For a united trade union class front!

To converge and unite working class struggles!

For a general movement demanding strong wage increases against the rising costs of living!

The first step to take today, to oppose the imperialist war tomorrow!

Capitalism is a society in full decay, a rotting mode of production. The reason lies in its economic base. The old Western capitalisms for half a century have been gasping for breath in the crisis of overproduction: an excess of goods produced to be absorbed by the market and a decline in the profit rate, that is, in the profitability of investment. In fact, these countries have been witnessing a so-called deindustrialization process since the mid-1970s.

The growing mass of capital, for these reasons, finds it increasingly difficult to be invested and seeks the path of accumulation in financial speculation. But it’s illusory, fictitious growth, as the bursts of speculative bubbles periodically show. However, the cause of the economic crisis lies in the production process and not in financial speculation, which is only an effect of and trigger for it. One of the deceptions of bourgeois ideology – fully adopted by the opportunist workers’ parties – is to pit financial capitalism against productive capitalism, to save both by saying it wants to attack the former.

The collapse of the world capitalist economy, worn down by the inexorable advance of overproduction, is inevitable but has been postponed by the bourgeoisie of the imperialist countries mainly by three means:

• by increasing the exploitation of the working class: by increasing productivity and gradually destroying the achievements of the labor movement;
• by State and private debt;
• by shifting production to countries with lower wages, which in the meantime have gone from pre-capitalist societies, through anti-colonial bourgeois struggles and revolutions, youthful capitalisms, first and foremost is of course China.

We’re now witnessing the epilogue of this process: youthful Asian capitalisms have become mature, already with one foot inside overproduction, as the bursting of the real estate bubble in China has shown. The economic tools for deferring economic collapse are worn out, and the consequence is capitalism’s approach to its only way of salvation, which is both political and economic: imperialist war. It’s by destroying cities, factories, infrastructure, that surplus commodities – including labor-power and proletarians themselves – are exterminated, breathing some oxygen into a new cycle of capital accumulation.

It was World War II – with 60 million dead – that brought capitalism out of the previous cycle of economic crisis and allowed it the post-war growth cycle, not the policies of State intervention and support for the economy, invoked today by the radical-bourgeois left, the opportunism of the false workers’ parties and the bourgeois so-called social right, and then applied by both democratic bourgeois regimes and totalitarian Nazi-fascist regimes.

Those policies, useless in solving the economic crisis of capitalism, are, however, useful to the bourgeoisie in spreading nationalism among the working class, deluding it that it can find salvation within national boundaries and thanks to a strong – bourgeois – State, are useful in convincing it that the workers’ fates are tied to those of its own ruling class and its own national capitalism, and finally in leading them along this path towards the war fronts.

False national fraternization between the class of wage-earning workers and that of their exploiters, social peace in place of class struggle, the acceptance of sacrifices by workers in order to defend the so-called “good of the country” – which is nothing but the good of national capitalism – is the path that prepares and leads to massacre between actual brothers, which is to say, between the workers of different countries.

Capitalism in decadence will drag the whole of humanity into barbarism if humanity doesn’t know how to rid itself of capitalism. Poverty, from which – in a handful of imperialist countries – the bourgeois and opportunist parties had deluded the proletarians into thinking that they had emancipated themselves, is again rampant. Nature, despite the hypocritical proclamations of governments, continues to be devastated. Imperialist war, with its atrocious record of deaths and destruction, is the grave of any illusion of social progress under capitalism.

But it won’t be a generic interclass, popular movement that originates from the denunciation of the evils of this society that will be able to liberate humanity from this anti-historical society. The only social force capable of breaking bourgeois political regimes – whether democratic or totalitarian – is the working class.

The most important social movements from recent years have confirmed this. It was the coming to the fore of the working class in Egypt in the Arab Spring of 2010 that, in a matter of days, forced the ruling class in that country to cast aside its representative Mubarak. Conversely, the movement in Iran against the oppression of women shook the ayatollahs’ theocracy. But until the large, young and combative Egyptian and Iranian proletariat go into struggle those bourgeois regimes will remain in place.

Even the period of strictest confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic, in March 2020, when in Italy factories, logistics warehouses and ports were the last activities to be stopped – partially, for a very short time and only after workers’ strikes to protect their health – showing how the heart of capitalism is in the hands of the working class. Only by stopping production and the movement of goods can the capitalist regime be resisted.

RIt’s for this reason that in all capitalist countries – including those that still insist on usurping the title of socialist such as China, Venezuela and Cuba – the control over the working class is maximized. It’s deployed through State repression and blackmail by the employers.

But the most important weapon of the ruling class is regime unionism, which in every way tries to keep the workers away from struggle, tries to prevent the unification of their struggles, to inculcate in the workers the bourgeois prejudice that if capitalism goes down the workers are doomed to drown with it, like the ancient slaves chained to galley ships!

Instead, if workers are unable to get out of the galley of national-politics in which the bourgeoisie and opportunist parties want to keep them locked in, they’ll be drowned in the bloodletting of the new world war to which capitalism wants to lead them to in order to save itself; conversely, the working class will save itself and all humanity if it can break the chains that keep it tied to its own ruling class, to the so-called “good of the country”.

The first step in breaking the chains that bind the working class to capitalism is to organize workers’ struggle in defense of their own living and working conditions. The struggle against the exploitation of wage labor is a struggle against capitalism because it inherently rejects calls for sacrifices for the national economy, because what benefits workers necessarily harms Capital.

The necessary task, which must be fulfilled by anyone who wants to act consistently against capitalism, is to fight in order to converge and unite the struggles of the working class. To this end, it’s necessary on the one hand to physically converge the strikes and demonstrations of workers, in time and space, and on the other hand to unite them with the demands that unite the entire class of wage-earning workers: the defense of and increase of wages, with greater increases for the worst-paid categories of workers; reduction of work pace, working hours and working life; full wages to unemployed workers!

Such a task can only be fulfilled by militant trade unions, opposing regime and collaborationist unionism. To unite workers’ struggles, it’s therefore necessary to strive for the unity of action of all militant unionism, which is to say, of the grassroots unions with the class-based opposition inside the CGIL and with the groups of combative workers still organized in the regime unions (CGIL, CISL, UIL), which aren’t lacking, as for example recently demonstrated by the struggle at Ansaldo in Genoa.

THE GENERAL STRIKE THIS NEXT DECEMBER 2 PROCLAMED UNITARILY BY THE GRASSROOTS UNIONS is a first step in the direction of building the unity of action of all class-based unionism, and combative workers and union militants must fight for to reach as far as possible, for the adherence of their union bodies to the strike.

Only a lasting and organic united action of militant trade unionism will make it possible to free the working class from the control that the regime unions in Italy still exert over it and to build a general strike movement against the increasingly high cost of life, for strong wage increases, like those developing in France and the United Kingdom right now!

The struggle for the defense of one’s living conditions is also the first step in building workers’ opposition to the imperialist war – which is now being fought in Ukraine and maturing all over the world – because it implies a refusal to pay the costs of the war, the first step in organizing the refusal to fight on the front tomorrow.

The war in Ukraine is an imperialist war on both fronts! It’s a war whose cause is only vile bourgeois interests, it’s a war against the proletariat, be it Ukrainian, Russian or international! Against war between States, for war between classes!