Rosarno – an example to all workers

The following short articles, designed to be distributed as leaflets, and translated from Italian into several other languages so as to be accessible to immigrant workers, situate the issue of race where it belongs: squarely within the context of the international working class struggle against capitalism. The first was written in response to a revolt of immigrant workers in the Calabrian town of Rosarno in the South of Italy. Rising anger about appalling working and living conditions finally erupted after two immigrant farm workers were subjected to a random airgun attack in early January 2010.

The second leaflet takes up the same theme in a more general way, and was distributed on March 1^st 2010 at a demonstration in Italy called in defence of the rights and conditions of immigrant workers.
 

A question of Class and Class struggle, not Race!

The immigrant farm workers have proved they can contain their anger no longer. Their explosive demonstration is a body blow to the apologists of the ‘progressive nature’ of capitalism. Their strike that exploded on the streets of Rosarno, for such indeed it was, wasn’t an episode in a racial war but a battle between the two opposed sides in a class war; a typical seasonal farm workers’ struggle bearing all the same tumultuous features of its centuries-old history. On one side stands a strata of completely proletarian wage-earners who, like the rest of their class, have nothing to lose and no country, whilst on the other side stand the landowners and the agrarian capitalists, with their state, their police and armed janissaries; whilst on the trees the ripening fruit waits to be harvested.

Just the fact of the class sticking up for itself was enough to terrorise the bourgeoisie and get all of its hired thugs to make a hasty exit.

Yes, certainly the farmworkers’ living and working conditions were ‘fit for slaves’, and their pay miniscule, as the bourgeois bleeding hearts have not been slow to point out. But such conditions are, in fact, the usual lot of the casual labourer. Starvation wages and unbearably long hours are normal and inevitable for workers under capitalism; as much the case now in capitalism’s decline and death throes as during its ascent in the eighteenth century. Is the condition of the young part-time worker in the ‘rich North’ really any better, even though they’re white Italian citizens? Do they earn more than the 30 euros a day that ‘the Negro’ gets? Aren’t they sacked without warning and without back pay as well, whenever the boss can get away it?

Racism, the fruit of a dirty campaign skilfully organised by the bourgeois regime’s clever tricks department, is the required instrument to divide the working class front. The other major rift is the one lying between old workers in ‘permanent’ jobs and young workers who are deprived of any protection or security. It isn’t a matter of fighting racism with anti-racism, of ‘integrating them’ into ‘our’ society, but of integrating them into our class and into our struggles. And clearly it is the Italian workers who need to be integrated, not the immigrant farmworkers!

Not a hint of this simple truth can be detected in the pronouncements of the regime unions. There is not a mention of it in either the FIOM or the RdB documents.

Everything is blamed on ‘local criminality’, as if instead of the problem being inevitable in capitalist society it was a question of ‘public order’, or was the result of a particular type of ‘immorality’ against which the workers should concentrate their efforts, side by side with the ‘honest’ bourgeois, of course, to make their state function better. The working class must fight against the bourgeois state not seek to ‘improve’ it. And indeed the ‘ndrangheta’ would be hard put to squeeze the workers any more than the state is already doing on behalf of the bourgeoisie.

The real responsibility for the harsh conditions of the farm workers and illegal immigrants in general is certainly to be ascribed to the discriminatory laws of the bourgeois state, who divide workers according to their passports. But this has only been possible because the regime’s unions, the Cgil-Cisl-Uil-Ugl, have never opposed this divide and rule tactic, and have done nothing for the great mass of workers forced into illegality. The defence of the working class includes the struggle to defend its weakest and most vulnerable elements, something that is necessary to oppose the bourgeois organisation of blackleggery by the utilisation of the most blackmailable and lowest paid workers, whether temporary workers or immigrants. The unions have abandoned the ‘illegal’ immigrants to the same degree they have accepted the ‘regularisation’ of temporary work, because they are unions which are betrayers of the working class as a whole. The common organisation of every type of wage worker and a joint trade union fight for common objectives, with the mobilisation and strength which the full timers would bring, would defend these particularly vulnerable workers and also the new generation of workers.

The anti-racists, who organise the immigrants as immigrants instead of alongside the Italian workers, regard racism as a kind of illness from which present society needs to be cured whilst we regard it as a weapon of the bourgeoisie in its permanent war against the working class. With its weak and moralizing tone, anti-racism is an expression of the petty bourgeois thinking which is totally extraneous to the working class. It is an anti-racism which does nothing to tackle the underlying causes of racism.

The more the conditions of workers of every nationality, race and trade come to resemble each other, the easier and more urgent will it become for them to reorganise as a unitary fighting trade union and for them to recover the old perspective of a common emancipation.

With that in mind we address the class – of Rosarno, and everywhere else in the world – and invite them to proclaim, along with us their, and our, one instruction: Workers of the world unite!