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Complicit Silence

Ultimately, what will become of the negotiations surrounding the conflict in Ukraine? It is impossible to say. War is a strange matryoshka doll, where each front contains its own conflicts, dividing alliances and bringing adversaries closer together. At the outset, Putin thought he could get it over with in a matter of weeks: a special military operation, as he called it. But he has become entangled in a long war of attrition; his military advantage no longer compensates for the weakness of his economy and his dependence on Xi's China.

Beijing has finely balanced a sort of active neutrality. It has declared eternal friendship with Russia but is signalling that it could mute its support for Moscow in exchange for recognition of its vital interest in reunification with Taiwan.

Europe has been caught off guard by the conflict, which has also been fuelled by American connections in Poland, the Baltic States, and the Nordic countries, with their historical and deep-rooted aversion to Russian imperialism. The result has been a proxy war between NATO and Russia, which hints at a brutal imperialist partition between Moscow, the EU, and even Washington. Russia has secured Donbas and Crimea and would like some form of neutrality for Ukraine. Europe has promised Kyiv entry into the Union, but as the alliance with the US falters, it has rushed to implement a German-led countermeasure: rearming Ukraine to rearm Europe. The United States, in Trump's new style, mixes peace plans with the shameless calculation of business opportunities in reconstruction, and does not even renounce the classic balancing act aimed at dividing the EU from Russia: until the day before yesterday, it wanted NATO on Russia's borders, and today it is siding with Moscow behind Europe's back.

And finally, there is Ukraine, where a rapacious and corrupt bourgeoisie is driven by adventurers who are the separated twins of the Russian oligarchs, all of them sprung from the disintegration of State capitalism in the former USSR. On the one hand, Kyiv is exhausted by the conflict; on the other, it senses the opportunity of the European market and EU funds.

America, Russia, Europe, China, Ukraine: as already happened in the war in Gaza, unspeakable barters are made behind the scenes between rival allies and adversaries in cahoots, while the peace plans show diplomacy is staged. These go hand in hand with the collective silence on the victims of the massacre and on resistance to the war. On both sides, at least 300,000 are dead. In Kyiv, judges are investigating 290,000 cases of draft evasion or desertion; as for Russia, the numbers are unknown, though it has 1.6 million men at the front plus another 350,000 recruits among reservists and migrants. Only the internationalist battle can give them a voice. Every silence is complicit.

One consequence of the ongoing demographic crisis is the ageing of the labour force. In Italy, the average age of the employed in 2024 was 44.2 years: in 2019, it was 42 years, so in just five years this has risen by more than two units.

Such an accelerated dynamic has inevitable repercussions on the labour market and class relations. Le Monde focuses on this issue, citing a comment from the French High Commission for Strategy and Planning. The observations are interesting, not least because they come from a country that was the first to confront the demographic crisis, although it did not succeed in preventing its effects.

French trade unions in the declining phase of social-democratisation

In France, as elsewhere, the first response to the problem is that, if the population is ageing – i.e., living longer – and the number of young people is declining, the retirement age must be raised and people must leave work later, up to the age of 70-71, depending on the age at which they entered the labour market (Le Monde, October 29th).

This is the response dictated by European restructuring, and in fact it is an issue that is present throughout the continent. It marks the decline of social-democratisation, which in past decades had found one of its emblematic expressions in pension policy. The emergence of new competing powers is making the global market more competitive, and we are seeing a renewed tendency to dump the costs, including human costs, of capitalist competition onto wage earners. Statistics, as well as news reports, show the dangers of certain types of work as people get older.

There is resistance to raising the retirement age throughout Europe. In France in particular, this is a point of contention for the presidency and its succession of short-lived governments. Among the opponents is the reformist French Democratic Confederation of Labour (CFDT); this is noteworthy because this union, now the largest in France, was one of the de facto supporters of the labour-market reform launched by decrees during Emmanuel Macron's first term in 2017. The criticism of the then-secretary, Laurent Berger, concerned only the lack of progress in introducing some form of co-management. Since then, the CFDT has always been characterised as a sort of mass base for the Macron presidency.

The social-imperialism of the CFDT

Now the rupture is official. The new secretary, Marylise Léon, in office since June 2023, warns that the pension issue remains an open democratic wound that can only be healed by the next presidential elections in 2027, i.e., by Macron's successor (Le Monde, August 28th).

In her autobiographical book S’engager (Getting involved), Léon makes explicit her criticism of the president, judging him unwilling to grant trade unions any space outside of enterprise-level bargaining. It should be remembered that, due to its history, the CFDT represents the trade union current that has made participation its definitive hallmark.

But this is only one side of Léon's and her union's political line: the other is Europeanism. The CFDT is a deeply European organisation, always has been, and always will be, she writes. She specifies that we are fighting for European social rights, such as the creation of unemployment insurance in all European countries. And she immediately adds: But this is not our only problem: European defence is becoming a fundamental issue. With Trump, the time has come to take concrete action, but above all to act quickly. At the CFDT, we need to intensify European industrial cooperation in the field of defence. Social Europe and military Europe: literally, Europeanist social imperialism.

It serves as a warning that a trade union demand, if left to its own devices, can end up supporting social-imperialist positions. Anywhere.

The hand on the lever

The October 29th article in Le Monde on the effects of the demographic crisis on the labour market offers further insight when it states that the resulting labour shortage is producing a reversal in the power relations between employees and companies. The idea that class relations can be reversed without a revolutionary leap is a myth of reformism. However, it is a fact that market laws can give more power to those who sell a commodity that becomes scarce, as is the case today with the labour-power commodity.

This is a concept that we have repeatedly emphasised, along with one clarification: favourable market conditions are a lever for the defence of workers, provided that there are those who wield it with determination. This is where the trade union, the body in charge of defending the working conditions of wage earners through struggle, has a major responsibility. In Italy, this has not happened, and this is so obvious that it has been noticed even abroad, in Germany: The Italian economy is growing, but purchasing power is falling, headlines Handelsblatt on November 5th.

Delayed bargaining

The German economics newspaper echoes the analysis of the European Central Bank, which estimates a 5.8% loss in purchasing power between the end of 2021 and spring 2023, only partially recovered thereafter: Italy is by far the eurozone country where wages have lost the most value. It should be noted that similar results have been produced by studies conducted by the European Commission and the OECD.

Handelsblatt reports the comments of Marco Leonardi, an economist at the University of Milan and former adviser to then Prime Minister Mario Draghi. Two elements are highlighted. The first, purely trade unions-related, concerns the collective bargaining system: Trade unions negotiate new contracts every three years. [...] Recently, negotiations have often taken so long that wages have not even kept pace with inflation. In some cases, contracts were signed after their expiry.

The list is long. In the public sector, contracts that expired in 2024 have only just been renewed. Metal workers signed a new contract seventeen months after the old one expired, with an unsatisfactory result, partly due to very limited and restrained mobilisation. Telecommunications unions signed a contract valid until 2028, after the previous one was signed in 2022, thus extending its duration by six years without the payment of arrears.

A calculation reported in Il Foglio (November 12th) shows that in the years of high inflation (2022-23) only two of the twenty main private sector contracts were renewed: as a result, nine accumulated more than a year's delay, and four contracts more than four years' delay. The result was clear savings for businesses and a net loss for workers.

Class subordination or class independence

The other element highlighted in the Handelsblatt article is related to the political climate, a euphemism for the continuing subordination of Italian trade unions to parliamentary politics: this is the root of trade union divisions, fuelled also by repeated attempts to implement a political exchange with the government of the day, for example by trading a few tax benefits for the necessary fight for wages. That is, talking about other things to avoid addressing the crux of the matter.

We need to return to the class tradition that makes wages and working hours the cornerstones of our bargaining demands. The contracts signed in recent years have not recovered the accumulated loss of purchasing power. Only a focused and determined struggle could turn the tide.

Lotta Comunista, November 2025

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