On April 25, the CGIL launched a new referendum campaign, promoting the collection of signatures for 4 repeals. 3 of these repeals concern parts of a law passed by a center-left government in December 2014, against which the CGIL promoted a general strike--nine days after the law was passed! These repeals, if passed, would go a long way toward alleviating the blackmail-ability of the working class, a fact that is ineradicable in capitalism, susceptible to variation depending on the power relations between classes, and which in recent decades has been exacerbated with the spread of precarious employment. However, it is very difficult to assess how much such changes would really benefit wage earners in the legislative and contractual quagmire. We communists do not naively deny the importance of even small gains for workers forced into increasingly harsh living conditions by the society of capital. The problem should not be framed according to a superficial scheme that promotes that any improvement is to be pursued by any means. The Problem should be measured with the yardstick of whether an achievement, small or large, is a harbinger of future (greater or lesser) achievements. That is, whether it is an ephemeral and illusory improvement or a step forward in strengthening the movement of the workers’ union struggle.

Included in this evaluation is necessarily the method one uses to pursue the goal. Indeed, within certain limits, the method is even more important than the goal. It is on this level that one appreciates the full contrast between the method of class unionism and that promoted by the CGIL, which is an expression of collaborationism between classes. One must also appreciate the difference between the trade union orientation of our party-which is class-based-and that of the leading groups of the trade union currents that more or less clearly refer to class unionism.

The referendum method of obtaining improvements in favor of workers must be rejected because it is the denial, in practice and in principle, of the class struggle. As always, this directive of ours is not the pre constituted, ideological, one that the hypocritical pro-unionists who run CGIL, CISL, UIL would have us believe. It is historically indisputable that the really important conquests of the working class, in all countries, has been achieved through greater, more extensive and radical struggle.

Trade union collaborationism, which limits the strike as much as possible in time and space and – avowedly – as a last resort, flourishes in periods of regression in working class conditions, leading, far from progressive small improvements, to a gradual retreat, as the last 4 decades very clearly demonstrate. Any improvements gained through a referendum would once again offer workers a miseducation in regard to struggle: that simply going to the polls would suffice, which is quite different from going on strike. By doing so, they would not create the conditions for greater workers’ fighting strength; rather, they would shore up the current passivity, offering the bosses guarantees of the continuation of the conditions of social peace that have ensured years of backwardness in working-class living conditions.

The referendum method is characteristic of collaborationist trade unionism for at least two reasons: 1) members of all social classes are called upon to vote on issues affecting the working class. Therefore, the principle of interclassism, the subjugation of the working class to other classes, is affirmed by this route; 2) by the method of the secret ballot, the opinion of the backward, unorganized, individualistic worker, even the scab, is placed on the same level as the vote of the fighting workers, who by consciousness, generosity and selflessness sacrifice themselves for the collective interests of their class. For the second of these two reasons, the referendum to ratify contractual agreements should also be rejected, insofar as it involves only workers, and it is certainly no coincidence that it has always been a workhorse of the Fiom-CGIL leadership, and not only it, but a very useful tool with which the regime unions have been sanctioning and justifying national contract renewals for decades, always to no avail.

It follows from these considerations how the democratic principle is against the class struggle, which is based instead on a relationship of forces, not on the counting of opinions. What counts in the struggle are the organized workers who, with varying degrees of commitment, are involved in it. From the membership base, to those who attend assemblies and meetings, to those who are consistently active in union life, to workers who take more or less determined sides during the strike. Of course, you vote in workers’ assemblies. But it is done by open voting, not in private, in the secrecy of the ballot box. Those who do not engage and those who don’t give a damn about the union struggle already, and do not attend the assemblies and meetings are thus excluded from decision making. Taking a public stand in front of one’s fellow workers motivates one another.

Evidently, this is not about obsequious compliance with an abstract, democratic principle of justice, which when dropped into the real world of capitalism turns into a formidable weapon for perpetuating the injustice of the privileged class to the detriment of workers. It is about positing as the sovereign principle the interests of the exploited class, and thus its strength and struggle.

That the pro-bourgeois leaders of the CGIL promote referendums, in order to continue their undying work of miseducating the workers and to cover with this diversion their willingness not to organize any struggle, is as obvious and logical as ever. We are interested in criticizing those trade union currents that want to be class-based, and therefore against collaborationist trade unionism, but respond to the maneuvers of the CGIL leadership in an inadequate way, and this because of the original vice of subservience to democratic, that is, bourgeois, ideology.

For the spokeswoman of the alternative area in CGIL, Le Radici del Sindacato (roughly translated: The Roots of the Trade Union), It is necessary to know that neither one nor two nor four referendums will suffice, but they are certainly a step to open a reflection and, I hope, a mobilization (Progetto lavoro”, May ’24). The referendum itself, then, is not denounced as a tool peculiar to collaborationist, anti-struggle unionism. The referendum campaign of the CGIL leadership would be a step in the direction of reflection and – hopefully [!] – mobilization, not the worn-out diversionary method against the struggle of the CGIL leadership!

CUB’s national leadership (an italian conflictual trade union born in 1992) follows a similar score in its May 21 communiqué: It is not enough to vote and win the referendum, which represents a piece of a more general battle that CUB has been waging all along. It is necessary to continue the mobilizations (Referendum CGIL). Only the national leader of CUB SUR (School, University, Research) and the secretary of the Milan Cub, at least as far as we are aware, has taken the correct position in this grassroots union, noting the miseducting nature of the referendum instrument.

Voting is not an effective tool of struggle, and even worse if in collaboration with the bosses: this is the lesson that those who support class unionism must give workers.