Italian Trotskyists Say:

Mobilize Labor Power in Defense of Roma, Immigrants!

We print below a translation of a June 23 leaflet issued by our comrades of the Lega Trotskista d’Italia, section of the International Communist League.

The Berlusconi government’s “security package” and subsequent wave of roundups, deportations and persecution of Roma [Gypsies] and immigrants inaugurated a new season of attacks on minorities and the entire working class. State terror has emboldened racist and fascist attacks. In the name of “ethnic cleansing,” a racist horde descended on Roma encampments on the outskirts of Naples and burned them to the ground on May 11-12. A gang of 20 hooded thugs ransacked Indian- and Bengali-owned shops on May 24 in Pigneto, a multiethnic working-class neighborhood in Rome.

Viktoria Mohacsi, a [Hungarian Roma and] member of the European Parliament, denounced the fact that in Rome “at the Casilino 900 camp…armed patrols of police in uniform turn up around midnight every three or four days. They don’t ask a single question, they just start attacking people. Each time they come, they take away about 20 people who are disappeared for 48 hours. They are kept in cells where they are beaten. Then they are released” (La Repubblica, 19 May). According to Opera Nomadi [an organization that defends the rights of Gypsies], 12 Roma children disappeared without a trace after being stopped by the police and accused of begging in Naples. In Milan, where every day the city council deploys city police and Milan transit authority ticket inspectors to round up immigrants on public transport, every Roma, Sinti and Kalé Gypsy in the province has been ordered to officially register with the authorities. Among the first to be targeted were Goffredo and Antonia Bezzecchi, two Italian Sinti who survived the concentration camps under fascism. A protest in Rome on June 8 recalled the anniversary of the founding of the “Central Office for Fighting the Gypsy Menace” in Munich in 1936, whose first act was a census of Gypsies in Germany.

Local governments run by the PD [Democratic Party] and Rifondazione Comunista [PRC] did not hesitate to get into the act. Filippo Penati, [PD] president of Milan Province (whose government the PRC has been part of for four years) attacked [Northern League Interior Minister] Roberto Maroni from the right, calling on him to stick to the “common goal” of “eliminating all Roma camps.” The PD called for security patrols by volunteers to work alongside the city police. In Rozzano (ruled by a PD/PRC council), hired squads of anti-Roma security guards, equipped with dogs and clubs, were led by the mayor and city council.

By attacking immigrants and Roma, the ruling class fans the flames of racism to pit workers against each other and obstruct a united fight against their exploiters. The goal of the government is hardly the deportation of the hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers who sweat and die in textile and metalworking factories, in the fields, construction sites, hospitals and homes to enrich the “Made in Italy” billionaires. The “security package” is used to isolate and terrorize immigrants, to bind them hand and foot to their exploiters, in order to further divide the working class. It also serves to strengthen state surveillance and repression: some 2,500 soldiers will be deployed in major cities to intimidate all workers, at the very moment when the Confindustria [the bosses’ cartel] and the government are preparing an offensive against national wage contracts, planning thousands of layoffs (at Telecom and Alitalia) and trampling on public employees, who are denounced en masse as “lazy bums.”

The attacks by the state and the racist gangs against immigrants represent an attack on the entire working class. 700,000 immigrant workers are already members of the CGIL, CISL and UIL trade-union federations (a very high percentage considering that many work in small, non-union companies), and their participation in working-class mobilizations is growing. The defense of immigrants is therefore not only a question of defending democratic rights, but also defense of the entire working class. What is needed is an immediate mobilization of union power, supported by all potential victims of racist terror, in class-struggle actions to stop deportations and racist attacks against Roma, Sinti and immigrants. Down with the racist “security package”! Full citizenship rights for all immigrants!

For the unions to take up the fight for immigrant rights and defend the entire working class, it is necessary to wage a political struggle against the pro-capitalist union bureaucracies—of the COBAS [“Rank-and-File Committees”] and the [CGIL/CISL/UIL] union federations linked to the Democratic Party and Rifondazione.

Berlusconi, Bossi and Fini are doing nothing other than marching with redoubled violence down the path paved by the [2006-2008] Unione/Rifondazione government that preceded them. The current attacks are the direct continuation of the racist campaign against immigrants and Roma launched by the Unione/PRC government last autumn, which culminated in the infamous legislation [the Amato decree] adopted unanimously on 31 October 2007 by Prodi government ministers, including current PRC leader Paolo Ferrero. The leader of the PD, Walter Veltroni, declared his agreement with the security package, boasting that “most of its content was copied from the Amato Decree” (La Repubblica, 23 May). Moreover, it was the Ulivo [Olive Tree coalition government] and Rifondazione that bear responsibility for the Turco-Napolitano law of 1997, which established the existing structure for racist repression: entry quotas, temporary detention centers (CPTs) for certain ethnic groups, and mass deportations!

Historically, the Italian working class has been chained to its exploiters through popular fronts (coalitions between reformist workers parties and parties of the “progressive” bourgeoisie). Beginning in 1994, popular-front coalitions including the PRC exploited the right-wing bogeyman, or the logic of the “lesser evil,” and in so doing played a decisive role in curtailing workers’ struggles while the ruling class smashed, bit by bit, the hard-won gains of struggles in the period following the Second World War. Unione/Rifondazione governments have had the same goal as the right: to control the spigot of immigrant labor and periodically use racism to divide the working class.

The role of popular-front governments, and the role played by Rifondazione in particular, was clearly seen during the two years of the Prodi government. This contributed to the PRC’s electoral collapse. Now the reformist Falcemartello [FM, affiliated with the International Marxist Tendency of the late Ted Grant]—even these self-proclaimed “PRC Marxists”—are forced to recognize that:

“The Italian working class was reduced to poverty by each successive government. The real wages of an average Italian worker are among the lowest in Europe. Pensions have been attacked and there have been privatizations across the board. All of this was done either by the previous Berlusconi government or the Prodi government that followed it.”

—www.marxist.com

But Falcemartello hides the fact that they actively helped bring the Prodi coalition to power, campaigning for it in the elections and recruiting people directly to the PRC, and they are therefore complicit in that government’s policies. FM tries to hide the PRC’s responsibility for the Prodi government’s racist and anti-worker attacks, hypocritically stating that “the PRC was imprisoned inside the government and absented itself from that fight” (FM No. 210, 9 June). On the contrary, the PRC was in the government and directly responsible for that policy! Despite its working-class base, Rifondazione has a pro-capitalist program and leadership that cannot be reformed.

We Spartacists are opposed on principle to any form of class collaboration with the capitalists, their parties and their state; we called for no vote to the parties in the Unione (including Rifondazione), emphasizing that they would form capitalist governments that are the enemy of workers, women, and immigrants. In the recent elections, we called for no vote to either the Democratic Party—a party that is entirely capitalist—or to the remnants of Prodi’s popular front regrouped around the Sinistra l’Arcobaleno [Rainbow Left], or to any of the other reformist refugees from Rifondazione such as Sinistra Critica (SC), the Partito Comunista dei Lavoratori (PCL) or the Partito d’Alternativa Comunista (PDAC).

Sinistra Critica, PCL and PDAC now pretend to be opponents of “class collaboration” and try to pass themselves off as a “new anti-capitalist left” or a “left that does not betray.” But when they were in the PRC they shared responsibility for the anti-worker and anti-immigrant policies of the popular-front governments, and every one of them, without exception, voted for the Unione/Rifondazione capitalist coalitions (from the “Progressives” in 1994, to the Ulivo, to the Unione in 2006) and even campaigned directly for capitalist candidates. They were part of Rifondazione when the PRC voted for racist legislation such as the Turco-Napolitano law and the Treu Pact that introduced “precarious” jobs and undermined national contracts—and they still lay claim to this tradition.

Sinistra Critica repeatedly gave the Prodi government a vote of confidence and went so far as to vote to refinance the imperialist missions in Afghanistan and the Balkans (July 2006). As for Marco Ferrando, líder máximo of the PCL, he stayed in Rifondazione until 2006, when, against his wishes, he was thrown off the Unione electoral slates, which he voted for and aspired to join. In the last elections, which were carried out as a violent, racist campaign against immigrants, with “security” as the hot button, the PCL’s electoral program did not make even the slightest mention of the attacks on immigrants, much less a fight for their citizenship rights. All these groups have one thing in common: opposition to revolutionary internationalist Marxism and proletarian revolution. Even now that the PRC has lost its seats in Parliament, they desperately seek to revive a popular-front coalition to kick out Berlusconi and put the reins of Italian capitalism in the hands of “the left.” This is the meaning of the PCL’s call for a “parliament of the left, based on the working class and the people, to oppose the Berlusconi government,” and PDAC’s call for a “united front against Berlusconi.”

One historical reason for this wave of attacks against Roma and immigrants is the counterrevolutionary destruction of the degenerated workers state of the Soviet Union and of the deformed workers states of East Europe. This historic defeat for workers all over the world reduced the former Soviet Union and East Europe to misery, forcing broad sectors of the population to emigrate in order to survive. Capitalist restoration in East Europe made entire regions prey for interethnic and nationalist bloodshed and subjugation under the imperialist jackboot, including Italian imperialism, which militarily occupies the Balkans. The enlargement of the European Union to East Europe (accompanied by restrictive laws against the East European workers) is another reactionary product of the counterrevolution, which reduced those countries to miserable protectorates of the imperialists. Under capitalism, the conditions of the Roma are similar to those in South American favelas [shantytowns].

The life expectancy of a Roma in Italy is 35 years, against the Italian average of 80 years, and infant mortality is 15 times higher. In contrast, even under the grotesque Stalinist regime of Ceausescu [in Romania], the Roma population enjoyed an unprecedented standard of living and level of integration in industry and the state apparatus. In Yugoslavia, the Roma were recognized as a national minority and had the right to education in their own language. The flight of Roma from the Balkans and Romania is a product of racist persecutions stemming from the restoration of capitalism. Full democratic and citizenship rights for the Roma! Down with the restrictions imposed on workers from East Europe! All imperialist troops out of the Balkans! Down with the reactionary imperialist alliance of the European Union! For the Socialist United States of Europe!

We of the Lega Trotskista d’Italia/International Communist League fought for unconditional military defense of the deformed workers states and of the USSR against capitalist counterrevolution and for a proletarian political revolution to kick out the Stalinist bureaucratic caste, replacing it with a government of workers soviets. Instead, the pseudo-Trotskyist decomposition products of Rifondazione (SC, PCL, PDAC) supported (with different nuances) all the counterrevolutionary forces that contributed to the restoration of capitalism in the USSR and East Europe, from Solidarność in Poland to Yeltsin in the Soviet Union. The opposition of these groups to proletarian revolution at home has always gone together with support to counterrevolutionary forces in countries where capitalism has been overthrown. And today they all support (with varying degrees of enthusiasm) the imperialist provocations against the Chinese deformed workers state, waged under the slogan “Free Tibet” (i.e., for a Tibet dominated by the imperialists and the Dalai Lama’s feudal theocracy). Defend China!

Racism is an integral part of the capitalist system, used as a tool for the division of the working class. To eradicate it requires a socialist revolution. To fight unemployment, which is endemic to capitalism, it is necessary to divide all available work among the entire workforce, not only at equal pay, but with a sliding scale of hours and wages to reverse the continual impoverishment of the working class. To fight black-market jobs and the dramatic insecurity in employment and working conditions experienced by thousands of workers, which doubly affects immigrant workers and is the cause of so many work-site deaths, the unions must fight to organize all non-unionized workers, starting with immigrants. Housing, schools, childcare, and free, quality health care are needed for all. Fulfilling all of these basic demands for the working class is in conflict with the capitalist profit system. What’s required is the revolutionary overthrow of bourgeois power and the establishment of a workers government based on organs of workers power, a planned, collectivized economy on an international scale. Reformists accept what is “possible” and practical under capitalism. Our aim is different: it is to build a revolutionary, multiethnic and internationalist workers party that fights for socialist revolution!