The Working Class Must Defend Immigrants

Italian Government Steps Up Racist Attacks

European Union: Enemy of Workers and Immigrants

The following article is an edited translation from Spartaco No. 82 (October 2018), publication of our comrades of the Lega trotskista d’Italia.

The government of the far-right racist Lega (formerly Lega Nord—Northern League) and nationalist Five Star Movement (M5S) inaugurated its rule with what they do best: attack immigrants, minorities and the poor. One day after they took office, on June 2, Minister of the Interior and Lega leader Matteo Salvini thundered that “the party is over for illegal immigrants” and threatened to deport hundreds of thousands of people en masse. He announced plans to start a registry of the ghettoized and oppressed Roma (Gypsy) population and to dismantle their camps. Finally, he threatened to evict all poor families from “illegally” occupied houses because “private property is SACRED.”

The government showed its vicious face to refugees, taking hostage hundreds of immigrants who had been picked up by the ships Aquarius and Diciotti, in an attempt to divert them to other European Union (EU) countries. It also threatened to close Italian ports to ships carrying immigrants. Racist murders came quickly on the heels of the government’s arrogant proclamations. On June 3, Sacko Soumaila, a 29-year-old farm worker from Mali and a trade-union activist in the Unione sindacale di base (USB) trade-union federation, was shot in an abandoned factory while looking for sheet metal to build a shelter for his co-workers.

Refugees and the Roma people are in the government’s crosshairs, but its broader aim is to attack millions of immigrant workers who are an integral part of the working class in this country. For the last 20 years, citizenship rights have been denied by every Italian government, including the last one led by the Partito democratico (PD), which distinguished itself by opposing the introduction of birthright citizenship for the children of immigrants born in Italy! If the Lega/M5S government gets away with marginalizing and isolating immigrant workers, the path will be paved for driving down wages and worsening working conditions for all workers.

Capitalist governments use demagogy and terror against immigrants to divide the working class and obstruct united struggle against the capitalist offensive. The Lega/M5S slogan “Italians First” is intended to stop Italian workers from defending their immigrant class brothers and fighting to improve conditions for everyone. Anti-immigrant chauvinism is a primary means to shackle the Italian working class.

Many workers blame poverty and unemployment on immigrants, who allegedly “steal jobs,” instead of directing their anger against the capitalist bosses and the whole system of exploitation. Central responsibility for this situation lies with “leftist” politicians and the treacherous trade-union leaders. They crippled any class-struggle opposition as their friends in the PD government, beginning in 2013, dismantled the gains of past workers’ struggles bit by bit. The Lega/M5S victory represents a massive rejection by layers of the oppressed of years of austerity and misery imposed by the PD and the EU. Their policies—the Fornero labor reform, the “Jobs Act,” wage and hiring freezes in the public sector, etc.—were the main pillars of a decade marked by poverty and intensified exploitation.

Nobody should be fooled by the “anti-racist” wheedling of the PD now that it’s out of office. The PD is a capitalist party that wants to return to the helm of the executive committee of the ruling class (the government) and bolster the reactionary structure of the EU.

The anti-immigrant policies pushed by Salvini and Labor Minister Luigi Di Maio of M5S are in line with those of the PD and the “center left” governments before it. One such, the Romano Prodi government, enacted the Turco-Napolitano Law in 1998 with the support of Rifondazione comunista (RC) to expedite deportations. On 12 April 2017, a majority PD parliament approved the Minniti-Orlando decree, which expanded the network of detention centers for undocumented immigrants and limited legal rights for asylum-seekers. The decree toughened the notorious Bossi-Fini law binding residency visas to employment contracts. Two months later, on 28 June 2017, that same parliament threatened to block NGO ships from Italian ports. Just before the last elections, the PD boasted that it had reduced the number of immigrants making it to shore by 70 percent, stating:

“One should not forget the approval of the migrant decree at the beginning of the year, which resulted in an increase in repatriations; while on February 2, a memorandum was signed with the Libyan prime minister Fayez al-Sarraj to counter the flow of illegal immigrants. The key points of the decree were greater control of Libyan borders and technical support to local organizations combating human trafficking. An essential point to reduce immigration was the creation of centers in Africa to identify migrants.”

—democratica.com, 23 December 2017

The current government, as well as its PD predecessor, tried to get the multiple factions vying for power in Libya to act as border guards for Italy by stopping immigrants from leaving Libya and throwing them into prison camps. From there, they are often sold into slavery. Italy has provided ships and weapons to the puppet government of Sarraj, trains its military forces and keeps a contingent of 400 soldiers in Misurata. The current government, like the PD government before it, not only aims to prevent immigration, but to re-establish Italy’s historic role as the foremost imperialist exploiter of Libyan resources, particularly hydrocarbons. Italy, which bloodily oppressed the Libyan people for a century, feels that role has been threatened by imperialist rivals since the NATO bombings that devastated Libya in 2011. Italian troops out of Libya and Niger!

Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants!

African and Asian immigrant workers from countries whose economies have been devastated by decades of imperialist domination and exploitation have no rights, live in fear and are exploited by the ruling class as a reserve army of low-cost labor. The capitalist rulers’ immigration policies rest on two pillars: regulating immigration in accordance with capitalism’s demand for labor and segregating immigrant workers. Immigrants, who are denied the “rights” of Italian workers, face harsher exploitation, which is used to drive down the conditions for all workers.

There can be no compromise between the internationalist program required by the proletariat to fight for power (or even wage defensive struggles in the imperialist epoch) and the poisonous racism that divides the working class in the interests of the bourgeois masters!

We of the International Communist League fight for full citizenship rights for everyone who manages to set foot inside a country, regardless of how they arrived or whether they have legal papers. We oppose all forms of police violence and repression against immigrants and call on the trade unions to fight to stop deportations. It is crucial to struggle against the innumerable forms of racist oppression of the immigrant population. The Muslim minority, for example, is constantly criminalized in every way imaginable. These demands are fundamental to forge working-class unity.

The new government (like its predecessor) manipulates poverty and unemployment as a lever to incite a war by the poor against immigrants. To fight unemployment, we demand a much shorter workweek with no loss in pay. All work should be shared by all available workers. Contract agencies, cooperatives, and caporali (labor contractors linked to the Mafia) must be swept aside and jobs be made permanent under union control. This government, which claims to be for “change” and “dignity,” is a capitalist government. It will say that there is no money for full employment (because money shouldn’t leave the bosses’ pockets). But if capitalism is incapable of guaranteeing decent jobs and living conditions for everyone, then it must be abolished and replaced by a new social system: a collectivized economy that places the enormous resources and technological capacity of society at the service of all.

European Union: Enemy of Workers and Immigrants

From day one, the new government has been harassed by the EU, which will not tolerate any challenge to the monetary and financial order that maintains the dominance of the imperialist countries at the core of the EU. The European and Italian banks holding the country’s public debt want every cent extracted from the population to be deposited in their vaults. No threat to the EU’s existence will be tolerated. Every time the government dares to mention increasing public spending, financial institutions threaten to sell off Italian state bonds, and pro-EU politicians raise the bogeyman of an increased financial spread relative to German bonds that would put Italy at a disadvantage.

High finance and big capital are worried about the growth of the rightist extremists in Europe (such as the Lega in Italy, Orbán in Hungary and Le Pen in France) not because of the far right’s hatred of immigrants and workers, but because their right-wing nationalist policies threaten the downfall of the EU.

We have always opposed the EU and the euro on principle. We do not seek alternative policies for the capitalist rulers, but oppose the EU on the basis of the revolutionary, proletarian and internationalist principles of Marxism and with the perspective of fighting for a Socialist United States of Europe. As we wrote last year in Spartaco No. 80 (September 2017):

“The working class must fight for Italy out of the EU and the euro. An Italian exit could precipitate the collapse of the EU. This would be in the interest of all workers and the oppressed and strike a hard blow against the bosses. The end of the EU would not mean the end of international capitalism, or of the exploitation and racism that are intrinsic to this system of production, but it would facilitate workers struggles across Europe and more sharply expose that the main enemy to combat is one’s ‘own’ national exploiter.”

—translated in WV No. 1118, 22 September 2017

The EU exists to strengthen the competitiveness of its dominant imperialist powers, centrally Germany, in the world market against their American and Japanese rivals and increase the exploitation of the working class. The Italian ruling class has also benefited from its participation in the EU, although Italian capitalism has lost lots of ground to its stronger German rival. The EU oversaw the dismantling of the entire “Stato sociale” (the social safety network)—all the gains won after World War II, when the imperialists needed to contain working-class struggle during the Cold War against the Soviet Union.

Following capitalist counterrevolution in the USSR in 1991-92, the Italian capitalist rulers launched a ceaseless offensive to take back what they now deemed “unnecessary expenses.” What passes for the “left” in Italy today is totally discredited after 20 years of supporting capitalist governments, the EU and the euro. Their support led to vicious attacks and the immiseration of the working class. In Italy today, there is not a single sizable parliamentary party that even pretends to represent the interests of the working class.

The PD is the party that most staunchly defends the EU, with the help of the majority of the reformist left and the treacherous trade-union leaders. The union bureaucracy upholds the EU as a supposed bulwark in defense of workers’ rights. The exact opposite is true. The Italian capitalists made enormous profits by joining the EU, allowing them to participate in pillaging eastern and southern Europe. Workers across Europe have been devastated.

In spring 2017, after strikes by air traffic controllers in France and Italy, major air carriers appealed to the EU to stop further strikes. Ryanair accused the European Commission (EC) of “standing by and doing nothing while air traffic controllers’ unions held Europe hostage.” The EC then published a series of anti-strike measures on 8 June 2017 to guarantee “100 percent continuity of airline services for flights in the airspace of EU member states affected by strikes.” Back in 2014, the EU tried to destroy Spanish port workers unions for damaging “free enterprise.”

Salvini and Di Maio turned back NGO boats and held refugees hostage to try and convince Germany and France to change the rules for distribution of refugees in Europe and revise the Dublin III Regulation. Dublin III stipulates where refugees must file applications—i.e., which country must detain or deport them.

For years, the Italian bourgeoisie has demanded revision of this regulation, which sanctions the domination of the Northern-Central European countries in decision making over the flow of immigration. Italy’s capitalist rulers view Dublin III as an obstacle to driving out a few thousand immigrants to other EU countries. Many liberal and reformist groups, from Potere al Popolo (Power to the People) to Rifondazione comunista, single out Dublin III for opposition. The regulation is an embarrassment to them because it exposes their promotion of the myth of “freedom of movement” associated with the Schengen Agreement and of a so-called “social Europe.”

We do not have a position on the allocation of refugees. Instead, we oppose all deportations, regardless of the laws and agreements that sanction them. We oppose the whole construct of the EU and have no intention of suggesting ways to moderate EU agreements.

The conflict sparked by the refugee crisis exposes the reality of the EU as a consortium of capitalist nation-states, each with its own interests, which cannot fundamentally be reconciled. The EU is not a pan-European “superstate” and there is no such thing as European “citizenship.” By definition, the EU is based on suspending internal borders to the free movement of capital, allowing the more powerful countries to easily plunder weaker ones, like Greece and East European countries.

The Schengen Agreement never meant “freedom of movement” for people. “Freedom of movement” has never existed for anyone with black skin or an East European passport, or the Roma. In 2017, President Emmanuel Macron’s “liberal” France said to hell with Schengen and Dublin, turning back 45,000 people at the French-Italian borders of Bardonecchia and Ventimiglia. Entry to France was simply denied on the basis of skin color. European capitalist states have not hesitated to arrest, jail and deport hundreds of thousands of non-EU immigrants and slap restrictive measures against citizens of East European EU member states. Under the Schengen Agreement, the “external” borders of the EU have been closed with ship blockades of coastlines and walls of barbed wire, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of immigrants.

The fixation on reforming or abolishing the Dublin Regulation reveals the politics of liberal and reformist groups who peddle the belief that the EU is a “supranational” formation, supposedly more advanced and progressive than its individual national states. These groups promote the lie that a Europe with open borders will peacefully overcome the interimperialist conflicts that defined the 20th century. This is why they shriek that any call to “exit” the EU represents a “step backward” toward nation-states, as if the imperialist nation-states disappeared with the creation of the EU.

The demand for “open borders,” or for a “Europe without internal borders,” is raised by a spectrum of organizations ranging from the Catholic church to anarchists and Maoists. We communists decisively reject the utopian call to “open the borders.” This demand expresses the pipe dream that capitalist states will dissolve on their own and that racist oppression will disappear absent a revolutionary struggle. But in the real world, this demand serves only to put a humanitarian mask on the imperialist EU.

The borders of capitalist nation-states, along with their police forces, armies, jails and courts, are basic elements of class domination. The state is the fundamental instrument by which the ruling class—the owners of the factories, means of transportation and finance—maintains its rule over the working class and all the oppressed. To call on the ruling class to “eliminate borders,” to do away with the police, jails, etc., only serves to disarm those seeking a way to fight against the capitalist system. It creates the illusion that racism, war, police violence, etc., can be eliminated without a proletarian revolution, without a civil war by the exploited against the exploiters.

The idea that borders are always and necessarily reactionary is false. In the days of Italian colonial rule, there were no borders between Italy and Libya or Croatia. Today, to implement its right of independence against Spanish repression, a Catalan Republic would need a strong border separating it from the Castilian monarchy and its armed forces. Lenin explained that national divisions will completely disappear only in a communist future:

“By transforming capitalism into socialism the proletariat creates the possibility of abolishing national oppression; the possibility becomes reality ‘only’—‘only’!—with the establishment of full democracy in all spheres, including the delineation of state frontiers in accordance with the ‘sympathies’ of the population, including complete freedom to secede. And this, in turn, will serve as a basis for developing the practical elimination of even the slightest national friction and the least national mistrust, for an accelerated drawing together and fusion of nations that will be completed when the state withers away.”

—“The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up” (1916)

Down With Protectionism!

The Lega and M5S won the elections by campaigning for protectionism, also promising tax reforms and a “guaranteed minimum income” (reddito di cittadinanza) that raised the hopes of millions of desperate workers and the unemployed. But the proposed “flat tax” will especially benefit the bosses, who will line their own pockets with profits and not reinvest in production. And the “guaranteed minimum income” would only undermine the unions, handing out a pittance for basic survival while eliminating current forms of union-won unemployment insurance. Workers would have to take jobs, no matter how bad the working conditions, or do “public work” that would previously have been done by permanent workers under the protection of a union contract. The economic measures pushed by the Lega and M5S would increase exploitation and misery for the working class.

The government also threatens more protectionism. In June, Salvini stated: “No more welcome mats. We will block ships carrying Asian rice.” Minister of Agriculture and Lega member Gian Marco Centinaio attacked the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement between Canada and the EU, saying it permits trade in imitations of the products that are Italy’s pride and joy, such as Parmesan cheese and mozzarella (not to mention wheat). Di Maio added that tariffs could be introduced to protect Italian products from cheaper imports. Most of these threats are probably paper tigers given the weakness of Italian capitalism and its dependence on exports. (Moreover, one can’t fight a trade war based on Parmesan and mozzarella!)

As Marxists, we oppose economic protectionism by imperialist countries. The bosses use it as a weapon to pit workers of different countries against one another and to create a climate of venomous chauvinism that spawns fascist groups.

In 2010, to break the resistance of combative auto workers in Pomigliano, Sergio Marchionne (the now-deceased CEO of Fiat Chrysler) threatened to move production to different locations in Italy as well as to Poland and Serbia, pitting Fiat workers against each other. Instead of organizing united class struggle across national borders, the trade-union bureaucrats accepted the conditions imposed by Fiat, while complaining that the government was not defending national interests and products “Made in Italy” (see Spartaco No. 73, October 2010).

Economic, financial and military force is the only way for the ruling classes of the imperialist countries to divide up the world’s wealth. As Lenin wrote amid World War I:

“In the realities of the capitalist system, and not in the banal philistine fantasies of English parsons, or of the German ‘Marxist’, Kautsky, ‘inter-imperialist’ or ‘ultra-imperialist’ alliances, no matter what form they may assume, whether of one imperialist coalition against another, or of a general alliance embracing all the imperialist powers, are inevitably nothing more than a ‘truce’ in periods between wars. Peaceful alliances prepare the ground for wars, and in their turn grow out of wars.”

—Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916)

The task of the working class is to wage a class-struggle fight to overthrow the imperialist EU alliance and build the Socialist United States of Europe. Then, the proletariat throughout Europe could establish economic coordination as a key component of worldwide revolution, the only real hope for workers on the planet.

Immigrant Workers and Class Struggle

Immigrants are not helpless victims, but a growing component of the working class in many strategic sectors of the economy: metalworking industries, construction, transport and health care. They have frequently been in the forefront of important struggles. In fact, immigrant workers have won the main gains wrested in class battles in recent years. Immigrant logistics workers, mainly organized by SI Cobas (a “rank and file” union federation), have been at the center of important fights against subcontractors who hire them out to big transport companies.

These workers have won significant contractual gains and unionized a sector that was previously under the thumb of caporali, the mob-infested labor brokers euphemistically called “cooperatives.” Since 2016, more than 2,000 Sikh farm workers, who worked for as little as three and a half euros per hour, repeatedly waged strikes in the greenhouses of Agro Pontino and won a wage increase to five euros per hour and union representation by the FLAI CGIL agricultural workers federation.

Several recent episodes have thrown a spotlight on the exploitation of immigrant farm laborers. In early August, 16 died in two separate car accidents in Foggia while crammed like cattle into dilapidated vehicles. In Padova, a 44-year-old Polish woman farm worker was locked in an apple crate for two weeks by the farm owner for protesting work conditions.

Such incidents are just the tip of the iceberg of the obscene exploitation that has propped up the entire agribusiness sector for decades. For 1.2 million agricultural laborers, the legal minimum wage is a paltry seven euros per hour. But the reality is much worse. Half these farm workers are employed in what is known as “black work”: they are paid under the table for piecework, and continually threatened with layoffs. Immigrant workers make up 36 percent of the agricultural workforce, concentrated in the north of Italy. They are paid two to three euros per hour and live in hellhole ghettos or shacks scattered across the countryside. The living and working conditions are hardly any better for thousands of women and Italian farm workers in the south.

After the carnage in Foggia, immigrant laborers waged a solid strike in the fields of Puglia to demand better working conditions, adequate transportation and legalization of their status in Italy. After the killing of Sacko Soumaila, a massive protest in Rome was organized by the USB, which has led a courageous unionization drive among immigrant workers. But the call for the demonstration exposed the pro-capitalist politics of the leaders of this “rank and file” union. It read:

“Labor Minister Di Maio and immigration minister Salvini must take a stand.... This dramatic story poses a question to the new government: how do they intend to promote change? By restoring rights and dignity to the workers or by fanning the flames of a war among poor people and kneeling to EU diktats. The country is holding its breath. We don’t have a clear idea of what the new ministers will do and especially whether they will fulfill their electoral promises.”

—“Break with EU Diktats to Fight Social Inequalities,” contropiano.it

Since the new government took office, USB leaders have adopted a posture of “critical” support to the Lega and M5S, presenting them as a step forward for workers. This is a suicidal policy that ties the hands of the workers to their mortal enemy while giving the government time to consolidate its rule. The USB maintains that the caporali system “must be fought by prevention, by reinforcing existing hiring centers and labor inspectors, and providing them with adequate means.”

Labor inspectors have been around for decades and serve only to provide a veneer of legality to the most abject forms of exploitation. Thus, the leaders of the USB push workers to have confidence in the instruments of their exploiters.

It’s not only the USB union bureaucrats who demand that the capitalist state act in defense of immigrant workers. Self-styled Marxists like the Partito comunista dei lavoratori (PCL) do likewise when they demand “immediate confiscation without indemnification of land owned by those using caporali and demand that the exploitation of ‘black work’ be made a crime. Supervision of the fields should be entrusted not to state inspectors and prefects, but to laborers committees. They know who exploits them and they are the ones who can report them” (“The Struggle of Immigrant Laborers,” pclavoratori.it, 13 August). While implicitly denouncing illusions in “labor inspectors” (who everybody knows are a joke), the PCL creates an even bigger illusion: that “laborers committees” should denounce their exploiters to the police. Thus, they directly subordinate class struggle to the uniformed agents of the capitalists.

The difficult struggles of rural laborers require the class unity of all workers—immigrants and Italians—in one union. Particularly in agriculture, where the bosses are notorious for dividing workers along ethnic and national lines, the unions must have an exclusive monopoly on employment through a union hiring hall. The caporali temporary hiring system must be replaced with union control of hiring, based on seniority, with jobs divided equally among all workers. This must be a central demand of the struggle, along with abolishing piecework, an eight-hour day, and permanent jobs and wages comparable to industrial workers. These demands will be wrested not through the good offices of labor inspectors, but through hard class struggle, including strikes, picket lines and farm workers committees that insist that union conditions are met.

In the case of agricultural laborers, especially seasonal workers, it is crucial to rally the support of workers in other industries, like metal workers at Ilva steel works in Taranto or Fiat in Melfi, who are just a few kilometers from the tomato fields and are also under attack by the bosses. Unions should take a stand alongside immigrant struggles by organizing the unorganized and building workers defense guards to protect immigrants against violence and deportations. From the fields and construction sites in the south, to factories and warehouses in the north, immigrant workers are destined to play a key role in the class struggle and the socialist revolution in this country. They will enrich the working class with their own traditions of struggle, potentially providing a bridge of proletarian internationalism, linking the struggles for socialist revolution in Italy and their countries of origin.

For a Multiethnic Revolutionary Workers Party!

A revolutionary workers party and a class-struggle leadership of the trade unions are necessary to transcend national and ethnic barriers and unite the working class. The current workers misleaders function as agents of the ruling class in the proletariat. They defend the existence of capitalism and merely seek to bargain for a few crumbs from the bosses’ table for a small layer of skilled and privileged workers. An integral part of their defense of private ownership of the means of production is supporting the “competitiveness” of companies owned by their own bourgeoisie. This necessarily means supporting bourgeois nationalism.

In order to lead the international working class, a revolutionary party must be built based on the internationalist principles of Marxism. Such a party would act, in the famous words of V.I. Lenin, leader of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, as a tribune of the people “who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat” (What Is To Be Done? [1902]).

This is the kind of party that we in the Ltd’I, the Italian section of the International Communist League, strive to build. Join us!