Italy – 17-18 November: two important days of internationalist struggle in support of the Palestinian people. Now we need to break the ghetto they want to lock us in!
Although covered by an iron silence from the militarized regime press, and sabotaged by the political and trade union opportunism of forces, or weaknesses, which who knows why continue to call themselves “communist” or “anti-capitalist”, the two days of struggle on Friday 17 and Saturday 18 November in active solidarity with the Palestinian people and with the Palestinian resistance will end with a decidedly positive outcome.
How long has it been since there was a purely political strike in Italy, and moreover not for internal facts but for international events, therefore an internationalist strike?
Of course, the strike day of October 20 was also called against the war. But this theme was accompanied by the fight against the war economy and the demand for strong wage increases. That is, trade union and political issues came together in it. SI Cobas, however, focused the strike on November 17 on the sole objective of stopping the genocide of the Palestinian people by the Zionist state and its NATO godfathers.
It was a courageous choice that confirms the anomaly that the SI Cobas represents in the increasingly bloodless panorama of the Italian “rank-and-file unionism”. A choice made with determination by the RIT (Revolutionary Internationalist Tendency) comrades, as can be seen from Aldo Milani’s interview with the editorial staff of Pungolo rosso (which went around the world) (*). A choice welcomed very favorably by the most advanced part of the proletarians adhering to SI Cobas who, especially in the Bologna area, have decided to extend the strike to the whole day.
In this way we responded to the appeals of the Palestinian trade unions and the Young Palestinians of Italy (JPIs) to intensify the struggle against the state of Israel and its accomplices, among whom Italy has always been in the front row, directly hitting their interests in the places of production and circulation of goods. In addition to the strikes in the logistics warehouses, we organized the blockade of the port of Salerno which involved numerous workers and unemployed, and for a few hours stopped the containers of the Israeli company ZIM, active throughout Europe in the transport of weapons destined for the Zionist army, and a complaint demonstration against the Israeli cybersecurity company Tekapp in Modena.
Friday 17th was also a day of mobilization in universities and schools “for a free Palestine”, proclaimed by the GPI and other student bodies with the occupation of the Orientale in Naples, the Sapienza in Rome and the universities of Padua, Bologna, Macerata and Turin. At the Milan State University, a large assembly of students blocked the session of the academic senate after the rector’s refusal to consider severing ties with Israeli universities. At the center of the student protests, which in some cities also had a following among middle school students, in addition to the immediate ceasefire, there was the request to interrupt all relations with Israeli institutions.
The demonstration on Saturday 18th in Bologna was the result of the confluence of the two initiatives, on which we have worked in recent weeks. It was a very well attended demonstration (the police headquarters, through Il resto del Carlino, gives the figure of 5,000, but there were more people, with many people attentive to the sides of the procession in its final part), packed with young people, very lively, without a moment of passivity from start to finish, concluded with a long rally full of energetic interventions, strongly characterized in a classist and internationalist sense.
Perhaps in Rome, on 28 October, the numbers of participants were a little greater – but what a difference in content between the two events! Because it is one thing to just ask for a truce and appeal to the UN, or to an impossible “different role” of Italy and the EU, with various explicit or implicit forms of distancing from the Palestinian resistance – these positions were strongly present in the Italian section of that manifestation -; what was said on Saturday in Bologna is a completely different matter. Full solidarity with the oppressed masses of Palestine and their resistance. Without appeal condemnation not only of the actions of the colonialist, racist and genocidal state of Israel, but of the entire gang of imperialist protectors and accomplices of Israel, the EU and Meloni in the foreground (“Meloni Zionist, you are one of the list”, one of the slogans shouted more insistently). Criticism of the passivity and complicity of Arab and “Islamic” states and governments, and of other false friends of the Palestinian cause. And above all the often-repeated statement : the only force that can impose an end to the genocide, the only force that can help the Palestinian resistance to win, is that of the army of the exploited from all over the world united against the warlords and of exploitation: the capitalists, the imperialists.
We do not hide the fact that the core of this very hot demonstration, as well as of the workers’ and students’ strikes on Friday, was made up of proletarians and students of Palestinian and Arab origins, while the presence of Italian proletarians and students was reduced, certainly much lower than the necessity and the dramatic urgency of the moment. But it is equally certain that these two days have sent a signal in Italy and internationally to strengthen and radicalize solidarity with the struggle of the oppressed Palestinians, to consider it, to feel it as an integral part of our fight against the capitalist social system as such – of which Israel’s settler colonialism is an emanation.
Starting from autumn 2018 when we organized a strong demonstration in Rome against the Salvini decrees, state racism, a weapon of the masters, and the Trumpist Lega-Cinquestelle government, we have taken political initiatives that have become a reference for individual comrades and organized forces more or less small who intend to take seriously the fight against global and national capital and its national and international institutions, and/or seek to emancipate themselves from opportunism – most recently the demonstration against the wars of capital in Ghedi, the main base of attack by the Italian Air Force, where a plurality of collectives and political areas converged on an anti-militarist platform with a clearly defeatist imprint. But to progress our plan of initiative requires an organized force that goes beyond a small organization of comrades, however experienced they are in the various forms of the fight against capitalism, and beyond a combative union composed of a few tens of thousands of proletarians, mostly immigrants.
This is why we call all those who have collaborated with us in recent years, in particular in the construction of Ghedi demonstration, to share the responsibility for the further expansion of the activity that we intend to propose. Here lies the challenge for us: not to be satisfied with having been and being, in Italy, the only center of political and trade union initiative that strives to be consistently classist and internationalist. Don’t let us lock ourselves in the ghetto – a ghetto constantly under attack, moreover: just think of the hundreds of layoffs announced by Leroy Merlin. We must reject the ghetto mentality, and look at the great masses of working men and women and young people who are still damnably passive, making every effort to establish a dialogue with them.
It does not seem to us that this passivity was broken with the CGIL-UIL general strike-non-general-strike that began last Friday. A couple of large squares, or the success of the strike in some historic unionized factories (the Fincantieri of Ancona, for instance), are not enough to sensibly talk about the resumption of the class struggle in Italy. Even more so due to the inconsistency of the objectives of demands presented by CGIL-UIL and the sinister nationalism of the platform on which the strike was called. However, the course of world capitalism has taken such a direction and the policy of the Meloni government has taken on such provocative aggressiveness in all fields (ideological, economic, repressive) that the possibility of continuing to live on the relative guarantees of the past continues to diminish with increased speed.
We certainly do not expect the CGIL to regenerate itself by becoming at least a conflictual union. This is excluded due to the solidity achieved by the process of incorporation of its entire structure into corporate logic and bourgeois institutions. We expect, however, that the workers who still look, albeit with diminishing illusions, to the CGIL, and above all the enormous mass of proletarians without a union and without a party, will sooner or later strike a blow. This was recently done by female and male auto workers in the United States of America. Different sectors of the French proletariat have done this on several occasions, albeit odd. It is inevitable that it will happen in Italy too, although the moment does not seem close. And since we are not spontaneists, we intend to do our part in the “wait”.
For the next time, doing our part means supporting and actively participating in the demonstrations that will be called to stop the genocide in Gaza and the aggressions in the West Bank, renewing the full support of the Palestinian resistance; intensify the counter-information and orientation activity that we are carrying out with our blog Il Pungolo rosso (The red goad); strengthen cooperation with the JPIs and other Palestinian associations not aligned with the positions of the PA; organize a national assembly in Bologna on Sunday 3 December on the economic and political phase, against the wars in Palestine and Ukraine, to strengthen class opposition to the Meloni government; continue to weave the thread of political and trade union connections on an international scale to arrive at that day of international and internationalist initiative against the wars of capital that we have been working on for some time, in continuity with the assembly of 11 June in Milan.