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
Inside:
– Lessons from the five month miners’ strike
in South Africa: Apartheid
- 500,000 workers - Machine gun fire on strikers - Electoral
circus - NUMISA calls off strike - “Anti-communist” - Strikes
“damage capital” - A
victory for the international working class - Compromise - Rebuild
class-based trade unions
– May Day 2015 - Workers
have nothing to lose but their chains and a world to win - As
capitalism prepares for a new world war it has nothing to offer the
proletariat but poverty - The workers must defend their standard of
living today so they can destroy the global power of capitalism
tomorrow!
– Pioltello (Italy), 8 June, 2014 - For
the Territorial reorganisation of the Working Class
– A
Report on Rank and File Movements in Italy
Lessons from the five month miners’ strike
in South Africa
After a long
five month battle, the momentous strike of 70,000 platinum miners in
South Africa, led by AMCU (Association of Mineworkers and
Construction Union), ended on June 23, 2014. Especially because of
its duration and intensity, it has much to teach workers throughout
the world, and not least in its further confirmation of the communist
programme.
It was the
longest strike in the history of the South African working class,
much longer than the two most significant up to now: the strike in
Durban in 1973, launched by the dockers but which spread to almost
every sector; and the strike of 360,000 miners in 1987, which lasted
three weeks and was led by the NUM (National Union of Mineworkers).
As we have recently had cause to mention (see article in Communist
Left no.33) the class struggle in South Africa, a modern industrial
country, is intensifying. This struggle doesn’t represent an
exception but is rather one more manifestation of a general
historical process: peace between the classes is impossible; it is a
false and hypocritical notion used to keep the proletariat down.
Class struggle remains the motor of history and the key to
understanding its development, as expressed in Communist theory.
This strike
has confirmed another fundamental communist position: the ending of
apartheid and arrival of democracy haven’t altered the wretched
condition of the working class and it is still being exploited. And
it couldn’t be otherwise because the underlying cause is
capitalism, not a particular form of government. In South Africa, as
in the rest of the world, the underlying cause of all social
contradictions is not race, religion, democracy or dictatorship, but
the current mode of production, which is based on the division of
society into the class of salaried workers on one side, today’s
proletarians, and the class of owners or managers of Capital on the
other, the bourgeoisie. The fake workers’ parties, in all
countries, always try to convince the exploited masses that it is
just one particular aspect of capitalism which needs sorting out,
after which this society will finally be OK, even for them.
Apartheid
In South
Africa as long as apartheid existed it was easy to get black
proletarians to believe their miserable condition was due to the
whites’ racism and not the economic laws of the capitalist mode of
production. But the fact is that after the ending of the racist
regime in 1994 the situation of the workers failed to improve and the
growth of the class struggle over recent years confirms it beyond any
shadow of a doubt. Notwithstanding this, opportunism, which can be
depended upon to lie, explains low salaries as a yet to be tackled
legacy of the past regime, defining them as the “colonialist wages
of apartheid”: a typically ideological view which conceals the
clear economic reasons which give rise to this condition. It is
capitalism which pushes down wages! Today, in this rich and important
country, a bourgeois government, made up of blacks, manages the
interests not of whites but of national and international capital.
The
magnificent battle fought by the miners also confirms our theses on
trade unionism. As mentioned in earlier articles, COSATU is
evidencing its pro-regime nature, same as in the other countries with
large trade union organisations. With the ending of apartheid, and as
a consequence of its reformist political line, which aims for an
impossible reconciliation between the requirements of capitalism and
the needs of the working class, it has become a pillar of capitalism,
guaranteeing moderation of the workers’ demands. A regime union
like the CGIL in Italy or TUC in Great Britain.
500,000
workers
South Africa
is a great agricultural and industrial country which produces a third
of Africa’s wealth. In the mines 500,000 workers are employed and
many more indirectly. They are thus highly concentrated and due to
extremely harsh working conditions they are the most combative sector
in the country. This has made it easier for them to recognise the
pro-bourgeois nature of the NUM, and of COSATU as a whole
In 2009,
Piet Matosa, president of the NUM, intervened to try and shut down a
strike at Impala Platinum Holdings Ltd., the biggest platinum mine in
the in the world, and was chased off under a hail of stones. In May
2011, in Karee Mine, the miners went out on strike not against the
company but against the regional leadership of the NUM, which had
suspended the strike leaders at the mine. The AMCU thus became the
main trade union in that mine. In January 2012, 4,300 rock drillers
at Impala Platinum struck against a union agreement signed by the NUM
which awarded a pay increase only to the higher grades. The rock
drillers asked for a substantial increase to take their net pay up to
9,000 Rand. The NUM accused them of stopping others from going to
work.
Machine gun
fire on strikers
The struggle
which marked the turning point in relations between the proletarians
in the platinum mines, the NUM and the AMCU was the struggle in the
following August, in which the rock drillers of the Lonmin mine in
Marikana took strike action in support of a demand for a basic wage
of 12,500 Rand. The NUM, which along with the mining company had
declared the demand to be “unsustainable”, did everything it
could to break the strike, and during the first three days of the
strike there were ten casualties. On 16 August, the sixth day of the
strike, the police opened fire with machine guns and killed 34
workers. The bloody massacre serves as a clear demonstration of the
bourgeois continuity from the previous regime through to the new
post-apartheid regime: a black government with a black police force
repressing the black working masses. The only difference is that
democratic South Africa can no longer disguise class oppression as
racial discrimination.
Despite the
’Marikana Massacre’ as it has since become known, the strike
continued for a further four weeks, spreading to other mines, and not
just those mining platinum. On September 18 the Lonmin miners of
Marikana accepted an increase of 22%, taking their pay up to around
5,500 Rand ($485). This result, which however would only be partially
conceded by the company, fell far short of the workers’ demands,
but the courage and determination shown by the miners was such that
their sense of unity would remain intact despite the only partial
nature of their victory. As the 1848 Communist Manifesto explains,
the most important result of workers’ struggles is not the
contingent economic benefits they bring, but rather the strengthening
of proletarian unity and organisation
The
democratic electoral circus is useful to the bourgeoisie because it
disguises the underlying dictatorship of capital, persuading the
workers they have a say in things
It marked
the end of the NUM in the platinum mines. The AMCU became the biggest
union in the Amplats (60%), Impala and Lonmin mines (66%).
In 2013,
from the strikes in May at Lonmin to the strikes in September at
Amplats, both led by the AMCU, there was a steady stream of victims
in the Marikana area in the struggle between members of the NUM and
those of the AMCU.
On 23
January of this year, a year and four months after the Marikana
Massacre, the miners went out on strike again to fight for their
original objective: basic pay of 12,500 Rand. To begin with the
mining companies agreed to open a dialogue with the AMCU, but once
they saw how resolute the union was, after it rejected their
ridiculous offer, they shut down negotiations. On 29 April thousands
of miners, summoned to the Wonderkop Stadium in Marikana by the AMCU,
rejected the company’s latest offer.
The NUM and
COSATU openly declared their opposition to the strike and went about
organising blacklegs. On May 1st, at the COSATU demonstration in the
Olympia Park Stadium in Rustemberg, 30 kilometres to the east of
Marikana, the president of the NUM declared: “We appeal to all
workers to go back to work; this strike is against the economy of our
country”.
At the end
of April the ANC office in Marikana was attacked and set on fire. The
presence in the area of the President of the Republic, Zuma,
campaigning for re-election, was confirmed right up to the last
minute, to demonstrate there was nowhere in the country he couldn’t
go, but in the end the visit was cancelled. The provincial head of
the ANC declared that the decision was made in order not to favour
“anarchists and their initiatives”. On 5 May, for the first time
since the struggle had begun, Zuma got directly involved in the
matter and issued a condemnation of the strike. On 7 May the
elections went ahead and the ANC-SACP governmental coalition was
confirmed.
Electoral circus
The
democratic electoral circus is useful to the bourgeoisie because it
disguises the underlying dictatorship of capital, persuading the
workers they have a say in things, but once it was over the
anti-proletarian front composed of Government, State and bourgeois
trade unions passed openly on to the attack. The platinum mining
companies sent telephone messages to the miners in which each of them
were asked if they accepted the pay agreement rejected by the AMCU or
not. This was a way of circumventing the union by dealing with the
workers individually and then, justified through their use of the
ideological weapon of democratic consultation, putting themselves in
a better position to organise blacklegs. The companies’ declared
intention, backed by the NUM, was to see the majority of the miners
return to work by 14 May. The AMCU stood firm. It urged the workers
not to allow themselves to be intimidated and organised
demonstrations to block the roads giving access to the mines. This
led to the first confrontations with the police, resulting in
injuries and arrests. On 14 May thousands of miners once again filled
the Wonderkop Stadium in Marikana, providing a great show of
strength.
There have
been various battles resulting in casualties between the striking
miners and the NUM blacklegs. In the platinum mines this union’s
power is now compromised but it continues to exert an influence in
the coal, gold and diamond mines. This has prevented the strike from
spreading to other miners, which would surely have allowed greater
success. The same goes for the rest of the working class, controlled
by COSATU, in which there have been no cases of organisation and
struggle outside and against this confederation comparable to AMCU’s
initiative.
The 70,000
platinum miners have thus struggled heroically for five months on
their own, isolated from the other miners and from the rest of the
working class. The attempt by AMCU to extent the strike to the gold
mines was blocked by the Labour Court which declared the action
illegal; just one more fact confirming the bourgeois nature of the
South African, democratic post-apartheid regime.
The Court’s
sentence was condemned by the leaders of the NUMSA, the
metal-workers’ federation within COSATU, which was expelled from
the Confederation last November. This is a matter of no small
importance which we will return to in the future. After the NUM’s
loss of more than 50,000 of its members to the AMCU, the NUMSA had
become the biggest federation within the COSATU, organising around
270,000 workers. In December 2013, in anticipation of the political
elections in the following May, it withdrew its support from the
ANC-SACP governmental alliance and thus lined up against its own
confederation. After the elections, which confirmed the previous
government in place, the NUMSA called for an extraordinary congress
of the COSATU, which never took place.
NUMISA calls off strike
The NUMSA’s
conduct was ambiguous. In the refinery and smelting works of the
Amplats (Anglo American Platinum) mine, where the workers had still
not gone out on strike with the miners, on 2 February the NUMSA
initiated a strike of 1,800 workers but instead of taking up AMCU’s
demand for a basic salary of 12,500 Rand it called for a lower
increase. On 17 March it called a general strike in the sector but
again for demands which were extraneous to the ongoing miners’
struggle. Three days later, on 20 March, The NUMSA called off the
strike after it accepted a deal agreeing pay increases for its
members in the Amplats refinery and smelting works. In a
communiqué
in early April it declared that due to the length of the strike an
unspecified number of miners were abandoning the ACMU in order to
join not the NUM but the NUMSA.
During the
five month miners’ strike the NUMSA did nothing to support them. In
May it declared, in the face of rising tension, that it would
consider the possibility of calling a strike in solidarity with the
miners, but first it wanted to take the proposal to the COSATU’s
central committee. A move, therefore, which was more to do with
promoting itself than anything else. Insofar as the NUMSA is the
biggest federation within the COSATU and organises an entire sector,
the metalworkers’ which, along with the miners, represent the core
of the working class, it thus caused a rupture within the working
class and isolated the strike. This appears even more evident if we
consider that the NUMSA waited for the miners’ strike to end, which
eventually happened on 23 June, before launching its own general
metalworkers strike on 1 July! The unity of the two struggles would
have inflicted a mortal blow to the resistance of the mining and
industrial companies and ensured a great victory for all workers. The
NUMSA was careful to prevent that unity from occurring. And that
counts for much, much more than all its bombastic declarations and
professed eagerness to take part in congressional debates. Facts are
stubborn, as Lenin used to say.
There is
something else that is important. Since 2012 the platinum miners,
organised first in struggle committees than in the AMCU, have been
demanding a basic salary of 12,500 Rand, around 890 Euros. The NUMSA
called the metalworkers out on strike on 1 July for a basic salary of
5,600 Rand. This indicates two things: firstly the modesty of the
claim, compatible with capitalist interests, and indeed supported by
COSATU; secondly that the metalworkers’ are paid about the same as
the miners, and therefore the battle for a basic wage of 12,550 Rand
was entirely their battle as well.
This
situation and the trade union struggles in South Africa confirm both
the tendency of the trade unions to submit to the bourgeois regime, a
defining characteristic of capitalism in its imperialist phase and
considered by our party to have become more or less entrenched in the
post-Second World War period; and the consequent spontaneous reaction
to reconstruct the trade union organisation through class struggle,
either by means of an internal struggle within the unions subservient
to the regime, or through an organisation outside and against them.
The party cannot always predict which of these two roads the movement
will take but the activity of the militants within the movement
enable it to study at close quarters the spontaneous defensive stance
which the class takes, the aim being to predict the difficulties and
modalities which might occur in subsequent phases of the class’s
contingent defensive battle and to prepare for it in advance, and to
chart a course that doesn’t contradict with the general
revolutionary deployment directed by the Party.
“Anti-communist”
To the AMCU
goes the great merit of having led with great courage and
determination the longest strike in the history of South Africa,
refusing to give in to the intimidation of the mining companies and
the bourgeois regime. This union has earned the trust of the miners.
The trade union committees in the various mines, which were
associated with the NUM to begin with and then detached themselves in
order to conduct the struggle on their own, eventually joined the
AMCU. About this union however we still know very little. Due to the
fact it is fighting against COSATU, and in particular the NUM, which
is influenced by the fake South African communist party, it is held
to be ‘anti-communist’. Its leader, Joseph Mathunjwa, is a
fervent Christian. The political line which a trade union takes
cannot but influence its actions, for good or for ill. The leadership
of the AMCU declares itself to be ‘apolitical’. But ‘politics’
is just the expression of the conflicting class interests: there can
be no ‘apoliticism’ in a society divided into classes. Anyone who
declares him or herself to be apolitical, and thus rejects communist
political principles, ends up embracing bourgeois principles. For
example, at the end of the strike Mathunjwa addressed thousands of
workers gathered in the Rustemberg Stadium with the following words:
“Comrades, you have made South African history: this victory is not
ours alone but the entire country’s”. This is already a political
declaration, in which a bourgeois political principle is enunciated.
Strikes “damage capital”
Maybe the
head of the AMCU was responding to the industrialists who accused the
strikers of damaging the national economy. But the strikers were
right to do precisely that! Strikes always damage companies and
countries, in a word, they damage capital. On 16 June the
international finance agency Fitch lowered its forecast from stable
to negative because “the prospects for growth in South Africa are
threatened above all by the miners’ strike which for five months
has been weakening the platinum industry”. A few hours later the
sister agencies, Standard & Poor’s and Moodys, did the same. In
the first quarter of 2014 the GDP fell for the first time since the
recession in 2009, by 0.6%, with manufacturing activity down by 4.4%
and mining by 24.7%.
The miners’
struggle undoubtedly did contribute to the economic recession in
South Africa, but, rather than being a negative factor for the
working class this in fact serves to demonstrate its power and
strength, confirming the communist argument that the workers’
struggle shouldn’t defend the national economy because it is
necessarily opposed to it: national economy equals capitalism. The
only honest, consistent and effective response to the inevitable
bourgeois anger against the strikers, who have been publicly vilified
as defeatists as regards to the national interest, lies not in trying
to deny the evidence for this accusation, but in defending the
assertion that if the national economy is hit by the workers’
struggles it can only be to the workers’ advantage because it
favours the political collapse of the capitalist regime and therefore
the revolutionary conquest of power. To defend this view means
stepping outside the sphere of ‘trade-unionism’, which doesn’t
actually exist in isolation. But the fact remains: only after the
system as a whole has been brought down and replaced will it be
possible to finally respond properly to the needs of working humanity
rather than those of the profit mongers; and this will involve
subverting the function of productive activity and organising it in a
rational way, according to a global plan, and certainly not
restricting it within national borders, which for a long time have
been far too restrictive for capitalism itself and used by the latter
merely to divide and oppress the working class.
A victory
for the international working class
This victory
of the miners, but even more the actual struggle itself, has taken on
an importance that goes way beyond the particular workers who took
part in it, the platinum miners, but it certainly won’t be ‘the
country’ – all the classes in South Africa, that is -- which will
have cause to celebrate it; rather it is a victory for the entire
South African and international working class.
It could be
that the AMCU’s failure to extend the strike beyond the platinum
belt to other mines was due to timidity or a lack of decisiveness. We
certainly haven’t come across any appeals by AMCU inviting other
miners to join the strike. If their stance derives from a wish not to
cause too much damage, through the mobilisation of other workers, to
the national economy, then we can already see how the union’s
policy of wishing to remain apolitical is affecting its actions: by
effectively blocking the unification of the working class struggle.
Clearly the AMCU will have to solve this knotty problem soon, and the
way it does so will see it either continuing on the path of defence
of working class interests, or taking the path of defence of
capital’s interests, onto which the COSATU has already turned.
Compromise
The strike
was concluded with a compromise, presented as a victory by the AMCU,
although it appears it has met with a positive response from the
strikers. The original demand for a basic wage of 12,500 Rand,
involving a pay hike of 125%, wasn’t achieved. Instead it was
agreed there would be an incremental agreement stretching over three
years, at the end of which basic pay would be 8,900 Rand (630 Euro),
a 46% rise. The increases are greatest for the worst paid categories,
which is a positive thing because reducing wage differentials helps
to unify workers (In Italy Cisl, Uil and Cgil, including Fiom, are
applying the opposite principle: bigger increases for the workers who
are already earning more, and less for those on a lower wage).
Beyond the
economic outcome of any workers’ struggle we should always remember
that the fundamental result is whether there is a lessening or
increase of workers’ unity, i.e. in their organised strength in
view of the battle to come. This unity will soon be put to the test
in the struggles already announced, after the Lonmin mining company
declared on 25 August, in response to the recent pay increases, that
it would be sacking 5,700 workers, which corresponds to 21% of the
company’s labour force in South Africa. This is not long after the
latest unemployment figures were announced on 29 July, now risen to
the highest ever of 29.5%.
Beyond
the economic outcome of any workers’ struggle we should always
remember that the fundamental result is whether there is a lessening
or increase of workers’ unity, i.e. in their organised strength in
view of the battle to come.
In response
to the sharpening of the class struggle this bourgeois regime in
democratic garb is preparing to take remedial action, and already
various of its representatives have expressed themselves in favour of
a law to limit the duration of strikes, with State arbitration being
imposed after a certain length of time: Mildred Oliphant, the
minister of labour, declared that “The government has to intervene.
We cannot have strikes of this length in our country; where mediation
isn’t possible it must be imposed by arbitration”. As we can see,
when it’s a matter of class struggle, democracy quickly reveals its
true, bourgeois nature.
On 1 July
the NUMSA strike began. This too was a long strike, which held out
for four weeks until 28 July. The works of Toyota in Durban, Ford in
Pretoria and General Motors in Port Elizabeth, to name just the
biggest, were shut down. Contrary to what happened in the Miners’
strike, which had every possible obstacle placed in its path, the
strike received the support of the COSATU and its federations,
amongst which the NUM, which naturally limited its involvement to
solemn declarations. This may be explained by the sense of
responsibility its leaders feel towards Capital, and this, as we have
seen, emerges from the very modest nature of its economic demands.
Another sign
of this emerges from the declaration of the NUMSA’s National
Executive Committee at the start of the mobilisation: “The strike
was a painful, not an easy, decision. “Organising a strike was
never on our agenda; it was imposed on us. We use the strike as part
of a tactic whose aim is to put pressure on the bosses to return to
the table with an offer which is acceptable to our members”. A
conciliatory tone analogous to that of the trade unions in Italy.
Rebuild
class-based trade unions
The NUMSA
fights against what it calls “colonial apartheid wages”,
following an opportunist formulation which attributes the cause of
low salaries not to capitalism but to a worse form of it, even if it
was liquidated twenty years ago. The problem for workers, in a
nutshell, is their pay, which national and international capitalism
is forcing down. And the workers certainly won’t be able to fight
against low pay if they are led by unions who are scared of using the
strike weapon!
In South
Africa, then, same as everywhere else in the world, the struggle
between wage labour and capital involves the rebuilding of a trade
union organisation which expresses the interests of its working class
membership, not those of capital and the nation.
Workers
have nothing to lose but their chains
and a world to win
May Day
2015
As
capitalism prepares for a new world war it has nothing to offer the
proletariat but poverty The
workers must defend their standard of living today so they can
destroy the global power of capitalism tomorrow!
May Day is
the day on which workers throughout the world, overcoming the
barriers of nation, race and religion, confirm that they are joined
together as one class, are united by the same interests, and are
fighting the same battle to free themselves from exploitation and
poverty.
May Day
2015 finds proletarians everywhere in a situation which has been
getting worse and worse for years due to the crisis of world
capitalism.
Bourgeois
propaganda is keen to exaggerate the small signs of recovery in
industrial production emerging in the United States and has announced
that the crisis is over, when in fact it is only just beginning;
already it is spreading and deepening and now it is hitting China.
All the financial measures carried out by the United States, Japan,
China and Europe to ‘kick start’ production will only result in a
new financial bubble that will burst in a few months’ time, and
which will be much worse than the one in 2008, which made the
comatose state of the capitalist economy abundantly clear in the
middle of a major crisis of over-production.
This
crisis, which has been forecast and expected by revolutionary Marxism
as an inevitable consequence of the capitalist system of production,
has already thrown tens of millions of proletarians out of work
throughout the world, pushed down wages, and resulted in the
dismantling of the so-called ‘Welfare State’. And competition
between workers will keep on making the situation worse if the class
proves unable to prevent it by mobilising against it, by means of
reorganisation and class struggle.
The
economic crisis is also intensifying the clashes between imperialist
states, great and small, who are competing to: acquire new markets
where they can sell off their surplus production; to control the
areas rich in the raw materials needed to reproduce capital; and to
position themselves strategically in anticipation of the third world
war. The war to control the sources of oil, which the ’terrorists’
are fighting, financed by the opposing imperialist centres, has
devastated the entire Middle East, and in particular, Iraq, Syria and
Libya, and has forced tens of thousands of refugees to abandon their
homes fearing for their lives. The contest between the old and the
new imperialist powers is also spreading to Africa.
Europe has
seen war return to its eastern borders. A few years ago national and
religious divisions served as the pretext for the partition of
Yugoslavia. Today, the fragility of the Ukrainian state has allowed
the United States to interpose itself between Germany and Russia and
provoke bloody clashes, which yet again seek to divide the
proletariat and harness it to the interests of the various bourgeois
States.
In the Far
East the arms race embarked upon by bourgeois and capitalist China,
which is committed to gaining control of an area commensurate with
its economic power by shattering the equilibrium established at the
end of the second imperialist war, is bringing it into conflict with
the neighbouring states of Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, South
Korea and Vietnam; and in open defiance of the United States, which
dominates the surrounding seas with its atomic fleets.
The
bourgeois myths of progressive disarmament and of peaceful
coexistence between states, which have somehow survived two deadly
world wars, are belied by the continual increase in armaments
production, including atomic weapons, and by the increasingly violent
clashes between the imperial juggernauts, even if for now they are
being conducted as proxy wars between mercenary and irregular forces,
such as the Islamic State militias.
The small
States are the first to pay the price of this power politics;
however, the proletariat in these countries, and internationally,
mustn’t allow itself to get drawn into the defence of national
interests, as for example the ‘left-wing’ government is
attempting to do in Greece, by stoking up patriotism and resistance
to the economic aggression of Germany, or as the Chavist government
is attempting to do in Venezuela, against United States imperialism.
And when a war is already taking place the proletariat shouldn’t
feel it has to line up on one of the two opposing bourgeois fronts as
is happening, for example, in Palestine, where the only revolutionary
perspective is that of a single working-class State opposed to both
the Israeli and the Arabic bourgeoisie, who have been using
proletarians as cannon fodder for decades, although mainly
Palestinian proletarians for sure.
Only with
its own party, founded on a sound theory of its own, which
encompasses a comprehensive vision of the world which we call
Marxism, will the working class be able to repel these opportunist
influences and the corrupting ideologies of the enemy classes; only
then will it be a class that can fight for its own interests. This
party is the revolutionary and internationalist Communist Party,
which from the very outset rejected all the bourgeoisie’s false
principles, above all democracy, in the knowledge that the engine of
history is powered not by opinions, but by class struggle.
The
bourgeoisie will never relinquish its miserable privileges unless
forced to do so. It prefers war, so it is up to the global
proletariat to take up the challenge: by engaging in an economic war
to defend wages, organised in genuine class trade unions, against the
economic war of the bourgeoisie to defend its profits; by engaging in
the revolutionary class war against the wars between bourgeois
national states, and organised and led by its own united and
disciplined international communist party.
We don’t
know how long the death throes of the capitalist beast will last, but
what we do know, drawing largely on the lessons of the past century,
is that the organs of the revolution, that is Party and trade union,
must have prepared themselves well before the revolutionary crisis
breaks out, in order to be recognised and utilised by the class.
Working to form the political and defensive organs of the working
class today, in the midst of the enduring counter-revolution is
already communism, is already revolution.
This party already exists in embryonic form today, as the International Communist Party.
Pioltello (Italy), 8 June, 2014
For the Territorial reorganisation
of the Working Class
When workers
set out on the road of class struggle – which is what the workers
organised by the SI Cobas at Dielle, at Caat in Turin, at IKEA in
Piacenza, at Granarolo in Bologna, at Carrefour, at SDA and in many
other battles have done – it soon becomes very apparent that an
entire anti-proletarian system has been installed to bring
proletarians into submission to capitalist exploitation: the various
businesses respond to the struggles with reprisals and sack trade
union militants; the regime trade unions support them by trying to
break strikes, dividing the workers and organising blacklegs; the
bourgeois State sends in its police force to break up the picket
lines.
Against all
these enemies the workers can count only on their own forces. These
forces, when restricted to within one company, may temporarily get
the better of their bosses in the odd battle here or there, but they
can never achieve victory in the long-term. CLASS UNITY is the way to
working-class victory, which starts in the workplace but can only be
achieved by breaking out of it, by extending beyond the narrow
confines of the firm, and of the sector, and by breaking down the
barriers of sex, race and nation, all of which are divisions which
only serve capitalism.
UNITY OF THE
WORKERS becomes a reality when there is UNITY DURING STRIKES: when
workers express solidarity with other sections of workers when they
are under attack and take action to support them; at which point a
strike is no longer considered a private matter of employees in a
particular firm, but rather as a flame to ignite the struggles of
more and more workers.
For this to
happen there has to an organisation which is fit for purpose, a trade
union which can express class demands, a CLASS TRADE UNION. One
which:
– puts up
an intransigent defence of workers’ interests, that is, which
doesn’t subordinate them to either the firm or the national economy
(that is, to national and international capitalism);
– doesn’t accept limitations on the use of the strike weapon in
exchange for so-called rights (recognition, representation): the
bosses only negotiate with a genuine trade union if they are forced
to do so; they’d far prefer to sit round the table with their
official union accomplices.
In order to
develop the unity of wage-earners, whether working or not, the class
union must as far as possible be organised not at the level of the
workplace or company, but at the territorial level, as in the
glorious tradition of the original Camere del Lavoro. A Centre for
the Proletariat:
– In which
workers meet as members of one class, not as employees of a firm, so
they can strengthen the ties of brother/sister hood;
– Which
functions as a meeting place for the many workers who work for small
companies, the majority in fact, who are isolated from those in the
big and medium firms; and also for the ever more numerous unemployed,
and thus rekindles their sense of belonging to a class;
– Which
becomes the organisational centre for territorial mobilisations of
the working class;
– Which
becomes point of reference for the many struggles occurring in
crisis-hit firms which are today prevented from linking up by the
regime trade unions.
– Which
promotes the proletarian united front from below through the
formation of struggle committees in each firm, which workers can
belong to whatever union they are in, and which is tasked with
wrenching the leadership of struggles from the regime unions and from
the domesticated representative bodies (RSU).
The network
created by these territorial structures of the proletarian struggle
will form the effective living body of the re-born CLASS UNION.
– LONG LIVE THE STRUGGLE OF THE DIELLE WORKERS!
– FOR THE EXTENSION AND STRENGTHENING OF THE SI COBAS!
– FOR A CENTRE OF THE PROLETARIAT IN PIOLTELLO!
– FOR THE REBIRTH OF THE CLASS UNION!
A Report
on Rank and File Movements in Italy
Dear M.
In response
to your very reasonable comment that there needs to be more focus on
the ’difficulties of organisational steps on the shop floor’, a
comrade sent me the following commentary and update which hopefully
you will find addresses that point to a certain extent. We hope you
find it useful.
The SI Cobas
was born as a split from another Rank & File (R&F) union –
the SLAI Cobas –
in 2010. The SLAI
Cobas had already organised some workers in a couple of warehouses
but not much more. The SI Cobas
has been able to build up a workers movement in the logistics sector,
spreading to a good number of warehouses in some regions of Italy:
mainly in Lombardia and Emilia Romagna (North Italy); then in Turin;
more weakly in Lazio (centre Italy) and Campania (South Italy). In
another
region in the North East of Italy, the Veneto (of which the regional
capital is Venice) we have a similar R&F union, the ADL Cobas,
based in Padova.
We can
consider this union ’a sister’ of SI Cobas since they co-ordinate
their strikes, demonstrations and national agreements. But the ADL
Cobas arose many years earlier, in 1992, and it seems less combative
then the SI Cobas. In spite of
having been around since 1992, it isn’t achieving the same success as
the SI Cobas, only spreading across the Veneto and a bit into Romagna
(the eastern part of Emilia Romagna) and to a warehouse in Parma
(Emilia
The SI Cobas
R&F union managed to achieve what no one other R&F union had
been able to achieve before (with the partial exception of COMU in
the railways): it started to organize strikes in a substantial number
of companies and managed to organize a first general strike in March
2013 and then another four, really affecting the sector.
On 19th
February of this year the SI Cobas achieved a national agreement with
three big international corporations (TNT, GLS, Bartolini).
This is a
result no other R&F union has ever managed to achieve before: to
obtain a national agreement on its own, without the regime unions;
and, what is more, to obtain a signed agreement that improves
workers’ conditions in the midst of an economic crisis in which
agreements in all other sectors have agreed to worse conditions.
How has it
been possible to achieve this result?
The first
reason is the workers themselves. These workers, mainly immigrants
(although there are also some Italians), want to fight, are ready to
go out on strike and hold out, to picket, and fight the police.
They belong
to that part of the Italian working class whose conditions are worst.
So the SI
Cobas achieved a success because it organise workers’ energies
effectively; an already existing workers’ strength and energy.
Our direct
experience in Turin in the CAAT (agroindustrial market) confirms this
view: the SI Cobas’ militant just went up to the entrance of CAAT
and gave flyers to the workers.
Many workers
stopped to speak with these militants because they were fed up with
their awful working conditions. A spontaneous meeting took place.
Then a
meeting in the SI Cobas headquarters was organised with some of these
workers and a strike was decided upon. It was May 2014.
After this successful strike (involving clashes with the police) a
group of about 40/50 workers of CAAT began to attend meetings at the
SI Cobas HQ on a regular basis and affiliated to this union.
But why did
SI Cobas achieve this result and not the other Italian R&F
unions? That is the
question!
Also after
the SI Cobas began to spread in the logistics sector (in 2010),
showing that it was possible to organize a working class fight there,
the other R&F unions somehow weren’t able to keep up with it, to
do the same.
We think the
reason is that the SI Cobas has been ready to organize really
determined strikes, with picket lines, as opposed to what the other
R&F unions have been doing, which is saying they want to organise
workers struggles but being too frightened to actual do it.
The strikes
organized by the SI Cobas really get results. In some
warehouses workers improved their really awful conditions. These
workers began to talk about these achievements with their friends. And
thus SI
Cobas began to spread. Workers go
to SI Cobas and explain their problems. The SI Cobas
sends a letter to the company, but usually the company doesn’t reply
to a union it doesn’t recognize. So the SI
Cobas organises a strike with a picket line. The SI Cobas
attempts to organise the picket line not just with the workers of the
particular company but with workers of other companies, to build
class unity, to lend more strength to the picket line.
But there is
not always a happy ending! Sometimes the strike is won and the SI
Cobas is recognised by the company and a satisfactory agreement is
signed.
But more
often than not the companies, once the agreement is signed, fire the
workers organised in the SI Cobas.
For this
reason SI Cobas has organised a number of fights against these
layoffs. Some times
it has won. Sometimes not.
To support
these fights the SI Cobas has created a fund so it can give money to
the workers who have been fired, but this has created financial
problems.
Another
problem is about the nature of the national agreement achieved this
February. It is a
success as far as the economic part is concerned: workers improve
their conditions with it. But the
agreement also includes a section that limits the freedom to strike.
That,
clearly, is a compromise. And we
aren’t necessarily against certain compromises. But not all
compromises are acceptable.
We need to
know more about the situation.
Linked to
these two problems – the financial one and the issue of compromises –
is the question of the way workers’ pay their monthly subscription to
the union. This is the well known question of the DELEGA.
The SI Cobas
is certainly different from other R&F unions in terms of its
readiness to take strike action, etc – as we have tried to explain –
but is not so different as regards ’the delega’: it too wants to
utilize this facility, the payment of the monthly quota through the
company.
So there are
two problems:
1) the
companies know who is affiliated to the SI Cobas and therefore know
who to fire; as they have done on many occasions;
2) there are
some companies that won’t pay organisation the collection of union
dues through the Delega system..
On the 1st,
2nd and 3rd May there will be the first national congress of SI
Cobas.
