They all agree on one thing, politicians of the parliamentary right and left, economic experts, scholars, trade unionists, etc.: for the good of the country, of our beloved Italy, the various social classes and subclasses will have to make sacrifices and renunciations to ensure recovery and progress.

Renunciations and sacrifices that will have to be endured by both the worker and the bourgeois, the very figures that Marxism portrays as irreconcilable enemies.

Once ‘the law’ was proclaimed, the discussion began on the methods of its implementation, a discussion that, we believe, will become more heated by the day, as the announcement of the increase in electricity tariffs has shown: who will have to bear the brunt of the sacrifices required by the country? The formerly united front of honourable Italian politicians face to face with this question is split and a thousand subtle distinctions differentiate one group from the other: there are those who would like to hit the notorious multinationals the hardest, those who target absentee landlords, those who blame speculators and greedy merchants, and those who instead aim at the large army of proletarians who would only need to be penalised by a small per capita share to save and earn Italy Inc. a lot of money.

We believe that it will be precisely the workers who will pay for everyone, unless the workers themselves pull down the current trade unionists and politicians from their armchairs.

The CGIL-CISL-UIL Confederations are perfectly at ease in this bleating chorus. Poor things, they see no other way out of the current economic crisis than by reducing the consumption share (read: worsening living conditions of all wage earners) to the full advantage of the investment share. Their only request is to one day be consulted when it comes to investing and implementing the infamous industrial reconversion plan, which should expand the productive part, for the good of all, of course.

This is, after all, the big lie that is being peddled to the workers. In truth, the Italian and international economy is in a blind alley from which it will only emerge with immense destruction of men and means, if the communist revolution does not open the way to a different economic and social order.

The dilemma is this: on the one hand, capitalists must reduce the production costs of their own commodities in order to win the fierce international competition, to expand the ‘productive base’, after having invested part of the mass of profits in constant capital (new, more perfected machines) and in variable capital (more workers to set in motion the increased mass of constant capital). They can only do this by decreasing and squeezing workers’ wages, as the openly bourgeois rightly maintain. On the other hand, it is not enough to squeeze wages alone, not least because it is tantamount to an immediate decrease in the purchasing power of the great mass of consumers, if all the other costs that contribute to the formation of the price of the commodity (and here goes in a bit of everything from taxes, to credit, to the cost of electricity, etc., etc.) increase, and here the opportunists are right.

The fact of the matter is that, having embarked on the track of maintaining this regime of production, they are all right: both those who advocate income policy and the defenders of investment policy are false opponents defending a particular aspect of bourgeois interests, and sooner or later all the distinctions will disappear and there will be a united front of tout court supporters of the regime.

A class-based trade union policy must defend neither this nor that aspect of the bourgeois economy because its goal is the emancipation of the working class, the abolition of the wage-labour system.

What then should be the direction of a truly proletarian trade union? It is quickly said: the workers must not take on any sacrifice, and if their refusal to do so will be the ruin of the capitalist economy, then ruin it is.

The other road, the one that attempts to make workers and entrepreneurs march side by side on supposedly common interests, is fascist corporatism, corporatism that differs from the medieval one, which united those who exercised a particular trade (it was, we once said, monopolar corporatism), in that it binds together two classes, the proletarian and the capitalist, two classes with opposing interests, a bipolar corporatism.

Thus, the main distinguishing point of the Class Union that will necessarily have to be resurrected is that it will take on the interests of one class only, the proletarian. With this we distance ourselves from all corporatisms, the former based on the trade and the latter on multiple classes.

Another point belonging to the heritage of the Class Union is the international solidarity among the various national working classes, classes that have no national or patriotic aims and purposes to fulfil but to fight ceaselessly for their own common class interests. Italian goods, if the intentions of our capitalists to reduce the costs of production pass, will perhaps regain the positions lost in recent times in the world market, and consequently some crumbs may fall onto the Italian proletariat, but to what end, if this potential improvement (if it occurs) comes at the expense of the French, English, Spanish and Yugoslav proletarians, whose goods would be defeated in the ruthless arena of the world market?

Mors tua vita mea! This has been elevated to the immanent law of the economy and of bourgeois society, based on individual enterprises that produce in a mercantile atmosphere. The workers’ movement from its inception countered this with international class solidarity that transcends borders and unites nationalities; Mors tua vita mea gives way to the well-known Proletarians of all countries unite!

What therefore remains for the working class in the various countries to justify its sacrifices for the good of the economy? With absolutely nothing left for it, the class must instead prepare to overthrow its national enemy, the state, be it Italian, French or Polish.

Breaking all bastard solidarity between bosses and workers is the first step that the proletariat will have to take to seize one of its classic weapons: the Class Union, indefatigable defender of the interests of the proletariat against all the demands of national economies.