THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF ITALY’S POSITION ON THE TRADE UNIONS
Categories: General Meeting, Italy, Union Activity
This article was published in:
FROM 1922 EDITIONS OF ‘IL COMUNISTA’
[GM112]
The comrade went on to read further extracts from Il Comunista, this time from June and July 1922 editions. He showed how the Communist Party of Italy tried to bring the struggles of the metal-workers, who were out on strike at the time, and other categories of workers into the orbit of the recently formed Labour Alliance (Alleanza del Lavoro.) The intention was to unite proletarians from the various trade unions, in accordance with the watchword of the Trade Union United Front. Naturally the leaders of the Confederation, and Buozzi’s FIOM (the Metalworkers union) did everything they could to break up the struggles, countering our proposal of a general strike with calls for strikes one city at a time or even one factory at a time, arguing that if only one section of the bosses is opposed to the metal-workers proposals, it would be better to strike only in their factories, thereby avoiding other workers having to lose money, and halting production during a time of crisis.
Even demands by the industrialists for a reduction in wages would be accepted by the Confederation’s leaders in the name of the national economy, touting as victory that they had obtained slightly reduced wage cuts to those originally demanded.
Rallying behind the slogans of apoliticism and peace, we find a haphazard array of reformists, maximalists, syndicalists and anarchists all confusingly united on the same side: that of anti-communism.