Oppose all divisions in the Working Class! For Working class unity!

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 Ugt and Cfdt, 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!