Il Partito Comunista 366

The air raids on Gaza over the last few days are just a continuation of the Israeli government’s same old policy against the Palestinian people, and especially the proletarian class. Once again the Israeli government is fighting “terrorism” in Gaza, but not with the aim of totally destroying Hamas, despite what they say. Rather they want to use Hamas to serve its own ends, to continue to police Gaza as Al Fatah and the PLO did in the past. They aren’t really out to destroy them because they know that a bourgeois movement like Hamas, cloaked in nationalism and religion, or even better, corrupt like Al Fatah, is the best defence against the development of a class movement. The two bourgeoisies, Israeli and Palestinian, have this interest in common. And the missiles launched from Gaza are certainly more useful to the Israeli, and global, bourgeoisie than to the “Palestinian cause”.

Palestinian and Israeli proletarians are thus kept like rats in a cage in a miniscule stony ghetto between Jordan and the sea, intoxicated with patriotic idolatry and bloodlust, and pawns in a cynical ruthless game between the big imperialisms.

Over time the various attacks, missions, and campaigns have been designated in various ways but nothing has changed. Two years ago we had “Operation Pillar of Defence”, before that “Operation Cast Lead”, before that “Operation Hot Winter”, always with the same result, because the same result was what was intended. The victims, like in all wars everywhere, belong to the class of proletarians. Proletarians die, the assassins derive the political advantages they were after, and then a ceasefire is declared. The bourgeois, with few exceptions, do not suffer the consequences of war. They give the orders, proletarians give their blood. As of today the death toll has mounted to 650, most of them proletarians, elderly proletarians, proletarian children who have no safe shelter to flee to. These victims are nothing to Hamas, Al Fatah or the Israeli government, they are just numbers. Meanwhile the occupation continues and extends.

In Israel, as is still the case in many other centres of capitalism, an unfavourable economic situation has rendered the proletariat prone to indifference and inactivity, threatened as it is, given a lack of class-based trade union organisations, with losing the work and privileges it enjoyed up to not so long ago. Only as the capitalist crisis deepens, with the Jewish proletariat of Israel losing their economic advantages and so-called social state, will we see a real development of a mass class struggle. The war serves to keep the proletariat divided and imprisoned by the counter-revolutionary ideology of the defence of the bourgeois fatherland and national interests.

Now we are seeing the rise of fascist groups in Israel who support a Greater Israel, and wear insignia and uniforms like the neo-nazi cells in the rest of the world, and – irony of historical irony – they are increasingly coming to resemble the original Nazis who wanted to exterminate them.

The groups of peace activists in Israel show clearly the impotence of their sterile movement, which invokes an impossible peace between nations whereas in fact the only way capitalist wars will be stopped is by the proletariat, when they cast off their chains and engage in the class war. In any case, these pacifists always seem to end up relapsing into warmongering in defence of democracy; the democracy which these small fascist groups, composed mainly of young dropouts, “want to destroy”.

Discontent has meanwhile exploded in Ramallah, with protests and demonstrations of young proletarians against the bourgeois Al Fatah, reacting to the killing of an Arab boy who had fallen into the hands of a fascist cell of young Jews, and there have also been illegal demonstrations in East Jerusalem.

But what Hamas, Al Fatah and the Israeli bourgeoisie fear most of all are new trade union organisations formed on a proletarian class basis, be they Palestinian or Israeli, which are opposed to the bourgeois forces of Israeli and Palestinian nationalism; and also the spreading into that crossroads of history of the one, reborn, world communist party.

Pioltello (Italy), 8 June, 2014.

When workers set out on the road of class struggle – which is what the workers organised by the SI Cobas at Dielle, at Caat in Turin, at IKEA in Piacenza, at Granarolo in Bologna, at Carrefour, at SDA and in many other battles have done – it soon becomes very apparent that an entire anti-proletarian system has been installed to bring proletarians into submission to capitalist exploitation: the various businesses respond to the struggles with reprisals and sack trade union militants; the regime trade unions support them by trying to break strikes, dividing the workers and organising blacklegs; the bourgeois State sends in its police force to break up the picket lines.

Against all these enemies the workers can count only on their own forces. These forces, when restricted to within one company, may temporarily get the better of their bosses in the odd battle here or there, but they can never achieve victory in the long-term. CLASS UNITY is the way to working-class victory, which starts in the workplace but can only be achieved by breaking out of it, by extending beyond the narrow confines of the firm, and of the sector, and by breaking down the barriers of sex, race and nation, all of which are divisions which only serve capitalism.

UNITY OF THE WORKERS becomes a reality when there is UNITY DURING STRIKES: when workers express solidarity with other sections of workers when they are under attack and take action to support them; at which point a strike is no longer considered a private matter of employees in a particular firm, but rather as a flame to ignite the struggles of more and more workers.

For this to happen there has to an organisation which is fit for purpose, a trade union which can express class demands, a CLASS TRADE UNION. One which:

– puts up an intransigent defence of workers’ interests, that is, which doesn’t subordinate them to either the firm or the national economy (that is, to national and international capitalism);

– doesn’t accept limitations on the use of the strike weapon in exchange for so-called rights (recognition, representation): the bosses only negotiate with a genuine trade union if they are forced to do so; they’d far prefer to sit round the table with their official union accomplices.

In order to develop the unity of wage-earners, whether working or not, the class union must as far as possible be organised not at the level of the workplace or company, but at the territorial level, as in the glorious tradition of the original Camere del Lavoro. A Centre for the Proletariat:

– In which workers meet as members of one class, not as employees of a firm, so they can strengthen the ties of brother/sister hood;

– Which functions as a meeting place for the many workers who work for small companies, the majority in fact, who are isolated from those in the big and medium firms; and also for the ever more numerous unemployed, and thus rekindles their sense of belonging to a class;

– Which becomes the organisational centre for territorial mobilisations of the working class;

– Which becomes point of reference for the many struggles occurring in crisis-hit firms which are today prevented from linking up by the regime trade unions.

– Which promotes the proletarian united front from below through the formation of struggle committees in each firm, which workers can belong to whatever union they are in, and which is tasked with wrenching the leadership of struggles from the regime unions and from the domesticated representative bodies (RSU).

The network created by these territorial structures of the proletarian struggle will form the effective living body of the re-born CLASS UNION.

– LONG LIVE THE STRUGGLE OF THE DIELLE WORKERS!
– FOR THE EXTENSION AND STRENGTHENING OF THE SI COBAS!
– FOR A CENTRE OF THE PROLETARIAT IN PIOLTELLO!
– FOR THE REBIRTH OF THE CLASS UNION!