(from Il “Partito Comunista” no. 18, February, 1976)

Part One

“The free laborer sells his very self, piece by piece. Each day he puts up for sale 8, 10, 12, 15 hours of his life, to the highest bidder, to the owner of raw materials, tools, and the means of life – i.e., to the capitalist. The laborer belongs neither to an owner nor to the soil, but 8, 10, 12, 15 hours of his daily life belongs to whoever buys them. The worker can leave the capitalist to whom he has hired himself out whenever he wants, and the capitalist sacks him when he wants, as soon as he no longer has any use for him. But the worker, whose only source of income is the sale of his labor power, cannot abandon the whole class of purchasers, i.e., the capitalist class, unless he wants to renounce his own existence. He does not belong to this or that capitalist, but to the capitalist class; and it is up to him to find his man – i.e., to find a buyer in this capitalist class”

Thus does Marx sum up, in Wages, Labour and Capital the conditions under which the worker is forced to live and work, and on the basis of which he is free neither to choose the task he performs, the factory in which he does it, or where he lives. All these conditions are imposed from without, to be precise by the economic determinism of the capitalist mode of production, in which anarchy, the unexpected, and chaos rule. Thus it is that the working masses suffer the vicissitudes of the “alternations of the industrial cycle”, and find themselves divided into one part that is employed and the other that isn’t, that is, in a condition of “relative overpopulation”, of which a “fluid” part, as Marx defines it, “migrates and in reality cannot but follow the emigrating capital”.

This is not an exception but the norm. From when the worker was deprived (“freed”) of his means of production, and stripped of any property, from that moment he became “transient”, alternatively attracted and repelled by the needs of capitalist production. Capital is moved from one sector of production to another, withdraws from one activity to invest in another according to whatever is most expedient. Equally the worker is forced to keep up with these visicitudes.

With these bare premises of a general character in place, we can tackle one of the particular aspects that labor-power assumes when in a state of “fluctuation”, i.e., emigration abroad, by highlighting that the particularity of this aspect derives from conditions of a legal nature. In fact, the worker who moves from his place of birth to take up a job elsewhere, moving from the north of Italy to the south or vice versa, and without necessarily being treated better than a worker who crosses the state borders, that worker is also an emigrant. It is known that numerous workers from the South live and work in the big industrial metropoles of the North in a state of underemployment, without protection or welfare assistance, at the mercy of mafiosi “employers”, and most of the time under worse conditions than those abroad. Every day the daily papers report on accidents and even homicides happening to “unknown” workers, who aren’t on the official registers or known to the employment exchanges.

From a national point of view capital presents itself as one gigantic firm, which ensures that the entry and exit of goods across the sacrosanct frontiers is subject to bilateral treaties and conventions between the countries concerned. Customs duties protect the interests of the national capital by taxing commodities that are imported, such that their competitiveness is reduced with respect to the same commodities produced in the national factories.

In theory the same criteria should also be adopted for labor-power, as a particular kind of commodity. But this commodity, due to its special qualities, such as being easily disguisable, is more elusive and less controllable, it being understood that clandestine expatriation is still a crime. Foreign workers, do not enjoy – even if set up in the job with all the blessings of the legality of the import-export of their labour – the same conditions as the indigenous workers, and even where the bourgeoisie finds it in its interests to formally equalize wages and normative conditions of the immigrant with the native workers, it nevertheless tends to differentiate them as regards their political, trade union and legal status. And the overwhelming majority of emigrant workers carry out dangerous and degrading rank and file jobs; think of the Italian miners in Belgium, the Mexican fruit-pickers in California, etc. There is not much, therefore, to distinguish foreign emigration from internal emigration. Economically it is an exportation of variable capital that returns a profit to the “exporter” country, that famous “remittance” of the emigrants, so appetizing for a state’s balance of trade and foreign exchange. Socially it constitutes a safety valve, a momentary outlet for relative overpopulation, a local alleviation of the pressure of unemployment, and therefore a relative and temporary distancing of social risks for the wealthy classes.

In confirmation of what we’ve said so far Lenin, in Imperialism, reports on the thinking of the English millionaire Cecil Rhodes, writing: “My cherished idea – says Rhodes – is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines. The empire, as I have already said, is a bread-and-butter question. If you want to avoid civil war you must become imperialists.”

No beating around the bush then, which is always preferable to a snivelling and philistine moralism. But Rhodes conceals the other side of the coin, which is that while the English unemployed are sent to colonize Rhodesia today, Rhodesians are being employed in English factories on a lower wage.

A CENTURY OF UNITARY POLITICS

The Italian state offers an exemplary model in this regard. The squalid and cowardly Italian bourgeoisie, all the more squalid and cowardly after the unity established during the Risorgamento, found nothing better to do, in politics, than hiring out its state to the highest bidder and, in commerce, hiring out the commodity which in essence costs it nothing, and which it has had in abundance. Indeed, from the day of its political independence until today [1976], it has hired out, by exporting them, 26 million proletarians!

The data and news articles we have drawn on are from a specific publication of the Il Ponte magazine, entitled Emigration – one hundred years – 26 million. We will refrain from commenting on the views of the magazine’s individual writers, who reproach the Italian bourgeoisie with having squandered such precious ‘capital’, having failed to understand, however, that the bourgeoisie, or rather capitalism, is capable of this and much else besides. In any case we will pre-empt the conclusion which we came to after reading the text and the numerous news items. Which is this: under all governments of the historical Right, and of the historical Left, whether democratic, liberal, fascist or anti-fascist, the emigration of the Italian proletariat has never stopped. The new evidence also applies to the emigration of proletarians from other countries, which have “socialist” regimes: East Germans emigrating to West Germany, Poles expatriating to work in Russia and East and West Germany, and Yugoslavians emigrating to all of the countries of Western Europe, etc.

(To be continued)