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
Contents:
1. - The Struggle of the Cadiz
Metalworkers Shows the Way to Fight Attempts at Further
Exploitation 2. - Strike at the Container Port
of Piraeus/Athens: A death foretold - Our struggle is for all workers - COSCO is forced to come to terms - A fourth dock 3. - Karachi, A Capitalist Hell: The new agreement with China - Capitalism dominates in Karachi - Expropriation - The destruction of proletarian neighborhoods - The whole city is suffering - The necessity of Communism 4. - The
Class Origins of the Mapuche Insurgency in Chile - Only
Workers’ Struggles Can Free Native Peoples From Oppression: Economic Origins of the Conflict - The Course of Events - Foquismo Has Done Nothing For Native Workers - Militarization Against “Native Rebellions” Is Not Limited to Chile - Only Workers’ Struggle Can Free the Native Laborers from their Oppression 5. - The National Strike of ex-ILVA
and Piombino steelworkers: For a Class Union Line - For
United Action by the Combative Unions
The Struggle of the Cadiz Metalworkers Shows the Way
to Fight Attempts at Further Exploitation
Since
Tuesday, November 16, metalworkers in the Bay of Cadiz, in the south of
Spain on the Atlantic coast, have been on a major strike, one of the
toughest in recent Spanish working class history.
A bourgeois
commentator, in the editorial of a local newspaper in the city, compared
it to the strike in the shipyards that took place 45 years ago, lamenting
– according to the silly ideology of his social class – how the city would
be stuck in the 19th century.
The
bourgeoisie is lulled into the illusion of an eternal social peace and
cannot admit that the class struggle arises from the social relationship
between Capital and wage labor, does not belong only to the past of
capitalism but to its present and will determine its future fate. It is
enough to observe the wave of strikes that has crossed the United States
in recent months to deny the thesis that the most advanced national
capitalisms have definitively overcome the class struggle.
The strike
originates from the loss of purchasing power of workers’ wages in the last
ten years, aggravated by the rise in inflation in recent weeks, and in
this context from the negotiations for the renewal of the provincial
collective agreement, expired December 31, 2020, between the employers’
association of small and medium companies – the Femca – with the regime
unions – the Comisiones Obreras (CCOO) and the Union General del Trabajo
(UGT) – broken by the employers at the end of October.
Of the
approximately 27,000 metalworkers in the province, 70% work on temporary
contracts. These receive a salary on average 1,500 euros less annually
than workers with fixed, permanent contracts.
The former
work mainly in small and medium-sized companies that work as contractors
for large companies in the area, such as the three Navantia shipyards in
Cadiz, Puerto Real and San Fernando, Airbus, Dragados, whose direct
employees are instead mostly hired on permanent contracts, with relatively
better employment conditions, defined in company contracts. Negotiations
for the renewal of the provincial contract therefore involve only the
employers’ association of small and medium enterprises – the Femca – and
not the large companies involved.
A first
demonstration was called by CCOO and UGT on October 21 in front of the
Femca headquarters.
A few days
later a minority union present among the metalworkers in Cadiz, the
Coordination of Metalworkers (Coordinadora de Trabajadores del Metal –
CTM) – formed in March 2020 – denounced the exploitative conditions in the
Navantia shipyards in Cadiz and Puerto Real, which in recent months have
resumed work at full capacity acquiring orders for the repair of large
cruise ships, employing about 1400 workers, most of them employees of
small and medium-sized companies, many of them working up to 12 hours a
day, seven days a week. The labor employment system appears similar to
that of shipyards in Italy, where most of the workers are not direct
employees of Fincantieri which, like Navantia, is a State-owned company.
This should dispel any doubts about the presumed goodness of the claim of
nationalization, in Italy contested by the majority of combative unionism.
CTM also
denounced the employers’ black list, i.e., the list of workers undesirable
because of their union militancy, with dozens of expulsions from their
jobs, forced to emigrate, with the hiring supported by the CCOO and UGT,
and claimed to oppose this a Labor Exchange, i.e., a list of workers to be
hired according to non-discriminatory criteria managed by the unions.
At the end of
October, the employer Femca broke off negotiations for the renewal of the
provincial contract. CTM – which claims to be fighting for class unionism
– called for a general assembly of metalworkers by the unions CCOO and
UGT, in order to let the workers know the progress of the negotiations and
not conduct it behind their backs. Also according to the CTM, the CCOO and
UGT organize less than 20% of temporary metalworkers.
CCOO and UGT,
in response to the breakup of Femca, have called a two days-long strike on
October 9 and 10, which CTM, without obviously revoking its criticism of
these regime unions, has correctly indicated to adhere to, as a sign of
the unity of action of the workers in the union struggle.
Another
minority union active among metalworkers in the province of Cádiz is the
General Confederation of Labor (Confederacion Generale del Trabajo – CGT),
a historically anarcho-syndicalist’s organization present because of its
presence, for example, in the Airbus plant and in a contractor company of
Dragados.
The two-day
strike was a success, with thousands of workers crossing Cadiz in a
compact and fierce procession. The strike also affected Algeciras –
another town in the province of Cadiz, on the Strait of Gibraltar –
stopping companies in the port and the Acerinox steel mills, which employ
about two thousand workers. This showed the degree of the workers’ anger
and their willingness to fight.
It was this
pressure from below that led CCOO and UGT to call an indefinite strike, as
mentioned above, starting on November 16, the course of which confirmed
its inevitability, which the regime’s unions went along with in order to
avoid losing control of the workers.
The claims
made by CCOO and UGT were for a wage increase of 2% for 2021, 2.5% for
2022 and 3% for 2023, against the bosses’ proposal of 1.5% for each of the
three years and only with an increase in productivity.
From the
first day of the strike and for the next ten days, the workers had to face
the action of the police who attacked the workers on the picket lines in
front of the factories and even in the workers’ quarters, firing tear gas,
rubber bullets and using an armored car to break through the barricades
set up by the workers.
This is the
response of the Spanish center-left government, formed by the Spanish
Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), Podemos, the Socialist Party of Catalonia
and the United Left, and which has called itself "the most progressive
government in the history" of Spain.
Evidently it
is the response of a bourgeois government in defense of the interests of
the bosses threatened by an actual strike and terrified by the possibility
that the workers’ struggle could spread to the other provinces and
autonomous regions of the country.
For his part,
Enrique Santiago, Secretary of State for the "Agenda 2030" and Secretary
General of the Spanish "Communist" Party (PCE) – which is part of Podemos
and is therefore in the government with two ministers, including that of
labor – had the gall to ask the workers to return to work and to "have
confidence in the work being done by the government"!
Among the
various factors that contribute to the division of the working class in
Spain, it should be noted that in this country, unlike in Italy – where
for years there has been an effort to empty them out – there are no
national labor contracts, but rather provincial contracts. Which is to
say, not even regional contracts, as happens in federal Germany, in the
various Länders. Employers and trade unions of the regime take care to
conduct negotiations, and strikes, for the renewal of provincial contracts
with a time lag, in order to avoid the risk of workers’ unity.
This
territorial division – into provinces – of the working class, is
reinforced by the historical regionalist division of the Iberian country,
sanctioned by the 1978 constitution that gave rise to the autonomous
regions.
Autonomism,
regionalism and localism are the workhorses of the radical bourgeois left
and Spanish opportunism, which they counterpose against the centralism of
the bourgeois right, in a game of parties in which the interest of the
working class, which is to unify its action, its organizations, its
working conditions, at the national and international level, is lost.
For example,
in the face of the repressive action of the Spanish bourgeois State, the
mayor of Cádiz – elected in the lists of Adelante Cadiz, a political
formation of the radical left – has defended the strikers, as an enemy of
the central government in Madrid, taking advantage of the opposition
between the territory of Cádiz and Madrid, putting in the background the
social reality of the opposition between the social classes, working class
and bourgeois, for the one between the central State and the local
population. They were careful not to point out the only way that could
help the metalworkers in their struggle is, in fact, not solidarity in
words calling for an end to police repression, which in fact continued,
but the extension of the strike to other working class in the rest of the
province and the throughout the country.
Even the
alternative unions, such as CTM and CGT, do not seem to have freed
themselves from these ideological shackles of opportunism, if their common
manifesto for a demonstration in support of the strike on Saturday,
November 19, called for participation in the name of the "Defense of the
Industry of Cadiz", instead of in defense of the working class and its
unity, in Spain and internationally.
One of the
weaknesses of the strike, in addition to the fundamental one that it was
not extended to other sectors of workers and provinces, was that the
direct employees of large contractors did not join the strike. CCOO and
UGT were careful not to promote such actions, always hiding behind the
fact that the conditions of employment of these workers are not defined in
the provincial contract but in company contracts. In other words, they
sanctioned the divisions among workers, a benefit to the bosses, with
their union action.
A strong
point of the strike, however, was the solidarity received from the working
class in the city and the province – with demonstrations in Seville as
well – which could not materialize in a city or regional general strike
because of the lack of a sufficiently strong class union organization.
The pickets
and clashes between workers and police were joined by young proletarians
and the unemployed, in a province with one of the highest unemployment
rates in the country, about 23%. The contractual precariousness, which as
mentioned concerns about 70% of the metalworkers in the province, a
powerful weapon of blackmail by the employers in order to better exploit
the workers, in the strike turned into a factor in favor of the workers’
struggle, leading to the involvement of not only of the contingently
employed workers but also of those temporarily unemployed, all aware of
the fact that precisely because of the uncertainty of employment, and
therefore of wages, a strong increase in wages is even more necessary and
vital for the survival of working class families. The contractual
precariousness, in perspective, will end up giving strikes the character
of a revolt, as we have seen in the 10 days of proletarian struggle in
Cadiz!
On the 10th
day of the strike, Thursday, November 25, in a meeting that began in the
evening and ended at night, CCOO, UGT and Femca finally reached an
agreement for a 2% increase for each year. Without waiting for it to be
presented and sanctioned or rejected by workers’ assemblies, they called
off the strike the next morning. The CMT and CGT were immediately opposed
and called for the continuation of the struggle, but this only happened in
a couple of companies. They then denounced how in many companies there
were no votes to approve the agreement, due to the simple fact that the
two unions of the regime have no affiliated workers.
The agreement
signed is a middle ground between the initial proposal of the employers
(1.5%) and the demands of CCOO and UGT. It is a small breath of fresh air
for the workers but does not appear satisfactory given the strength of the
struggle.
The strike
was in any case a great example for all workers, it gave morale to the
forces of confrontational unionism in the struggle to free the working
class in Spain and in every country from the control of regime unionism
and to rebuild the class unions!
Strike at the Container Port of Piraeus/Athens
In 2009,
taking advantage of Greece’s financial difficulties, in order to repay its
debts and avoid default, the Chinese State-owned group Cosco obtained a
35-year concession from the government to manage two of the three
terminals of the Port of Piraeus (Athens). The Port Authority, which is
publicly owned, continued to ensure the operation and management of
Terminal I.
In 2016, under
the Syriza government, Cosco purchased 51% of the entire Piraeus Port
Authority (PPA), for €280 million, thus taking over the port; in 2021,
under the New Democracy government, it purchased another 16% of the PPA.
The Chinese
government thus secured control of the port until 2052. Beijing is intent
on further expansion and aims to build a fourth container terminal, even
if the local authorities show a certain impatience with these increasingly
invasive projects, such as the one for the construction of four luxury
hotels within the port area.
The arrival of
Chinese capital has led to a remarkable development of the port: in 2009
it handled less than 700,000 20-foot containers (TEU); in 2014 it handled
3.6 million, in 2019 4.9 million and in 2020 5.4 million.
When Chinese
President Xi Jinping visited Athens in 2019, along with Greek government
head Mitsotakis, they celebrated the collaboration between the two States
and declared that the project would lead to the creation of thousands of
jobs; in fact, Cosco already employs 2,500 workers but plans to hire, both
directly and through subcontracters, another 3,000 each year for a total
of about 10,000.
However,
behind the official toasts, the harsh reality is that the new bosses have
invested capital to increase the port’s activity, but not so much in the
safety of the workers, aiming instead to increase their exploitation,
often subjected to blackmail of precarious work or subcontracting to force
them to accept extremely harsh working conditions.
A death foretold
On October 25,
at Pier II, a 46-year-old dock worker was cut in two by the movement of a
bridge crane. According to the Container Handling Workers’ Union (ENEDEP),
the accident tragically demonstrated the shortcomings in safety
precautions and a strike was immediately called.
The next day
the workers, gathered in a plenary meeting, called a new 24-hour strike,
demanding a meeting with the bosses of China Ocean Shipping Company. But,
arriving at the COSCO Offices, they found the gates closed. The fence did
not stop them. Shouting "enough with the blood of workers shed for the
profits of shipowners", "we have lost a fellow worker not an animal", a
gate was torn down and the dockers, increasingly determined, gathered in
the courtyard in front of the building until they were received by
representatives of the Company. The meeting, however, served no purpose
other than to put down on paper the simple and more than legitimate
demands of the workers:
- an increase
in personnel: teams of six dockers instead of the current four;
- an end to
12-hour shifts and double shifts, i.e. two full shifts with only eight
hours rest in a single day;
- the
conversion of all fixed-term contracts into open-ended contracts;
- the
creation of a workers’ health and safety monitoring body that includes the
workers themselves.
After the
meeting, reaffirming the complete success of the strike and the decision
to continue the struggle until their demands are fully achieved, the union
president added "It is our duty to continue the struggle. We warn the
employer and the government that if they send repressive forces and touch
a striking worker, they will see containers floating in the Gulf of
Thessaloniki".
Recall that
the Greek government only a few weeks ago passed a new law against trade
unions and the right to strike ("Passes also in Greece, in the impotence
of trade unions, a new serious attack on the working class").
Our struggle is for all workers
On Thursday,
on the fourth day of the strike, there was a large motorized march of the
strikers that crossed all of Piraeus and reached Korai Square where
hundreds of workers, including those of other categories, were already
waiting. Again the president of the ENEDEP union spoke, saying that the
death of their comrade was foreseeable given the complete lack of the most
elementary safety measures in the port. He denounced how the bosses,
shipowners, businessmen, and political authorities, who fight and compete
with each other when it comes to sharing profits, in the face of this
murder have all united to cover up the responsibility, in defense of their
common interest, which is the exploitation of workers.
On Saturday,
the Union sent a message to the crews of the ships anchored in the port
waiting to be unloaded: "The striking port workers turn to you. Six days
ago, one of our comrades was killed in a work accident. This happened
because of the lack of safety measures. We are on strike for our right to
work, for safety measures and for a collective agreement. Your solidarity
is our most important ally in our struggle. Ours is a struggle for all
workers".
The union,
after several meetings with the Company and government representatives,
decided to resume work on Monday, November 1, but maintained its
mobilization and declared a 48-hour strike for Friday, November 5 and
Saturday, November 6.
COSCO is forced to come to terms
At this point,
in the evening of Thursday, Cosco, faced with the firmness and
determination of the workers, changed its ind and came to an agreement: in
a letter to the union it declared itself willing to accept the increase
from 4 to 5 of workers on the loading and unloading groups, the abolition
of double shifts, the establishment of a joint committee for health and
safety with the participation of technicians and doctors, workers’
representatives and a European certification body.
Cosco’s
acceptance of a significant portion of the union’s demands, after its
initial total closure, allowed union leaders to cry victory. The 48-hour
strike already called has been withdrawn. The mobilization continues to
force Cosco to adhere to the national labor contract and transform
temporary contracts into full-time contracts.
It is
interesting that these workers, who belong to a trade union and not to a
company union, a union that is therefore more prone to express corporative
positions, have instead conducted the struggle in an exemplary manner on a
class level, without giving in to nationalist or racist temptations, like
some self-styled extreme left wing party that had called for the
"expulsion of the Chinese" and the nationalization of the port!
The head of
the ENEDEP union reiterated in his speech in front of hundreds of striking
workers that the bosses are all taking the same approach towards the
workers, and are all united in the defense of their profits. The workers
must do the same, always seeking maximum unity in their struggles for the
defense of their living and working conditions, opposing the conciliation
policy of the leadership of their unions with the State and the bosses.
This strike
had a partially positive outcome not only because of the determination of
the workers, exasperated by particularly harsh conditions, but also
because they are located at a strategic point for the functioning of the
apparatus of capitalism and the bosses evaluated that it was less costly
to give in to part of their demands rather than risk seeing port closures
at Christmas time.
Workers do not
always fight under these conditions and often do not receive the
solidarity of other companies and other categories, which is essential to
ensure a successful outcome of the battle. This coordination, this search
for unity in the struggle is the task of the confederal union. That is why
it is so important for workers to be able to equip themselves with union
organizations devoted to the defense of their class interests.
Even port
workers, despite their crucial role in the capitalist system of
production, are increasingly competing with workers in other ports, both
national and from neighboring countries. For this reason, even for this
category, it is urgent and necessary to weave an international union
network, to unite them between different ports and countries, and prevent
them from being divided by capitalist competition for the sole benefit of
corporate profits.
For this
reason, dockers should avoid the trap of opportunism, which locks them
into a national vision of their problems, deluding them into thinking that
they can find protection from exploitation under the umbrella of the
bourgeois State, invoking the defense of "national ports", perhaps through
nationalization. This is a bankrupt path, an economic nationalism that
paves the way for political nationalism, and it is a path that goes in the
opposite direction to that of international workers’ unity.
A fourth dock
After the
strike, however, Cosco went on the offensive immediately trying to create
rumors of a crisis in the port: "The numbers of October are indicative – writes the website Capital.gr – according to Cosco, terminals II and III
only moved a total of 364.4 thousand containers, compared to 407.2
thousand containers in October last year, a decrease of 10.5%. But this
decline is due to the six-day strike! "When 11,000-12,000 moves are made
on a daily basis, even one day of inactivity creates serious problems", they observe.
Cosco’s
complaints have a specific purpose: it intends to return to ask for the
concession to build a fourth terminal, not caring about the protests of
the population of the area already suffering from heavy problems of
pollution, noise, traffic, etc. What is important for the bosses is that
the new terminal will increase the capacity of Piraeus by more than 11
million containers per year, with related profits!
Karachi: A capitalist hell
The new agreement with China
In the
increasingly close synergies between Chinese imperialism and Pakistan, a
memorandum of understanding was signed for the development of the Karachi
port, Capital of Sindh province, in the south-east of the country, along
the eastern coast of the Arabian sea. Chinese firms are to build new
berths, a commercial area in the port and a bridge connecting the city to
the nearby Manora Islands. These projects are part of the China-Pakistan
Economic corridor (CPEC), which today represents the most important plan
of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the new strategic Silk Road, vital
for Chinese imperialism, an access point to the Indian Ocean which
provides an alternative route circumventing that of Straits of Malacca and
the Sunda, garrisoned by the United States. Chinese capital invested in
the Pakistani metropolis would create the premises for a new route, which
would add to or replace the current one, which today connects the Chinese
region of Xinjiang to the area of Gwadar, in Balochistan, though today
considered a region of problem by Beijing for having inadequate
infrastructure and political instability.
In a message
circulated on social media, the current prime minister Imran Khan
commented: ‘’ This project will cleanup marine habitat for fisherman,
develop low-income housing units, present opportunities for investors and
bring Karachi on par with developed port cities’’. The truth is, if there
will be benefits, it will be only for the bloodsuckers of capital, for the
dominant Chinese and Pakistani classes, all on the backs of the exploited
classes in a city that is already battered by the vicious effects of
capitalism.
Capitalism dominates in Karachi
Karachi,
Pakistan’s first port, is its largest city, among the most populous in the
world. For decades, having a fairly well-developed industrial sector in
various areas, which includes textile, automotive, energy, pharmaceutical
and steel sectors.
In 1947, the
year of the independence of the Islamic Republic and the division of the
Indian Republic, the city had 450,000 inhabitants, a census conducted in
2017 revealed a population of 16 million, growing at a dramatic pace and
today probably close to 20 million.
Ever-increasing
skyscrapers
and minarets are surrounded by an immense series of shanty-towns, about
600, which make up a large part of the city. According to a recent
international study, more than half of Karachi’s inhabitants reside in
katchi abadis, chaotic clusters of buildings, illegal, unauthorized by the
local administrations, made up of bricks, rarely cement, which have partly
replaced the Jhuggis, houses made with mud, make-shift materials,
sheet-metal and plastic. Millions of people live in these slums, which
cover a huge portion of the city, in overcrowded, suffocating
circumstances, surrounded by violence and crime. Waste-water often flows
openly, there is no access to sanitation services and drinking water. The
water provided to these settlements is often contaminated with fecal
matter, toxic agricultural chemicals and industrial waste. Every year
water-borne diseases kill tens of thousands of people in Karachi alone,
particularly infants and children, in extreme poverty and glaring
malnutrition.
However,
because the city is industrially developed, it continues to attract a
great number of rural people in search of a salary. Arriving from nearby
abandoned villages or the less capitalistically developed areas of the
country. Those arriving in the city are often destined to magnify these
shantytowns.
The problem of
housing in the city was striking after the independence, with the arrival
of hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees from the new India. But,
especially during the 60’s the katchi abadis would skyrocket, when the
Ayub Khan military regime sought to throw the working class to the
periphery of the city.
Those who
arrive in the city today and can’t find work, go to enlarge the
lumpenproletariat, which survives by searching inside garbage that invades
drainage channels, others by begging for rupees on pavements. But most
join the ranks of proletarians, offering themselves as laborers for
low-wages or in industry or the service sector. Some move to Gadani, a few
kilometers from Karachi, where, in a hellish landscape, decommissioned
ships from all over the world are demolished, pushed onto the shore, with
mutilation and daily deaths.
Just as has
happened in other Asian metropolises, which massively increased in size in
the last three decades, Karachi has been incapable of solving the housing
demand. Some studies estimate that the demand for housing in Karachi’s
urban areas is three times the supply. The enormous growth in population
has made building space scarce and very expensive. This is the scenario,
filled with the internal contradictions of the capitalist system.
Expropriation
Some areas are
expropriated to extract surplus value for the lucrative real-estate and
infrastructure sector.
It is
estimated, that in all of Pakistan half of the peasants are landless. The
proletarianization of the peasant class is still progressing, in a slow
process, as it has happened in various regions of India. Modern
agriculture often exists next to enduring class relationships and archaic
methods of working, peasants owning small lots, settlers, sharecroppers
etc.
This is in
part, a consequence of the conditions in which the bourgeoisie of the
nascent independent States found themselves in after taking power, having
primarily put financial resources to develop the national industrial
sector. There was however a pressing need to provide subsistence for the
enormous peasant population. In a delicate balancing act, the national
bourgeoisie, if on the one hand issued reforms to the agricultural sector
in order to modernize the countryside so as to make it attractive for
capital, on the other could not attack the landed-aristocracy, which arose
with the arrival of the British, as it kept the endless peasantry in
submission and maintained social peace, thanks to the old but useful
caste, ethnic, tribal, and religious superstructures.
The
uncontrollable growth of Capitalism therefore poses increasingly
contradictory issues, what we describe well in our article crisis and
pandemic-ridden India- between peasant protests and workers strikes
Nell’India flagellata dalla crisi e dalla pandemia – Tra proteste
contadine e scioperi operai, in il Partito Comunista n.407, which
describes the current peasant revolts in India.
As the city
has continued to develop, recently, there has been an intensification in
expropriation for real-estate development, of land that is already in
agricultural use. For this, small land-owning peasants are forced to sell
their lands, often by intimidation from thugs, but also with the
complicity, and sometimes help of the local government and police. The
landed-aristocracy which exploits and oppresses the peasant work force,
controls The People’s Party, which today is in power in the city and all
of Sindh. Most of these lands are villages destined to be demolished
having been given the green light to evictions.
The
composition of those that work on these lands is varied, there are
seasonal laborers, often migrants, but especially middle-classes,
share-croppers, settlers, tenants of landowners, who generally demand more
than the 50/50 ratio: more than half of the harvest is delivered to the
land-owner, with the tenant, hari, bearing the costs of providing the
machinery, planting, irrigation and more, for which loans have to be
taken, which are often taken from the land-owners themselves, putting them
in a never-ending cycle of debt.
The usual
scenario looks like this. The village is visited by officials and
engineers from the real-estate companies, accompanied by squads and the
police; the peasants are informed that their lands have been acquired and
that they must leave; immediately they are threatened, any resistance is
dealt with brutal violence, those who continue to resist are imprisoned
and frequently killed. Soon the machinery arrives to flatten everything
and make place for new construction. All taking place under the watchful
eye of the local police.
One case of
police brutality belongs to the name of Rao Anwar, ex-chief of police of
the Malir district in Karachi, in cahoots with the real-estate companies,
on the payroll of the underworld, accused of ordering the murder of 444
people between the period of 2011 and 2018 in 745 “interrogations” during
which small salaried peasants and the petty-bourgeoisie were tortured and
subsequently killed. All over Pakistan, workers and poor peasants are
abducted by the police for the purposes of extortion, blackmail,
intimidation or simply to restore class order.
Besides the
destruction of entire rural villages, huge amounts of sand and gravel are
taken from riverbeds for the construction of real-estate property units,
transforming the surrounding lands into monstrous wastelands, with
devastating effects on some “national parks” as that of Kirthar. These
excavations have reduced the water-table, worsening the conditions of many
peasants, dependent on the monsoon rains and tightly squeezed by debt.
It is in this
situation, Sindhi nationalist parties have found fertile ground, managing
to mask these needs of capital as a war between Sindhi locals and
Mujahirs, the Urdu-speaking migrant population which arrived from India
after the independence and the partition.
The destruction of proletarian neighborhoods
Urban areas
are also destined to be expropriated, where not only the
lumpen-proletariat and the petty-bourgeoisie live, but also the
proletarians that work in large industry or service. The gutting of entire
neighborhoods has been underway for several decades. Already in 1975 4,200
houses were demolished, with no compensation. In a suburb of Karachi – Bahria – the State had permitted the Bahria town society group to acquire
16,000 acres of land, but then “realized” that 46,000 acres of land had
been occupied under “irregular” purchase conditions.
It is however;
from the new millennium that this process has accelerated. From 2002 to
2008, 77,000 housings were destroyed to make space for the construction of
the Lyari express-way, of which only 30,000 were compensated with the
meagre sum of 30 thousand rupees. In 2014 more than 14,000 homes were
demolished in Gujjar nala under the pretext of reducing risk of flooding.
Finally, the
on-going demolishment of housing in the famous Orangi district. Formed
during 1947 with the arrival of refugees from new India, when the
government permitted groups of emigrants to settle freely on some
State-land. Today, this massive informal settlement is a beehive in which
over a million people live, extending to an area of 22 kilometers. It is
Karachi’s largest slum, as well as Asia’s largest and most densely
populated.
As the years
passed, a part of this area was recognized as an administrative district.
With the arrival of refugees from Bangladesh in 1971, year of independence
of the former East Pakistan, and the subsequent uncontrolled growth of the
city, Orangi town grew astronomically, with no administrative approval.
Today, many workers live there, providing cheap-labor to the industrial
districts of the city.
The whole city is suffering
Real-estate
development is currently underway on a hilly part, in the north of the
city. Reckless demolitions have attacked geological formations crossed by
natural drainage canals, channels and water collection depressions. When
it rains, downstream areas, like the district of Saadi, are flooded by the
water that runs off the hills and, in the event of heavy-rainfall, is
channeled into the precarious sewage system, flooding the streets with
sewage. Last year in August, three days of monsoon rains flooded majority
of the metropolis, cars and houses were carried away by flood water, there
were many landslides, over a hundred drowned or electrocuted, thousands
displaced. Protests were carried out in various parts of the city.
In 2003, 484
died throughout the province. These tragedies occur in various
neighborhoods but particularly where the poor-classes reside, where
outlets to the sea for water to dispose have been interrupted or greatly
reduced.
A city as huge
as Karachi only has two authorized landfills operated by the city
administration. The greater part of garbage is thus placed in numerous
areas of unofficial garbage collection, which have supplied a recycling
industry where contractors hire youth, primarily of Afghan origin, for
collecting all recyclable material. The rest is either burned or abandoned
waiting for the next flood.
All the
bourgeoisie parties nested in the local administrations, territorial
appendages of the administrative structure of the State, if they are ever
occupied with the floods affecting the metropolis for decades, it is only
during elections, with lies and phony promises.
Partial urban
reforms, even if put into practice, would solve little; being unable to
confront the root of the problem: The social relation of capital with
terrain. Capitalism will never be able to definitively solve problems of
such magnitude, which are obviously not only exclusive to metropolises.
The necessity of Communism
Capitalism is
a catastrophe for a large part of humanity and Karachi is a crystalline
example. A senseless capitalist urbanism where overcrowding and the
impossibility of living are a given, a constant general for this social
system which no longer has any progressive role for history, a tentacular
monster that suffocates mankind in an oppressive grip.
Karachi, like
other metropolises, expresses the urgent need of the post-revolutionary
communist program, which will provide for the gradual elimination of the
antagonism between the city and countryside by creating a uniform network
of connections on a world level with a re-distribution of the population
throughout all territory. Certainly, not a simple work, it will be up to
the future generations, which will however be made easier for them by
living in a world free from profit, permanently restoring a healthy and
organic equilibrium between land, water, animals and man, today widely
altered and violated.
This is how we
concluded our article – Space versus cement – which appeared in our
journal then, the Communist Program (Il Programma Comunista), n.1 of 1953:
"Urban and
productive agglomeration thus persists not for the sake of the best
possible way of producing things, but to maintain the profit economy and
the social dictatorship of capital. When it will be possible, after having
forcibly crushed this dictatorship which becomes more obscene by the day,
in order to subordinate every solution and every plan to the improvement
of the conditions of living labor, creating for this purpose what is dead
labor, constant capital, the furnishings that the human species has given
over the centuries and continues to give to the crust of the earth, then
the vulgar verticalism of the concrete monstrosities will be derided and
forcibly repressed, and for the immense horizontal expanses of space, once
the gigantic cities have been dispersed, the strength and intelligence of
the man-animal will progressively tend to make the density of life and the
density of work uniform on less hospitable lands as well, as they would
then be equals and not, as in today’s deformed civilization, fiercely
hostile to one another and only held together by the specter of servitude
and hunger".
Karachi is
there to describe to us that in the world of capital, there exists no
limit to the exploitation of man on man and that in the kingdom of the
market, useless and harmful abuse of natural resources is a cornerstone of
the structure of capitalism and its blind drive for profit.
But it will
not be the men of good conscience who can solve these terrible infamies.
Only the proletarian class, united above religions and races, will have
the possibility of standing against the ruling classes. Only the
proletarian classes of Pakistan and India, China and America, standing
above nationalities, can prevent the course which today is heading towards
a new world war catastrophe. Only the proletariat of the entire world,
directed by their revolutionary party, will be able to fight for a new
form of social organization – Communism – a classless society, without the
separation between means of production and land from work, a society of
the species, actually capable of solving the needs of man.
But the
proletariat can never be ready for this final goal without adequate
training in the struggle between the classes. Becoming more and more
autonomous, it will have to go back to recognizing itself as a distinct
social class, equipping itself with sincere and combative trade union
organizations, the only ones which will be able to start defending it from
the continuous attacks of the bosses and all their States.
Only Workers’ Struggles Can Free Native Peoples from Oppression
The Class Origins of the Mapuche Insurgency in Chile
The Mapuche
are the biggest indigenous group in Chile, with around 1.7 million Mapuche
in the country, comprising 84% of the Chilean indigenous population and
around 9% of the country’s population of 19 million. Most Mapuche people
have moved to the cities, mainly Concepción, Temuco and Santiago, but they
originate from the Southern Zone of Chile, especially Biobío and La
Araucanía, where many live in poverty. These zones are known as hotspots
of political violence between Mapuche guerrilla groups and the terrorist
forces of the bourgeois regime.
The Mapuche
insurgency, which has been going on for a while, has once again exploded
in a shocking way, escalating to gun battles for the first time amidst the
general background of State terrorism on the behalf of the farming and
logging companies which systematically take land from impoverished Mapuche
laborers in their lands.
Economic Origins of the Conflict
Never
subjugated by the Incas, the tribal society of the Mapuche remained
independent right up to the late nineteenth century. War and trade were
the main relationships between the Mapuche and Chile and Argentina.
Acquiring horses, the Mapuche resisted conquest and raided Hispanic
settlements. They also traded horses, cattle, textiles and silverware.
Silversmithing, a male occupation, developed from an older tradition of
working in copper once silver was obtained through trade.
In 1881 the
Mapuche were “pacified” by the Chilean army and confined to reservations
like many other indigenous people in bourgeois regimes, but even then,
reservation land continued to be held communally, rather than private
property. This changed as powerful landowners expropriated more land from
them. From the 1930s, land hunger led many Mapuche to migrate to the
cities.
The bourgeois
Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende passed an Indigenous Law and
began restoring Mapuche lands, but this stopped with the Pinochet coup.
During the regime, alongside trade unionists, leftist party members and
militant workers, many Mapuche rights activists were killed and tortured.
But despite
the change from open dictatorship to a democratic facade of bourgeois
dictatorship, nothing has changed, least of all exploitation – Chilean
forestry companies now own and exploit most of the Mapuche land, a
monopoly they enforce with the aforementioned ruthless terrorism, while
the Mapuche themselves live in incredible poverty, earning around 60% less
than the average Chilean, and often without access to potable water or
electricity. As such, this is not a “racial”, “indigenous” revolt as the
bourgeois media likes to paint it in order to hide any class character out
of the events, but a revolt of impoverished rural laborers against capital
and the bourgeois State.
According to
the provisos embedded in Decree 701 (introduced by Pinochet in 1974)
forestry companies today enjoy State subsidies of up to 75%. It is no
coincidence then that two of the biggest forestry corporations, CMPC and
Bosques Arauco, own by themselves over two million hectares while the
Mapuche hold less than 500,000 hectares (and these statistics are based on
conservative estimates).
To keep the
bourgeois dictatorship, hidden behind a democratic facade, safe from
attacks, the State has turned these areas in the Southern Zone into an
outright militarized area: kilometers of eucalyptus and pine plantations
are surrounded by frequent carabinero checkpoints, as well as army tanks
and heavily armed riflemen.
The Course of Events
The
insurgency is not new – the most militant of the Mapuche rights groups
(whose demands range from the return of their ancestral lands to a fully
independent Mapuche State) began a guerrilla campaign of violently
destroying company property back in 1997. The bourgeois regime naturally
calls this “terrorism” and uses the Pinochet-era Anti-Terrorist Law to
allow its terroristic forces, the heavily militarized Special Forces
police, to kill unarmed Mapuche, torture, abuse, fabricate evidence,
detain without trial for months on end, etc. The guerrilla groups, for
their turn, tend to avoid straight gun battles, and tend to stick to the
destruction of company vehicles by lobbing molotov cocktails and
sabotaging machinery. But things have escalated, and are escalating even
now.
The conflict
has moved onto a new stage in 2021: in July there were clashes between the
police and members of the Coordinadora Arauco-Malleco (CAM), a typical
indigenous guerrilla group that fights for an independent Mapuche State,
not unlike the EZLN in Chiapas, Mexico.
In July, a
group of CAM militants set fire to three vehicles belonging to the company
logging on their land – the police answered with fire and killed one of
their militants. According to a CAM member, he was “executed on the spot”.
Rebellion broke out soon afterwards with armed clashes, and in October the
Chilean government declares a state of emergency to restore “order” in
South after serious gun battles, which had been a rarity up to this point.
In early
November there were reports of Mapuche being shot by army-backed police,
as well as reports of a dead child.
The Weichán
Auka Mapu (WAM), a more radical split from the CAM, releases videos of its
militias decked out with full armor and military-grade weaponry such as
assault rifles and semi-automatic pistols.
On 6
November, the police open fire on unarmed Mapuche, injuring a child and
killing a 23 year old man, which led fighting out of the rural south and
into the cities, particularly in Santiago where clashes occurred in
protest over his death.
The CAM and
WAM have upped their armed campaign against the State in the increasingly
violent and still developing insurgency – there are dead on both sides and
the conflict has reached an intensity as of yet unseen.
Foquismo Has Done Nothing for Native Workers
Foquismo, or
focoism, a small concentration or vanguard of guerrilla cadres engaged in
rural paramilitary struggles and inspired by Che Guevara’s insurgent
tactics, has become a mainstay in Latin American struggles since the
victory of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro in Cuba; however, it has brought
absolutely no successes – neither the urban guerrilla revolts in Brazil,
nor any of the Guevara-inspired insurgencies (indeed Guevara himself died
on one such insurgency in Bolivia) nor the “native revolts” that followed
guerrilla lines have led to gains.
Focoism in
this context has taken the role that Bakuninism had in the 19th century
European workers’ movement. To quote Lenin: “What is missing is 1) an
understanding of the causes of exploitation; 2) an understanding of the
development of society, which leads to socialism; 3) an understanding of
the class struggle as the creative force for the realisation of socialism
[...] Anarchism is a product of despair. The psychology of the unsettled
intellectual or the vagabond and not of the proletarian” (Lenin, Socialism
and Anarchism, 1901).
Focoism is
likewise a product of despair, of the exploited, crushed by exploitation
and seeing no way out due to the tragic lack of an organized working
class, to take up arms at once, as the main form of struggle. Knowing that
they are unable to take on State forces, the groups limit themselves to
the forest, to small attacks, not hoping to take down the State that backs
their exploiters but rather engaged in endless hopeless skirmishes,
desperately trying to hold back their exploiters by means of violent but
small attacks, to no avail.
It has not
emancipated native people – it cannot. The supposed “success” of the
Zapatistas in Chiapas is a prime example – in trying to protect the
Tzotzil, who have been exploited and repressed violently for centuries,
all it did was lock itself in the most remote parts of the jungle engaged
in a sterile struggle with its opponent while allowing the Mexican State
to lead its death squads right onto Acteal and execute its horrendous
massacre that left 45 dead, while the EZLN remained barricaded and
impotent to help.
After such a
loss, all that came from the naive reformist group was, essentially,
municipal self-management for Chiapas, which does not harm the bourgeoisie
or ease the exploitation of the natives any less and it’s something that
the experienced Mexican government knows full well it could end at any
moment should it so choose to. And they have.
Militarization Against “Native Rebellions” Is not
Limited to Chile
The increased
militarization of the security forces fighting against the Mapuche
insurgents is not exclusive to Chile, but rather an example in a general
trend in South America.
On October 18
the Ecuadoran government decreed a 60-day state of emergency, ostensibly
to combat drug trafficking, in reality to repress the ongoing protests and
strikes. The Government deployed the Armed Forces in the streets to
support the police. Indigenous organizations, which have led to the
collapse of two governments this century, carried out protests, including
roadblocks. Skirmishes between the natives and the police ensued. The
President called for dialogue and rolled back the increase in fuel prices
in reaction to the native and proletarian unrest, which for the moment is
still rooted in class demands.
In Guatemala,
on the 17th of November, the police set fire to homes of Maya Q’eqchi’
families in El Estor, as part of a State siege targeting indigenous
communities resisting palm oil plantations and a nickel mine. This was
after the heavily militarized police carried out more than 40 raids and 60
arrests and the government declared a 30-day state of emergency.
Everywhere
the struggle is the same – that of native laborers who need their land to
work and live off of, and who know that exploitation of their lands by
capital can only bring unbearable exploitation. Just as the struggle is
the same everywhere, so is the enemy – Capital and the bourgeois State,
and their repression and exploitation of workers.
Only
Workers’ Struggle Can Free the Native Laborers from their Oppression
It can never
be on the terrain of democratic compromises, no matter how many acts of
guerrilla violence are backing it, that the oppressed and exploited will
liberate themselves, and this is true of Latin American natives, violently
exploited for centuries, as well.
The Mapuche
people, as well as all who are exploited, can not put their hopes for
liberation on small armed struggles and even less on the opportunists that
court democracy, but only on a truly revolutionary party that organizes
the workers and exploited on all levels, which can link up the urban
workers’ struggles with the rural workers’ and natives’ struggles in order
to bring down the bourgeois dictatorship that oppresses them.
In the 2019
protests, the rioting and striking Chilean proletariat managed, through
its own hands and violence (rather than democracy!), to wrest significant
concessions from the government: an increase in the minimum wage from
310,000 to 350,000 pesos, 20% increase in basic retirement pensions
allowance, and the cancellation of the recent increase of 9.2% in
electricity tariffs. The government had acted in the same terroristic way
it does towards the natives. It did this by fighting for classist demands.
During the
protests, many protesters flew the Mapuche flag as opposition to the
government. But while the urban Mapuche workers certainly scored a victory
by acting along with the entire working class, no concessions were made to
the rural natives in the Southern Zone. This is because the Mapuche
movement does not have any links to the workers’ movement. From this, the
path to take is clear – uniting the rural and the urban struggles as one
single workers’ struggle, rather than on either a “racial” or “national”
basis. Only the revolutionary party can and will link together the forces
of the proletarian class.
The National Strike of Ex-ILVA and Piombino Steelworkers: For a Class Union Line - For United Action by the Combative Unions
FIM FIOM and
UILM have called for Wednesday, November 10, the national strike of
steelworkers of the groups Acciaierie Italia (former ILVA) and Acciaierie
Piombino. They improperly, and equivocally, defined it as a "general"
strike – a formula used when all the categories of the working class go on
strike together – despite the fact that it was neither a strike of the
category of metalworkers – whose national collective contract includes the
steelworkers – nor of the steel sector alone, since the workers of the
other industrial groups were excluded: Marcegaglia, Thyssen Krupp, Arvedi,
Dalmine...
In Genoa, the
previous day, a paid assembly had been held outside the entrance to the
Cornigliano steel plant, attended by about 150 workers. The three
provincial secretaries of FIM, FIOM and UILM, and a FIOM delegate from the
plant were present. The USB representative, who had been in the factory
for only a few months, did not attend. The next day, in the presence of
the three national secretaries, a small demonstration took place in Rome,
under the Ministry for Economic Development (Mise). About ten people from
Genoa were present. In the Cornigliano plant, the strike adherence was
about 40% on the first shift, 30% on the second, and almost 50% on the
night shift. On the whole, it was an undertone, but a highly publicized
action by the Italian unions.
The main claim
of FIM FIOM and UILM is a "national plan for the steel industry": they ask
the State machine of the bourgeoisie to defend its industry.
These unions
of the regime, in fact, believe in the principle – proper to union
corporatism – according to which industrialists and workers do not form
social classes of capitalism with opposing and irreconcilable interests,
but, in concert with the government and the State, could contribute to the
alleged superior and common good of the "country", which is the fable as
old as capitalism with which the bourgeoisie try to make the proletariat
work to their advantage.
The union – if
it is a class union and not a regime union – defends wages, fights to
reduce working hours, for health and safety in the factory, in short, for
the elementary and immediate interests of the workers, not for the
satisfaction of these needs through different phantom "industrial
policies".
The class
union therefore also fights against layoffs, but this fight is not in
defense of capitalist industry – whether private or State – but against
it: it seeks to impose, to the detriment of corporate profits, the
maintenance of all workers.
If instead, as
CGIL CISL and UIL do, the struggle against layoffs is made to coincide
with the defense of the industry of a given sector, or of the company, the
workers are brought to an inclined terrain all in favor of the bosses,
which makes them slide towards the acceptance of ever greater sacrifices:
reduction of wages, increase of rhythms, in short, keeping a low union
profile, which is limited to "defend the place" by defending the company.
The blackmail
of unemployment is a product of the crisis of overproduction of
capitalism: it is from the late ’70s that, in capitalistically mature
countries (so-called Western), factories close, are downsized and
transferred to countries where the lower cost of labor ensures a higher
profit rate. This process has been going on for decades and continues to
worsen.
So that the
threat of unemployment does not annihilate the struggle to defend the
living conditions of workers, authentic class unionism – based on the
awareness of the incompatibility of the needs of the working class with
the interests of the company and the capitalist economy in general – counteracts it by seeking to raise union action above the narrow confines
of the company.
If the fight
against layoffs is to be waged, and waged tenaciously, thinking that it is
enough to stand in this trench is a losing line of defense. In capitalist
competition, losing companies close down and lay off workers. Winning
companies often do so by virtue of investments that involve new plants and
fewer workers. These normal processes of capitalism become more acute as
the economic crisis progresses.
"We are
entering a new era characterized by hyper-competitiveness", European
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen pronounced in her State of the
Union address on September 15. The fact that a bourgeois politician
affirms what for Marxism is a truism, is a consequence of the fact that
the crisis of overproduction is beginning to manifest itself even in the
hitherto "young" capitalisms, which have allowed world capitalism not to
collapse in recent decades, thanks to their very high growth rates, which
however have led to their premature aging: the failure of Evergrande in
China is a clear manifestation of this.
Faced with a
process of historical significance such as the decline and global crisis
of the capitalist economy, if a national bourgeoisie – like the Italian
one – succumbs to international capitalist competition in a given sector – as happened in the civil aviation sector with Alitalia – can and should
the trade unions prevent it, invoking a stronger bourgeois State to defend
national industry?
A class union,
in order to deal with the rising threat of unemployment, would have called
at least all steelworkers to strike, not only those of the groups affected
by State intervention (through Invitalia), and not for a "national plan
for the steel industry" but to reduce working hours with equal pay, to
increase the redundancy fund to 100% of the wage, and to unite the
struggle of steelworkers in Italy with their class brothers in France,
Spain, Germany, in short, internationally.
Defending the
"Italian" steel industry goes in the opposite direction, of course: they
should close the steel mills and lay off the workers in other countries,
not in Italy! Regardless of the contortions of opportunism to justify and
deny that this union line feeds nationalism, this is exactly what the
workers are led to think.
One must also
ask why these collaborationist unions organized a mobilization of a
fraction of a single productive sector at a time when it is the entire
wage class that is under attack.
In the face of
the new attack on pensions and other anti-worker contents of the budget
law, in the face of the decline in wages since 1990 as recently certified
by OECD data (-2.9%), in the face of the further decline in wages as a
result of inflation in recent weeks, what is needed is a mobilization of
the entire working class.
The action of
the steelworkers of FIM FIOM and UILM, partial, weak, in defense of
national industry, is motivated at least in part by the concern to fill,
in this context, the void of mobilization left by the Confederations CGIL,
CISL and UIL, in the face of the, albeit small, step forward of grassroots
unionism made with the general strike of October 11.
In order to
defend itself from the crisis of capitalism, the working class must be
called upon to fight united beyond the divisions between companies and
categories. To resist the growing pressure of unemployment, from the
necessarily initial factory-by-factory reaction against layoffs, union
action must be elevated into a general movement to demand
- strong wage
increases, more for the worst paid categories and qualifications;
- Reduction
of the retirement age, abandonment of the contributory system, pension
allowance equal to full wages;
- generalized
reduction of working hours;
- Single
redundancy fund for all workers equal to 100% of the salary, paid by the
employers (not paid with the workers’ pension contributions paid to INPS);
- full wages
to the dismissed workers paid by the bourgeoisie and its State.
CGIL, CISL and
UIL, who do not want to start a battle even for the misleading goals they
proclaim, will never organize the struggle for these class claims, which
they have repudiated forever.
It is enough
to look at what they have done with pensions: against the Fornero reform
they did not move a finger and by virtue of the contributory system
pensions will be more and more miserable. For years, workers have been
pushed to make up for this misfortune with supplementary pensions; the
trade union federations of CGIL, CISL and UIL are the first to promote
supplementary pensions among workers, including them in contract renewals
(presenting them as contractual increases!), and they manage pension funds
together with the bosses. It is against the interests of these tricolor
unions to oppose the impoverishment of workers’ pensions.
Only
confrontational unionism – grassroots unions, confrontational union areas
within the CGIL, groups of combative workers within each union – can take
on the task of calling workers to a general struggle in defense of their
immediate, economic, basic interests, but it can only do so by acting in a
unified way. A class union line can be affirmed only in the unity of
action of combative unionism, freeing itself from the straitjacket of the
unity of CGIL CISL and UIL regime unionism.
A first step
in this direction was taken with the general strike of basic trade
unionism last October 11, which saw more than 4,000 workers marching in
Genoa, and which was joined by workers and unions of some large
metalworking factories, even if they are part of CGIL (GKN in Florence,
Perini in Lucca, Piaggio in Pontedera...). It is in this direction that
every area and union fraction, group of workers and individual workers
must march, regardless of the union organization to which they belong, to
be consistent and consistent with the defense of the interests of the
working class!
Unfortunately,
the leaderships of most of the grassroots unions, instead of promoting a
new general strike, have decided in recent days to organize
anti-government, political and popular demonstrations, not class and union
demonstrations. A step backwards.
This swinging
behavior of the current leadership of the combative unionism is not
surprising because it is characteristic of opportunism to divert the
workers’ movement from the path necessary to its strengthening, slowing it
down and pushing it in pursuit of illusory reformist policies.
This confirms
that the affirmation of the class union movement is a battle that must be
waged on several fronts, against the unions of the regime and against the
opportunism of the leadership of the combative unionism.
