Report
no official
traslation -
In Italy we
now find ourselves more
than one
month and half of full emergency for the pandemic. It begun from the
second largest city in our country, Milan, Lombardy, where are two of
the largest industrial concentrations in our country, Bergamo, the
most affected, and Brescia.
The pandemic
has affected other areas, them also with a high level of industrial
concentration, such as at north-west, Piedmont, and at north-east
Veneto. Neighbouring to this northern belt there is Emilia-Romagna,
full of small and medium-sized industries of various sectors and
large concentrations of logistics, where some cities such as
Piacenza, Modena were hit hard by pandemic.
Apart from
these areas, the expansion of contagion was at much lower level in
the central part of the country and the capital itself, Rome, and
have had and even less the impact was in the southern Italy, from
Naples to Puglia and Taranto, to Sicily.
Our Party and its mass
organizations immediately tried to give a class orientation to the
working class and the masses, initially opposing the terrorist and
alarmist information which were pushing the masses back into a sort
of blind fear and immobilized them, unable to understand what was
happening and how to deal with it.
The March 8 (International
Women’s Day) fell in this very first phase, and the forces of the
petty and medium-bourgeois feminist movement in Italy, grouped under
"Not One Less" (from “Ni Una Menos” in Argentina and
Spain), have soon backtracked the plans of mobilization and women’s
strike scheduled in those days. At that moment, the bourgeoisie had
not yet declared the "state of emergency", except in some
areas of Northern Italy, therefore, in the rest of the country the
situation allowed strikes and demonstrations, but the bourgeois and
petty-bourgeois feminist movement beat in retreat immediately,
clearly in line with what the base unions had already done.
The
Revolutionary Proletarian Feminist Movement, strongly supported by
the Slai Cobas for the Class Union, which is the class and combative
organization led by the PCm, instead fir mmly maintained both the
strike of some workers, and the planned demonstrations, giving
indications to concentrate them mainly in southern Italy where there
were better conditions of political and social viability. Right the
day before the March 8, the government extended the state of
emergency to the whole country, making pressure to withdraw strike
and demonstrations.
Particularly
in Palermo, pressure was exerted directly by the police and its
political office, but the comrades firmly withstood and both the
strike in some situations of precarious workers, and the gathering in
front the Palaces of power were observed. Mass participation was less
than usual but still significant.
In Taranto the Day was linked to
the mobilization of trade female workers against layoffs and in the
gathering in the street, although with the significant absence of all
the groups of petty bourgeois feminism, saw the participation of the
communist youth organization associated to one of the existing small
new-revisionist Parties.
In the North and especially in
the city which was not yet the epicenter of the pandemic, Bergamo,
the workers challenged the prohibitions and experienced the
aggressive reaction from the a whole front made up by masters,
government and official unions.
However, the
flag of the revolutionary struggle of the proletarian women was held
high on the International Women's Day, and continued to be very
present and active in the following weeks when, with the pandemic and
the state of emergency, the condition of women worsened heavily non
only on the jobs, but in the neighborhoods, the houses, where women
had to deal with vital problems, with the children at home because of
schools closure, and the family oppression which transforms houses
into prisons and potential places of femicide, due to the impact of
the eternal presence of patriarchy. The MFPR continued this truly
hand-to-hand struggle, to feed the women's spirit of rebellion and
make it emerge.
Meanwhile, the pandemic expansion
was spreading and met the immediate reaction of workers in the main
industrial centers of northern Italy: strikes and abstention from
work, spontaneous or organized by the cobas, reached a number
evaluable in 50,000 workers. On numerous occasions there has been
police pressure, intimidations of all kinds, but this has not
prevented strikes and massive abstentions from work.
A part of official unionism in
Lombardy was also forced to declare strike in the metalworking
factories.
These strikes were very important
for various reasons: they showed that the workers did not agree to be
"slaughter meat"; they rejected the blatant attempt of the
bosses to say that “everything was fine”, “everything was safe”
and that the production had to be saved in any case; they showed that
no emergency state could prevent workers to struggle for their own
health and safety; they have exposed bare the hypocrisy of the bosses
and the government who on the one hand wanted the whole population
locked up in their houses and on the other hand the factories full of
workers, the large centers of commercial logistics running with
workers exploited to the bone and without personal protective
equipment.
We can say
with certainty that worker strikes prevented the massive spread of
COVID-19 in factories.
Not only that, but this reaction
of workers, in which the cobas were decisive, in the various
organizations in which they are structured, including the class and
combative organization led by our Party, forced the government and
the bosses to make a first step back. Safety protocols were signed
which, although insufficient, strengthened the workers protection
structures and above all allowed workers to continue to escape, if
the protocol was not applied, any dangerous work.
The spread of the pandemic,
precisely in some of the areas with the greatest workers
concentration, gave strength to the resistance of workers and forced
the government to take a further step back, that of indicating the
factories that could stay open because purposed to the production of
essential goods and services and those that were to be closed. But
the government and masters, with the complicity of the official
unions, included among the factories to not be closed since
strategic, the plants of imperialist multinational war industry, the
iron and steel plants and other productive units that certainly do
not produce "essential services". So the conflict and
resistance in the factories, now explicit now in facts, continued.
Meanwhile, other major events
were taking place outside the factories and jobs.
The revolt of the detainees
exploded angrily in the prisons. Some of the biggest riots in the
prisons in the last decades in our country. The prisoners immediately
understood that no defense was possible against the virus and
rebelled, starting from the prison in Modena. The reaction of the
State immediately became violent, inside and outside the prisons hard
clashes took place, with the prisoners who took possession of some
wings of the prisons, set fire to and devastated parts of the
facilities to make them instruments of resistance and face the
murderous violence of the State. The revolt in few days reached all
the prisons of our country, from North to South, also pushing family
members and solidarity organizations to mobilize in support. The
massacre inside the prisons left 16 inmates dead, and a number
prisoners injured, tortured, deported and subjected to the harshest
measures already implemented in prisons, those which were affecting
the political prisoners belonging to the Red Brigades. In front of
the prison in Milan and other cities, the police assaulted the
demonstrations of the family members and solidarity organizations.
Proletarian Red Relief tirelessly
bore his voice of support to prisoners, condemnation and unmasking of
the lies by the State that claimed that the prisoners killed had
actually died for overdose. At the same time, it gave voice to every
document coming from prisons and family members, doing this on the
whole national territory.
The revolt brought concrete
results with the decision to release prisoners with minor penalties,
but the State excluded the prisoners who had participated in the
revolt from any benefit. The result is clear, compared to the 10,000
prisoners to be released, as assessed by democratic associations,
even the pro-institutional ones, a maximum of two thousand came out
so far. So the struggle goes on.
The prisoners were right to
rebel. In the immediate following days, there were cases of COVID-19
in prisons, even if news of deaths, except one, and the real size of
contagion are kept hidden.
The workers in
struggle did not fail to make their solidarity felt through the cobas
and they inserted the claim for an amnesty in their platform.
But at the front line in all
these weeks there were the doctors and health workers who, in the
face of the rampant outbreak of COVID-99, which has made Italy a
"second China" for several weeks, were thrown into the fray
barehands, deprived of the necessary protection and taking advantage
of their unselfish, somtimes heroic, self-denial for the salvation of
the sick. This has so far led to 126 doctors dead and numerous other
deaths among nurses and healthcare workers in general, mainly in the
pandemic epicenter, Lombardy.
The very core
of this epicenter was the city of Bergamo, where there is a factory
for every 50 inhabitants, which for a few days became a hospital and
an open-air cemetery, the "Italian Wuhan". The very core of
this epicenter has been the city of Bergamo, in whose area there is a
factory for every 50 inhabitants, which for a few days became
open-air hospital and cemetery, the "Wuhan of Italy".
Here also militants and activists
of our Party and union saw their parents die, and the intertwining
between incapacity of the local authorities and a privatized
healthcare built as service for the rich, marked by corruption, led
to the explosion of the pandemic in the Retirement Homes for the
elderly, with thousands of deaths and with real data still hidden,
which even the bourgeois press is forced to report, speaking of
contagions ten times and deaths three times greater than those
declared.
In this situation, the reaction
of health workers and working class contingents was not long in
coming. Without leaving their jobs they began to condemn, to claim
and shout: "hit the those responsible who transformed the
pandemic into a massacre!".
Still in the area of highest
impact of the pandemic, other workers, younger, have been exposed to
the infection, and only thanks their young age there was not a higher
level of massacre. The postmen, the riders, the workers of the
infamous Amazon daily tried to resist, asking the reduction of their
work to the essential services and an effective personal protection.
In the central
and southern parts of the country the situation is different. The
struggles in the factories reached only some automotive plants and
the ArcelorMittal steel plant of Taranto. Also in these factories the
workers responded by absenting from work, in some days in massive
forms and trying to organize strikes, partially successful and
boycotted by the official unions. The government's ad hoc Acts
offered the necessary cover for the masters to impose to continue
working in the factories with several thousand workers inside. This,
albeit in still slow pace, led the virus to the factories, to the
ArcelorMittal in Taranto for example, and probably the game has not
really started yet.
In the center-south, from the
suburbs of Rome to the large concentrations of undeclared workers,
street vendors in Campania, to the migrant fields laborers, to the
poor in Sicily, along with the virus came the end of work, the lack
of income, the difficulty of housing, rooted into precariousness and
unemployment.
But even here, the fabric of
organizations, social centers, housing committees, base unions
structures have tried to respond by claiming incomes and houses, to a
much more large extent than the alms given by government Acts.
In Palermo,
Naples and Rome there have also been initiatives of open uprising,
criminalized, repressed and attacked by the state and the mass media.
This is the general portrait of
what has made Italy not only the European epicenter of the COVID-19
for several weeks, but also the site of an intense proletarian
struggle significant for quality and quantity, which spread another
contagion throughout Europe, the contagion of the class struggle.
Now we are at the eve of the
“Phase 2” in which the masters and the government want to make
profits again, based on exploitation, despite the pandemic is still
fully active. But proletarians and people’s masses and their
organizations, some born by spontaneity, some already organized,
including the Maoists, their structures and their generated
organizations, work to promote a general strike that can have a
revolutionary character if it will be able to build a mass dimension
in an increasingly accentuated state of emergency.
The experience
our Party drew in this situation has been important. How to maintain
its structure and work in spite of the confinement to houses and
maximum control imposed. The experience our Party drew in this
situation has been important. How to maintain its structure and work
in spite of the confinement to houses and maximum control imposed.
And the response it is giving is very positive, the activity did not
stopped a single minute and has not been limited to the websites. The
comrades have violated the state of siege by going to the factories,
they have strengthened their theorethical work using the internet,
with the help of Marxist intellectuals, and they are growing
theoretically and politically. A not stereotyped and doctrinaire
education, but a high and profound effort to arm ourselves with
Marxism to give a strategic and programmatic response to the
international situation of crisis of imperialism that produced the
pandemic and the current scenario.
The determined action of the
Party in all conditions has allowed the growth of influence and
recognition throughout the field of revolutionaries of other
tendencies, of class and combative unionism, of the women's movement
and of organizations supporting the fight against prisons.
Of course, a difficult
qualitative leap awaits us, but our links with the vanguards and the
masses that make the Italian Maoists different and advanced are a
great factor of strength and endurance which gives us hope that the
qualitative leap will be achieved.
Pcm taly
21 avril 2020
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