Italy: Unions Must Defend and Organize Immigrant Workers!

Correction Appended

We print below an article translated from Spartaco No. 72 (March 2010), newspaper of the Lega Trotskista d’Italia, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). The term caporali refers to people operating the caporalato, a mob-run system of exploiting immigrant labor in conditions of virtual slavery. The ’ndrangheta is a powerful crime syndicate based in southern Italy.

In early January, the town of Rosarno, located in one of the main agricultural areas of Calabria, was the scene of a bloody manhunt against dozens of farm workers of African origin. Racist gangs, armed and instigated by the caporali, wounded the immigrant workers with clubs and gunshots. The racist violence exploded after several hundred farm workers, fed up with the violence of the local landowners’ caporali and the ’ndrangheta mobsters’ hired hit men, courageously protested in the town streets, overturning cars and garbage cans and clashing with cops in riot gear. Approximately 2,000 immigrants later demonstrated in front of city hall with placards reading “We Are People, Not Animals” and “Italians Are Racists.”

While the government takes the lead in inciting lynching, with Maroni, the Northern League [a racist, far-right party] Minister of the Interior, going so far as to denounce “excessive tolerance toward foreigners” while the newspaper of the family of [Prime Minister Silvio] Berlusconi (Il Giornale) encouraged lynching with the headline, “Shoot the Mafia Instead of the N-----s”). Meanwhile, the police intervened to stamp out the workers’ protests, leaving the bosses’ armed thugs to carry on without interference for almost two days. The racist terror against the immigrant farm workers ended in a variant of “ethnic cleansing,” entirely to the benefit of the bloodsucking capitalists.

As soon as the orange harvest was finished and the bosses no longer needed labor, the police “evacuated” some 100,000 workers, locking them up in hundreds of Centers for Identification and Expulsion (CIE). From there, the workers were deported. Those with residence permits were dispersed to various cities, without a job or a roof over their heads. Many of them also lost the miserable wages they had spilled their blood and sweat for, under the heel of the caporali. (Calling on the cops to arrest and deport undocumented immigrant workers is a timeworn practice in the fields of southern Italy.) We demand: Free all the arrested immigrants now! No deportations! Shut down the Centers for Identification and Expulsion now! We fight for full citizenship rights for all those who live in this country—an elementary democratic demand for complete equality for all, not merely the right to a residence permit and a vote in local elections, which is the most that the reformist left is willing to concede.

The Unions Must Defend Immigrants

In the face of mass racist violence such as occurred in Rosarno, it is essential to mobilize the social power of the unions. The workers movement must not permit one of its most isolated and vulnerable sections to face racist gang violence by themselves. The unions must confront the racist violence of Rosarno by organizing protest actions and strikes. They should have sent dozens of busloads of workers to put an end to the racist riots. Workers’ self-defense guards, made up of immigrants and Italians, would have been indicated.

Even if this may be difficult in the present reactionary political climate, it is necessary to learn from the traditions of solidarity and class struggle that built the unions in this country. After the police massacre of Calabrese farm workers in Melissa in October 1949, there were protest strikes in all the major plants in the North, and workers from the OM truck factory in Brescia and from Turin drove back the police attacks. In 1972, the CGIL [General Confederation of Italian Workers] organized special trains to bring more than 40,000 workers to Reggio Calabria, where they braved eight dynamite attacks and held an impressive demonstration against the fascist-led riots in which a number of leftist militants had been killed.

By contrast, in Rosarno the union bureaucrats acted as auxiliaries of the police repression. The secretary of the Calabria CGIL wrote an open letter to Maroni and public institutions demanding a police intervention, allegedly to protect the immigrants, and “a guarantee that a sufficient number of police will be maintained in Rosarno and the surrounding area to ensure adequate control of the town” and to “designate ‘welcome centers’ where immigrants who are living in Rosarno in intolerable conditions that ‘destroy human dignity’ would be brought together.” In this situation, the intervention of the repressive apparatus of the state necessarily augments racist oppression and mass deportations to the CIE’s horrendous ethnic jails!

The pro-capitalist bureaucrats currently running the unions do not base themselves on the perspective of class struggle, but collaborate with the bosses to enable them to compete with their foreign rivals, hoping to obtain in return a few crumbs from their profits. Thus in Rosarno, CGIL secretary Epifani called for an improvement in the farm workers’ conditions “through a commitment by the employers’ associations and all national and local institutions, with an appropriate plan to provide the labor the agricultural industry needs and an obligation to normalize labor relations and respect national wage contracts.” To make an appeal to the “employers’ associations” and the capitalist “institutions,” in other words to the class of bloodsuckers who live off the workers’ labor, to improve conditions for immigrant farm workers serves only to deceive the workers and send the capitalists a clear signal that the union tops are willing to collaborate to fulfill “the need for manpower.”

For their part, the reformist left’s only perspective is to give capitalism a more human face. Thus the editor in chief of Liberazione, Dino Greco, lamented the absence of state forces in Rosarno, demanding “that the state ally with the migrants to promote a policy of integration and shared citizenship.” The capitalist state was only too present in Rosarno as a repressive force against the agricultural workers. The police, the courts and the army are the core of the capitalist state, which is an instrument for the defense of private property and the power of the ruling capitalist class. Every strike, every important struggle inevitably confronts this armed force of the ruling class. One need only recall how the police attacked the Innse workers [strikers at a metallurgical plant] last summer or, more recently, attacked immigrant workers at the Fiege and GLS plants in Lombardy and FMA-Fiat workers in Pratola Serra.

On the basis of racist laws passed during the past few decades by right-wing governments and by the Unione and the Olive Tree and Rifondazione Comunista coalition governments, the cops and courts persecute, imprison or deport hundreds of immigrants every day, accompanied by beatings and abuse. No illusions in the capitalist courts! Cops out of the unions! As the Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin wrote:

“The basic rule, the first commandment, of any trade union movement is not to rely on the ‘state’ but to rely only on the strength of one’s own class. The state is an organization of the ruling class. Don’t rely on promises. Rely only on the strength of the unity and political consciousness of your class!”

—“The Need for an Agricultural Laborers’ Union in Russia,” June 1917

Unlike Lenin, the Partito Comunista dei Lavoratori (PCL—Communist Workers Party) wants to use the organized working class not to overthrow the bourgeois state but to aid the work of the police. In Milan, after the killing of an Egyptian immigrant in a brawl, the police laid siege—colonial style—to the multiethnic district of Viale Padova, with armored police vans on every corner. Salvini of the Northern League demanded that the immigrants be mopped up with “checkpoints and expulsions, house by house, floor by floor.” The only response from the PCL was that vigilante squads should be organized against “crime”:

“We call for a cleanup too. But not the cleanup by police and right-wing squads against the migrants that Salvini (Northern League) would like. Instead, organized action of mixed groups of Italian and migrant workers against criminality in neighborhoods of any color. Against dealers in hard drugs, Italian or ‘foreign.’ But also against the criminality of the property owners…against the criminality of the oh-so-Italian moneylenders who act as loan sharks against small neighborhood shopkeepers, especially immigrants; against the criminality of the underworld, Italian and ‘foreign,’ which extorts protection money from neighborhood businesses. And finally, of course, against the provocations and aggression of bands of racists or communal gangs, which harm both migrant and Italian workers.”

—pclavoratori.it, 17 February

In practice, the PCL offers their own services to the ruling class to impose bourgeois “legality” in the immigrant districts. We oppose organizations of this type, which would be nothing but auxiliaries to the racist police and would encourage the hysteria of the “patrols” even more. The PCL also tails the “war on drugs,” the battle cry of all the reactionary forces targeting immigrants and the left. Communists fight for the decriminalization of the use and sale of all narcotic substances.

For Unionization of All Immigrant Workers!

The explosion in Rosarno threw a spotlight on the conditions of more than 50,000 immigrant agricultural workers who move according to the needs of the harvest, forming the backbone of entire agricultural sectors, in the South and in the North. The inhuman conditions in which they live were described by Fabrizio Gatti in L’Espresso (“I Was a Slave in Puglia,” 1 September 2006):

“To protect their business, the growers and landowners have cultivated a network of ruthless caporali: Italians, Arabs, Eastern Europeans. They house their farm workers in unsafe hovels, where not even stray dogs will sleep anymore. Without water, light or toilets. They make them work from six in the morning until ten at night. And they are paid—if they are paid at all—15 or 20 euros a day. Anyone who protests gets hit with an iron bar to shut them up. Someone went for help to the police station at Foggia. And then discovered the law that [right-wing politicians] Umberto Bossi and Gianfranco Fini wanted: he was arrested and deported because his work permit was not in order. Others ran away. The caporali searched for them all night long. Just like the manhunt recounted by Alan Parker in the film Mississippi Burning. In the end someone was caught. Someone else was killed.”

These conditions are not caused by the fact that the South is under the control of Mafia organizations, or that there is a particularly racist right-wing government at the helm of the capitalist state, as the reformist left would like you to believe. Conditions like this exist in entire industrial sectors of this country. Indeed, they can be found all over the world, everywhere the bourgeoisie imports vulnerable, low-cost labor and succeeds in dividing the proletariat along ethnic and national lines, as has been seen in the repeated revolts of immigrants and the racist violence in Andalusia, Spain. The brutal exploitation that immigrant farm workers endure is a poisonous fruit of the capitalist profit system: a system in which the bosses of a whole branch of industry (from the caporali to the lords of agribusiness, the food industry, information technology, marketing, finance) divide up the profits derived from the workers’ labor and constantly try to raise the rate of exploitation to compete on the market.

The caporalato system and superexploitation are certainly not limited to agriculture. Recently the transport workers’ section of the CUB trade-union federation denounced the fact that there are thousands of immigrant workers at Milan’s Malpensa airport working under caporalato conditions—and this is but one example. It is essential that the unions launch a campaign to unionize all immigrant workers and all non-unionized workers in general. These workers represent the weakest and most vulnerable sector of the proletariat. It is necessary to fight so that all workers, Italian and immigrant, legal and “clandestine,” under contract or working “off the books,” are guaranteed equal pay for equal work and union protection based on the best contractual conditions.

In caporalato country as well as on building sites and in warehouses throughout Lombardy, just as in the “cooperatives” of Emilia Romagna, this will require a hard struggle of class against class with strikes, flying pickets and solid mobilizations. It was thanks to hard and sometimes bloody struggles that generations of farm workers and poor peasants in the South wrested better living conditions from the latifundistas and growers, the grandfathers of today’s lords of the food and agriculture industry.

As the investigation by L’Espresso (1 September 2006) noted, one of the areas where exploitation and racist oppression are the most brutal is “a lawless triangle which covers almost the entire province of Foggia. From Cerignola to Candela and above, further to the north, as far as San Severo. And in Nichi Vendola’s progressive region.” [Nichi Vendola is a former Rifondazione Comunista leader, now head of Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (Left Ecology Freedom).] In reality, the fact that the person running the Puglia plantation in the capacity of “governor” is the leader of Sinistra Ecologia Libertà hasn’t changed the wage slavery of immigrant agricultural workers one iota. It has only served to chain the workers to the bosses, reinforcing illusions in the possibility of capitalism “with a human face.”

Bourgeois ideologues, particularly those like journalist Roberto Saviano in the “fight the Mafia” chorus, which is so much in vogue on the reformist left, try to blame the power of the local Mafia for the brutal exploitation of immigrant farm workers. They keep themselves busy appealing to the repressive institutions of the capitalist state (police, courts) to intervene to impose “legality.” But Mafia, camorra crime syndicates or ’ndrangheta are particular components of the capitalist class, originating under the stifling conditions of the belated capitalist development of southern Italy. Capitalists, wherever they are located, whether “honest” or “criminal,” live off the exploitation of workers’ labor. They don’t need the ’ndrangheta to subject workers to brutal exploitation, as the cooperatives of the North or the sweatshops of America remind us. And the bosses don’t always need caporalis from the ’ndrangheta to suppress those who revolt: when the police or private guards don’t show up, they have always found a reservoir of anti-working-class forces when their profits and property are at risk.

The capitalist state, which wants to keep the monopoly of organized violence in order to maintain the bourgeois status quo, does not really like the existence of armed bands that escape its control. But in decisive moments of the class struggle, the Mafia was a tool for the bourgeoisie in the bloody repression of land occupations in Sicily after World War II, and thus became an integral part of Italian capitalist rule. Among the services the Mafia “offers” to businessmen who accept its “protection” in exchange for a cut is certainly the guarantee that it will stifle any attempt whatsoever to organize unions. In 1989, Jerry Maslo, a South African immigrant fleeing apartheid, was murdered by the camorra for trying to unionize immigrant farm workers in Campania.

The conflict between the Mafia and the state (insofar as they oppose each other) reflects a conflict within the bourgeoisie for distribution of the profits derived from the exploitation of workers’ labor. The problem is not to replace “dishonest” exploiters with others who claim to be honest, but to get rid of the entire system of capitalist exploitation, expropriating the land and factories from the bosses and running them in a collectivized and centralized way under a government of workers power.

Class Struggle and the Oppression of Immigrants

The capitalist crisis of the past two years has brought poverty and devastation to the lives of millions of workers around the world. In Italy alone, in less than two years more than 600,000 people have lost their jobs, not to speak of the thousands who were working off the books, who are officially excluded from the statistics. The list of factories laying off workers or closing down is getting longer every day, and some hard struggles are being waged to prevent whole branches of industry from being dismantled. These are often the last proletarian concentrations in entire regions of the South, such as Fiat in Termini Imerese or Alcoa in Portovesme. Six out of the 12 European regions with the highest rate of youth unemployment (greater than 30 percent) are in southern Italy.

In the face of this carnage, what is needed is a massive mobilization of the working class, with strikes that go beyond the plants in crisis and demand the distribution of all work among everyone able to work, with no reduction in wages. With the workers facing this crisis and the burden of poverty and layoffs, the capitalists seek to further divide them along ethnic and national lines to prevent them from fighting together against the real cause of their suffering, the capitalist profit system. But there are no trade-union solutions to the cyclical crises of capitalism. In the face of mass unemployment, two tendencies develop among workers. One is the reactionary, losing one of competing with each other to sell the only property they have—their labor power. This is the road, often supported by the reformist left, of nationalist protectionism, which calls for defending “Italian jobs” at the expense of workers in other countries, or racism against immigrants accused of “stealing jobs from Italians.” This road leads to lining the workers up with their compatriot exploiters, undermining the solidarity of the working class and worsening conditions for all.

The other road is that of uniting in class struggle against the capitalist bosses, based not on what’s possible from the standpoint of profits for the industrialists and their banks, but on what is indispensable for the proletariat: a job and a decent wage for all, new homes, new streets, new factories, free quality education and health care. If capitalism is not capable of guaranteeing what the masses of workers need, then it must be overthrown by a proletarian revolution and replaced with a planned economy on an international scale. But to be able to take this second road, the working class needs a revolutionary party, based on the internationalist program of Leninism and Trotskyism. The interests of workers and immigrants go forward together or they will be defeated separately.

The special oppression of the immigrant population—or those of immigrant origin, given the growing presence of a generation of youth born in Italy, whom the bourgeoisie refuses to consider Italians and would like to ghettoize from kindergarten onwards—goes well beyond economic exploitation.

Immigrant workers employed in small and tiny businesses, often working without a contract or union protection, have paid a very high price for the crisis and were the first to be thrown onto the streets. Since the racist Bossi-Fini law links a residence permit to a work contract and a minimum income, poverty and unemployment for immigrants also means the risk of arrest and deportation. Racist discrimination is encountered in every corner of society, with mayors and governors competing to ban phone centers, mosques and kebab cafés. In Milan, the city council and the ATM public transport company are jointly organizing dragnets on buses, during which immigrants’ documents are taken away and they are locked in vans with barred windows and taken to the CIE. In the province of Brescia, the Northern League administration launched operation “White Christmas” to cleanse the area of “illegal” immigrants before Christmas.

On top of this is the pervasive legal violence of the state, symbolized by the ethnic CIE prison hellholes, as well as police violence and abuse. Encouraged by the continuing racist campaigns and laws, carried out by the current Berlusconi government and by the previous governments of Unione and Rifondazione, extralegal violence is also on the rise, carried out by gangs of fascist thugs who target immigrants, Roma [Gypsies] and homosexuals.

We support and in fact emphatically demand that the unions organize militant actions and strikes by the whole working class in defense of immigrant rights and against every manifestation of racist oppression. Strikes of this kind would be powerful actions whose value would be anything but symbolic.

Under the umbrella of the “First of March Association” (and using the sham “political neutrality” of the color yellow, historically the color of the Vatican and scabs), a coalition of bit players from the Democratic Party (PD), the ARCI [a cultural and recreational organization linked to the PD] and the Catholic church proclaimed a “day without immigrants”—a horrible name that could also please the Northern League. The organizers’ aim was “a large nonviolent demonstration to broaden public opinion by showing how indispensable immigration is for our society and how defending rights is key to upholding democracy” (primomarzo2010.it, 10 January).

The message the organizers of the First of March Association want to send to capitalist public opinion is this: our (capitalist) economy needs immigrant manpower, and if you want to keep exploiting it to your advantage without provoking social explosions, you have to make some concessions. The bourgeoisie is divided over what immigration policy to adopt. On one side are the racist ideologues who call for segregation, roundups and deportations. On the other there is a political spectrum ranging from the reformist left (Rifondazione & Co.) to the Democratic Party and all the way over to the Catholic church. Aware that whole sectors of industry depend on the availability of cheap immigrant labor, they are open to a limited extension of immigrant rights and they want to keep racist excesses in check. For example, they are open to a more rational system for residence permits or giving “legal” immigrants a vote in local elections.

It was not to the working class but to this sector of the bourgeoisie that the Democratic Party and Rifondazione, and those that tail them, oriented with their “day without immigrants,” exploiting as usual the fairy tale of anti-racism in the final days of campaigning for the regional elections at the end of March. Proof of this is the fact that Livia Turco was among the first and most prominent supporters of the First of March Association. Turco was the author of the racist laws that created the Centers of Temporary Residence [CPT, precursor of the CIE] and approved tens of thousands of deportations.

The political practices and program put forward by the organizers of the “day without immigrants” are antithetical to the idea of a class-struggle mobilization in defense of immigrants and are bound to perpetuate the oppression of immigrants. Nevertheless, the burning need for a social mobilization in defense of their rights drew a lot of support from a large sector of immigrants who perceive that they have some weight and growing social power and are tired of being victims of one-sided racist attacks.

Instead of giving an organized class expression of immigrant workers’ anger and willingness to struggle, the union bureaucracy was against calling a strike, even if only to provide union cover to the “day without immigrants.” Exceptions were the CUB health workers and a few “rank-and-file” local unions in companies where the majority of workers are immigrants. Petro Soldini, the CGIL leader responsible for immigrants, refused to call a strike, arguing that this could “boomerang.” Instead he proposed “a consumer strike and logos people could wear to an event organized on a Saturday when most people are already not working” (L’Espresso, 21 January).

Without a serious mobilization of the unions, a “strike of immigrants” could only be a show of weakness and a confused mess because many immigrant workers would feel they had to work in any event, and those with enough class consciousness to strike would risk losing their jobs. And even if it had the support of the unions, a strike limited to immigrant workers would be nothing but a mirror image of a racist mentality like that of the Northern League, according to which “Italian” workers would never mobilize in defense of immigrants, and the only people willing to do so would be immigrants themselves plus some philanthropists in the editorial offices of newspapers and in the parishes. We communists base ourselves on the principle of working-class unity in the unions: one out, all out!

Bitter Fruits of Class Collaboration

For the unions to be able to fight effectively in the interests of immigrants and the poor, they need a class-struggle leadership forged in political struggle against the current sellouts at the head of the main union organizations. If they don’t support the government directly, the current leaders are often linked to the Democratic Party or to Rifondazione Comunista, as is the case with leaders of the FIOM metalworkers union and many “rank-and-file” unions. This struggle in turn requires building a revolutionary party forged in opposition to the class-collaborationist politics shared by the various reformist left organizations.

Today the Democratic Party and Rifondazione Comunista shed crocodile tears over the suffering of immigrants. But when Prodi’s Olive Tree coalition—a capitalist popular-front government, i.e., a coalition of parties of the bourgeoisie supported by reformist workers parties like Rifondazione Comunista—was in government in 1997, it was they themselves who approved racist laws such as the notorious Turco-Napolitano law that introduced the Centers of Temporary Residence. When they returned to government in 2006, Unione and Rifondazione did nothing to abolish the racist Bossi-Fini law linking the residence permit to a work contract. Quite the contrary. On 31 October 2007, one of the last actions of the Prodi government was to pass a law (with the direct vote of Ferrero, secretary of Rifondazione and a government minister) which established numerous racist policies against Roma and Romanians, including deportations and razing of their encampments. This law made the Bossi-Fini law even worse and paved the way for the Berlusconi government’s subsequent security package that in 2009 introduced the crime of “clandestinity”!

The “alternative policy” on immigration put forward by the Democratic Party and Rifondazione rejects the racist “excesses” of the Northern League and its friends, but its fundamental aim is to guarantee that a spigot of vulnerable, low-cost immigrant labor remains firmly in the hands of the capitalist state and is used to satisfy the needs of the Italian capitalists. In fact, after the aggression in Rosarno, the PD accused the government of not having “put the brakes on illegal immigration at all, and of having no serious government policy with regard to the fluctuation of migrants, which should correspond to the needs of the labor market and companies as well as the capacity to receive them” (partitodemocratico.it, 8 January).

The Democratic Party is a capitalist party which offers itself as a more rational and efficient force for managing the interests of the Italian bourgeoisie, and which, especially when in opposition, dresses up as the “friend” of workers and immigrants. Rifondazione Comunista, a party with a working-class base and a bourgeois program, is groping around in a permanent crisis after being discredited by its participation in the anti-worker Prodi government and marginalized by the Democratic Party. In spite of the slaps in the face it has received, Rifondazione continues to beg for electoral alliances with the Democratic Party. [RC] secretary Ferrero went so far as to propose to put Pierferdinando Casini, ex-minister in the Berlusconi government, at the head of a new electoral coalition against Berlusconi, christened by Ferrero: “Committee of National Liberation” (La Repubblica, 21 December 2009). We of the Lega Trotskista d’Italia have always opposed voting in any way for Rifondazione and Unione (or today Rifondazione and the PD) coalitions in capitalist popular fronts, which tie the workers to their exploiters. These coalitions are based on the lie that workers can run capitalism alongside a supposedly progressive wing of the bourgeoisie; in the name of the coalition, the workers are forced to accept the interests of their exploiters.

The various decomposition products of Rifondazione—Partito Comunista dei Lavoratori, Sinistra Critica and Partito di Alternativa Comunista (PDAC)—share these politics. Even if at the moment they do not want to be compromised directly by electoral blocs with Rifondazione, they supported this party for 15 years, voting for the coalitions Rifondazione was part of; their political horizon is to “get rid of Berlusconi,” the lowest common denominator of today’s parliamentary cretinism.

The head of the PCL, Marco Ferrando, displayed his enthusiasm for the desperate revolt in Rosarno, but his conclusion is as always the request for “an immediate united mobilization of the entire political left and the unions to side with the revolt against state repression” (pclavoratori.it, 8 January), i.e., a mobilization of those very forces that contributed to creating the conditions for the current racist oppression when they were in government. On a more general political level, the PCL argues: “It is time, therefore, for the entire left everywhere to break with the PD and with the center-left to stand as an autonomous pole, as an alternative to the two existing poles, representing independent rights of the working world” (pclavoratori.it, 26 January). For more than ten years, the PCL (and its predecessors) have been calling for an “autonomous pole” of “the whole left.” At present, this seems to be limited to Rifondazione Comunista and Sinistra Ecologia Libertà, which in turn contains various scraps of Democratici di Sinistra [Left Democrats, the more right-wing component of the former Italian Communist Party, which had parted ways with Rifondazione] and bourgeois parties like the Greens.

This “autonomous pole” serves no purpose except to demonstrate the PCL’s willingness to be the last link in a syphilitic chain in which the PCL would hang on to the coattails of Rifondazione, which is glued to the trouser legs of Di Pietro [ex-public prosecutor, now leader of the bourgeois party Italia dei Valori], who swears loyalty to the Democratic Party. Over the last 15 years, Rifondazione, precursor of the current PCL (and of PDAC too), gave electoral support to the anti-worker and anti-immigrant coalitions of Unione and Rifondazione.

In its statement on Rosarno, the PCL rightly demands “the abolition of all the anti-immigrant legislation of the last 12 years.” They forget to say where they were during those 12 years: inside Rifondazione, where they remained peacefully, even when all the RC parliamentarians voted en bloc for the Turco-Napolitano law.

Workers of the World Unite!

Since Italy was transformed from a country of emigration into a country of immigration at the beginning of the 1990s, the oppression of immigrants has become one of the key aspects of capitalist rule in this country. Today more than 4.5 million immigrants live in Italy (7.2 percent of the population), relegated to the lowest rungs of the proletariat, doing the hardest and worst-paid jobs under conditions of extreme vulnerability. These workers, deprived of rights, can be exploited by the capitalists to the limits of their physical tolerance. They are hired and fired simply according to seasonal or temporary demand.

At the same time, the social power of immigrant workers, who represent a growing and significant component of the working class in whole industrial sectors, from the building trades to the metal industry, has increased. This is demonstrated by the one million immigrant workers who have joined the unions, almost all of them only in the last ten years. The fact that in the course of a few years, hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers have joined unions and taken part in hard class battles is evidence of their consciousness and combativity. In the last two years, it has often been immigrant workers in the cooperatives (at Bennett in Origgio, at Fiege and at GLS in southern Milan, to mention but a few cases in Lombardy), who have played a leading role in hard strikes that succeeded in spiking the bosses’ arrogance.

The struggle for full citizenship rights for all immigrants and to eliminate racist oppression is indissolubly linked to the struggle to bring down the system of capitalist exploitation. As we wrote in the “Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program” of the International Communist League (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 54, Spring 1998):

“Modern capitalism, i.e., imperialism, reaching into all areas of the planet, in the course of the class struggle and as economic need demands, brings into the proletariat at its bottom new sources of cheaper labor, principally immigrants from poorer and less-developed regions of the world—workers with few rights who are deemed more disposable in times of economic contraction. Thus capitalism in ongoing fashion creates different strata among the workers, while simultaneously amalgamating the workers of many different lands. Everywhere, the capitalists, abetted by aristocracy-of-labor opportunists, try to poison class consciousness and solidarity among the workers by fomenting religious, national and ethnic divisions. The struggle for the unity and integrity of the working class against chauvinism and racism is thus a vital task for the proletarian vanguard.”

Our aim in defending immigrants is to win workers to the consciousness that they must oppose the whole capitalist system. We do not seek to patch up the system by putting forward an alternative policy on immigration. We fight against every form of oppression and discrimination and to wrest improvements, however minimal, from the capitalists and their state. But only when the working class and its revolutionary leadership have seized political power from the ruling class and taken control of the economy away from them can we be concerned with the ebbs and flows of the workforce. We take no responsibility for the bourgeoisie’s immigration policy today. We have no advice to give them. We try to organize the proletariat to destroy this system and establish proletarian power. Our ideal, as explained by Lenin in What Is To Be Done? (1902):

“should not be the trade-union secretary, but the 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.”

Our model remains that of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The rule of the capitalists and landowners was replaced by that of the working class, which waved the banner of world socialist revolution. In spite of Stalinist degeneration, which in the end threw open the doors to capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92, the Soviet Union demonstrated the capacity of a collectivized, planned economy to provide work, education, health care and decent conditions of life for all. We carry forward the battle for the emancipating principles of the Bolshevik Revolution. And as far as universal and not merely formal equality for workers is concerned, this is what the Constitution of 1918, on which the Soviet workers state was based, said:

“Article 20. Proceeding from the principle of solidarity of the working people of all nations, the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic grants full political rights of Russian citizens to foreigners residing in the territory of the Russian Republic for purposes of employment, and belonging to the working class or to the peasantry not employing the labour of others: and it empowers the local Soviets to grant to such foreigners, without any cumbersome formalities, Russian citizenship rights.”

—quoted in First Decrees of Soviet Power, Lawrence & Wishart (London) 1970

The ever-more multiethnic working class in Italy has the social power to liberate itself and all the oppressed in a socialist revolution. The immigrants are not only victims, but increasingly an integral part of the proletariat. Just as the workers who migrated from southern Italy played a key role in the pre-revolutionary struggles which shook capitalist power in the Italian “hot autumn” of 1969, so too are immigrant workers destined to play a fundamental role when class struggle heats up in this country. In addition, immigrant workers represent a human bridge to the oppressed masses of the semicolonial countries from which they come, posing the question of the struggle for proletarian revolution internationally. As Lenin wrote in a 1913 article titled “Capitalism and Workers’ Immigration”:

“There can be no doubt that dire poverty alone compels people to abandon their native land, and that the capitalists exploit the immigrant workers in the most shameless manner. But only reactionaries can shut their eyes to the progressive significance of this modern migration of nations. Emancipation from the yoke of capital is impossible without the further development of capitalism, and without the class struggle that is based on it. And it is into this struggle that capitalism is drawing the masses of the working people of the whole world, breaking down the musty, fusty habits of local life, breaking down national barriers and prejudices, uniting workers from all countries in huge factories and mines in America, Germany, and so forth.”

In order for class unity to prevail, it is necessary to construct a revolutionary vanguard party on the model of the Bolshevik Party that Lenin and Trotsky built in the Russian tsarist empire, a party which fights for socialist revolution and for a planned, collectivized economy. A party that fights to win the working class to the struggle against all forms of oppression, a party that knows how to generalize every battle into the consciousness of the need to overthrow the bourgeoisie. Only proletarian revolution, which establishes the power of workers’ councils, expropriating the means of production (factories, land, means of transport) and constructing a planned economy on an international scale aimed at meeting the needs of the masses of millions of people and not of a handful of exploiters, can create the social wealth and equality to eliminate wars, crises and racist discrimination. This is the aim of the Lega Trotskista d’Italia and all the sections of the International Communist League.

Correction

The article “Italy: Unions Must Defend and Organize Immigrant Workers!” (WV No. 961, 2 July) contained a factual error due to a mistake in the translation. In discussing a roundup of workers, we wrote that “police ‘evacuated’ some 100,000 workers, locking them up in hundreds of Centers for Identification and Expulsion (CIE).” In fact, 1,100 workers were “evacuated” and hundreds of them locked up. (From WV No. 963, 27 August 2010.)