Communist Party (Italy

In Italy, the health emergency following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has put the contradictions and limits of monopolistic capitalism before the eyes of all.

Already other catastrophic events, such as the collapse of the Genoa bridge, had displaced common sensitivity, dispelling the myth of the goodness of privatizations compared to public management. The pandemic crisis has definitively demolished this myth.

The destruction of public health service is now being impeached by many, even by some who until yesterday were on the side of the private vision/ privatisation. In particular, it is now clear that a system cannot be based only on the concentration of resources and capital, which the private system produces precisely to maximize profits; on the other hand, the public system, based on the massive contribution of motivated and well-educated operators spread throughout the national territory, is the best weapon not only against emergencies, but also in the daily prevention of disasters.

This general debacle of bourgeois ideology – as opposed to the sympathy aroused by the examples of support offered, for instance, by the Cuban Medical Brigades and other countries– opens up great spaces for us to resume our ideological battle from more favourable positions.

The post-Covid crisis is acting like a war without bombs, which destroys productive forces, annihilates small activities and favours large monopolistic concentrations.

Those who are paying the price for it are, as usual, the lower classes. Employees are either out of work with a promised layoff that most of the time is in guilty delay or forced to work in conditions of serious danger to their health. Not to mention the whole vast sector of small undeclared work that was eliminated at once, ruining financially millions of workers, already forced to suffer the oppression of this system. The queues at the pawn shops are testimony to this and we can imagine how profiteers of all kinds are preying on these poor people.

The extreme point of this exploitation has been in health care. The massacre of inpatients and workers in retirement homes, the recruitment of doctors and paramedics with the promise of a stabilization that has not yet been seen and will probably not be seen. People betrayed after being sent into the trenches with the rhetoric of “heroes”, while being treated instead as modern cannon fodder.

Many small activities have been cancelled. Tourism, crafts, professions, catering, personal services, etc., have suffered a total collapse for months, with serious consequences for workers, managers and employees.

At the same time, the agricultural sector is really on the ropes. The entire fabric of small-scale production is literally massacred, while the government uses the alibi of the regularization required by Confindustria (general confederation of Italian industry) exclusively in favour of the agri-food chain and the worst illegal hiring. We need a perspective of work in the agricultural sector that intersects with environmental issues and the most brutal exploitation of the weakest sections of the labour market, starting with the immigrants, for whom we continue to ask for fundamental social rights.

The government has responded to this crisis with shameful alms that may barely be able to repay the taxes, which have been moreover postponed and not reduced or cancelled.

The European Union has responded with the characteristic instruments of debt aggravation. The measures envisaged – MES, Corona-bond, recovery fund – are all within the paradigm that serves to enslave the peoples to an increasingly extended public debt that will result as we have already seen in Greece.

In Italy the target is the large amount of small savings still immobilized in private homes and little funds deposited in current and similar accounts. Certainly not the large real estate assets that are protected, but the small security that in the past decades the workers had accumulated thanks to painful sacrifices for their children’s future. This patrimony is under attack to pay off the monstrous public debt that with this crisis will come – between an increase in debt and a fall in GDP – to exceed the ratio of 170 percent.

Contradictions within the European Union are increasing.

The northern countries, let’s call them that for convenience, among which the Dutch tax haven stands out, are recalcitrant because they have an enormous private debt and large banks with bankruptcy exposures. The countries of the south, including Italy, are in the opposite position, with high public debt and low private debt. In the middle, the two heavyweights, France and Germany, are trying to recover a tarnished leadership. Of course, each bourgeoisie is trying to exploit its relative strength to increase its own advantages and minimize dangers. The north does not want to pay the public debt of the south and the south does not want to pay the private debt of the north. The governments and ruling classes of France and Germany want to continue dictating the music.

In this situation, great spaces open up for the ideological and political battle of the Communist Party.

The first area of intervention, as always, is the working class. With all the difficulties of the historical phase, the fundamental dictate is to take root in the class, starting with the large industrial groups. The objective difficulties are the same as always: fragmentation of production, atomisation of contracts, blackmail in the workplace, scarce and contradictory unionisation.

However, if the Party, from the point of view of principle and proposal, appears to be the only one consistently on the side of the workers, it still fails to gather adequate feedback from the working class, today still disoriented by the betrayal of the left and malignantly infatuated with a right wing, which has to be clearly contested for the unnatural hegemony that has been created. Communists in their workplace must go back to being the leaven of the class struggle and must constitute a unifying moment in the construction of the class union, without ever replacing it. With organization and creativity, Communists must provide the workers’ struggles with a political perspective and an awareness of their historic tasks. Without this the struggles will inevitably turn back on themselves sooner or later.

The second area, includes all the sectors of society that suffer the strongest contradictions. Workers doubly exploited because they are weaker, such as young people, women, immigrants, precarious workers. To all these the Party must give a perspective of class unity, the awareness that, only united on a basis of common struggle, war between the poor can be prevented. It must make it clear to them that every contradiction of the bourgeois system cannot find a solution by itself in this society, but must be channelled and must simultaneously give and take strength from the common struggle for socialism.

The third area, that is, the other intermediate classes that are strongly suffering the consequences of the crisis and have precipitated socially, economically and politically. They are small individual activities, family businesses or ones with very few employees. They pay the consequences of the monopolistic concentration because the income they extract from their business is diverted into taxes and bank in-

74 terest and, if they were already in crisis before the pandemic, now they risk being unable to move on.

Socially, they now feel completely excluded from the ranks of the middle classes experiencing proletarianization and this could definitively detach them from the trail of the ruling classes and make them willing to ally themselves with the proletariat by accepting its common leadership. Politically they are no longer represented by any party. The sirens of the parliamentary parties that are still trying to attract them are in a vertical loss of credibility. They just have to “throw themselves” to the extremes. Therefore, the Communist Party is the only alternative to their radicalization in a markedly reactionary sense. The historic occasion is important: the strategic unity between the working class, the workers and the proletarianized middle class can become the historic opportunity for a radical change in society. As always, the slogans of the Party that must be brought to these sectors must be consistent and unambiguous. They must be simple, concrete slogans and break with the capitalist system.

For example: 1) Nationalizations with expropriation without compensation for large strategic companies that relocate, entrusting the workers with the management; 2) The minimum wage per job, with the restoration of trade union rights and the single national contract; 3) The reduction of indirect taxes and heavy taxes on small activities and the increase in direct taxes on profits and large incomes; 4) Expropriation of large real estate properties; 5) Large public permanent recruitment policies for really useful works, infrastructure, environment, health, education.

These are all things that anyone can understand, feasible, but conflicting with profit and with the European treaties. Hence the need to break down the European political and military cage (EU and NATO) which becomes clear, concrete, and necessary in everyone’s mind.