Good news from the belly of the beast

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From the FIAT plant in Pomigliano (Italy) to the General Motors one in Indianapolis (USA), and back, with the blessings of mr. Marchionne and president Obama! At the General Motors plant in Indianapolis, the United Auto Workers (UAW), one of GM’s main shareholders, have signed an agreement for the sale of the plant (employing some 650 workers) to the J. D. Norman firm. Among other things, the agreement includes a 50% wage cut (wages p/hour to drop from $29 to $14). End of September, after a series of negotiations accompanied by real intimidations against the workers, the agreement was voted down, 457 against 96. At this point, J. D. Norman declare they have no more intention to buy the plant; on their part, GM and UAW try to use the menace to divide the workers of other local situations: they press for imposing wage reductions and plan real retaliations (for instance, making more difficult any transfer of the Indianapolis workers to other plants of the same GM group). The workers organize a fighting committee (the GM Stamping Rank-and-File Committee) and are now trying to extend their fight beyond the Indianapolis GM plant – in the attempt to involve both the Flint GM workers and the Indianapolis Ford ones, and the local population of cities and towns which in their majority revolve around such big plants. UAW have declared that first and foremost comes “global competitiveness”: the workers become aware of the fact that they have to fight both the bosses and the union. We will trace the developments: meanwhile, hurrah for the fighting US workers! our wish is that their fight be gritty and unyielding and that it may attract other militant sectors of a proletariat who, in the past, was the protagonist of glorious battles.

International Communist Party

(International Papers - Cahiers Internationalistes - Il Programma Comunista)

Beyond residence permits, for a united front of the whole proletarian class, for internationalist organization of proletarian forces

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Proletarians, comrades,

remember the struggle of the immigrant proletarians in Rosarno (Southern Italy), their self-determination against exploitation, against the indifference and hostility that surrounded them? They challenged a world that was oppressing them, consisting of work-gang leaders and police, bosses and union organizations, which constantly kept them separated from the rest of the proletariat for fear that a spontaneous alliance might be formed against the existing social order. They had residence permits, they didn’t need to apply for them in order to work, so this was not what they were claiming or fighting for: they were fighting the deplorable and inhuman treatment they received and to defend themselves from their horrendous living and working conditions. During their struggle it was clear to them that in a capitalist regime, whether you have a residence permit or not, there can be no life worth living unless this regime is fought against until it is destroyed. Read more ...

Proletarians, beware! They promise us blood and tears!

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What is happening in Greece is not a remote and isolated incident. It is one more chapter in the now long and devastating economic crisis that began in the mid ‘70s and is destined to become even deeper, with increasingly serious effects on the proletariat in all countries. Arising in production, and not in the world of finance as they would like us to believe, it is a systemic crisis of the capitalist mode of production: it is a crisis of overproduction of goods and capital, which the bourgeoisie can only approach by striking at the proletariat and squeezing the most out of them – with tighter and tighter crunches in terms of living and working conditions and, lastly, when this is no longer sufficient and the situation of inter-imperialist contrasts (mors tua, vita mea) demands it, dispatching them to massacre one another on opposing sides in a new world bloodbath. Read more ...

To the bourgeoisie that promises the workers “blood and tears” the answer is class war throughout Europe

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A tiny earthenware vase

In terms of world reality, what does the enterprise-Greece representeconomically? A small thing indeed. And in the European Union? Only 2.5% of total GNP: a small earthenware vase in the midst of massive iron containers.What real difference is there in “her” crisis compared to that of America, Europe, Japan? None: it is the daughter of the same global crisis of capitalism. And it is her very economic insignificance that is leading Greece to bankruptcy, and not the scandal of faking the accounts with the help of Goldman Sachs, the bank that is today under investigation for having caused (so they say) the crash of home mortgages in the USA: Greece is too small not to go bankrupt. To this we should add the concern of petit bourgeois pro-Europe feeling: the entire framework, so to speak, of the monetary Union is said to be unravelling, alas, under the blows of the crisis... Whether Greece leaves the monetary Union, or whether Germany leaves to re-establish a new and more solid monetary agreement, as is being whispered on many sides, meaning that everything ends up by being temporarily patched up before its final annulment, by restructuring of the debt or some other expedient, as in Argentina, the dynamics of the economic crisis will run on through their transit stations towards an inevitable political crisis between countries. Read more ...

First of May 2010

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Proletarians, comrades!

The economic crisis has started to have a devastating effect on our already hard living and working conditions.In the name of profit, a class of parasites (the bourgeoisie in all its variations, both right- and “left”-wing) and its attendant officials (the embodiment of a union aristocracy that has nothing to do with the workers) continues to keep us chained like slaves, without ever being made to pay for the destruction of our lives – indeed, continuing to collect its incomes, interests, dividends, interests.We pay the price of this exploitation without a moment’s respite in terms of those thousands of our comrades assassinated in their workplaces, by the so-called “social diseases”, the harmful factory environment, the infernal acceleration in production rates, the work that suffocates our existence, and our miserable salaries.This terrible situation is now aggravated by lay-offs, mass unemployment, relocations, clandestine labour everywhere, widespread insecurity in employment, the drastic reduction of salaries – all delights that we share with our brother immigrants.This mode of production, whose only objective is profit, fuels the competition of each man against the other and produces today’s commercial wars and tomorrow’s real warfare.It must therefore be removed by using the scalpels of our class violence.