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Italy

Posted: Mon May 27, 2019 1:57 pm
by blindpig
The primaries, the Europeans and the restructuring of the Italian political framework

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The PD primaries, held last March 2, were an event that certainly left those in Italy ideally placed in the anti-capitalist, socialist and communist camps cold. And yet, a fact that is anything but secondary in the Italian political landscape. With a million and seven hundred thousand voters, a leader elected with 70% of the votes, according to the large area press, it was "a great democratic moment".

Triumphalism and propaganda rhetoric aside, it must be emphasized, however, that the bet of the call to the primaries promoted by the apparatus has succeeded. Especially considering a party, the democratic party, largely discredited in the eyes of public opinion, also considering its past government. A party, moreover, torn apart by the internal clash, which is essentially about which line to apply to better serve the interests of financial capital.

A party that has managed to mobilize its base, however, by electing a new secretary to express the "left" consortium of a party that is actually a liberal and technocratic right wing. This fact will undoubtedly determine a restructuring of the political framework in the medium term. In fact, Zingaretti's statement gave the electorate's collective imagination the idea of ​​a concrete alternative to the yellow-green government: the "center-left". In fact, a pseudo-left proposal , but one that has shown itself to be still attractive, to be in the field.

It cannot therefore be liquidated, it is something to be questioned about. This is certainly an opportunist repositioning, in order to break away from the Renzian season. But it is also a trap, for the formations that are to the left of the PD. In fact, the call of the forest of the so-called center-left will be felt in all its force in the coming months. And it doesn't matter if thanks to this alliance device, every reference to what should characterize a true left, or a profound social upheaval in the interests of workers, has been lost over time.

Moreover, the attempt to consolidate yet another pole centered around the Democratic Party will legitimize itself on the classic appeal to the useful vote. On the logic of the least worst, since in the face of a government with reactionary traits, the prospect of a respectable centrist government formed by the so-called "competent" appears to be the one where the hopes of the electorate today in opposition are anchored.

The right to guide the League - the party of the most conservative and selfish component of the national bourgeoisie - is certainly at ease with this dynamic. He can only look at it with pleasure at the restructuring of the opposing camp, if it is the direction of a comfortable re-proposition of bipolarity. A dynamics that liquid the anomaly grillina to vent the protest, a third permanent pole as sterile opposition.

The Five Star Movement is in fact in a deep crisis of consensus since it is in government. The League, from navigated strength, dominates the debate, weakening the ally, obliged to chase after an agenda that is not his. It is not inconceivable that the movement would expect the right occasion to break away from governmental responsibilities, which objectively go beyond its political capabilities and perhaps its original intentions. The Five Stars will return where they were born, to dominate the area of ​​discontent in society and the media; while traditional forces will occupy the institutions. And in this division of labor, all the political spaces that can be practiced for a long time will be consumed. We will thus have an Italian armored capitalism, which will walk on the safe tracks of double liberalism: the nationalist of the extreme right and the cosmopolitan one of the liberal right.

And we come, finally, to the mournful notes: or rather to the place that occupies a socialist, communist and anti-capitalist pole in this context. In reality this pole does not exist, and it seems to have no place. The recent vicissitudes related to the formation of lists and coalitions for the European countries prove it. Instead, there is a pulverized galaxy of groups and parties, associations and movements, companions without organization. Many are also found to suffer the "left turn of the PD" and mobilizations in which there are workers, pensioners and popular classes ready to look at the Democrats, while others look at the Five Stars.

If the return of bipolarity is therefore a possible outcome, in the logic of things though perhaps not immediately, it is instead all too easy to foresee that these European elections will sanction the disappearance of the radical left and the communists from the Italian electoral landscape. Together with the disappearance of the themes of the left and communists from the national discourse - in the absence of a subject and instruments capable of propagating them - ultimately the total inability to affect real processes will be sanctioned.

The alternative forces seem to start again from less than zero. A minimum platform for representing the interests of work seems more necessary than ever, to be able to configure a small but at least visible popular front of resistance to the current offensive and revive the fire of the capital / labor conflict. U n front that is based on minimal bases, but with long-term planning that "takes away" forever from the compulsion to chase the last electoral cartel arrived on the scene (which will promptly melt the day after the elections) or irrelevant isolation. A process that should go in parallel with that of indispensable unification in a single party of the various communist parties and groups (ie Marxists and Leninists) that exist. An essential step, to which there is no alternative if we really want to return to being incisive one day: and it would still be nothing compared to what we should do, but it would already constitute a pole of attraction for other scattered and lost Marxists.


All this while those who have clear ideas, capital and its reference parties, are unfortunately capable of mobilizing the masses for the interests of an increasingly restricted oligarchy.

* This article is taken from my speech in the Radio Guerrilla Pill dedicated to the PD primaries, available here " Guerrilla Radio in Pills: The primary explained well " along with the other Pills and Episodes produced so far by the Guerrilla Radio Editor .

https://lottobre.wordpress.com/2019/04/ ... -italiano/

Google Translator's Italian seems a bit rusty.

Re: Italy

Posted: Tue May 28, 2019 1:28 pm
by blindpig
Bergamo, the new mother fired: immediate strike by all 230 factory workersBergamo, the new mother fired: immediate strike by all 230 factory workers

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Workers on strike in front of the gates (Photo by bergamonews.it )

Reggiani Macchine employees protest for the decision that affects a 30-year-old woman who has just returned from maternity leave

26 May 2017
"All on strike, immediate and sudden. The 230 employees of Reggiani Macchine di Grassobbio are at the gates to protest against the dismissal of a colleague and to support the negotiations that Fim Cisl and Fiom Cgil are holding with the company, for less than 18 months absorbed by the American group Efi and specialized in the production of printing machinery ". This is the note from the unions that denounce the episode that would have happened in the Bergamasco factory that produces machinery for printing and processing for the textile industry.

Neomamma fired in Bergamo, Agazzi (Fiom): "Here people are numbers"

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The workers left the factory and found themselves on the street. The dismissal, for the company "for justified objective reason and suppression of the job" - report the workers' representatives - concerns "a 30 year old woman, recently returned from maternity leave". The worker in question returned to work about nine months ago, and since then - tell union sources - "there has never been a real attempt to relocate it". Then the communication, which struck her, "identified as an excess".

Bergamo, woman fired after maternity leave. Clash between company and unions

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"The workers - continues the note of Fim and Fiom - are worried above all by the modalities and the labor relations that the property has adopted for some time, and ask for the withdrawal of the dismissal and the restoration of a system of correct relations". The fear of workers is that the new American property wants to usher in an "easy", "American" system - they say - to deal with labor issues.

However, from the company they reject the
accusations. The general manager of Reggiani, Adele Genoni, excludes that the dismissal is connected to the maternity of the employee and explains that "despite the attempts it was impossible to relocate her". "A specific case - says the manager - because we were not able to integrate the person into another function. Motherhood has nothing to do with it. On the contrary, we launched an initiative aimed precisely at supporting women in the company".

https://milano.repubblica.it/cronaca/20 ... 166453024/

Google Translator

Imagine US workers striking for such reason. You'll have to imagine, cause class consciousness got some catching up to do in these parts,

Re: Italy

Posted: Mon Jun 15, 2020 1:15 pm
by blindpig
Capitalist reconstruction and the "economic miracle" at the beginning of the post-war period

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With this essay by G. Carocci we conclude the overview on the history of Italian capitalism, which has embraced the first century of history of our country since its foundation: from its origins , to liberal Italy , to the fascist regime . In this chapter Caroccianalyzes with clarity the events that after the Second World War constituted what was yet another hairpin of the development of capitalism in Italy. In this case, the reconstruction and all that it entailed in economic and political terms: from the acquiescence of the communists who in the name of the strategy of "progressive democracy" let themselves be swallowed up by bourgeois parliamentarism, leaving every initiative to the class enemy; the Christian Democracy which laid the foundations for the bourgeoisie's resurgence of power and the extension of its hegemony among the masses, coercive power and hegemony that had been shaken by the war and the Resistance against the fascist regime. From frustration with the lack of economic reforms demanded by the masses, to the resurgence of the bosses' power which, again,

The bourgeoisie, as this essay clearly highlights, could thus operate its Gattopardesco regime change by showing itself, where the contingent conditions required it, now heir to the worst liberal Italy, now to the fascist one, all conditioned largely by subjection against US imperialism which has closely watched over the construction of the Republic born from the denial of the Resistance. The narration stops in the early 1960s, before Tambroni's reactionary breakthrough attempt and then the subsequent attempt by the so-called "center-left"; however, enough time to see the path on which Italy's politics and economy had been channeled.


De Gasperi was the Christian Democrat leader who, with skill and energy, was able to resist the most crudely clerical and reactionary pushes of the Vatican, and, together, he knew how to contain the renewed push of the Resistance, make his party the gathering center of conservatives and traditionally dominant forces, and to return to them, albeit in new ways, political and economic power. De Gasperi's main strength was the confidence that the Americans placed in him. It is no coincidence that he was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs in that Bonomi cabinet of December 1944 which, after the warning signs of the previous months, marked the beginning of the political involution of the Resistance, and that he held the office continuously until February 1947, that is, for the whole period during which the peace treaty negotiations took place between Italy and the winning powers. And it is indicative the different and greater consideration that, in the second half of 1945, the American representative in Rome showed towards De Gasperi compared to what he showed towards the president of the board, Parri.

De Gasperi constantly affirmed that internal politics should be subordinated to the decisive reasons of foreign policy, in practice, that his efforts to weaken the communists were aimed at obtaining better conditions in the peace treaty and in the matter of supplies and economic aid . In the negotiation for the peace treaty, Italy's main opponent was Communist Yugoslavia, supported by the USSR, with its territorial claims on Venezia Giulia. The United States, on the other hand, which was now the leading power of the capitalist West, preferably supported Italy, to which it assigned an important role in the Western anti-Russian strategic system. In addition, the United States was the only power capable of providing large economic aid and to facilitate the recovery of the Italian industry.

In reality, despite the undoubted consistency of these arguments and despite the ability with which the Christian Democrat leader was able to present them to public opinion, De Gasperi's diplomacy constituted perhaps the greatest example in the whole history of Italy of subordination of the foreign policy to domestic politics, to exploit the incipient tension in Russian-American relations to weaken the Italian communists and, since they were their allies, the socialists. It was a diplomacy which, in some respects, was exactly the opposite of the fascist one. Both fascist diplomacy had been directed, at least up to Hitler's enslavement, to seek initiative and autonomy in a dynamic context, as much aspost-fascist diplomacy was passive registration of American directives. In other respects, however, post-fascist diplomacy was an updated continuation of the fascist one, to the extent that it aimed to subordinate Italy's foreign policy to that of a great imperialist power. In particular, the diplomacy of De Gasperi and his successors was close, albeit with much greater emphasis and one-sidedness, to that of the Grandi era, when Italy's goal had been to present itself as "first of the class" to the American government and finance.

Shareholder Parri, one of the top leaders of the Resistance, presided over the first ministry of liberated Italy between June and December 1945. It was the ministry that more than any other wanted to draw inspiration from the charge of moral renewal expressed by the Resistance, the only one that endeavored to keep in mind some aspects of the new shadowed state in the CLN. The first months of the Parri government were also the only period during which Togliatti seriously considered the opportunity to implement some incisive economic and social reforms, such as land reform and a law on factory management boards. But Parri was unable to implement the reforms, and already by the end of September the failure of his government attempt began to loom. It fell following the opposition of the conservatives, manifested openly by the Liberal Party and subtly by De Gasperi, and because the subtle opposition of De Gasperi was joined by that, even more subtle, of Nenni and, in the end, of Togliatti himself. The latter, realistically assessing the political weakness of the attempt by Parri, once again intended to put the alliance with the Catholic masses before that with the CLN.

But if De Gasperi, Nenni and Togliatti played Parri, it was then De Gasperi, uninterruptedly chairman of the board from December 1945 to August 1953, who played Togliatti and Nenni. To achieve the weakening of the leftist De Gasperi began in December 1945 giving ample space to the presence in the government of the social communists and, at the same time, presenting a clearly conservative program, modeled on that of the liberals. In other words, De Gasperi casually reversed, in practice, the definition he liked to give of Christian Democracy: not already a center party that moved to the left, but a center party that moved to the right. Perhaps decisive for the final victory of the line carried out by De Gasperi was the decision not to confer on the Constituent Assembly, elected on June 2, 1946, the legislative power, and the decision to refer to a popular referendum - and not to the assembly constituent - the choice between monarchy and republic (on June 2 the measurement republic prevailed). The Constituent Assembly, devoid of legislative power, was unable to introduce reforms in the economy, in society, in the state. The choice between monarchy and republic referred to the referendum allows the Christian Democrats to maintain an agnostic attitude. This was a fact of great importance in determining the character of the Catholic, conservative and interclassist party. In fact, if the Christian Democrats had openly chosen the republic, he would lose his potential monarchist voters, and conservative votes would split between Christian Democracy and a monarchist party that would rise to his right. If, on the other hand, the Christian Democrats had openly chosen the monarchy, it would have largely lost its popular base and above all its interclassist character (Baget-Bozzo).

The main goal of De Gasperi until the first half of 1947 was to exploit the presence in the government of the communists and to expel them when their presence no longer constituted a useful cover in the negotiations for the peace treaty (which was signed in February 1947) and a useful support to insert in the constitution the recognition of the Lateran Pacts (which was done in the following March). Another consideration that led De Gasperi to oust the social-communists from the government was the opportunity to recover the conservative electorate of the ordinary man's movement from the government, which reached the apogee of its strength at the end of 1946. Furthermore, the split Social Democratic, carried out by Saragat in January 1947 within the Socialist Party, offered De Gasperi a minimum of coverage on the left. However, it cannot be ruled out that De Gasperi proposed to maintain collaboration with the communists in the government until the constitution was finalized. But this latter objective was not of such importance as to impose itself on others and to induce De Gasperi to fight hard to resist the growing anti-communist pressure exerted on him by the Vatican, the Americans and Confindustria. Indeed, as far as the Americans are concerned, the pressure came from De Gasperi. Vatican pressure had started since June 1946, in the aftermath of the institutional referendum. The pressures of the Americans were simultaneous with the enunciation, in March 1947, of the Truman doctrine, with which the cold war was born, and were accompanied by the veiled threat which, if the Communists had not been removed from the government, Italy would have been excluded from the aid of what was then the Marshall Plan. Apparently this was the decisive element that led De Gasperi to remove the communists from the government. The same thing happened in the same weeks in France.

In the face of the American attitude, which was part of a world strategy, marginal importance, although not to be overlooked, in developing De Gasperi's decision had the attitude of Togliatti. The latter, probably not to disappoint the growing discontent of the popular masses, had for some time adopted an attitude of harsh opposition against the government, in which, however, his party was participating. In May 1947 the social-communists were expelled from the government and some liberals were called to take part in it personally, including Einaudi, the greatest exponent of the economic program based on deflation and the pre-eminence of the private sector over the public sector. However, until December 1947, that is, until the end of the work for the constitution, a particular relationship continued between the Christian Democracy on the one hand and the two large parties of the left on the other. The constitution was in fact the result of a compromise between these three parties, cemented by traditional liberal ideology and, above all, by anti-fascism. The validity of the compromise has not diminished due to the fact that, within it, there were changes of position, dictated by changes in the power relations between the Catholic alignment and what is commonly called Marxist. At first the social-communists, who did not foresee the expulsion from the government, were substantially critical of the aspects of the constitution, especially wanted by the Catholics, intended to slow down the shareholders' meeting and strengthen its guarantees (in particular the regional system). But, after the expulsion from the government, they considered positively the whole guarantee system.

In December 1947, the work of the constitution ended, the particular relationship between Christian Democracy and the social-communists also ended. De Gasperi allied himself with the secular minor parties (the Social Democrat, the Republican and the Liberal) and took care to contain the thrusts, always present in the Catholic world and in the Vatican, towards the clerical right; but above all he took care to exert constant pressure on the two large parties of the left and their union, the CGIL, not hesitating, in order to achieve this aim, to sabotage the application of the guarantee rules provided for by the constitution (constitutional court and regions) and to prepare in 1953 a new majority electoral law (the "scam law," as the leftists called it) that should have practically marginalized the opposition from the system,

In essence, De Gasperi aimed to create a type of state that came as close as possible to the old liberal oligarchic state(of course in the context of a reality marked by the active presence of the masses). It is indicative, in this regard, the low sensitivity of De Gasperi for the problems of the party, which for him was nothing more than a group of notables supported by the organizational apparatus of the church. We have already compared the majority of Christian Democrat government to the majority of Giolittian government. This comparison, if justified by the fact that Giolittian liberalism, although separate from the caesura of fascism, is chronologically the closest to degasperian liberalism, does not however take into account the fact that De Gasperi aimed to create a concentration of bourgeoisie, middle classes and peasants essentially anti-worker, while Giolitti had considered, especially in the first part of his period, the workers' movement is one of its privileged interlocutors. [...]

In some respects De Gasperi even seemed to relate to the historical right, to the tendency to privilege the coercive function of the state, to direct the country from above, with a rigid formula of government (centrism), intended more to exclude than to absorb in the parliamentary majority forces present in the country. What made this formula of government possible was anticommunism, which turned out to be an aggregating cement of different forces stronger than the transformism of Depretis and Giolitti had been. But if anti-communism had this "positive", aggregating function, which somehow made De Gasperi's majority of government analogous to that of the historical right, the limits were also analogous, that is, a sort of political Malthusianism that prevented the two majorities (of the historical right and De Gasperi) from gradually adapting to the growing demands of the country. [...]

The left current [of the DC, ed], headed by Dossetti, was formed in December 1946 to react to De Gasperi's increasingly clear tendency intended, in a more or less close or distant perspective, to oust the left from the government. The leftist current, on the other hand, declared itself a staunch supporter of the collaboration between the three mass parties. [...] Later a part of the left underwent a transformation, whose greatest exponent was Fanfani. Between 1954 and 1959 these, as secretary of the Christian Democracy, no longer aimed so much at reforms as at the actual creation and strengthening of the party, intended as a bureaucratic-led mass organization and clientele base. Thus was born in Christian Democracy a second, decisive way of obtaining consensus in the country,ed ]

Perfectly homogeneous to De Gasperi's model of state was the economic policy of the ministries chaired by him after the removal of the social-communists, a policy that aimed to overcome the post-war crisis, inflation and the budget deficit only with the restriction of credit and of investments. This policy weakened the bargaining power of the unions, favored the middle classes and the peasants and paved the way for the great electoral victory of April 18, 1948 [a victory that nowadays even the reactionary historiography and the press admit to be the result of fraud and foreign interventions, of the CIA : h ttps: //www.lastampa.it/topnews/primo-piano/201 ... 1.35749190 ,ed.] Compared to the previous political elections of June 2, 1946 for the Constituent Assembly, Christian Democracy advanced from 35% to 48.5%, the social-communists moved back from 40% to 31%.

For the left, the day of April 18 was the confirmation that Togliatti's policy had overestimated the electoral consistency of the social-communists, who were less strong than the Christian Democrats. It was the definitive crisis of the progressive democracy program, which the Communist Party had to abandon to curb the conservative offensive. After April 18 De Gasperi also prepared, for the facade, a program of reforms, necessary to modify the state inherited from fascism and to apply the republican constitution: reform of the public administration, of the school, tax, agrarian, regional system. But only two excerpts from this program were implemented, destined to remain asphyxiated: the Segni agrarian reform and the so-called Vanoni tax.There was no room for reform in a program that pursued the restoration of classical capitalism . For similar reasons, Saraceno's four-year plan for 1948-1952 was dropped and the previously mentioned CGIL work plan was rejected. The conservative offensive was singularly favored not only by the capitalist restoration but also, during the 1950s and especially in their second half, by an exceptionally favorable international economic situation, which began with the Korean War, from which those economies were able to profit particularly, like the German and the Italian, which had been rebuilt after the war, leaving the bosses the greatest freedom.

The Italian industry moved after the German one but had a growth of proportions such as never before. Between 1950 and 1961 the average annual increase in national income was 6.1%, exceeded in the capitalist West only by Germany with 7.5%. Real per capita income tripled in Italy between 1861 and 1961, but more than half of the increase is concentrated in the decade 1951-1961. The financial aid provided by the United States with the Marshall Plan, even if accepted by the Italian government with thrifty caution for fear of breaking the deflationary and restrictive framework, curbed some negative effects of the latter and relieved the Italian and European economy from that lack of capitals that had so deeply troubled her since the First World War.

It was an extensive industrial development, favored by the "pulling" foreign market and by the great elasticity of the internal labor force market; a development in which not only all types of industries found their place, especially those that worked for export - from large concentrations to a myriad of medium and small companies - but also income. In particular, the income from urban building areas which, linked to construction, had a significant propulsive function. Another type of income that, improperly, is usually assimilated to income, that provided by public spending through subgovernment and bureaucratic patronage, found ample margins to proliferate, individually facilitated by the ruling ruling party, such as Fanfani organizing, which became the main link in a triangle made up of the state, public companies and large private companies. In principle, public spending should no longer have served as much to support the private sector, which was walking on its own thanks to the exceptional economic situation, but rather to finance objectives of a social nature or intended to remove imbalances. In practice, however, the dominant privatism rendered these interventions inefficient, the main real purpose of which was to finance the ruling class, and in particular the Christian Democratic party, for patronage and electoral purposes.

The political-social consequence of the economic boom was , unlike what had happened in the years immediately following 1896, not so much a relatively autonomous growth of a new business class as a concentration of the middle classes around the dominant groups, an alliance of the profit with urban property income and with unproductive public spending for clientele purposes, an alliance made by compressing wages and accentuating worker exploitation, but also extending employment. The main cause of the lack of autonomy of the new entrepreneurial class was the central role that the state continued to play, as at the time of fascism, in promoting development, dominated by private groups who came to exercise public power.

The economic boom overturned, in many if not all aspects, Togliatti's hypothesis of a concentration of the middle classes and the working class. Mass consumerism was established in Italy which tended to integrate the working class into the middle classes under the deluge of cars and household appliances. The middle classes, at least those of the central-northern regions, ceased to feel excluded from the traditional agreements between industrialists and workers, to pay the price; and they felt far more involved in industrial development than in the past. Of course this referred only to a part of the middle classes, to the modern ones, administrators of the services required by the development. This type of integration did not refer to the part of the middle classes, traditionally large in Italy, not inserted or not inserted with a positive function in the production system, nor did it refer to students. However, the middle classes not included in the production process, widespread especially in the South, found room for integration in the system thanks to public spending for clientele purposes.

The monopolies affirmed their ability to integrate, at least tendentially, the whole of society, to give them the model of their authoritarian substance. If Fascism had been a kind of shortcut to achieve similar results to a much greater extent, his hypothesis now became less suitable for the country, which no longer seemed to need this shortcut.Compared to the fascist twenty years, the country had grown both economically and politically: economically, because the monopolies seemed able to integrate the masses, with the certain determining force of the state, but not in the ways and to the extent that this force had assumed in fascism; politically, because, thanks to Christian Democracy, there was now a conservative party capable of obtaining the consent of the masses without having to subvert the political order and suppress all freedoms. In the past, the traditional complaints of conservatives over the predominance of parliament over the executive, of minorities over the majority, of parties over the state had resulted in fascism, that is, in the subversion of parliament and the liberal regime.A conservative reactionary design capable of using and mastering subversion became possible, without having to follow the path of the subversive reaction, which the past proved risky, to the end.

Although the exceptional economic growth seemed to solve all the problems, in reality these were only temporarily put aside and, around 1960, they reappeared, magnified by the same development. It was and is a series of "bottlenecks" that have their basis in the dualism of the Italian economy, in the accentuated height difference between the expanding and stagnating sectors, between the private and public sectors, between industry dynamic that produces also for export and the stagnant one that produces only for the internal market, between industry and agriculture, between the North and the South. These were and are, in part, problems common to the whole capitalist and industrialized world. But the lacerating nature of the boom was particularly violent in Italy because it was accentuated by the economic and social imbalances typical of our country. Think of the southern question. Think about thatmassive public intervention, rigidly subordinated to the private sector, exalts the dualism between monopolies and small and medium industry, together with territorial imbalances ; and that these negative effects of public intervention are greater the more intense the development (they were greater in 1915-1918 and in 1954-1962 than during Fascism).

We said that the middle classes have integrated into the consumer industrial society; and we also said that this integration was not without limits. The main of these limitations, which generates strong social tensions, is perhaps the one caused by the imbalance between the growing schooling and the inability of the system to provide adequate schools for students and adequate jobs for graduates and graduates. This slows down the integration of the middle classes and indeed contributes to creating a state of frustration which, as we know, has a rich past in Italy. Furthermore - we said - one of the channels of integration of the middle classes into the system has been public spending for clientele purposes. The integration of the middle classes, for this aspect, occurred by accentuating their parasitism.

The boom of the 1950s did not concern agriculture. In 1950-1961, while the average annual increase in national industry income was 7.6% and that of the tertiary sector was 7.5%, that of agriculture was only I% (Saracen) . At the root of the imbalance is the fact that trade and industry prices have risen more than agricultural prices. The gap between industrial prices and agricultural prices that began in the two decades between the two wars continued, accentuating. Furthermore, the costs of commercial intermediation (sometimes a real income, which aligns alongside that of urban areas and bureaucratic ones) affect agriculture much more than it does industry. In the context of an agriculture in crisis and unable to modernize and rationalize, the rapid exodus from the countryside (the percentage of farmers on the active population fell from 40% to 20% between 1951 and 1961), which increased labor costs and caused the abandonment of many lands, is was a further, fundamental element of crisis. The agrarian crisis and the exodus from the countryside have particularly affected the hilly areas of the whole peninsula and the South as a whole. Even in the South there has been an escape from the countryside to the cities. But here the exodus from the countryside has taken the traditional form of emigration. The agrarian crisis and the exodus from the countryside have particularly affected the hilly areas of the whole peninsula and the South as a whole. Even in the South there has been an escape from the countryside to the cities. But here the exodus from the countryside has taken the traditional form of emigration. The agrarian crisis and the exodus from the countryside have particularly affected the hilly areas of the whole peninsula and the South as a whole. Even in the South there has been an escape from the countryside to the cities. But here the exodus from the countryside has taken the traditional form of emigration.

However, even in emigration there was a novelty of great importance because, in large part, the migratory flow was no longer directed abroad but, especially after 1960, in the industrial cities of northern Italy. In this respect, emigration has ceased to be a net loss of the nation's resources. But it has also ceased to be a useful valve to ease social tensions and create a greater availability of land for the farmers left in the South; on the contrary, it has accentuated the imbalances between North and South, contributing to the chaotic and congested growth of the northern cities, and also contributing to making a desert of large parts of the South. Perhaps never as in the last twenty years has the South played, in the economy of the state unitary, a dual role: dynamic in the short term, in the long run. In a first phase it favored the development, supplying the northern industry with manpower; in the following phase it became, as never before, "the major bottleneck that stands in the way of the development of the whole country."

The usual phenomenon that the modernization of the North accentuates the disintegration of the South has been repeated on a larger scale because it undermines the old social relationships without creating new ones. It is no coincidence that the mafia has experienced two periods of particular diffusion: after the advent of the historical left in power in the last century [19th century, ed.] and, to a much greater extent, in the present day, in which the new forms taken, the poor sense of the state of the Christian Democratic ruling party and perhaps the intertwining with political forces interested instrumentally in the reactionary subversion have allowed it to spread even at the level national. The reality of a tumultuous and unbalanced development, "pulled" by industry, contrasted with the pattern of gradual and balanced development, in which the growth of industry was associated and followed by the expansion of the internal market. The ancient southern evil of peasant pressure on land has disappeared, but the consequence of that evil, namely immobility, has remained: not so much the immobility of a patriarchal and backward society as the immobility of a desert,

As we have already mentioned, at the beginning of the 1950s, the Christian Democrats made a partial agrarian reform to cut the wings of the peasant movement in the South (moreover already outflowing) and drive the Communists out of their conquered positions. The agrarian reform had a heavy political cost for the Christian Democrats because it temporarily made them lose the electoral sympathies of the southern conservatives, apparently the cause of the failure of the "scam law" in 1953. But the agrarian reform, while definitively eliminating the traditional power of the landowners, already put in crisis by the war, has not been able to create a new vital class of peasant owners and has actually started the premise of the accentuated social disruption caused then by the "economic miracle. "It is precisely on this lack of renewal that Christian Democracy has leveraged to regain its positions of power. The organization of the Christian Democratic Party by Fanfani after 1954 was a significant fact that concerned the South. Christian Democracy has recreated the clientelary system, broken in previous years by the peasant movement, on new foundations, whose main elements are no longer the notables but the party and its bureaucracy (more widespread in the South than in the North), the sub- government and the Cassa del Mezzogiorno.

Since then the South has returned to being, according to tradition, more tied than the North to the ruling party; and, when he made the frond or the opposition, this was on the right, although the left wing was practically absent from the southern Christian Democracy. Since then the South has ceased to be, as it had been for some years after 1945, the subject of political debate in a perspective of democratic renewal, and, as in the time of liberal southernism, it has returned to being a simple object of that debate, a problem to be addressed with more or less effective interventions from above. It was a question of intending to become aware of the national nature of the southern question, in the sense that the lack of development of the South is now holding back the development of the North. It was treated and it is, in intention, to prepare a set of public interventions capable of curbing and reversing the traditional spontaneous trend of market forces, for which economic growth is concentrated in the North and translates into an impoverishment - absolute or relative - of the South; to create in the South an industrial base capable of offering work to those who do not find it in agriculture and capable of setting in motion an autonomous market-based development mechanism (Saraceno).

For this purpose (and for the purpose of consolidating the positions of power of the Christian Democrats) a special body was set up in 1950, the Cassa del Mezzogiorno. But this, until the early sixties, was limited to doing, while strengthening it, the traditional public works policy to improve or create the so-called infrastructures. The increased public interventions in favor of the South resulted in a benefit above all for the North, because the additional demand for industrial products, caused by public spending in the South, transferred this to the North (Saraceno). The imbalance between North and South, instead of decreasing, has increased.

Source: Giampiero Carocci, History of the Unification of Italy to the present , Feltrinelli, Milan, 1975

Introduction and editing by Luscino

https://ottobre.info/2020/06/15/la-rico ... opoguerra/

Google Translator

"History, read it and weep."

Re: Italy

Posted: Mon Jun 29, 2020 4:21 pm
by blindpig
The question of the petty bourgeoisie, the workers and the tasks of the communists

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by editorial staff

1) The state of the art of the communist question in Italy
The formation of a communist party, in which to bring together the vanguard of the working class, which manages to exert a real influence on the subordinate classes and on society as a whole, can be considered today as the fundamental task of the Italian communists. At different levels, it is a need felt by all organizations, groups and parties that refer to the communist historical experience.

A task certainly to be related to the historical development of the international workers' movement, which has been in profound reflux since 1989 and in general to the capitalist restructuring of the 1970s. This reflux translated into the progressive submission of the proletariat to capitalism - evident today, at the moment in whose large groups of workers seem to have almost completely introjected the values ​​of the class enemy - facilitated by the reformist line promoted by the most important western communist parties since the end of the Second World War, up to the landing at the shores of the first social democracy, and of the "social -liberalism ”or third way then (during the 90s).

In Italy in particular, the task of creating a communist party in step with the times assumes great importance if the events of the workers' movement are kept in mind, especially from the turning point in Bolognina and from the dissolution of the communist experience organized in the center-left governments until the subsequent marginalization and pulverization.

The defeat of revolutionary Marxism and with it workers was certainly a supranational process, favored by the development of the imperialist phase of post-70s capitalism, triggered by the capitalist restructuring and the emergence of the new "globalized, generalized and financialized" monopolistic groups (Amin [ 1]) of the financial capital that dictates the law through the ubiquitous "financial markets". This process has left heeling and ininfluence in our ranks, difficulties of all sorts for those who today try to rebuild the threads with a history made of defeats, but also of great victories, and which however continues outside the West, in a vital and creative in countries that lead anti-imperialist struggles and seek to develop despite US unilateralism and hegemonism.

This situation gives rise to innumerable debates and controversies, both on the international positioning with respect to contemporary socialism, in particular the Chinese one on the one hand; both on internal strategy, where one of the most heard questions regards who the party should speak to at this stage, and who its interlocutors are on the other. All in a conjuncture where the petty bourgeois revolt seems to be the protagonist of discontent and the workers of Italy sensitive to the conservative sirens of the sovereign branch or immersed in generalized apathy.

There is debate as to whether everything should focus on a pure class line, or open to the petty bourgeoisie (the craftsman, the merchant, the VAT number) objectively oppressed by the domination of monopoly capital.

We will try with this short article to clarify the issue and make our contribution to the debate.

2) Class structure of Italian society
Imperialism, i.e. industrial and banking monopolistic capitalism linked to the dynamics of globalized financial capital (whose accumulation and operating center is Wall Street, and which relies on supranational institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, WTO, EU-ECB, NATO) is the predominant element in Italian society, as in every western society, and the force that most determines its development. In this context, the aim that the ruling classes set out to achieve from the 1990s on was to conform states and capitalist societies to the renewed demands of financialized monopoly capital. It was a new modernization, which was essentially a viable liberal restoration without resistance after the fall of the USSR. Specifically:

Accession to the EU is a piece of this inevitable modernization, as a large center of dependent accumulation, but with autonomous and competitive ambitions (as far as possible), from Washington, and as an extended area of ​​implementation of the new liberal policies, no longer confinable to the level of individual European states. The highest levels of economic concentration and capitalist centralization occur in this period and, thanks to these dynamics, the internationalization of the Italian top groups is successfully completed (FCA, Ferrero, Unicredit, Intesa etc). The Italian bourgeoisie therefore stabilizes its monopolies and takes its place at the big table on the chessboard of the capitalist West.

It finds itself faced with large non-monopolistic national enterprises, medium enterprises and small diffused production, typical of the Italian manufacturing fabric since the economic boom, as gregarious but often recalcitrant forces . It therefore supports the mature and internationalized capitalist class, a class of local capitalists and an extended small bourgeoisie of traders, artisans, professionals, and a high-end (middle class) white collar and urban wage-working class. Upper bourgeoisie which, on the other hand, can count on the almost unconditional support of a metropolitan "intellectual" class which benefits from imperialist income - while retaining "progressive" beliefs - and is often linked to the liberal-democratic currents of the bourgeois "left".

The extension of this property class, small and medium, and the lower compactness of the monopolistic bourgeois class [2] , makes their claims an extremely important element in the political life of the country (and almost always in a reactionary sense, starting from from fascism). The relative weakness of the bourgeoisie in the face of the tasks of imperialist modernization requires compromises and constant attention to the petty bourgeoisie that is pauperizing. The latter has the feeling of losing the social status that it enjoyed when the economy "was doing well", and suffers from the comparison with the suffering of today due to its inability to take advantage of the extreme internationalization and financialisation of the system.

The usual dynamics of these clashes within the Italian property classes is usually resolved in the substantial solidarity of interests between privileged groups. A solidarity to the bottom, where the ruling class, expression of the mature and imperialist bourgeoisie, grants: evasion, subsidies and low wages - which, moreover, it also takes advantage of - to keep afloat the activities of medium production and small commerce. This dynamic marks the relative backwardness of the Italian system compared to other western capitalist countries.

Hence a chronic permanent depression of the productive forces, all at the expense of the majority of workers, with little hope and no prospect other than emigration, gradual impoverishment, precariousness, misery and unemployment. The working class is annihilated. Objectively fragmented as everywhere in the West, following the innovations and restructurings of the 70s (when the incipient technological revolution was used by the ruling classes to allow outsourcing, subcontracting, relocations; inverse process to factory centralization so far characteristic of historical capitalism), and subjectively no longer aware of its role.

2.1 Who are ours ?
What have been the effects of these processes on the Italian social structure, on the classes from which and for whom a subject capable of representing them in the struggle for their emancipation should arise? Without going into a detailed sociological analysis, but aware of the need to draw a faithful picture of the situation, we can try, using the latest Istat data and some analyzes already produced on the matter, to outline the contours of a precise reference block.

Out of 60 million inhabitants in our country, the demographic structure is divided roughly as follows:

0-14 years: 13.5%, 8 million

15-64 years: 64%, 38.5 million

65 years and over: 22.5%, 13.5 million [3]

Always Istat points out that the prevailing trend in the population is aging. The first indication that comes from the data is that of the 38.5 million in working age there are 25 million employed, of which more than 19 million are employees while the independent ones are about 6 million [4] .

Within the fixed-income dependent working population and largely at low wages (lower than in the rest of Europe, both in the private sector and in the public administration) we can identify, following the groupings of the Istat table , macro- branches that each bring together approximately 25% - more than four million employees each - of total employee work:

1) The extractive and manufacturing industry, a place of the "working class" in the classical sense, and we could say Fordist; agricultural buildings and workers and laborers

2) The salaried service for private services: wholesale and retail trade, repair of motor vehicles and motorcycles, transport and storage, accommodation and restaurant services.

3) The salaried employee of public services: in particular social security, education, health and assistance

4) The remaining 25%, in our breakdown, results from an aggregate of service activities, ranging from artistic and entertainment, to the repair of household goods, to scientific and technical activities, information and communication services, financial, insurance and real estate activities.

Next to this mass of subordinate workers we have, then, an audience of 6 million independents which include the different layers of the ownership classes, from large and medium entrepreneurship, to small employers, to traders, professionals, real autonomous. A sociologically disparate reality, but very important and politically influential, numerous and which tends to act as a block.

On the European scene, Italy ranks third in terms of the incidence of independent work on total employment (22.9 percent in 2018), after Greece and Romania, and well above the European average (15, 3 percent). [5]

The numbers in detail of these 6 million independent are these:

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Source: https://infogram.com/autonomi-1hdw2j7nm7gj2l0

As can be seen, among them professionals and self-employed (first of all traders) together together, in 2019, about 3.3 million people, while instead the real capitalists, together with professionals and traders who exploit labor waged, they are 1.4 million. [6]

Lastly, in view of the recent changes in the world of work, the subordinates and exploited, false self-employed para-subordinates, VAT numbers fall instead:

figures that have subordination constraints more typical of dependent work. [...] "partially self-employed", which amounts to 338 employees. The distribution of the employed by sector of economic activity clarifies even more the specificity of the partially self-employed, who have greater implications in the sectors of services to families and people, health and social assistance, education and public administration and transport and storage. . […] In the South, higher portions of partially self-employed (compared to pure self-employed) are estimated between home and remote salesmen and call center operators. In the North there is a greater presence of bricklayers, drivers of heavy vehicles and trucks, porters and workers in charge of moving goods. [...] The tripartite division of self-employment therefore shows coexistence,of a more vulnerable group of independent and uncertain professional identity, which is in many respects closer to subordinate work than to independent work. Among the most relevant aspects, the weight, among the partially self-employed, of the female component and of the younger workers, that is of two traditionally fragile categories in the labor market, should be underlined.

Instead, the number of professionals is growing, in particular without employees. They are 1 million 233 thousand, about 300 thousand more than 15 years ago. They are all those workers in the field of consultancy, research, information, who often carry out activities with a high intellectual content, often young people, who in the last few years have put themselves on the market and, by choice or necessity, are not employed by employees. none, but they work with a supply relationship with the various customers. Similar to these are the collaborators, coordinated and continuous, but they are decreasing. [6]

Just as this pocket of subordination is hidden among the independent or autonomous, which is analogous to dependent work, similarly among the employees there is a layer of high-level wage earners who are assimilable to the capitalists in that they represent their functionary and share their interests: "Modern workers aristocracies, public or private, manual or intellectual who are" [8] . Directors, administrators and managers, superior cadres, in the statistics reported as wage earners, but in reality a particular layer of privileged beneficiaries of the system, with a material and ideological situation that leads them to think and act as capitalists. Those with the highest remuneration and the most senior positions in companies are themselves part of the upper middle class of business as shareholders and investors.

However, this cross-section would be incomplete if we did not consider that we have spoken so far of the so-called active population. What is remarkable of the Italian figure, however, is the mass of inactive people who reach a population of 13 million people, as shown in the graph below:

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Source: https://infogram.com/quanti-inattivi-in ... mv95mvz6xo

Without a doubt, in addition to the students, within this category we count the countless exploited illegal workers and other invisible ones. In this further graph we can have more precise knowledge of it, bringing out a very interesting fact:

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Source: https://infogram.com/inattivi-per-motiv ... zyewmoq2yo

If the students and pensioners, which together amount to about 6 and a half million, are separated from the 13 million inactive, they remain just as many which in fact constitute the data, this real yes, of unemployment in Italy - in spite of the accounting somersaults and the scarce typical transparency of bourgeois surveys - providing a complete picture. In addition to the 2.4 million real unemployed (i.e. only those who are registered in the official job placement lists) there are another 6.5 million unemployed who are expertly expunged from the statistics and who in fact bring real unemployment in Italy close to 9 million .

2.2 Employment relationships
But what is the situation within the labor relations of this mass of workers ?

The first indication we have from this very broad overview is that the industrial proletariat tends to be a minority, this is due to the tertiarisation that characterizes advanced capitalist economies. However, it is still an ever-present and central nucleus: it is necessary to consider that Italy is still a manufacturing country and that a large part of this outsourcing consists "in the outsourcing of many services: those that were provided within industrial companies, today they are mainly produced by specialized companies classified as "tertiary" " [9] .

The second is that the wage-worker of services (to companies and individuals, public and private, the "tertiary") is a growing development basin of the contemporary working class: drivers, railroad workers, nurses, warehouse workers, teachers, educators, employees of the large distribution, commerce and catering, public employees etc ). All these categories contribute to filling the ranks and defining today's proletariat, which is at first sight more composite than the "old".

In short, we are faced with a diverse working class within it, where the wage workers of the services come to join the mainly industrial proletariat of factory and numerically in decline, at least in the West. They objectively support each other since these professional figures are increasingly related to the classic worker, in the methods of management and organization of the work they undergo, in work processes managed according to managerial methods marked by the private individual in increasingly harsh conditions. Furthermore, flexible and precarious contracts are used in public services no less than in the private sector: the proliferation of fixed-term contracts and other types of contracts is the general trend of our time, especially in Italy. In short, contemporary capitalism tends to produce widespread precariousness.

In numerical terms, if almost 14.9 million permanent workers are employed, the remaining 3 million are temporary workers " [10] and precarious workers, the latter component with a general trend towards growth. We can draw an excellent glimpse of the situation from a pertinent investigation made at the time by the collective Clash city worker [11] . An inquiry that offers us a real photograph of a fragmented and scattered contemporary proletariat, where large companies with tens of thousands of workers have given way to large production complexes, linked by subcontracting and outsourcing systems. Countless supply companies, subcontractors, temporary employment agencies and small pseudo-independent companies have developed around large companies.

Photograph of a working class struggling with the integral internationalization of companies , in which it becomes more international as it increasingly comes into contact with multinationals that settle in the territories, as well as the classic national companies which fight exclusively in and for the internal market.

Finally, a photograph of a working class invested by a growing integration between manual and intellectual work , thanks to information and communication technologies, which develop at unprecedented speeds, in the context of a production process that requires ever increasing technological knowledge in various sectors; this tendency is generalized and the distinction between workers and employees becomes weak and often arbitrary, to the extent that all workers are incorporated into production:

thanks to the changes that took place in the work process and in the company organization, the distinction between workers and employees loses more and more meaning as worker work becomes more and more intellectual work and that of employees increasingly mechanical and alienating. This also translates into a lower differentiation of the respective wages [12] .

To complete this quick excursus, it is necessary to consider the approximately two million "chronic" unemployed people reviewed by official statistics, which when added to the ten million "inactive" indicated above, gives us the measure of the true reserve army available to the capitalists in the country-system Italy . These, together with the overwhelming majority of the 19 million wage workers, as seen, and the new pseudo-independent exploited, form a basin of more than 30 million people who are, in disparate conditions and systemic crisis, subject to subordinate employment relationships, parasubordinated, of real slavery (hired labor and gig economy) and ultra-precarious exploitation. To this we must support pensioners, victims in turn of violent anti-social counter-reforms, underway in Italy and Europe [13].

A completely voiceless mass, and often a mass of maneuver for the reactionary or liberal adventures of the parties of the bourgeoisie, which, without going to investigate the numbers in detail, we have seen accounts for a small numerical minority and which however occupies, indeed monopolizes, the whole spectrum of political representation, economic, media and hegemonic power.

3) Strategy: our tasks
Therefore, given the results of the class struggle, the social structure given and the state of the movement of the workers and the communist parties, it seems clear that the task of the communists is to get to know and have a link with the dependent work, to seek in it its reason to be and the social block of (re) departure . With a global vision that unifies: these are the struggles of the workers of Ilva, the protests in the health or school sectors, the struggles of the laborers, the employees of the large-scale distribution and trade, logistics, the anger of the precarious and the exploited from online platforms (we think in particular of the riders), of the worries of the employees of multinationals who cut costs and restructure by laying off, and of the professionals of intellectual and artistic activities, often precarious and poorly paid; of all those who work for a salary, and that concerns how we have seen something like 19 million people, classified in the main branches indicated above: industry, private services and public services.

It is a one and only working class. Our main task is to unite and bring out a new class consciousness among these workers. From this point of view, one of the essential questions is: "to move the bulk of the workers out of apathy", ie the trade union question; ie make sure that a movement of workers takes effect (similar to the French one, to say [14]). Only in a wide and varied sea of ​​workers' protagonism it is in fact possible to develop a policy of unity of the sectors of the work that meet and recognize each other in their common interests and as subordinates fighting against a common enemy for emancipatory purposes. And, speaking of protagonism, positive signals come precisely from that part of foreign workers often, and superficially, indicated as a passive tool - through an unprejudiced use of the concept of industrial reserve army - to weaken the claims of the salaried workers: think of the recent workers' strike, an event that is certainly not without precedent, however neglected by the media. [15]

Secondly, and only secondarily, there is the discourse of knowing how to speak "to other classes" for example the petty bourgeoisie that proletarizes itself, that is, small traders and craftsmen, small entrepreneurs etc. The discussion with these subjects must however be in a perspective of trying to impose the hegemony of the proletariat on them, and not the other way round. In short, our task is not to represent their class instances. In case - strong of an in-depth analysis, of the investigation, of a platform representing workers, and capable of speaking in their name and with a certain influence on them - you will have to go to meet him to make it clear that their fate depends on the fight against the capitalist system. Try to make them understand that the liberation of workers is also liberation for them,

In this perspective, the direction of the process, of the propaganda cannot be entrusted to the petty bourgeois interests, which in certain perspective cannot be delivered to the reaction, but to make hegemony we must first recreate the conditions of our legitimacy, the lost link with the world of work. Our proposal moves in this connection. Only then can we think of social alliances. The working class can do them only when it "exists", that is, it is at the head of the movement with a unified purpose and will and can exercise an ideological and practical hegemony over the adjoining classes.

In short, the primary objective of the communists should therefore be the expansion of their consensus and their ability to manage among the ranks of the working class and the question of social alliance with the petty bourgeoisie is secondary at this stage. In other words, if unifying, representing and taking root is an immediate practical political task; taking into consideration the world of the petty bourgeoisie is a medium-long term theoretical task. The communists must not preclude anything, they must be able to act dialectically among the masses. Recreating the link with the workers (i.e. raising the level of class consciousness) is the main front. As in war, there is always a main front and one, or more secondary. The relationship with the petty bourgeoisie is one of these, which dialectically must also be linked with all the other secondary fronts, even if the workers' front is always the one that must have the pre-eminence.

There is a "hierarchy" of interests that necessarily come into conflict in certain contexts of struggle. In order not to get lost, we must always look to the main front. This configuration of struggle can and must change when and if the class struggle of the subordinates and their political subjectivity has developed, and the main enemy will be correctly identified: the financial capital of the monopolies, and a capable social alliance will be built to isolate the ruling class of capitalists and their lackey officials. Only in this sense can it be said that authentic perspectives for a revolution in the West will have opened.

[1] S.Amin , La loi de la valeur mondialisée: Valeur et prix dans le capitalisme, 2013; S.Amin, The implosion du capitalisme contemporain, 2012; https://www.sinistrainrete.info/crisi-m ... ile-2.html

[2] Cf. our historical series on Italian capitalism available here https://ottobre.info/2020/06/15/la-rico ... l-secondo- war /

[3] Istat table, Population residing on 1st January: http://dati.istat.it/Index.aspx?DataSet ... IS_POPRES1# ;

[4] Istat table, employment by branches of activity http://dati.istat.it/Index.aspx?QueryId=12581 ;

[5] Istat, ANNUAL REPORT 2019, The situation of the country: https://www.istat.it/storage/rapporto-a ... le2019.pdf

[6] Crf https://www.truenumbers.it/lavoratori-autonomi/

[7] Istat, ANNUAL REPORT 2019, The situation of the country: https://www.istat.it/storage/rapporto-a ... le2019.pdf

[8] https://www.emilianobrancaccio.it/2020/ ... QMsyyz1A_8

[9] https://www.lacittafutura.it/economia-e ... o-i-nostri

[10] https://www.documentazione.info/occupat ... o-i-numeri

[11] https://www.lacittafutura.it/economia-e ... o-i-nostri

[12] https://www.lacittafutura.it/economia-e ... o-i-nostri

[13] https://pcifermano.wordpress.com/2019/1 ... in-france/

[14] Podcast, "The awakening of the class struggle in France": https://guerrigliaradio.simplecast.com/ ... in-francia

[15] https://www.usb.it/leggi-notizia/pieni- ... azione-or- they will follow- others -mobilitation-of-the-invisible-1628.html ; https://sbilanciamoci.info/migranti-e-l ... -di-nardo/

https://ottobre.info/2020/06/25/la-ques ... comunisti/

Google Translator

Re: Italy

Posted: Thu Sep 03, 2020 12:47 pm
by blindpig
Cut of parliamentarians: a defense of the indefensible

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by Davide Clementi

After the postponement linked to the COVID19 emergency, on 20 and 21 September the Italians will be called to approve or reject the constitutional reform on cutting the number of parliamentarians .

Strongly desired by the Five Star Movement but approved by all major political parties - from the League to the Democratic Party, from Italia Viva to Fratelli d'Italia, with only 14 no and 2 abstentions - the 'Fraccaro reform' , from the name of the pentastellato undersecretary who proposed it, gives a clear cut to the elected representatives of the Italian Parliament: minus 230 in the Chamber, for a total of 400 deputies, and minus 115 in the Senate, for a total of 200 senators. The reform drastically changes the numerical representation ratio: each elected to the Chamber will have to represent over 150,000 inhabitants (previously 96,000); each elected to the Senate will instead represent over 300,000 (previously about 188,000).

According to its supporters, the main reason for the approval of the reform is the savings it will entail for the state coffers: on 'IlBlogdellestelle.it' we read [1] of a saving of one billion in two terms, therefore in 10 (theoretical ) years. We are therefore talking about 100 million a year, equivalent to savings of € 1.67 per inhabitant of the Republic. Less optimistic estimates [2] describe savings of 81.6 million per year (€ 1.36 per inhabitant). In any case, we are talking about savings that amount to between 0.005% and 0.007% of the annual budget of the Italian state, as stated by the Edward Scissorhands of Italian public accounts, Carlo Cottarelli [3] .

Taking into account the servant when in question is that institution that represents, at least abstractly, the will and interests of citizens only confirms that hegemony of money and the rigidity of public accounts to which even the self-proclaimed friends of the people against liberalism they are tied like a dog is tied to its master's leash.

Parliaments - in Italy and in the world - are in severe crisis . A long crisis, inflamed by a multiplicity of factors and situations that are also very distant from each other.

The United Kingdom is back from three years of rebounds, postponements, rebounds on the Brexit issue, with a Parliament of a constitutional monarchy (without a written constitution) continually hostage not only to governments that are anything but strong and stable [4] , but also of the traps he posed from time to time for not respecting the vote of the British in the referendum on leaving the European Union .

In France, the approval of the highly contested pension reform wanted by President Macron through the mechanism of art. 49 paragraph 3 of the Constitution [5] , which allows the government to override the parliamentary vote on a provision for which it is feared that there is no majority willing to approve it. A very strong popular reaction , longer than that of May 1968, and 72% of the French who consider Macron an "authoritarian" [6] were not enough to prevent the use of an exceptional tool to curb the anger of the French.

And what about the European Parliament , the only body directly elected by European citizens that does not even have the power to propose regulations but only to approve or reject, on an equal footing with the Council of the European Union [7] , what it is submitted by the European Commission, which has a monopoly on legislative initiative?

The Italian Parliament is no exception: since the beginning of the XVIII Legislature - the current one - 32% of the laws approved are laws converting decree-laws [8] , [9] or instruments that the Constitution justifies for "reasons of necessity and urgency "and of direct competence of the Government; 36% is instead dedicated to ratification laws, or laws that approve or authorize the ratification of international treaties.

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Our Parliament produces less and less, more and more for the benefit of bodies not elected by citizens [10] and, it is right to reiterate it, worse and worse: flag laws such as the law on civil unions or "security decrees" are composed in an inorganic way, between articles, paragraphs, letters, numbers, which often refer to laws which in turn refer to others, regardless of that principle of clarity of the normative texts which the legislator has tried to adhere to in art. 13-bis l. 400/1988 and present in the same Parliamentary Regulations [11] .

Parliament - and therefore the parliamentarians, often maliciously accomplices - has been progressively stripped of the centrality that is typical of a parliamentary republic like ours.

Those who make odd comparisons between our system and those with much lower numbers of parliamentarians - such as, for example, the Congress of the United States of America - carry out a false operation: the United States is a federal republic, where a very wide range of powers is entrusted to the fifty parliaments of the states as well as to the federal Congress.

In Europe, with the exception of the European Parliament itself - 1 MEP for every 657,371 inhabitants - the country that has the highest parliamentary / population ratio is Germany, also a Federal Republic, with 1 MEP every 104,109: Italy would finish in second place place on the podium of European countries, with 102,800 inhabitants represented for each parliamentarian, positioning ourselves globally just below Malaysia and just above Mali.

It is not a question of a simple rebound of numbers, of a competition between who has more and who has less: democracy, consistently with the constitutional dictate, would aim at the effective participation of citizens in the political, economic and cultural life of the Country.

It is now clear that citizens cannot participate in the economic life of the country : the trade union is increasingly prone to the employer counterpart, preventing in the beginning any type of management of the productive systems by workers, stifling innovative forms of social struggles, silencing every soul of revolt and strike. Culture remains the shell of the ruling class alone, with media - television channels, newspapers, publishers, radio - increasingly centralized in the hands of large companies controlled by highly influential financial and industrial groups.

For those who adopt a Marxist point of view, Parliament remains, in a moment of general retreat of the proletariat and the working class, the only and last instrument capable of acting as a sounding board for those who do not have the economic instruments - and therefore the media - in order to express the first dissent. It is no coincidence that the entire Italian media world has paved the way for a vast and now prevalent public opinion which, for decades, has been in favor of a reduction in the number of parliamentarians, fueling the idea of ​​a "caste" of satraps privileged, well- fed and richly paid and with no other function than that of gorging themselves and plotting to the detriment of the common citizen and the honest entrepreneur.

Well, if many of these impressions can be accepted due to the growing media exposure of inept and incapable parliamentarians, their reduction in number will not only in no way remedy the problem of the quality of the elected representatives - their morality - but rather risks making that component of unconscious people catapulted to Montecitorio or Palazzo Madama to the detriment of those few able to worthily represent the interests of the reference social group.

The constituent legislators, mindful of the fascist experience, had the aim of allowing political representation as broad and real as possible: we should remember the attempts to constantly update the number of parliamentarians to the ratio of 1 to a hundred thousand inhabitants by some constituents, including which the same president of the drafting committee of the Constitution Ruini [12] . We will have to wait for the constitutional law 2/1963 to put a point on the question of the number, set at 630 for the Chamber (1 for every eighty / one hundred thousand inhabitants) and 315 for the Senate (1 for every one hundred and eighty thousand).

It is clear that the current constitutional reform - which, unlike that of Renzi in 2016 and the others in the past, will present a single question - will lead to a redefinition of the boundaries of the electoral colleagues in the Chamber and Senate, inevitably resulting in an increase in size of constituencies with three indirect effects :

1) The raising, especially in the Senate of the Republic, of the natural (or implicit) barrier threshold, which will be much higher than the 3% envisaged by the legal threshold, surreptitiously introducing a very selective system of political or territorial minorities present in a territory [13] .

2) The parliamentarian will have to be linked to a larger, more populous constituency which will encompass more densely populated urban areas and more depopulated rural areas. It is clear that, from the point of view of electoral campaigns and parliamentary action, the largest pool of votes capable of ensuring re-election will be privileged instead of the more meager and already marginalized one.

3) The territorial dimension will also determine an increase in the costs of electoral campaigns, further exacerbating the personalization and mediatization of political confrontation.

These effects do not have a decisive impact on the constitutional architecture. The reform only serves to update the Constitution in response to the party class that voted the reform law with a very large majority. This clean break does not fit, despite the unrealistic declarations of majority and opposition exponents, in the framework of a more articulated plan for the reform of the bourgeois state, perceived as essential by many and continually aborted by the voters. What makes the constitutional update regressive from the point of view of the conflicting social forces is the further erosion of the mechanism of classical parliamentary representation in a framework of general incapacity of actors, even if other than state bodies, ofexperiment and create new modes of political responsibility, direct and indirect, also alien to the main form of the liberal-democratic regime.

This reform does nothing but make clear the stiffening the liberal-democratic regime is facing: political parties, all expressions of the ruling classes, must close ranks and reduce the infiltration of dissent which could, even remotely, undermine the taken on the state. With a view to a return to conflict, the socialist and communist forces should restart, once they have reconnected themselves to the reality of the exploited, a political experimentation that goes beyond the mere electoral rite to which we are accustomed and which has contributed to making the diaspora communist an Italian theater made up of characters looking for seats.

Parliamentarism, in the words of Lukacs, should only be a "tactical problem" [14] of the class struggle of the proletariat. Parliament, the instrument originally most suited to the bourgeoisie to maintain the fiction of representing "all the people", has ended up being the heart of a liturgy coveted and sought after by communists and socialists reduced to abjuring the conflictual nature of their political proposal , instead embracing compromising and pacifying positions with the bourgeoisie in command.

While on the one hand we cannot help but fight against parliamentarism, on the other hand the reconstruction of a unitary front is of primary importance that puts at the center the theoretical and practical development of new forms of political expression , of productive and social organization, capable of to reverse the present state of affairs. Only then will it be possible to look with detachment on parliament as the tactical tool that it is. Until then we must try to defend him, even at the cost of sharing a battle with the devil or, worse, with Emma Bonino.

https://ottobre.info/2020/09/03/taglio- ... fendibile/

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Re: Italy

Posted: Tue Sep 29, 2020 4:53 pm
by blindpig
Work less, work better, work everyone

by Alberto Ferretti

Image

In a previous article analyzing the current phase we had stated that, following the health crisis triggered by the pandemic, the European capitalist societies, or rather the ruling forces that are an expression of it, would have been forced to follow all roads, even the less orthodox from the point of view of today's dominant economic liberalism, to address the social consequences that this would have determined:

" Governments are now forced to revive those social policies long and in vain required by the ultra-minority anti-liberal and anti-capitalist opposition forces, always for this reason violently repressed and insulted "

" The governments of the bourgeoisie find themselves against their will to sponsor a state of health unrest that objectively pushes, in some ways, in a direction contrary to the interests of their reference class and capital: having to deal with social issues for too long neglected "

From this contradiction we recognized that “forgotten” ideas could re-emerge in public discourse - if only with the intention of guaranteeing the stability of the capitalist system - but such as to be able to significantly modify the political framework and thus open potential spaces for struggle.

The battle for the ruling bourgeoisie would then have been to try to bring this thrust back into system compatibility. For the communists, on the other hand, “to push so that the immediately necessary social measures are really implemented and in the widest possible way; to press for the costs of the crisis not to fall on the lower classes; to affirm and make permanent new social achievements. "

But what contradictions? What would these new social achievements be, in an age marked by restoration and which is accustoming us to generalized social regression? A striking example of the current dynamic comes from the emerging debate on the reduction of working hours and the recent opening by the EU authorities on the minimum wage. [1]

A GDP in free fall as never before in the history of capitalism is characterizing a historical conjuncture that poses unprecedented challenges to the bourgeoisie of European countries. The most explosive of these undoubtedly concerns how to deal with the avalanche of layoffs expected in the coming months: in fact, there is talk of one million layoffs expected in Italy alone. Huge numbers, a clear indication of the urgency: to prevent autumn from turning into a social disaster, to do everything possible to mitigate the avalanche by guaranteeing “stability”.

It is here then, in search of “innovative” solutions, that the debate on working time breaks.

“Work less, everyone work, for the same salary”. Historical workhorse of the workers' movement in all its articulations - from the socialist left to the reformist and revolutionary communists - this theme is taken up and discussed periodically by unsuspected bourgeois voices.

Leading the way today are the statements of Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin who in her investiture speech as president of the Social Democratic Party expressed the need for a six-hour day to be "more equitable and productive". Subsequently came the proposals of IG Metall, a powerful German metalworking union, which announced in August that it will propose the introduction of the four-day week as part of the negotiations for the new collective agreement that will begin next year [2] .

Given the centrality of the German automotive industry, which directly employs 850,000 workers in the first EU economy, this was enough to trigger a debate with continental ramifications and to sketch the (still vague) contours of a political terrain in which positions - apart from the obvious opposition of the most extremist sectors of the bosses - they still seem fluid and wait-and-see.

Even in Italy, where the social and political situation is the most backward on the continent, the subject has found its place; it is spoken openly in the big official press and on television [3] . The debate takes place in an internal context that is more tense than ever, in which in mid-November [4] the block on layoffs wanted by the government in full pandemic expires and Confindustria intends to take advantage of it, invoking a free hand in particular on the resources coming from the Recovery Fund , on the collective agreements and therefore on wages.

The new president Bonomi attacks the government on a daily basis [5] with a line that does not intend to concede anything to work and has even dared to formulate the most reactionary of claims; the unprecedented one, which unfortunately did not arouse the indignation and the general outcry that it would have deserved, to untie wages from working hours .

Against this indecent proposal, the real reform, say labor lawyers and left-wing economists, would instead be to relaunch the issue of reducing working hours with equal wages, which represents the exact opposite [6] . Proposal that for now does not seem to interest the unions (undoubtedly considered too extremist given their level of collusion with the Confindustria bosses) as opposed, for example, to their French counterparts, such as the CGT which set the 32 hours and the minimum wage at 1800 euros which claims of the struggle platform for autumn [7] .

Madness, utopias, did you ask for thoughtlessness? Far from it, if we put ourselves in a correct historical perspective to evaluate the stakes. The eight-hour day was conquered after ten years and fierce workers' battles to reduce it from the sixteen hours in force in the second half of the nineteenth century; a demand that was at the center of the concerns and actions of the labor movement and of the first International of Marx and Engels. In Italy it was definitively approved in 1923, on the wave of the successes of the Russian revolution and internal workers' struggles: it was in fact initially the FIOM, in February 1919, to wrest a category agreement from the Confederation of industrialists for the reduction of working hours eight hours a day and forty-eight hours a week; agreement then extended to all categories precisely by the 1923 decree.[8] . Since then, however, working hours have not changed.

The eight hours thus turn a century, daughters of an era in which automation was in its infancy; the forty hours turn fifty, daughters of an era of great mass struggles. Instead today, an era in which since the 1970s the automation process, especially thanks to the digital revolution, has literally exploded and developed to unprecedented levels, we still uncritically inherit this past structure, anachronistic with respect to the development of the productive forces.

There is therefore nothing more realistic, modern and legitimate, than the goal of the six-hour day. Rather, it is Bonomi's claims that are configured as retrograde externalizations of those who intend to put the hands of history back.

It would therefore be necessary to understand whether the bourgeois front, made up of government-employers-large monopolies-parties, is aligned with the fundamentalism and completely reactionary strategies of the current leadership of Confindustria. Already some clues to the contrary exist, given the tough battle between Bonomi and some of the agri-food giants over the wage increases that the latter have "dared" to grant to employees due to a trade union agreement with Federalimentare [9] .

Is Confindustria therefore split? Do you hold too many different interests together at this stage? And how would traditional parties, all expressions of the same economic interests but bearers of different cultural sensitivities, position themselves in the face of a request for a reduction in working time?

The only way to be sure would be to dare with the right passwords. The confrontation within the industrialists could deepen, with important reverberations in the political arena, if a concrete and serious hypothesis is put in place - that is, that it walks on the legs of a general mobilization of the most conscious workers - of reducing working time. A proposal capable of marking a season of conflict and driving other strong demands, such as the minimum wage and at the same time, as a keystone, that of generalized wage increases .

But why insist on minimum wages and wage increases, when up to now we are only talking about reducing working hours at "equal wages"? In reality, this proposal would be incomplete if it did not consider - although reducing hours is fundamental for redistribution - the need to heal the current dualism, particularly aberrant in Italy, of the labor market. Today it is the product of a capitalism that generates masses of precarious and part-time workers who have been experiencing a real decrease in working time for some time, but in the worst way, that is, accompanied by zero protection and miserable wages.

Faced with this reality, if there is one thing in which the slogan now adopted by the progressive bourgeoisie is not entirely sufficient and partially deviates from past intentions (the content of the claim is in fact that of giving a dignified life to all workers, that is, to be able to enjoy quality free time), is that the reduction in working hours "must not and cannot happen at the same wage, but it is necessary to demand wage increases appropriate to the cost of living"; “We need a reduction in working hours, linked to the increase in wages” [10] .

So work less, with better wages, everyone work .

The awakening of a renewed class struggle that knows how to challenge the bourgeoisie on the political field should start from shaping this new terrain of struggle, politicizing the question of work as much as possible through the six-hour battle. Certainly not with simple and ineffective requests to employers or the government, nor as a school hypothesis discussed without practical effects in the media arena. It must be imposed by the class struggle; placed at the center of mobilizations that sharpen the contradiction between the various segments of capital so that their political-institutional representation creaks. Any repercussions would constitute a small political capital for the more conscious organized workers who have long been accustomed to defeats and disorganized defensive maneuvers.

[1] https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2020/0 ... -italia-un - global-summit-on-health / 5933119 /? utm_campaign = zonaeuro & utm_medium = twitter & utm_source = twitter

[2] https://ilmanifesto.it/i-contratti-rivo ... ellorario/ ; https://www.ansa.it/canale_lifestyle/no ... 45d4-bc54- 89c6e4fad4e9.html

[3] https://24plus.ilsole24ore.com/art/lavorare- meno-puo-essere-antidoto-crisi-proposte-germania-e-finlandia-ADgr2Cl ; https://www.raiplay.it/video/2020/09/La ... 3d167.html

[4] https://www.fanpage.it/ricoltura/blocco ... di-lavoro/

[5] https://sindacatounaltracosa.org/2020/0 ... eferendum/

[6] https://liberacittadinanza.it/articoli/ ... be-sociale ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4f6uVCw ... Apz3UUZI3o

[7] https://www.collettivo.it/copertine/lav ... re-257330/ ; https://www.cgt.fr/comm-de-presse/passe ... -aux-actes

[8] https://fortebraccionews.org/2020/02/20/20-feb febbraio- 19-gli- operai-conquistano-le-otto-ore-di-lavoro/ ; https://www.lordinenuovo.it/2020/04/27/ ... oro-tempo/

[9] https://proletaricomunisti.blogspot.com ... R_abu4U64K

[10] https://www.cumpanis.net/orario-di-lavo ... nW_8v98LEY

https://ottobre.info/2020/09/25/lavorar ... are-tutti/

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Re: Italy

Posted: Thu Oct 15, 2020 2:11 pm
by blindpig
Minimum wage: work and dignity

Image

by Alberto Ferretti

Continuing in the analysis of the contradictions that emerged following the health crisis on which the communists could and should leverage in order to try to affect on a mass level - and after having previously dealt with the issue of reducing working hours - let us now put the focus on the wage issue, from the particular point of view, little investigated in Italy, of minimum wages.

That the wage issue is the central material problem of Italian workers is beyond question: salaries are not adequate to the cost of living and need support, like the difficulties that have come to light in these months of semi-paralysis of the activity economic have increasingly highlighted. It is so true that even a tool originally designed to help those who are unemployed, such as the Citizenship Income (RdC), has in fact been configured as a support for wages, since it is also up to those who have a job, but the whose salary is not enough to live.

It thus happens, as noted by the Bank of Italy, that “the citizen's income reduces the number of absolute poor ( the incidence of poverty ) and, above all, reduces their condition of need ( the intensity of poverty )”; and moreover, as the economist Emiliano Brancaccio points out, it "induces some groups of workers to prefer it over a low wage [...] and precisely because it contributes to wages, well it supports them, that is, it slows down their fall [1] ".

This is intolerable for the Italian bosses, furious at the very idea that the Democratic Party can save layers of the proletariat from the blackmail of the post-COVID "recovery". Bonomi then thunders against "subsidistan" and thus we understand the violent campaign of denigration by the media owned by the industrialists and capitalists themselves against this device. Campaign based on lies and criminalization of the recipients, which associates the RdC in total bad faith with every nefariousness, while silent on corporate frauds to layoffs during the lockdown and on the 100 billion non-repayable subsidies granted to entrepreneurial activities [2] .

The Italian capitalists are in fact not opposed to subsidies in general: they are opposed to subsidies for the poor and for workers . And above all, they have said and made it clear that they are deeply averse to any substantial wage increase today and also in the future, as Federmeccanica's recent sensational breakdown of the metalworkers' contract negotiation table clearly demonstrates.

But how could the minimum wage be an effective claim and response to this state of affairs?

In a previous article we analyzed Italian society in terms of class composition and working sectors . As a result, there are 19 million employees, of whom 14 are permanent and 4 with temporary contracts, with precarious and less protected contracts (many of whom are forced to double work to live). This is an exponentially growing trend in recent years of wild deregulation of the labor market, consequently the precarious and part-time situation (not to mention internships unpaid ) is literally out of control. . Besides the wage earners, there is also a conspicuous mass of half a million para-subordinates in conditions similar to employees, although classified as self-employed.

This state of affairs can only have an impact on wages, indeed it is a consequence of the intent to lower them. And in fact, salaries in Italy "are growing at a snail's pace: not even enough to keep up with the rising cost of living" so much so that "half of the jobs receive an hourly wage equal to or less than € 11.25 (median value) ". The median value means “the salary (…) which is obtained by lining up the wages of all workers from the poorest to the richest and choosing the one exactly in the middle. In this way it is possible to 'purify' from the statistics the effects of those who earn a lot - which instead can distort the average (...) - and instead give a picture close to that of ordinary people. " [3]

We brutally simplify in order to fully grasp the orders of magnitude: € 11.25 per hour for 40 hours a week, € 1,800 gross, € 1,350 net. Here, therefore, is positioned the threshold of dignity , today, of the "common person", the full-time and permanent wage worker in Italy. To understand, 50% of employees take less than € 11 per hour, 50% more; that is, there are millions of people paid from € 3 to € 8 per hour (call center operators, tourism seasonal workers, laborers, waiters, delivery boys, kitchen assistants, cultural workers, social assistance and health care, especially among young people who they overlook the world of work, but not only); from 9 to 11 €, like the workers and employees of large-scale distribution; just over € 11 for employees [4]. These would be the famous "privileged" denounced by industrialists, politicians and journalists, to whom the Italian ruling class, small and very rich, would like to pay for the crisis.

The picture is that of wage depression and growing misery, functional to an employer that corresponds to the wage class of Italy with the lowest wages in Europe , at the bottom of the ranking among industrialized countries. If then in the early 2000s we spoke with concern of the "thousand euro generation", well today we find ourselves talking with dismay of the "five hundred euro generation, in constant fear of not having economic stability".

In this context, the need for a minimum wage seems increasingly pressing. What is it about? The minimum hourly wage is the legal threshold below which no employee can be paid. It is established by law and is subject to periodic revaluation to adjust it as much as possible to the cost of living.

As for Italy, the comparison with the rest of Europe is quite merciless [5] , being one of only six countries to have never established it. In France the minimum wage is € 1500 gross per month (€ 1220 net, 70% of the median wage of € 1790) and the CGT union is asking today for an extraordinary revaluation to € 1800. The same happens in Belgium where the minimum wage has stood at € 1500 gross (€ 10 per hour) for years and the FGBT union asks for an increase to € 14. In Spain, the latest increase, to € 950 per month out of fourteen months, dates back to last February.

In Germany it was introduced in 2015 at € 8.50 per hour, increased from January 2020 to € 9.35, to try to palliate the epidemic of poor workers from mini-jobs (the "jobs", which we know well in Italy ) triggered by the Hertz counter- reforms . Even in Great Britain it has recently been revalued to € 10, also applicable to para-subordinate work in order to protect those who work in a single-client regime, whose degree of dependence is similar to that of employees. Finally, the recent victory of the referendum , proposed by trade unions and the left in the canton of Geneva, caused a sensation in Switzerland, for a minimum wage of € 22 per hour, the highest in the world, in order to support categories such as cleaners, restaurants and hairdressers facing a very high cost of living.

Significant increases in minimum wages are on the agenda everywhere in Europe . And in Italy? Originally the choice of the Constituent Assembly was not to attribute to the law the task of establishing a minimum wage in order not to hinder the action of the trade unions which, if properly registered as per article 39 of the Constitution, establish collective agreements valid for all. those belonging to the categories to which the contract refers ( erga omnes ). However, the provisions contained in this article have never been fully implemented (without going into the debate, we put some reasons in a note [6] ).

What interests us here is that concretely today in Italy, when all goes well, the contractual minimums established by collective agreements (often very low) apply, but such collective agreements cannot apply erga omnes , thus leaving many workers uncovered by the point. view of the minimum safeguards. However, the confederal unions are wary if not opposed to the establishment of the minimum wage in the legal hours. The management of CGIL CISL and UIL affirm - unique in Europe, but they must know better than the others given the great results they have achieved in the defense of workers - that minimum wage would not be able to guarantee the overall remuneration and the protections that the collective agreement guarantees; even, it would have "probable dangerous side effects" because "it could favor an escape from the application of the National Collective Labor Agreement, thus revealing itself as a tool to lower wages and protections". Finally, it is seen as an interference in free bargaining between the social partners.

Inexplicably, CGIL, CISL and Uil peremptorily oppose collective bargaining and the minimum wage. For the grassroots unions, in favor of this measure, the triad does not intend to give up a policy of generalized wage moderation in favor of the interests of the company [7] and is afraid of losing bargaining power. But if already the case of Belgium, where the minimum wage is not fixed by law but negotiated by the trade unions in the context of collective bargaining, makes this position fragile, it is not clear why a minimum fixed by law cannot rather constitute a complementary degree - thanks to the determination of a "high" minimum threshold that comes as close as possible to the current median value - to lift those collective agreements [8]with low minimums, as well as protecting by law those to whom the collective agreement does not apply. In short, it would be one more tool to use against capital. Without detracting from the fundamental battle of extending collective bargaining, which however does not guarantee much on the levels of remuneration in the concrete and immediate emergency of low wages underway in Italy .

There is therefore no reason why its introduction should not be on the agenda in Italy . Even two bills lie stranded in Parliament, presented by the PD and the 5 Stars [9] , which can certainly be improved, but no force seems to want to press the governments in this sense, nor the confederal unions as we have seen, nor the pseudo-left decorative a trailer of the presentable right, the PD. In practice there is no will, yet:

The introduction and / or increase of wages thanks to the minimum wage would be [...] a first and firm response to the attempt of capital to restructure itself to the detriment of the workers, because it would frustrate the attempts of exploitation through low-cost contracts, labor brokerage, piecework contracts. Of course, it is necessary that the minimum wage is not just a stroke of ink on paper, but between having it and fighting for it to be respected and not having it there is a big difference. [...] "It would be enough to start from a minimum threshold set at 10 euros per hour to which to add contributions, holidays, thirteenth monthly payments and sicknesses [10]

Claiming wages is not just a trade union issue, it is an eminently political option. Together with the reduction of working hours, we are not dealing here simply with simple measures of immediate and yet necessary economic relief for the working class strangled by capitalism. There are those who propose them to reform capitalism and suppress misery, such as the democratic socialists and the more consequent bourgeois left; there are those who invoke them to limit the damage of a savage capitalism, such as the most paternalistic and shrewd liberals whose purpose is to maintain current society at all costs by eliminating distortions that can lead to insurgency; finally there are the communists for whomthe struggle for the introduction of these measures would constitute the stages of a process of accumulation of forces, of recovery of trust, of distribution of power towards the subordinate classes.

[1] Bank of Italy Report ; Brancaccio: how many hypocrisies against citizenship income

[2] Business subsidies

[3] How much do Italians earn; fbclid = IwAR36buQW_GMHCJG2uDgz96mnyhr3jd2NYBslqmZV6hZfyT38KaJLrwHydH0 ; https://www.investireoggi.it/ economy/stipendio-misero-da-4-euro-allora-il-dramma-del-lavoro-per-migliaia-di-italiani/

[4] http://www.traderlink.it/notizie/primo- ... NGA3MT9TCB

[5] Overview of the European situation: Germany ; Median salary in France ; Belgium ; Spain ; Geneva; Great Britain

[6] https://www.altalex.com/guide/salario-minimo ; http://www.appuntigiurisprudenza.it/dir ... parte.html ; https://www.dirittiadirotto.com/inactua ... parte-dell Articolo-39-cost/#:~:text=Le%20ragioni%20storiche%20che%20hanno,collettive%20con%20eefficiency%20erga%20omnes.

“The most serious problem is that of the subjective effectiveness of the CCNL . Lacking the implementation of art. 39 of the Constitution, the principles are those of the private law of contracts. Even once fully implemented, the rules of the TU Representation will not be of general application, resulting in a double regime of subjective effectiveness of the collective agreement, which will introduce further complications in an already very tiring system. " "The collective agreement , due to the failure to implement art. 39 part two of the Constitution, was reconstructed by the jurisprudence in private terms; Riccardo della Punta, "Labor Law".

[7] USB: minimum wage, prisoners of CGIL, CISL and UIL ; http://www.filt.veneto.cgil.it/content/ ... -sindacati

[8] Thus in France: “If the minimum tables of collective agreements must be applied respecting the minimum wage. With each increase in the minimum wage, it is necessary to check whether the conventional minimums of the lowest classification levels in the collective agreement have not fallen below this amount. If this is the case, it is the minimum wage amount that prevails as long as an amendment to the collective agreement has not revalued the minimums " https://www.editions-tissot.fr/actualit ... onvention- collective-comment-bien-appliquer-le-salaire-minimum

[9] https://ilmanifesto.it/salario-minimo-o ... attazione/

[10] Marta Fana, Simone Fana: Enough starvation wages, the reasons for a minimum wage

https://ottobre.info/2020/10/15/salario ... e-dignita/

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Re: Italy

Posted: Fri Nov 06, 2020 2:39 pm
by blindpig
05/11/2020ALBERTO FERRETTI
The patrimonial, the fiscal side of the class struggle

Image

by Alberto Ferretti

There is a piece of class struggle that has always been underestimated if not forgotten in Italy, in whose name the time would have come instead of engaging in a decisive political battle: the fiscal one, with particular regard, given the circumstances, to the urgent a property tax.

This pandemic has in fact highlighted the cracks due to chronic underfunding of health care that have dramatically amplified its impact on the working and working classes. Underfunding and cuts that have disrupted the response capacity of the national health system on the one hand, and on the other directed resources towards the private sector, therefore tailored to those who can afford them and to the great detriment of those workers forced to use them at a high price. Furthermore, coverage is now needed in order to guarantee adequate income, and not mere alms, to employees who are unable to work due to the closure of many activities due to force majeure.

To cope with the health and social crisis, therefore, money is needed - many cursed and immediately. Where to get them? Why not from those who have not seen their assets affected, if not even increased, during these months? It would be time, in layman's terms, to tax the rich. In this sense, fighting for a patrimonial property on great wealth is more necessary than ever.

And we don't want the wealthy, the industrialists and the owners of Italy, whose screams we already hear against the "taxing and communist state", but for at least thirty years we have been living in a regime of tax privilege for the rich, where the taxes on capital, business income and assets fall, while the state's revenues are based on wages; where the capitals favored by convenience taxation take the path of the financial markets to convert themselves into credits to the States themselves, which thus bind hand and foot to the market trend and to the interests of subjects - large banks, hedge funds and investment companies - who control it.

Reversing the course is a vital necessity. At the systemic level, only the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of socialist planning would guarantee the repression / management of this process. At the cyclical level, however, the battle is about the resources immediately available, and the capitalists are well aware of the pitfalls that can be hidden in a tense context such as today. So much so that they have already unleashed second-hand journalists, politicians and court economists in order to pollute the debate with the indecent proposal of a "solidarity contribution" to be asked of employees, portrayed as privileged, earners of fixed salaries that they do not deserve (in particular the public, "slackers" by definition).

As if employees had not already and always provided that ordinary and unavoidable contribution, having everything taxed at source. As if Italian wages were not - as we had the opportunity to analyze earlier in our article on the need to introduce a legal minimum wage - by far the lowest among those of industrialized countries.

In short, together with the wage question and that of the organization of working times , the tax question is also configured as a primary battlefield and object of open dispute in capitalism. Wasn't the abolition of the capital and the introduction of a flat tax on capital income the first step taken by the Macron government after its 2017 installation in France? With the logical result of exploding the distribution of dividends and the wealth of 0.1% of the richest French, while at the same time the poor in the country increased by millions [1] . And in Italy it was perhaps not the leader of the conservative camp, Salvini, who made the flat taxthe electoral workhorse a year ago? As we can see, the factions of the bourgeoisie, superficially at odds, instead have clear ideas on what to do.

And U.S?

What then would these riches be taxed ? The rhetorical weapon used by detractors to scare the masses and try to alienate public opinion from the patrimonial is to paint it as a kind of indiscriminate tax on every home, every current account and on pensions, without thresholds. Nothing could be more false, this is a discourse indeed that serves to hide the central point of the question: namely that patrimonial wealth is given by real assets - real estate, companies, valuables, land - and financial assets- investments in government bonds, shares, foreign bonds, private bonds, funds, policies, deposits-; that this wealth is very high, but it is very unevenly distributed, extremely polarized.

From a survey conducted at the end of 2017 [2] , it appears that the total net wealth of Italian families is equal to 9,743 billion euros: made up of 5,246 billion from real assets and 4,374 billion from financial ones. The richest 30% of households hold 75% of the overall net assets recorded, with an average net wealth of € 510,000, while the share of net wealth of the poorest 30% is 1%, on average approximately 6,500 EUR. Narrowing the scope further, we find that over 40% of this stake is held by the richest 5%, who have an average net worth of € 1.3 million.

If it is true that almost seven out of ten families own a residence, it is equally true that not all houses are the same: the value of the properties owned varies enormously, from an average of about 70,000 euros in the poorest segments, up to the average of 800,000 euros for the richest tenth of the population; only a quarter of families also own other properties. The distribution of financial assets reflects the same polarization dynamic: 30% of the wealthiest households own almost 80% of total financial wealth, of which more than half attributable to households belonging to the richest 5%, which hold on average about 220,000 euro in financial assets, when 30% of households with the lowest net worth hold only 4% (an average of around 4,000 euro per family).

The class differences can also be seen in how the financial portfolio is composed: the poorest families hold simple deposits; in the intermediate classes the share of government bonds, private bonds and investments managed by mutual funds grows; but it is above all the families belonging to the wealthiest 20% who hold the bulk, that is the direct possession of the shares, and entrust the management of their financial activities to professional operators. Those who operate in the aforementioned financial markets.

We would then have to take into account the patrimonial wealth of the companies, constituted, in addition to the factories and machinery, by shares and active accounts. Companies that have long taken advantage of ever lower tax thresholds and ever more consistent non-repayable subsidies, on which to impose an extraordinary and structural increase in taxation on dividends and capital gains seems, these days, really the minimum wage.

The data summarized in this brief overview illustrates a reality that is clearly in contrast with the official terrorist propaganda on the "home", "current account" and "pensions". The real issue is that, by brutally simplifying and aggregating the data, the richest 10% of Italians own 55% of total wealth ; the richest 5% even concentrate the vast majority of financial assets, to which 70% of the population has absolutely no access now or ever. Even if we want to ignore real estate, the value of financial assets amounts to around 4300 billion euros. Even the most ridiculous of patrimonies, like the one proposed in Spain [3], would be able to provide the tens of billions needed today to cover social expenses. Yet taxing these riches, restoring the logic of a progressive mechanism, is taboo.

Why never? Because the speech is dominated by the 10% who do not intend to give up anything. A 10% that we have already met during our previous survey on the Italian social composition . It's about that

audience of 6 million independents including the different strata of the proprietary classes, from large and medium-sized businesses, to small employers, traders, professionals, real self-employed. As can be seen, among them the professionals and self-employed workers (traders in the first place) together, by 2019, amount to about 3.3 million people, while the real capitalists, together with professionals and traders who exploit labor salaried, they are 1.4 million.

The owning class as a whole therefore, large and small capitalists (and their officials and administrators) always competing with each other, but acting en bloc at the political level against the enormous mass of dependent labor. Their struggle spills over to this now passive, unrepresented, disrupted working class at the rear. The class from which to expect then that "contribution of solidarity" that they intend to put on the workers to make them pay for the crisis.

Holding this flag, on the basis of these considerations, all the populist (and therefore interclassist) propaganda flies in the air, centered on the rhetoric of compact blocs: that of "bottom" towards "up", of "us" against "them", of " people ”against“ a handful of stateless rich people ”, of nations against nations or of“ we are all in the same boat ”. The social pyramid exists, the relationships are multiform and complex within the capitalist class itself which is not reduced to its top figures, as the lowest common denominator of possession of wealth and means of production is in force even in the hierarchy of wealth, centrality and power of its various segments.

It is therefore not surprising that when the real terms of the question are exposed the vast majority of Italians - between 60 and 70% according to a recent survey - are absolutely in agreement with the patrimonial property on great wealth [4] . It is also no wonder that such arguments and polls are largely hidden from the media and politics.

Capitalism is so shaken that even financial institutions, once the spokesman for proprietary orthodoxy, such as the IMF, are surprisingly open to such measures [5] , if they can serve to avert the social and economic "catastrophe" that everyone fears. It sounds like a contradiction, and indeed it is. And as we have already had the opportunity to say, these are the contradictions on which we must graft our unifying slogans. In the awareness that giving political battle for a patrimonial property, for fiscal progressiveness, is therefore the only realistic option in terms of immediate finding of resources necessary for the defense of employees, precarious and unemployed workers, for income for all, in order to recompose the false contrast between health and work. Because the solution is not to be forced to choose, but to deprive one part of society of its privileges to allow the other, the majority, not to have to sacrifice, not to fall into blackmail, to have both: health and income. Paid by the rich.

[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/articl ... stribution -de-dividendes-ont-explose-en-france_6055276_823448.html? utm_medium = Social & utm_source = Twitter # Echobox = 1602158074)

[2] https://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazio ... 180312.pdf ; https://www.bancaditalia.it/publication ... beG3MBVhIn

[3] https://alessandrograziani.blog.ilsole2 ... lla-spagna /

[4] https://altrigianato.it/viva-la-patrimo ... g1LfcPLFR8

[5] https://www.businessinsider.com/imf-mak ... 17-10?IR=T

https://ottobre.info/2020/11/05/la-patr ... di-classe/

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Re: Italy

Posted: Thu Nov 12, 2020 2:53 pm
by blindpig
12/11/2020
Trump and Biden. Better the less worse, but better?

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by Giuseppe Sini

A little over a week ago, Bolivians and Chileans gave proof of real democracy, the former reaffirming the popular will overturned by the coup of a year ago - jointly implemented by the most reactionary political forces and the army, backed by the US and its puppets of the OAS -, the latter voting massively to replace the Constitution legacy of the Pinochet era. The Western media obviously distinguished themselves for a mixture of superficiality - especially with regard to Bolivia, denying the coup d'état and defaming Morales in good company with a certain left - and silences alternating with ill-concealed melancholy, aroused by the probability that the Chilean constitution, ' Economist"Among the most pro-private sector in the world," could end up in the dustbin of history. After all, the US "backyard" and third world countries in general are constantly pointed to as a negative comparison to the "largest" or, depending on the degree of flattery, "ancient" democracy in the world; even and indeed, above all, when the latter performs in a show whose tones and methods recall the resentful aftermath of a condominium dispute. With all due respect to commentators and politicians who for decades have praised the fair play of US election campaigns, as well as the certainty and speed of results guaranteed by their voting system.

Silences regarding Chile and Bolivia which contrast - while superficiality and flattery remain - with the wide spread of news, analyzes, opinions on the occasion of the US presidential elections, to which are added the renewal of the Chamber and part of the Senate, the election of governors and some referendums. It is now certain that the colorless Biden will be sworn in as forty-sixth President of the United States, perhaps not with the blue wave prophesied by the polls, but still cashing in a large advantage and ranking as the most voted candidate ever; this does not mean that the four years of the bankrupt palazzinaro will be archived as a bizarre and divisive parenthesis of a harmonious and exemplary democratic society, all the more so considering the high number of votes it has obtained anyway. We do not want to refer only to the legal consequences announced by Trump and his cronies, supported by some bigwigs of the Republican apparatus such as Mitch McConnell, with the outline of potential clashes caused by the armed gangs formed by the most agitated supporters, but to the fact that the outgoing President is an expression of trends in US society that are certainly not unprecedented,

Just as the evangelical fanatics, who had so much importance in the two elections of Bush the son, did not come out of nowhere in 2000, the white supremacists often armed to the teeth, convinced that they had to defend their property, no matter whether it is a poor veranda or of an entrepreneurial micro-activity, from an elusive coalition made up of cosmopolitan liberals , African Americans, immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQ movements, federal bureaucrats, etc. , anxious to establish socialism, are certainly not a novelty in the social landscape of the United States. The same goes for supporters, mainly active on the web, of the most varied conspiracy theories, from the banal "deep state" - as if US capitalism and imperialism did not act perfectly in the light of day, even claiming their crimes or at most wrapping them with an increasingly creaky philanthropic or humanitarian rhetoric - to the more baroque Qanon phenomenon.

Paranoia is in fact a lasting and widely studied character in US history, well before Trump and McCarthy, at most amplified by social networks that hypocritically claim to fight it with occasional censorship. Hypocritically, taking into account how the same platforms have given ample space to the no less grotesque conspiratorial delusions of the Democrats; the Russiagate, but more generally the laughable idea that the United States, that is the entity that more than any other, at least since the Second World War, has interfered in every way in the political, social and economic life of those it has identified from time to time as allies (or customers or vassals) or enemies, is the victim of interference by the latter. A lasting character was said about paranoia, but also omnipresent, or rather bipartisan , and which found a particularly repugnant expression in the synophobia that prevailed during the four years of Trump's presidency, to which the Democrats and the media also contributed, from the most explicitly reactionaries like BreitbartNews up to Newsweek [1] .

Paranoia also brought another common denominator to the two electoral bandwagon contending for the US political scene, namely the idea that there would be an essence, a soul if you will, of the United States to recover ( make america great again or this is the time to heal america) or defend against both internal threats - the bogies already mentioned for the Republicans and for Trump and his base, the latter two and the polarization they would be a vehicle for, for the Democrats - or external, whether it is Russia, China , Iran or any other specter for both sides. Obviously there is no soul to recover, no healthy body attacked by external or internal pathogens in order to corrupt its essence, but only the periodic explosion of the contradictions of a structurally classist, racist, xenophobic, macho, militarist, imperialist society, perpetually and unanimously pleased with its vaunted exceptionality; the Trump presidency has exposed some of these attributes in a singularly coarse way, to his successor the task of attenuating them at least superficially,

With that comes the reactions to the outcome of the elections. On the one hand, it is foolish to blame, or worse to mock, the relief and even joy manifested in communities and parts of US society that are particularly afflicted by some of the aforementioned plagues, undeniably exacerbated during the Trump presidency, favored and conducive to a cultural climate. inclined to belittle and despise the sacrosanct claims of such subjectivities. On the other hand, the pathetic enthusiasm of some sectors of the left - think of the inconsistent radical icon Naomi Klein - the mythomania of certain Italian politicians, nourished by decades of Veltronian stupidity, whose posture makes one think of the postmen at a partyconvinced of being the soul, as well as the pragmatism unsheathed by subjects usually committed to reprimanding any appeal to the least worst or the lesser evil, they deserve to be mocked, without caring too much about their whining that in this way spoils the party. As for the media, to limit ourselves to Italy and leaving aside those that are declared to be bosses, consider the first pages dedicated by the Manifesto to Biden's victory: "Escape to victory" and "American beauty" headlines the communist newspaper in a cinephile transport access.

Equal contempt deserves not so much the more reactionary right - which even in Italy, despite clumsy attempts at anti-imperialist repainting and the irritating claim to give lessons to the left on how it should win back the people, has always been an instrument of Atlanticism - which, coherently, he mourns the exit of a President who seems to share or embody his obsessions: from immigration considered as an invasion to the attack on rights such as abortion, heavily limited in some republican states, to the ravings about the "genocide of whites " [2]. If anything, it is execrable that part of the left and communists basking in the illusion of an isolationist Trump, if not downright disrupting the US imperialist course, on the basis of a misleading and convergent reading with the image, passed off by the monopoly media, of an anomalous presidency; image based exclusively on outward behavior or fortuitous statements by the tenant of the White House, but which does not take into account anything but marginal facts.

The false isolationist
First of all, the influence of an important neocon institution , the Heritage Foundation , on the Trump administration, which explicitly boasted in 2018 that it had followed its recommendations like Reagan did, finding validation in the applause of the same think tank . The latter, among his indications followed by the President, included a budgetthat "it requires an increase of $ 54 billion in military spending in order to increase the capacity and readiness of the US military"; military spending which in 2019 - although down compared to the peak reached in 2010, followed by seven years of decline - recorded an increase of 5.3% compared to the previous year, reaching 732 billion dollars, or about 38% of the global ones.

Coming to relations with Russia, in spite of the ravings about a Putin puppet President, the Trump administration expelled sixty Russian diplomats and closed the Consulate in Seattle, as well as appointed Richard Grenell, a well-known hawk as ambassador to a key country like Germany. russophobe; moreover, and even more significantly, it approved the supply of lethal weapons to Ukraine, the culmination of an aggression against Moscow even recognized by the Washington Post , a voice certainly not prone to the Trump presidency [3] . Trump who, returning to the Latin America mentioned at the beginning, can exhibit a resumeunequivocal imperialist: from support for the Venezuelan opposition's twenty-year coup strategy - with the appointment of an authentic criminal like Elliot Abrams as special representative for Iran and Venezuela and the economic strangulation of the country - to the policies of opening Brazil to US commercial interests Bolsonaro to the detriment of MERCOSUR, by sending troops to Colombia under the pretext of the fight against drug trafficking, Pompeo's attempts to sabotage relations between China and resource-rich countries such as Suriname and Guyana and the aforementioned coup in Bolivia [4] .

As for the Middle East, in addition to supporting the most indecent Israeli claims - the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital and sovereignty over the Golan Heights, just to cite some striking examples - there is the extrajudicial murder of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, in the context of a policy against Iran defined as "maximum pressure", but which has been less euphemistically identified as "besiege and starve". In addition to this, Trump vetoed a Congressional resolution aimed at halting the aggression on Yemen, implemented through military assistance to Saudi customers, and deployed in the Middle East region, as of May 2019, an additional 14,000 troops; finally, Trump certainly did not escape the custom of his predecessors to bomb the entire region: 7,423 bombs and missiles in 2019 in Afghanistan, while between Syria and Iraq in 2017 there were almost 40,000 [5] .

The imperialist used safe
This is the concise and certainly incomplete final balance of Trump's four years in the White House, it is therefore time to turn our gaze to what is announced with his successor; if in fact Obama, in his first term, was a relatively new character, Biden has a career as an official of imperialism for decades. As early as 1998, the President-elect had been calling for an invasion of Iraq, helping to delegitimize the disarmament work of UN inspectors and then, in October 2002 - as president of the Senate Foreign Affairs Commission - again spread the lie of weapons of mass destruction; particularly odious, therefore, his attempt to justify the vote in favor of the aggression against Iraq as the result of a deception hatched by the Bush administration: "it was a mistake [...] I learned a lot, like everyone else, about what we were told ”. Regarding Israel, Biden has always expressed not only unconditional support, but also a lucid awareness of its role as the bastion of US imperialism in the Middle East: "the best three billion dollar investment" he stated in a speech steeped in anti-Arab rhetoric from the 1986, thus continuing, "if there were no Israel, the United States would have to invent it to protect our interests in the region"; after all, the Obama / Biden administration is responsible for a deal, reached in 2016, that guarantees the Zionist entity $ 38 billion in military aid but also a lucid awareness of its role as a bastion of US imperialism in the Middle East: "the best three billion dollar investment" he stated in a speech steeped in anti-Arab rhetoric in 1986, thus continuing, "there was no Israel, the States United should invent it to protect our interests in the region ”; after all, the Obama / Biden administration is responsible for a deal, reached in 2016, that guarantees the Zionist entity $ 38 billion in military aid but also a lucid awareness of its role as a bastion of US imperialism in the Middle East: "the best three billion dollar investment" he stated in a speech steeped in anti-Arab rhetoric in 1986, thus continuing, "there was no Israel, the States United should invent it to protect our interests in the region ”; after all, the Obama / Biden administration is responsible for a deal, reached in 2016, that guarantees the Zionist entity $ 38 billion in military aid[6] .

On Latin America, the plan published on the Biden / Harris presidential campaign website - in addition to generic evocations of the friendship between the United States and Central America, and announcements of overturning the Trump administration's "draconian immigration policies", glossing over the fact that some were anticipated by that Obama - lists economic aid in exchange for "significant, concrete and verifiable reforms" whose content is not difficult to imagine given that, just above, reference is made to the "mobilization of private investments". Regarding Venezuela, and the sanctions that are devastating its economy, this is how a collaborator of Biden's electoral campaign, Leopoldo Martinez, says: "we do not aim to dismantle the policy of sanctions, but to apply them intelligently […] with specific objectives […] mainly free, fair and credible elections ”; it seems almost a response to the complaints about Trump and Rubio's "incompetent imperialism doctrine" made by a former Obama adviser on the occasion of the election of Luis Arce in Bolivia[7] .

With respect to Iran, Biden proposes "an intelligent way to be tough" and assures "we will continue to use targeted sanctions", dusting off the rhetoric that sweetens what is a real tool of imperialist war; as for Syria, with a not indifferent bronze face, a Biden adviser said "there can be no [...] support for the reconstruction of Syria if political reforms do not take place", as if the Obama administration, backing the " rebels ”, had not contributed to the destruction of the country. Regarding Russia, in 2018 the president-elect dwelt on an article with paranoid and bellicose tones in which - in addition to the usual spiel about Moscow's alleged attempts to "subvert democracy in Western Europe and the United States" - he calls for a more aggressive both militarily and economically.

Even China Biden did not spare the baseless accusations of interference in the elections, moreover one of the candidates for the future administration's secretary of defense, Michele Flournoy - former consultant in the arms industry - has argued that the military capacity of the US in the region should be such as to "credibly threaten to sink Chinese military ships, submarines and civilian boats in the South China Sea in 72 hours". Ultimately, this is entirely in line with the policy of the Obama presidency, advocate of a "strategy aimed at strengthening defense ties with the countries of the region, expanding the US naval presence"; as for trade policy, the protectionism of the Trump era,[8] .

In the light of both Biden's past action and what lies ahead for his presidency, both in his statements and in those of his collaborators, is it legitimate to indulge in a circumspect optimism and celebrate the return of the less worst? No, at most one can and must say, taking up the effective words of an Italian economist, that the Democrats "are not better than the latter [the Republicans], that is, they are only imperceptibly better, not that the latter are to be preferred", especially if this preference serves "not to criticize US power politics, but only to disguise one's conservative sympathies" [9]. A minimally decent left and Communists - without underestimating the specificity and gravity of the Trump presidency's impact on large swathes of the oppressed, both in the United States and globally - should have no reason to be deluded about the next administration.

1) https://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status ... 5694042112 ; https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/11/03/10 ... he-worlds/ ; https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the ... -politics/ ; https://gordondfraser.files.wordpress.c ... ocracy.pdf ; https://www.cisa.gov/news/2020/11/04/st ... day-voting ; https://www.newsweek.com/2020/11/13/exc ... 41624.html .

2) https://twitter.com/NaomiAKlein/status/ ... 1075418112 ; https://twitter.com/matteorenzi/status/ ... 1530996736 ; https://ibb.co/Cv8qvfb ; https://ibb.co/G0XqPfX ; Davide Conti, The black soul of the Republic. History of the MSI , Laterza, 2013, pp. VI, VIII, 51-56, 60-61, 116, 131, 140, 171-172, 181; https://www.ilpost.it/2019/06/02/leggi- ... ati-uniti/ ; https://voxnews.info/2018/08/24/trump-c ... sudafrica/ .

3) https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/sta ... 0005450752 ; https://www.heritage.org/impact/trump-a ... mendations ; https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/fil ... ex_0_0.pdf ; https://edition.cnn.com/2018/03/26/poli ... index.html ; https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2 ... ith-russia ; https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/us ... ne-n832311 ;https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/na ... 018/03/29/ 3e056a28-337b-11e8-8abc-22a366b72f2d_story.html .

4) https://www.state.gov/venezuela-related-sanctions/ ; https://lvsl.fr/bolsonaro-le-grand-tour ... du-bresil/ ; https://www.telesurtv.net/news/colombia ... -0014.html ; http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/latestne ... me,_Guyana .

5) https://www.irishexaminer.com/world/arid-30817874.html ; https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/03/ ... n-heights/ ; https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2020/ ... e-on-iran/ ; https://apnews.com/article/1b17cee217b3 ... 42139fb606 ; https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2 ... middle-ea/ ; https://www.afcent.af.mil/Portals/82/Ai ... 021511-537 .

6) http://emperors-clothes.com/analysis/ri ... ke-sen.htm ; https://twitter.com/DabSquad_Slank/stat ... 5113726976 ; https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna18381961 ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYLNCcL ... =emb_title ; https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/09/13/ne ... -aid-deal/ .

7) https://joebiden.com/centralamerica/ ; https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama ... mmigrants/ ; https://observer.com/2017/01/barack-oba ... uslim-ban/ ; https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-ele ... SKBN2762RG ; https://twitter.com/brhodes/status/1318180765000060928 .

8) https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/13/opin ... index.html ; https://syrianobserver.com/EN/news/6162 ... eform.html ; https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/worl ... trump.html ; https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles ... nd-kremlin ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef7XiJ4uNCo ; https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles ... t-war-asia; Robert S. Ross, The Problem With the Pivot: Obama's New Asia Policy is Unnecessary and Counterproductive, in Foreign Affairs, Vol. 19, N. 6, November / December 2012, p. 72; https://www.fdiintelligence.com/article/78835 ; https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/si ... -FINAL.pdf ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_NQ9kn ... e=emb_logo .

9) https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_ ... 1605273407

https://ottobre.info/2020/11/12/trump-e ... ma-meglio/

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Re: Italy

Posted: Fri Jan 08, 2021 2:29 pm
by blindpig
The first years of the economic policy of fascism

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We publish below an excerpt from Salvatore La Francesca's text ' The economic policy of fascism ', published for Laterza in 1972. The text deals in a synthetic way, but with a wealth of statistical indications, the economic policy adopted by fascism since the dawn of Twenty years after its ruinous fall. The extract shown focuses in particular on the phase preceding the great crisis of '29, when fascist Italy was hit hard by the crisis of global capitalism.

The autarchic and collectivist rhetoric of which fascism cloaks itself and is cloaked by liberal commentators is denied by La Francesca, who on the contrary claims that fascism came to power and then governed with the intent of carrying out purely liberal economic policies, entering the dynamics of international capital circulation with the support of Italian and foreign financial groups.


The crisis of the first post-war period has been thoroughly analyzed by recent historiography. As a premise to this survey, it will be useful to underline the aspects schematically attributable to two essential themes: the crisis of authenticity of the democratic-parliamentary system, the inadequacy of structures to suddenly face the problems of a mass economy.

[...]

On the economic level, it should be noted that peace was lost also because the war had been won with very intense forcing on the development of large Italian industry '. This led to the creation, especially in the sector of capital goods, a production capacity much higher than the domestic demand, which in a traditional liberal regime was not susceptible to the toning and rapid increase that can now be impressed in a more developed society, technically more gifted and in possession of a new baggage of economic knowledge. This imbalance between productive potential and the internal market was moreover corresponding to the wide gap between the needs of a democracy that would have had to extend the area of ​​consensus to survive, and the scarce maturity of the political forces.

[...]

The culpae in faiendo , in the collapse of a democracy, is then accompanied by a no less decisive role culpae in omittendo. Among the great missed opportunities, the most evident was the refusal by Parliament and political forces to accept that the Giolitti government, in October 1921, could normally legislate by decree-law. But other lost opportunities can be identified in less obvious omissions, for example in not having led to the discussion and approval of the bill that provided for the payment of war over-profits by companies through the transfer to the State of shares equity. It would have been the latter, perhaps, the most timely move to assign to the public hand those functions of coordination and guidance of large industry that only after the 1929 crisis had to be faced under the pressure of things. It wouldn't be bad for the industry that, given the market and liquidity situation, he would have found it less difficult to pay the tax in the form of shareholdings, and above all it would have been an opportunity to mitigate a threat that in reality he was unable to trigger due to the operational inefficiency of the state levers . The positive effects of the provision calling the state over profits were negligible; the negative consequences from a psychological point of view were instead well operative, and decisive in the formation of tensions towards a State which, in order to achieve a balance between such different positions, ended up being disliked by everyone and expressing a policy only nominally center-left. and above all it would have been an opportunity to mitigate a threat that in reality was unable to trigger due to the operational inefficiency of the state levers. The positive effects of the provision calling the state over profits were negligible; the negative consequences from a psychological point of view were instead well operative, and decisive in the formation of tensions towards a State which, in order to achieve a balance between such different positions, ended up being disliked by everyone and expressing a policy only nominally center-left. and above all it would have been an opportunity to mitigate a threat that in reality was unable to trigger due to the operational inefficiency of the state levers. The positive effects of the provision calling the state over profits were negligible; the negative consequences from a psychological point of view were instead well operative, and decisive in the formation of tensions towards a State which, in order to achieve a balance between such different positions, ended up being disliked by everyone and expressing a policy only nominally center-left.

[...]

To get out of the state of economic crisis, on the basis of a newfound legal certainty, the incisiveness of the policy of De 'Stefani [Minister of Finance of Mussolini starting from 1922 ed] was decisive to the extent that it was consistent. At first it seemed to have happened what was to turn out to be the fundamental moral error of the liberal ruling class . [...] De 'Stefani's policy was set precisely as a policy clearly and coherently aimed at a productive development in function of the resumption of a traditional accumulation mechanism , and in this capable of solving, in the moment of the economic recovery, the problems of an economy to which no one, in the phase of the crisis, he had managed to impress a coherent productivist direction; pol Itica tax efficiency, financial and productionwhich, as a bearer of economic interests, represented the rational component of many irrational political solutions and assumed the character of covering up the violence that was pressing on the body of Italian society. The clearly positive results in the economic situation up to 1925 strengthened fascism: the regime showed that it was able to proceed, when the major economic groups required it, to rescue that a system capable only of ensuring a weak protection of established interests had manifested itself unable to carry out, leaving ultimately more significant disasters for the whole community than the burdens of a reasonable bailout policy.

Industrial production in 1922 was considerably higher than that of previous years: in the face of continuing difficulties in the shipbuilding, mechanical and chemical industries, the steel industry, in the process of settling, nevertheless recorded better results than those of previous years. ; the textile and food industries resumed intense productive activity. The most important agricultural productions recorded significant improvements [...]

The trade balance deficit of 13.8 billion lire in 1920 reached 8.5 billion in 1921 and 6.6 billion in 1922, as a result of the concomitant effects of more favorable prices for imports, the reduced surplus on exports. in the food sector and the simultaneous recovery of exports. Consequently, the exchange rate improved at the end of 1922, legitimizing the interpretation that this circumstance was also a sign of solidarity of international finance towards the fascist regime. The good resilience and the overall rise in share prices, which began at the beginning of '22, was linked to the strong inflationary pressure already underway. In any case, the price of public securities also rose in correspondence with the slight decrease in the deficit: 15,755 million in the financial year 1921-22, compared to 17,409 million in the financial year 1920-21. The situation of the internal public debt remained heavy: compared to 86,482 million in 1921-1922 in the following year it reached 92,856 million. In 1922 the volume of banking and state circulation decreased to 20,741.9 million compared to 21,931.3 million in 1921 and 22,420.3 million in 1920. However, the pressure of unemployment could not be mitigated: the 607,000 units in January '22, the 304 thousand units of July '22, they recorded an increase compared to previous years and continued to represent a threatening picture for the prospects for recovery. But, ultimately, the Italian economic structures, in the presence of a general crisis in the country and a ministerial crisis already underway since February 1922, showed a remarkable capacity for resistance.

[...]

The liberal economic policy of the first Mussolini ministry , operating within the framework of the rules of the game, which were no longer liberal because they were occultly founded on the silence imposed on the workers' unions with the pact of Palazzo Chigi of 20 December 1923 (among other things interpreted more and more restrictively in favor of the fascist side), initially settled the fortunes of fascism with certain pre-eminent interests of the economic right, but also offered that basis of certainty and stability that the middle and petty bourgeoisie believed they needed. […] Free from redistributive objectives and social conditioning, and instead aimed exclusively at full productivity maximization, Minister De 'Stefani's financial and tax policy directives were incisive and organic.

In reality it was possible to obtain a decrease in expenses and an increase in income by eliminating certain secondary taxes , rearranging the remaining taxes, reducing the rates, but making the assessments more precise. The special taxes originating from the coverage needs of war finance were abolished , such as the tax on company administrators and managers and the extraordinary personal war contribution which constituted an additional charge on direct taxes. The work already begun by the governments of Bonomi and Facta was thoroughly pursued, for an application as prompt and favorable to the taxpayer of the tax on war surpluses. At the same time they camethe agreements for the redemption of the extraordinary tax on assets were facilitated , thus making a mass of fresh savings flow rapidly to the state coffers, with positive effects that in the short term amply compensated for the large cuts imposed as a counterpart to the generic tax credit. The decrees of 21 December 1922 and 10 August 1923 extended until 30 June 1925 the faculty given to the financial offices to renounce the application of penalties for omitted, unfaithful and late denunciations of property tax . The complementary income tax was reorganized with a much more organic measure than that issued with a lieutenant decree of 17 November 1918; streamlined the tax on mobile wealth with reduced rates, with an extension, however, of the mass of taxpayers which also included earners of limited incomes; abolish the family tax and rental value tax.

In addition, during 1923 various measures were provided with facilitations for foreign capital; concessions were introduced in favor of building property by extending the 25-year exemption to new premises not intended for residential purposes and reducing the rates on buildings, and also widening the exemption from the tax for buildings intended for industrial factories. The revaluation of blocked rents and the further gradual commitment to put an end to them by 1926 certainly constituted a not negligible component of the inflationary phenomenon affecting the wealthy middle classes , but also served to give a further boost to the expansion phase of the construction already started in 1922.

Some of the first measures were politically of particular significance: the operation of telephones was entrusted to some private companies and the life insurance sector, entrusted to the monopoly of the National Insurance Institute since 1912, was open to individuals ; with Royal Decree of 10 December '22, the inheritance tax within the family unit was abolished and the definitive abolition of the general obligation of nominativity for shares was decided . The inheritance tax, which had provided a revenue of 305 million in 1922-23, fell to 117 million in 1924-25 and to 72 million in the financial year 1925-26.

[...]

The policy of containing inflationary pressures, of a traditional liberal style , met with indisputable successes, because it took advantage of the positive tactical results of an economic and social policy of a substantially opposite sign in some respects.

The liberal approach of the years 1921-25 , without any embarrassment for the unscrupulous governmental pragmatism, proceeded in parallel with that of the bailouts of giants in crisis and the promotion of new decisive interventions in the economic life of the country, including, for example, in the 1923, that of the Credit Institute for Public Utility Enterprises and the State Company for State Forests. The two major rescue operations, that of Ansaldo and that of Banco di Roma, decided and implemented outside the same governing bodies, take on the character, before financial transactions, of actual payments of political bills to the family Perrone and moderate Catholic groups. This is not so much for the interventions in themselves, supported by valid objective arguments, but for the passive role of funder assumed by the State, which could perhaps have achieved the same objective under less onerous conditions and in any case would have had to use its own contribution since then. to include the activities of the companies saved in a strategic vision of economic development.

[...]

The bailout of the Banco di Roma must have been much more expensive, which recorded a charge of 1,104 million to which, up to 1930, another 3 billion was added, for interventions in favor of various Institutes, including the Italian Agricultural Bank, Credito Marittimo, Banco di Santo Spirito and various Catholic banks.

The halt to wage increases was imposed after the world of work had achieved notable income improvements. [...] On the other hand, the wage compression at the high levels reached had a counterpart in the development of net fixed investments which had already doubled in 1922, passing from 1.82 to 3.94 billion9, and which rose vertically to 5, 97 billion in 1923, to 8.65 billion in 1924 and 11.3 billion in 1925 without substantial decreases until 1931. A good part of these investments was destined to the public works and reclamation sector, to machinery and public transport .

1925 closed with a deficit in the trade balance of approximately 7.3 milliards, 1.3 milliard higher than that of 1922. The result was a fall in the lira against the dollar, sterling and the Swiss franc.

After a period of relative stability in 1924, the lira quoted on London 117.50 in January 1925, reached a low of 144.92 in June. Therefore, failing to operate with further productive expansion measures at the base of the national industrial and agricultural apparatus (nor would this have been possible in any case in the short term and in a situation characterized by lively inflationary pressures and strong tensions of mistrust in the future of the lira ), De 'Stefani's policy sought to minimize the imbalance with financial measures essentially based on the following directives: the reduction of the amount of banknotes issued by the issuing institutions on behalf of the State; the increase in the official discount rate which reached the 7% ceiling in June '25;

[...]

The repercussions on the stock market of De 'Stefani's latest initiatives would have been the cause of his replacement with Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata on 10 July 1925.

[...]

Stringher's statement, indeed correct, which pointed out that the whole world was interested in the Italian monetary recovery, lends itself to various considerations, not only on the financial connections re-established in the recovering international capitalist economy, but in particular on the substantial adhesion given by international finance to the fascist regime . The first credit opening for 75 million dollars in fact took place under the auspices of the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve, and many issuers. The second credit opening for 50 million dollars was granted by the Morgan House of New York together with some London banks: Morgan, Grenfell, Hambros, Rothschild. In return, an agreement was signed in Washington on November 14, 1925 for the settlement of the war debt to the US Treasury. [...] Another large loan, in the form of an assumption for the placement of an Italian bond issue at the price of 94.50 of the nominal value per 100 million dollars, allowed by the Morgan House to the Italian Treasury, was used to partially repay the advances made by the Bank of Italy to the State to close the previous credit line of 50 million, previously allowed to the Consortium of Issuers. […] In 1927, recourse to foreign capital took the form not only of loans, which mainly benefited electricity companies, but also of launches of Italian shares in various European and US markets.

[...]

It is evident that Mussolini wanted to seek, at a high price, definitive and not precarious equilibrium and to surround himself with the financial world and public opinion , which had necessarily become solidarity in a battle for survival and pride.

S. LA FRANCESCA, 'The economic policy of fascism', Laterza, Rome-Bari, 1972, pp. 3-24

Introduction and editing by Davide Clementi

https://ottobre.info/2021/01/07/i-primi ... -fascismo/

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