Rome, Saturday October 26, 2019: For a Class Union Front

Capitalism has entered the global crisis of its economy. The masters and their political regimes of all countries – whatever the ideology with which they try to disguise their bourgeois nature – are working to unload the effects of this crisis on the working class in order to postpone the inevitable catastrophic collapse of this dying mode of production.

For years, in fact, the living and working conditions of the workers have been under attack and in on-going deterioration. The regime trade unions (in Italy CGIL, CISL, UIL) have all prevented any real organization of a defensive struggle. They sign give-back national and corporate agreements and limit real struggles to being divided by company and by category.

Base trade unionism – developed by the most combative workers because of the CGIL went to the side of the bosses – also finds themselves in a crisis both because a good part of its leaders did not know how to prepare the base of the members to the harshness of an open clash, demonstrating not to have a really class trade union conception, and because they conducted a war against each other subordinating to it the basic needs of the movement of workers’ struggle, first of all the unity of action of the workers.

The SI Cobas is the only base trade union which has in recent years has been able to strengthen itself. By building a militant workers’ movement through a long series of hard strikes, the SI Cobas has built itself through the methods of genuine class unionism. But the employers and regime trade unions have succeeded limiting it to the logistics industry – except for important but small exceptions – and especially among immigrant workers.

In order to extend this movement to the majority of the working class, it is necessary to pursue a line of UNITY OF ACTION OF WORKERS AND OF COMBATIVE UNIONISM:

• We need to show other workers the strength and the combativeness of workers in the SI Cobas as much as possible. We must push for joint strikes with workers still members of the regime unions, to help free them from regime control. As well we have to push those organized in the other base unions, to support their more combative groups against the opportunism of the leaders;
• to promote and fight for unified actions of the whole combative trade unionism (grassroots trade unions and opposition in the CGIL) as the most favorable condition for the deployment of strikes – at company, territorial and category level – that come as close as possible to the force necessary to really set the workers in motion;
• to fight within each combative trade union organization to organize unitary coordination to support each individual struggle, to intervene in disputes with the aim of offering workers an alternative to the regime’s trade unionism.

It was only as a result of such work that a real general strike could be organized tomorrow. The work to be done today is to try to unite the hundreds of struggles against dismissals for company crises, which are kept isolated by the collaborationist trade unions, those against the repression of employers, which affects more and more workers and militant trade unions, those of national agreements renewals involving millions of workers, starting with logistics, and then moving on to metalworkers, railroad workers and the public sector.

To engage in the construction of organizational fronts with political parties – which are just political fronts – is opposite of workers united actions and of the combative unionism. This operation only perpetuates and aggravates the division in the action of the militant trade union movement, since each trade union leadership subordinates strikes and demonstrations to the support of its own political front.

The task of the revolutionary proletarians, and of class union militants, is to build a trade union struggle movement as united and strong as possible. It is on this material basis, and working to this end, that each party will have to show that it is capable of directing the working class from the trade union struggle to the higher, and necessary, revolutionary political struggle which will break capitalism.

As for the revolutionary communist party, it cannot be born from any political front, which, supporting the illusion of being stronger because they are more numerous, is instead a very weak constructions, ready to collapse at the first social and political earthquake, built on the basis of ambiguous positions, lack of clarity, and therefore opportunism.

On the contrary, the authentic Communist Party is the result of the entire historical path of the proletarian struggle of almost two centuries, which has defined and selected – separating and discarding schools and currents – its theoretical characteristics, program and tactics, through the lessons of huge battles and of tragic defeats.