(Translated from Il Partito Comunista, no. 8, April 1975)

The following article figures as a kind of ‘prequel’ to the series ‘The working Class is a class of Emigrants’, a long series of articles whose first part appeared in Il Partito Comunista no.18 in February 1976 with later parts appeared more or less continuously up to issue no. 41. All together, the result is a forensic examination of emigration placed firmly on a class rather than a national basis.

The series was prompted by the lived experience of an Italian comrade, Ezio, who worked as an emigrant worker in Switzerland and who interpreted his experiences in the light of previous party studies on the subject supplemented by wider research, viewed through the lens of the wider international and classist vision of our party.vision, which he shared to the end of his days.

The first part has now been translated into English and appeared in The International Communist Party no.68, and we will aim to publish further parts going forward.

The government recently held a ‘National Emigration Conference’ in Rome, in which the big union Mandarins took their turns at the podium alongside priests and ministers.

Opportunism once again confirmed its total submission to the bourgeois State. Indeed the great ‘national communist’ party [The Italian Communist Party] does not defend the interests of emigrants as proletarians, as potential brothers of the exploited of the entire world, which by its very nature is opposed to the international front of capital, but as ‘Italians abroad’, Italian citizens whom the Italian State is supposed to protect. This is a complete betrayal of the communist approach.

With the ongoing development of the capitalist regime comes further confirmation that the State apparatus, which overshadows the other machinery of bourgeois rule such as parliament, the judiciary and the individual possessors of capital, is increasingly becoming the cumbersome protagonist of all aspects of social life (don’t you realise, romantic petty-bourgeois daydreamer pondering over restrictions on freedom, that with the “tax registry” the State can even count the small change in your pocket?). Opportunism - while babbling on about demagogic and reactionary “grassroots participation” under the current regime, which on closer inspection proves to be complementary to rather than an obstacle to State power - always bows down before the “raison d’état”. For it, same as in fascist ideology, the raison d’état is the synthesis, at a higher level, of the various “class rights”. The State belongs to everyone. Marxist revolutionaries do not call on the State to do, say, or protect anything: the “doing” is now up to the working class alone.

In the case of emigrants, the proletarians of Italy, providing the labour-power commodity, belong to the State of the Italian bourgeoisie: the ABC of our doctrine is that the State, having this surplus commodity at its disposal, can also export it, like any other commodity; the bilateral agreements on the recruitment of workers to go abroad are, after all, drawn up on the model of normal trade agreements. Yes, the State protects its goods to be shipped, stowed safely away on international trains.

Not only, therefore, have we established that the false communist who trusts in the paternal influence of the State is a renegade, but also that proletarians abroad can expect nothing but confirmation of their oppression from the solicitude of consulates and welfare associations.

The conditions of insecurity, segregation, and forced and artificial separation from families also turn out to be useful to both the host capital, and to the exporting bourgeoisie, with the latter thus assured of remittances and of the lives of the workers themselves: in southern Italy in 1968, more than a third of credit entries came from emigrants’ remittances.

But our renegades, no different from others elsewhere, speak of “the prestige of Italy, of the international authority of our country, of which the communities abroad are among the most important representatives among other peoples”. We know, you are interested in Italy, they say, that it should make a good show itself on the market, in competition with the other labour-exporting countries.

“How can one deny,” the Stalinist resistance fighter and patriot will insinuate, “that there are real national, racial and cultural differences even among workers? A differentiated tactic is needed, one that respects the cultural heritage of emigrants”. He forgets that production, trade and even social life in the most capitalistically developed countries are no longer regulated by the yardstick of “nations”: the latter, with their multiple elements produced by the history of past centuries, formed the material basis on which capitalism in its infancy first built its markets, but its States as well; today, it is the latter that regulate production. The boundaries of the market coincide with the administrative boundaries of the State and not with the limits of ethnic settlements. People are registered according to citizenship and not race. Wars are waged by bourgeois States, no longer by nations, and are fought for State purposes, to divide up zones of influence, such that in every war there are more the nations and peoples divided up and bartered over at the peace table than there are those who manage to settle in their “legitimate” country.

For the proletarian abroad, being an Italian citizen (and the same obviously goes for Spaniards, the Irish and anyone else whom the whims of international capital force to emigrate), the language and “national culture” that he is expected to carry with him is nothing but than a double chain, keeping him apart from his foreign comrades: proletarians have written in their own name, in the registers of the country of their birth, neither land, possessions or interests to defend, neither have they homeland, citizenship nor culture. Citizenship for them, not for the bourgeoisie, is a one-sided relationship: an obligation to work, an obligation to go to war, even an obligation to vote (yes, now - the ultimate mockery - they want emigrants to “vote” too). For the bourgeoisie, homeland means comfortable and well-paid government sinecures, schools where they can laze around and learn how to cheat the workers, armies of lawyers and police officers devoted to defending their sacred private property; for the proletariat, it means only a hail of bullets whenever they dare to raise their heads.

Sacrosanct, and we have made it our own, is the phrase that circulates among workers in Switzerland: “every worker is a foreign worker”, which is absolutely in tune, more than a century later, with our own expression: workers have no homeland, you cannot take away what they do not have.

But if the proletarian is essentially always a stranger, in the land he inhabits, in the society in which he lives, estranged from his own daily and exhausting work, and individually competing even with those who share his condition, how can he hope, as the lowest class in society, to oppose or at least defend himself from bourgeois oppression? Our dialectical materialism has already given its answer: the proletariat is either revolutionary or it is nothing. Where the bourgeoisie sees only nations, Marxism discovers the classes that are the actors of history: the working class can exert its weight and strength not insofar as it permeates and blends into the bastardised interclassist categories, but only insofar as it moves as a class, that is, when its members are organised in structures specific to it committed to its own exclusive objectives. It is a revolutionary and conscious class only when it is led by its party. But inviting workers, as the PCI [Italian Communist Party] does, in order to “participate in the life of local authorities, to democratise consular committees or for the social management of schools abroad” means precisely to downgrade the proletariat.

It is also pointless to call for participation in local trade unions if one fails to note that in Switzerland, as elsewhere, the trade union centre, in addition to being complicit with capital in the marginalisation of foreign workers, has a long tradition of collaboration with employers behind it. Proof of this is the recent renewal of the draconian agreement known as ‘labour peace’, in force in Switzerland since 1937, whereby the Swiss Trade Union Federation undertakes in advance not to organise any strikes, even in this period of employer attacks on wages and employment, and to repress any spontaneous workers’ unrest: ‘Art. 2 - the parties undertake to maintain absolute industrial peace and to ensure that it is respected by their members. Any industrial action is excluded (...) This absolute industrial peace also applies at the individual level’. This is not the language of workers’ representatives, it is the economy, national capital speaking in the guise of opportunism.

The first step in the revival of the labour movement will be marked – with the unmasking of these traitors – by an objective and inevitable contradiction between the requirements of the labour movement and that of the so-called general “progress”, “peace” and “welfare” brigade. The growth of the movement will then also require the autonomous doctrine of its class party.