Il Partito Comunista 411

The protests in Cuba at the beginning of the second week of July are the latest of the jolts in areas where the consequences of the economic crisis of the capitalist mode of production are taking on devastating proportions.

In Lebanon, the state’s bankruptcy prevents it from paying its oil bill; power plants stop working and the country remains in the dark. Repeated explosions of popular discontent are suppressed by the opposing bourgeois factions that, although fighting each other, converge in maintaining political power.

Riots exploded in the same days in South Africa, where 117 people have already died, following the sentencing of former president Zuma to a prison term and which the media hastily describe as “inter-ethnic” clashes fomented by the Zulu community. Clearly, the dozens of deaths in the looting of supermarkets are not the product of ethnic hatred, but of unemployment, marginalization, and misery brought on by modern capitalism.

Famines are spreading across the planet, also as a consequence of the economic disruption aggravated by the pandemic, adding tens, hundreds of millions of people to those condemned to hunger.

In this general context, the Cuban protests cannot be underestimated, as is done both by those who defend the increasingly faded image of Castro’s “socialism”, and by the bourgeois media that spreads a failed picture of a “communist” regime that denies “democratic freedoms”.

The flare-up of street riots in Cuba, on the other hand, concentrates in itself all the chaos of the countries of the imperial periphery, a crisis, however, of a fully capitalist economy, the one described and predicted by Marxist theory.

This reality remains valid even without ignoring the two occasional events that, according to a superficial representation, would be the causes of the current crisis: the collapse of tourism due to the pandemic and the embargo imposed by the United States back in 1962, under the Kennedy administration, and further tightened under Trump. We do not deny that these two factors have played their part in bringing the Cuban economy to its knees, but they are intrinsic to the overall crisis of the mode of capitalism. The Trump administration has tightened sanctions against Cuba in line with the foreign policy of a power forced to reckon with its own decline in a global context of increasing tension. In the contest for markets, the U.S. must counter the penetration of goods and capital from other powers. Cuba’s main trade partners are Russia and China, in addition to the ailing Venezuela, and Western European countries, including Italy in particular, play a significant role. The problem for the US is to prevent the Caribbean island from becoming an outpost in the Americas for the commercial advancement of rival powers.

The crisis of tourism has a devastating effect on Cuba because of the intrinsic weakness of its economy, the impossibility for a small country poor in natural resources to sustain a process of autonomous development without the contribution of capital from the major powers. Cuba has never been offered the possibility of asserting itself in the international division of labor, given the balance of power among the capitalist powers.

These unfavorable relations of force have prevented the national anti-imperialist revolution, which in 1959 brought the Barbudos guerrillas to power, from making Cuba an economically strong country. So the petty bourgeois ideological representation was able to blame the Cuban version of false communism of not having been able to realize capitalism! It is truly a terrible test of cunning on the part of those on the false left of half the planet who stubbornly cling to the nostalgia for a “socialist” Cuba. When the living conditions of the Cuban proletariat are deteriorating day by day, plunging into malnutrition, this alleged “socialism” would only be the confirmation for the lying bourgeois propaganda of the impossibility of getting out of the bleak horizon of capitalism.

If, on the other hand, it had been possible to achieve socialism in Cuba alone, as the Castros and Che Guevaras did not want and could not do, why should we have ever feared the embargo of US goods and capital? What happened to the high-sounding proclamations of “Homeland or death” of a grotesque and unrealistic nationalism, accompanied for six decades by a pitiful jeremiad for the disastrous conditions of the Cuban economy attributed to the “Bloqueo genocida”, that is, the impossibility of importing goods “made in the USA”?

The worsening shortage of food and medicine on the island is also due to Venezuela’s economic marasmus, which has caused a drop of more than 70% in interchange compared to 2014, with a drastic reduction in imports of Venezuelan oil, which Cuba has been buying cheaply since the days of the 2000 agreement between Chavez and Fidel. In June, only 35,000 barrels per day arrived in Cuba from Venezuela, half of what it was in February and barely a third of what it was in 2012. In the meantime, the trade balance has continued to worsen with the deficit reaching 10% of GDP. The production of sugar, Cuba’s main export product, has fallen considerably due to the scarce availability of fuel for agricultural machinery and the lack of spare parts. With the pandemic, in addition to the halving of income from tourism, remittances from emigrants have been reduced by a third.

To this situation – as we have well described in the previous issue – the government reacted with a monetary reform that abolished the convertible peso causing a considerable devaluation of the Cuban peso. Wage increases did not compensate for inflation at all. A situation aggravated by the scarce availability of primary consumer goods that have become hard to come by despite strong price increases.

It is not surprising that in dozens of cities hungry proletarians clashed with the police, looting government food stores. The harsh repression resulted in one death on the outskirts of Havana, numerous injuries and many arrests. The riots have forced the government, having realized the danger, to a sudden reshuffle of government and concessions, the increase of salaries in the public sector and the abolition of import duties on basic necessities, such as food and medicine, which are a means for Cuban emigrants to feed and care for families left behind. The Cuban bourgeoisie is afraid of the proletariat, which shows that it knows how to rebalance the power relations between the classes in its favor with its struggle. The Cuban proletarians feel less the call of the “socialist homeland” than that of the stomach, and nationalist rhetoric is not enough to keep them calm.

In such circumstances, the thesis of the US conspiracy, that the demonstrations were piloted by Yankees determined to overthrow the regime, sounds ridiculous. We don’t even know to what extent the US is really interested in destabilizing the island by provoking a new wave of immigrants on the Florida coast. If the US bourgeoisie will try to exploit the Cuban protests to its advantage, this does not imply any intention to replace the regime of false communism with the forms of a liberal democratic system.

Communists do not therefore face the alternative between supporting the rubble of the Cuban revolution or the anti-Castro circles in Miami and the strongest imperialism. It is not a question of defending Cuba and its anti-imperialist revolution, now a historical achievement, although inevitably sold out to the highest bidder among the big bourgeois powers. Nor is it ever a question of accepting the democratic demands, certainly overestimated by the media, of a protest that starts from the primary needs of the proletariat and certainly not from the impotent aspirations of the petty bourgeoisie and traffickers of Cuba to see the birth of a liberal democracy. Communists are nevertheless always with every proletarian rebellion in which they see hints of class awakening, and they direct them towards the maturation of a higher level of class formation, providing themselves with the organs proper to the proletariat, namely the class union and the communist party.

[the following leaflet was released by ICP comrades in Italy against closures at factories of the GKN group. GKN provided parts for Stellantis auto groups which includes Fiat, Chrysler and Peugeot amongst others]

The struggle at GKN must be included in a general protests at the Stellantis group and united with all the other struggles against the redundancies in order to obtain a reduction in working hours, 100% unemployment benefits for laid off workers!

Since 30 June – the day of the release of redundancies granted by Cgil Cisl and Uil to the government and employers – the list of companies announcing closures and redundancies has grown longer: GKN in Florence, Gianetti Ruote in Monza, Whirlpool in Naples, Timken in Brescia, ABB in Vicenza and many other smaller ones that are not newsworthy.

The CGIL leadership is now pretending to be indignant and the Fiom leadership has called a two-hour national strike, divided by territory and by factory: they are trying to regain credibility with the workers, which is increasingly difficult, and above all with their own members and delegates, in whom discontent is rife.

In confirmation of how bogus are the intentions of the regime unions – that they do not intend to call the workers to fight – Fiom Fim and Uilm have not called any mobilization of the workers in the factories of the Stellantis group, except for a two-hour strike at Mirafiori just for July 30. And yet it is clear that, if there is any chance of reversing the closure of GKN, it lies in promoting first and foremost a struggle of the whole ex-FIAT group, for which GKN devoted most of its production.

The automotive sector is particularly affected by the crisis of overproduction that has been afflicting the global capitalist economy as a whole for decades. A few weeks ago, in the main Stellantis plant in Italy – the one in Melfi – Fiom Fim and Uilm signed a disgraceful agreement to reduce the production lines to a single one and to transfer the production of ancillary industries to the parent factory. This will lead to further redundancies both in the factory and in the supply chain.

A general dispute in the Stellantis group should demand, against redundancies and closures of factories in the group and in the allied industries, a reduction in working hours and an increase in the redundancy fund to 100% of the salary, since a large part of the workers in all the factories work only a few days a month and receive miserable salaries, which prevents them from participating in strikes on the few days they are at work.

It is this kind of union action that the workers of GKN, Gianetti, Timken – all factories in the automobile sector – need, not the fake solidarity of institutions, church and bourgeois parties, or two hours of strike action proclaimed by the regime’s unions to save face.

But the struggle of the GKN workers must also be linked to the struggles against redundancies in all other sectors. The closure of the GKN plant, even though it was fully operational until the very end, is also a consequence of the crisis of overproduction in the world capitalist economy: increasingly asphyxiated markets lead to increasingly fierce competition between industrial groups and an exasperated search for cost savings, which presumably led Stellantis to prefer other suppliers of components that were produced by GKN.

For years, companies have been closing factories in industrially mature countries and relocating them to young capitalism, where wages are lower. But overproduction is a process that is inexorably advancing in the world economy and is already beginning to affect even those capitalisms that are no longer so young, that have matured early, starting with China.

In this situation, trade union defence of workers cannot be conducted company by company: it is a matter of defending the entire working class from the economic crisis of world capitalism.

The CGIL, CISL and UIL refuse to do so, and for decades have instead refined, together with bosses and governments, a sophisticated mechanism of ’company crisis management’, aimed at resolving each dispute for itself, isolating any fight against redundancies within the factory walls. There are more than a hundred company crisis tables open at the MISE, where workers’ anger and hopes are withered away.

That is why it is necessary to support and fight for the unity of action of conflictual unionism – grassroots unions and combative union fractions in the CGIL – so that it can really stand as a candidate to replace the regime unions in the direction of the trade union struggle. There is still much to be done in this area.

Finally, this year, a few days ago, a national general strike of all grassroots trade unions was called for 18 October. It will be necessary to work for its best success and the widest adhesion of the groups of combative workers still within the regime unions.

This first important result in the battle for the unity of action of conflictual trade unionism has certainly not been definitively achieved, with the leaderships of grassroots trade unionism that for years opposed it by promoting divided actions, and that only contingently changed course. Only the pressure from below of groups of combative workers can allow this unity of action to become a stable and organic factor, which is deployed at all levels of trade union action – company, territorial, category, inter-category – leading to the formation of a unified class union front, a further step towards the rebirth – outside and against the regime unions – of a large class union.

The occupation of the factory by the GKN workers is a confirmation of their combativeness. But in the context of the crisis of overproduction, the fight against redundancies cannot stop at the factory gates, only by opposing its closure. Even if every factory is occupied and production is carried out by the workers, what is the point of producing goods that have no market outlet? Moreover, competition between companies, in which the bosses try to involve the workers by instilling a corporatist spirit in them, in order to squeeze them better, would become a problem for the workers themselves.

The same applies to the suggestion of nationalisation of the big companies: the workers in state-owned industry would also be in competition with other companies on the world market, they would also have to sacrifice themselves in order for ’their’ state-owned company to win in the arena of the international market, which is increasingly clogged up with overproduction, and, in all of this, the nationalist ideology, rather than that of the international workers’ union, would be fostered in them.

What workers need in order to live are primarily wages and time off from exploitation. The fight against redundancies, against the closure of factories, is the first necessary step. Uniting these struggles is the next step, but it can only be completed with common demands that unite all workers, without divisions between large and small companies, without binding them to corporatist and nationalist views, without dividing them along national borders. These demands are full wages for redundant workers and a reduction in working hours and working life.

The workers’ struggle to defend themselves against the effects of the crisis of the capitalist economy must not be confined to the fortresses of a few factories, but must go out of them and into the streets and squares, to involve and join the hundreds of thousands of workers who have already been made redundant despite the blockade.

The world capitalist economy, due to its inexorable contradictions, has been in decline for years and will collapse in the near future. Workers must be organised to fight not for its impossible maintenance, keeping open factories that the capitalists want to close, but in defence of their needs, demanding satisfaction. It is these trade union demands that are likely, because of their class characteristics, to take the trade union struggle to the political terrain, finally making concrete the motto taken up by the GKN workers: Let’s rise up!