The Draghi Government in Italy: Apparent Democracy, Reigning Fascism

The living conditions of the workers and of all wage earners have been continuously worsening for decades, subjected, in perfect continuity, to the attacks of all successive governments. Above parliamentary alchemy, every government of the bourgeois state is necessarily opposed to the workers.

This is because the real holder of power is not the current government, but those who today, with hypocritical modesty, call the “strong powers”, and who are none other than the industrial, financial, and landed, the national and international bourgeoisie.

The parties of the parliamentary arc are bands that pose as representatives of classes and class interests, but the threads of these puppets are in the hands of big capital: they cannot go beyond certain limits in their disputes over how to divide the surplus value extorted from the working class, and must discipline themselves to protect the common interest of the entire ruling class, which requires that they maintain of the productive system based on the exploitation of the working class.

The story of the probable settlement of Mario Draghi as head of the government is the driving license. Who better than that international banker can embody the current, stringent general needs of the Italian bourgeoisie?

This is an urgent hour, and all the lobbies and tradesmen of media-parliamentary politicism must step aside or kneel and obey – these clowns are useful only for the staging of an apparent democracy, played only to mask the fascism that, behind the scenes, is alive and prevailing everywhere.

The working class is therefore not interested in taking sides for or against the formation of this government. Democracy, the mask of the dictatorship of capital, must not be defended; its role must be denounced and the true face of our enemy exposed. The new government – be it “technical” or “political” – will work against the living conditions of the wage class, in perfect continuity with the previous ones.

What is needed instead is to rebuild the strength of a real class union to deploy real strikes. This is the only means that the proletarians have to stop the deterioration of their conditions.

The signing of a new national contract for metalworkers on February 5 confirms this urgent need. The Italian Confederation of Metalworkers (FIOM), the Italian Federation of Metal Mechanics (FIM), and the Italian Union of Metalworkers (UILM) in 12 months of dispute have called the category to only 4 hours of national strike, finally obtaining a salary increase well below what they requested: 82 euros out of 153.

The Italian General Confederation of Labor (CGIL), the Italian Confederation of Workers’ Trade Unions (CISL), and the Italian Labour Union (UIL) are collaborationist and regime unions that prevent workers from returning to struggle. On the other hand, the rank and file unions still do not represent a valid alternative because of their divisions, a consequence of the pettiness of their leadership.

For this reason, the inescapable task of communists and militant workers in the workplace and in the trade union movement today is to fight for the unity of action of conflictual unionism – base unions and opposition in the CGIL – to win the struggle against current opportunist leadership, the first practical step towards the rebirth of a true class union, outside and against the regime unions.

Only on the basis of a reborn workers’ movement will more and more workers return to join the revolutionary communist party, which is the fundamental weapon of the class for the overthrow of capitalism and its political regime.