There is no society divided into classes without class struggle: even when it seems dormant, it smoulders under the ashes in the balance of forces and the silent threat to employ them. In capitalism, the proletariat, when it does not have the strength to take the initiative for its defensive action, is equally forced to suffer it, to resist, in order to reduce the damage or prevent further deterioration. This is what we are witnessing in the Fiat affair: the bosses launch an attack, being able to denounce every previous agreement. Obviously every right, whether established de facto or by law, is only based on power relations.

As in all countries with advanced capitalism, in Italy, first, with the strikes of the 1960s and early 1970s, the working class achieved improvements in their living and working conditions, then, with the onset of the economic crisis from 1974-75 onwards, workers suffered a steady stream of defeats. Over time, the deterioration in precariousness, welfare, and finally also in wages became greater and greater.

But the most serious aspect of this retreat was not the deterioration in itself, but in the fact that every attack was suffered without a fight. It did not produce the necessary strengthening of workers’ organised strength but, on the contrary, its decay. In thirty years each defeat has led to a retreat both in the living conditions of the working class and in its defensive capacity.

This disastrous result was the product of the control over the working class by trade unionism loyal to the bourgeois regime. This, in the face of the growing attack on workers has continued to take the opposite path to the necessary one: instead of fighting to unite workers in common struggles above the divisions in which capitalism locks them, it has confirmed those divisions, within companies and categories. Worse still, it has closed them within their own generation, pitting fathers against sons, left completely defenceless in the hands of the bosses.

It was not a simple error of strategy, but the inevitable consequence of the political conception of reformism and Stalinism (today, worse still, all ‘ex’: a circus of zombies), mortal enemies of socialism, who suffer the class struggle with annoyance and show the workers the road to conciliation with the bourgeoisie, for a ‘good management’ of capitalism, which they euphemistically call ‘the Country’. This totalitarian and prevailing conception ties the fates of the proletarian class to those of the state and the capitalist economy, which translates, at the bottom of the ladder, into tying the fates of the workers to those of the company.

For the old 19th century reformism there was no revolutionary way out of capitalism, but only a slow and gradual overcoming of it, by peaceful and legal means, was possible. It would therefore have been self-defeating to conduct struggles that damaged the entire productive machine, instead collaborative work had to be done between the different social classes to let it naturally evolve towards Social Progress. Instead, in the century of imperialism, the 20th Century, we have at the head of both the trade unions and the so-called ‘workers’ parties not non-revolutionaries but counter-revolutionaries, undoubtedly emanations of the ruling class, infiltrating the workers’ ranks.

Bourgeois trade unionism, following this descending branch of its parabola, was able to succeed and impose itself in the class thanks to the material support of the states, but basing itself on the temporary economic growth of the post-war period, which allowed – not without hard and bloody struggles – some real improvement to the workers’ condition. The policy of social collaboration passed off as its successes the contingent results of a phase in the capitalist economic cycle, which ended with the 1974-75 crisis.

The ephemeral post-war economic boom, with its large corporate profit margins, could only be realised on the ruins and on the 55 million dead of the Second World War, the only real solution that capitalism found to the crisis that had plagued it since the turn of the century. Only in this exceptional context, and in a handful of countries in the world, was it possible to achieve any improvement for the working class.

With the onset of the crisis, decreasing profit margins, and increasingly fierce capitalist competition, continuing to tie the workers’ fates to those of the company has meant nothing more than forcing them to endure every sacrifice in order to keep the company and the national economy alive. Now that capital, socially decrepit, is demanding more sweat, more work, less wages in order to survive, bourgeois trade unionism is running towards bankruptcy, and into this precipice it seeks to drag the working class with it.

The policy of the regime’s trade unions, even in their ‘left-wing’ components, cannot change course. For them, irreversibly bound by now to a mentality that in Italy dates back to right-wing reformism, organically transcended into the ideology of first fascism and then Stalinism, and to a now assimilated patriotic and nationalist psychology, the interests of the workers are reconcilable, they must be, with those of capitalism. This bond with capitalism is now in their nature, it is absolute, precedent and prevalent even over the workers’ own lives. If it is not possible to guarantee a decent standard of living for those who toil and at the same time the normal course of the capitalist economy, that standard must be worsened; if it is necessary to lay off, let them lay off. And, consistently, tomorrow, if necessary ‘for the Country’, let the proletarians go off to be torn to pieces at the front. Marchionne and Fiom disagree on particular procedural and formal issues, not on this framework.

Since this has not always been the case, and we communists have been reminding ourselves of this for a very long time, the working class can rediscover tomorrow, along with its international recomposition, which today sees the conditions, needs and aspirations of proletarians in the west and east coming together, its tradition of independent organisation and its defensive movement, not closed to overcoming bourgeois society.

Such a class war is likely, if directed by the communist party, to move from the defence of the wage-earner as such to its social negation, once the political power of capital has been destroyed.