Italy : The Struggle against Racism and Fascism

1. The struggle against racism and fascism in Italy

The criminal attack against migrant workers in Rosarno, in Italian region Calabria, has been known all over Europe.

It demonstrates what our Party is saying for months, that Italy is a fore front of racist and fascist war the European bourgeoisie is carrying out against migrants. The Italian State make people drowned in the Mediterranean sea, had made their boats sink, is organizing and supporting economically and politically in many Italian cities fascist and racist groups who have representatives in the bourgeois institutions and who did attacks against migrants, so as against gay people, workers, leftist young people and communists’ seats and so on, and acts together with the criminal organizations as it does in Rosarno. They are the criminal organizations that killed six African people in Castel Volturno in Campania in September 2009, by gangsters with carabinieri’s uniforms .

So as Italy is a forefront of this bourgeoisie’s war, it is a forefront of the resistance by the people’s masses and by the communists.

On January 2009, in Rome, tens thousands of migrant people marched in a demonstration of more than a hundred thousand people in support of Gaza Palestinians attacked by Zionists, one of the many demonstrations that leftist, anti-imperialist, antifascist and antiracist forces and the people’s masses by themselves are been able to organize in the latest years independently from revisionists forces.

On July 2009, an antifascist and antiracist squad started from the National Feast of the Association for Proletarian Solidarity for demonstrating against a fascist and racist “patrol” in Massa (Tuscany), and against the fascist and racist “security package”, the laws promulgated by the Berlusconi’s gang against migrants. The comrades were attacked by the police and by the fascists, three of them arrested, among them Alessandro della Malva, secretary of the CARC Party Tuscan Federation, member of the National Direction of CARC. The arrested were liberated after a hard struggle by people supporting them, demonstrating in front of the police stations, blocking the railway stations at Massa and in Naples. The minister Maroni, member of the racist Lega Nord, was compelled to modify the racist measures aimed to organize anti-migrant patrols.

On 11 October 2009 in Pistoia (Tuscany), 20 people who were having a meeting for organizing antifascist and antiracist activities in Tuscany were seized by the police and held in the police station all night long, with the false charge to have participated in an antifascist raid against a fascist seat near there. Three of them were arrested, and one of them, Alessandro della Malva, kept in jail where he is still today, with no right ever to communicate by mail with people outside and mainly with his Party, in rigorous imprisonment. Many demonstrations and initiatives of solidarity for him have been carried out, involving hundreds and thousands of people, relatives, friends, comrades, remembering us the images we got of the solidarity for the political prisoners we see, for example, in Turkey.

On 16 October, another great demonstration against racism and fascism, with ten thousands of people, was held in Rome, this one too self organized by leftist, anti-imperialist, antifascist and antiracist forces.

We ask the international antiracist, antifascist and communist movement to pay attention to what the imperialist bourgeoisie is testing in Italy, that is how to promote the reactionary mobilization of the popular masses. We also ask to the movement to support strongly the resistance the popular masses, the antiracist, antifascist and communist forces are carrying out against these that we call “fascism testing” by the bourgeoisie.

The comrades of ATIK (Confederation of Workers from Turkey in Europe) have made a statement about Rosarno facts.

Their statement is important. It answers to the call we sent already in the summer, asking the antiracist, antifascist and communist movement, and mainly the European one, to take care how what was happening in Italy, both about bourgeoisie’s war against migrants and about the struggle against this war, that is a kind of war itself, part of the protracted revolutionary people’s war applied according to the particular laws to be applied in the imperialist countries.

We have some remarks to make about the statement. Below we reproduce the document and indicate the remarks. Our comments are in italic.


2. ATIK statement

The hysteric aggression against migrants in Italy-Rosarno is
‘modern slavery racism’!

The aggression against migrants in Rosarno is not “hysteric”. It is a planned operation, organized by the local criminal organizations connected with the State forces of repression, a part of a national strategy carried out by the extreme right of the imperialist bourgeoisie, of whom Berlusconi’s gang is representative. The tactic to make acting before the illegal forces (fascist or criminal gangs) and then the legal ones (the carabinieri, the police) as a rearguard is the old one tested firstly by Italian Fascism in the Twenties of the past century.

Rosarno fact are not “modern slavery racism”. The migrants are not slaves. They are integral and important part of the Italian working class. Some of them were workers of Northern Italy factories fired because of the crisis. All of them were workers of the agricultural sector in Southern Italy.

Workers may be treated worse than slaves, but anyway they are not property of somebody, they are free men and women, even if this means that they are free to die because they lack means of subsistence. Workers are a higher kind of laborers than slaves, and this is not a matter of words, but of what political action we are going to carry out with them and for them.

In South Italy, in the Calabria region in Rosarno, new attacks occurred against semi-legal or illegal migrants that are brought into the region for seasonal agricultural work.

The original source of the conflicts in the town has been the violent measurements against the migrant worker’s legitimate mass action by the Rosarno police and carabinieri teams, after the racist-fascist-mafia circles had injured two migrants with firearms. Migrants are moving to protest against the inhumane treatments, humiliations, discrimination and racist aggression of the past months in Rosario. With their legitimate upraising, they have presented a new example of the tradition of civil courage.

It is said that hundreds of migrants were injured during the joint attacks by the mafia circles and the police. The international ruling media is reflecting the issues distorted and is instigating racism by doing so. Migrants have been complaining in the past periods that ‘protection fees’ have been forced upon them by the notorious mafia organization of the Calabria region ‘ Ndrangheta’ resulting in a second exploitation. After these events hundreds of migrants were made subject to sudden and forced deportation without any legality to base this on, they were placed into homes in Bari and Brindisi that not even had a hygienic infrastructure. Thousands of migrants and refugees whom lives are at risk have the intention to flee the region with their own recourses.

The Italian Interior Minister Roberto Maroni is supporting the hysterical aggressive attacks of the mafia- police collective against illegal migrants, by stating ‘The incidents in Rosarno have shown the necessity for harder method in the struggle against illegal migration and migrant criminality’.

Against this, the progressive, democratic Italian public opinion and the left opposition have expressed a correct political analysis by stating that ‘the essential problem is not the migrants (legal or illegal) but the exploitive, mafia, racist and fascist-minded power struggle’.

Ten thousands of migrant workers are being put to work as slaves in the Calabria region, in Rosano, on the fruit fields, working under bad, unhealthy and precarious conditions. Even the refugee board of the UN, the UNCHR and the Italian unions has been criticizing these inhumane conditions for many years.

Since the period of Mussolini, Calabria is known as a province where racist, fascist-minded and the mafia are very strong, is actually economically an agricultural and domestic tourism region. The demand for maximum profit and superiority on competition through the exploitation of cheap, non-skilled, precarious migrant labour is the common goal of the small businesses, large farmers and the capitalists.

To say that “Since the period of Mussolini, Calabria is known as a province where racist, fascist-minded and the mafia are very strong” is a cliché, and moreover a cliché used by the racists themselves. We need to be dialectical. Calabria has been the region of many important peasants struggles after the Second World War, occupation of lands, tens of people killed. It has been a region with an important communist tradition. It has been a region with one of the most important workers struggles in the Nineties, the one of Enichem workers of Crotone. Going back in the past, before the period of Mussolini, this was the region of the hardest people’s war by the so called “brigands” against the occupation by the Italian State. Going further back, it was one of the lands with utmost resistance against the Vatican, in the sixteenth century, in a struggle that would have determined the future of our peninsula for the next centuries until today. Thousands of Calabrian Waldensians were killed by the papal forces. Tommaso Campanella, jailed for thirty years, one of the most important revolutionary thinkers of the century, was Calabrian. Gioacchino da Fiore, one of the most important inspirers of the revolutionary heretical movements of whole Europe in the first centuries of the past millennium, was Calabrian. More than 2500 years ago Pythagoras, well known as one of the greatest philosophers and mathematicians in all history, came in Calabria, in Crotone, were he wanted to establish an aristocratic government, but democrats rebelled, and killed him and his followers.

The Calabrian people’s masses are among the most oppressed masses in Italy, obliged to migrate themselves in many parts of Italy and all over the world. They are the first victims of the Mafia system. Their resistance must be known and supported. The Communists must be able to unite the resistance of the migrant people and that of Calabrian people. If they are not be able to do so, it is a problem of them. The reason why the reactionary powers are strong in Calabria is the fact that Communists are weak, it is a problem of the Italian Communist Movement, from the period of Mussolini until today

The entire Italian ruling class is profiting from this nationwide fascist-minded relentless exploitation. Berlusconi, who heads up the most racist power in Europe, is named the ‘representative of modern fascism of our times’ by many of the Italian leftists and progressive public opinion because of the oppressive implementations on all workers and migrants.

Those who talk about “modern fascism” in Italy are wrong. In Italy there is not fascism like the one we had from 1922 to 1945. If it were so, all people who call themselves “communists” would be in jail, or killed. There will be no freedom of strike, we should have an open terroristic regime, mass extermination, and so on. No doubt that Berlusconi and its gang are trying to establish something like this, but they have not yet succeeded in doing it. In Italy, so as in the other imperialist countries, we have a regime of counter preventive revolution, aimed
to maintain people’s masses’ cultural and political backwardness,
to prevent people’s masses from building their mass organizations, doing so as they associate themselves in organizations (trade unions, associations, etc.) led by men of the regime to selectively repress Communists,

To develop channels for popular masses’ participation in bourgeoisie’s political struggle in a subordinate position, following its parties and exponents, making them believe that so doing they participate in leading the State, that they somehow “are the State”

To satisfy the requests of improvement that the popular masses make more strongly, to give everyone the hope to have a dignified life and feed this hope with some practical result, to envelop every worker in a network of financial bonds (loans, mortgages, bills, taxes, rents, etc.) that every moment make him risk to lose everything or anyway much of its social state and richness if he’s not able to respect fixed deadlines.

Thanks to this regime the imperialist bourgeoisie rules in the imperialist countries. This is the regime that the communists have faced in most of the imperialist countries, (with the exception of the countries and the periods when bourgeoisie adopted the open terroristic dictatorship as Nazism or Fascism). This is the regime still existing in the imperialist countries, even if somewhere, as in Italy, the extreme rightist bourgeoisie is trying to restoring fascism, that anyway it will not be different from the old one. That is why we ask to the forces that are talking of modern fascism what they are talking of.

Who says that we are in a fascist regime says something wrong and damaging. It is wrong, because Fascism is the terrorist dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. It involves consequences and has characteristics everyone knows in Europe and all over the world, many people for having learned them the hard way.

Undoubtedly in Europe and particularly in Italy part of the imperialist bourgeoisie is trying to get at this. Outlawing the youth communist organization of Czech Republis is one of these attempts. The imprisonment of Alessandro della Malva in Italy, and the general attack against CARC Party and against all the organizations of the caravan of the (n)PCI are “fascism testing” as well. Also the attack against Rosarno migrants is this. Italy is a forefront of the clash between reactionary and revolutionary mobilization of people’s masses.

Anyway, they are all attempts. To say that we are already in a fascist regime, modern or not, means to say that enemy has already won. That is why it is a damaging thesis. It does not allow to organize people’s masses to defend the conquests and the political freedom they, in Italy, had been able to wring out from the bourgeoisie by the war of Resistance and workers struggles followed in the decades after the Second World War, and that the bourgeoisie has not been able to destroy completely. It does not allow uniting the struggle of these people’s masses with the struggle of migrants, who are the first target of the “fascism testing” of racists, fascists and Mafia men of Berlusconi’s gang.

This unity between autochthonous and migrants’ people’s masses is a necessary means for winning. This unity is a means that guarantees victory.

On behalf of the Confederation of Workers from Turkey in Europe; we condemn the modern slavery, degrading, oppressive, racist, fascist-minded policies of the Italian government and state. Once more we declare that we will not cease to protect the right of migrants where we will be. We call upon the Italian and international democratic-progressive public opinion, unions, human rights organizations and activists to act more to defend the rights of migrants. Long live the international unity of workers and the fraternity of people!

End to the civil-bureaucracy-police and mafia cooperative racist aggression in Italy!

Solidarity with the attacked African (illegal, legal) migrants!

Democratic rights of migrants are also human rights!

End to the aggression against migrants and refugees!

The EU 2010 Return Directives should be stopped immediately!


Conclusions

In Italy, but also elsewhere, there is only one way for defending migrants’ rights and interests. As we told in the 23rd Thesis of our Second Congress (November 2009), “communists and progressive people must committ themselves on a large scale in order to favour by all means migrants’ organization and mobilization to defend their rights and to favour the unity between the auchtoctonous and the migrant people’s masses in the common struggle against bourgeoisie and its system of mysery and exploitation”. They will do so advancing in the revolutionary struggle for establishing socialism in their countries. This is the core of the matter, and it is very important that every force of the international communist movement and of the resistance movement of the people’s masses all over the world become aware of this.
We thank very much the Turkish comrades for their statement that reveals a deep attention to many details of the political struggle ongoing in Italy. Mainly we thank them for the opportunity they gave us to start a debate within the international antifascist and antiracist movement about some most importante and decisive issues.


Partito dei Comitati d’Appoggio alla Resistenza – per il Comunismo (CARC) - Italia
Via Tanaro, 7 - 20128 Milano - Tel/Fax 02.26306454
e-mail: resistenza@carc.it

http://www.carc.it/