Strikes and Repression in Piacenza and Prato, Italy

Our comrades in Italy are involved with two significant struggles in the cities of Piacenza and Prato. In Piacenza, workers at a FedEx‑TNT facility, represented by the rank-and-file union SI Cobas, are on strike against planned layoffs. In Prato, textile workers at Texprint, also members of SI Cobas, are on strike against sweatshop conditions and outrageous working hours. In both cases, many of the workers are immigrants from the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia. Both strikes were met with severe repression from the bourgeois state, with picketers attacked by police and union militants arrested.

This article analyzes the strikes and their repression. It is followed by a leaflet distributed at a demonstration of striking textile workers in Prato. We would like to note that this was the first ICP leaflet distributed in both Italian and Urdu, the language of many Pakistani immigrants working in the textile industry.

How to Respond to the Agencies of Bourgeois State Repression

On the night of February 1, on the 13th day of the strike, police and carabinieri attacked Fedex‑TNT picketers in Piacenza. In an especially disgraceful manner, they threw tear gas canisters between the legs of workers sitting peacefully in groups in front of the gates. This provoked the striker’s anger and while being pelted with stones, the forces of order were forced to retreat.

This embarrassment couldn’t be allowed to go on: in a society divided into classes, violence can only be legitimately used by the ruling class’ repressive organizations. This is a necessity for the defense of the ruling class’s political dominance and social privilege.

So, on March 10, a large retaliation was conducted against Piacenza members of SI Cobas: including fines of up to 13,200 euros; searches of workers’ homes; two union leaders were placed under house arrest; five prohibitions of residence; and six cases seeking to revoke the residence permits of immigrant workers.

This is the way in which the bourgeois state is trying to break the strength of the SI Cobas union, which in the last 10 years has organized many fierce workers’ struggles. Piacenza’s logistics sector is also one of the union’s strongholds.

On the same day, March 10, police also attacked another SI Cobas picket, at Texprint in Prato. Workers have been on strike there for over 50 days. In Prato’s textile district, SI Cobas has been organizing the workers against their ruthless sweatshop exploitation. Demands include an 8‑hour, 5‑day workweek, instead of the common 12‑hour, 7‑day workweek!

Under the bourgeois regime, while the left hand offers promises and solemn commitments to protect so‑called “workers’ rights”, the right hand repeatedly attacks workers fighting for their material needs.

“Rights” are a lie which goes hand in hand with the lie of “democracy”. Both are useful to mask the oppressive nature of capitalism and the dictatorial nature of the bourgeoisie’s political regime. Workers have no rights because their needs are always subordinated to the demands of profit. Workers also have no power, which only exists in the hands of big industrial, financial, and landed capital. This exists both on the national and international levels.

For example, the “right to strike” is allowed only to the extent that it is used without causing excessive harm to the bosses. That is, only when it’s ineffective in defending workers. When workers organize struggles with the real ability to defend their interests – strikes without notice and without a fixed deadline, along with pickets to block goods and scabs – and they do so organized in unions that openly make these methods of struggle at the center of organizational action, the bourgeois regime will show its true face, taking off its mask of democracy and unleashing repression.

As long as the workers remain under the control of the regime unions (CGIL, CISL, UIL) whose strikes are rare and mostly very timid – lacking picket lines, called well in advance and of fixed duration – the bourgeois regime can continue pretending to be sympathetic to the sufferings of wage‑earners, and the clowns of the various institutional parties can even parade through the workers’ mobilizations in search of votes.

The workers of Piacenza and Prato organized by SI Cobas understand they can only count on their own strength; that they have no friends or allies outside the working class.

In their defense, and in order to raise this awareness in the working class, the entire militant unionist movement – rank and file unions as well as the class-based CGIL opposition – must react in a united fashion to this attack, which is not only against SI Cobas but against all class unionism and all workers. An appropriate response would be to organize a united national strike in all logistics by SI Cobas, ADL Cobas, USB, CUB, SGB, and the opposition in CGIL.

Along the road of workers’ unity of action and militant unionism, the working class will regain confidence in its strength, freeing itself from the control of the regime unions (CGIL, CISL and UIL).

The most militant section of the working class will adhere to the revolutionary communist party, necessary to overthrow the political power of the ruling class and open the way to the future communist society, without classes or exploitation.

March 20
ICP Leaflet to Prato Textile Workers

Texprint workers,

Your struggle is a great example for all workers, Italians and immigrants, and of all categories! The working conditions to which you and all the textile workers of Prato are subjected are proof of how capitalism is based on the exploitation of the working class.

These conditions are analogous to those of laborers, logistics porters, slaughterhouse workers, and thousands of factory workers, to which the bourgeoisie would lead the whole working class if only it were not afraid of awakening the workers’ anger, their struggle, and their enormous and invincible power.

For this reason, for years, the ruling class has been acting gradually, attacking the working class with great prudence, to weaken it and increasingly shatter its unity and strength.

In all countries, for this purpose, one of the fundamental tools of capitalist regimes is the division of workers between natives and immigrants, both through specific discriminatory laws and by fomenting racism, so as to subject immigrant workers to more intense exploitation and worsen in this way the conditions of the entire working class.

The fact that your conditions of exploitation have existed for decades for a substantial part of the working class, and that they tend to expand and worsen, demonstrates what a rag the much vaunted constitutional charter is, which always works where it enshrines the rights of the bosses and never where it should protect workers.

The police repression of the strikes organized by SI Cobas, in Prato as in Piacenza and throughout Italy, is the demonstration of how much democracy is a perfidious deception against the workers. The workers can only count on their strength, their class trade union organizations, and their revolutionary party. From democratic institutions they will only receive promises to deceive them and beatings to bend them.

The fact that the conditions of exploitation in the Prato textile district and in many other jobs and production sectors have been perpetuating and worsening for years without CGIL, CISL, or UIL ever lifting a finger demonstrates how these are trade unions of the capitalist regime, unusable by the working class for its defense.

SI Cobas, which in Prato managed to organize the workers of various textile factories by conducting harsh strikes, has done admirable and very important work, giving workers a glimmer of light, a path along which to fight exploitation.

To strengthen your struggle, your union, it is necessary to break the divisions imposed by the bourgeoisie, uniting the workers above ethnic, national, and religious divisions. In Prato it is essential to be able to involve workers of all nationalities, from Italians to Pakistanis, Bengalis, Chinese, etc. in the struggle and in the trade union organization.

A very difficult task, hampered for the latter – who represent the majority of workers in the textile sector – by the ties that keep them locked up in the jail of the “national community”, which obviously benefits only their bosses, but a task that is absolutely necessary.

Comrades, workers,

The trade union struggle and a true class union are absolutely necessary to put a stop to exploitation and as a basis for the political struggle necessary to eliminate it. For this purpose, the political party of the working class is necessary: the authentic communist party, which indicates how from the trade union struggle it is necessary to rise to the struggle for the revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, the only way for the overthrow of capitalism and the liberation of a communist society, without classes and without exploitation, with which the dying society of capital already carries within it.

Proletarians of all countries unite!