From the series Assessment of a tactical choice
The failure of the referendums promoted by the CGIL (Italian General Confederation of Labour) confirmed that this instrument cannot be a weapon in the trade union struggle, which is necessarily based on the power relations between capital and wage labour. We republish the leaflet of the workers of our Workers' Clubs on this subject below. Shifting the relationship to the terrain of parliamentarism is a recipe for disaster and is not part of the tradition of the trade union movement, which has always been vigilant against interference by the legislative and executive powers in their bargaining with the employers.
The defence of migrants
In the most recent referendum, there was an aggravating factor: the inclusion of the question of citizenship, a very sensitive and important issue for immigrant workers. By the distinction of nationality, millions of migrants are kept in a regime of wage segregation. How could they not think that bringing this issue into the parliamentary and electoral arena would open enormous opportunities for the government's law and order campaign, based on the false pairing of immigration and security
?
This is the case all over the world, as can be seen from the campaign launched by Donald Trump in California, which has gone so far as to use the Marines against immigrants. Citizenship is a goal that cannot be addressed lightly through rallies and talk shows. This battle requires in-depth work among the masses, consisting of solidarity volunteering and a methodical work of education and organisation of the proletariat. Tackling this very difficult issue superficially, throwing it to the wolves of political demagogues and opinion makers, as well as to many charlatans, has produced the disastrous results seen in the referendum vote, which had, moreover, a very low turnout.
Managing our energies
For us, it was an opportunity to confirm a long-term approach, certainly not to be confused with our strategic abstentionism, which concerns the possibility of using the parliamentary arena in a revolutionary manner. This is a possibility that we have long ruled out in our strategic analysis, but it has nothing to do with referendums, which do not elect any representatives to any legislative assembly.
Referendum votes have always been mere tactical choices for us, often of little importance, to be evaluated on the basis of objective conditions, case by case. As always, tactics must be verified according to a strategic perspective: for us today, this perspective is the establishment of a party on the Bolshevik model in the European metropolises. Based on this, we have always weighed up our position: to participate or not to participate; to vote yes or no. In other words, we have always chosen the position that offered the greatest advantages, and in doing so chosen how to best dedicate our energies to that front of struggle, which is often secondary.
Divorce and the sliding wage scale
In the last ballot, we voted five times in favour, even though we considered and denounced the CGIL's backsliding towards a referendum as a mistake. We felt we could not abandon young people in precarious employment and migrant workers who had been deceived by the referendums. Immigrants were forced to stand by helplessly, without the opportunity to express their views on a matter of great importance to their condition. So, we were present, as on other occasions, and devoted part of our energies to the latest referendums. After all, we had already participated in the 1974 referendum, voting against the repeal of the law that introduced divorce into Italian family law. We did so with great clarity in a bitter political clash in which Amintore Fanfani, who was closely linked to the groups of State capitalism, had lined up the DC (the Italian Christian Democrats), of which he was secretary, in favour of repeal.
Voter turnout was close to 88% and the No
to repeal won with over 59%. In April 1974, our newspaper came out with a single page, signed by Arrigo Cervetto, illustrating our tactical choice, entitled Against State Capital and Its Petty-bourgeois Mass Base
. Our choice was not inherently about divorce but addressed the instrumentalisation of the family issue in a campaign orchestrated mainly by the big economic groups of State capitalism. Their aim was to involve the middle strata and the petty bourgeoisie in their economic policy, using them as a mass to manoeuvre against the working class and its bargaining demands.
In the following decades, there were dozens of referendums, now reduced to electoral tools of a parliamentarism in ever deeper crisis. Our tactical choice was to ignore them. However, we took to the field again in the referendum on the scala mobile (sliding wage scale
). This was in 1985, when the Craxi government converted the 1984 Valentine's Day decree into law. The decree was an act of executive power that cut wages by reducing the effects of the scala mobile, a mechanism that at the time partially adjusted wages to inflation.
There were protests and strikes, which the government ignored, and the decree was turned into law. Enrico Berlinguer's PCI (the Italian Communist Party) launched a referendum to repeal it, and this was immediately supported by the majority of the CGIL, which was loyal to Berlinguer. We warned the CGIL leaders against a choice that divided the unions and the CGIL itself, given that its socialist component did not follow the PCI. Their choice made the union subordinate to the parliamentary parties, cost it dearly, and has not been sufficiently studied within the union. We devoted part of our energies to that battle and voted for repeal, thus remaining alongside the workers who, following the PCI's illusions, were voting against the Craxi decree.
The result was disastrous for the PCI because, with a turnout of almost 78% of those eligible to vote, the Craxi government won with 54% of the votes. It was a defeat that was unnecessary for the CGIL and a blow that greatly accelerated the decline of the PCI, which was destined to be buried a few years later under the rubble of the collapse of Moscow's empire.
In our newspaper, we took a stand once again with an article by Cervetto, A Degrading Deadline for Restructuring
, which framed the referendum within the broader restructuring processes then underway:
It is difficult to find examples in the history of the trade union movement of entrusting to the legislative power wage demands that are specific to economic sector bargaining. The defeat of the trade unions in Italy has degenerated to the point that the executive has cut wages and the trade unions, prisoners of the parliamentary parties, have been unable to prevent it.
Priority to the internationalist struggle
Cervetto added that the unions at the time relied on the expedients of the PCI, including the referendum. This time it was worse, because the damage was self-inflicted by the CGIL itself. Given the poor results of the recent referendum, we hope that no one in the union will talk about referendums again. Never again. Instead, we see signs of reflection at the top of the CGIL: the mistake of politicising the referendums
, the need for a grassroots union that goes to the people
, the invitation to young people to join the CGIL even to change it
.
It is about time, and if this happens we will be at the forefront, provided that we are clear about the intrinsic limits of the economic struggle and of commitment to the unions. For Leninist workers, the main task to which we must devote most of our energy is to bring to our class an awareness from outside of the relationship between capital and wages. To bring not only an awareness of the relationships between all classes, but also an awareness of the international scope of the class struggle
. The crisis in the world order, the massive rearmament underway, Gaza, Kyiv, Tehran, and Tel Aviv under bombs and missiles, all make this task urgent and imperative, and require spreading internationalism among workers.
At the same time, these same factors put the defeat of the CGIL into perspective as nothing more than a backyard squabble. This must be kept in mind.
YET ANOTHER REFORMIST FAILURE
When the union lends itself to parliamentary and electoral games, it ends up, as usual, bellyflopping. We already saw this in 1985 with the degrading referendum on the sliding wage scale, and in 2003 when the CGIL was seduced and abandoned during the melodrama over Article 18.
Today's situation is even worse, if such a thing is possible, because the CGIL has promoted the manoeuvres of the broad coalition and a settling of scores between political currents within the Democratic Party (PD). But who made you sink into the swamp of interclassism? We told you this early on at trade union assemblies at all levels. Who made you put the union, an indispensable tool of class defence, at the service of exhausted parties that no one listens to anymore, neither public opinion nor the mass media?
The masses didn't even notice that there was a referendum. The deadline was set ad hoc at the beginning of the beach season and the debate was kept low-key precisely because the ruling class, from the big groups to small business owners, is happy with the way things are, happy with precarious jobs for young people and apartheid rights for migrants. But how will the Italian bourgeoisie attract the workers and talent from around the world, that it vitally needs, while flirting with xenophobic pettiness?
Now the charlatans of parliamentarism are trying to win over millions of voters and abstainers in daring exercises in political fantasy, while they meddle in the wars of the crisis in the world order and prepare new deadly ventures with rearmament.
The parties of the left, when they were in power, after dithering for years with the jus soli and jus culturae, did not have the courage to speed up the path to citizenship for young people and workers of immigrant origin, and now they have flushed this important issue down the electoral toilet as well. What's more, the referendum showed how much, by descending into the parliamentary and electoral arena, it plays into the hands of the law and order campaigns against migrants so dear to the government; a rough terrain where a serious commitment to in-depth solidarity volunteering and militant work to organise and educate the proletariat is needed, rather than than proclamations and talk shows.
We revolutionary communists rejected the sirens of parliamentarism in time, but with our five Yes
votes we did not abandon young people and migrants. Nor will we abandon the trade unions, that still serve to defend wages, rights, and working conditions. To the incurable reformist trade union leaders we say enough is enough! Never again will we drag the trade union into ruinous parliamentary and electoral adventures. We must talk to real people in the workplace and stop drowning in the ramblings of television talk shows.
The defence of wages, the struggle against exploitation, against precarious employment, against workplace deaths, the struggle for the integration of young people and migrant workers must be waged in the factories, in the offices, in the large concentrations of our class, where its real strength lies. Enough with demoralising games at the ballot box, we need campaigns to organise and recruit members.
As far as we are concerned, our Workers' Clubs in the neighbourhoods of Europe's cities are bastions of internationalist solidarity and of the struggle against the disastrous contradictions of the bourgeois world.
Reformism is a failure across the board; only a fierce revolutionary struggle in depth among the real masses, the hard work of communist organisation and propaganda, will bring forth the forces that can sweep away the barbarism and misery of imperialist society.
The workers of the Workers' Clubs of Lotta Comunista