Rosarno - an example to all workers
A question of Class and Class struggle, not Race!

The immigrant farm workers have proved they can contain their anger no longer. Their explosive demonstration is a body blow to the apologists of the ‘progressive nature’ of capitalism. Their strike that exploded on the streets of Rosarno, for such indeed it was, wasn’t an episode in a racial war but a battle between the two opposed sides in a class war; a typical seasonal farm workers’ struggle bearing all the same tumultuous features of its centuries-old history. On one side stands a strata of completely proletarian wage-earners who, like the rest of their class, have nothing to lose and no country, whilst on the other side stand the landowners and the agrarian capitalists, with their state, their police and armed janissaries; whilst on the trees the ripening fruit waits to be harvested.

Just the fact of the class sticking up for itself was enough to terrorise the bourgeoisie and get all of its hired thugs to make a hasty exit.

Yes, certainly the farmworkers’ living and working conditions were ‘fit for slaves’, and their pay minuscule, as the bourgeois bleeding hearts have not been slow to point out. But such conditions are, in fact, the usual lot of the casual labourer. Starvation wages and unbearably long hours are normal and inevitable for workers under capitalism; as much the case now in capitalism’s decline and death throes as during its ascent in the eighteenth century. Is the condition of the young part-time worker in the ‘rich North’ really any better, even though they’re white Italian citizens? Do they earn more than the 30 euros a day that ‘the Negro’ gets? Aren’t they sacked without warning and without back pay as well, whenever the boss can get away it?

Racism, the fruit of a dirty campaign skilfully organised by the bourgeois regime’s clever tricks department, is the required instrument to divide the working class front. The other major rift is the one lying between old workers in ‘permanent’ jobs and young workers who are deprived of any protection or security. It isn’t a matter of fighting racism with anti-racism, of ‘integrating them’ into ‘our’ society, but of integrating them into our class and into our struggles. And clearly it is the Italian workers who need to be integrated, not the immigrant farmworkers!

Not a hint of this simple truth can be detected in the pronouncements of the regime unions. There is not a mention of it in either the Fiom or the RdB documents.

Everything is blamed on ‘local criminality’, as if instead of the problem being inevitable in capitalist society it was a question of ‘public order’, or was the result of a particular type of ‘immorality’ against which the workers should concentrate their efforts, side by side with the ‘honest’ bourgeois, of course, to make their state function better. The working class must fight against the bourgeois state not seek to ‘improve’ it. And indeed the ‘ndrangheta’ would be hard put to squeeze the workers any more than the state is already doing on behalf of the bourgeoisie.

The real responsibility for the harsh conditions of the farm workers and illegal immigrants in general is certainly to be ascribed to the discriminatory laws of the bourgeois state, who divide workers according to their passports. But this has only been possible because the regime’s unions, the Cgil-Cisl-Uil-Ugl, have never opposed this divide and rule tactic, and have done nothing for the great mass of workers forced into illegality. The defence of the working class includes the struggle to defend its weakest and most vulnerable elements, something that is necessary to oppose the bourgeois organisation of blackleggery by the utilisation of the most blackmailable and lowest paid workers, whether temporary workers or immigrants. The unions have abandoned the ‘illegal’ immigrants to the same degree they have accepted the ‘regularisation’ of temporary work, because they are unions which are betrayers of the working class as a whole. The common organisation of every type of wage worker and a joint trade union fight for common objectives, with the mobilisation and strength which the full timers would bring, would defend these particularly vulnerable workers and also the new generation of workers.

The anti-racists, who organise the immigrants as immigrants instead of alongside the Italian workers, regard racism as a kind of illness from which present society needs to be cured whilst we regard it as a weapon of the bourgeoisie in its permanent war against the working class. With its weak and moralizing tone, anti-racism is an expression of the petty bourgeois thinking which is totally extraneous to the working class. It is an anti-racism which does nothing to tackle the underlying causes of racism.

The more the conditions of workers of every nationality, race and trade come to resemble each other, the easier and more urgent will it become for them to reorganise as a unitary fighting trade union and for them to recover the old perspective of a common emancipation.

With that in mind we address the class - of Rosarno, and everywhere else in the world - and invite them to proclaim, along with us their, and our, one instruction: Workers of the world unite!
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The proletariat is a class of migrants; a global class of the exploited which transcends national boundaries; a class whose true collective interest is to fight to defend its living and working conditions since it has nothing to lose and a world to gain.

The bourgeoisie seeks to hide this truth from the workers. In every country it seeks to restrict the resolution of problems to within the narrow confines of national boundaries. The mass media, with its cynical and well orchestrated racist campaigns, encourages mistrust and hatred between the indigenous and the immigrant worker. In the performance of this infamous task the democracies are demonstrating that they are even more sophisticated and efficient than openly racist and dictatorial bourgeois regimes of past and present.

The bourgeoisie’s racist propaganda takes advantage of the competition between indigenous and immigrant workers that was created by the bourgeoisie to divide the working class, weaken it and make it easier to exploit. As such, racism is no different from the other means of creating divisions which the bosses use, such as the employment of workers on short-term contracts, the subcontracting of work to external companies, the rift between older workers on ‘protected’ terms and conditions and younger workers without any kind of protection or security, and the division between workers in different companies and workplaces as a result of the progressive dismantling of collective bargaining at a national level.

So, racism isn’t a sick instinct from which bourgeois society can be cured, but rather the inevitable fruit of the latter’s conditions of existence and a weapon in the class war waged between capital and the proletariat. It will disappear when there is no more class struggle, after classes themselves have become extinct, after the proletariat has freed itself from wage labour; it will happen under communism.

It is for this reason that fighting racism with anti-racism, on the abstract plane of opinions and moral values, is not only useless but positively dangerous. Communism does not set as its goal an impossible inter-cultural mediation, but aspires to go beyond mankind’s ancient historic cultures in order to synthesise them into a higher form which will stand in opposition to all of them.

The battle being fought today is a classist and proletarian one which has unity as its objective. Its aim is to prevent the employment of workers under worse terms and conditions, whether through lower salaries, the greater ease with which workers can be sacked or through them being in a position where they can be blackmailed by the threat of expulsion if they are sacked! The really important struggles of the working class are those that coincide with the defence of its weakest components: by taking part in these struggles the workers who are relatively less exploited are above all looking after their own interests, insofar as they prevent their more blackmailable class brothers and sisters from exercising a downward pressure on their own terms and conditions.

These simple, sound principles of class action and class struggle have been trampled on at an international level by pro-regime trade unionism which everywhere has adopted a diametrically opposed method: with the state and bosses they have pursued a tactic which first saw the conditions of temporary workers, immigrants, young people and employees of small businesses being attacked, immediately followed by a further onslaught on the last restricted circle of workers with ‘safe’ jobs, thus obtaining the defeat of the entire working class.

In every country the official unions (in Italy the Ggil-Cisl-Uil-Ugl, in France the Cgt-Cfdt-Fo, in England the trade unions in their poisonous alliance with the labour Party) are all organisations which have permanently passed over to the side of the bosses. Those who continue to militate within them with a view to restoring them to heath (like the Cgil left) have achieved nothing at all over the last thirty years, apart from facilitating anti-worker action by spreading the illusion of internal pluralism and retarding and boycotting the work of reconstructing a genuine class union.

But to those today who, using the betrayal of the Cgil-Cisl-Uil as pretext, claim that they wish to fight against racism outside the field of trade union struggle by organising demonstrations of inter-class opinion, or who propose that immigrant workers should strike on their own (something impossible to achieve and doomed from the start) we say to them that the only contribution they are making is to create new, and worse, disorientation and confusion.

The one way forward is to reconstruct the class’s trade union organisation, and organise it on a territorial basis like the traditional Camere del Lavoro,(the chambers of labour similar in some respects to the old trade’s councils and labor unions in England and America). These were organised outside the workplaces and united the different trades, enabling them to include workers from smaller companies as well and to act on the basis of the principles of class struggle. It would be a movement, for example, which wouldn’t distance itself from revolts such as those of the Rosarno labourers and their quite understandable reaction to being shot at, but which would consider them as its own; a movement which would seriously aspire to an ever broader movement culminating in the general strike as a means of obtaining the real immediate objectives of the working class:

- Reduced working hours with no reduction of pay!
- A guaranteed wage for unemployed workers!
- Wage increases, especially in the worst paid sectors!
- Rights of citizenship for immigrant workers!