the building owners is almost certainly one of the contributing factors
in the building’s failure.
The building stood on
a piece of reclaimed wetland which, according to a study in the 1990s,
was sinking much more quickly than the greater Miami area surrounding
it. It is possible that part of the structure was sinking faster than
the rest, leading to the partial collapse on June 24. This process of
land reclamation cannot be sustainable in areas like South Florida. And
yet new buildings are constructed everyday, in Florida and across the
world, on lands susceptible to subsidence, all in the name of capitalist
profits.
The problems at this
particular building were not new. In 2001, the Champlain Towers South
Condo Association was found liable for negligence for lack of repair to
exterior walls due to water seepage. While damages were paid, the
underlying structural issues were not properly addressed. In more recent
years, some areas within the parking garage and pool equipment room
flooded so frequently that the water pumps wore out.
In 2018, a structural
engineering firm conducted a 40‑year inspection of the building (Florida
law only requires building inspections every 40 years!). The engineers
found that the steel rebar reinforcing the concrete structure had rusted
and expanded. The corrosion was likely due to saltwater spray from the
nearby beach. When the steel rebar rusts, it expands, displacing the
concrete around it. Flakes of concrete break off, compromising the
structural integrity of the building. It is surprising that galvanized
or epoxy-coated rebar was not used, given the conditions in the area,
but these more expensive building materials eat into developers’
profits!
The initial estimate
to repair the building was $9.1 millon, however just three months ago
the proposed cost (after incurring more damage, or neglect, in this
span) had increased to $15 million. Had the repairs been completed
promptly, had the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois property owners thought
about anything other than capital accumulation, the residents would not
be buried under tons of rubble, now beyond help.
Despite this
devastation, it is the bourgeoisie who stand to gain. New economic
ventures present themselves with each disaster. This tragedy, and
countless others, enrich the bourgeoisie as whole – the banks,
contractors, insurance companies, law firms, etc. – through new loans,
new construction, and new legal proceedings.
If buildings are not
stable under capitalism, what can we say of the structure of capitalism
as a whole? This is not the fault of the working class: it is that of
the bourgeoisie and the parsimonious nature of business, conducted at
our expense! Once the means of production rest at the fingertips of the
whole society, labor and resources will be dedicated to building and
maintaining safe and livable housing for all.
Death and Justice in Capitalism
“Only the poor break laws – the
rich evade them.” – T‑Bone Slim
This newspaper often
carries articles involving death. This has especially been the case in
the past year-and-a-half, as nearly four million workers died
prematurely and unnecessarily across the globe, and life expectancy
dropped in even the wealthiest countries. This issue is no exception: we
describe the murder of our fellow militant Adil Belakhdim in Italy, the
building collapse in Florida has left at least 24 dead and dozens more
missing, the heatwave that killed hundreds of people in the Pacific
Northwest of North America, the brutal conditions that kill prisoners in
Italy and around the world, and the massive number of Covid casualties
in Brazil.
We would prefer not
to fill the pages of our newspaper with these sad stories, and in our
communist future we will write about happier things. But the present
bloodbath is the worst expression of the criminal dictatorship of the
bourgeoisie. Every one of the deaths mentioned above is a homicide,
either through intent or through neglect. The perpetrators make no
attempts to hide their identities, their whereabouts, or their guilt.
But the police will never arrest them, and the law will never hold them
accountable, because the capitalist state is nothing other than an
instrument for the bourgeoisie to oppress the proletariat.
Common criminals go
to great lengths to conceal their activities from the state. The
bourgeoisie, by contrast, openly brag about who they are and what harm
they do. They attend glamorous parties to compare notes on the best way
to extract surplus value from the proletariat’s labor. They buy luxury
homes in the most desirable neighborhoods. They sit for TV interviews
and write opinion pieces for the bourgeois press. Every public company
is required to identify its executives and board members.
Yet these people
remain at‑large. Everybody knows that oil companies have fought all
attempts to reduce carbon emissions, but will this government arrest the
board of directors of ExxonMobil for the deaths caused by the recent
heatwave? Will it charge the owners of the Lidl supermarket chain with
terrorism because they murdered Adil Belakhdim? No! Those charges are
only for the proletariat. The members of the bourgeoisie are not
subjected to such things. When a few of them occasionally get busted, as
happened with the Enron and Madoff scandals, it is for ripping off other
members of their own class, not for what they all do to the proletariat.
That the bourgeoisie
still feel comfortable showing their faces in public demonstrates that
they are the law in the present state. Only the communist revolution can
make them answer for their crimes.
UK Electricians’ struggle - A powerful end to a decade long fight
Electricians in the
UK (often known as “Sparks”) have a long history of organisation and a
defence of their economic interests and status of being a skilled trade.
For many decades the Electricians union had a right‑wing leadership, and
this was finally incorporated into the larger Unite Union.
For the last decade
there had been attempts by contracting companies such as Balfour Beatty
to introduce a new grade of semi‑skilled worker, paid about a third less
and have scant training. The rationale was for this new semi‑skilled
role would be running in of cables, and some connecting up of these
cables. This was seen by rank-and-file electricians as not only a threat
to their wage rates but also a threat to their own jobs. The fear was
not only deskilling of the electricians jobs, but also the displacement
/ replacement of many of the existing workforce.
Balfour Beatty
attempted to introduce this new semi‑skilled role of worker at the end
of 2011 and this led to determined opposition from the electricians
employed by them. Balfour Beatty operated on many construction sites and
on the railway network. Over 80% of the electricians balloted voted
against this proposal, being concerned that either they would either
lose their job, or be expected to work for much less in their wage
packet. The ballot result was for a declaration of an official strike.
Balfour Beatty
reacted to the strike vote by threatening Court action. The Unite Union
reacted by calling off the strike, but the electricians came out anyway.
There were demonstrations in London including the headquarters of
Balfour Beatty and another site in Victoria, which led to other workers
coming out in support. There were also demonstrations in Glasgow which
involved other sites. Further strikes and sympathy action took place in
Grangemouth, Immingham and Hartlepool. These strikes and demonstrations
were unofficial.
There was another
ballot on strike action in February 2012 which led to a two‑thirds
voting for strike action. While the opposition to the deskilling of the
electricians role continued Balfour Beatty and other employers took the
strike action issue to the High Court to have it overturned. The Court
saw no reason to get involved in declaring the strike to be unlawful.
The Unite General Secretary Len McCluskey welcomed the Court decision,
looking for ways of resolving disputes around the negotiating table
rather than in the Courts.
Another attempt at
introducing deskilling role
Strikes broke out
again this year when contractors, including Balfour Beatty, planned to
introduce again a semi‑skilled electrical worker with just seven weeks
of training – this was to be known as electrical support operative. The
resistance of the existing skilled electricians was determined and
well‑organised. Attempts to introduce the semi‑skilled role at the new
nuclear power station at Hinckley C led to picketing at the site at the
end of March. A Balfour Beatty site in Bromborough, Wirral, was
consistently picketed from March 24th until April 7th. The offices of
companies involved in the construction plans, such as EDF, were
occupied.
There were also
demonstrations over this deskilling role in London, Glasgow and in the
North East of England.
By early June the
plans for the electrical deskilling role with Balfour Beatty, NG Bailey
and the Hinckley Point site was officially abandoned. The employers
agreed to revert to the industry standard Joint Industry Board for
training standards of skilled workers. Unite Union officials were more
than happy to ensure the smooth running of the construction projects and
would be cheaper than taking on a prolonged fight with rank-and-file
electricians, who would have little option but to engage in an intensive
round of picketing and spreading the strikes. Whether the strikes were
official or unofficial would have meant little to the striking
electricians, as they would have been able to rely on the support of
fellow workers, by either not crossing picket line and providing money
at site collections.
Final Round in
Gateshead
An Amazon fulfilment
centre is being constructed in Gateshead as part of the Amazon
distribution network. News circulated that a contractor was using
unskilled labour to perform electrical work, for which they were not
trained for and probably had little understanding of what they were
doing, raising legitimate health and safety issues. On June 16th
rank-and-file electricians from outside the site picketed the Amazon
site. About 60 electricians employed on the site refused to cross the
picket line and went home. A few days later at least thirty workers were
sacked for taking part in this solidarity strike action. They were
notified by txt on mobile phones to ensure all their belongings were
removed before the end of their working shift that working day.
As of Monday 21st
June the sacked workers announced they would picket the site until their
jobs were reinstated. There appeared to be attempts to recruit other
electricians to replace those picketing outside the site. That appears
to have come to nothing.
On Wednesday 23rd
June the contractors held a hurried meeting with Unite at which it was
agreed that those sacked workers could return to work if they wanted to
and would be reinstated starting the following day. An email from a
recruitment agency had informed the workers that the matter had been
resolved as the site is nearing completion. The recruitment agency
stated that matters had been taken out of their hands the previous
Friday but now the matter had been settled.
The electricians had
won this round because of their determination and class solidarity. The
use of a picket line of electricians not employed at the site provided a
way of fighting back against the internal threats to the workers
employed on the site. The picket line provided the means and excuse for
strike action by all the electricians on the site. This was a way of
achieving unity in struggle that was not possible because of the lack of
organisation in the site. The tactic of external picketing of the site
was a way of bringing the dispute to a head, and to be resolved by the
contractor backing down or the strike possibly escalating out of
control. The employers and Unite union was quick in backing off and
resolving the issue. These tactics by the pickets were well thought out
and controlled and not some sort of “Wild Cat” action, which was not
necessary or possible by the balance of forces on this site.
The Division of Powers in Bourgeois Democracy
In the
eighteenth-century Encyclopedia of Diderot and D’Alambert, in the
article on “Civil liberty” written by Chevalier de Jaucourt, we read:
“There are no words, as Mssr. Montesquieu says so well, to which men
have attributed so many different meanings like this one.”
In the Enlightenment,
words such as Freedom, Reason, Man, Consciousness, and Nature dominated
the scene – however, transported to the realm of abstraction, outside of
time and history. Only dialectical or historical materialism has made it
possible to understand that these terms do not indicate eternal and
immutable realities like so many divinities, but products of history:
ideas and ideologies which, as such, are the reflection of the relations
of production and relations between classes, that is, of the positions
in which individuals find themselves with respect to certain relations
of production.
The aforementioned
conceptions from the Enlightenment, and among them in particular the
“law of nature”, had enormous importance as constituting the
revolutionary ideology of the bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century, and
in particular in the French Revolution. This ideology, then
revolutionary, was born in the previous century with natural law, not
surprisingly in countries such as Grotius’s Holland and Locke’s England,
where the bourgeoisie was already in power or was about to get there.
According to this conception, man as such has rights that derive from
nature, always as such, so that emperors, kings, and popes cannot deny
them.
We limit ourselves to
two quotations from Montesquieu and Blanqui on freedom.
It is necessary to
first make some clarifications about Charles-Louis de Secondat, who in
1716, at the age of 27, inherited the title of Baron De Montesquieu from
his uncle, along with a large fortune and the post of president of the
Bordeaux parliament. His most important work is The Spirit of the Laws,
written in 1748, in which he supports the division of powers between the
executive, the legislature, and the judiciary, based on the English
model he admired.
After Montesquieu’s
death, his ideas were seen through the dominant perspectives of the
subsequent centuries. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he
became a theorist of the bourgeois democracies of the time, while in the
French Revolution of 1789‑94 he became a republican and a revolutionary.
The ideology of the Jacobins and the revolutionaries in general was a
reworked mixture of Rousseau and Montesquieu, with a clear pre‑eminence
of the former. Rousseau was purged of his criticism of private property
and his pessimism, and was uplifted by the optimism of Condorcet and the
encyclopedists in general regarding the possibility of regenerating a
society corrupted by ignorance, superstition, and inequalities.
Montesquieu, having
placed the principle of the republic in virtue, was seen as a
republican, and therefore a revolutionary. Billaud-Varenne, a member of
the Committee of Public Safety, wrote in the third year of the Republic
(after the Thermidorian Reaction) that Montesquieu was the turning point
of French political thought, a thought which was then continued and
surpassed by Rousseau. Montesquieu speaks of three types of government:
the republic, the monarchy, and despotism. The republic has virtue as
its principle, the monarchy has honor, and despotism has fear. The
republic can belong to the whole people or to a part of them: it can
therefore be democratic or aristocratic. Bourgeois and aristocrats,
readers of Montesquieu and Rousseau as well as Plutarch and Cicero,
could therefore aspire to be virtuous, custodians of the ancient
republican virtues in the myth of Lycurgus’ Sparta and the republican
Rome of Marcus Junius Brutus.
The myth of these
virtues, then widespread, did not automatically mean wanting the
republic, and even less the revolution: otherwise it would be difficult
to understand the praise of republican virtues made in those years by a
King of Poland, even taking into account that Poland, monarchic at that
time, was in fact an aristocratic republic, where kings were elected by
a very numerous aristocracy, which in some periods of Polish history
came to constitute more than 10% of the population.
With the American
Revolution of 1776, people began to think that the republic did not
concern only the ancient Greek polis or the Swiss cantons, but was also
a possibility for large states such as France.
It must be said that
Montesquieu, who is difficult to define as a republican, in his writings
and notes dated between 1716 and 1755, later rearranged by others with
the title of “Reflections and Unpublished Thoughts”, writes under the
subtitle “Republics”: “I am not one of those who consider Plato’s
Republic as an ideal and purely imaginary thing, which it would be
impossible to implement.”
The political freedom
of which Montesquieu speaks can be found both in the monarchies and in
the republics: it is not proper to one or the other as such, but to the
governments he calls “moderate”, where the division of powers prevents
abuses, as he writes in The Spirit of the Laws: “For the very
arrangement of things, power must stop power.” Montesquieu’s sympathies
therefore went both to constitutional monarchy and to the republic,
provided they were “moderate,” with the tripartite division of powers.
Obviously, in the
France of his time, together with the very large part of the
Enlightenment, he supported the less traumatic solution, that is, a
monarchy which, under the influence of new ideas, would reform itself in
a constitutional sense. He certainly he was not a revolutionary.
But the separation of
powers between executive, legislative, and judicial was an attack on
absolute monarchy, and therefore a possible ideological tool in the
hands of the bourgeoisie in view of its rise to power. In this sense, at
least until 1789, the separation of powers found a place within the
revolutionary ideology of the bourgeoisie.
However,
Montesquieu’s conception of the separation of powers also responded to a
need for stability and conservation, referring, from this point of view,
to the most ancient and traditional vision of a society of classes.
Class societies were made up of aristocracy, clergy, and the (future)
third estate, that is, a bourgeoisie that expressed itself in municipal
parliaments, often as conservative, if not more, than the aristocracy.
The power of the king, even if absolute, found a limitation on the part
of the classes which, although not having decision-making power, could
not be ignored: it was not wise for the king to ignore them, as this
would certainly have procured different problems, lengthened the list of
his enemies, and made his power more unstable. The classes therefore had
a limited power of influence towards the monarch, but at the same time
they fulfilled an important stabilizing function in that society, a
function understood by all, starting with the monarch himself.
This does not mean
that sometimes, or often, the stability of the kingdom jumped due to the
struggles and wars between monarchy and aristocracy, in which one tried
to subjugate the other.
For Montesquieu, the
tripartition of powers aims to make power itself more stable and
therefore stronger, avoiding shocks of various kinds. Executive power
remains in the hands of the monarch, as before; legislative power should
pass into the hands of a parliament presumably dominated by the
aristocrats and with bourgeois participation; the judicial power is in
the hands of courts where the bourgeois were already competing for
domination with the aristocrats. The example of England, admired by the
baron, seemed to confirm the effectiveness of this division of the
garments of the poor Christ between monarchy, aristocracy, and
bourgeoisie. The effectiveness was in guaranteeing the stability and
“freedom of man”, which we know to be the freedom of the man who owned
property in France at the time, landed and bourgeois. The latter, with
the revolution and the Napoleonic period, later became far more
important.
We now come to the
quotation from Montesquieu taken from the aforementioned collection
under the subtitle “On political freedom”: “The word freedom in politics
does not even remotely have the meaning attributed to it by orators and
poets. This word properly expresses only a relationship and cannot serve
to differentiate the various types of government: since the people’s
state consists in the freedom of the poor and weak and in the slavery of
the rich and powerful; while the monarchy consists in the freedom of the
great and in the slavery of the small (...) So when, in a civil war, it
is said that one is fighting for freedom, it is something else: the
people are fighting to obtain dominance over the Great, and the great
ones fight to obtain dominance over the people.”
These words are
significant precisely because they do not come from a revolutionary.
However, there is the intuition that freedom has a class connotation,
and that the freedom of some coincides with the slavery of others.
Montesquieu, despite
being a baron, is the exponent of an objectively revolutionary bourgeois
class, as was shown a few decades later in France. As a revolutionary
class, the bourgeoisie can afford to tell the truth, or what it deems to
be true, without having to look over its shoulder. Another revolutionary
class is still not pressing against it. Then, when the bourgeoisie has
become mature, first stagnant and today in a state of decomposition (but
it does not die by itself), then it can no longer afford the luxury of
saying something that comes close to the truth: materialism and naive
ideologies, and in part also generous ones, that it had professed are
abandoned. In the name of its war of life and death, of its Armageddon
against the proletariat, the bourgeoisie then allied itself with the
remnants of all the previous owning classes, recovering their ideologies
like an old coat that it is turned inside out and patched up, in order
not to appear naked to the proletariat. The bourgeoisie, after having
cut off the heads of kings and priests and professed atheism, sprinkles
its head with ashes and asks for forgiveness from kings, priests, and
God, with whom it stipulates a holy alliance against infidels and
blasphemers who do not believe in the holy right of property.
We come now to the
revolutionary Blanqui, a communist with a solid vision of class but
lacking in science and dialectics. In Social Criticism, a collection he
made of his writings from 1850 to 1870, from one of 1869‑70 entitled
“Communism, the future of society” we read: “Now, communism is
reproached for representing the sacrifice of the individual and the
denial of freedom (...) On the other hand, where is the evidence in
support of the accusation made against it? It is only a gratuitous
insult, since the accused never lived. And in whose name is this
arrogant supposition? In the name of individualism, which for thousands
of years has permanently killed freedom and the individual. How many
individuals of our species are there who have not been made helots or
victims? Maybe one in ten thousand. Ten thousand martyrs for an
executioner! Ten thousand slaves for a tyrant! And this is supported in
the name of freedom! (...) The freedom that communism accuses, we know
it, is the freedom to enslave, the freedom to exploit at will, the
freedom of great existences, as Renan says, with the multitudes on the
sidewalk. The people call this freedom oppression and crime. It no
longer wants to feed her with his flesh and blood (...) Communism is the
safeguard of the individual; individualism is his extermination. For the
one, each individual is sacred. The other takes no more account of it
than an earthen jar and immolates it with the massacre to the bloody
trinity Loyola, Caesar, and Shylock; after which he says phlegmatically:
“Communism would be the sacrifice of the individual”. It would ruin the
banquet of the anthropophages, this is clear. But those who pay the
price will not find this setback annoying (...) No freedom for the enemy
(...) In 1848, the republicans, forgetting fifty years of persecution,
granted full and complete freedom to their enemies. The hour was solemn
and decisive. It will never come back. The winners, despite long and
cruel wrongs, took the initiative, gave the example. What was the
answer? Extermination. Closed business. The day when the gag is removed
from the mouth of labor, it will be put on that of capital.”
Here we agree with
Blanqui, and in the wake of Marx’s scientific, historical, and
dialectical communism, we say that the only freedom available to the
proletariat is the exercise of its own dictatorship.
For The Class Union - Italy
On Friday, June 18,
there was a national strike of logistics workers joined by virtually all
the grassroots unions in the sector: SI COBAS, ADL COBAS, USB, CUB, SOL
COBAS, and SLAI COBAS, for the Class Union.
An unexpected and
important fact, because it tends to overcome one of the main reasons for
conflict between the two major unions – SI COBAS and USB – which in
logistics had come to clash very strongly.
SI COBAS, USB, and
ADL COBAS have also published a common communiqué for the strike, and in
the warehouses where both SI COBAS and USB are present, the workers of
the two unions picketed together, with their respective flags.
The leaders of these
grassroots unions, therefore, who have always rejected, with various
instrumental justifications, the trade union indication of our party in
favor of the unity of action of trade unions and workers, have found
themselves following it and making it their own, contradicting their
previous position.
The leaflet of our
party, drafted and distributed for the strike and published below, gave
particular emphasis and prominence to this important novelty, although
we are certainly not unaware of how fragile this unity of action is and
how occasional recourse to it is not enough to restore strength to class
unionism and the workers’ movement.
It was a step in the
direction of the necessary unity of action of militant unionism, to be
practiced permanently at the various levels of union action, corporate,
territorial, categorical, general.
But this is not to
say that the current leadership of the major base unions, which have
conducted – for years and until yesterday – the political struggle in the
union field with the opportunistic method of dividing the strike
actions, have abandoned this practice permanently. At the first
opportunity, they will adduce justifications to return to their previous
conduct. In addition to the seriousness of the situation described in
the leaflet, the pressure from below of the workers who are members of
their organizations has perhaps brought them to the field of unity of
action at this juncture. In any case, it is only on this force from
below that one can count on to permanently impose the class line of
unity of action in every union body.
* * *
On the morning of the
national logistics strike, at the Lidl logistics warehouse in Biandrate,
the provincial coordinator of SI COBAS, Adil Belakhdim, was run over and
killed by a young 26 year old boss who drove his truck through the
picket line.
The young man is
being investigated not for voluntary manslaughter but for road homicide,
an indictment routinely assigned in every road accident in which there
are victims, which seems to indicate an intention to hit him with a
minimum possible penalty.
This fact, together
with that of the acquittal, a year ago, of the truck driver who ran over
and killed Abd El Salam, an USB worker, in September 2016 during a
picket at Gls in Piacenza, would indicate a kind of impunity to other
bosses, bosses or scabs who wanted to emulate the gesture of the
murderer of Adil Belakhdim.
Similar episodes are
very frequent during pickets for strikes in logistics. After years of
hard struggles – many lost, many won – which, as an overall result, have
marked an improvement in working conditions and a strengthening of
grassroots unionism in the category, the bosses seem to have been given
a kind of pass to discourage workers from engaging in these methods of
struggle, even by means of road accidents. This tool is in addition to
police charges, judicial measures, and the maneuvers of the regime’s
trade unionism to assist companies in replacing combative workers with
other unorganized workers, as is happening at Fedex TNT.
On Wednesday, June
30, in Pontecurone (Alessandria), a manager drove his truck into a group
of striking workers in front of the company at Miliardo Yida, injuring
one.
* * *
The day after the
national logistics strike, Saturday, June 19, SI COBAS had already
scheduled a national demonstration in Rome.
This is the practice,
highly questionable, put in place for three years now by the leadership
of the SI COBAS: national strike of logistics on Friday, national
demonstration in the capital the next day. This is with the aim, pursued
by this leadership, to give greater "political" content to the union
mobilization.
This choice has
several negative effects:
- Workers are
required to expend more energy, having to first participate in the
pickets and then bear the journey to Rome, the demonstration and the
return trip; this has negative effects on both the participation in the
pickets and in the demonstration itself. After the first successful
national demonstration in Rome on February 24, 2018, subsequent
demonstrations have had much lower participation, even prior to the
pandemic;
- Organizing the
demonstration in Rome implies a greater financial burden for the union,
which has to rent the buses; a burden doubled with the pandemic, since
the buses have to be filled to only half their capacity;
- With this decision
are abandoned local city demonstrations, which took place the same day
of the strike, with a much broader participation of workers and, at
least in part, the union with workers of other unions, which instead
have always deserted the demonstrations convened by the SI COBAS in
Rome, precisely because of their political characterization; all,
without exception, even ADL COBAS that has always participated in
strikes together with the SI COBAS.
The demonstration on
Saturday, June 19 was attended by about 1,700 people. Successful, then,
but not as successful as we had wished, in the just hope of a greater
presence in reaction to the murder of the unionist of the previous day,
at least from Rome and the surrounding area.
Of the other
grassroots unions, the one with the largest presence was USB, with about
one hundred militants, including those of the political leadership group
and the student organization it controls.
It now becomes clear
how decades of political opportunism of the false workers’ parties (PCI
and subsequent wreckage) and of collaborationism of the trade unions of
the regime (CGIL, CISL, UIL) have thrown the workers into individualism,
into indifference, a condition from which it is not at all easy to get
out.
The role of trade
unions – trade unions, opposition class union currents, company trade
union representatives – is crucial in every phase of the class struggle,
even more so in this condition: in trying to set up a mobilization,
their involvement is necessary and it is not enough to appeal only to
workers or, generically, to conflictual unionism, as has been done so
far by the leadership of SI COBAS, including through the Assembly of
Combative Workers.
On this level, the
reaction of the trade unions to the murder of the SI COBAS unionist was
appreciable. Many RSUs and RSAs (bodies representing workers to the
employers, respectively of all unions in a firm and individual unions)
have called strikes – of a couple of hours – in solidarity and denunciation,
both of the basic unions and FIOM, who have called for a regional strike
of all metalworkers in Emilia Romagna.
A general strike was
called by the various quarters of militant unionism, both from the
grassroots unions and from the CGIL internal opposition group
“Reconquistiamo tutto,” in response to the release of laoyffs, the
liberalization of contracts, the attempt to include the logistics sector
in the law forbidding strikes in essential public services, and the
murder of Adil.
These positive
reactions, however, have remained scattered, and have not been channeled
into a single general mobilization. The leadership of the SI COBAS would
have had the opportunity, given its position in the affair, to undertake
such an initiative and ask all the grassroots unions and opposition
groups within CGIL to react with a unified mobilization. It did not do
so, and on Tuesday, June 22, called alone a 4‑hour national logistics
strike for Thursday, June 24. It then called for a demonstration for the
following Saturday in Novara, which saw a similar participation to the
one in Rome, but with the almost total absence of the rest of the
militant unionists.
Therefore, the step
forward towards unity of action, taken with the strike of June 18, was
not followed in the days immediately following by another in the same
direction, despite the relatively favorable situation. A good
opportunity was lost. The national general strike need not necessarily
have been called. We could have called for a new unified national strike
of logistics for the entire day; or a general strike in the province of
Novara, even if it was only for 4 hours; or a public, formal and
official invitation to all the organizations of unionism in conflict to
a national demonstration in the Piedmontese city. Or resort to all three
possibilities, making the strike in logistics coincide with the one in
the province of Novara.
On June 28 in Rome,
however, a meeting was held, convened on the initiative of the
leadership of the SI COBAS, between representatives of militant
unionism, that is, the grassroots unions and "Reconquistiamo tutto",
aimed at organizing a general strike for October.
Therefore, unlike
what happened in past years, we have overcome the divisive practice with
which some organizations were previously excluded from such meetings
(USB, Confederazione COBAS, CGIL opposition, etc.) and the leaders of SI
COBAS, which excluded the formal involvement of all bodies of trade
unionism conflict in the preparation of mobilizations – denigrating this
path as a useless "sum of acronyms" – have backtracked and implicity
admitted the correctness of our union address.
June 18
A United National Strike of Logistics Workers
For the unitary strike of rank-and-file trade unions in logistics!
For the establishment of the United Class Union Front!
The national strike
of logistics workers initially called by SI Cobas received the support
of most of the rank-and-file trade unions: ADL Cobas, USB, Cub
Trasporti, Slai Cobas for the Class Union, AL Cobas, Sol Cobas.
This unitary support
for the strike is an extremely important and positive fact because it
breaks with years of deleterious conflict between rank-and-file unions -
for the sole benefit of the employers and the regime unionism of CGIL,
CISL and UIL – which had its most serious manifestation in the rivalry
between SI Cobas and the USB.
The unitary support
of the militant trade union organizations for a strike is not the
fulfillment of the unity of struggle of the workers. But it creates the
most favorable condition for this objective to be achieved in the most
complete way, so that the widest mass of proletarians, including those
who are in the regime unions or who are not unionized, also join the
struggle.
It is therefore
misleading to contrast the unity of the rank-and-file unions in calling
the strike with unity in the struggle of the workers, diminishing the
former as a mere sum of acronyms, useless for the purpose of the latter:
the workers’ struggle is powerless if it is not organized!
The current unitary
action of rank-and-file unionism is the result of the bosses’ aggression
on several fronts: the beatings by police officers and thugs hired by
the company during the fight against the closure of the FedEx‑TNT
warehouse in Piacenza; the judicial proceedings initiated by the
Piacenza and Genoa prosecutors against trade union militants of SI Cobas
and USB; with the announcement of layoffs starting from 30 June
(hundreds of layoffs are already being announced at FCA in Melfi and
other facilities); the liberalization of subcontracting; the project to
include logistics in the anti‑strike regulations of the Guarantee
Commission to hit the sector where strikes have been most numerous and
hardest-fought in the last 10 years; the relaunch of the concertation
between the government and CGIL, CISL and UIL; and finally the attack
last Wednesday at the SI Cobas encampment at Texprint in Prato.
The gravity of the
situation has pushed the leadership of the rank-and-file unions to this
united action. This is an extremely positive fact in itself, but also
because it shows how this unity of action strengthens the workers’
struggle. It must therefore become a permanent practice, and also be
expanded to all of militant unionism, including the class opposition
within the CGIL, and which ultimately leads to the formation of a united
class union front.
The causes that have
hitherto prevented us from moving in this direction have not been
overcome. They continue in the opportunism of the union leaders, who
pursue a political united front, which is necessarily detrimental to the
united class union front. This unified strike in logistics should be
considered a victory that is not definitively achieved, but rather is
fragile and revocable at any time by the current leadership groups.
It is equally
deceptive to confuse the union with a political party. It is true that
every trade union struggle has a political significance, and that as the
economic struggle of the working class grows stronger it assumes a more
and more political value. But the union is not a party and must not be
inserted into political fronts. This effort is one of the causes that
hinders the unified actions of the major rank-and-file unions, first of
all SI Cobas and USB, with their respective leaders committed to using
the trade unions as tools of support for their competing political
fronts.
It is up to the
workers and the rank-and-file trade union militants to fight, so that we
continue to march in the direction of the united class union front,
making permanent the unity of action of rank-and-file unionism, as a
necessary tool to obtain the widest unity of the workers’ struggle.
The resumption of a
strong workers’ movement on the level of economic struggle is the
condition for the reconstruction of the link between the workers and the
authentic revolutionary party. This party rejects any political fronts
(inexorably affected by opportunism) and, certainly not by chance,
indicates now that the only way to respond adequately to the bosses’
offensive is to constitute the united class union front.
The Murder of a SI Cobas Militant: The Perpetrator is the Bourgeois Regime!
This morning in
Novara, Italy, on the day of the first national strike of rank-and-file
unions in logistics, a truck driver rammed through the picket line at
the Lidl grocery warehouse. The driver struck and killed Adil Belakhdim,
provincial coordinator of the SI Cobas union in Novara.
There have been
dozens of similar episodes in these years of strikes in logistics, the
sector in which workers’ combativity is highest. Fortunately, most of
them happen without serious consequences, but this was not the case on
September 14, 2016 at GLS in Piacenza, when Abd El Salam, a worker with
the USB union, was hit and killed during a picket.
However, this new
tragedy, the death of this new martyr of the workers’ struggle, was not
unexpected, but was preceded by a series of political events that have
prepared the way for it.
Since 2010, strikes
and pickets by logistics workers have managed to obtain important
economic and regulatory improvements in many warehouses. In recent
years, the employers and their state regime have gone on the
counter-offensive, unable to bear this proletarian force in such a
crucial sector of national and international capitalism, and fearing the
extension of struggles and rank-and-file unionism into other categories.
With the "security"
decrees passed by the old government of the Lega party and the Five Star
Movement, the penalties for roadblocks have become very heavy, and the
police obviously treat a picket in front of a factory gate just like a
roadblock. These denunciations and sanctions are attempts to break the
strength of the rank-and-file unions in logistics, the workers’
struggle, and to revoke the gains they have obtained. The later
Democratic Party‑Five Star government has partially modified the
"security" decrees, but not the part that is used by force against
workers’ pickets.
Covered by the
trumpet blast of "national reconstruction" propaganda from the new
government, companies and law enforcement agencies seem in recent months
to enjoy their authorization to carry out any wickedness against
striking workers.
In Genoa, the
prosecutor ordered a search of the homes, telephones, and workplace
lockers of port workers’ delegates from the USB, after the workers chose
them over candidates from the CGIL regime union. In Piacenza, the
prosecutor placed two local leaders of SI Cobas under arrest following
the clashes that took place at FedEx‑TNT, after the police attacked the
picket on February 1.
An admirable fight by
SI Cobas has been underway for two months in all the FedEx‑TNT
warehouses in Italy, after the company decided to close the Piacenza
warehouse with the sole, blatant purpose of breaking the strength of SI
Cobas and getting rid of 280 unionized workers (some of whom were also
with the USB). On several occasions, the company has deployed groups of
private guards to help the police break the pickets. On the night of
June 9 in Tavazzano, Lombardy, dozens of these thugs, along with some
scabs, attacked the picket line with improvised clubs, rocks, and broken
bottles, seriously injuring a worker.
On June 17, at the
Texprint facility in Prato, the boss and some of his henchmen attacked 3
workers who had remained to keep up the strikers’ camp, while their
comrades had gone to support a strike in another textile company in the
Prato area.
In this context, the
Guarantees Commission has indicated a clear desire to include logistics
within the framework of its anti‑strike rules.
Against all this,
rank-and-file unionism has finally been able to act together in today’s
unitary strike. And in this climate of hatred against the exploited who
strike, preventing the "national rebirth" (which, of course, is nothing
other than the rebirth of employers’ profits), a boss felt authorized to
crash through a picket line and kill a worker.
The workers must not
collaborate with the bosses and their political regime, because nothing
will ever really be granted to them, except deceit and hypocrisy. From
the infamous actions of the bourgeois class it is only necessary to draw
greater conviction of the need to organize ourselves to fight, because
only force will defend our class. Today’s unitary strike is a step along
this path. The assassination of Adil Belakhdim requires an equally
unified response, involving not only the rank-and-file unions but also
the class opposition within the CGIL, and, on a higher level, the entire
working class.
